those variable realities out. If he is the exceptional test case for reading Rome
against the grain of an expected discrimination, he is the exception that proves
the rule of cross-cultural incorporation.
***What, then, are we to make of the moments when the Moor is singled out,
scripted into stereotype, and produced finally as an “execrable wretch”? If
we really are in a world where cultural intermixing defines the status quo,
where a Moor such as Muly can interbreed unnoticed on the sidelines of
Rome, why then does the discovery of the “black” baby, fathered by Aaron
and mothered by Tamora, provide the climax for the Moor’s undoing? Is it
not miscegenation that tests and establishes the limit here, becoming the
thing itself, an unquestionable sign of an ultimately unaccommodating,
would-be-impenetrable culture? If not, why then at the end of the play is a
highly public “direful slaughtering death” reserved exclusively for the Moor?
Despite Aaron’s ability to insinuate himself inscrutably into the structures
of the Roman court, it is simultaneously, even ironically, clear that Rome is
well-equipped for discrimination against the Moor—so equipped that nega-
tive associations emerge within the language as part of the culture’s inherited,
proverbial lore. Consider the exchange that follows Aaron’s initial confession
of his many crimes. A Goth asks how Aaron can “say all this and never blush”
( 5. 1. 121 ), invoking the commonplace “to blush like a black dog,” which means
to show a “brazen face.”^55 Aaron himself completes the proverbial phrase with
“like a black dog, as the saying is,” and his addition calls attention not only
to the embedded slur but also to the fact that it is so embedded that it can lit-
erally go withoutsaying ( 5. 1. 122 ). Or consider the cryptic message that Titus
sends to Chiron and Demetrius once he realizes their guilt: “Integer vitae,
scelerisque purus, / Not eget Mauri iaculis, nec arcu”—“the man of upright life
and free from crime does not need the javelins or bows of the Moor”
( 4. 2. 20 – 21 ).^56 Chiron misses the point entirely, not realizing that the lines
are meant to incriminate him and his brother. He notes rather that the
lines come from “a verse in Horace” which he read “in the grammar long ago”
( 4. 2. 22 – 23 ). Prejudice is masked along with pertinence by the assumed neu-
trality and remoteness of classical education that seems, even in this “Roman”
world, almost quaint. It is not even clear that Titus intends the line literally;
his reference to the “javelins or bows of the Moor” functions as a figure of
speech, not necessarily as speech about a figure. Aaron, who calls the unsee-
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