Racialisms, from Greco-Roman Antiquity to Global Capitalist Modernity

The main problem with unpacking constructions and representations of racialized difference from the early eighteenth century is that what people now tend to think of as ‘race’ is not an inherent, transhistorical physiological property of bodies, but rather a historically and culturally contingent concept with roots in specific Enlightenment ideologies. As Ndiaye puts it: ‘Race is not a form of human difference but a system of power falsely packaged as a system of knowledge’, one that ‘mobiliz[es] the dominant epistemic fields at any given point in time.’Footnote ⁹ The dominant epistemic field of the late eighteenth century, which still haunts the present, privileged naturalizing and taxonomizing configurations of knowledge. The resulting Enlightenment ideologies of racial difference, such as those promulgated by the likes of David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson, (d)evolved into the scientistic racial theories of the nineteenth century that positioned difference as biological and essential, at once inscribed on the surface of bodies and inextricably embedded within them.Footnote ¹⁰ Twenty-first-century discussions of race tend to be strongly influenced by the anthropological and physiological epistemes inherited from the nineteenth century, whether critiquing their premises or reifying them. The enduring shadow cast by Enlightenment thought has therefore obscured many formulations of difference from previous eras.Footnote ¹¹

In the context I focus on here, the first third of the eighteenth century, European notions of difference were far less beholden to any single ideology than they would be after the Enlightenment. ‘Human variety’, as it was then often called, was more fluid than later taxonomies would permit, since the human body was not yet regarded as a self-enclosed system but rather as a porous, malleable one. As Greta LaFleur and Roxann Wheeler have each persuasively argued, it was only after mid-century that differences were taxonomized according to increasingly rigid categories of race, gender, and sexuality and, from there, theorized as immanent structural properties of bodies. But in the earlier decades of the eighteenth century, human variety was largely attributed to perceptible manifestations of bodies’ susceptibility to external factors, from the environmental to the cultural.Footnote ¹² To a certain extent, difference was imagined as potentially flexible, multiple, and mutable.

But just because difference was less rigidly defined does not mean that the systems of power that operated through these pre-Enlightenment discourse domains were less materially harmful than those that operated via later biological-phenotypical constructs of race. Although difference was understood more flexibly than it would be later, it was nevertheless externally imposed by those in power onto people whose own sense of self-determination was mostly excluded from the historical archive, and it was used as both justification and technology for enslavement, colonization, and other very real forms of violence. Racism was rampant, even if some of its terms, principles, and justifications differed from those of later periods. In other words, approaching race as a historically contingent concept does not invalidate individuals’ experiences of moving through the world in a body that has been racialized. As performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o explains, race itself may be a ‘fiction,’ but racism, as a result of that fiction and the ‘historical memory’ attendant on it, is unquestionably real as ‘collectively experienced and enacted’.Footnote ¹³ One way of critiquing that fiction, then, is through examining aspects of its (pre-)history in performance culture.

The pre-Enlightenment potential for flexibility, fluidity, and multiplicity in differentiating processes was amplified by the generalizing poetics of Metastasian opera, which is why I use the phrase ‘racialized difference’ throughout this study rather than ‘race’. With ‘racialized difference’, I mean to avoid reifying the familiar phenotypical-biological construction of ‘race’ and projecting it backwards as though it were a transhistorical concept. I am working within an earlier and less defined epistemic field in which some modes of difference were racialized, but not yet equated with biological essentialism or physiological destiny. I thus follow LaFleur’s and Simone Browne’s definitions of ‘racialization’ as the ‘strategic production of human difference’.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, the phrase ‘racialized difference’ acknowledges that there are also continuities between different historical moments and their respective epistemes. I account for those continuities here by drawing on Cedric Robinson’s foundational 1983 study Black Marxism, where he deploys ‘racialism’ as an umbrella term for ideological processes of differentiation across the history of Western civilization. As Robinson suggests, such processes were already at work in Greco-Roman antiquity and persisted in various guises throughout the medieval and early modern periods, but they were invested with new power when the advent of modern capitalism solidified racialisms into ‘race’.Footnote ¹⁵ Metastasio wrote his major libretti between the mid-1720s and 1740, a critical phase in the emergence of the intertwined systems of capitalism and plantation slavery, yet his texts and their many reinventions have traditionally been treated as cordoned off from these emerging global power dynamics.

To continue ignoring that broader context is to miss something crucial about both opera seria and the pre-history of race. After all, race is first and foremost a system of power, as Ndiaye has established, and the genre of opera seria was devoted to explorations of power, as Martha Feldman has categorically shown. In Metastasio’s libretti in particular, those explorations took place almost entirely within imperial and colonial scenarios borrowed from ancient history, ratifying the tenets of good sovereignty in the present by re-staging past conflicts between Greek or Roman figures and their African or Asian counterparts. This is not to say that Metastasio’s operas portrayed every European authority figure as ‘good’ and every non-European character as ‘bad’ — far from it — but rather that racializing difference provided one important mode through which the poet dramatized power dynamics in his operatic corpus.Footnote ¹⁶

For a basic example of how Metastasio drew on racialism to characterise such relations, take the early libretto Didone abbandonata (Naples, 1724), which effectively made his reputation and became one of his best-loved works. The opera’s eponymous queen, Dido, founded Carthage (in what is now Tunis) after fleeing Tyre (in what is now Lebanon), and has been variously associated with both Africa and Asia (as the Levant or ‘Orient’) depending on the situation. Metastasio’s rendition of Virgil’s well-known tale centres on a love triangle. Didone loves the Trojan exile Enea, whom eighteenth-century audiences would have recognized from the Aeneid as the eventual founder of Rome; she is also pursued by the treacherous African king Iarba, hiding his identity under the pseudonym ‘Arbace’. The African king is not a viable suitor in this version but serves primarily to set off Enea’s political and moral virtue. For instance, Iarba’s first stage appearance has the disguised king enter accompanied by a troop of Moors parading leashed tigers and lions as gifts for the queen, the exotic and dangerous pets alluding to the potential for violence that attends his marriage proposal.Footnote ¹⁷ In the end, Enea, the figure of good sovereignty, abandons Didone and his own desires in order to accept his divine duty of founding Rome. Iarba, the bad king, makes good on his threat of destruction, punishing Didone for rejecting him by setting fire to Carthage. Didone, neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and without a claim to either Enea’s Rome or Iarba’s Africa, dies in the flames of her burning city.

None of this indexes race in any post-Enlightenment sense, as Didone’s categories of ‘Trojan/Roman’ and ‘Moorish/African’ are not presented as biological or even physiological, but rather portrayed as cultural and geographical. Yet Metastasio was clearly using them as shorthand for a process of differentiation — in this case, to distinguish between the types of government associated with the two male figures in the libretto. Although such ‘national’ categories were more flexible and less particularized than later biological taxonomies of race, they had been leveraged as strategies of differentiation since antiquity; by the early modern period, as Ndiaye argues, those national categories had become one of the most significant progenitors to Enlightenment racial thinking.Footnote ¹⁸ Of course, ‘African’ is not a nationality, nor is ‘Moorish’, but their function as such in Metastasian libretti exemplifies the generic tendency of opera seria to privilege broad strokes over particularities.

In Metastasio’s next major effort, the comparatively under-studied Catone in Utica, such longstanding racialisms were reconfigured and modernized in ways that provide important insights into pre-Enlightenment strategies of racialization. This is because Catone’s drama revolves around the very issue of marking differences between imperial subjects in a colonial context — namely, by defining who does and does not count as a ‘Roman’. The scene is set in 46 BCE, in the Roman colony of Utica in North Africa, where two famous Roman political leaders are waging a civil war over Rome’s future. Can an empire be run by a republican government ‘at home’, as stoic senator Catone insists, or does empire require absolutist rule, as would-be dictator Giulio Cesare believes? (Note that Rome had long been both a republic and an empire, having held colonies in North Africa dating back centuries to the Second Punic War; at issue in Catone is not the ethics of imperialism in general, but rather which type of government is best for the Romans who benefit from that empire.) The colonized African soil on which the two leaders fight is a proxy for Rome itself — as is the body of Marzia, Catone’s daughter, who is caught between her filial duty and her illicit love for Cesare. The requisite love triangle is filled out by Arbace, a Numidian (North African) prince who is in love with Marzia and allies himself with Catone against Cesare. As he is constantly reminded by the other characters, Arbace is an African, not a Roman. Still, while he shares his name with the pseudonym of Didone’s African king, the loyal and sentimental Arbace is utterly unlike the nefarious Iarba. His Africanness was written for a different purpose.

The opera ends when Catone commits suicide rather than submit to Cesare’s rule, a prospect he equates with nothing less than enslavement. ‘I am teaching the world, and all of you, how to escape slavery’, the dying senator proclaims, invoking one of the opera’s recurring tropes.Footnote ¹⁹ Catone’s last command is that Marzia renounce her beloved Cesare and marry the faithful Arbace. Lying in his daughter’s arms, Catone says to her, ‘Ah, I didn’t think I’d leave you in Africa like this!’Footnote ²⁰ He dies (offstage), while Cesare is filled with remorse and throws his victor’s laurels on the ground. Despite Catone’s accusations, Cesare has expressed an inner conflict about his divinely ordained duty to take over Rome, so he is effectively absolved of charges of tyranny.

In Catone, as in Didone and most of his later libretti, Metastasio elided political dilemmas about the management of empire with the emotional dilemmas of the subjects under that empire’s dominion. This is exemplified in Catone by the obvious parallel between Marzia and Rome, in which both woman and state are caught between a desire for Cesare (or the absolutism he represents) and duty to Catone (or the republicanism he represents). Metastasio wrote Catone for the Teatro Argentina in Rome, where he was hoping to gain a foothold, so it makes sense that the libretto would be preoccupied with delineating what it means to be a good Roman.Footnote ²¹ What is important about Catone’s delineations of Romanness, though, is how they served the poet’s broader dramaturgical aim of blurring political designations into moral ones. Essentially, this early libretto shows Metastasio in the process of developing his major dramaturgical modus operandi: he gave operagoers the romantic intrigues they desired, but invested those intrigues with monumental political implications in order to elevate them to the register of historical tragedy.Footnote ²² The result was that individual emotional conflicts took on the stakes of much bigger power struggles, while grand historical events became more immediate and affecting because they were played out through characters’ interpersonal relationships. As we’ll see, this all relates back to the issue of racialized difference because, in Catone, the political-emotional conflicts of Romanness were undergirded by a racialism that was not only ancient but also, significantly, inflected by Metastasio’s contemporaneous context of European colonization of the New World and plantation slavery.

‘The rest is verisimilar’: Metastasio’s Sources

Uncovering the processes of racialization at work under the surface of Catone begins with investigating the poet’s source material. Metastasio’s rendition of the events of Julius Caesar’s civil war (49–45 BCE) is more akin to fan fiction than history, even by eighteenth-century standards, for Cato and Caesar did not clash in Utica, nor did any of Cato’s daughters have a secret relationship with Caesar, and ‘Marcia’ was not even one of Cato’s daughters, but his wife. These fictions, among various others, were not owed to the poet’s lack of familiarity with the historical sources. Like any Settecento man of letters, Metastasio had read the canonical representations of Caesar and Cato’s African war in Lucan’s Pharsalia (mid-first century CE) and Plutarch’s Lives (early second century CE), as well as germane texts by Cicero, Seneca, and Sallust. Even as a teenager he knew these texts well enough to borrow phrases straight from both the Lives and Pharsalia for his elegy La morte di Catone (1717), where he ventriloquized the dying Cato in Dantesque terza rima. Footnote ²³

Yet in his later operatic version of Catone, Metastasio departed so far from these ancient sources that he did not even gesture to them in his argomento. That alone is a sign that something unusual was afoot. In Didone he had been careful to spell out precisely which elements he took from which sources: ‘Everything is from Virgil’, along with a few bits from the third book of Ovid’s Fasti. Footnote ²⁴ But with Catone, the poet simply noted: ‘Everything is from history, the rest is verisimilar’ (i.e. ‘realistic’).Footnote ²⁵ But that wasn’t entirely true. Metastasio was uncharacteristically evasive about his sources for Catone because openly acknowledging his immediate inspiration would have rankled the classicist establishment in Rome.Footnote ²⁶

The clue to finding his inspiration lies with the character of Arbace. The sentimental African prince does not appear in any of the classical texts on Caesar’s civil war because he is not exactly a historical figure. But Metastasio did not invent Arbace himself: he borrowed him from one of the most popular English stage plays of the eighteenth century. Entitled Cato, A Tragedy, that play was written by Joseph Addison (of Spectator fame) and had premiered in London in 1713. In basic outlines, the plot of Addison’s tragedy is nearly identical to that of Metastasio’s libretto from fifteen years later. What is more, both dramas vary from the canonical ancient sources in many of the same ways, with Cato’s daughter renamed ‘Marcia’ and inserted into a love story that ends with her marrying an African prince.

The similarities are unmistakable and, though this point is often overlooked, Metastasio himself admitted that he had regularly consulted modern dramas when writing his own. In a 1754 letter to none other than Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, Metastasio explained his debts to the contemporary theatre:

Given the rapturous reception of Addison’s tragedy, Metastasio certainly would have been interested in reading it — and he easily could have, since by 1718 there were already at least five Italian translations in circulation. In addition to lesser-known ones by Luigi Riccoboni, Nicola Saverio Valletta, and Rodolfo Aquaviva, there was Anton Maria Salvini’s immensely influential literary effort and Pier Jacopo Martello’s ‘Italianized’ rewrite. The Martello was most likely Metastasio’s source, for that version exonerates Addison’s villainous Caesar by adding a lengthy defensive speech for a secondary character. (Caesar could not exonerate himself, as he does in Metastasio’s version, because Caesar never actually appears on stage in Addison’s tragedy.) Martello also changed some of Alexander Pope’s prologue in order to praise Italy instead of Britain, making plain how Addison’s ancient-Roman-turned-modern-British story could appeal to a Roman-imperial nostalgia in Italian audiences.Footnote ²⁸ Metastasio may well have taken the risk of adapting a modern, rather than classical, source in hopes of activating similar resonances himself; furthermore, Addison’s love story offered him the perfect opportunity for experimenting with mapping personal relationships onto political ones.Footnote ²⁹

The character Metastasio calls ‘Arbace’ was originally Addison’s invention, as one half of the love plot, but in the play Marcia’s African lover is named ‘Juba’. He is a fictionalized composite of two historical Jubas: King Juba I of Numidia, a client king who was not directly involved in the Utica conflict, and his son Prince Juba, who in 46 BCE would have been a toddler.Footnote ³⁰ Neither of these Jubas met, let alone married, any of Cato’s daughters (although Prince Juba did grow up to marry Antony and Cleopatra’s daughter, which may have been how Addison got the idea to make him into a romantic figure). There are some important differences between Addison’s and Metastasio’s versions, but there is no question that Metastasio’s Arbace is Addison’s Juba. The list of roles printed in the 1727 Catone libretto includes a tiny note explaining that the poet changed the name Juba to Arbace to accommodate musical setting (see Figure 2).Footnote ³¹

Figure 2.

Text explaining how the poet changed the name ‘Juba’ to ‘Arbace’ for the sake of musical setting. In Metastasio, Catone in Utica (Rome, 1728), p. 6.

The poet’s source is important because Metastasio’s Arbace retains crucial aspects of Addison’s Juba, and Juba’s central role in Addison’s play is inextricable from early-eighteenth-century British constructions of racialized difference vis-à-vis empire and coloniality.Footnote ³² Addison’s play became ‘the most politicized drama of the eighteenth century’, famously quoted at key moments by American revolutionaries like Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, and George Washington, but in its original version the play was not intended as a celebration of republicanism.Footnote ³³ As Srinivas Aravamudan argues, Addison’s characters recite clichés about liberty and virtue so as to appease a range of political factions, thereby enabling the drama to serve whatever ends its spectators required.Footnote ³⁴ What the original Cato did promote, however, appealing to Whig and Tory alike, was a triumphalist narrative about colonialism. Addison’s play premiered when the British were tightening their control over the Atlantic against the Spanish, expanding their plantation system in the Americas, and increasing their trafficking of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade. The central dilemma of the play as Addison presents it is therefore not about the legitimacy of a colonial empire in general, but rather about how the project of empire should be framed. Especially through the relationship between Cato and Juba, Cato portrays Britain’s nascent empire-building as a benevolent force that could remake colonized peoples in their colonizers’ mould.

This dynamic is established early in Act I in one of the play’s best-known scenes. Prince Juba, the Arbace prototype, is arguing with his anti-Roman general, Syphax, about the Numidians’ alliance with Cato. Syphax urges Juba to throw Cato over and unite all of Africa against the Roman colonizers, but the faithful Juba refuses, insisting that his bonds with his fellow Numidians are merely ‘Bones and Nerves’. Such embodied connections mean little, Juba explains, when compared with the ‘Virtues’ of Rome:

Envoicing a British fantasy of the willingly colonized, Juba presents the project of empire as one of civilizing, cultivating, even humanizing. Romanness, he implies, is not a quality found in one’s body but a nobler state to which one should aspire. For Juba, Romanness inheres in the ‘Soul’, which, unlike the body, can be ‘reform[ed]’ by ‘Virtue’.

From the outset, Addison’s play presents Romanness as a potentially fluid category, and colonization as a tool for reshaping others into Romans. Syphax asks Juba if Rome’s civilizing project isn’t simply forcing the colonized to ‘disguise [their] passions’ and ‘set their looks at variance with their thoughts’ — that is, to separate their bodies from their minds. He is disapproving, but Juba replies in the affirmative: ‘To strike thee Dumb: turn up thy eyes to Cato!’ In other words, Juba believes that he and his fellow Numidians must follow Cato’s example and subjugate themselves, physically and emotionally, to Rome’s ‘higher Views’.

This is the lesson Cato teaches his protégé Juba throughout the play. In Act IV, the Numidians go against Juba and betray Cato’s forces, leading to the death of Cato’s son. Juba laments that his Africanness implicates him in their ‘crime’: ‘I’m a Numidian’, he apologizes to his mentor. But Cato absolves Juba of his embodied connections, responding: ‘And a brave one too. / Thou hast a Roman soul.’ Cato then continues the lesson by refusing to weep over his son’s death, for the only death that requires tears, the dry-eyed Roman instructs the lachrymose African, is the impending death of the Roman Republic (IV.4). Thanks to Cato’s stoic influence, Juba’s sentimentality — what Aravamudan reads as a manifestation of both his racialized identity and his colonial dilemma — is gradually civilized into generic political virtue.Footnote ³⁵ Such political virtue, dependent on subsuming one’s body and emotions to ‘higher Views’, is what ultimately confers Romanness. The final scene brings this home with Cato’s suicide and his affirmation of Juba’s completed transformation. The dying senator’s last act is to deem the prince worthy of marrying Marcia by finally, if obliquely, granting him the status he has long desired: ‘Whoe’er is brave and virtuous, is a Roman’ (V.4).

While later biological-essentialist racism would maintain that behaviour was predetermined by a racialized body, Juba’s character arc proposes that a racialized body matters less than one’s behaviour and is thus secondary to the virtue of one’s soul (or lack thereof). Nevertheless, Cato upholds skin colour and place of birth as external markers of racialized difference. In the same early scene (I.4), Juba is described as one of ‘Numidia’s tawny sons’, Marcia as ‘one of the pale unripen’d beauties of the north’, and both as far closer on the continuum to Romanness than are the unnamed sub-Saharan African peoples whose presence is only ever alluded to by the main characters — presumably because, given the context of Addison’s play, they would not have been regarded as eligible for the Romanizing project. The play thus presents skin colour and origins as racialized qualities, but ones that can potentially be overcome, and indeed must be overcome, as part of the successful colonizing process. Yet, unsurprisingly, the traces of difference were never fully erased in this framework. Juba’s Roman soul only gets him so far; he may be a Roman among Africans, entrusted with Cato’s legacy and his daughter, but he will never be enough of a Roman for Rome. In Addison’s British colonialist ideology, racialized difference had to be at once clearly visible and conveniently, but never completely, mutable.Footnote ³⁶

‘Do not say that you are a Roman, so long as you live in servitude’

On a basic level, both Addison’s and Metastasio’s frameworks for racialism were derived from similar ones in Roman antiquity. In the Rome of Caesar and Cato, social identities were determined by one’s position amidst multiple intersecting systems of power: citizenship and legal status, social and economic class, gender, sexual practices, political affiliation, and so on. Crucially, both masculinity and Romanness, romanitas, were defined by an individual’s capacity to exercise certain kinds of control: control over one’s own body, one’s own emotions, and the bodies and actions of one’s subordinates (i.e. family members and servants). Being unable to wield any of these types of control meant one could not claim true romanitas. Footnote ³⁷ If someone lacked legal control over their own body, it was because they were enslaved (servitus), and enslaved people were not considered Romans as they were not free citizens. A lack of emotional or physical control over one’s own body correlated with femininity and/or puerility, both of which precluded masculinity and hence full Roman status.Footnote ³⁸

A germane example of this is Lucan’s Pharsalia, which was the main ancient source on Caesar’s African war for both Addison and Metastasio. In Lucan’s epic, self-control is the primary metric of romanitas, with Cato providing the limit case of Roman masculinity throughout the text. More specifically, Cato’s famous refusal to lament his son’s death has traditionally been understood as evincing the stoic senator’s extreme level of self-control and, consequently, his unimpeachable (if hard-edged) romanitas. Footnote ³⁹ As classicist Robert Cowan argues, the foils to this romanitas in Lucan include Egyptians and North Africans such as Cleopatra, Ptolemy, and others. Portrayed as effeminate, childish, or both, these non-Roman figures lack sufficient bodily and/or emotional self-control, and therefore contrast with the ideal of Roman masculinity.Footnote ⁴⁰ I would also note that in many cases, their racialization as non-Romans is emphasized by their status as royalty (as opposed to republicans). If we take Lucan’s characterizations as an example of what Robinson calls racialism, that ancient identity matrix shows how Romanness and its alternatives were conceived as neither static nor essential physiological qualities, but rather as socio-cultural identities that were constantly (re)produced through multiple ongoing processes of differentiation. Some of those processes, especially ones that separated Romans from Africans, do resonate with more recent constructions of race, though they are not identical because they were motivated by different power structures (especially since they pre-dated Christianity).

Metastasio’s representation of Romanness and its alternatives is, like Lucan’s, highly dependent on the ancient rubric of control. Yet he also drew significant inspiration from Addison’s rendition of the story, and as we’ve seen, Addison mediated ancient Roman racialism through his own colonialist and slave-trafficking British worldview. Given what we now know about Metastasio’s consultation of Addison’s play, then, it is telling that the operatic Catone repeatedly defines the antithesis of Romanness as ‘slavery’.

Initially, this might seem like a political ideology that was unrelated to racialization. The opposition invokes a metaphor from republican Rome in which ‘slavery’ indicated not only literal enslavement, but also subjection to any tyrannical government.Footnote ⁴¹ The most obvious use of this version of the metaphor in the opera is Catone’s oft-struck contrast between republican self-sovereignty and (what he sees as) the tyranny of imperial-absolutist rule. In Act II, for instance, Catone derides the senators who have enabled Cesare’s illegal seizure of power by declaring in recitative: ‘The Senate is no longer what it was; it has become the vilest herd of slaves [schiavi]’ (II.2).Footnote ⁴² He then sings an aria expanding on the metaphor, equating Cesare’s tyranny with the lifetime servitude — that is, the enslavement — of his imperial subjects:

The rhyme scheme links ‘servitù’ with ‘virtù’, setting them in opposition to one another (though the effect would have been more visual-poetic than aural owing to the norms of musical setting). In typical opera seria arias from this period, the first stanza of poetry was repeated as part of the standard da capo form. This means that the second couplet of the first stanza — here, the lines ‘but do not say that you are a Roman, / so long as you live in servitude’ — had extra rhetorical weight, because in any musical setting those lines would have closed out the entire number as the end of the da capo, not to mention being repeated internally multiple times before then. (The poet likely used ‘servitù’ [servitude] instead of ‘schiavitù’ [slavery] here for the simple reason that the former is far easier to pronounce when singing, as well as a better rhyme with ‘virtù’.)Footnote ⁴³ Metastasio of course knew aria-setting conventions well and would have taken them into account when composing any aria text. He situated this maxim about Romanness and enslavement in these two structurally significant lines in order to bring it out as a key point. But with the second stanza, the aria hints that the opposition extends beyond the political. The issue of Roman self-sovereignty is not only governmental, but has emotional implications, too. Accepting ‘the vile yoke’ of tyranny ought to ‘torment’ one’s ‘heart’ — if one has any shred of ‘virtue’, that is.

Catone’s servitude aria thus reveals that the Romanness versus slavery trope was far more capacious than the simple political equation would suggest. And indeed, the belief in the mutual exclusivity of Romanness and enslavement persisted long past the demise of the Roman Republic. Once untethered from a specific model of (self-)government, the trope enabled Romans in the imperial period to assiduously differentiate themselves from the many other peoples they conquered, colonized, and enslaved. By marking differences among the denizens of a geographically vast empire, the opposition between being Roman and being (potentially) subject to enslavement became an enduring ideological aspect of Rome’s cultural self-identification.Footnote ⁴⁴

The multivalent resonances of this trope both facilitated Metastasio’s dramaturgical plans and furnished a strategy for racializing difference without particularizing it. Simply, the poet mediated the ancient Roman identity matrix, together with Addison’s ideological revision thereof, through the moral-philosophical precepts of Cartesian dualism. As others have discussed in detail, Metastasio studied René Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649) in his youth while under the formative tutelage of Gregorio Caloprese della Scalea, and was so taken with the ‘ingenious René’ that he went on to infuse the major tenets of Cartesian moral philosophy into his many libretti.Footnote ⁴⁵ This was a strategic move as much as an intellectual one. By importing Descartes’s philosophy of the passions into his dramatic works, Metastasio put into practice the Arcadian reformist injunction to create opera not merely for entertainment, but for moral instruction (a purpose also supported by the Roman theocracy).Footnote ⁴⁶

Broadly, Metastasio oriented his dramaturgy around Cartesian moral philosophy by presenting characters’ struggles between desire and duty as a negotiation between body and soul (often glossed in Metastasio scholarship as ‘passions’ versus ‘reason’). He followed Descartes in regarding the passions as the most direct means of understanding the relationship between the two components of dualism, body and soul, but the point of negotiating between them was not to subjugate the body so thoroughly as to utterly suppress the passions. Neither Descartes nor Metastasio sought to inculcate Catonian stoicism in modern Christian subjects. Instead, the point was for one to feel the passions, then exercise moral judgment in regulating and interpreting them so that the mind (or soul) could direct the body along the rational, virtuous course of action.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moral behaviour was the result of the mind’s ability to rationalize feelings before acting on them, while improper behaviour was caused by the triumph of body over mind, the inability to moderate the passions through reason. A good Cartesian subject exercised sovereignty over his own self — over his passions, and hence his bodily actions. From the level of the aria to that of the character arc, this generic Cartesian frame supported Metastasio’s move of mapping the emotional onto the political.

In the case of Catone, that framing enabled Metastasio to adapt Addison’s tragedy, and Juba’s central role within it, into an appropriately moralizing opera by generalizing the British play’s particularist politics into a parable about virtue reigning sovereign over the passions. But such a Cartesian frame, with its blurring between the moral and the political, created new problems. Arbace’s alterity needed a proper Cartesian foil in order to be recognizable as alterity. And while Addison’s narrative about Juba learning to subjugate (racialized) body to (Roman) soul fit easily into a Cartesian paradigm, something crucial did not fit at all: the eponymous stoic himself as moral mentor. This was partly a political issue, in that Metastasio could not appear to promote republicanism in a Rome governed by the papacy, much less in an Italy dominated by various other European empires. Thus neither the word repubblica nor any of its derivatives ever appear in Catone, leaving the characters to rely on vague references to ‘liberty’ and ‘virtue’. But the bigger issue was the incompatibility between ancient Roman values like Lucan’s and those of Metastasio’s own Christian day. If Cato’s republicanism risked the ire of eighteenth-century theocratic and imperial governments, his stoicism risked the ire of eighteenth-century audiences by seeming uncompassionate, even cruel. Metastasio certainly leaned into Catone’s extremism with his characterization, perhaps to link the senator’s unappealing harshness to his untenable republicanism. (For example, Catone sings an aria about how he should have murdered Marzia as a baby rather than letting her grow up to love a tyrant.) Metastasio was criticized for casting such an important Roman figure in this mould, but he insisted that he had to stay true to history by not allowing Catone to sound, as he put it, like ‘a French chevalier’ speaking to a ‘lovely lady’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Since this harsh Catone was not an ideal Roman role model for Arbace, let alone for eighteenth-century Roman audiences, the poet needed someone to perform Roman masculinity according to Cartesian, rather than Catonian, moral principles of self-sovereignty.

This, then, is why Cesare implausibly appears in Metastasio’s libretto, and as the requisite emblem of good sovereignty, no less, even though such a rendering went against both Addison’s play and Lucan’s epic.Footnote ⁴⁹ (According to the historical sources, Caesar and Cato never encountered one another in Africa, while in Addison’s drama, Caesar is not an actual speaking role but an ideological bogeyman menacing the onstage action from afar.)Footnote ⁵⁰ In Catone, the fallible yet upright Cesare is the perfect adversary for the rigidly principled Catone: unlike the stoic senator, Cesare experiences a full range of passions, from the ugly to the tender, and in good Cartesian fashion uses his reason to moderate those passions in service to his ‘higher Views’. (Or, as Cesare himself puts it, ‘in service to a nobler desire’.)Footnote ⁵¹ In the early Settecento, it was the flawed but ultimately heroic father of the Roman Empire who could show both audience and African prince what it meant to be a Roman. Despite having ended the republic’s self-sovereignty with his coup, Cesare could still be the opera’s emblem of Roman virtue because, in Metastasio’s reimagining, he puts his duty to the future glory of Rome above his love for Marzia. Metastasio’s presentist retelling of ancient history thus proclaims that Cesare has been divinely chosen as sovereign over Rome because he successfully exercises sovereignty over himself. The self-sovereignty Cesare modelled for an eighteenth-century Roman audience was not that of republican government but the (much safer and more universalizing) Cartesian ideal of moral self-sovereignty.

Thanks to Metastasio’s canny manoeuvring, Cesare’s so-called tyranny, as his attempted ‘enslavement’ of Rome, is in fact forgiven because of his Cartesian moral self-sovereignty. This careful exoneration, with its insinuations about how the ideal government was imperial-absolutist instead of republican, was made possible by the political-moral affordances of the recurring trope of enslavement. Just as the lack of legal control over one’s own body was tantamount to enslavement in Cato’s ancient Rome, the lack of moral control over one’s own body was tantamount to enslavement in Metastasio’s Cartesian-cum-Christian Rome. If, in Catone, a true Roman is one who is sovereign over his passions, then the opposite of a Roman is one who is enslaved to his passions.

Aligning alterity, as un-Romanness, with emotional enslavement served Metastasio’s purposes, but the poet did not invent such a solution himself. He was simply applying Cartesian terms to what had been a fundamental tenet of European thought since at least the sixteenth century. As decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter argues, the notion of enslavement proved essential to definitions of ‘Man’ and ‘Other’ across early modernity by bridging the gap between Christian-theocratic and political-humanist constructs of subjecthood (of ‘Being’, as she puts it). Renaissance humanist intellectuals, Wynter notes, needed a way to define ‘alternative’ modes of ‘being human’ without relying on the Christian premise of ‘mankind’s enslavement’ to original sin. They therefore ‘secularized’ that metaphorical enslaver from original sin into ‘the irrational [and] particularistic desires of one’s human nature’. One who was ‘enslaved to one’s passions’ remained marked as ‘Other’, while ‘Man’ was he who could ‘subdue his private interests in order to adhere to the laws of the politically absolute state, and thereby to the “common good.”’Footnote ⁵² (Cesare is clearly the exemplar of ‘Man’ according to such a rubric.) Throughout her essay, Wynter pointedly and repeatedly uses the word ‘enslavement’ to describe this shifting moral-ethical construct — for, as she goes on to demonstrate, the metaphorical concept of emotional enslavement quickly became ‘objective’ justification for the colonization of the Americas, the mass enslavement of Africans, and the resultant naturalizing reformulation of human variety into ‘race’.Footnote ⁵³

Even aside from its Cartesian-humanistic connotations, enslavement had become a widespread stand-in for racialization by the time Metastasio wrote Catone. Already by the 1710s, as Wheeler argues, the term ‘slave’ was commonly understood as referring to people of African descent, though it was not yet ‘inextricably connected to skin colour’ because slavery as a ‘condition’ was not yet totally racialized (due to the continued practice of, for one, Barbary captivity). In this transitional period between the 1720s and the 1740s, the category of enslavement had at once particular connotations and multiple real-world manifestations, as Wheeler notes. ‘Slave’ therefore served as shorthand for Africanness at the very same time as it encompassed non-racialized modes of enslavement both metaphorical and literal.Footnote ⁵⁴

It is no coincidence that this type of differentiation — emotional enslavement — is the one projected onto Arbace, the sentimental African prince. Metastasio used the Cartesian, secularized-yet-Christian metaphor of emotional enslavement to represent Arbace’s Africanness without presenting it in any physiological way. He had to racialize Arbace if he wanted to exonerate Cesare, but he also had to ensure that the libretto would transcend the exoticisms and particularities then associated with difference in comic and other popular genres. Thus although Addison’s play frequently refers to characters’ skin colour, Metastasio’s libretto indexes neither Romanness nor Africanness in physiologically racializing terms. True, the Italian poet did not have the same political-ideological reasons as the English playwright did for including the visual parameters of racialized difference. But beyond that, physical description would have been out of place in the representational world the Italian poet was in the process of forming — a world that could seem both historical and timeless, geographically located yet endlessly transportable. In general, then, Metastasio’s libretti reference body parts or physical attributes only to use them as metonyms for Cartesian passions (e.g. pallid countenances, shaking hands).Footnote ⁵⁵ And that is precisely how the poet dealt with Addison’s racializing references to Juba’s skin colour: he metonymized them. In Catone, Arbace’s Africanness is de-particularized and then poeticized through a Cartesian conversion into the ubiquitous trope of enslavement.Footnote ⁵⁶

Unassimilated Space: The ‘Royal Slave’

Arbace’s potentially flexible yet clearly racialized difference becomes a major theme in the central second act of the opera, but it is established as a problem from the start. Arbace is introduced as inherently moral — quite unlike Didone’s Iarba — but not yet at the level of a true Roman. Early on, Catone questions Arbace’s loyalty by asking: ‘Arbace, are you already remembering you were born an African? […] And yet I believed you were so different [from them]’ (I.12).Footnote ⁵⁷ The prince is ‘enslaved’ to his passions, as evinced by his inability to put political duty above personal desire. This is, of course, the lesson he needs to eventually learn from Cesare in order to then ratify the dictator as a good sovereign.

The Cartesian conversion of Arbace’s Africanness takes centre stage with a chain of scenes in Act II. Catone exits after his servitude aria, ‘Va’, ritorna al tuo tiranno’, having just clarified in no uncertain terms the Roman/slave dichotomy for his listeners (those on stage and in the audience). Marzia and Arbace are left alone; Arbace begs her for ‘mercy’, reiterating his position of servitude and acknowledging how it humiliates him: ‘Serving you makes me less worthy’ (that is, because his doing so displeases her). But Marzia rejects this mistress/servant dynamic for, as a daughter of Rome, she believes in self-sovereignty instead of enslavement: ‘I set you free to do whatever you please’, she proclaims (emphasis added). She then launches into a tirade in which she accuses Arbace of enabling his own subjection by accepting her ‘cruelty’, and commands him to find some other woman to love from among those in ‘Africa’s bosom’. All told the scene’s language of cruelty, mercy, servitude, and freedom would pass unnoticed in any operatic quarrel over unrequited love — but for Marzia’s attendant insistence on Arbace’s Africanness.

However clichéd it may seem, the metaphorical language of human bondage cannot be disentangled here from Arbace’s positionality as male, royal, and African. It places him within a representational tradition of the early modern European stage, one laid out by Ndiaye through her analysis of seventeenth-century French masques in dialogue with Wilbourne’s reading of the ‘slave to love’ trope in Seicento commedia dell’arte. As Ndiaye argues, Europeans without a strong foothold in the trafficking of enslaved Africans — the French, in her analysis, but also, I would add, the Italians — fantasized about obtaining such power for themselves without having to resort to violence. They played out those fantasies through the musical-theatrical performance of particular courtly love tropes: for example, scenes of European performers portraying Moors or other North African men, typically aristocratic or royal ones, willingly offering themselves up as love-slaves to the pale-skinned European women in the audience.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although enacted in Catone according to the different representational code of opera seria — through context, allusion, and metonymy rather than textual references to skin colour, and directed towards another character instead of at the audience — Arbace’s racialized difference nevertheless fits the mould. Read through this tradition, Arbace’s self-imposed emotional enslavement to Marzia provided Italian audiences with a tantalizing scenario of nonviolent domination in which the realities of partaking in the enslavement and trafficking of Africans were softened by the language of love.

More broadly, troping the prince’s Africanness as emotional enslavement updated the ancient identity matrix of racialization, gender, and class in such a way as to accommodate operagoers’ affective demands within the constraints of Metastasio’s developing dramaturgy. Crucial to this was carving out a separate dramatic-musical space for playing with the emotions that were, at once, essential to cultivating listeners’ pleasure and threatening to the project of promoting Cartesian moral self-sovereignty through opera. Arbace’s liminal but racialized home terrain of North Africa offered just such a space, both by providing the colonial and peripheral setting for all of Catone’s action and by making Arbace himself a figure of transitivity.

The early eighteenth-century European imaginary geography of North Africa placed the prince into an emerging literary-theatrical paradigm of racialized masculinity. Arbace is the prince of Numidia, in modern-day Algeria, which in the eighteenth century was strongly associated with Ottoman (and, as Europeans saw it, ‘Oriental’) rule. Yet the opera’s characters describe Arbace as ‘African’, without differentiating between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. This de-particularization was owed in part to the fact that such distinctions were largely irrelevant in the time of Cato and Caesar, which pre-dated not only Christianity but the Islamization and the Arabization of North Africa. But more importantly, subsuming Numidia into a generalized ‘Africa’ points to the tendency of early-eighteenth-century Europeans to assume that all of Africa was like the North Africa with which Europe had interacted for millennia.Footnote ⁵⁹ While it now seems unthinkable to collapse all of Africa into one, and even more so to throw in the Levant and Middle East along with it, such sweepingly general characterizations were typical of pre-Enlightenment racialisms.Footnote ⁶⁰ Metastasio’s Arbace hails from what Felicity Nussbaum calls the ‘unassimilated space’ between ‘Blacks So Called’ and ‘Orientals’ in the pre-Enlightenment imagination — unassimilated, because Western Europeans understood the geographical and racial boundaries between Africa and Asia as highly porous, only solidifying much later in the eighteenth century when racialized difference became conceived more (pseudo-) scientifically than culturally.Footnote ⁶¹

Significantly, the mutability of identity categories within the unassimilated space extended to social class in ways that allowed Metastasio to write Arbace as, at once, future king, potential Roman, and present slave (if the latter only metaphorically). As we’ve seen, monarchy and enslavement had been conceptually intertwined since republican Rome. For ancient Roman republicans, then, Arbace’s princely status would have made him an heir to tyranny, as the eventual king and hence enslaver of his subjects. As shown by Lucan’s Pharsalia, such a characterization was also, often, a racializing one. The racializing implications of the tyranny/enslavement doubling became more pronounced in the early modern European imagination as the figure of the tyrannical non-Roman royal turned into the ‘Oriental despot’ stereotype who, Europeans feared, literally enslaved Christians and thirsted to take all of Christendom under the dominion of Islam. Metastasio’s Iarba, from Didone, is of this latter type, though like Arbace he is described not as Eastern but as ‘African’ and ‘Moorish’.

What is striking about Arbace in all of this is his precarious position on the boundary of the racialized tyranny/enslavement doubling. His paradoxical status as both potential tyrant and present slave is made possible by the slipperiness of the differentiating processes imposed upon the unassimilated space. As Nussbaum argues, the boundary between royalty and enslavement was regarded as especially hazy for ‘Moorish prince’ types: royal yet racialized, masculine yet sentimental, potential rather than actual rulers, these ‘swing figures’ were treated more fluidly with regard to status than were their European counterparts.Footnote ⁶² That surprising possibility for slippage between the categories of prince and slave, albeit only for racialized subjects, enabled Metastasio to cast Arbace’s difference as transitive — as contingent on his ability to learn Cartesian moral self-sovereignty.Footnote ⁶³ Arbace’s performance of the tyranny/enslavement threat is not external and political like Iarba’s, but self-reflexive and emotional. His passions are the tyrants, enslaving his potentially Roman soul to his African body. He may be a prince, but at present he is in (metaphorical) chains.

As royal figure of emotional enslavement, Arbace neither fit the stereotype of the Oriental despot nor portrayed the reality of the enslaved African, but instead animated a version of an emerging representational tradition that literary historian Laura Brown calls ‘the fable of the native prince’.Footnote ⁶⁴ This character type, the native prince, is generally associated with late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England. Yet from where did Metastasio get his Arbace if not the Juba of the London stage? And, going back even further, Addison based his Juba on the most famous African prince to appear on that stage: the eponymous hero of Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave (1688), which had been adapted into a remarkably popular spoken tragedy by Thomas Southerne in 1695. Metastasio had not read either the novella or the play before writing Catone, as neither was translated into any languages he knew until much later, but he certainly encountered the type through other sources, including (but probably not limited to) Addison’s Cato. Though Juba’s colonial dilemma is purposefully and carefully separated from representations of enslavement in Cato, Oroonoko is generally recognized as a direct inspiration for Juba.Footnote ⁶⁵

The genealogy of Metastasio’s Arbace thus extends beyond Juba to the explicitly racialized and enslaved African prince Oroonoko, even though the poet himself likely did not realize it. Both Behn’s novella and Southerne’s play recount the tragedy of the West African prince Oroonoko who is sold into New World slavery by his jealous tyrant of a father. Oroonoko has been educated in European languages and culture; he also has the features of a European man with the ‘Ebony’ skin of a sub-Saharan African one. He is overtly racialized by his skin colour and country of origin, yet marked as elite (by European standards) by his royalty, education, manners, and incongruously ‘Roman’ nose.Footnote ⁶⁶ (That Oroonoko is represented as a European man with ebony skin would have been especially apparent in the stage play, where that is exactly how he was portrayed: by a white actor wearing dark cosmetics.) Oroonoko’s racialization is all the more multiplicitous — operating within that unassimilated space — because his father’s court in Coramantien is orientalized into a kind of harem, and the prince himself is referred to as a ‘gallant Moor’.Footnote ⁶⁷ After being betrayed by his despotic father, Oroonoko is transported to Surinam on the north-eastern coast of South America, where he leads an ill-fated uprising against his enslavers. Virtuous, brave, and noble, Oroonoko ultimately ‘chooses’ death rather than continuing to live in slavery. He is future king, internal European, and actual slave — literally, not metaphorically. Oroonoko is, in Behn’s words, the paradoxical ‘royal slave’.

Although set in the very different contexts of ancient Rome and late seventeenth-century Surinam, Metastasio’s Catone, Addison’s Cato, and Behn’s and Southerne’s Oroonoko have a surprising number of connections, largely owing to the fact that Behn linked Oroonoko to ancient Roman virtue so as to render his actions, especially his death, intelligible to her English readers. He has a ‘Roman’ nose; his enslavers rename him ‘Caesar’; and, in Catonian fashion, he dies ‘on stage’, painfully and at length, for the sake of his principles.Footnote ⁶⁸ Southerne retained most of these elements in his beloved stage adaptation, yet he also made a major change that influenced the plot of Addison’s tragedy. Behn’s Oroonoko marries an African woman named Imoinda but, taking a page from Shakespeare’s Othello, Southerne’s stage version makes Imoinda white, perhaps to encourage identification from the (white) women in the audience.Footnote ⁶⁹ As others have noted, the interracial love story of Southerne’s Oroonoko provided the model for the one in Cato. Juba, and hence Arbace, are descended from Oroonoko the royal slave. Yet while Oroonoko’s racialization preordains his tragic ending, Juba’s and Arbace’s respective racializations — manifested as colonial dilemma and emotional enslavement — are swept away once they have served their authors’ purpose.

That purpose was using the unassimilated space embodied by the native prince to simultaneously encourage and delimit emotion within the strictures of a political-heroic narrative. In Britain, the native prince figure helped smooth the transition in literary-theatrical styles from heroic tragedy to sentimental drama; Metastasio’s version did something similar for dramma per musica, in that it made room for feeling within the heroic-political frame of post-Arcadian-reform opera. The juxtaposition of racialization with royalty was crucial in this. As Brown explains, the native prince was a noble, non-European male figure who was given a specific place of origin (Coramantien, Numidia, Polynesia, Tenochtitlán), yet composed of various cultural and physical markers borrowed indiscriminately from the unassimilated space and beyond (Africa, Asia, the Americas), and topped off with recognizable indicators of European ‘elite’ class status. The native prince’s racialized difference made him susceptible to tragic circumstances (of which enslavement was a common manifestation), while his elite status and noble soul invited spectators’ pity because such subjection was clearly at odds with his inherent virtue.Footnote ⁷⁰ One wept for the plight of the native prince because his inherent nobility transcended, but did not prevent, his de-particularized and narratively necessary racialization.

This accounts for why it was Addison’s Juba, much more so than Cato, who became a site of sentimental identification for decades of readers and spectators. Among them was none other than a young George Washington, who cast himself as the enthusiastic ‘Juba’ to his potential lover Sally Fairfax’s ‘Marcia’, even expressing a desire to play the role on stage someday.Footnote ⁷¹ That an enslaver like Washington had no cognitive dissonance in identifying with the African prince Juba points to the enduring potency of the native prince trope — to its capacity to overwrite racialization with the combination of sentimentality and elitism — especially for those who were grappling with their own (albeit unracialized) colonial dilemmas.

In the case of Catone, reading Arbace as a native prince/royal slave figure sheds light on how a flexibly racialized difference was imagined as both invitation to, and container for, certain emotional responses. Metastasio retained Addison’s Juba for his libretto, even though he was not a real historical figure, because of what his royal, male, African, and sentimental presence made possible dramaturgically. By racializing Arbace, not via brutality like Iarba, but through sentimentality, Metastasio colonized the unassimilated space as a site for representing unrestrained feeling without disrupting his overarching Cartesian frame. Generalizing Arbace’s Africanness into emotional enslavement was thus not solely about mitigating the presentist, the particularized, and the political via poetics to fit a representational code. The conversion of racialized difference, via transitivity, into sentimentality also afforded a much-needed space within which emotions could be experienced at length, even enjoyed, while still cordoned off from the political business of empire. The enslaved prince could play host to the affective energy that needed a sufficiently elite object in order to be permissible, while simultaneously preventing any sentimentality from spilling over into inappropriate places — the present, the particular, the political — by containing it all within the unassimilated space of his metonymized racialization.

Unassimilated Space, Dilated: Music and Petrarchan Poetics

Metastasio’s poetry laid the groundwork for expropriating the unassimilated space as a container for feeling. But it was through musical setting and live performance that Arbace’s sentimentality and requisite elite status became audible, and thus through such musical-vocal sound that the poet’s written text was dilated into an expansive yet clearly demarcated musical-temporal space.

To give a sense of one way, among many, that Metastasio’s libretto may have worked in performance, I consider several moments from the first musical setting of Catone in Utica: Leonardo Vinci’s for Rome in 1728. Since the text being set was more or less what Metastasio had written, it is easier to see how the music worked with the poet’s script, especially since the poet and composer corresponded about the setting (and indeed, they went on to collaborate on several more operas after Catone).Footnote ⁷² These excerpts are only examples, and not the full story of how Catone was performed throughout the century: in general, Metastasian libretti were re-performed over the decades with new music instead of being repeated in any one particular setting, and the composers who provided the new settings made all kinds of changes to the poetry to accommodate their singers and local tastes. In the case of Catone, such changes frequently altered Arbace’s characterization, as with the swapping-in of totally different aria texts (Venice, 1729) and cutting his role to comprimario size (Naples, 1789). Without going into detail, I suggest that these later changes were made, not because the character was unimportant — Arbace was sung by Farinelli himself in Venice, after all — but rather the opposite. Arbace’s affective function was both readily apparent and conveniently mutable such that later composers and performers could reimagine (or dampen) that function according to their own needs.

The musical idiom Vinci used for Arbace does the necessary work of establishing the prince as at once noble and sentimental, elite and emotionally enslaved, but always appealingly so. In particular, Arbace’s arias in Act II — again, the central act of the opera and the one in which the Roman/slave dyad drives the action — present him as sentimental other to the two bellicose Roman politicians. The doubling of Arbace with Cesare is especially apparent in Vinci’s version since they were both castrato roles, while Catone was set for a tenor, as was typical with such fatherly authority types.Footnote ⁷³

Arbace’s function as emotional outlet is first explored in his sweetly tender aria ‘So che pietà non hai’ (II.3), where he responds to Marzia’s setting him ‘free’ and commanding him to find an African woman. Atop feather-light string accompaniment, often without even the harpsichord as continuo, Arbace’s vocal line is delicately pleading and eminently cantabile. He begins with shorter phrases, punctuated by hopeful rising figuration, then extends them into repetitive, sob-like melismas before sinking into the cadential points with plaintive appoggiaturas. It is textbook galant sentimentality, though not at the luxurious level of a true aria patetica.

These local musical effects are less about illustrating specific words or passions and more about painting a sonic picture of Arbace as noble, virtuous, and worthy of tender pity. It is therefore Vinci’s music, in excess of Metastasio’s words, that sounds out how Arbace’s reference to ‘burning’ in the last line of the aria is not the vengeful kind that led Iarba to set Carthage aflame, but the kind associated with the Petrarchan lyric language of unrequited love.Footnote ⁷⁴ While the imagery of burning and flames is a ubiquitous trope in Italian vernacular poetics, it had a double meaning when put in the mouth of a character who was male, elite, and African, especially one portrayed on stage by a European performer. As Ndiaye argues, stagings of African men offering themselves as love-slaves to pale-skinned women typically invoked the Petrarchan trope of ‘burning with love’ as a play on their own ‘burnt,’ i.e. dark, skin. When spoken or sung by white performers, this also gestured to the fact that their skin had been artificially darkened for their roles by the application of soot or burnt cork.Footnote ⁷⁵ Again, Arbace’s skin colour is never mentioned in the libretto, and while it is possible that the singer who played him in Vinci’s setting, Giovanni Battista Minelli, was made up like Nicolino was in the Idaspe caricature from this article’s opening, it is probable that he was not.Footnote ⁷⁶ But either way, Arbace’s Petrarchan ‘burning’, like his enslavement, draws on a common metaphor for excessive emotion that also subtly racializes its object. Vinci’s setting clarifies which type of burning this African prince experiences in order to invite the audience to be moved by it. Arbace’s emotional enslavement is made not only audible but pleasurable through delicate, tender, sentimental musical-vocal sound.

The musical pleasures afforded by Arbace’s plight work as affective counterbalance to the very different kind of musical delight provided by the heroic Cesare (composed by Vinci for the castrato virtuoso Giovanni Carestini). In contrast to the simple beauty of Arbace’s ‘So che pietà non hai’, Cesare’s two arias in the same act foreground his self-sovereignty and his power — both martial and musical. The first of those arias, ‘Soffre talor del vento’, is a standard aria di paragone, in which a character elucidates his emotional situation through an extended metaphor; here, Cesare compares himself to a calm sea enduring a tempestuous wind, controlling his anger by externalizing it into metaphor.Footnote ⁷⁷ For Cesare’s second aria in Act II, ‘Se in campo armato’, he proclaims that his skill at ‘arms’ will vanquish Catone’s ‘anger’. In both, Cesare performs his moral self-sovereignty while wielding his voice like a weapon, with the dazzling, hammering fioritura affirming his heroic status to all who hear it. Arbace sweetly sings to the sound of sparse strings, but Cesare is backed up by an orchestral phalanx of strings, woodwinds, and brass, with the emphatic addition of trumpets in his battle aria. The difference in characterization between the Roman general and the African prince — from their aria texts to their musical settings and vocal styles — would have been obvious to Roman listeners in 1728, especially given the repeated references to Arbace’s ‘enslavement’ in the recitative scenes in between these arias.

That Arbace serves as sentimental foil to the good Cartesian Cesare becomes unmistakable by the final scene of the second act. The closing number of the middle act was regarded as one of, if not the, emotional high points of the three-act opera seria format, and it is significant that the character who sings at that moment (in the 1728 Catone) is Arbace. What is more, the scene is set up by the most overt instance of the enslavement trope: Arbace’s scena is directly preceded by an aria in which the secondary character Emilia scolds him for his inability to ‘free [his] heart from its chains’ and ‘seek for liberty’. After Emilia departs, Arbace remains alone on stage to finish out the act. He launches into a lengthy accompanied recitative, which musically emphasizes his position as the paradoxical ‘royal slave’: the intensity of feeling connoted by an accompanied recitative is what marks him, fresh on the heels of Emilia’s aria, as enslaved by his emotions, and yet assigning him a then-rare accompagnato also ratifies his elite status by casting him as someone whose emotions deserve such special musical treatment.

The aria that follows, a meditation on the nature of jealousy, invokes the same two tropes that have thus far connoted Arbace’s racialized difference:

By describing his jealousy of Cesare and Marzia as ‘ice in the midst of fire’, Arbace intensifies the Petrarchan trope of burning from his previous aria by essentially quoting Rime sparse 122: ‘I feel ice in the midst of flames.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Similarly, his reference to love as ‘tyrannous’ gestures back to the recurring metaphor, amplified by Catone’s aria earlier in the act, of self-sovereignty as oppositional to the dyad of tyranny and enslavement. In thus drawing on Petrarch and Catone as representative Italian figures of, respectively, emotional subjectivity and political subjectivity, Arbace navigates his own dilemma of emotional and political self-subjection.

Despite his use of poetic language, Arbace insists in the last couplet of the first stanza that he ‘feel[s]’ all of this in his ‘heart’ but ‘do[es] not know how to explain it’. Whereas Cesare’s metaphorical language serves as proof of his rational capacity to manage his passions by imposing order upon them, Arbace’s metaphors are cast as bodily and unrationalized, Petrarchan and Catonian echoes notwithstanding. The unrationality of his expressivity is exacerbated by his unusual versification form: with twelve lines and an irregular rhyme scheme, Arbace’s aria is not a typical da capo (two stanzas of four lines each), and seemingly stretches toward (but does not quite achieve) the fourteen-line form of a Petrarchan sonnet. Without the intervening rationalization that would make him into a good Roman and Cartesian like Cesare, Arbace is, like the Petrarch of the Rime sparse, a fractured subject. But unlike Petrarch, the prince splits along a Cartesian fault line that has been mapped onto the imaginative geography of his metonymically African body and potentially Roman mind.

Arbace’s Petrarchan quotation also points to a more fundamental, transhistorical process beneath that of Cartesian subject formation. The allusion to Rime sparse 122 might seem as nothing more than Metastasio’s recycling foundational tropes of Italian vernacular love lyric, and that may well have been how the poet himself understood it. But whether he knew it or not, such Petrarchan tropes bore the traces of imperial-colonial politics. On one level, as Roland Greene showed twenty-five years ago, the Petrarchan lyric scenario of unrequited desire served as an early modern ‘literary technology’ for exploring the subject-object relations of colonial conquest in the Americas, much like Ndiaye’s more recent reading of such scenarios as playacting slavery.Footnote ⁷⁹ But even from their inception in the fourteenth century, these Petrarchan tropes had depended on both a colonial framework and a racialized lyric ‘I’. Petrarch wrote the Rime sparse contemporaneously with his unfinished Latin epic Africa, which tells the story of the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE) and Rome’s establishing its first colonies in Africa. As Ayesha Ramachandran argues, much of Petrarch’s metaphorical language in the Rime sparse was initially developed in the Africa, particularly through the Numidian king Masinissa expressing his excessive love for Carthaginian princess Sophonisba. Through this earlier North African royal, Petrarch experimented with the lyric love language he would more famously direct at his beloved Laura in the Rime sparse. Footnote ⁸⁰ In similar ways, then, Petrarch and Metastasio each ventriloquized racialized royal male figures to explore scenarios of feeling within an epic-heroic framework. In so doing, they offered readers and audiences entry to an unassimilated affective space that they could also — and this is key — exit. After the end of the lyric moment, after the closing ritornello of the aria, readers and audiences were returned to the political temporality of epic, of heroic drama, and hence to their own real-world subject positions. At once elite and other, like Petrarch’s Masinissa, Behn’s and Southerne’s Oroonoko, and Addison’s Juba, Metastasio’s Arbace was de-particularized and made into a suitable surrogate for the feelings that both menaced and motivated the ideological labour invested in the texts of empire.

In Metastasio’s framework, the labour assigned to the sentimental surrogate exceeded the textual by virtue of musical-vocal sound’s power to elasticize time. The lyric space opened up by Arbace’s aria is akin to that of a Petrarchan sonnet, but it is both dilated and delimited through musical setting into nearly eight minutes of sonic sentimentality. In the case of Vinci’s setting, ‘Che sia la gelosia’ builds on the galant-sentimental musical idiom of Arbace’s earlier aria, spinning it out more fully than before, though the aria never quite reaches heart-rending levels of pathos. Instead, with accented Lombard rhythms like sobs, gracefully escalating triplets, and lightly piquant appoggiaturas, Arbace’s aria draws the audience into the delicacy, rather than the torments, of feeling. His scena ed aria is not meant to conjure reality or even verisimilitude, for it furnishes an extended but nevertheless temporary experience in which his enslavement is transumed into musical enjoyment. According to the generic musical conventions of seria aria setting (in which the aria is a closed-form ‘number’), Vinci’s music opens up a temporally demarcated but otherwise unassimilated space for feeling — one that will be definitively and necessarily closed when the music stops at the end of the aria. Within the lyric space of aria, as poetry temporalized through music, Arbace’s racialized difference transforms. His transitivity is further abstracted, via musical-vocal sound, into a hollowed-out vessel for listeners’ affective responses (Example 1).

Example 1.

Leonardo Vinci, Catone in Utica (1728), aria for Arbace, ‘Che sia la gelosia’, bars 9–22. Reduction by John Y. Lawrence, based on manuscript copy held at the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica S. Pietro a Majella, Naples.

Sentimental Surrogation

But the ultimate goal of metonymizing Arbace’s racialized difference and corralling his sentimentality in the unassimilated space was to bolster the opera’s central narrative — one that reframed the eighteenth-century present by rewriting the ancient past. Citing as his sole sources only ‘history’ and ‘verisimilitude’, Metastasio substituted for Virgil’s quasi-historical Roman origin myth — in which the Trojan Aeneas was the founder of Rome — with an origin history, driven by Julius Caesar but rendered transhistorically relevant through its Cartesian trappings. In Metastasio’s new origin history, Caesar’s tragic victory over Cato marked the painful yet necessary transition from untenable republic to glorious empire — and not just any empire, but the originary Roman imperium to which all subsequent European powers feverishly aspired.Footnote ⁸¹ To that end, the third act of Catone focuses on resolving the dual moral-political drama of Cesare and Catone. But Arbace’s purpose is not yet fulfilled, for it is his metonymically racialized difference that must exonerate Cesare — and thus rewrite history — by authenticating the tyrant as the exemplar of self-sovereignty.

If Arbace performs this labour implicitly as Cesare’s foil in Act II, in Act III he does so explicitly as his student. At a crucial moment (III.3), Cesare honourably prioritizes his enemies’ lives above his own, leading the astonished Arbace to tell him: ‘I admire your great heart’.Footnote ⁸² Now for the first time, instigated by Cesare’s example, the prince wrestles with his divided self — and, tellingly, he does so by adopting Cesare’s poetic and musical language. In his final aria, ‘Combattuta’, addressed to Cesare, Arbace casts his struggle not in terms of servitude or sentiment, but as war: his ‘soul’ is now ‘embattled’.Footnote ⁸³ In Vinci’s setting, he grapples with this Cartesian conflict amidst rhythmically driving accompaniment and woodwind flourishes, unleashing rapid-fire fioritura and heroic vocal leaps worthy of a castrato virtuoso (Example 2).

Example 2.

Vinci, Catone in Utica, aria for Arbace, ‘Combattuta da tante vicende’, bars 22–77.

Though brief, Arbace’s ‘battle’ aria exemplifies how Metastasio renovated Addison’s strategic racialism to accommodate his own aims of legitimizing, rather than villainizing, Caesar’s historical coup. In one of the most famous scenes in Addison’s play, a traitorous Roman senator, likely intended as a proxy for the absent Caesar, disguises himself as Juba and steals into Marcia’s room. In order to save her, the real Juba must physically fight this blackface version of himself. Juba’s ongoing struggle between his African exterior and Roman soul is externalized and literalized as he battles against an enemy who appears as his shadow self, his inverse, with a false African exterior and false Roman soul. But Metastasio dispensed with the evil Caesar stand-in, and instead translated Addison’s two duelling Jubas into an internal battle between the two halves of Arbace’s fractured Cartesian self — with this attempt at self-unification inspired by Cesare’s ‘great heart’. Here, the accused tyrant exonerates himself through Arbace’s voice, for Cesare turns out to be the one who finally liberates the emotionally enslaved prince by teaching him to seek moral self-sovereignty. As Arbace tells Cesare in the aria: ‘You set me free’ (tu m’involi).

The opera’s central proposal — that true Romanness inheres in moral, not political, self-sovereignty — is reinforced one last time by Cesare himself in the final aria of Act III. In his ‘Quell’amore che poco accende’, the father of the Roman Empire proclaims that real ‘tyranny’ is letting one’s feelings dominate one’s ‘reason’. The action in the scenes that follow, including Catone’s suicide, plays out through recitative both secco and accompanied, but Cesare has the last word in song. Metastasio’s tyrant is no tyrant after all, but a true Roman, a good Cartesian, and — as evinced by his effect on Arbace — the transhistorical emblem of Italy’s imperial-colonizing potential.

The tidy moral espoused in Cesare’s final aria would become foundational to the genre of Metastasian opera, what with its Cartesian propositions about good sovereignty both personal and political.Footnote ⁸⁴ But in this early libretto based on a highly politicized play about empire, coloniality, and the expediencies of racializing difference, such a conventional moral seems inseparable from the presentist and particularizing concerns of 1720s Italy. When Metastasio wrote Catone, it was barely twelve years after the Peace of Utrecht had ended the War of Spanish Succession and granted Britain complete control over the transatlantic slave trade, signalling the decisive shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic as the global axis of economic and political power. In this context, Metastasio’s re-presentation of Romanness offered his Roman audience a cross-temporal fantasy about how the Roman Empire, not the British, had been the original divinely ordained ‘civilizer’ of the world.

In traversing the millennia through a dramaturgical elision of sentiment and politics, Metastasio did more than appeal to a presumptive Roman longing for the past. He created a repeatable yet variable template for operatic dramaturgy, as what Joseph Roach would call a drama of ‘substitution’. As Roach explains it through analysis of eighteenth-century ‘circum-Atlantic’ performance, certain cultural institutions continuously fashion substitutes, or ‘surrogates’, for that which is no longer present but nevertheless needs to be replaced.Footnote ⁸⁵ Catone’s transhistorical Roman-imperial self-identification, with its attendant legitimation of Julius Caesar as figure of Italian sovereignty, performed that work. But significantly, after developing this approach in Catone, Metastasio invested the libretti that followed with similar powers of substitution and repetition, creating a metatheatrical and sociocultural process that exceeded any one libretto, musical setting, or even storyline.Footnote ⁸⁶ To borrow Diana Taylor’s performance studies terminology, the ‘scenario’ set out in Metastasio’s operatic drama of Cartesian subject formation was not limited to this one narrative of Cesare and Catone. Rather, it furnished a ‘portable framework’ that could ‘bear the weight of accumulative repeats’, perennially proposing new substitutes for the figures and forms of power that remained, for Italians, only as spectres in collective cultural memory — and thus as reminders of their ongoing subjection to other Old World empires.Footnote ⁸⁷

And yet, as Roach notes, the residual anxiety over failures to fully replace what has been lost demands another step from processual dramas of surrogation. Invoking Toni Morrison’s point that the concept of ‘freedom’ emerged in contradistinction to that of ‘slavery’, Roach argues that representations of the ‘other’ become a tool for producing the ‘us’ through performance.Footnote ⁸⁸ Claims about self-formation through marking alterity are now well established, but less so is an understanding of how that process operated differently in early modern musical contexts than in, for example, American antebellum literature. For Metastasio, the transitivity, flexibility, and mutability of Arbace’s racialized difference were beneficial, rather than threatening, to the surrogation process. Cesare is therefore not the only proposed substitute. At once future king and present (if not literal) slave, Arbace hails from the unassimilated space that is geographically situated between Africa, Asia, and Europe, but metaphorically located between the dual possibilities of subjection and subjectivity. His metonymized Africanness defines Cesare’s Romanness not only by serving as foil to it, but also, thanks to Metastasio’s reworking of Addison, by being inspired and ultimately changed by it. Thus even as Arbace’s racialization renders him a safe container for the threat that unrestrained sentiment posed to the absolutist political order of opera seria, the transitivity of his racialized difference, via conversion into Cartesian metonymy, indicates the potential for alterity to be assimilated into and even effaced by the very order it was once meant to oppositionally define.

Put simply: while Cesare performs the fantasy of the once-and-future Roman Empire, the sentimental African prince with a Roman soul embodies the twinned precarity and potentiality of an eighteenth-century Italy that had long since lost its empire and become the colonies in Europe’s own backyard. Both figures, the king and the prince, reappeared in endlessly reimagined guises across the vast geographical dominion of Metastasian opera seria,Footnote ⁸⁹ though the sentimental surrogate was stripped of his racializing garb once his differentiating function had become structurally embedded into the scenario’s portable scaffolding. Nevertheless, Arbace’s inherent dyad of difference and potentiality remained present in more than just the Cartesian poetic and dramatic structures of Metastasian opera. His transitivity also resonated in the musically conventionalized yet variable sounds of operatic performance, for in practice these sentimental surrogates were nearly always voiced by castrato singers. As representatives of both Italy’s proxy imperialism via opera and, increasingly throughout the century, of Italy’s temporal and geographical alterity vis-à-vis Enlightenment progress, castrati embodied an interstitial position not unlike that of the ‘royal slave’.Footnote ⁹⁰

We already know how this scenario played itself out after all these innumerable repetitions and variations. By the end of the eighteenth century, racialisms were conceptually ossifying into ‘race’, and ‘human variety’ was geographically mapped onto the unidirectional trajectory of universal history, together foreclosing further repetitions of opera seria’s recursive drama of sentimental substitution.Footnote ⁹¹ And so too, then, did the once-porous geographical, temporal, and affective borders of the unassimilated space slam shut — such that, owing to the ideologies that followed, it seemed as though they had never been otherwise.