Lisl Walsh (Beloit College)
As literary scholars have learned to pay attention to the phenomenology and topography of the city of Rome, they have gained additional perspectives on the ways that Roman literature “intra-acts” with the physicality of the city itself: texts-in-place affect, and are affected by, an audience’s understanding of the semantics of the place itself (for the concept of “intra-action,” see Barad 2007; for texts-in-place, Vasaly 1993, Goldberg 1998, Welch 2005, Pandey 2014, Unruh 2014).
Roman tragedy has thus far suffered from a dearth of scholarship that takes the semantics of place seriously, in no small part because of the lack of evidence: our complete tragic texts are those written by Seneca the Younger, but they are not attested to have been performed in antiquity at all, much less attested to have been performed in a specified location. Without attestation of performance, how can we explore the ways that Roman tragedy may have intra-acted with topography and phenomenology of the city?
Taking Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” as both a methodological approach and an ethical imperative, this paper shows how Seneca’s Troades, when considered in the Theatre of Marcellus, not only reveals nuances of the play that have heretofore seemed only mildly interesting (if they are noted at all) in the scholarship, but also offers interesting insight into the Theatre’s own problematic coding of gender, memory, and grief. Specifically, I argue that this theatrical place—finished by Augustus and dedicated to his deceased nephew/son-in-law—would have changed an audience’s reception of Seneca’s tragedy to highlight its intertextual reliance on Vergil Aeneid 6 (Aeneas’ introduction to the men of Rome’s future, which culminates in Anchises’ lament of the theatre’s dedicatee: cf. Sen Tr. 453-454 and Aen. 6.862; Tr. 771-773 and Aen. 6.851-853; Tr. 775-779 and Aen. 6.882-887). By helping to invoke Anchises’ “parade” in Act 3 of the Troades, the Theatre of Marcellus provides a way of understanding Andromache’s fruitless lament for Astyanax and the sanctity of Hector’s tomb as a comment on the very function of Roman memory and grief, when faced with the loss of Rome’s promising youth and the memory of their ancestors. In turn, watching this scene of the Troades in Marcellus’ theatre implicates the theatre itself as an analogue for Hector’s tomb: a site for preserved memory and grief, a reminder of the city’s downfall, with Rome’s “future,” like Astyanax, alive and hiding inside.
In its own gendering of grief and past-obsession as feminine (Fabre-Serris 2015), finally, Troades could be seen as an ironic critique of the masculine expression of grief that is the Theatre itself. This critique may provide insight into Roman women’s experience of the theatre, where the gender-stratified seating provides to Roman upper-class men, and not women, fewer obstacles to feeling connected or even identifying with the characters on stage because of their closer proximity (Rawson 1987).