Caesar—Lucan—Addison: Three moments in the history of racializing ancient Numidians

ABSTRACT This paper examines the complex entanglement of ancient sources and modern concerns in the racist portrayal of Numidians in the 1778 staging of Joseph Addison's Cato at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. The analysis proceeds in three interconnected case studies, all related to the African ‘theatre’ of the Roman civil war of 49–46 Bce: (1) the racializing presentation of King Juba I and his Numidian cavalry in the Caesarian corpus (especially the pseudo-Caesarian African War); (2) the Numidians’ portrayal in Lucan's Pharsalia, and (3) the famous performance during the US-American revolutionary war, which equates Cato with George Washington and, I argue, the Numidians with modern Black, Indigenous, and other People of Colour. Each of the three depictions displays some continuity with its predecessors and successors, but it is most immediately defined by the specific requirement of rationalizing oppression in the relevant writer’s or performance’s present. This article thus provides evidence for processes of racial formation operating across time and spanning the premodern as well as the early-modern and modern eras.