The author of the « Octavia » was steeped in the study of Senecan, and probably Augustan, tragedy.
The versification of iambics imitates Senecan technique. Most line-end parallels between the Senecan corpus and « Octavia » are literary idioms rooted in Augustan or post-Augustan Latin ; no instances of direct imitation from Republican tragedy can be identified. In the anapaests, some of the hexametric clausulae may have been common poetic property ; in other cases, a specific context in Ovid (e.g., Octavia 364 = met. 7, 346) or Vergil (e.g., Octavia 203 = georg. 4, 411) can be traced.
Apart from the three-day structure of « Octavia » and the poet 's failure to use choral odes consistently as act dividers, differences from Senecan stagecraft are not great.
