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The rapidity with which tears appear may certainly be a sign of their falsity. Why dost thou turn away thy sorrowing face and hide with veiling robe the tears that suddenly o’erflow thy cheeks? The tired and weary sovereign is greeted with cries coming from within the palace, and he immediately requests an explanation: By juxtaposing different and unreconcilable gestures, Seneca thus subjects the recurring motif of fake feminine tears to a paradoxical treatment that is such that this traditional means of deceit loses its efficiency and even becomes a revealing sign of the deceit itself.įalse tears are the gestural element that dominates Act III of Phaedra, which opens with Theseus’ return from the Underworld. 15 On the contrary, when facial expression and gait are incoherent like in Andromache’s case, they deprive words of their reliability and, for an attentive observer, signal the need to further investigate ( Tro. In this case, they are completely coherent with one another, to the point of allowing Andromache to puzzle out the hero’s intentions. Ulysses is here, with step and look of one in hesitation in his heart he weaves some crafty stratagem. For instance, these are the elements on which the identification between Hector and Astyanax is based: 12įrom a preliminary reading (of course, a more in-depth study would be needed on the matter), we can notice that three elements ( uultus, incessus, and habitus) substantially reveal a person’s animus in Seneca’s philosophical reflections 13 as much as in his dramas. For an attentive observer like Ulysses, all of these elements are clues that reveal the woman’s true state of mind. 11 Andromache attempts to deceive Ulysses by expressing pain caused by the death of her child, but her tears are mixed with concern, which is clearly revealed by her anxious way of pacing. consistency between ideas, states of mind, and external behaviours (the latter made up of the union of various elements, including gestures, posture, and gait). The heroine violates a behavioural principle of the utmost importance in Roman culture that is codified in oratory and philosophy, i.e. In particular, her tears, which are a gestural sign of sufferance, and her stride (referred to in Latin as incessus or gressus) do not harmonise. It is precisely this inconsistency that causes the failure of the deception and leads the interlocutor to understand that the woman is lying. nervously pacing back and forth and receiving every word with concern. In this passage, we observe how Andromache exhibits, on the one hand, the typical gestures of maeror, above all tears, and how, on the other hand, such gestures clash with the typical manifestations and attitudes of timor, e.g.
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She grieves, she weeps, she groans now here, now there she wanders restlessly, straining her ears to catch each uttered word this woman’s fear is greater than her grief … The tears that Andromache is unable to share with the Trojan women are those that she sees Hector’s ghost shed during a vision that occurs while in a strange state of psychic suspension between wakefulness and sleep: 7 Her rigidity and listlessness affects her gestures and renders her unable to take part in the external manifestations of grief that, on the contrary, characterise the behaviour of the other prisoners.
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Hector’s wife is a stranger to the other women’s mourning because her experience was different from theirs and she is in a different psychological condition. Ilium has fallen but now for you for me she fell long since …Īndromache claims that the Trojan women may give vent to recent losses through their tears, but her long acquaintance with pain has made her insensitive and numb ( Tro. Ye Phrygian women, mournful band, why do you tear your hair, beat on your wretched breasts, and water your cheeks with weeping unrestrained? Trivial woes have we endured if our sufferings can be told by tears.