SOURCE: Erich Segal, in Roman Laughter, Harvard University Press, 1968, 229 p.

[In the following excerpts from his book-length study of Plautus's comedies, Segal sketches Plautus's career as a professional playwright popular with Roman audiences and explores the relationship between Plautine Roman comedy and the Roman holiday mentality.]

Introduction

Of all the Greek and Roman playwrights, Titus Maccius Plautus is the least admired and the most imitated. "Serious" scholars find him insignificant, while serious writers find him indispensable. He deserves our careful attention, not merely because his twenty complete comedies constitute the largest extant corpus of classical dramatic literature (more plays than Euripides, nearly twice as many comedies as Aristophanes, more than three times as many as Terence), but because, without any doubt, Plautus was the most successful comic poet in the ancient world. We know of no setback in his artistic career comparable to Aristophanes' frustrations with the Clouds, or to Terence's inability to hold his audiences in the face of competition from gross athletic shows. What is more, Plautus is the first known professional playwright. Like Shakespeare and Molière (to name two who found him indispensable), Plautus depended upon the theater for his livelihood. Terence could afford to have the Hecyra fail twice. Subsidized by the aristocrats of the so-called Scipionic circle, he had merely to satisfy his patrons. Plautus the professional had to satisfy his public.

It was primarily his economic motives which put Plautus into disrepute with the "classicists." Horace threw one of the first stones when he taxed the Roman comedian for seeking only to make money, and therefore ignoring all the rules for proper dramatic construction.¹ But it was easy for Horace to criticize, doubtless in the comfort of the Sabine farm given him by the eponymous Maecenas, far away from the profanum vulgus to whom Plautus had to cater—in order to eat. For, if such an attitude be a fault, Plautus must share Boileau's objection to Molière, that of being "trop ami du peuple." Terence could afford to call the Roman audience populus stupidus (Hecyra 4), but Plautus knew only too well that those "who live to please must please to live." Even the characters within his plays keep an eye on the mood of the spectators. "Be brief," says one of them as the plot nears its conclusion, "the theatergoers are thirsty."²

One of the few indisputable statements which can be made about Plautus the man is that he enjoyed great popular success. The ancient biography states that he twice amassed a fortune in the theater. Having lost his first profits in a disastrous shipping venture, he bailed himself out of a Roman version of debtors' prison by writing once more for the comic stage.³ Thereafter, he entertained no further business schemes; he merely entertained the Romans.

Plautus' popularity reached such phenomenal proportions that his very name acquired a magic aura. It seems that the mere words "I bring you Plautus" were enough to captivate a huge, unruly—and probably drunken—crowd.⁴ In contrast, the prologues of Terence, which work feverishly for the spectators' attention, never once mention their author's name, although they refer to Plautus three times. And it is well known that unscrupulous producers would put Plautus' name on plays by others to enhance their market value. A century after the playwright's death, there were in circulation over 130 comedies of allegedly Plautine authorship. It had long since become a scholarly enterprise to determine the authenticity of these plays.⁵ And Varro's diligent triple cataloguing of definitely-, probably-, and probably-not-Plautus was by no means the final word. Several centuries thereafter, Aulus Gellius is found passing judgments on Plautinity, as is Macrobius still later, on the threshold of the Dark Ages.

The tribute of such prolific plagiarism and forgery is unique in the annals of literature. One never hears of any Aristophanic apocrypha, of pseudo-Menander or pseudo-Terence. The only valid analogy would seem to be with the Spanish Golden Age, when Lope de Vega's name was forged on dramatic manuscripts to increase their commercial value. Even the Shakespearean apocrypha cannot be considered in this regard, since the counterfeits were never so numerous, nor did they entice vast audiences into the theater, as the names of Plautus and Lope obviously did.

No less amazing than the strength of Plautus' name is the durability of his comedy. This phenomenon of vitality is evident not only on the pages of works like Karl von Reinhardtstoettner's exhaustive chronicle of Spätere Bearbeitungen,⁶ but on the stages wherever comedy has flourished. The Roman playwright is still very much alive in our own day. As recently as 1962, an unabashed contaminano of the Pseudolus, Casina, and Mostellaria entitled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum delighted Broadway audiences for almost a thousand performances, repeated its triumph throughout the world, and was transformed into a motion picture. Horace might boast that he created a monumentum aere perennius, but Plautus created a perennial gold mine.

And yet few scholars of the last century have been willing to examine Plautus for what he undeniably was—a theatrical phenomenon. While the ancient professors like Varro (diligentissimus, as Cicero praised him for his research methods) concerned themselves with giving Plautus his due credit by rescuing his name from inferior Latin comedies, the modern approach has shifted from integrity to disintegration. Plautine comedy has become the child in the Judgment of Solomon. From Friedrich Ritschl in the mid-nineteenth century to T. B. L. Webster in the mid-twentieth, a possessive family of scholars have stressed the Roman playwright's "echt-attisches" parentage, considering the value of Plautus to consist solely in what may be discerned of his Greek models which lie beneath an exterior defaced by jokes, puns, songs, and anachronisms.⁷ Webster states his views in temperate terms, and a few sentences from his Studies in Later Greek Comedy may serve to epitomize the attitude of the Hellenists toward Roman comedy in general. He begins by stating that "the Roman copyists … are known quantities," and continues:

Plautus may elaborate the particular scene to the detriment of the play as a whole; he remodels his text to produce song and dance where there was plain dialogue before; he substitutes elaborate metaphor and mythological allusion for the plain and "ethical" language of the original. But this colouring and distortion is a recognizable quality for which allowances can be made.⁸

And Webster is far more objective than was Gilbert Norwood, who argued:

When the plays are strongly suffused by Plautus' own personality and interests, they are mostly deplorable … The result is that we find only one rational principle for discussing his work. The genuinely Greek passages should be distinguished from the far larger bulk where the original has been smothered by barbarous clownery, intolerable verbosity, and an almost complete indifference to dramatic structure.⁹

Norwood's views have not gone out of fashion. And, although recent discoveries of Menander have done little to strengthen the myth of "the perfection of New Comedy," many scholars still attribute everything that sparkles in Plautus to his models, and everything that falters to his fault.¹⁰

But the case for Roman artistry has not lacked partisans. Eduard Fraenkel's monumental Plautinisches im Plautus demonstrated, even to the satisfaction of the Hellenists, that certain turns of phrase, rhetoric, and imagery are uniquely Plautine—and praiseworthy.¹¹ Indeed, Webster himself acknowledges a debt to Fraenkel's perceptive work.¹² Moreover, in recent years, sound and persuasive studies, particularly by D. C. Earl, Gordon Williams, and John Arthur Hanson, have pointed out the dramatic purpose of many seemingly random Roman references in the comedies, thereby directing Plautine studies into the area which the present writer considers the most vital: the playwright's relation to his public.¹³ And yet the Greco-Roman tug of war still occasions extreme arguments on both sides. Thus, in passionate defense of his countryman's art, Raffaele Perna can loose Plautus entirely from his Greek moorings and eulogize "l'originalità di Plauto."¹⁴

But what exactly is the "originality" being debated? The "fresh new jokes" which Aristophanes keeps boasting of? That "novel something" which Boccaccio presents in each of his hundred tales? If innovation alone were a standard of excellence, King Ubu would take the palm from King Lear. Clearly this is a notion both unclassical and unsound. Ancient theories of art were based on mimesis within traditional genres: an imitation of life. To this Platonic-Aristotelian concept, Roman aesthetics added a second mimetic principle: imitation of the Greeks. Horace in the Ars Poetica states it as the first rule of artistic composition. But this had been Roman practice long before it became Horatian precept. One thinks of Catullus and Sappho, or (more to Horace's liking) Virgil and Homer or, for that matter, the odes of Horace himself. Conscious emulation of Greek models was the tradition in Rome from the very beginning.

And for us Plautus is the beginning, the very earliest surviving Latin author. After all, Livius Andronicus is some lines and a legend; Plautus is a literature. There is nothing which distinguishes his treatment of Greek models from that of later Roman artists. The Ars Poetica enjoins the poet: exemplaria Graeca … versate manu (lines 268-269). Plautus frequently describes his technique of composition in a similar manner, e.g. (Trinummus 19):

Philemo scripsit: Plautus vortit barbare.

Philemon wrote it: Plautus made the "barbarian" version.

What a paradox that Horatian versare is a praiseworthy practice and Plautine vortere (the same root, after all) is looked upon as a reverse alchemy which transmutes the gold of Athens into Roman dross.¹⁵ The problem is not eliminated even when a scholar of Fraenkel's stature sets out to redeem the Plautine vertere,¹⁶ for this merely aggravates the general tendency to anatomize the playwright, to separate "Plautinisches" and "Attisches." But the real Plautus only exists as the sum of his parts—whatever these parts be: inverties etiam disiecti membra poetae.

We cannot deny the value of studying a playwright's sources. It is interesting, for example, to know that Shakespeare took Enobarbus' colorful description of Cleopatra on the barge directly from North's Plutarch. The bard copied it almost word for word, altering it chiefly to turn (vortere?) prose into pentameter.¹⁷ But are these lines, once in the play, any less Shakespearean? Did it matter to the groundlings who wrote them first? Surely the Roman audience did not care whether what they heard was copied or concocted, as long as it made them laugh. Like Shakespeare and Molière, Plautus begs, borrows, and steals from every conceivable source—including himself.¹⁸ But we must acknowledge that once the play begins, everything becomes "Plautus" just as Plutarch becomes "Shakespeare."

Another circumstance cannot be left unnoticed: Shakespeare's sources fill several well-edited volumes, but there is not a single Greek original to which a Plautine version may be directly compared. There is not even a scene or a speech [See now E. W. Handley, "Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison" (London 1968)] that we might contrast with its Latin counterpart in the way Gellius is able to compare Menander and Caecilius.¹⁹ But we do have twenty-one thousand lines of Plautus, twenty Latin plays which share many common elements, regardless of origin. Of course our view of Roman popular comedy, like that of Old Attic comedy, is somewhat distorted, since the work of only one of its many authors is extant. What will be said of Plautus in the succeeding pages may well have been true of the comedy of Naevius and Caecilius.²⁰ Terence, of course, represents an entirely different tradition: drama for an aristocratic coterie.²¹ The Elizabethans who paid their penny at the Globe would not have stood for the theatricals composed in the polite circle of the Countess of Pembroke any more than the Roman groundlings put up with the fabulae statariae of Terence.

Even if he disagrees with some of the conclusions put forth on the pages that follow, the reader should not view this study as yet another round in the agon between "Plautinisches" and "Attisches." For whether we insist upon calling Plautus' comedy Greek, or dissect it so minutely that we can term it "Greco-oscoetrusco-latin,"²² there is one undeniable fact to be faced: Plautus made them laugh. And the laughter was Roman.

It is impossible to understand Plautine comedy without appreciating the context in which it was presented; for Roman drama from the earliest times is inextricably connected with Roman holidays. Livy (7.2) associates the beginning of theatrical activity with the ludi Romani in 364 B.C., when Etruscan ludiones were imported to perform for the populace. At this same September holiday in 240 B.C., Livius Andronicus introduced the first (Greek-into-Latin) "play with a plot." But there is evidence that some kind of performance took place at this harvest festival long before Livy's traditional dates, in the lusus iuvenum, which Varro regarded as the true ancestor of Roman dramatic art.²³ Horace describes the "rustic banter" that delighted the farmers during September holidays of a bygone age (Epist. 2.1.145-148):

Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem
versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit,
libertasque recurrentis accepta per annos
lusit amabiliter…²⁴

From this tradition [of primitive holidays] the Fescennine, verses developed, and rustic abuse poured forth in dialogue-verse. This freedom, playing happily along, was welcomed year after year …

What characterized these festive occasions (and we need not discuss the precise nature of the "entertainment") was licentia (line 145) and libertas (line 147), attitudes which also describe the ludi in the poet's own day (Ars Poetica 211ff), as well as the "libertà e licensiozità carnevalesca" of later Italian festivals.²⁵ Sir James Frazer found this phenomenon in various cultures throughout the world:

Many people observe an annual period of license—when the customary restraints of law and morality are thrown aside [for] extravagant mirth and jollity. Though these festivals commonly occur at the end of the year, they are frequently associated with one or another of the agricultural seasons, especially the time of sowing and harvest.²⁶

The best known of such festivals is, of course, the Roman Saturnalia held in December.²⁷ There is a strong possibility that this holiday may have originally taken place in September, that is, at the time of the ludi Romani. Many scholars even see in the name Saturnus the suggestion of an agricultural deity.²⁸ Fowler cites the frequent incorporation of winter "saturnalian" customs into harvest holidays—like the ludi Romani.²⁹

But I am not arguing for the direct influence of specific holiday customs on Roman comedy. The important connection is the fact that "the holiday occasion and the comedy are parallel manifestations of the same pattern of culture."³⁰ With this principle as his point of departure, C. L. Barber has provided brilliant new in-sights into Shakespearean comedy. But if Barber's premise is at all valid for Elizabethan drama (which was basically a year-round activity), how much more so would it be for ancient Rome, when the holiday occasion and the comedy are not merely "parallel manifestations" but simultaneous occurrences. All Plautus is literally "festive comedy," since the various ludi were the only occasions for dramatic presentations, a condition which prevailed even as late as Juvenal's day.³¹

The festive feeling, as Freud described it, is "the liberty to do what as a rule is prohibited,"³² a temporary excess which implies everyday restraint. Comedy, likewise, involves a limited license, a momentary breaking of society's rules. Man's inner urge to "misbehave," the psychological tension between restraint and release, is not a concept new with Freud. Plato long ago recognized this unconscious desire as one of the prime appeals of comedy.³³ Moreover, if there is truth in Max Beerbohm's statement that "laughter rejoices in bonds,"³⁴ that the joy of the release is in direct proportion to the severity of the restraint, then Roman comedy must have given rise to a laughter of liberation which even the art of Aristophanes (albeit fecundissimae libertatis, according to Quintilian)³⁵ could not equal.

For the "bonds" in Plautus' day were literary as well as social. Greek Old Comedy was distinguished for its πᾳ̑ρρησίᾳ̑ that celebrated freedom of speech which licensed even the most brutal personal attacks on individuals of high rank. But the Roman Twelve Tables (those antique vetantes, tabulae as Horace calls them)³⁶ forbade the merest mention of an individual by name—even to praised him. Cicero mentions this in the De Republica (4.10): veteribus displicuisse Romanis vel laudari quemquam in scaena virum, vel vituperari, "the ancient Romans looked askance if a particular person was either praised or criticized on the stage.""³⁷ "Censorship" is, after all, a Roman invention and originally involved much more than jurisdiction over words. The Roman censor was essentially a guardian of behavior.

We must constantly bear in mind that the age of Plautus was also the age of Cato the Elder. In fact, when he wishes to describe the historical period of the late third century B.C., Aulus Gellius links the names of comic author and authoritarian censor in what at first glance seems a most curious tandem (N.A. 17.21.46):

Ac deinde annis fere post quindecim bellum adversum Poenos sumptum est … M. Cato orator in civitate, et Plautus poeta in scaena floruerunt.

And then, almost fifteen years after the beginning of the Punic War, the men of prominence were Marcus Cato the orator in the state, and Plautus the poet on the stage.

The atmosphere in Rome of this era is constantly described by scholars as "spartan" or "puritanical," and it was, without question, conservative in the extreme. Early Roman society was distinguished for its "thou shalt not" attitude which was embodied in a unique series of restrictive, moralistic ordinances, about which Crane Brinton comments in A History of Western Morals:

We here encounter clearly for the first time another persistent theme in the moral history of the West, and one that confronts the sociological historian with some difficult problems: sumptuary, prohibitory, "blue law" legislation accompanied by official or semi-official educational propaganda toward a return to "primitive" virtues.³⁸

Plautus was just beginning his theatrical career when the first of these laws, the Lex Oppia, was enacted in 215 B.C. And the date traditionally given for Plautus' death—184 B.C.—was the famous year in which Cato and Valerius Flaccus assumed the censorship, to wield their power with a reactionary rigor that became a legend. Plutarch reports that they expelled one man from the senate for kissing his wife in public.³⁹ What actual effect these "blue laws" had on the Romans does not bear upon our arguments.⁴⁰ Whether or not they were strictly adhered to is less important than the fact that the rules were promulgated; they were there. And to appreciate what Plautus' characters are doing, we must be aware of what his contemporary Romans were not supposed to do.

Of course conservatism by definition yearns for the good old days, and Byron's wry observation is quite true: "all days when old, are good." Yet in Rome the conservative conscience was very special. For the Romans had created an impossible ideal and transferred it to the past, making myths out of the men who were their forefathers. The Roman obsession with the greatness of their ancestors is epitomized in Cicero's well-known apostrophe (Tusc. Disp. 1.1):

Quae enim tanta gravitas, quae tanta constantia, magnitudo animi, probitas, fides, quae tam excellens in omni genere virtus in ullis fuit ut sit cum maioribus nostris comparanda?

What people ever had such dignity, such stoutheartedness, greatness of spirit, uprightness, loyalty, such shining qualities of every kind that they could possibly compare with our ancestors?

The guiding principle for behavior was mos maiorum, our forefathers' precedent. But which forefathers? Cicero lavished praise on Cato's day, and Cato himself evokes the precedent of still earlier maiores nostri.⁴¹ No Roman of any age could fulfill the dictates of mos maiorum any more than Sisyphus could push his rock to the summit. Roman gravitas (at least as it is celebrated in literature), was more than seriousness and avoidance of frivolity. It was a pervasive melancholy nurtured by a vague sense of guilt and personal un-worthiness. The final lines of Horace's Roman Odes express this (Carm. 3.6.46-49):

We find this sentiment everywhere. Cicero begins Book Five of De Republica with the same thoughts. The Roman mentality was suffused with guilt feelings analo gous to Christian original sin. In the ode quoted above we hear of delicta nondum expiata.⁴³ In Virgil's Aeneid it is voiced even more strongly; the sins being purged in Elysium are described as vetera mala, scelus infectum, concreta labes (6.735-746).⁴⁴ The fact that these are poetic references to the recent civil wars, as well as to the mythical sin of Romulus, does not adequately explain the omnipresence of this motif. It was more than Adam's transgression which caused the medieval loathing for the flesh. In both societies, the guilt is even more psychological than historical. Gravitas may describe a paragon of behavior, but it may also reveal a pathology.

A Freudian psychologist would describe the early Romans as a people with an overdeveloped superego. The superego, as A. A. Brill defined it, is

a precipitate of all the prohibitions and inhibitions, all the rules which are impressed upon the child by his parents and parental substitutes. The feeling of conscience depends altogether on the superego.⁴⁵

These very same words serve as a precise definition of mos maiorum, the rules imposed upon the Romans by various parental figures, not the least of whom was pater Aeneas! Every Roman institution was a sacred patriarchy, every family the state in miniature. But Aeneas was a myth, and the ideal he embodied an impossibility. It is small wonder that mos maiorum is linked with gravitas.⁴⁶ The superego is the father of melancholy.

But comedy has been described by the psychiatrist Ernst Kris as a "holiday for the superego,"⁴⁷ and Plautus, reflecting as he does the festive spirit, banishes Roman melancholy, turning everyday attitudes and everyday values completely upside down. To a society with a fantastic compulsion for hierarchies, order, and obedience, he presents a saturnalian chaos.⁴⁸ To a people who regarded a parent's authority with religious awe and could punish any infringement with death, Plautus presents an audacious irreverence for all elders. The atmosphere of his comedy is like that of the medieval Feast of Fools (product of another highly restrictive society), which some see as "providing a safety valve for repressed sentiments which otherwise might have broken their bonds more violently."⁴⁹ But we need not stress the cathartic value of Plautine comedy; we need only appreciate the fascination which a flouting of the rules would have had for people so bound by them in everyday life. This very appeal to what Shakespeare called "holiday humor" accounts in large measure for the unequaled success of Plautus.

If we are to understand the whole tradition of popular comedy, we must see Plautus in the proper perspective, and acknowledge that his work is a significant milestone.⁵⁰ If it seem bold to compare him with Aristo phanes, let us not forget that Cicero did so.⁵¹ Nor should we hesitate to compare to Molière a writer who had also mastered "le grand art de plaire." The most passionate partisan would never place Plautus' achievement on a par with Shakespeare's, but no reasonable man should deny that Plautus was like Noah: great in his age. His art does not give rise to "thoughtful laughter," but Meredith may not be correct in seeing this as the aim of True Comedy. For True Comedy should banish all thought—of mortality and morality. It should evoke a laughter which temporarily lifts from us the weight of the world, whether we call it "das Unbe-hagen," loathèd melancholy, or gravitas.

Plautus is our only example of popular Roman entertainment, comedy "as they liked it." His twenty plays show us what delighted a nation on the verge of world domination, in the only age when its theater lived and flourished. Rome went on to build much that remains vital and viable in our own day. The most obvious monuments to her craftsmanship are the aqueducts which still carry water, the bridges and highways which can still be traveled. But when Zero Mostel as Pseudolus trod nightly on his way to the Broadway forum, he was walking another Roman road of astounding durability.

…..

From Forum to Festival

The primary characteristic of "holiday" is its distinct separation from "every day." Ordinary activities cease, the agenda completely changes. In a mood of sincere admiration (not, as so often, sarcastically) Horace praises the ideal "Roman day" (Epist. 2.1.103-107):

Romae dulce diu fuit et sollemne reclusa
mane domo vigilare, clienti promere iura
cautos nominibus rectis expendere nummos,
maiores audire, minori dicere per quae
crescere res posset, minui damnosa libido.

At Rome it was a pleasure and a practice of long standing to be up and about in the early morning, with the house doors open, giving legal aid to clients, carefully investing money with good-risk creditors, heeding one's elders and teaching the younger generation how to increase their wealth and decrease the ruinous urge to be profligate.

… [I]t is interesting to note that Horace is here comparing the responsible Romans with the fun-loving Greeks (whom he has just described in lines 93-102). The latter, he intimates, are a "holiday race," whose everyday activities are play, not work. Such noble practices as clienti promere iura are contrasted to a Greek agenda filled with games and levity. Horace describes Greek behavior as nugari (line 93) and ludere (line 99), words which always had pejorative connotations to the Roman.¹

Horace's "Roman day" also stands in direct opposition to the activities of a "Plautine day." … [T]he people of Plautus do the precise opposite of "heeding one's elders." Such an attitude was a prime characteristic of pietas, and this virtue is turned topsy-turvy by the comic playwright. Unlike the economical, obedient sons whom Horace eulogizes, the younger generation in Plautus is always in passionate pursuit of damnosa libido. And if Horace epitomizes as ludere all activities that contrast with the duties of a "Roman day," it is understandable that the Roman festivals were all called ludi.²

The Menaechmi illustrates in dramatic terms the longing of an ordinary citizen for temporary escape from his everyday agenda. The two houses on stage represent the conflicting forces in the comedy. They are not unlike the statues of Artemis and Aphrodite which frame the setting of Euripides' Hippolytus. In both plays, the action takes place in a magnetic field between personifications of restraint and release. It is no mere coincidence that the house of Menaechmus I stands at the exit nearer the forum. The Epidamnian twin is bound by innumerable ties, legal, financial, and social obligations, not to mention his marital bond to a shrewish wife who is constantly "on the job." Menaechmus describes his wife's behavior as excessive industria (line 123), a term which almost gives allegorical overtones to the action of the comedy.

Across the stage, and nearer the harbor whence visitors come, dwells a lady of pleasure aptly named Erotium. (Menaechmus' spouse has no name at all, she is merely called matrona. Shakespeare reverses this situation in the Comedy of Errors, creating a nameless "courtesan.") Menaechmus always seems to have le mot juste, for he refers to his mistress as voluptas, which is not only an endearment, but the most appropriate description of the atmosphere at Erotium's house, one which contrasts diametrically with the industria across the stage. In going from one side to the other, Menaechmus is "acting out" the inner direction of the comic spirit. The comedy itself presents the conflict of industria and voluptas, holiday versus everyday, or, as Freud would describe it, the reality principle versus the pleasure principle.

As the parasite Peniculus remarks, today's celebration is much overdue, there has been a long "intermission" (intervallum iam hos dies multos fuit, line 104). But when Menaechmus gives a party it is almost a national holiday. His parasite, who must be regarded an expert in these matters, says as much (lines 100-101):

Ita est adulescens: ipsus escae maxumae
Cerialis cenas dat …

That young chap is like this: the greatest of all eaters,
The feasts he gives are festivals of Ceres..

To Peniculus, his patron's entertainments are like those gala Roman occasions when banquets were served in the Circus; this will be quite a day indeed.

We first meet Menaechmus battling soldier-like against domestic oppression.³ To him, the precondition for holiday is the absence of his wife (line 152):

Clam uxoremst ubi pulchre habeamus atque hunc comburamus diem.

Hidden from my wife, we'll live it up and burn this day to ashes.⁴

He describes her restrictive behavior in no uncertain terms (lines 114-118):

His wife is the antithesis of the holiday spirit; she is both rule book and conscience, always questioning his behavior. Her industria has driven Menaechmus to seek festive release, as he himself tells her (lines 122-124):

The playwright himself understood the psychological motivations for his hero's behavior, as indicated by the remarks of Menaechmus' father-in-law later in the play. When his wife sends for him to complain about her husband's antics, the senex blames her, not Menaechmus (lines 788-791):

The old man echoes Menaechmus' opening tirade almost verbatim (especially lines 115 and 122). He excuses the husband's desire to revel, seeing it as the natural result of the wife's excessive vigilance: ob earn industriam (Menaechmus, line 123), ob istanc industriam (Old Man, line 791).⁵

In contrast to the wife's industria, the mistress represents its polar opposite, pleasure personified. When he first spies her, his explanation emphasizes this antithesis, counterpoising as it does uxor and voluptas, withholding the verb, and hence the entire meaning of the outcry until the last possible moment (line 189):

Ut ego uxorem, mea voluptas, ubi te aspicio, odi male!

Oh my wife, my joy, when I look at you, how I hate her!

Wife and mistress dwell at the antipodes of human experience; Plautus states this in no uncertain terms. To visit Erotium is pulchre habere (line 152), whereas life with his wife is a perpetual atmosphere of male habere (line 569). This contrast—the essential conflict of the Menaechmi—goes even further. Just as Erotium is nothing at all like Menaechmus' wife, so too the day which will be devoted to her will differ totally from an ordinary day. Even the banquet which the wayward husband orders would underscore for the Roman audience in a very specific way that the usual rules would be set aside (lines 208-213, 215):

lube igitur tribus nobis apud te prandium accurarier,
atque aliquid scitamentorum de foro opsonarier,
glandionidam suillam, laridum pernonidam,
aut sincipitamenta porcina aut aliquid ad eum modum,
madida quae mi adposita in mensa miluinam suggerant;
atque actutum … propera modo.

Please arrange a feast at your house, have it cooked for three of us.
Also have some very special party foods bought in the forum.
Glandiose, whole-hog, and a descendant of the lardly ham.
Or perhaps some pork chopettes, or anything along these lines.
Let whatever's served be "stewed," to make me hungry as a hawk.
Quickly too … and hurry up.

In many ways Menaechmus' menu resembles the slave's request for festive food in the Cosina…. His desire for something "stewed" echoes Olympio's call for a "drunken dinner," and in both instances there is an emphasis on "holiday haste."⁶ Most important, each celebrant rejects ordinary Roman fare. For Olympio, this merely meant "something fine and fancy" as opposed to "bland barbarian beans." But the delicacies which Menaechmus orders and all food "along those lines" were specifically forbidden to Romans by the current sumptuary laws. These, according to Pliny, forbade the eating of abdomina, glandia, testiculi, vulvae, sincipita verrina.⁷ Not only do these outlawed items figure prominently on Menaechmus' bill of fare, but Plautus plays with them verbally, concocting dishes like sincipitamenta, and the comic patronymics glandionida and pernonida. Apparently Menaechmus is savoring his words in anticipation of the breaking-ofthe-rules banquet.

According to Pliny, Cato's orations constantly inveighed against gastronomic luxury, especially eating certain cuts of pork.⁸ In spite of this (perhaps because of this), Plautine gourmets went whole hog, and so, it appears, did the characters of Naevius. Just as the fragments of Plautus' comic predecessor reveal traces of pietas abused, so too they mention some of the unlawful delicacies.⁹ Once again we discover a Plautine characteristic which may well have been common to the general palliata tradition: a holiday from the rules (here dietary), further emphasized when the playwright calls attention to the very prohibition being violated.¹⁰

After ordering his un-Roman banquet, Menaechmus leaves for the forum. A split second later, his long-lost twin enters from the harbor. And by artful coincidence, the visiting brother's very first word upon arrival in Epidamnus is voluptas (line 226). He is little aware of the reverberations that word will have for him and how apt a description it is for the whole way of life in this place. For with the exception of his twin brother's house, this is the ultimate in "party towns." When the slave Messenio describes it to his master, he uses only superlatives (lines 258-264):

Nam ita est haec hominum natio: in Epidamnieis
voluptarii atque potatores maxumi;
turn sycophantae et palpatores plurumi
in urbe hac habitant; turn meretrices mulieres
nusquam perhibentur blandiores gentium.
propterea huic urbi nomen Epidamno inditumst,
quia nemo ferme huc sine damno devortitur.

Now here's the race of men you'll find in Epidamnus:
The greatest libertines, the greatest drinkers too,
The most bamboozlers and charming flatterers
Live in this city. And as for wanton women, well—
Nowhere in the world, I'm told, are they more dazzling.
Because of this, they call the city Epidamnus,
For no one leaves unscathed, "undamaged," as it were.

The visiting twin does indeed encounter "voluptuaries," especially the dazzling Erotium, but unlike an ordinary tourist on an ordinary day he will suffer no damage (damnum literally means financial ruin). This boy from Syracuse belongs to a great comic tradition: a lowly stranger who arrives in town, is mistaken for someone of greater importance, and fulfills the comic dream: everything for nothing, or more specifically, food, sex, and money. Xanthias in the Frogs is the first of such types in surviving ancient comedy, and true to this tradition is Khlestakov, Gogol's humble government clerk who is mistaken for the Inspector General and treated accordingly. Like Gogol's hero, the traveling Menaechmus has come to town virtually penniless. What ensues seems too good to be true. A lovely courtesan calls him by name and invites him to a lavish feast of all the senses … at no cost. What Menaechmus II receives is the precise opposite of damnum. In fact he profits in every imaginable way. Having reveled to the fullest and been given an expensive dress (supposedly to be taken to the embroiderer for improvements), he emerges from Erotium's house drunk, garlanded and euphoric; no man, he says, has ever received more favors in just a single day (lines 473-477).

But someone has to pay the bill. And here the local twin suffers a double damnum, physical as well as fiscal, for the significant reason that he has gone to work on a holiday. Acting "the good Roman," Menaechmus I has gone to the forum and ended up defending a client in court. According to Horace, clienti promere tura was one of the primary duties of the ideal Roman day…. The fate of Menaechmus I emphatically demonstrates how inimical this activity is to the festive agenda. He finally reenters with a barrage-in-song against the patronage system (lines 571ff).¹¹ It is a bothersome thing to have clients (lines 588-589):

Fulfilling one's civic obligations is a form of restraint, it "tied up" Menaechmus (ita med attinuit, ita detinuit) and prevented him from following his instinct (quod volui agere).¹² In the famous canticum which follows, the twin of Epidamnus realizes that his great error was even thinking of business on a holiday. It is as much his fault as his client's (lines 596-599):

Di ilium omnes perdant, ita mihi
hune hodie corrupit diem,
meque adeo, qui hodie forum
umquam oculis inspexi meis.
diem corrupi optimum.
iussi adparari prandium,
amica exspectat me, scio,
ubi primum est licitum, ilico
properavi abire de foro.

By all the heavens, cursed be he
Who just destroyed this day for me.
And curse me too, a fool today,
For ever heading forum's way.
The greatest day of all destroyed,
The feast prepared, but not enjoyed.
My love awaits, I know. Indeed,
The very moment I was freed
I left the forum with great speed.

Plautus stresses the haste with which Menaechmus rushes away from the commercial center (ubi primum … ilico / properavi). From business in the forum, he dashes to pleasure at its polar opposite: across the stage, at the house of Erotium. The antipodes of the Plautine world are industria and voluptas, forum and festivity. At Rome, the first step in a holiday direction was always (as quickly as possible) abire de foro.

Forum and festivity are also specifically counterpoised in the Cosina. Like young Menaechmus, old Lysidamus has set this day aside for merrymaking (ego cum Casina faciam nuptias! line 486), and has ordered a luxurious banquet. But again like Menaechmus, Lysidamus has been detained by a lawsuit in the forum. He finally reenters, having learned his lesson (lines 563-568):

Stultitia magna est, mea quidem sententia,
hominem amatorem ullum ad forum procedere,
in eum diem quoi quod amet in mundo siet;
sicut ego feci stultus. contrivi diem,
dum asto advocatus cuidam cognato meo;
quern hercle ego litem adeo perdidisse gaudeo.

It's folly, that's what I would call it, totalfolly,
For any man in love just to approach the forum,
The very day his love awaits, all fancied up.
That's what I've done, fool that I am. I've ruined the day,
While acting as attorney for a relative.
By Hercules, I'm overjoyed we lost the case!

Ad forum procedere has destroyed Lysidamus' festive plans (contrivi diem) just as a similar journey had spoiled Menaechmus' day (diem corrupi optimum, Menaechmi 598a). Again, like the twin of Epidamnus, Lysidamus has been defeated in court.¹³ Totally devoid of professional pride, Lysidamus is happy to have failed. These lawyers' laments prove conclusively that funny things happen only on the way from the forum.¹⁴

The prologue to the Cosina affirms this interpretation of the festive rule.¹⁵ It demonstrates that the lesson which Menaechmus and Lysidamus learn the hard way is actually the first principle of Roman holiday. The prologue's appeal to the public is very specific (lines 23-26):

Eicite ex animo curam atque alienum aes,
ne quis formidet flagitatorem suom.
ludi sunt, ludus datus est argentariis;
tranquillum est, Alcedonia sunt circum forum.

Just kick out all your cares, and as for debts, ignore 'em.
Let no one fear fierce creditors will sue.
It's holiday for everyone—for bankers too.¹⁶
All's calm, a halcyon quiet floats around the forum.

The prologue speaks not merely of the play, but of the day as well. The ludi are on, here in Rome, and there is an unusual silence even in the very center of business. So unequivocal is this statement that all commerce has ceased that each of the lines quoted contains a financial or business reference: to debts, creditors, bankers, and the banking district. During the ludi all ordinary activity came to an absolute standstill, a practice which Cicero, in the heat of prosecuting Verres, vehemently objects to, but could do nothing to change.¹⁷ On a Roman holiday there was simply no business—but show business. The forum was empty because the theater was packed. The sons of Aeneas, longing like Menaechmus to loose their everyday ties, to travel from the regions of industria to the realm of voluptas, had all beaten a path to that festive place which may best be described as being as far as possible from the forum.

The Roman may have flatteringly pictured himself as a paragon of pietas, but an objective view sees him as more pragmatic than pious. His materialistic attitude is evident even in Horace's idealized "Roman day," where the poet lauds the noble practice of heeding one's elders. The parents he pictures are not imparting to their children mos maiorum in the spiritual sense but are rather lecturing them on sound investment policy: per quae I crescere res posset (Epist. 2.1.106-107). And this was in fact considered a Roman virtue. In the oftquoted eulogy by Quintus Metellus at his father's funeral (221 B.C.), the son claims that his father achieved the ten greatest things (decent maximas res optimasque) which wise men strive for, and these include not only being first in war and first in peace, but being first in finance as well: pecuniam magnam bono modo invenire.¹⁸ It is well attested that the Romans were extremely fond of money and would pass up no opportunity for financial gain.¹⁹ Horace's picture of the Roman father teaching his son to enlarge his patrimony serves well to describe Cato the Elder, who, according to Plutarch, considered a man who increased the capital he inherited to be "marvelous and godlike." …²⁰

Polybius, like Terence, was a protégé of Scipio Aemilianus and could hardly be praised for writing sine ira et studio; yet in his Universal History he punctuates what is essentially a panegyric celebrating the superiority of Roman qualities to Greek with the candid observation that the Roman was extremely difficult, in fact a stickler when it came to financial matters. As Polybius sees it, this quality is not unpraise-worthy; it suggests that the Romans were hyperefficient and kept a good house. He states in no uncertain terms that at Rome you get nothing for nothing (31.26.9): …

Absolutely no one gives anyone anything he possesses of his own free will.

Polybius' emphatic language demonstrates how antithetical the typical Roman outlook was to the comic spirit. Max Eastman observes that in comedy it is "the too much—always and absolutely—not the much that is funny."²¹ But according to Polybius "too much" is a completely un-Roman concept. In the pragmatic "nothing-for-nothing" atmosphere of workaday Rome, there could be none of the laughter which Freud saw as inspired by the aspect of "an excessive expenditure of energy."²² The Romans had a violent aversion to spending anything, as Polybius notes further: "their punctiliousness about expenditures is as intense as their compulsion to turn every second of time into profit" (31.27.11). One of Plautus' most brilliant characters, Euclio the miser, reflects this trait, caricatured to absurdity. He would not only refuse to expend the energy for laughter, but he is parsimonious even with his ordinary breath (Aulularla 302-303):

PYTHODICUS: Quin cum it dormitum, follem obstringit ob gulam.

ANTHRAX: Cur?

PYTHODICUS: Ne quid animae forte amittat dormiens.

PYTHODICUS: Why when he sleeps he strings a bag around his gullet.

ANTHRAX: What for?

PYTHODICUS: SO he won't lose a bit of breath while sleeping.

Euclio is also madly possessive about his bath water (line 308), his hunger (line 311), and his fingernails (lines 312-313). When he is viewed with Polybius' description in mind, Euclio seems very much a "Roman parody." … The Romans were notoriously stingy (we need not paint the lily by calling them "economical"). Plautus even mocks their well-known miserliness in one of his prologues…. [T]he Truculentus opens with an invitation to the audience to make room in their imaginations so that Plautus can deliver Athens to Rome (lines 1-3). The prologue then muses lightheartedly about what would happen if Plautus would ask the spectators to pay for this delivery. He quickly concludes that Romans would refuse to hand over any cash whatever, noting further that the spectators would be following in the footsteps of their forefathers (line 7):

Eu hercle in vobis resident mores pristini!

By Hercules, the great traditions live in you!²⁵

Although in the "Roman day" which we have been discussing he lauds the pursuit of wealth, Horace the moralist more often deplores the Roman predilection for material gain at the expense of spiritual enrichment.²⁶ But whether we believe the poet when he is admiring or critical, we are none the less presented with a Roman society imbued with the doctrine of acquisition. And "doctrine" it was. This attitude seems to have been characteristic of the Romans from the earliest times, and at least one scholar sees it as an implicit aspect of mos maiorum.²⁷

Moreover, while the Roman praised profit-making by noble means, as in the elder Metellus' accumulation of wealth bono modo (see above), in point of fact he gathered his lucre quocumque modo, by means fair or foul. Witness Horace's deprecation of a current maxim (Epist. 1.1.65-66):

These are the very lines that Ben Jonson renders in describing the materialistic atmosphere of his contemporary London (Every Man in His Humour II V 49-51):

The rule, "get money"; still, "get money, boy,
No matter by what means; money will do
More, boy, than my lord's letter."

Thus while the Romans may have extolled virtus in word, in deed they placed money before morality, virtus post nummos. Horace imagines this as a phrase which echoes and reechoes from one end of the forum to the other.²⁸ Even Cato, for all his celebrated asceticism, chased Ironically, huge Livy profits in the him praises most as manner.²⁹ disreputable a contemptor … divitiarum (39.40.11), an ambiguous compliment, suggesting that he had no regard whatever for wealth, in the very manner Virgil described his ideal hero Aeneas, who responded nobly to King Evander's request, aude, hospes, contemnere opes.³⁰ But Livy surely means that Cato was unawed by the riches of others, probably because he had gathered so much for himself, and quocumque modo, at that.

In direct contrast to Horace's picture of the forum resounding noisily with shouts of quaerenda pecunia, we may have the situation described by the Casina prologue, tranquillum est, Alcedonia sunt circum forum (line 26). This atypical calm, this empty business district, characterizes a Roman holiday, the only occasion on which the city did not echo with the cry, "get money."

The characters of Plautus display an attitude diametrically opposed to the markedly Roman regard for profit. His comedies almost always involve money matters, but never the pursuit of wealth for its own sake. The typical Plautine youth may be amans et egens, but he only seeks money enough to win his beloved. Quite unlike Balzac in his Comédie Humaine, Plautus never presents a scheming protagonist in search of "une femme et une fortune." His young men are lunatic-lovers who scorn material things. Phaedromus in the Curculio (verum totum insanum amare, line 177) provides a ready example: sibi sua habeant regna reges, sibi divitias divites (line 178), "let kings have kingdoms, rich men have their riches." This is, of course, a cliché, a romantic outburst that in most contexts would be taken with a grain of salt (although it specifically reminds the student of Latin poetry of that unRoman poet Tibullus).³¹ But these Plautine lovers live up to their word; they want the girl, not the gold.

Nowhere in Plautus do we find an ambitious young man like Balzac's Eugène de Rastignac. Though there are several marriages in the plays, the affluence of the girl's family is never a motivating factor.³² Yet this affects even Shakespeare's suitors from time to time, as, for example, Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor (III iv 13-16):

Albeit I will confess thy father's wealth
Was the first motive that I wooed thee, Anne,
Yet wooing thee, I found thee of more value
Than stamps of gold, or sums in sealed bags.³³

The attitude of Plautus' lovers toward dowries stands in sharp distinction to what actually went on in Roman society at the time, where the size of the bridal portion greatly influenced most marriages. Polybius makes this point, describing very complicated dowry arrangements, the payments to be made in three precise installments, and so forth.³⁴ Not only does the behavior of the Plautine hero differ from the practices of the audience, but it contrasts with the outlook of almost all comic heroes, perhaps typified by Beaumarchais's scheming barber, of whom the countess remarks, "Figaro n'est pas homme à laisser échapper une dot." In fact Figaro is after two dowries and ends up with three, a triumph celebrated in the final song,

Triple dot, femme superbe
Que de biens pour un époux!³⁵

Even if a dowry is mentioned in Plautus (which is seldom), it is dismissed with a shrug or rejected without regret. Thus Megadorus in the Aulularia is not only willing, but anxious, to take Euclio's daughter sans dot, a condition which became a famous mot de caractère in Molière's adaptation.³⁶ The plot of the Trinummus involves arranging a dowry for a young man who wants none at all. Lysiteles tells his father that he would marry into his best friend's family (lines 374-375, 378):

The sire is far from pleased, but the son convinces him.³⁸ Even when the girl's father arrives unexpectedly from abroad and offers a marriage portion, Lysiteles insists, dotem nil moror (line 1158). He finally relents, but the subject is dismissed forever three lines later. In the Cistellaria, young Alcesimarchus rejects great riches and a huge dowry for his true love Silenium. His father is distraught and beseeches his son to abandon a sweetheart who "keeps you from great wealth, a dowry both fat and plentiful," prohibet divitiis maximis, dote aitili atque opima (line 305), but not even the most passionate pleas can impress upon the Plautine lover the (everyday) value of money.³⁹

If a dowry is suddenly reduced, as in the Truculentus, because the young man has been too forward with his fiancée, the youth cares little (lines 844-846):

And the situation in this play differs vastly from that of the Cistellaria. Here young Diniarchus is not a rhapsodic Romeo willing to give all for love and the world well lost. When the above-quoted conversation takes place, he has already ravished Callicles' daughter, given her a child, and then broken the engagement. From a pragmatic point of view, he has a very strong bargaining point, since the old man is anxious to give his grandchild legitimacy. Yet here again, and this time without strong motivation, a Plautine lover pays no attention to the practical matters that concerned his audience almost to the point of obsession.

Scholars have called attention to the multitude of commercial references in Plautus, to the countless mentions of contracts, debts, lawsuits, business trips, and so forth. But few have noted that this is rarely "business as usual." The only meaningful transactions are those which bring the youth the girl he longs for. In almost every instance, the sum of money for which the clever slave is scheming turns out to be just enough to buy his master's sweetheart and nothing more. Profit for its own sake is never a factor; gold is merely the means to an end. Here again Plautine and Balzacian worlds stand in direct contrast. At the end of Eugénie Grandet, for example, Judge de Bonfons marries the heroine for her fortune, but agrees to forgo all conjugal rights. In Plautus the situation is just the reverse: connubium always takes precedence over commercium.⁴⁰ As one of his typical adulescentes expresses it (Poenulus 328):

Namque edepol lucrum amare nullum amatorem addecet.

A lover should love love, by Pollux, not love lucre.

Plautus presents a world where ludi sunt argentariis, whereas in Balzac, as old Grandet tells his daughter, "la vie est une affaire."

In Plautus, money is meaningless, coins are merely tokens to be redeemed for pleasure. It is more than coincidence that in the Asinaria the amount needed to purchase the girl Philaenium is precisely the sum being delivered as payment for the asses: twenty minae. This price is mentioned no less than eighteen times during the play, but its "value" lies only in what it represents, a yearlong holiday with a beautiful courtesan (Asinaria 636-637):

The aim is to gain the money with a view toward "losing it" again. The sum they are after is just enough; but to the Plautine lover, "just enough" is satis super que.

An even stranger phenomenon is that the prime mover in the plots, the clever slave, is never after profit for himself.⁴² This is especially odd considering that slaves in Plautus' day were not only permitted, but encouraged, to amass their own peculium (personal savings). Bondsmen who did not try to save toward their ultimate freedom were looked upon with disdain and suspicion.⁴³ Yet Plautine slaves do not care for cash. Epidicus executes his particular scheme so well that he obtains more money than his master needs. Triumphantly, he hands the sack of gold over to his young patronus, asking for no financial reward (Epidicus 345-347):

How would the Roman audience react to this? Polybius claimed that absolutely no one in Rome would refuse any opportunity for any sort of profit, yet here a slave rejects an ideal occasion to add to his peculium. For Plautine slaves, however, the playing's the thing. Toxilus in the Persa best expresses this attitude when he shouts, iam nolo argentum! (line 127).⁴⁴ Like Epidicus and other slaves with like esprit, the only profit he seeks is nonmaterial.

The Poenulus presents an interesting variation on this theme. Here the young lover is not egens, but qffluens. His riches could easily buy the lovely Adelphasium from the pimp. But his clever slave Milphio would never permit such an ordinary procedure (lines 163-169):

From a practical point of view, all the trickery in the Poenulus is absolutely superfluous. Agorastocles can afford to purchase whatever he desires. But one of the prime characteristics of "holiday" is its sharp distinction from the ordinary. Thus Milphio, who insists upon extraordinary, unbusinesslike methods, will have his way. Like Epidicus, Milphio uses cash merely as a stage prop in his merry masquerade. In fact, later in the Poenulus, Plautus has one of the lawyers whom Milphio has hired for his trickery step forward and break the dramatic illusion to emphasize, paradoxically, that "it is all illusion" (lines 597-599):

This is quite in the spirit of the prologue to the Casina, which reminded the audience that all businesses were closed, while at the same time referring to many commercial activities. Here too, at the very moment the actor is assuring the audience that all is "play," he also alludes to Roman ("barbarian") husbandry, noting that the lupine seeds being used on stage as money were ordinarily soaked and fed to fatten oxen. Today is a holiday for farmers too.

But we still have not explained why Milphio has cooked up this theatrical scheme, this game with aurum comicum, when his young master Agorastocles could have solved all problems—that is, purchased the lovely Adelphasium—in a normal businesslike manner. Indeed, there has been much critical discussion on this matter. Why does the playwright present such "psychological improbabilities"? This is a question posed by Legrand, who then adds: "Occasionally the devices and tricks by the actors have no raison d'être, or else there is no possibility for their resulting in any good."⁴⁶ What Legrand here objects to is precisely what Johann Huizinga in Homo Ludens defines as "play," an activity with no raison d'être, "and no profit can be gained by it."⁴⁷ We are near the very fountainhead of comedy, which developed, as Freud saw it, from "play."⁴⁸ The profitless trickery which Plautus presents reflects a levity quite the opposite of gravitas: the spirit of holiday, and especially that of the Roman ludi.

Plautus' heroes go even further than ignoring monetary gain. They rush with holiday haste toward financial disaster. Prodigality replaces pragmatism as the order of the day. As mentioned earlier, good business sense was an implicit aspect of mos maiorum. A fine Roman son will increase his patrimony, bono modo if he is a noble Metellus being praised posthumously, but quocumque modo if he is anything but dead. In the Mostellaria, Plautus uses the verb patrissare to suggest this "business tradition." When old Theopropides returns from abroad, he is told that his son has purchased a house. Overjoyed at the youth's sound judgment, he exclaims (line 639):

Patrissat! iam homo in mercatura vortitur.

Taking after father! Now the boy's become a businessman.

The truth, of course, is that his son has turned in precisely the opposite direction. The verb which best describes young Philolaches' behavior is not patrissare, but pergraecari (line 960), as well as potare (lines 946 and 964) and perpotare (line 977). In a phrase, instead of taking after father, he is taking from him: suom patrem … perdidit (line 979), a contrast which Plautus drives home with abundant alliteration.⁴⁹

In reality, mos maiorum was more mercantile than moral. Young Charinus in the Mercator acknowledges as much. His father had set a shining precedent, investing his own patrimony in mercatura and acquiring prodigious wealth (lines 73-78). Charinus realizes that his sire expects him to turn to commerce as well: me idem decere, si ut deceret me forem (line 79). And much to his parent's delight, the boy embarks on a commercial voyage. At first he seems his father's son (lines 93-97):

Rhodum venimus ubi quas merces vexeram
omnis ut volui vendidi ex sententia.
lucrum ingens facio praeterquam mini meus pater
dedit aestimatas merces: ita peculium
conficio grande.

We came to Rhodes, where all the goods I brought along
I sold—and just the way I wanted to. I made
A great enormous profit, far above the price
That father specified. So for myself I gained
A lot of extra money.

The youth's spectacular success has realized a double reward, lucrum ingens for his father, and peculium grande for him. But the subsequent fate of this money exemplifies what happens to all income in Plautus (lines 98-99):

Hospes me quidam adgnovit, ad cenam vocat.
venio, decumbo acceptus hilare atque ampliter.

An old friend spied me and invited me to dinner.
I came, relaxed, received a lush and lovely welcome.

The initial intent to patrissare is overcome by the irresistible urge to pergraecari.⁵⁰ The youth succumbs to the holiday spirit hilare atque ampliter, and by the morning, lucrum has been sped to its polar opposite, damnum. The Mercator's son has surrendered to the same damnosa libido against which the elders in Horace's "Roman day" have preached. He has squandered all his earnings on a girl whose very name, Pasicompsa ("Omni-pleasant"), suggests that she is pleasure personified. Since it is not unlikely that Plautus invented her name,⁵¹ the metamorphosis of peculium into pasicompsa would then be a conscious echo of the industria to voluptas theme in the Menaechmi, another victory of the pleasure principle over the reality principle.

The voyage of Charinus, the Mercator's son, typifies the behavior of innumerable other Plautine characters toward matters pecuniary. Moreover, they are reckless with pecunia in its most literal sense: pecus, farm animals.⁵² Very often in Plautus we find the un-Roman tendency to forsake livestock in pursuit of liveliness. One thinks of three ready examples which would have made the author of De Agri Cultura shudder, if he couldn't laugh. Asses in the Asinaria, oxen in the Persa, and sheep in the Truculentus all become debit items to pay for pleasure.⁵³ In the first play, as mentioned earlier, the asses have been sold for the magic sum of twenty minae. This payment is en route to Demaenetus' wife and the plot revolves around a masquerade to have the right price fall into the wrong hands. In the Persa, the slave Sagaristio has been given money by his master to purchase domitos boves (line 259), but these funds will serve bachelorhood, not husbandry (lines 262-264):

Sagaristio fully realizes he is putting good money to bad uses, argentum abutar, but proper business procedure will be ignored for one splendid day of pleasure.⁵⁴

In the Truculentus, the sheep represent earnings from a deal which Strabax' farmer-father has negotiated. But here again, profit is quickly reversed to loss. Forgetting the frugal ways his parent has taught him, Strabax hastens from country simplicity to city luxury, in passionate pursuit of "joy" (he states his desire to gaudere three times in lines 922-924). His own account bears quoting in full, since he displays many of the (disgraceful) characteristics we have previously noted in Plautus' young men (lines 645-657, 660-661):

Rus mane dudum hinc ire me iussit pater,
ut bubus glandem prandio depromerem.
post illoc quam veni, advenit, si dis placet,
ad villam argentum meo qui debebat patri,
qui ovis Tarentinas erat mercatus de patre.
quaerit patrem. dico esse in urbe, interrogo
quid eum velit.
homo cruminam sibi de collo detrahit,
minas viginti mihi dat. accipio libens,
condo in cruminam. ille abit. ego propere minas
ovis in crumina hac in urbem detuli,
fuit edepol Mars meo periratus patri,
nam oves illius hau longe absunt a lupis.

…..
eradicarest certum cumprimis patrem,
post id locorum matrem ….

This morning early father sent me to the country,
He ordered me to give the cows some nuts for breakfast.
But when I reached the farm, a man came—praise the gods!
A man who owed a sum of money to my father,
Because he'd bought some sheep a while ago from father.
He asks where father is. I say he's in the city.
I ask him what he wants.
He takes a leather wallet from around his neck,
He gives me twenty minae. I accept. Why not?
I put them in my wallet. Then he goes. I rush.
I bring the wallet with the sheep-cash to the city.
By Pollux, Mars was surely angry with my father,
These sheep of his are not far from "the house of wolves."

…..

My plan is this: I'll first completely wipe out father
And then I'll wipe out mother …

No son could be more aware of his filial obligations. Strabax mentions his father four times in the first six lines. Like young Charinus in the Mercator (line 79), he fully realizes that he should be taking after father, not taking from him. But he suddenly receives the magic sum of twenty minae, which is precisely the cost of the girl (and the asses) in the Asinaria and the same amount which Pseudolus must swindle to win his master's sweetheart. And in young Strabax we note once again the holiday haste (line 654) toward merriment reminiscent of Menaechmus, Olympio, and so many others. In but a few seconds, pragmatic provincial becomes prodigal parricide,⁵⁵ as Strabax throws his father's sheepmoney "to the wolves."

To state the comic paradox succinctly: pound-foolishness in Plautus is as common as penny-pinching was in the Rome of his day. And the Latin poet is not merely presenting an extravagant revel, for this is at the heart of every comedy. Yet Aristophanes can present a komos without mentioning who is paying the bill. In Plautus, however, part of the pleasure seems to be that someone else's money is being wasted. To explain why this appealed to his audience we may invoke Freud or Schadenfreude: the stingy Roman enjoys a vicarious prodigality similar to the secret pleasure he derived from seeing pietas abused. For the parsimonious, industria-bound spectator, Plautus provides an imaginary excursion to a land of voluptarii maxumi much like the place where Menaechmus lives, there to succumb to what might be termed Epidamnosa libido. But prodigality of the imagination involves no real loss; on holidays, joy comes sine damno. In fact, since these revels are paid for in aurum comicum, they bring dividends of laughter.

Notes

Introduction

¹ Cf. Horace Epistles 2.1.175-176:

Gestit enim nummum in loculos demittere, post hoc
securus cadat an recto stet fabula talo.

The man only gets excited about adding a coin to his money box. After he does, he couldn't care less whether the structure of his play stands straight or falls flat.

Being a true man of the theater—as well as a classicist—the Spaniard Lope de Vega understood, as Horace could not, that good rules do not necessarily make good (i.e., successful) plays. Quite the contrary, says Lope in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, if one wishes to enjoy public favor, one must completely ignore the classical precepts. The Spaniard began his own playwrighting process as follows: "encierro los preceptes con seis llaves" ("I lock up the rules with six keys"). And, after all, Horace's Ars Poetica virtually ignores the greatest theatrical skill, for, according to Molière, "le grand art est de plaire."

²In pauca confer: sitiunt qui sedent (Poenulus 1224). Among many similar examples, we might cite Casina 1006 and Pseudolus 720-721, wherein Plautus' characters express concern about keeping the audience attentive and content. Of course this attitude is not a Plautine innovation, as witness Aristophanes Ecclesiazusae 581ff.

³ Gellius Noctes Atticae 3.3.14. Perhaps there is all fancy and no fact in this vita; it may describe the plays and not the playwright. Leo (P.F.², [Friedrich Leo, Plautinische Forschungen, 2nd ed., Berlin, 1912] pp. 63-86) demonstrates how the famous story of Naevius' imprisonment could have been based on the poet's Hariolus. And there is a suspicious similarity between both Plautus' and Naevius' writing plays while incarcerated. Many scholars regard the tale of Plautus' being sent in pistrinum to be a reflection of the countless references to such punishment in his comedies. Still, Gellius insists that his authority is the great Varro et plerique alii.

The strongest evidence for Plautus' unique success is statements like those added to the prologue of the Casina for a revival performance (lines 11-13, 17-18):

Nos postquam populi rumore intelleximus
studiose expetere vos Plautinas fabulas,
antiquam eius edimus comoediam.

…..

haec cum primum acta est, vicit omnis fabulas.
ea tempestate flos poetarum fuit …

After the uproar of the people let us know
You're all so very anxious to see Plautine plays,
We've re-produced this ancient comedy of his.

…..

When first presented, this play beat all other plays.
Those were the days when greatness flourished on the stage.

⁴Apporto vobis Plautum—lingua non manu, "I bring you Plautus—not in person, just his play," Menaechmi 3. On the rowdy, intoxicated audience, cf. Horace Ars Poetica 225.

⁵ The playwright Accius (c. 170-c. 86) is the first known scholar of Plautinity; it seems reasonable to assume that the "authenticity question" became a live issue right after the poet's death. See Paratore [Ettore Paratore, La Storia del Teatro Latino, Milano, 1957], p. 80.

⁶ Karl von Reinhardtstoettner, Plautus: Spàtere Bearbeitungen plautinischer Lustspiele (Leipzig 1886).

⁷ Friedrich W. Ritschl, Parerga zu Plautus una Terenz (Leipzig 1845) (rep. Amsterdam 1965); Τ. Β. L. Webster, Studies in Later Greek Comedy (Manchester 1953). Other major works which stress Plautus as a "spoiler" of his models include Legrand, The New Greek Comedy, and Gunther Jachmann, Plautinisches und Attisches (Berlin 1931) [ = Problemata, Heft 3].

⁸ Webster (above, n. 7) 2-3. With these principles set forth, Webster can then discuss such Greek plays as "Diphilos' Rudens" (p. 7).

⁹ Gilbert Norwood, Plautus and Terence (New York 1932) 27-28.

¹⁰ Studying a complete comedy by Menander enables L. A. Post to dissociate the Greek playwright "from the frivolous inconsequence of Plautus and Terence" ("Some Subtleties in Menander's Dyscolus, " AJP [merican Journal of Philology] 84 [1963] 37). Plautus is defended in the next issue by Robert B. Lloyd, "Two Prologues: Menander and Plautus," AJP 84 (1963) 146-161.

¹¹ Fraenkel, Elementi Plautini in Plauto. [Eduard Fraenkel, Elementi Plautini in Plauto, rev. ed. of Plantinisches im Plautus (Berlin 1922), translated into Italian by Franco Munari (Florence 1960)]. The discovery of Dyskolos has called some of Fraenkel's conclusions into question. For example, Walter R. Chalmers observes that Menander's mythological passage in lines 153ff is, by Fraenkel's criteria, "Plautine" ("Plautus and His Audience," Roman Drama, p. 48 n. 22). Several scholars have pointed out the similarity between the boisterous finales of the Dyskolos and the Pseudolus.

¹² Webster (above, n. 7) 98.

¹³ D. C. Earl, "Political Terminology in Plautus," Historia 9 (1960) 234-243. (Earl studied these same elements in a subsequent article on Terence, with less rewarding results: Historia 11 [1962] 469-485.)

John A. Hanson, "Plautus as a Source-Book for Roman Religion," TAPA [Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association] 90 (1959) 48-60, hereafter cited as "Religion in Plautus."

——"The Glorious Military," Roman Drama, [ed. T. A. Dorey and Donald R. Dudley (New York 1965)], pp. 51-85.

Gordon Williams, "Some Problems in the Construction of Plautus' Pseudolus, Hermes 84 (1956) 424-455.

——"Evidence for Plautus' Workmanship in the Miles Gloriosus" Hermes 86 (1958) 79-105.

——"Some Aspects of Roman Marriage Ceremonies and Ideals," Journal of Roman Studies 48 (1958) 16-29.

¹⁴ See, for example, Perna's discussion Of the Amphitruo, L'originalità, p. 91. For a recent survey of the "Plautinisches-Attisches" debate, see Perna [Raffaele Perna, L'originalità di Pianto (Bari 1955)], pp. 10-37 (although the author's critical bias must be borne in mind).

A fine general introduction to the contemporary view of Plautus may be found in Chalmers (above, n. 11) 21-50. Chalmers' essay appeared just after the first draft of this book was completed; certain similarities in our observations are coincidental and would seem to indicate the present trend in Plautine scholarship. Invaluable to the specialist is John A. Hanson's "Scholarship on Plautus since 1950," Parts I and II, Classical World 59 (1965-1966) 101ff, 141ff.

¹⁵ These critics of Roman Comedy say precisely what Terence's literary enemies said of him: he made good Greek plays into bad Latin ones, ex Graecis bonis Latinas fecit non bonas (Eunuchus 8).

¹⁶ Fraenkel, p. 6.

¹⁷Antony and Cleopatra II ii 191 ff.

¹⁸ Cf., for example, Gordon Williams, "Pseudolus" (see above, n. 11) 448ff.

¹⁹ Gellius N.A. 2.23. This early exercise in comparative literature concludes with the scholar's unhappy observation that the Latin poet nescio quae mimica inculcavit, "he stuck in some farcical stuff," a criticism echoed by Boileau when he complained that Molière in Les Fourberies de Scapin "à Terence a allié Tabarin."

²⁰ Fraenkel makes this same point, p. 324. Many scholars believe that Naevius influenced Plautus (e.g., Duckworth [George E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton 1952)], p. 394), and some of the fragments suggest as much. I have tried to incorporate these fragments into my discussion.

²¹ On the two traditions of dramatic literature evident even from the earliest times, see Paratore, p. 64.

²²Ibid., p. 18.

²³ See J. H. Waszink, "Varro, Livy and Tertullian on the History of Roman Dramatic Art," Vigiliae Christianae 2 (1948) 229.

²⁴ Cf. Virgil Georgics 2.38off. Horace's account describes how the libertas of fescennine jesting grew bolder and bolder, hence the strict Roman law against libel on the Twelve Tables. See my discussion on pp. 9-10.

²⁵ The "saturnalian" tradition in Italy has been studied in depth by Paolo Toschi of the University of Rome (Le Origini del Teatro Italiano [Torino 1955]). It is Toschi's thesis that Italian popular comedy from the very first (and who is to say where Roman ends and Italian begins?) reflects the atmosphere of Carnevale, the Italian festival celebrated at the same time as the Saturnalia and without question a descendant of the Roman event (p. 112). Carnevale, says Toschi, is a "frenesia gioiosa … un momentaneo allentamento nei vincoli di una rigida morale" (p. 9), which could be an equally apt description of the holiday being enjoyed by Horace's agricolae prisci.

²⁶ Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (one vol. abr. ed., New York 1951) 675.

²⁷ There was never any drama associated with the Saturnalia in classical times (perhaps because of the weather), although it was the occasion for the revival of Roman comedies during the Renaissance.

²⁸ G. Wissowa connects Saturnus with sero-satus, assuming him to have originally been a god of sowing;Religion und Kultus der Romer (2d ed., Munich 1912) 204. This etymology is questionable because of the difference in vowel quantity: Sāturnus-sătus. Its origin may be Etruscan. See H. J. Rose, Religion in Greece and Rome (New York 1959) 225.

²⁹ W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals (London 1925) 177.

³⁰ Barber, [C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Cleveland and New York 1963)] p. 78. I have already acknowledged how deeply this entire study is indebted to Barber's work.

³¹ Cf. Juvenal Sat. 6.67-69:

[female theater fans have nothing to watch] when the stage curtains lie quietly stored away, when the theater is empty and closed—only the forum's now alive with noise—and it will be a long time between the Megalensian Games and the Plebeian.

In Plautus' day, in addition to the ludi Romani, the ludi Plebeii (November), ludi Apollinares (July), and ludi Megalenses (April) were occasions for theatrical entertainment. See Lily Ross Taylor, "The Opportunities for Dramatic Performances in the Time of Plautus and Terence," TAPA 68 (1937) 284ff. Or, more briefly, Duckworth, pp. 76ff.

³² Freud, [The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 vols. (London 1953——)] XIII, p. 140, in "Totem and Taboo."

³³ Plato Republic 10.605a-b. It is interesting to note that both Plato and Freud see comedy as affecting man's inner desire to "break rules." But while the Greek philosopher objects to comedy because it may lead its spectators to enact the disgraceful things they see on stage, the psychoanalytic view is the exact opposite! Drama to Freud affords man the opportunity to "act out" (inwardly) the potential aberration, thereby serving a useful social function.

³⁴ Max Beerbohm, "Laughter," in And Even Now (New York 1921) 308: "[for great laughter] nothing is more propitious than gravity. To have good reason for not laughing is one of the surest aids. Laughter rejoices in bonds."

³⁵Inst. Orat. 10.1.65.

³⁶Epist. 2.1.23.

³⁷ On the very strict laws against libel, see Harold B. Mattingly, "Naevius and the Metelli," Historia 9 (1960) 416. Some scholars have discerned covert allusions to proper names in Plautus (e.g., R. W. Reynolds, "Criticism of Individuals in Roman Popular Comedy," Classical Quarterly 37 [1943] 37-45), but this is unlikely. Mattingly argues that even the famous story of Naevius' imprisonment for slandering the Metelli is fictitious (p. 423); in fact metelli may not have been a family name at this early time.

³⁸ Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals (New York 1959) 111.

³⁹ Plutarch Cato Maior 17.7. Here as elsewhere the Roman moral outlook is like that of the Middle Ages. One may compare Cato's attitude toward the "kissing senator" to Peter Lombard's argument that to have great love for one's wife was, in effect, a grave sin: omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est. This morbid severity contrasts sharply with Oscar Wilde's ironic description of the very same situation: "The amount of women in London who flirt with their husbands is scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public" (The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I).

⁴⁰ In fact Pliny (N.H. 8.78.209), in discussing the Sumptuary Laws, mentions that Publilius Syrus, composer of mimes, was notorious for his flagrant infringement of the dietary prohibitions. Yet Publilius does not appear ever to have suffered for his "crimes."

⁴¹ For example, Cato's famous speech on the status of women (195 B.C.), as quoted by Livy 34.2.11.

⁴² The verses quoted follow an evocation by Horace of "the good old days," which, from the poet's standpoint, are the days of Cato and the Punic Wars.

⁴³ Cf. also Epode 7.

⁴⁴ In Eclogue 4, Virgil predicts that Pollio's consulship will restore the Golden Age, purging mankind of its old "traces of sin" (lines 13-14):

Te duce si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri,
inrita perpetua solvent formidine terras.

John Dryden's rendering of these lines is interesting:

The father banished virtue shall restore;
And crimes shall threat the guilty world no more.

⁴⁵ A. A. Brill (ed.), Introduction to The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York 1938) 12.

⁴⁶ Of course it is impossible to state with certainty that the average Roman was gravis. But the fact that the Romans constantly praised and preached gravitas is clear beyond doubt, and it is this fact which is important for our discussion. After all, the precondition for French Boulevard Comedy (or any bedroom farce, for that matter) is merely an awareness among the audience that the Seventh Commandment exists.

⁴⁷ Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York 1952) 182.

⁴⁸ If the Roman obsession with order and precision needs any documentation at all, one might cite Fabius Pictor's mission to Delphi in 216 B.C., when he carried an itemized list of the gods and goddesses, the exact manner in which each was to be addressed, etc. (Livy 23.1-6).

⁴⁹ Allardyce Nicoli, Masks, Mimes, and Miracles (London 1931) 19.

⁵⁰ It is distortion enough when Gilbert Norwood prefaces a discussion of Plautus by calling him "the worst of all writers who have ever won permanent repute" (Plautus and Terence, p. 4), but Albert Cook goes still further, entirely omitting any consideration of Plautus (or Terence) from his study of the comic tradition because "only the accident that Western Europe had nothing in the genre for a long time could have imparted such an undeserved reputation to works so devoid of ideas" (The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean [Cambridge, Mass. 1949] p. i).

⁵¹De Officiis 1.29.104: Duplex omnino est iocandi genus, unum illiberale, petulans, flagitiosum, obscenum, alterum elegans, urbanum, ingeniosum, facetum. Quo genere non modo Plautus noster et Atticorum antiqua comoedia, sed etiam philosophorum Socraticorum libri referti sunt, "There are two completely different categories of wit: the first coarse, wanton, shameful, and foul, the other graceful, civilized, inventive, and charming. This second category includes not only our own Plautus and Attic Old Comedy, but it abounds as well in the books of the Socratic philosophers."

…..

From Forum to Festival

¹ Catullus provides a ready example. He depreciates his own poetry as nugae (1.4) and refers to the writing of verse as trifling ludere. E.g., multum lusimus in meis tabellis (50.2) and his famous renunciation of poetry, multa satis lusi (68.17).

² Johann Huizinga comments on the appropriateness of the term ludi to describe Roman holidays in his fascinating study of "play" as a cultural phenomenon, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (English trans., Boston 1950) 174.

³ Menaechmus' use of hostile military language has already been discussed in Chap. I, p. 24.

⁴ As stated earlier (Chap. I n. 33), I am aware that pulchre habeamus is not the favored reading for Menaechmi 152.

⁵ Williams comments on the significance of morem gerere as an important virtue for Roman wives, "Some Aspects…," pp. 28-29 (see above, Introduction n. 13). As usual in Plautus, the wives behave in a manner which is precisely the opposite of the ideal. Ironically, Menaechmus refers to Erotium as morigera (line 202).

⁶ Fraenkel (p. 394) sees "das Properare" as a quality extremely Plautine. Elsewhere (p. 296), he interprets the Casino as a conflict between speed (Lysidamus and Olympio) and delays (the wives). This serves equally well as a description of the fate of Menaechmus I, whose experience in the forum is like those of Molière's protagonist in Les Fâcheux, who is constantly stopped on his way to an amorous rendezvous. It is perhaps significant that one critic sees this as a theme of Molière's comedy in general (Alfred Simon, Molière par lui-même [Paris 1957]).

⁷ Pliny N.H. 8.78.209. Pliny admits, however, that the censors' strictures had little real effect on the eating habits of the populace. But here again the mere fact that there were such prohibitions provides the basis for comedy (see Introduction, p. 11).

⁸ Pliny N.H. 8.78.210. Cf. such portions of proscribed cuts of pork in Plautus as Pseudolus 165-167 and Curculio 323.

⁹ Naevius, frags. 22-24, mentions volvula madida, which recalls Menaechmus' menu not only because of the forbidden meat but because it seems to be another "drunken dinner" (cf. Menaechmi 212). Naevius presents another such bill of fare in frag. 104.

¹⁰ Long catalogues of food were already a familiar comic motif in the days of Aristophanes. Cf. the antiphonal offers of delicacies made by the Paphlagonian and the Sausageseller to Demos in Knights 1162ff, not to mention Ecclesiazusae 1167ff, a menu for which Aristophanes concocted a seventy-nine-syllable dainty (lines 1169-1175), a bit of verbal audacity which makes a Plautine coinage like glandionida seem tame indeed. And yet, in content if not in expression, Menaechmus' menu is a more daring comic utterance, containing, as it does, a list of forbidden delights. Also of significance is Fraenkel's argument (pp. 238ff and 408ff) that the references to pork are peculiarly Roman and most probably Plautine additions.

¹¹ The special "Roman-ness" of Menaechmi 571-601 has often been remarked upon. Fraenkel (pp. 152ff) believes that when Menaechmus says hoc utimur maxime more (line 571) he is saying "we Romans." This is supported by Earl's conclusions on the significance of mos and mores to the ears of Plautus' public ("Political Terminology…," p. 237; see above, Introduction n. 13). But we need not go so far as some scholars who believe that Plautus is alluding in this passage to the Lex Cintia regarding the relationship between clientes and patroni (see Perna, p. 291 n. 1). In fact, even if we conceive of Menaechmus as heading off to the agora, the polarity between industria and voluptas remains the same.

¹² Plautus stresses the "tenacity" of the many ties which bind Menaechmus by using three variations of tenere. First retinere (line 114) in reference to Menaechmus' wife, then attinere and detinere (line 589) to describe his clinging client.

¹³ Cf. Menaechmi 591-595. To his credit, Menaechmus has performed well; the suit has been lost because of his client.

¹⁴ This view may be further substantiated by examining an instance of the same phenomenon in the opposite direction. Simo, the next-door neighbor in the Mostellaria, has been dining at home. His wife has been especially lavish in her preparations, providing him a prandium perbonum (line 692). But Simo realizes that this festive meal is "to get him in the festive mood," as it were. He slips out of the house, however, explaining to the audience that he wishes to avoid the sensual experience and will head in the opposite direction (lines 696, 698, 707):

Voluit in cubiculum abducere me anus

…..

clanculum ex aedibus me edidi foras

…..

potius hinc ad forum quam domi cubem.

My ancient wife tried to entice me to the bedroom

…..

But secretly I sneaked outside the house unseen

…..

I'd rather go to business in the forum than to bed at home.

Simo would gladly have traded clients with Menaechmus. Earl ("Political Terminology…," p. 236; see above, Introduction n. 13) sees what I have described as the forum-festivity polarity in Trinummus 259ff and especially Trinummus 651: in foro operam amicis da, ne in lecto amicae, "Go serve your friends in court, not court your friend in bed." He considers the references to be Plautus' articulation of a Roman aristocratic ideal, concern with one's clientela.

¹⁵ Some of the prologue to the Cosina is obviously postPlautine, but the later interpolations are obvious enough and bear no relation to our argument. Friedrich Leo, who was, if anything, overzealous in distinguishing non-Plautine lines, considers the passage under discussion to be authentic: "in fact, if we disregard the specific revisions, that is, remove verses 5-20, we can consider the entire prologue as Plautine" (P.F.², p. 207 n. 2). Leo's view has found almost universal support. For a list of recent scholarship on this question, see Perna, p. 250 n. 3.

¹⁶ Even though ludum dare is the conventional way of saying "to give a holiday to someone," there may well be, as Mason Hammond suggested to me, a subtle insinuation of ludificatio in the Prologue's speech, inasmuch as so many Plautine comedies involve the bamboozlement of "banking" types.

¹⁷ In his first oration against Verres, Cicero complains that the opposition is stalling until the ludi begin, during which there can be no business. Hence the trial will be suspended and the force of Cicero's argument will, by the passage of time, be defessa ac refrigerata (In Verrem 1.10.31).

¹⁸ Pliny N.H. 7.139ff.

¹⁹ Leffingwell, p. 132 (see above, Chap. I n. 5).

²⁰ Plutarch Cato Maior 21.8.

²¹ Max Eastman, The Enjoyment of Laughter (New York 1936) 150.

²² Freud, VIII, p. 187, in "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious." Barber, p. 99, writes, "festivity in wit is language which gives you something for nothing" (italics mine)….

²⁵ In evaluating these remarks, we must once again refer to Earl's observations on the term mores in Plautus (see above, n. 11).

²⁶ Cf. Horace's disappointment that Roman education spends too much time on bookkeeping instead of books (Ars Poetica 325-326):

Romani pueri longis rationibus assem discunt in partis centum diducere … Roman schoolboys, by long calculation, learn how to divide a single penny into a hundred parts.

Horace criticizes this curriculum aimed to teach a youngster rem [posse] servare tuam (line 329); he decries the Roman cura peculi (line 330). Yet in the "Roman day," he had nothing but praise for those elders who taught their sons not merely to guard their assets, but how to have them increase, per quae / crescere res posset … (Epist. 2.1.106-107).

²⁷ "This businesslike disposition, this primeval inheritance, survived through the ages," J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome (3rd ed. rev., London 1960) 33.

²⁸Epist. 1.1.53-56:

"O cives, cives, quaerenda pecunia primum est;
virtus post nummos." haec lanus summus ab imo
prodocet, haec recinunt iuvenes dictata senesque.

"O citizens, citizens, get money, first of all, get money. Be worth a lot—then afterwards be worthy." These words great Janus, banking deity, proclaims across the forum, and these same dictates are echoed by the young and by the old.

²⁹ Plutarch Cato Maior 21.5-8. In view of this statement that even the good Cato was profit-mad, it is interesting to note that Brutus, Shakespeare's "noblest Roman of them all," was, at least to Cicero, more Shylock than saint. The orator accuses him of the most exorbitant usury in ad Att. 6.2.

³⁰ Evander's famous remarks to Aeneas (8.364) became proverbial in Rome. Juvenal mocks them ironi cally in Sat. 11.60, and Seneca quotes them with what he would have his reader believe is moral fervor (Epist. 18.12). But it is hard to imagine that this millionaire-philosopher was really a contemptor divitiarum except in the sense Livy used the term to praise Cato.

³¹ Tibullus 1.1 is a locus classicus: divitias alius fulvo sibi congerat auro, "Let someone else pile up a wealth of shining gold." On a grander scale we have the most un-Roman remarks of Shakespeare's Antony, who forsakes duty for Cleopatra's arms (I i 33-37):

Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch
Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man. The nobleness of life
Is to do thus (embraces Cleopatra) …

³² Legrand, [Philippe Legrand, The New Greek Comedy, trans. James Loeb (London and New York 1917)] p. 48, calls attention to this phenomenon.

³³ Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing is another "money-minded" Shakespearean lover. Cf. Act I i, esp. 262ff.

³⁴ Polybius 32.13. Cf. also Leffingwell (above, Chap. I n. 5) 46.

³⁵ The countess' remark is from Le Marriage de Figaro IV iii, the song from the premier couplet in V xix.

³⁶ Cf. Molière, L'Avare I v. To keep the record straight, Megadorus in the Aulularia is neither an adulescens nor impoverished like the young Plautine lovers in the rest of this discussion.

³⁷ Strangely enough, Ernout [Alfred Ernout, Plaute, Comedies, Texte et Traduction, 7 vols. (Paris 1932-1940)] (vol. VII, p. 14) believes it was this dialogue which inspired the "sans dot" of Molière's miser.

³⁸ In Menander's Dyskolos young Sostratus protests that he wants Knemon's daughter "sans dot," but he gets one all the same; the dyskolos is not really a pauper. And even the soldier Polemon in Menander's Shearing of Glykera receives a dowry of three talents (cf. frag. 720 Kock).

³⁹ True enough, Selenium is finally "recognized," in typical New Comedy fashion, and Alcesimarchus ends up with love and money. It is equally true, however, that the young man's actions are never motivated by gain. As Lejay rightly observes (above, Chap. I n. 71), p. 129, "nulle part il n'y est question d'argent." Of interest may be Paratore's opinion (p. 123) that the Cistellaria is the most Menandrian of Plautus' comedies. See also the preceding note.

⁴⁰ But the Plautine hero, unlike both the Terentian and the Balzacian protagonist, does not look to get married under any circumstances. He longs for a gamos without "benefit of clergy," a desire shared by both Plautine and Aristophanic heroes.

⁴¹ The terms of Diabolus' "contract" specify what the twenty minae are buying (Asinaria 751-754):

Diabolus Glauci filius Clearetae
lenae dedit dono argenti viginti minas,
Philaenium ut secum esset noctes et dies
hunc annum totum.

Diabolus transfers to Cleareta, bawd,
The sum of twenty minae, all in cash. This deal

Makes Philaenium stay with him both day and night
This next entire year …

⁴² It is true that Pseudolus ends up with an extra twenty minae as a result of the spectacular success of his trickery, but all indications are that the money Simo gives him will be passed on to his master Calidorus, or so Pseudolus states (lines 485-488). The wily slave is really unconcerned with cash; he even offers to refund half to the bamboozled old man (line 1329). In the Bacchides, Chrysalus successfully obtains the 200 nummi needed to save his master and does set about getting more, but for a special reason (lines 971-972):

Nunc alteris etiam ducentis usus est, qui dispensentur
Ilio capto, ut sit mulsum qui triumphent milites.

Now we need two hundred nummi more that we can spread around when
Troy is taken, so there'll be sweet wine to toast the soldiers' triumph.

Chrysalus wants to double the stakes, so that all can have a party. And yet he insists that it is not his party: non triumpho … nil moror / verum tamen accipientur mulso milites (lines 1073-1074), "For me no triumph's needed … I don't care / I only hope the troops will get their sweetened wine." The others can revel; for Chrysalus, playing the game was sufficient. And he turns every bit of the extra money over to his master: nunc banc praedam omnem iam ad quaestor em deferam (line 1075), "I'll now transfer all of this conquered booty to the quartermaster." Surely Chrysalus and Pseudolus are in the best tradition of the unmaterialistic Plautine slaves who, like Toxilus, cry: iam nolo argentum, "I don't want money!" (Persa 127). Indeed, they love the game and not the prize.

⁴³ Leffingwell (above, Chap. I n. 5), p. 79. Moreover, a slave gathering his own peculium enhanced his own value on the market; his ambition would show him to be a willing worker. Cf. Digesta lustiniani 21.1.18. There is no reason to believe that this situation did not prevail even in the earliest times.

⁴⁴ This rejection of money contrasts diametrically with the desires of the "agelast," a character to be discussed in the next chapter. Unlike Toxilus and other merry Plautine slaves, this anticomic figure wants only money.

⁴⁵ Euanthius (De Fabula 3.8) calls this practice of addressing the audience out of character vitium Plauti frequentissimum. But such instances are found even in Menander, not to mention Aristophanes.

⁴⁶ Legrand, p. 317.

⁴⁷ Huizinga (above, n. 2) p. 13.

⁴⁸ Freud (VIII, pp. 128ff) discusses the psychogenesis of comedy from "play" in "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious." It is remarkable that the author of Homo Ludens never read a word of Freud. On this phenomenon, see R. L. Colie, "Johann Huizinga and Cultural History," American Historical Review 69, 3 (April 1964) 626.

⁴⁹ Cf. Mostellaria 976-977:

⁵⁰ These two verbs from the Mostellaria do not appear in the Mercator. They are used here merely to illustrate my argument.

⁵¹ The question of whether Plautus himself coined the redende Namen of his characters has long been debated. Duckworth, for example (pp. 347-350), believes Plautus took the names right from his Greek originals, as does Legrand, pp. 842ff. The problem is really part of a larger question, i.e., how much Greek did Plautus' audience know? This is impossible to determine with certainty. Leo's argument (P.F.², 107ff) that Plautus' Greek names are coined in exactly the same manner as his Latin ones still seems convincing. Fraenkel (p. 141) considers Plautus to be the inventor of the girls' names. It may also be pointed out that in contrast to the infinite variety of intriguing female appellations in Plautus, Terence seems content to present "Pamphila" in play after play. But even if our poet did not coin the names, I believe that his audience would still have understood enough Greek to appreciate something like "Pasicompsa," if not "Pyrgopolynices." There is perhaps an analogy with the French which Shakespeare scatters now and then in his plays. His audience certainly appreciated the humor of King Henry V masquerading as "Harry Le Roy" (IV i 48ff).

⁵² On the deeper connotations of pecunia, specifically the "cattle-money" in Homer, see B. Laum, Heiliges Geld (Tubingen 1924) 8ff.

⁵³ The Bacchides provides another ready example. Here Chrysalus (somewhat like Strabax in the Truculentus) has been given money by a debtor in Ephesus to be delivered to Chrysalus' master, old Nicobulus. But the cash will never reach its rightful owner, and tricky Chrysalus, like Sagaristio in the Persa, will transfer these funds to a "pleasure account" (Bacchides 230-233):

Mille et ducentos Philippum attulimus aureos
Epheso, quos hospes debuit nostro seni.
inde ego hodie aliquam machinabor machinam
unde aurum efficiam amanti erili filio.

From Ephesus, we brought twelve hundred golden Philips,
A sum indebted by our host to our old master,
A sum for which today I'll schematize a scheme
To transfer all this gold to master's lover-son.

⁵⁴ This very common behavior of Plautine slaves, risking everything for a single day of pleasure (such is Epidicus' attitude in the scene discussed on p. 62) will be fully discussed in Chap. V.

⁵⁵ Cf. my discussion, in the preceding chapter (p. 17), of the "anti-pietai" comedy in these lines.