International audienceThis paper begins with a discussion of the corpus of hymnic forms in Seneca’s tragedies, paying special attention to questions of performance. It continues with an examination of the textual signs that indicate this performance. It asks what the tragic personae who sing these hymns can tell us about the act of performing them and whether such indications allow us to infer something about mimesis. If such tragic hymns are imitations, what do they imitate and how do they imitate it? Are they imitations of religious practices? If so, do they imitate Greek or Roman ones? Do they imitate texts? Finally, the paper explores the relationship between tragic and Horatian lyric and tries to identify which poetics Seneca elaborate...