142 Ideals in the Modern World
austere patriotism, his intolerance of dissent, his acute sense of
personal and family honor, his traditional piety, and his ferocious
commitment to patriarchal hierarchy... is a recurrent Roman
personality type” (Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, 372). Titus is
an exemplar of the peculiarly Roman version of the warrior ideal:
Rome, I have been thy soldier forty years,
And led my country’s strength successfully.
And buried one and twenty valiant sons,
Knighted in fi eld, slain manfully in arms,
In right and ser vice of their noble country.
(I.i.193–197)Titus is at the end of his life and feels justifi ed in proclaiming
that he has fulfi lled a high ideal. Titus is not Achillean: he does
not seek glory for himself. He is—or wishes to be— a descendant
of Hector.
Titus demands that the eldest son of Tamora, queen of the de-
feated Goths, be sacrifi ced to the memory of his own slain sons. The
sacrifi ce, Titus claims, has the status of religious rite. It is intended
to appease the suff ering shadows of the departed, his sons killed in
the wars, and so it must take place. Not long afterward, Titus kills
one of his remaining sons for opposing him when he declares that
Lavinia, his dau gh ter, will marry the newly proclaimed emperor,
Saturninus. Titus has— honorably, nobly— ceded his right to the
imperial seat to Saturninus and intends to give him absolute loyalty,
what ever the cost. When Titus’ son, Mutius, tries to block the
marriage, Titus draws his sword and kills him. In Roman life, it was
often considered an act of nobility to put the state or one’s concep-
tion of honor before family. Maus mentions Horatius, who killed his
own sister for lamenting the death of her husband, whom Horatius
killed in battle; Titus Manlius Torquatus, a general who had his own