This thesis looks at how the Roman poet Lucan uses the character of Cato to elucidate his beliefs about Fortune and Stoicism. The traditional Stoic view of Fortune views it as a force for good that allows people to improve through hardship. Lucan portrays Fortune as a purely antagonistic force that actively seeks to harm the Roman people and corrupt even good individuals like Cato. Lucan's Fortune arranges events to place Cato in a situation where it is impossible to maintain his virtue. Rather than providing him an opportunity to improve in the civil war, Fortune makes it so that whatever choice Cato makes, he becomes guilty. Brutus' dialogue with Cato in Book 2 of Pharsalia illuminates the position that Cato is in. Brutus looks to Cato as the traditional Stoic exemplar that can forge a path for virtue in civil war. However, Cato admits that joining any side in the civil war would cause him to become guilty. Fortune's support of Caesar and its dominance over contemporary events has forced Cato into this situation. Cato's desert march in Book 9 continues to show Fortune's dominance over Cato by continually denying him opportunities to gain virtue for himself. Lucan's portrayal of Fortune shows his rejection of Stoic teaching about Fortune and the ultimate futility of trying to remain virtuous in a time of civil war.

This thesis tackles the pervasiveness of aberration in Senecan tragedy. Aberration infects all aspects of the drama, and it is deeply entwined with Senecan criminality. In my introduction, I define my terminology of the aberrant, and I discuss a series of ongoing scholarly debates on the tragedies, showing how understanding the aberrant in Seneca's dramas can shed new light on these questions. In Chapter 1, I examine the relationship between the language of crime in the plays, tracing the Latin words for crime back to their instances in Republican Roman tragedy and other genres and seeing how Seneca uses and develops this language of crime, creating an unstable fuel for his dramas. In Chapter 2, I consider Seneca's paradoxes. I consider not only verbal manifestations but all the different paradoxes that appear in the dramas: visual paradoxes, paradoxes of infinity, thematic paradoxes, intertextual paradoxes and more. Paradox is not merely a formal feature of Seneca's writing but integral to the structure of each play. Paradox becomes Seneca's means of transforming linguistic aberration into thematic aberration. In Chapter 3, I argue that Senecan landscapes are not just verbal artefacts. Seneca describes his anomalous spaces in ways that connect with how space and place was experienced in Roman culture. Seneca's aberrant spaces give us buildings that are bigger on the inside than the outside and bodies that explode with the emotions within them. In Chapter 4, I probe aberrant behaviour, by considering the ambiguous characters of Hercules and Thyestes. I expand our focus to incorporate Roman notions of appropriate behaviour, reading the dramas and De Beneficiis as reflecting wider socio-cultural concerns, and I question common assumptions about the thematization of theatricality in Senecan tragedy. In both Hercules Furens and Thyestes, crime skews and twists the situation, rendering apparently ethical behaviour aberrant.