Infames, Roman Judicial Theatre, and the Mimesis of Process

I argue that the underlying criterion for the list of professions that fall under the Roman legal category of Infamia was not moral, as scholars have argued, but rather aesthetic-ontological. Revisiting Greco-Roman philosophy of mimesis and consulting Edwards’s analysis of infames-elite role exchange as well as Hell’s research into Roman “judicial theatre,” I argue that infames were disqualified from legal testimony because their trades involved professional dramatic mimesis. They were thus conceived to be prone to sacrifice the specificity of events for pre-established aesthetic forms, which undermines the pursuit of truth in a court of law. However, far from excluding mimesis, the Roman court deployed what Hutcheon has called “mimesis of process,” which, despite being self-referential, encouraged the depiction of the pure, naked event—what Blanchot (following Levinas) has termed il y a — prior to being reduced to pre-established aesthetic, moral, epistemological, and even linguistic forms and ideals.