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Remains: Performance at the Edge of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2017

Odai Johnson
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Extract

So wrote the Irish American poet John Montague of the great loss of culture under Great Britain's empire, a violent overmapping of identity whose poignant erasure was itself richly preserved in plays, poems, and songs. Nothing of Ireland's past, it seems, was remembered quite so vigorously as its erasure. And because that disappearance has become such a familiar text of loss, in poem, play, and song, I want to evoke that archive of absence for this study of a similar erasure, centuries earlier—not the Irish under English of Brian Friel's Translations, but the Gallic Celts under Rome; not The Dying Gaul whose images of self-slaughter ennobled their extirpation, but those who survived the conquest, the surrendered, widows and children of the slaughtered who grew that grafted tongue, the twice-born who learned to live again as refugees under Roman rule, and adopt foreign ways—to tease out what little remains there are of the theatre's role in that erasure, resistance, and that monumental realignment of identity called “Romanizing.”

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , May 2017 , pp. 233 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2017 

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References

Endnotes

1. Montague, John, “The Grafted Tongue,” in Collected Poems (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1995), 37–8Google Scholar, at 37.

2. “Romanizing,” “Romanization,” and the useful term “Creolization” have, of course, been much troubled of late in their particulars, yet they still function as useful general terms in the way that “Westernizing” or “globalization” remain useful. A discussion of the terms can be found in Woolf, Greg, “Beyond Romans and Natives,” World Archaeology 28.3 (1997): 339–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or more succinctly put elsewhere: “Romanization is a convenient shorthand for the series of cultural changes that created an imperial civilization, within which both differences and similarities came to form a coherent pattern.” Woolf, Greg, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Webster, Jane, “Creolizing the Roman Provinces,” American Journal of Archaeology 105.2 (2001): 209–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and MacMullen, Ramsay, Romanization in the Time of Augustus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 113Google Scholar, for the cultural “push” and “pull” toward becoming Roman.

3. The phrase is from the novelist Iris Murdoch: “There are certain areas of scholarship, early Greek history is one and Roman law is another, where the scantiness of evidence sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules.” Murdoch, , The Nice and the Good (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 176Google Scholar.

4. Representative studies that deal generously with Romanization yet leave unexplored the theatre's role in the process are the following: Woolf, Becoming Roman; David Mattingly, Imperialism, Power, and Identity (2011); MacMullen, Romanization; Potter, T. W. and Johns, Catherine, Roman Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Keay, S. J., Roman Spain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Thomas, Edmund, Monumentality and the Roman Empire: Architecture in the Antonine Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Curchin, Leonard A., Roman Spain: Conquest and Assimilation (New York: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar; Laurence, Ray, Cleary, Simon Esmonde, and Sears, Gareth, The City in the Roman West: c. 250 bc–c. ad 250 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dodge, Hazel, “Amusing the Masses: Buildings for Entertainment and Leisure in the Roman World,” in Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire, ed. Potter, D. S. and Mattingly, D. J. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 205–55Google Scholar.

5. The report of Formigé’s archaeological excavation at le théâtre antique Orange was summarized by Lantier, Raymond, “Roman Gaul, 1940–1944,” Journal of Roman Studies 36.1–2 (1946): 76–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation at 81. Lantier's, “Au théâtre gréco-romain d'Orange,” Revue Archéologique 25–6.2 (1946): 101–3Google Scholar, at 102, describes the second figure as “agenouillé” (kneeling). Formigé wrote many “remarks” on this and other Gallo-Roman theatres. He returned to the subject of the Gaul in his description, “Remarques sur les dates de construction des théâtres d'Arles, d'Orange, et de Vienne,” Revue Archéologique 29–30 (1948): 382–6Google Scholar.

6. J. F. Drinkwater has noted: “After the civil wars had ended the future lay not with dispirited civitas-elders, but with the young Gallic cavalry-leaders who … had accepted service with Rome as a means of giving vent to their native military enthusiasms… . If they … survived, these would return home wealthy, travelled, partially Romanised and with a positive inclination to change their own way of life and that of their communities, in which they would exercise considerable influence.” Drinkwater, , Roman Gaul: The Three Provinces, 58 bc–ad 260 (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 1983), 19Google Scholar.

7. For a comprehensive calibration of the extent of the Roman holdings, in ancient and modern terms, see Mattingly, 3–42; “more than 40 modern nation states” is Mattingly's own assessment, 8.

8. Drinkwater, 125, locates the major road building under Agrippa, 39–37 bce. For the general incursions of roads, see “The Making of the Provinces” in Keay, 47–71, at 49; for landscape management, see also the case of Salpia in Vitruvius 1.4.12.

9. John Montague, “A Lost Tradition,” in Collected Poems, 33.

10. Res Gestae Divi Augusti, The Achievements of the Divine Augustus, ed. Brunt, P. A. and Moore, J. M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 31Google Scholar. See also Strabo, 7.3.11 (trans. H. L. Jones; Loeb): “In fact, only recently, when Augustus Caesar sent an expedition against them, the number of parts into which the empire had been divided was five, though at the time of the insurrection it had been four. Such divisions, to be sure, are only temporary and vary with the times.”

11. Woolf, Becoming Roman 7–8. Tacitus, Agricola 14, documents this drastic sociogeographical remodeling in Roman Britain (trans. A. R. Birley, Oxford): “That part of Britain nearest to us was gradually shaped into a province and was given a colonia of veterans as well. Certain states were granted to Cogidumnus [i.e., Togodumnas] as king: he remained most loyal up to the time I can myself remember.”

12. This is the process mapped out in Vitruvius 5.

13. Chariton, first–second-century ce novelist in Aphrodisias, describes an impromptu gathering of the citizens in times of crisis, or use as an Assembly for high-profile trials; Chariton 1.1.11, 3.4.17, 7.3.10. The ecclesiastic historian Socrates Scholasticus, HE 7.13, describes a similar gathering in the theatre of Alexandria in 415; on this occasion the prefect announced public ordinances. For similar experiences see also Livy, 33.28; Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists 6.21.9; and Sozomenus 5.9. For the political threat of theatres, see Zonaras 8.2. For edicts and municipal decrees, see Sherk, Robert K., The Municipal Decrees of the Roman West (Buffalo, NY: Arethusa Monographs, 1970)Google Scholar. And finally, the discontented: it was in the portico of Pompey's theatre that Brutus and Cassius stood waiting for Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. Appian, Civil Wars 2.16.116.

14. Dio Chrysostom, The Hunters of Euboea [Euboen Oration)], in Three Greek Romances, ed. and trans. Hadas, Moses (1953; repr. New York: Macmillan, 1987), 127–42Google Scholar, at 133.

15. Ibid., 140. In Ephesus the apostle Paul likewise experienced an uproar brought to, and dispelled in, a theater: Ephesian silversmiths, seeing in the apostle a threat to their shrine-making business, gathered fellow craftsmen in the theatre and, for the space of two hours, denigrated Paul and his new god (Acts 19:23–41). For the theatre as an Assembly, see also Chariton in note 13; Apuleius (Metamorphosis 3.2.1–3.10.5) has a similar account of a trial in the theatre, one that proves to be an elaborate joke for all but the accused.

16. Josephus, Against Apion, 1:42–4; in Josephus, Complete Works, trans. Whiston, William (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1960), 180Google Scholar.

17. Michael Grant, The Jews in the Roman World, relying on Philo, (Against Flaccus 72.84 85) who offers a long descriptive passage on all of the anti-Jewish assaults that happened in later summer of AD 38 (called sometimes the first pogrom), and it is in this context that the terror spectacle in the theatre occurred. For the theatre as a site of parodying Jewish religious culture, see Weiss, Zeev, “Theaters, Hippodromes, and Amphitheaters in Ancient Palestine,” in Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine, ed. Hezser, C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 623–40Google Scholar, at 634–5.

18. Weiss, Zeev, Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. The Zoilos Frieze, Aphrodisias Museum, Geyre, Turkey; images reproduced in Erim, Kenan T., Aphrodisias, A Guide to the Site and Its Museum ([1989] Istanbul: NET Touristik Yayinlar A.S., 2012), 80–1Google Scholar; his cursus (catalog of achievements) and frieze are discussed in Reynolds, Joyce, Aphrodisias and Rome: Documents from the Excavation of the Theatre at Aphrodisias Conducted by Professor Kenan T. Erim, Together with Some Related Texts (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1982), 156–9Google Scholar, App. v.

20. The shard is preserved in the Roman exhibit in the Jewry Wall Museum, Leicester.

21. Birley, Anthony R., “The Names of the Batavians and Tungrians in the Tabulae Vindolandenses ,” in Germania Inferior: Besiedlung, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft an der Grenze der römisch-germanischen Welt, ed. Grünewald, Thomas (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001), 241–60Google Scholar, at 250, notes the masculine name “Julius Verecundus” was an officer stationed at the Vindolanda garrison, and notes additionally that the name was Latinized, but Celtic in origin. The Verecunda (feminine) of the greeting was dated to Phase III, ca. late 90s–100 CE. Bowman and Thomas, who published much of the Vindolanda Tablets, speculate on no other grounds than the familiarity of the tone that this Verecunda may have been the wife of the addressee of the “greetings”; Bowman, Alan K. and Thomas, J. David, The Vindolanda Writing Tablets: Tabulae Vindolandenses III (London: British Museum Press, 2003), 110Google Scholar.

22. Wilmott, Tony, The Roman Amphitheatre in Britain (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2008), 161–2Google Scholar.

23. Greene, Elizabeth, “Female Networks in Military Communities: A View from the Vindolanda Tablets,” in Women and the Roman City in the Latin West, ed. Hemelrijk, Emily and Woolf, Greg (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 369–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 375.

24. The compendious register of inscriptions Roman Inscriptions of Britain, vol. 1, Inscriptions on Stone, ed. Collingwood, R. G., Wright, R. P. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965)Google Scholar—with its 1995 Addenda and Corrigenda, ed. R. S. O. Tomlin—lists only two instances of the name, RIB 2183 and RIB 621, both funerary inscriptions. It is the second one that is cited. See online at https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/621, accessed 17 January 2017; in the sketch, DISM = dis manibus, to the spirits of the dead.

25. Beacham, Richard, The Roman Theatre and Its Audience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 131–8Google Scholar, surveys the uneasy careers of the Roman mime, including a comprehensive banishment of all actors in 115 CE, as well as individual infractions.

26. Devine, Jim, “Voices from the Past: Presenting (re)Constructed Environments through Multimedia Technologies,” in Presenting the Romans: Interpreting the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site, ed. Mills, Nigel (Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), 113–17Google Scholar, at 114.

27. From “Antigonish” (1899) by William Hughes Mearns—which has had many subsequent variations.