Roman Drama and Critical Theory

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).

In order to explain the philosophical notion of “affect”, Eugenie Brinkema starts with the word’s etymology, from the Latin affectus and the verb afficere (“to act upon”), concluding that “affect [...] invokes force more than transmission, a force that does not have to move from subject to object but may fold back, rebound, recursively amplify” (Brinkema 2014: 24).

This paper deploys Jacqueline Rose’s On Violence and On Violence Against Women (2021) to re-evaluate Seneca’s tragedy Troades. Rose’s framework for thinking about “unthinkable” violence is usefully robust, engaging in feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-colonial theoretical methods as she addresses the intersection of violence against women and racializing violence from the paterfamilias up to and through the ongoing pandemic.

Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, an affective response to something horrible that causes a breakdown between subject and object and thus threatens one’s sense of self, seems ripe for an application to Seneca’s Thyestes. Classicists (McAuley) as well as scholars of modern English literature (Ablett et al.) have cited the play’s cannibalism for its abjective potential: the consumption of one’s children represents a literal collapse of subject and object, as Thyestes’s children are forever made part of him.

Slave torture in Plautus’ plays has primarily been read through an elite perspective (Segal, Marshall, Hunt). Richlin, however, sees Plautine comedy as popular entertainment arising from a “reservoir of anger” (2017, 26) and vehemently asserting the subjectivity of the enslaved. Using Asinaria and Captivi, I foreground enslaved bodies and the violence they suffer, using Hortense Spillers’ distinction between enslaved flesh and enslaver’s body to read references to torture as subversive.

Plautus’ Poenulus has served modern scholars as an invaluable archive of Carthaginian identity and alterity. The bilingual entrance speech of Hanno, who arrives late in the play to star as a Carthaginian merchant, has been plumbed for fragments of Punic. There has also been a rich debate over Hanno’s characterization (be it sympathetic, Starks 2000; mixed, Franko 1995, 1996; negative, Giusti 2018; or subversive of the drama’s program, Henderson 1994).