In the opening scene of Titus, Titus Andronicus enters fresh from war, “re-
salute[s] his country with his tears” of “true joy,” and celebrates both his newest
victory over the Goths and his triumphant “return to Rome”(1.1.78–79).The
captain who prepares the stage for this grand entrance introduces the return-
ing hero as “Rome’s best champion” and “patron of virtue,” invariably “success-
ful in the battles that he fights” and now responsible for having “circumscribed
with his sword / And brought to yoke the enemies of Rome” (1.1.68–72). Titus
himself further elides his story with Rome’s: though saddled with the “poor re-
mains” of “five-and-twenty valiant sons” (“half of the number,” he is careful to
point out, “that King Priam had”), he “hail[s]” Rome as “victorious,” projects
his “mourning weeds” onto Rome, and invokes the “defender of this Capitol”—
implicitly Jupiter—in an apostrophe that could as well point to himself (1.1.73,
80, 82–84).^12 Embedded within these glorifications is the assumption not only
of Rome’s superiority over the Goths but also of its purity and permanence as
a clearly bounded state, one which has claim on the ur-past of Troy.^13 Although
Titus’s victory has meant returning with both Gothic prisoners and a Moor, for
him there is only one “culture” and it is Rome’s.^14
Critics have endorsed Titus’s presumptions as Rome’s starting ideal, how-
ever it may be punctured by the all too telling presence of a Moorish “alien
within.”^15 Yet as the first act traces the incorporation of the Goths and the
Moor into Roman society, it exposes that ideal as Titus’s own atavistic fantasy,
one clearly unsuited to the politics and cultures of conquest. One of the first
signs of Rome’s own breakdown comes when Lucius demands that “the
proudest prisoner of the Goths,” Alarbus, be sacrificed, his limbs “hew[ed]”
(1.1.99–100). The Gothic queen declares the sacrifice “cruel, irreligious piety,”
her son Chiron insisting as well that Scythia (the origin of Marlowe’s contro-
versial conqueror, Tamburlaine) was “never...half so barbarous” as Rome
(1.1.133, 134)—both charges, which critics have taken up, challenging Rome’s
vaunted virtue. Importantly too, however, in lamenting Alarbus’s fate, his
brother Demetrius calls for “sharp revenge” while simultaneously recalling the
glory days “when Goths were Goths” (1.1.140, 143). As the play thus raises the
possibility that something may be rotten in the city-state of Rome, it also un-
dercuts the discriminatory fantasy of cultural purity that his revenge and
Titus’s Rome are built on, coding as dangerously reactionary the inscription
of a world where Romans are Romans, Goths are Goths—and, we might add,
Moors are Moors. The representation of Aaron is embedded within this cri-
tique, not as its vehicle but as its evidence, a realized subject whose inevitable
presence within Rome requires accommodation. To see him for what he is
“Incorporate in Rome” 69