Passion in a Stoic’s Satire Directed against a Dead Caesar? Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis as a Saturnalian Text Composed for Overcoming the Crisis

Reviewing the rather ahistorical theory of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, I argue that Seneca used the Saturnalia as a concrete cultural and anthropological model from ritual daily life for his Apocolocyntosis. Despite the aggressive passions against the deceased Claudius the emotions are to be seen in the liminal framework of the festival of reversal. Seneca does not aim at accurately portraying a foolish dead princeps or at taking posthumously revenge through a sarcastic invective, rather with this totally Saturnalian text he playfully helps come to terms with the severe crisis of the transition from Claudius to Nero. The Saturnalia inscribes itself in the text and playfully experiments with casting out the old princeps, stylized as a foolish mock king and negative, dystopian monster of atavistic Cronian times, as well as enthusiastically embracing the new era, portrayed as the return of the Saturnian utopia. Under these circumstances it would be misleading to criticize Seneca, who as Stoic pontificated against every engagement with emotion, for the passion, hate and bitterness harbored against Claudius. Similar to his tragedies, Seneca invents a Stoic scenario of the crazy world as a madhouse filled with intense affects in order to make the reader first experience the crisis and then render him resistant to the emotional turbulences. Keywords: Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, Bakhtin and the carnivalesque literature, Saturnalia, carnival, cultural and anthropological model of festivals of reversal, mythic-ritual poetics, liminality, ludic experiment to overcome the crisis of transition, from Claudius to Nero, totally Saturnalian meta-discourse, passions framed.