Consequently, the echoes in Octavia of Sophocles’ plays about young, childless tragic heroines-Electra in the opening scene, Antigone in the closing scene-are natural and unforced. Historical figures as well as mythical ones fall into tragic paradigms: witness Aeschylus’ Persians, Shakespeare’s Richard II, and (more controversially) Marlowe’s Edward II. So there is nothing artificial, as has been alleged, about this casting of historical material in the form of tragic drama. Mother, father, and brother by violence, married while young to a brute, she paradoxically loses her life because of the people’s love and support, which enrages her husband against her. Octavia’s story is tragic in itself: deprived of her To illustrate this point, there is some overlap between the terms praetexta and tragoedia (tragedy), and tragoedia in turn can have the general sense of “a high-style play on serious themes” or the more specific sense of “a play embodying a fall into disaster.” Octavia is clearly a tragedy in the latter sense. In fact, drama in antiquity was too vigorous and manifold to fit into a system of well-separated types. But the label should not be taken to conjure up a well-defined distinct genre of drama: it denotes that the chief characters of the play wore the toga praetexta of leading Roman citizens (as distinct, for example, from the Greek-style dress of mythological plays), but it specifies nothing about the form of such plays. The term praetexta is sometimes used in antiquity as a label for such a historical play, and it will be used so here for convenience. It seems likely, however, that such plays often dealt with Roman identity and nationhood in the context of defining events, as Octavia does.

We know that other plays on Roman subjects (legendary or historical) were composed from roughly 200 BC to AD 100, but because information about them is scanty, we cannot say how closely Octavia resembles any of them in ethos, style, or structure. Octavia has great intrinsic interest as the only play surviving from antiquity on a Roman historical subject. A lyric interchange between Octavia, who resigns herself to death, and the chorus, which recalls the fates of other women of her family and comments on Rome’s destruction of its own.

Play by seneca the younger