Each of the three great Roman tragedians of the Republic, Ennius, Accius and Pacuvius, wrote plays concerned with Medea, but only fragments of these texts have survived. Seneca’s Medea is the only extant dramatic representation of the myth composed between Euripides and Seneca. The paper will try to demonstrate the ways in which the Medea–m...aterial is remodelled by this author. The analysis includes the dramatic structure, the narrative strategies and their comparison with relevant passages of other ancient and modern authors on the same material. I will focus on the ambiguous character and the polarities of Seneca’s heroine in connection with his philosophical prose work, De ira.

The name of Marcus Ofilius Hilarius does not occur in any other source besides book 7 of Pliny’s encyclopedia. With this in mind, the narrative giving an extensive account of the death of the actor needs further explanation. The present paper takes a look at the narrower and broader context of this detail which lends the story a meaning and a... structuring function within the Naturalis Historia. This inquiry enables us to draw certain conclusions not only about book 7, but about the whole encyclopedia as well.