verse more frequently than his wont. Direct evidence there is none, but
the general crudity of the work, coupled with the pedantic hardness and
rigidity of the Stoicism which pervades the plays, points strongly to an
early date, considerably earlier than the exile in Corsica. There is no
trace of the mature experience and feeling for humanity that
characterize the later philosophical works. On the contrary, these plays
are just what might be expected of a young man fresh from the schools of
rhetoric and philosophy.[174] As to the order in which the plays were
written there is practically nothing to guide us.[175] The _Hercules
Oetaeus_ is probably the latest, for in it we find plagiarisms from the
_Hercules Furens, Oedipus, Thyestes, Phoenissae, Phaedra_, and
_Troades_. Even here, however, there is an element of uncertainty, for
it is impossible to ascertain whether any given plagiarism is due to
Seneca or to his interpolators.

Leaving such barren and unprofitable ground, what can we say of the
plays themselves? Even after making due allowance for the hopeless
decline of dramatic taste and for the ruin wrought by the schools of
rhetoric, it is hard to speak with patience of such productions, when we
recall the brilliance and charm of the prose works of Seneca. We can
forgive him being rhetorical when he speaks for himself; when he speaks
through the lips of others he is less easily tolerable.

Drama is a reading of human life: if it is to hold one's interest it
must deal with the feelings, thought, and action of genuine human beings
and represent their complex interaction: the characters must be real and
must differ one from the other, so that by force of contrast and by the
continued play of diverse aspects and developments of the human soul,
the significance, the pathos, and the power of the fragment of human
life selected for representation may be fully brought out and set before