rifice of an enemy Goth is necessary to appease the “shadows” and prevent dis-
turbing “prodigies on earth” ( 1. 1. 102 – 4 ). Lavinia pays due “tributary tears” to
her “brethren’s obsequies,” but her own ceremonial theatrics emphasize life
over death, triumph over mourning, the future over the past ( 1. 1. 162 – 63 ).
Kneeling at Titus’s feet with “tears of joy” and exhorting him to “live Lord
Titus long,” “live in fame!,” she asks that he bless her with his “victorious
hand, / Whose fortunes Rome’s best citizens applaud” ( 1. 1. 164 , 160 – 61 ,
166 – 67 ). In response and contrast, Titus, true to form, stresses his mortality,
his “age and feebleness,” and enjoins her to “outlive thy father’s days / And
fame’s eternal date, for virtue’s praise” ( 1. 1. 191 , 170 – 71 ). Even Marcus, who
finds “safer triumph in this funeral pomp” than in the wars, immediately
turns attention to the urgent matter of rule, imploring Titus to “help set a
head on headless Rome” ( 1. 1. 179 , 189 ).
Glaringly here, in fact, Titus’s attempts to immortalize an ideal Rome
come at a significant political cost, limiting his comprehension and apprehen-
sion of the present, his ability to head a headless, or multiheaded, state. For in
so fetishizing the tomb, Titus neither acknowledges nor negotiates the cultural
complexity that his own acts of conquest have created.^28 On the stage, that
complexity is obvious: standing with the Romans, in living, possibly startling
color, are the ultrawhite Goths and the “raven-coloured” Moor ( 2. 2. 83 ), pris-
oners of war who are now, necessarily, Rome’s subjects.^29 Instead of scripting
his triumph over their distinctive bodies, the self over the necessary Other, as
new historicism would dictate that he should, or in some less divisive way ac-
knowledging and installing their presence, Titus effectively looks the other
way—at the corpses of his sons.^30 In fixating on their funeral rites, he immor-
talizes a conquest and conqueror quite apart from the conquered, displaying
the Roman victory as if it were spontaneously generated exclusively from the
matter of a sui generis Rome. Although Lucius will ask for the sacrifice of a
Gothic prince, prior to that point Titus explicitly references the enemy Goths
only when he credits them with giving him “leave to sheathe [his] sword,” and
he does not refer to the Moor at all.
Moreover, when Lucius’s demand for a sacrificial Goth forces Titus to
address the fates of Rome’s new captives, he does so in self-reflexive terms,
making no allowances and no space for alternatives to his monolithic
“Roman” view. In selecting the victim, he automatically follows the code of
primogeniture which he will valorize when he appoints the next Roman em-
peror and which, in that case, overrides the will of his people: his choice of
Saturninus, the “first-born son that was the last / That wore the imperial dia-
“Incorporate in Rome” 73