I. The Stage and the State

The idea that Roman drama should be perceived as anything other than a public, officially sanctioned spectacle may seem surprising. Of all modes of literary production, drama is intrinsically among the most closely connected to the public life of the state as a whole. Not only did dramatic productions take place within the context of official civic festivals, but in the Late Republic, the theater offered the people a crucial opportunity for voicing their political sentiments, and politicians in turn used the production of plays to win popular support. Thus M. Junius Brutus attempted to have the Brutus of Accius, a historical drama celebrating the deeds of the regicide, produced at the Apollonian Games in 44 B.C.E., four months after his assassination of Caesar.^[15]

However, despite the secure location of dramatic performances among the public events of the Roman state, the theater could also be defined as an institution deliberately isolated from the normal conduct of civic life.^[16] Although the games were part of an official calendar, they were nevertheless days on which normal public business was suspended. They may thus be considered as publicly controlled lapses in public participation, rather like the conception of otium, “time off,” which also has a recognized place in the rhythm of public life. So, too, the actors who performed in dramas were rigorously and emphatically excluded from membership in the res publica.^[17] Yet at the same time that they provide an opportunity for the suspension and inversion of traditional norms, such phenomena create a heightened awareness of the overarching structure of public authority that regulates the transgression of its own rules.^[18]

The clearest example of how the theater increasingly became a locus for the manipulation of public opinion during the Late Republic was the frequent translation of the action and dialogue of the stage into a commentary on political affairs. Cicero records many occasions where a particularly pregnant line sparked a demonstration, and himself reaped the benefit of such a display when an actor, “who always took the best parts both in the Republic and on the stage,” converted his performance into a plea for Cicero’s recall.^[19] Such a phenomenon indeed suggests that the segregation between the stage and the res publica, if it ever existed, was breaking down, and that the stage was becoming, as Cicero elsewhere suggests, a vital arena for the expression of political views. But this development is by no means incompatible with a theoretical segregation of the stage from the state as a political entity. On the contrary, the politicization of theatrical performances, and the volatility and license of their audiences, through which the stage mounted an increasingly potent to challenge to official institutions, made it all the more important to insist on such a separation.^[20]

Thus at virtually the same time that he was praising the artiste who had delivered him from exile, Cicero was also composing, in book 4 of the De re publica, a diagnosis of the dangers of just this kind of interpenetration between politics and the theater.^[21] Scipio, his interlocutor, praises an ancient Roman law that imposes the most extreme disjunction between the two realms: “Because the entire craft of the theater and the whole stage was held in such disrepute, they decreed that that whole type of men [i.e., actors] not only lacked the honor of the rest of the citizens but should even be removed from their tribe [i.e., made non-citizens] by the censor’s mark.”^[22] The complete isolation of all those connected with theatrical performances from the state is accomplished by the political authority of the censors. Scipio also beats back the attempts of drama to intervene directly in political life by openly criticizing public figures again by presenting it as a rival to the legitimate political authority of Rome’s magistrates. Even though Greek comedy often attacked men who were truly wicked (populares homines improbos), nevertheless it is the place of the censor to condemn them, not the poets.^[23] Similarly, it was inappropriate for Pericles, whose political status is described in terms with a very Roman ring,^[24] to be attacked on the stage. The Romans met the two-pronged threat of the theater—its propensity both to link itself directly to political institutions, and, in criticizing public figures, to usurp the authority of the magistrates—by forbidding any living man to be praised or blamed on the stage. “For we ought to consider our life liable to the judgments of magistrates, and to legal challenge, and we should not hear abuse except when it is sanctioned that it be possible to respond and to defend one’s self in a court of law.”^[25]

It may be argued against this picture of a theoretical segregation between the stage and the political life of the state that there existed a whole genre of Roman drama, the fabula praetexta, devoted specifically to representing episodes from Roman history and even current public events.^[26] Nor was the praetexta an entirely obsolete form in the Late Republic. We have seen that the tyrannicide Brutus attempted to revive Accius’s Brutus in 44 B.C.E. And we know of a new praetexta, performed only in Spain but available in Rome as a text, by L. Cornelius Balbus to celebrate his own exploits.^[27] However, even during the golden age of Roman tragedy in the Middle Republic, praetextae were significantly less numerous than tragedies composed on Greek subjects. According to Hubert Zehnacker’s count, in the case of the four great tragedians Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, the titles of only seven praetextae survive, compared to eighty-three from other tragedies.^[28] What is more, these performances seem usually to have had the clear purpose of glorifying the deeds of the poet’s noble patron and his ancestors.^[29] Thus the fabula praetexta may best be regarded as a not entirely successful experiment in the iconography of power whose use in the service of private ambitions symptomatizes precisely the overt politicization of the drama that was at the root of Cicero’s concerns about the theater.^[30] Indeed, the two Late Republican performances of praetextae that I have mentioned had obvious propaganda value. Accius’s Brutus would have cast the most favorable possible light on the assassination of Caesar, and Balbus’s production is portrayed in extremely negative terms by Asinius Pollio, as a form of self-glorification that surpassed the efforts of Caesar himself.^[31]

As Scipio in the De re publica stresses the dichotomy between the theater and Rome’s political institutions, so Varro in his Antiquitates rerum divinarum differentiates the theater from the state in terms of its portrayal of the gods. Varro distinguishes three forms of theology, which he calls the mythikon, the physikon, and the civile,^[32] associated with the poets, the philosophers, and the leaders of cities, respectively. These categories are by no means Varro’s own innovation; they reflect a well-established Greek division of the subject.^[33] What is most significant for us is that each of the three theologies was given a specific spatial sphere of operation. “The first theology [sc. the “mythical”] is most suited to the theater, the second [the “natural”] to the natural world, and the third [the “civil” or “political”] to the city.”^[34] Thus here too the theater appears as a realm separate and distinct from the civic space of the city as a whole.

Varro brings up the threefold division of theology in the first book of his treatise as a way of defining his own subject, which will be the civil religion,^[35] but his discussion of the genus mythikon possesses a moral charge of a piece with negative portrayals of the theater. In particular, his treatise suggests a link between the fears about the dangerous potential of images expressed by Livy’s Cato and the ideal of the political segregation of the theater emerges in the De re publica. While Varro recognizes that the theology of the state necessarily borrows elements from both of the other categories, he asserts that it should borrow more from the philosophers than the poets.^[36] One crucial distinction that Varro draws between the poet’s treatment of the gods and the state religion involves the use of representation. Roman religion was originally aniconic and Varro expresses the wish that it had remained so.^[37] The introduction of images (simulacra), whose fictive character suggests a connection with “poetic” theology, necessarily involved a misrepresentation of the gods, since it moved them away from the abstractions of the philosophers at the same time as it reversed earlier Roman traditions. While the poets’ anthropomorphization rendered the gods more easily apprehensible, it could also be connected with other ficta, such as descriptions of divine thievery, adultery, and periods of slavery to mortals, which Varro describes as “opposed to the dignity and nature of the immortal gods.”^[38] Though the substance of this remark goes back at least to Xenophanes,^[39] it is significant that Varro describes the errors of the poets partly in political terms. As the theater in the De re publica illegitimately attacks the political leaders of the state, so the “theology” Varro associates with the theater, as opposed to the city, violates the hierarchy imposed by the Roman structure of political authority where the gods, as superior in status, are possessors of a dignitas that deserves respect.^[40]

But its connection with the mythical theology of the poets is not the only context in which the theater appears in Varro’s treatise. Since theatrical performances themselves constituted part of the cult practices of the state religion, they received their own book (book 10) in Varro’s study. We cannot say much about the content of this book based on the one fragment that survives, a reference to certain magistrates’ right to use canopies in the theater,^[41] but it is natural to assume that, as opposed to the many works in which he treated Roman drama from the perspective of the litteratus, here Varro was interested primarily in the rituals of the performance itself. If this is the case, then the treatment of theater in the work as a whole reinforces the contrast between the potentially subversive, or anomalous, content of the plays themselves and the officially sanctioned context of their performance.

The spatial arrangement of the theater itself reflects a similar tension between the drama on stage and the religious framework in which it was embedded. When in 55 B.C.E. Pompey erected Rome’s first permanent theater surmounted by a shrine to Venus Victrix, he attempted to avert criticism by claiming that his edifice was not actually a theater but a temple “at the base of which we have added rows of seats for spectacles.”^[42] However disingenuously this remark was made, it highlights how the orientation of the spaces in which dramatic performances took place reinforced the institutionalized “otherness” of the stage.^[43] As J. A. Hanson has shown, the religious context of ludi scaenici was, in every case we are able to judge, emphasized by the proximity of the temple of the god in whose honor the festival was held.^[44] But within the theater-temple complex, the stage at the bottom of the steps is set against the temple itself, exalted by its podium. The direction of the spectators’ gaze within this architectural space thus creates an opposition between watching plays and participating in other forms of religious ritual, especially sacrifice, at least as it was enacted in Pompey’s theater.^[45] This opposition also appears in the pompa or procession preceding the actual dramas, which Tertullian describes as leading “to the stage away from the temples and altars” (ad scaenam a templis et aris).^[46] During dramatic performances, the spectators turn their backs on the temple itself, literally to look down on the actors whose social rank was correspondingly low. The act of watching becomes a bond that unites all levels of Roman society, from the people to the gods, who are also present as spectators.^[47] By contrast, sacrifices were performed on the altar in front of the temple, so that the gaze of the spectators was directed up the steps toward the shrine of the god itself. The importance of this kind of visual contact during sacrifice can be discerned from Vitruvius’s discussion of the orientation of the cult statues within temples. The statue should always face west “so that those coming to the altar to sacrifice might look to the east and the statue in the temple…and these images might seem to rise up and gaze in turn upon those making supplication and sacrificing.”^[48]

The decorations of the Roman stage itself reinforced the sense that it constituted an anomaly within the public spaces of the city. As the plays depicted actions that, in the vast majority of cases, took place outside Rome, usually in a markedly Greek milieu, and focused often on the domestic rather than the political lives of their protagonists, so each of the three genres of stage decoration described by Vitruvius defines a landscape antithetical to the civic context within which the festival itself took place. The comic stage depicted private buildings;^[49] the tragic, a distinctively royal palace;^[50] and satyric decoration created a non-urban landscape of trees, caves, and mountains. The stage buildings for the temporary theaters of the Republic were built anew every year and offered the magistrates in charge of their construction a chance to win prestige through the fabulous ostentation of the edifices they provided. As a result, the buildings themselves were connected with what was defined as an un-Roman emphasis on luxury and individual self-aggrandizement.^[51] Pliny’s outraged description of the stage buildings of Scaurus in 58 B.C.E. and Curio in 52 B.C.E. makes them emblems of all the vices that led to the fall of the Republic, especially the canonical two, luxuria and ambitio, and contrasts the decadent Romans willing to risk their lives for the thrill of riding around in Curio’s rotating theater with their ancestors who fell at Cannae.^[52] The case of Scaurus suggests another link between the displays on the stage and the private space of the domus. His scaena not only represented the luxury of tragic kings but emulated it with its gold, bronze, and, most remarkably, glass, and these splendid furnishings later became part of the decorations of Scaurus’s own house.

The foreignness of the stage was made all the more apparent by the careful arrangement of the spectators in the stands to create a contrasting display of the social hierarchy within the Roman state.^[53] Well before Augustus’s sweeping legislation, the place one occupied in the theater reflected one’s position in the state as a whole.^[54] (The use of the same Latin word ordo to designate both a row of seats and a social class makes the connection almost inevitable.)^[55] In even more fundamental ways, the conditions under which dramatic spectacles were watched served to highlight what made the Roman state unique. The very absence of a permanent theater, at a time when many less prosperous Italian cities already possessed one, not only signaled the Roman rejection of luxury, but also served as a reminder of the annual change in magistrates that crucially differentiated the Roman constitution from a regnum like those presented on the stage itself.^[56] When in 154 B.C.E. a permanent theater was begun by the censors, the consul P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica ordered construction stopped and had the building materials auctioned off.^[57] Valerius Maximus explains the resulting senatus consultum prohibiting “anyone from building theater seats in the city or within a mile of it or watching the ludi while seated, as a way of ensuring that the capacity for standing on their feet that distinguished the Roman gens might thus become more widely known.” ^[58]

Augustus’s theater legislation, whatever its actual details,^[59] was certainly the most comprehensive and elaborate attempt yet to make seating arrangements at the theater a manifestation of the idealized structure of Roman society. His innovations can be read as an attempt to emphasize even more clearly the boundary between the stage and the state that we have been describing, and to use this distinction specifically to differentiate the restored society of Augustan Rome from the disorder of the Late Republic,^[60] with which, as we have seen, the excesses and turmoil of the theater were particularly associated. Not only does Augustus prescribe who sits where in the stands, and make the seating arrangements more visually striking by requiring all those seated in the central stands to wear their white togas;^[61] he also forbids anyone from the highest classes to appear on the stage itself.^[62] The importance of the radical separation between the stage and the stands in Augustan Rome is also revealed in the fate of the actor Pylades.^[63] When hissed at by one of the spectators, Pylades pointed to him from the stage, thus reversing the spectacular order by making the spectator himself an object of attention (conspicuum). For this the emperor banished him from Italy.