Staging a Mutiny: Competitive Roleplaying on the Rhine (Annals 1.31-51)

Abstract

Discussions of Tacitus' use of theatricality or dramatic episodes are nothing new, but these studies have primarily focused on the Neronian books, where they are seen as particularly appropriate. The notions of performativity and pageantry, however, pervade all of Tacitus' historical writing, even in places where they have not previously been sought. I focus in this article on how Germanicus' conduct while quelling the Rhine mutiny of 14 CE dangerously assimilates him to the German soldiers insofar as both treat the uprising as an opportunity to display their most flamboyant behaviours in an attempt to frame the mutiny in their own terms. I see each party as staging performances designed to carry weight with their audience and so render the actors' claims to truth more persuasive. But first a distinction must be drawn between acts that are merely extravagant (e.g. the ‘dramatic gesture’) and those which, whether extravagant or not, happen in front of a group that is thereby constituted as the audience to a performance; only the latter will be of interest here. Nearly all forms of public discourse in Roman society aim at persuasion, and the scholarship on the subject often encourages slippage between dramatic, theatrical and performative acts: not everything that happens on a stage is performative, and not everything done with an eye to effect is theatrical. I therefore, with some hesitation, use throughout this piece the designation ‘performative’ to indicate those behaviours reminiscent of things that happen on stage (or, sometimes, in oratorical contexts), and which,becauseof their already familiar nature, seek to construct the audience to them specifically as a passive audience, i.e. to create a ‘script’ for the situation that requires a certain kind of response. So, to take an example from Old Comedy, the use in Aristophanes'Thesmophoriazousaeby the character Euripides of scenes taken from his own tragic plots seeks to persuade the audience-within-the-play that his relative must be rescued; it is thus both performative and persuasive.

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