‘Quid me uocatis, umbrae meorum?’. La visione infera di Cassandra (Sen. Ag. 741-758) tra nekyia e catabasi

In Seneca’s Agamemnon, Cassandra is seized by a vision that puts her in communication with the Underworld (vv. 741-758). This section recalls the typical features of a nekyia, since, in Cassandra’s eyes, it is as if the souls of the deceased Trojans came back from hades. This vision resonates with a passage of Euripides’ Trojans Women, in which the princess addresses her buried relatives from the Trojan shore (vv. 444-461). however, the different setting results in peculiar rhetorical effects. In fact, the Senecan Cassandra stands on the Greek land as a real sola sospes, and she feels so close to the Underworld that she expresses herself as if she had already experienced a katabasis. Due to this dramatic difference, the passage also echoes the sixth book of the aeneid, and it shares some traits of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and of the description of Euripides’s Alcesti’s death.