The date of the action is supposed to be 62 a.d. when Nero, who had for some time wished to wed his mistress, Poppaea Sabina, and had murdered his mother, partly on account of her opposition, divorced his virtuous wife, his step-sister Octavia, and exiled her to Pandataria, where shortly afterwards he had her put to death. The fact that Seneca is one of the persons in the piece, and that there are anticipatory references to Nero’s death, which followed Seneca’s compulsory suicide only after an interval of three years, sufficiently disposes of the theory that the philosopher himself was the author.
The text accepted in the sixteenth century suffered much, not only from the corruption of individual expressions, but from the displacement of entire passages. Greatly to its advantage it has been rearranged by later editors, but in the following account, their conjectures, generally happy and sometimes convincing, have been disregarded, as they were unknown to Thomas Nuce, who rendered it into English in 1561. In his hands, therefore, it is more loosely connected than it originally was, or than once more it has become for us; and something of regularity it forfeits as well, for the dislocated framework led him to regard it as a drama in only four acts. Despite these flaws in his work he is a cleverer craftsman than many of his colleagues in Senecan translation, whose versions of the ten tragedies, most of them already published separately, were collected in a neat little volume in 1851.[17]
An original “argument” summarises the story with sufficient clearness.
Octauia, daughter to prince Claudius grace,
To Nero espousd, whom Claudius did adopt,
(Although Syllanus first in husbandes place
Shee had receiu’d, whom she for Nero chopt[18]),
Her parentes both, her Make that should have bene,
Her husbandes present Tiranny much more,
Her owne estate, her case that she was in,