[In the following introduction to her co-translation of Callimachus, Nichols explores the classical sources and romantic / Christian theme of the play.]

Hrotswitha was a canoness at the Abbey of Gandersheim in Saxony during the tenth century. She wrote two epics, a number of shorter works, and six plays modelled after Terence's to replace his for readers who were "fascinated by the charm of [his] manner [and] risked being corrupted by the wickedness of [his] matter," as she says in her Preface to the plays.

Callimachus is her most romantic drama. At first reading it seems to be a play that loses its sense of direction. It begins with friends drinking in a tavern and ends with resurrections at Drusiana's tomb. Its opening style is literal and jocular: its closing tone is symbolic and reverent. The problem Hrotswitha seems to set for herself with this play is to reconcile apparent contradictions. And she does so, in a manner that is not only dramatically coherent but is also a commentary on her relation to Terence. The action starts in a world Terence might have created: the setting is urbane, the characterizations secular, the plot a solution to a love problem. And then the play moves with a kind of inevitability into the Christian world that Hrotswitha lived daily, one which rejected the Terentian idea that the social good is a moral equivalent of the private good.

Several actions in Callimachus tell us that while she was writing, Hrotswitha had in mind Terence's play The Eunuch in which violent rape has the shock value of Callimachus's attempted necrophilia. In The Eunuch, however, the tricks of the slave Parmeno and the disguise of the lover Chaerea seem to be simple necessities to resolve the comic plot and, like all the play's intrigues, are in themselves morally neutral. Their final aims are in any case cancelled out by last act discoveries about true parentage and true citizenship that remove all obstacles to the lovers' marriage and therefore guarantee social continuity. To Hrotswitha, however, intrigues are deceitful and deceit is always reprehensible for it reveals the immoral nature of a pagan sensibility. She therefore has her pagan lover Callimachus allude twice to the most famous scene' in Terence's play—the one in which Chaerea is inspired by a picture of Jove descending upon Danae as a shower of gold to take Pamphila by force. Callimachus argues to his friend (sc. ii) that the gods invent plans worse than his intention to seduce a married woman openly. Later, he threatens Drusiana that he will use any means he can to trap her into surrender. According to Chaerea, his rape has the authority of the highest god, a most successful lover. Jupiter behaves in the Greek and Roman mythological traditions much as men do. The moral question is presented in Terence's plays as it is in the Euripidean tragedies which inspired his models in New Comedy, but the answer is never simply given by theology, as in Hrotswitha. To her, tricks and stratagems can only be the inspiration of the devil, the sole instigator of men's sexual impulses whose only possible outcome is evil. Many classical writers were "moralized" in medieval times to make them agree with Christian dogma and ideals. Hrotswitha, nevertheless, does not add on a moral didactically as a closing preachment on the wages of sin. Instead, the drama itself moves toward a statement of belief, and the affirmation of a Christian ethic develops organically out of the central action—the hero's initiation into the spiritual life.

The classical spirit of sensuality that opens the play can lead only downward toward vice and perversity until, and unless, it is redeemed by a saving spirit of grace. The worldliness of a Roman pagan, mellow or corrupt according to the point of view, gives way in Hrotswitha's play to the other-worldliness of a new Christianity. The hero, epitomizing the ephemeral values of a hedonistic actual society, transcends his own nature, as it were, and becomes an exemplar of the greater values in an eternal, divine society. The rival worlds of Eros and Christ are unified here, as they were in history, by a new understanding of the word love.

From the viewpoint of plot and action, the force behind Callimachus's transformation is his passion for the chaste Drusiana. The very extremity of necrophilia to which he is driven is a necessary condition for the later exaltation he is to reach, both in terms of the psychology of character and in terms of dramatic development. A more temperate affection would neither have motivated his fervent wish for change, nor have justified the long celebration of triumphant spirituality in the last third of the play.

Callimachus's lust, like his love, is intensely felt and openly expressed. Drusiana's emotions, on the contrary, are more hidden, perhaps even from herself since her plea for death suggests that her fears are greater and more complex than she realizes. Still, her vow to remain chaste is unwavering—nor ought we probe too deeply into her psychology. Steadfastness makes it possible for her to assume a Beatrice-like role as her lover's guide to Paradise. Like Dante, Hrotswitha is giving an almost neo-Platonic significance to beauty by implying that its powers of attraction are valuable as they may lead to an apprehension of absolute good. If Drusiana suffers for impulses she cannot understand, we are limited by Hrotswitha's portrayal to noticing that her confusion, like Callimachus's torments, are believable because they are essentially human.

Probably the most literary figure in the play is the slave Fortunatus. Like all clever underlings in drama, from Terence's Parmeno to Shakespeare's Iago, he lives by his wits and they remain unregenerate to the end. Hrotswitha's belief in the imperturbable force of right is strong indeed. She knows that this satanic opportunist, licensed not only to steal scenes but to undermine what sounds to him like cant by dying in a rage, will damn himself. But we cannot speak of Fortunatus as a symbol of evil. He, and Drusiana too, are conceived of as static and unchanging: they end as they began, simple patterns of good and evil. Of all the characters, only St. John stands for more than himself. As a typological descendant of John the Baptist, he dramatizes an important link, new to church canon in Hrotswitha's time, between the meaning of baptism and the doctrinal significance of Christ's rebirth. And of all the characters, only Callimachus is dynamic: he becomes heroic when he confirms his understanding of resurrection by choosing to be baptised. In its entirety, the resurrection sequence at Drusiana's tomb is reminiscent of an epic hero's rebirth since that usually comes about through the agency of a special, or magical, or wise figure like St. John, and is always a signal that an heroic lesson has been learned.

The meaning of love, then, is the hero's lesson, the story's romantic theme, the mainspring of the plot, and a key to the play's unity of mundane and celestial realities. We might also expect these multiple aspects of love to motivate the carefully structured miracles; and they do. At the close of the first part of the play (sc. 1-14), God's love, expressed as pity, answers Drusiana's plea for death. In the second part (v viii), Callimachus at the nadir of depravity is punished by a Snake, the serpentine antithesis of love—a demon ex machina. In the long final section (ix), the play's upward movement is accentuated by successive resurrections, demonstrating another attribute of heavenly love. We may see Callimachus's redemption as a reminder that Christ's death brought universal redemption, just as we see Drusiana's rebirth as an illustration of the final reward of the just. As theatrical solutions to problems of character and action, these miracles are apt. Each, however, is also conceived dramatically as a visible expression of each character's will. Fortunatus chooses death as fully as Callimachus chooses life. Hrotswitha's use of Christian symbolism is often casual—as though she expected her audience to make ready associations between, say, an action and its Biblical parallel. God (Christ) announcing the coming resurrection to Andronicus and Saint John is probably a simple variation on the Gospel's angel announcing Christ's resurrection to the women at his tomb. But at a deeper level, Hrotswitha's symbolism is linked to humanistic values of self-determination.

Translating the play brings one up sharply against layers of association in the language that take us backward from Hrotswitha to the classics, and forward from her time to ours. To take an isolated case, Drusiana turns on Callimachus during their first meeting and calls him a "leno." The word is taken by Hrotswitha from Terence and in his context it needs to be translated as "pimp." In the argument between Hrotswitha's lovers, "pimp" makes no sense, for her meaning seems to be romething like "buyer and seller of souls." To us such a phrase might evoke the image of Gogol's enterprising landownes in Dead Souls, one wholmy at variance with the ledieval Latinist's idea of "a dealer in slaves." Similar problems occur in Callimachus's conversation with his friends. Read with a Tdrentian!eye, thd men comment as town gallants; yet become responsible advisors when they warn Callimachus against "any behavior that might lead him to evil." Clearly, Hrotswitha sees the concept of friendship as demanding and serious. The implications of these linguistic differences interest us as revelations of how Hrotswitha interpreted Terence, of how she understood the early Christian era she uses as a setting, and of how she reflected life in her own century. They are more important still for their advice to us about how to read Hrotswitha.

Hrotswitha's Latin is so deceptively simple and straightforward that the translator is tempted to use the spoken language of our day, perhaps even slang. But such language diminishes the serious import of the speeches and jars with the rhetoric of prayer or conversion. Unable to find a modem, colloquial English flexible enough to move with equal ease between high and low styles, the translator goes back with renewed respect to Tillyard's translation² which kept the solemn English rhythms of the King James Bible. Since Helene Homeyer's³ definitive Latin text appeared in 1970, however, an entirely new translation has become necessary. Making the play readable in English meant expanding Hrotswitha's extremely compressed Latin. A character often required a full line of speech rather than a sharp, monosyllabic "yes" or "no" when the context called for an expression of his emotions. In turn, expansion of this sort led to the inclusion of stage directions. Often these are derived from the text itself and thus are justifiable as part of the translation. At other times they are more interpretive. They are, in any case, always included within brackets so that the reader will have no trouble distinguishing them from the text proper. Whether the production takes place in the reader's mind, or in a formal stage presentation, there is clearly a need to visualize the scene and to hear the characters speak.

Notes

¹ It is often referred to in subsequent writings. St. Augustine, for one, discusses it in The City of God.

² H. J. W. Tillyard, Plays of Roswitha (London, 1923).

³ Helen Homeyer, Hrotsvithae Opera (Schöningh, Munich, Paderborn, Vienna, 1970).