Roman Tragedy

Anthony J. Boyle

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134696857
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Letteratura
• Categoría: Teatro antico e classico

The first detailed cultural and theatrical history of a major literary form, this landmark introduction examines Roman tragedy and its place at the centre of Rome's cultural and political life.

Analyzing the work of such names as Ennius, Pacuvius and Accius, as well as Seneca and his post-Neronian successors, Anthony J. Boyle delves into detailed discussion on every Roman tragedian whose work survives in substance today. Roman Tragedy examines:

• the history of Roman tragic techniques and conventions
• the history of generic form and change
• the debt that Rome owes to Greece, and text owes to text
• the birth, development and death of Roman tragedy in the context of the cities evolving, institutions, ideologies and political and social practices
• tragedy proper and the historical drama ( fabula praetexta ), which the Romans allied to tragedy.

Withparallel English translations of Latin quotations, this seminal work not only provides an invaluable resource for students of theatre, Roman political history and cultural history, but it is also accessible to all interested in the social dynamics of writing, spectacle, ideology and power.

Part I

The Birth of Roman Drama

1

Staging Rome

populi sensus maxime in theatro et spectaculis perspectus est.

(Cicero Ad Atticum 2.19.3)

The will of the people is most clearly seen in the theatre and at the shows.

Theatricality and power

Rome was always already theatrical. As an Etruscan city in the sixth century BCE and an independent state in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Rome from its genesis was shaped by institutions, religious rituals and social practices that involved complex performances by political and religious leaders before an engaged audience of citizens and slaves. Public celebrations, sacrifice, divination, communal prayer, political and military oration, legal trials and executions, marriage, funerals, religious and triumphal processions, even a magistrate’s movement through the city streets, as later his departure for or return from provincial office, involved self-conscious (re-)enactment of a social script. The re-enactments served several functions, among the more important of which was an acting-out of relations of power. Thus Polybius’ account in the mid-second century BCE of the typical funeral of a Roman aristocrat (6.53):

When a prominent man dies, he is carried into the forum to the so-called rostra, sometimes in an upright, conspicuous position, more rarely in a reclining one. Encompassed by the whole people standing, an adult son (if one survives and is present) or another relative climbs the rostra and speaks on the virtues and achievements of the dead man. The result is that the crowd, both those who participated in the achievements and those who did not, as they recall and visualise the past, are drawn to such sympathy that the loss seems not a private one for the mourners but a public one affecting the people. Then after the interment and the customary rites they put the image of the dead man in the most conspicuous place in the house, enclosed in a wooden shrine. This image is a mask (prosopon) which reproduces the deceased’s features and colouring with remarkable likeness. These images, honorifically adorned, are displayed at public sacrifices, and, when a prominent family member dies, are taken to the funeral procession and put on men whose stature and general appearance most resemble those of the different ancestors. The men wear togas – with a purple border if the ancestor had been a consul or praetor, whole purple if he had been a censor, embroidered with gold if he had celebrated a triumph or had accomplished something similar. The men parade in chariots, and before them are carried rods and axes and the other magisterial insignia according to the status of the offices of state held by each during their lifetime. And when they reach the rostra, they all sit in a row on chairs of ivory. It would be difficult to find a more glorious spectacle (theama) for a young man who aspires to fame and nobility. For who would not be stirred by the images of men renowned for their virtue, all together, as if alive and breathing? What could be a more glorious spectacle?

The funeral as political theatre: audience, dialogue, action, actors, costumes, masks, props, stages – one of the stages being the processional route through Rome itself, another the rostra in the place which became the principal site of Rome’s early ‘literary’ drama: the Roman Forum. Like a stage play, this theatrical procession was accompanied by music (omitted by Polybius) played loudly on the flute, trumpet and sometimes horn by musicians who led the way, and was accompanied, too, by a dirge from professional mourners, who sometimes interspersed and/or followed the funeral oration with a ‘chorus’ of lamentations, orchestrated by their own ‘chorus-leader’, the praefica.¹ The inspirational force of the event for the young elite Roman is well observed by Polybius; it was a function of aristocratic Rome’s obsessive, competitive culture. The funeral not only paraded the achievements of an individual aristocratic family, but furnished in the parade the grounds for that family’s superior social and political position.² Collectively, such funerals celebrated the values and traditions of the political elite and sustained its hegemony, employing the artifice of theatre to naturalise the past in justification of the existing social order.

More obviously directed to the validation of social supremacy was that coveted pinnacle of Roman military achievement, the triumph. Here is Silius Italicus’ account (some three hundred years after the event) of the triumphal procession of Scipio Africanus in 201 BCE:

mansuri compos decoris per saecula rector,

deuictae referens primus cognomina terrae,

securus sceptri, repetit per caerula Romam

et patria inuehitur sublimi tecta triumpho.

ante Syphax feretro residens captiua premebat

lumina et auratae seruabant colla catenae.

hic Hannon clarique genus Phoenissa iuuenta

et Macetum primi atque incocti corpora Mauri,

tum Nomades notusque sacro, cum lustrat harenas,

Hammoni Garamas et semper naufraga Syrtis.

mox uictas tendens Carthago ad sidera palmas

ibat et effigies orae iam lenis Hiberae,

terrarum finis Gades ac laudibus olim

terminus Herculeis Calpe Baetisque lauare

solis equos dulci consuetus fluminis unda,

frondosumque apicem subigens ad sidera mater

bellorum fera Pyrene nec mitis Hiberus,

cum simul illidit ponto quos attulit amnes.

sed non ulla magis mentesque oculosque tenebat

quam uisa Hannibalis campis fugientis imago.

ipse adstans curru atque auro decoratus et ostro

Martia praebebat spectanda Quiritibus ora:

qualis odoratis descendens Liber ab Indis

egit pampineos frenata tigride currus;

aut cum Phlegraeis, confecta mole Gigantum,

incessit campis tangens Tirynthius astra.

salue, inuicte parens non concessure Quirino

laudibus ac meritis non concessure Camillo.

nec uero, cum te memorat de stirpe deorum,

prolem Tarpei mentitur Roma Tonantis.

(Punica 17.625–54)

Possessed of eternal glory, the first ruler

To carry the name of a conquered land,

Confident of power, crosses the sea to Rome

And enters his ancestral home in a soaring triumph.

Before him Syphax on a litter held captive eyes

Downcast, and chains of gold guarded his neck.

There was Hanno and Carthage’s noble youth

And Macedon’s chiefs and black-bodied Moors,

Numidians and the Garamantes, whom sacred Ammon

Sees scouring the desert, and ship-wrecking Syrtis.

Soon Carthage passed, stretching conquered hands

Starward, and a model of Spain now peaceful,

Of Gades the world’s end, Calpe once the limit

Of Hercules’ fame and the Baetis which bathes

The sun’s horses in its sweet river waters –

And, pushing her forested height starward, that fierce

Mother of wars, Pyrene, and the ungentle Ebro,

When it crashes the ocean with all its streams.

But no picture held their minds and eyes more

Than that of Hannibal fleeing the field.

Standing in his chariot, clothed in purple and gold,

Scipio gave Romans the spectacle of Mars’ face:

So looked Liber when he drove from perfumed India

His vine-leafed chariot with bridled tigers;

So looked Hercules on Phlegra’s plain when the Giants

Were destroyed and he touched the stars as he walked.

Hail, unconquered father unsurpassed by Quirinus

In glory, unsurpassed by Camillus in deeds.

Truly Rome tells no lie when she calls your stock divine,

And names you child of the Capitoline Thunderer.

Again the theatrics are undisguised – audience (at first the reader, and finally the Romans of 201 BCE); a stage (Rome); players, including a cast of former warriors, now costumed in golden chains and paraded in their role of defeated foes; painted scenery and props (images of conquered territories and rivers) which themselves present the ‘plot’ of Scipio’s all-conquering campaigns, culminating in the climactic scene of the defeated general in flight; the whole accompanied, like the funeral procession, by music (the flourish of trumpets, again omitted),³ and modulated to include scenes of pathos and awe and to lead to, as dramatic finale and closure, the deus ex machina Scipio, who in his triumphal chariot, costumed in purple and gold, acts out through the triumphator’s ‘red mask’ his role as Mars and/or Jupiter. This ‘red mask’ was the triumphator’s face, painted red, which seemed to cast the Roman general in the role of Jupiter, whose cult image in the Capitoline temple, to which the triumphator made his ascent, was similarly painted, or, as in Silius’ account (for the red on the general’s face might signify, too, the blood of enemies), seemed to cast him in the role of Mars. Certainly the comparison with the gods – Mars, Liber, Hercules, Quirinus, Jupiter – underscores the prime political and social function of the triumph, its demonstration of the superiority of the triumphator. The triumph’s theatricalised celebration of Rome, its gods, its army, its conquering might, arouses the ‘patriotic’ emotions of the citizen-audience, reinforcing community, solidarity and collective identity in the face of the enemy ‘other’. But those emotions are made instruments of individual acclamation.⁴

Rome’s funerary and triumphal rituals, and the pompa circensis or ‘procession to the circus’ with which they are frequently compared, seem to modern scholars to have been Etruscan in origin,⁵ and were held by the writers of the classical period to have originated in the earliest period of the city. Their authority derived in part from their very antiquity, although their precise age is difficult to guess. There are some pointers to the age of the triumph, which is represented in classical texts as monarchic. The Triumphal Fasti, for example, record triumphs from the regal and the early republican period, Festus (504L) confirms the antiquity of the triumph, and Livy (2.16.1) assigns a triumph in the first decade of the republic to the consuls of 505 BCE, Marcus Valerius and Publius Postumius. The theatrics of Rome’s social institutions and their political force were certainly well established before the city’s first attested drama was produced.⁶ Spectacle was always already both the display and the agent of power.

Drama and archaic Rome

Whether such spectacle included unattested ‘dramatic’ entertainment is debated. Reliable evidence for the detailed cultural practices of archaic Rome is scarce. Rational hypotheses rule. It is now generally supposed that Rome had a flou...