El texto y sus fronteras: cuerpo, ritual y poética trágica en el Tiestes de Séneca

Abstract

The human sacrifice and the cannibal banquet constitute the two instances of Atreus’ crime in Seneca’s Thyestes. These instances are based on the perversion of some socio-religious Roman rituals. Atreus’ acts exceed the human limits and enter the monstrous realm of nefas. The imagery of corporeal dismemberment is an essential aspect of the process of ritual perversion. i will explore the textual mechanisms by which this tragedy can be read as a mise en abyme of Seneca’s conception of tragic genre. The bodies mutilated by Atreus during the sacrifice and ‘internalized’ by Thyestes during the banquet weave a metaphor of the intertextual and self-reflexive strategy of the text. i suggest that the diegetical level of Thyestes exhibits some emblematic elements of this unstable and border poetics.