Hippolytus:[116]

"Quis eluet me Tanais? Aut quae barbaris,
Maeotis undis pontico incumbens mari.
Non ipso toto magnus Oceano pater
Tantum expiarit sceleris."

But these declamations, deriving as they do, to begin with, from
AEschylus,[117] are seen from their very recurrence in Seneca to have
become stock speeches for the ancient tragic drama; and they were
clearly well-fitted to become so for the mediaeval. The phrases used were
already classic when Catullus employed them before Seneca:

"Suscipit, O Gelli, quantum non ultima Thetys
Non genitor Nympharum, abluit Oceanus."[118]

In the Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it
had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and
contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a
rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves
Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play
which may have been written before, though published after,
MACBETH[120]:--

"Although the waves of all the Northern sea
Should flow for ever through those guilty hands,
Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be"

--a sad foil to Shakspere's

"The multitudinous seas incarnadine."

It is very clear, then, that we are not here entitled to suppose
Shakspere a reader of the Senecan tragedies; and even were it otherwise,
the passage in question is a figure of speech rather than a reflection
on life or a stimulus to such reflection. And the same holds good of the
other interesting but inconclusive parallels drawn by Dr. Cunliffe.
Shakspere's

"Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all,"[121]

which he compares with Seneca's

"Et ferrum et ignis saepe medicinae loco est.
Extrema primo nemo tentavit loco,"[122]

--a passage that may very well be the original
for the modern oracle about fire and iron--is
really much closer to the aphorism of Hippocrates,
that "Extreme remedies are proper for
extreme diseases," and cannot be said to be
more than a proverb. In any case, it lay to
Shakspere's hand in Montaigne,[123] as translated
by Florio:

"To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies."

Equally inconclusive is the equally close parallel between Macbeth's

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"

and the sentence of Hercules:

"Nemo polluto queat
Animo mederi."[124]

Such a reflec