Abstract

When Seneca comes to describe the appearance of the monstrous bull which appears out of the sea to kill Hippolytus in answer to his father's curse, he uses a metaphor of birth: the sea's wave is said to be ‘heavy with burdened womb’ . If line 1016 is genuine – it was athetized by Leo – the sea is said to be ‘pregnant with a monster’ . The metaphor has not passed unnoticed in modern commentaries but it has not been fully appreciated. I want to examine further linguistic aspects of the metaphor, and to consider its significance in its literary context. Seneca is a writer who likes – as he himself acknowledges – to re-work tradition: all the more significant, then, when he introduces a conspicuous metaphor into his text which does not appear to have literary antecedents