Then the storm of Hippolytus' anger breaks. Here at least Seneca has used his great rhetorical gifts to good effect. The passion may be highly artificial when compared with the passion of the genuinely human Phaedra of Euripides, but it is nevertheless passion and not bombast: crudity there may be, but there is no real irrelevance.
There is less to praise and more to wonder at in Seneca's dialogue. Instead of rational conversation or controversy, he gives us a brilliant but meretricious display of epigram, the mechanical nature of which is often emphasized by a curious symmetry of structure. For line after line one character takes up the words of another and turns them against him with dexterity as extraordinary as it is monotonous. The resulting artificiality is almost incredible. It appears in its most extravagant form in the Thyestes.[187] Scarcely less strained, though from the nature of the subject the extravagance is less repellent, is a passage in the Troades. Achilles' ghost has demanded the sacrifice of Polyxena. Agamemnon hesitates to give orders for the sacrifice. Pyrrhus, Achilles' son, enumerates the great deeds of his father, and asks, indignantly, if such glory is to win naught save neglect after death. Agamemnon has sacrificed his own daughter, why should he not sacrifice Priam's? Agamemnon—in the speech quoted above—refuses indignantly. 'Sacrifice oxen if you will: no human blood shall be shed!' Pyrrhus replies (306):
hac dextra Achilli victimam reddam suam. quam si negas retinesque, maiorem dabo dignamque quam det Pyrrhus; et nimium diu a caede nostra regia cessat manus paremque poscit Priamus.
Agam. haud equidem nego hoc esse Pyrrhi maximum in bello decus, saevo peremptus ense quod Priamus iacet, _supplex paternus.
Pyrrh. supplices nostri patris hostesque eosdem novimus. Priamus tamen praesens rogavit; tu gravi pavidus metu, nec ad rogandum fortis Aiaci preces Ithacoque mandas clausus atque hostem tremens.
By this right hand he shall receive his own.
And if thou dost refuse and keep the maid,
A greater victim will I slay, and one
More worthy Pyrrhus' gift: for all too long
From royal slaughter hath my hand been free,
And Priam asks an equal sacrifice.
Agam. Far be it from my wish to dim the praise
That thou dost claim for this most glorious deed—
Old Priam slain by thy barbaric sword,
Thy father's suppliant.
Pyrrh. I know full well
My father's suppliants—and well I know
His enemies. Yet royal Priam came
And made his plea before my father's face;
But thou, o'ercome with fear, not brave enough
Thyself to make request, within thy tent
Did trembling hide, and thy desires consign
To braver men, that they might plead for thee.
MILLER.
Agamemnon retorts, 'What of your father, when he shirked the toils of war and lay idly in his tent?'—
levi canoram verberans plectro chelyn.