evades or draws eclectically on one or more potential sources, it effectively dis-
locates its story in time and underscores the uncertainty of any given histori-
cal markers. Congruently, the histories it seems to engage tell an open story,
raising the possibility that Rome’s conquest of the Goths is no more a fait ac-
compli than was George Bush’s invasion of Iraq when he declared his “mis-
sion accomplished” in May of 2003. The chronicle reports that Titus “was
styled the deliverer of his country” after a “signal victory” in which he killed
the Gothic emperor and captured the Gothic queen, but also acknowledges
that “those barbarous people still increas[ed] in their numbers” and, implic-
itly, in their aggression against the Romans.^23 It was, in fact, to secure the un-
stable “peace” that the Roman emperor decided to marry the enemy queen.^24
In Herodian too, Rome appears constantly under siege by “barbarian” in-
vaders—who are also, as abstractly, termed “Goths.”^25
Whether we look within the text or outside it, then, when Titus returns
for the fifth or sixth time, “bleeding to Rome,” “bearing” and burying “his
valiant sons,” and “resaluting his country with his tears,” his attempt to glo-
rify the moment edges on emptiness—as does his production of a purely
bounded Rome. In his pomposity, Titus seems much like the easily critiqued
Othello that Iago will at first construct and condemn—a warrior who “lov[es]
his own pride and purposes,” “evades” the realities of the moment “with a
bombast circumstance,” and is “horribly stuffed with epithets of war” (Oth.
- 11 – 13 ). Moreover, Titus’s exuberant patriotism is tarnished by a bizarre po-
litical necrophilia that renders his politics, and his promotion of a purely
Roman Rome, questionably eccentric.^26 In an odd move that blurs triumph
into obsequy, Titus—who groups his surviving and deceased sons together as
“poor remains, alive and dead” ( 1. 1. 84 )—turns the tomb, the “sweet cell of
virtue and nobility” and “sacred receptacle of [his] joys,” into the preeminent
measure of Roman honor and value ( 1. 1. 95 – 96 ). That is, instead of valorizing
the act of conquest, he memorializes its losses, celebrating the tomb as the ide-
ologic repository of an unchangeable and impenetrable Rome, leaving his
sons, “Rome’s readiest champions,” to rest there immutably “in peace and ho-
nour” ( 1. 1. 153 – 54 ).
Even if “proper burial” “provides the sign of [Roman] culture,” against
which the torture of Aaron gets “counterposed” as deviant, the play codes
Titus’s macabre dance of death as perversely and problematically his—not
Rome’s.^27 The Andronici who applaud his return look beyond the tomb to
other sites of meaning and action. Reading the tomb as an “earthly prison,”
Lucius, for one, insists that proper burial is not enough and that the ritual sac-
- 11 – 13 ). Moreover, Titus’s exuberant patriotism is tarnished by a bizarre po-
72 chapter three