SOURCE: John Arthur Hanson, "The Glorious Military," in Roman Drama, Basic Books, Inc., 1965, pp. 51-86.

[In the following essay, Hanson studies Plautus 's use and development of the stock character the miles gloriosus, or braggart soldier, maintaining that this character was used by Plautus as a commentary on Roman military ideals of his time. Hanson goes on to survey the appearance of this character in the works of later dramatists, including William Shakespeare.]

A stock character is a scholar's delight. He may be traced backward and forward in time, across national boundaries from writer to writer, engendering Quellenforschungen and appreciations of our debt to classical culture. With a figure as frequent as the miles gloriosus, the mere tabulation of his occurrences in Western literature might exhaust a learned lifetime. Such a catalogue would have to follow the intrepid soldier through Greek Comedy, Old, Middle, and New, across the Adriatic to Republican Roman Comedy and around the Mediterranean through various forms of prose fiction, then up through Italy in the Commedia dell' Arte and across the spread of the Renaissance stage in Europe; thence multifariously through each nation's dramatic and fictional literature to the present moment.¹

The present essay will not attempt to review this military parade in detail, from Lamachus to Sergeant Bilko, although the mere names on the roll call have their entertainment value: Therapontigonus Platagidorus, Horribilicribrifax, Ralph Roister Doister, Matamore, Chateaufort, Parolles, Bobadill, Bluffe, Bloody Five….

The presence of a literary ancestor for a fictional character is of course in some measure critically significant: in so far as the author and audience can also be presumed to be aware of the ancestry, it is a contributing factor to the understanding of the character in his own environment. Thus Evelyn Waugh can make use of the classical education of his readers and add a Plautine reminiscence to the already anachronistic selfglory of Apthorpe in Men at Arms by entitling a chapter 'Apthorpe Gloriosus'. Thus Plautus himself can make use of his hearers' expectations embodied in the stock traits of the miles gloriosus by comically disappointing these expectations: in the Truculentus he lets Stratophanes, named and dressed for a conventional entrance of boasting and threatening, tease the audience with his first line, 'Ne expectetis, spectatores, meas pugnas dum praedicem' (True. 482).

Yet in his quest for ancestral traits and family similarities, the literary historian may unconsciously obscure other critical questions which are raised by the iteration itself, by the very repetitiveness of the stock character. One must try to answer, both for the miles gloriosus as a type and for any specific embodiment of that type, questions of both motive and means. What attracts a playwright to the braggart warrior, and, once he has adopted him, how does he fit him into the formal and thematic structure of his play? What relation, if any, does he bear to the extra-literary world? Specifically, given the fact that Pyrgopolinices in Plautus's Miles Gloriosus is probably a copy in many essentials of a Menandrean military braggart, what values does he have in Plautus's play in Plautus's Rome? If the starting-point for this essay were Shakespeare instead of Plautus, there would be little need to insist on the primacy of these questions. Yet the sight of Latin sometimes tends to obfuscate the critically obvious and the prejudices which shape the directions of literary studies among classical scholars have been especially strong in the case of Roman Comedy. Critical opinion has in general valued Greek literature higher than Latin and deprecated the latter as derivative. Since in addition scholars manifest an unconquerable desire to reconstruct the non-existent from the extant, the chief use to which Plautus and Terence were put until 1958 was as a tool for the hypothetical reconstruction of Greek New Comedy. In that year the publication of Menander's Dyskolos ensured the world at least one genuine example of a Greek New Comedy, and lifted from Plautus and Terence the unreasonable burden of simultaneously permitting their critics both to divine their sources and measure their departure from those same sources.²

One may not of course ignore completely the problem raised by the derivative nature of Roman Comedy, since both Plautus and Terence freely admit, even proudly advertize the fact that they have 'translated' Greek originals. Terence in the prologue to his Eunuchus first cites his model as Menander's Eunuchus, then counters the charge that he has stolen his soldier and parasite from Plautus and Naevius.

si id est peccatum, peccatum imprudentiast poetae, non quo furtum facere studuerit. id ita esse vos iam iudicare poteritis. Colax Menandrist: in east parasitus Colax et miles gloriosus: eas se hic non negat personas transtulisse in Eunuchum suam ex Graeca.

(27-33)

But that he 'transferred' the character of the soldier Thraso from Menander does not prevent Terence from translating him into Roman terms, at least in details of military terminology, as in the following dialogue during the siege of Thais's house:

Thraso: ubi centuriost Sanga et manipulus furum? Sanga: eccum adest.

Thraso: quid ignave? peniculon pugnare, qui istum hue portes, cogitas?

Sanga: egon? imperatoris virtutem noveram et vim militum; sine sanguine hoc non posse fieri: qui abstergerem volnera.

Thraso: ubi alii? Sanga: qui malum 'alii' solus Sannio servat domi.

Thraso: ti hosce instrue; ego ero hic post principia: inde omnibus signum dabo.

Gnatho: illuc est sapere: ut hosce instruxit, ipse sibi cavit loco.
Thraso: idem hoc iam Pyrrhus factitavit.

(776-783)

Thus even Terence, agreed by all to be more faithful to the tone of his Greek originals than Plautus to his, has Romanized the scene with technical words like centurio, manipulus, imperator, and principia, and with the appropriate historical example of Pyrrhus. Such relatively minor adaptation of detail, found even more abundantly though less consistently in Plautus, along with the ebullient linguistic expansion that is so characteristic of Plautus's style, is usually what is meant by the 'originality' of Roman comedy, but this is hardly sufficient to establish its own validity in its Roman cultural milieu, and hardly consonant with what we know of other Roman adaptations of Greek forms, where individualization permeates far below surface translation.

There are numerous theories about the fundamental characteristics of good comedy and the causes of laughter. Central to many of these theories, and axiomatic in the rest, is the notion of familiarity. From the paradigmatic vaudeville joke—'Why does a chicken cross the road? To get to the other side'—to the fantasy of Aristophanes' Birds, the comic involves the rhetorical figure of para prosdokian, the cheating of expectations. As in reading an old issue of Punch or the New Yorker, much of our difficulty in properly understanding Plautus results from our failure to 'get the point', that is, our failure to recognize the expected in such a way that we may appreciate the unexpected.

Comedy always alludes in some degree to its environment, but the allusiveness of Plautus, since it does not name names in Aristophanic style, is difficult to prove. We have little contemporary material for comparison: the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus and a handful of other inscriptions of meagre content. Our view of the social and ideological history of the period is based almost entirely on two writers: Polybius, writing analytically a generation later of Rome's and the Scipios' rise to imperial glory, and Livy, who had Cato and Ennius, Augustus and Virgil between himself and the realities of the early second century B.C.

Although it is now generally conceded that in small things Plautus is Plautine and Terence even Terentian, the view is still often held that the larger world of Roman drama, including the moral, philosophical, and psychological framework within which the characters act and speak, is foreign. Yet when Plautus's characters issue pronouncements such as 'alii, Lyde, nunc sunt mores' (Bacch. [Bacchides] 437) and 'haec huius saecli mores in se possidet' (True. 13), he cannot have expected his audience to hear the words nunc and huius saecli in terms of the Athens of a century before. If so, Plautus should have continued working as a stage hand. If so, then the Roman audience was indeed a collection of strange bumpkins who would keep coming back to laugh at what was incomprehensible and not pertinent to their own experiences. In this light the stock soldier, a borrowed character who intrinsically need have no allusive relation to the life around him, forms an interesting test case. The aspects of real life which he embodies, the military and the glorious, are an important phase of Roman ideology, treated with the utmost seriousness by Romans and Roman historians. It thus matters greatly in our evaluation of Plautus as a comic playwright whether the repeated portrayal of military glory in his plays is to be taken as an academic allusion to the mercenary armies of Alexander and the Diadochoi or as a commentary on the military ideals of his own time.

The miles appears in seven of the twenty preserved plays of Plautus, with his fullest development in the Curculio, Truculentus, and Miles Gloriosus³ His function is that of the young hero's rival for a girl, a role which could be filled as well by several other occupational types, as long as they were rich enough to contrast to the young hero's lack of ready cash. It is not the rivalry itself and the personal confrontation of the two suitors that makes up the stage intrigue. Most often it is the necessity for the young man to obtain money, usually from his father, with the help of a clever slave. Once he gets the money, the girl is effectively his, and the rival miles seldom need appear on stage. Far from being an unavoidable necessity of the plot, then, the role of the braggart soldier was a flexible element which could be expanded or contracted as Plautus chose; the very frequency of its appearance must itself be regarded as a deliberate preference of Plautus, not an accident of his sources.

Plautus's miles gloriosus had seen new and exotic-sounding lands in the Greek East, had conquered many of them with incredible rapidity, and had been courted by their kings. He had come back laden with riches and extravagant honors, nor was he reticent about his miraculous feats. On his return men might find him vain, hard to approach, ready to threaten instead of reason, yet they might also flatter him, even to the point of finding a reason for his success in some special relationship to the gods. All this can be said as well of Rome's historic heroes of Plautus's time, who had taken Rome up from the disastrous trough of Cannae through the battles of Zama and Cynoscephalae into the Seleucid Empire.⁴ This fantastic series of successes brought with it an extravaganza of wealth and glory which the historian glimpses largely through the tradition of Cato's stern censorship. Both historian and literary critic should profit by a more detailed examination of the Plautine soldier to discover whether the parallelism between stage and contemporary reality that is clear in its broad outlines may be confirmed in particulars as well.

The soldiers' names, Greek or pseudo-Greek according to the conventions of the Roman stage, are Cleomachus, Stratophanes, Antamoenides, Pyrgopolinices, Polymachaeroplagides, and Therapontigonus Platagidorus. Pyrgopolinices also names an opponent, Bumbomachides Clutomestoridysarchides. In addition to a Rabelaisian relishing of the name itself, Plautus underscores the point of its length in the Curculio by having the banker Lyco say of Therapontigonus Platagidorus:

novi edepol nomen, nam mihi istoc nomine,
dum scribo, explevi totas ceras quattuor.

(Cure. 409-10)

One may well see an allusion here to the extra heroic military cognomina which accrued to Roman generals in Plautus's time, like Cunctator and Africanus; or perhaps even the specific occasion in 188 when the younger brother of Africanus, not to be left behind in a contest of name length, took the cognomen Asiagenus. That Plautus is not afraid of an even more pointed allusion to a name is clear from the joke in the Miles Gloriosus at the expense of the easily satirized cognomen of the Claudii. The maid greets Pyrgopolinices, 'Pulcher, salve', to which he confidently replies, 'meum cognomentum commemoravit' (1037-38).

The polysyllabic Therapontigonus Platagidorus is introduced to us largely through the imaginary description of the parasite Curculio, who has acquired the soldier's seal and must now draw a sufficiently boastful picture of the soldier to convince the banker that he is his bona fide representative. Asked why the miles was not there in person to retrieve his money, Curculio answers that he had just arrived in Caria from India, and there

nunc statuam volt dare auream
solidam faciundam ex auro Philippo, quae siet
septempedalis, factis monumentum suis.

(Curc. 439-41)

This passage gains point in the light of contemporary phenomena such as the honors paid Flamininus in Greece after the liberation proclamation, which, if they did not include seven-foot solid gold statues, did include his portrait on gold coinage. One of Cato's censorial speeches was entitled 'De signis et tabulis' and dealt with the violation of propriety in the proliferation of statuary in Rome, and Plautus gains a touch of the prophetic in view of the fact that the first gilded statue of a human was set up by Acilius Glabrio to himself in the temple of Pietas in 181. Plautus might well be less than prophetic, since this temple was dedicated by Acilius after the battle of Thermopylae and the routing of Antiochus in 191, and plans for the gilt statue 'made from Philip's money' might well have been known soon thereafter, before the traditional date of Plautus's death in 184.

Lyco the banker then asks Curculio why the general needs a commemorative statue. The answer:

Despite attempts to date the Greek original by explain ing this geographical buffoonery in terms of Alexandrian conquests or the career of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the best formal parallels are Roman honorific inscriptions. Although the sepulchral elogia of the great Scipios of Plautus's time are not among the famous inscriptions found in the Tomb of the Scipios, the family style can be demonstrated even from the factis monumentum suis of the earlier Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, despite his limited geographical range:

Taurasiam Cisauriam Samniom cepit,
subegit omnem Loucanam opsidesque abdoucit.

Even the farcical counting scene at the beginning of the Miles Gloriosus, where the parasite Artotrogus stands with a tablet and stylus doing the sums of the enemy soldiers killed by Pyrgopolinices on various battlefields:

in Cilicia	150
in Scytholatronia	100
Sards	30
Macedonians	60
total	7000

has its somewhat embarrassing analogy in the marked desire for numerical precision of official Roman monuments of conquest, from the Res Gestae Divi Augusti to the Columna Rostrata, where Duilius about 260 B.C. described his feats in part as follows:

… and all the Carthaginian hosts and their most mighty chief after nine days fled in broad daylight from their camp; and he took their town Macela by storm. And in the same command he as consul performed an exploit in ships at sea, the first Roman to do so; … and by main force he captured ships with their crews, to wit: one septireme, 30 quinqueremes and triremes; 13 he sank. Gold taken: 3,600 pieces; silver: 100,000; total in sestertii: 2,100,000.

Such reckoning of the commander's victims continues both in official and popular tradition. In Vopiscus's life of Aurelian we find this account:

Aurelian alone with three hundred guardsmen smashed the Sarmatians as they were breaking out in Illyricum. Theoclius, a writer of imperial times, states that in the Sarmatian war Aurelian by his own hand on one day killed forty-eight, and more than nine hundred and fifty on various other days. The result was that boys made up verses and ditties for Aurelian which they used to dance to on holidays:

mille mille mille decollavimus
unus homo mille decollavimus
mille bibat quisquis mille occidit
tantum vini nemo habet quantum fudit sanguinis.
(S.H.A., Vita Aureliani, 6-7)

Another theme of the soldier's ditty, the so-called versus Fescennini which were a traditional part of triumphal processions of famous generals, was the sexual prowess of the commander. Julius Caesar's troops chanted

urbani, servate uxores: moechum calvum adducimus;
aurum in Gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum.

(Suet. I ul. 51)

Although Plautus's braggart soldiers are not usually taunted about their love-making, except in so far as they end up as the unsuccessful rival for the girl, Pyrgopolinices in the Miles Gloriosus is the butt of teasing about his amorousness: he is inpudens, plenus adulterii (90), magnus moechus mulierum (755), moechus unguentatus (924), has long curly locks (64, 923), thinks himself handsomer than Alexander (777), is a 'skilled stud horse for the mares, both male and female' (1112-3), and is tricked in the finale and threatened with the standard penalty for adultery because of his belief in his own irresistibility.

ipsus illic sese iam impedivit in plagas;
paratae insidiae sunt: in statu stat senes,
ut adoriatur moechum, qui formast ferox,
qui omnis se amare credit, quaeque aspexerit
mulier: eum oderunt qua viri qua mulieres.
(1388-92)

The hero believes himself both bold and handsome, and his double vanity, military and amatory, accounts for much of his comic appeal. The underscoring of Pyrgopolinices' double pride—in great deeds and good looks—seems almost formulaic:

fortem atque fortunatum et forma regia.     (10)
virtute et forma et factis invictissumis.     (57)
cum hac forma et factis.     (1021)
formam et facies et virtutes.     (1027)
hominem tarn pulchrum et praeclarum virtute et forma, factis.     (1042)
saltern id volup est quom ex virtute formai evenit tibi.     (1211)
forma huius, mores, virtus.     (1327)

The pairing of virtus and forma, seemingly un-Roman, can best be paralleled in the epitaph of Scipio Barbatus, whose 'forma virtutei parisuma fuit'.

Beauty aside—since few military heroes might legitimately boast of such an endowment—Plautus's soldiers are normally labelled with epigrammatic tags of civic virtus:

virtute belli armatus promerui ut mihi
omnis mortalis agere deceat gratias.
(Epid. 442-42)

Stratophanes in the Truculentus, refusing to tell tall stories, philosophizes instead about the sufficiency of virtus:

facile sibi facunditatem virtus argutam invenit,
sine virtuti argutum civem mini habeam pro praefica,
quae alios conlaudat, eapse sese vero non potest.
(494-96)

But his boasting comes a few lines later in his pride for the baby whom he thinks is his new-born son. He is told that immediately after birth the infant reached for sword and shield, and expresses wonder that the child is not now away in battle winning booty: He congratulates Phronesium for adding to the glory of his name.

gratulor, quom mihi tibique magnum perperisti decus.     (517)
filium peperisti, qui aedis spoliis opplebit tuas.     (522)

This parallels the projected progeny of Pyrgopolinices:

PALAESTRIO: meri bellatores gignuntur, quas hic praegnatis fecit, et pueri annos octingentos vivunt. MILPHIDIPPA: vae tibi, nugator!

PYRGOPOLINICES: quin mille annorum perpetuo vivunt ab saeclo ad saeclum.

(Mil. 1077-79)

One thinks too of Hercules, the other miraculous babe in Plautus, of whom Jupiter tells Amphitryon, 'suis factis te inmortali adficiet gloria' (Am. [Amphitruo] 1140), and again of the epitaphs of the Scipios:

The divine aura which formed around Scipio Africanus and which Polybius was at such pains to rationalize is also drawn around Stratophanes and Pyrgopolinices. The latter is a self-styled nepos Veneris (1265), comically turned into Venerius nepotulus (1413, 1421) after his ill-fated attempt to seduce the supposed wife of Pleusicles. The best statement of his divinity occurs in an earlier exchange between Milphidippa and Palaestrio:

MILPHIDIPPA: ecastor hau mirum si te habes carum, hominem tarn pulchrum et praeclarum virtute et forma, factis. deus dignior fuit quisquam homo qui esset?

PALAESTRIO: non hercle humanust ergo—nam volturio plus humani credo est. (1041-4)

All the Scipionic parallels adduced up to this point are not meant to create a picture of Plautus as a political pamphleteer opposing the Scipionic faction in government. The modern critic is at the mercy of his sources, which are disproportionately concentrated on the Scipios—accidentally in the case of the inscriptional evidence and deliberately in the case of historians. Although to his contemporaries Africanus probably was a leading symbol of Rome's new heroism, the effects of the rapid military and diplomatic success of the period not only were visible in the other ruling families, but also permeated other social levels. The typical Roman soldier of the early second century was not the yeoman leaving his plough for an occasional short campaigning season, but a professionalized military man who saw nearly regular service in several theatres of war. One can see the pride of such a campaign veteran in Livy's version of a speech by Spurius Ligustinus, a centurion of Sabine origin, who in the period from 200 to 171 B.C. had served twenty-two years in the army, been primus pilus four times, had been rewarded thirty-four times by various generals virtutis causa, and had won six civic crowns (Livy, xlii. 34).

The impact of the returning hero, whether general, centurion, or common soldier, on Roman society is clearly revealed in Plautus. There is no reason to doubt the realism of his description in the Epidicus (208-15) of the streets full of soldiers carrying their weapons and leading their pack-animals, and being met by fathers looking for their own sons and by crowds of prostitutes, all dressed for the occasion. Nor is there any reason to doubt the justice of one of his few explicit criticisms of war greed at the beginning of the same play, where the slave Thesprio, returning wellfed from an overseas campaign, remarks that the wars have converted him from a sneak thief to an open robber (Epid. 10-12).

Plautus's miles gloriosus, then, is relevant to his own society. If originally he reflected the early Hellenistic mercenary captain, his traits as we meet him in Plautine comedy have become thoroughly congruent with the native Roman general turned world conqueror in Plautus's time.

Artistically, however, one must further question the relevance of the miles to the play or plays within which he occurs. Although satirizing society by stringing together a number of socially recognizable characters may be interesting in itself and provide good fun, great comic drama is more than this. The critic demands—and finds—unifying elements of structure, whether they be formal or thematic, imagistic or psychological. On the other hand, the usual critical comparando of Plautus are vaudeville and Gilbert and Sullivan: his plots are thin, his construction loose, he will do anything for a laugh. Yet some understanding of the coherence of Plautine comedy may be gained by studying the role of the miles gloriosus in its dramatic context.

This coherence is not primarily a factor of the plot as such. The soldier is neither a prime mover of the action, nor is he, except in the case of Pyrgopolinices in the Miles Gloriosus, an important antagonist who must be met and overcome. In the Curculio, Therapontigonus is deceived in absentiâ by the eponymous hero in order to deceive the banker to pay the leno to get the girl who turns out to be Therapontigonus's sister anyway. The soldier meanwhile returns and rages ineffectually at both banker and leno, but all ends happily when he is invited to dinner, getting neither girl nor retribution. In the Epidicus, the soldier enters only after the father has been deceived, is incidentally discomfited in a brief scene, and leaves the stage never to be mentioned again. In both Poenulus and Bacchides, the soldier, although an absent rival for the hand of the heroine, is not the effective enemy of the hero and arrives on stage only after the battle is essentially over. He struts and threatens for a time, and in the Poenulus returns at the happy ending to help gloat over the leno. In the Pseudolus, the Macedonian miles never appears in person, being replaced by his slave Harpax. Even in the Truculentus, a love-story without a hero in the usual sense, Stratophanes is merely one of Phronesium's three fools, whose deception by her leads to no peripeteia, but who is instead given a half share of the booty at the end.

Clearly, then, whatever organic quality the miles may have in Plautus does not depend on the dramatic exigencies of plot. It depends rather upon the parallelism of roles, the thematic repetition in other characters of the traits of the braggart warrior. In the Bacchides, for example, the role of Cleomachus seems perhaps more nearly fortuitous than that of any Plautine soldier. He appears in one short scene in which he is merely a tool used by the slave Chrysalus to defraud the old man Nicobulus. But the soldier's appearance is framed by the character of Chrysalus, who dominates the stage for a long period both before and after the brief apparition of the professional swaggerer with his identifying sword and shield. Chrysalus's entrance in this portion of the play is highly revealing. The young man Mnesilochus has just sung a monologue of utter despair. Although his friend Pistoclerus tries to console him, he only makes matters worse by mentioning the recent arrival of a parasite from Cleomachus to demand either the soldier's money or his girl.

PISTOCLERUS: tace modo: deus respiciet nos aliquis. MNESILOCHUS: nugae!

PISTOCLERUS: mane, MNESILOCHUS: quid est? PISTOCLERUS: tuam copiam eccam Chrysalum video.

CHRYSALUS: hunc hominem decet auro expendi, huic decet statuam statui ex auro;

nam duplex facinus feci hodie, duplicibus spoliis sum adfectus.

(638-41)

Pistoclerus's assurance that some god will help them is answered immediately by the appearance of Chrysalus, who begins with a claim that his glory warrants him a golden statue, like Therapontigonus in the Curculio, and clearly identifies himself with the military profession in the next line by a reference to his 'double-dealing spoils'. In heroic style he tells of the splendid wealth—'regias copias aureasque optuli' (647)—gained through his bravery—'mea virtute parta' (647). When he discovers that Mnesilochus has given the money back to his father in a sentimental rage because of a foolish misunderstanding, the slave becomes the commander in earnest to devise a new strategy, scheming in military metaphor:

de ducentis nummis primum intendam ballistam in senem;
ea ballista si pervortam turrim et propugnacula,
recta porta invadam extemplo in oppidum antiquom et vetus:
si id capso, geritote amicis vostris aurum corbibus,
sicut animus sperat.
(709-13)

He tells the young men not to rise from their banquet until he gives the battle cry, to which Pistoclerus replies, Ό imperatorem probum' (758-9). After his preliminary skirmish with the conventional soldier Cleomachus, Chrysalus produces a truly epic piece of selfglorification, comparing his past and future exploits to those of the Greek heroes at Troy.

Atridae duo fratres cluent fecisse facinus maxumum,
quom Priami patriam Pergamum divina moenitum manu
armis, equis, exercitu atque eximiis bellatoribus
milli cum numero navium decumo anno post subegerunt.
non pedibus termento fuit praeut ego erum expugnabo meum
sine classe sineque exercitu et tanto numero militum.
cepi, expugnavi amanti erili filio aurum ab suo patre …
ego sum Ulixes, quoiius consilio haec gerunt …
poste cum magnifico milite, urbis verbis qui inermus capit,
conflixi atque hominem reppuli; dein pugnam conserui seni:
eum ego adeo uno mendacio devici, uno ictu extempulo cepi spolia …
sed Priamus hic multo illi praestat: non quinquaginta modo,
quadringentos filios habet atque equidem omnis lectos sine probro:
eos ego hodie omnis contruncabo duobus solis ictibus.(925-75)

After the besieged old man gives the slave money for the second time, Chrysalus-Ulysses comments:

hoc est incepta efficere pulchre: veluti mi
evenit ut ovans praeda onustus cederem;
salute nostra atque urbe capta per dolum
domum redduco iam integrum omnem exercitum.
sed, spectatores, vos nunc ne miremini
quod non triumpho: pervolgatum est, nil moror;
verum tamen accipientur mulso milites.
(1068-744)

Thus exists the slave, at once more boastful and more military than the miles gloriosus whom he has overcome. The physical caricature of resplendent milita rism momentarily introduced on to the stage in Cleo machus is only one statement of a theme which is repeated more fully in the extravagant language of the slave-hero. Artistically Cleomachus and Chrysalus reinforce one another, the soldier being a literal embodiment of the figurative language and behaviour of the slave, and the slave generalizing the specific humorous traits of the soldier.

In the Miles Gloriosus, where Pyrgopolinices' role is the most extensive of all Plautus's soldiers and would not seem to need reinforcement from outside, the slave Palaestrio again acts as his counterpart in mock heroism. When he learns that his fellow-servant Sceledrus has seen Philocomasium kissing Pleusicles, he first calls a council with himself to plot his strategy:

After much painful thought accompanied by tragic gesture, he devises a plan and is warned by his young master of the dangers in the enemy forces:

viden hostis tibi adesse tuoque tergo opsidium? consule,
arripe opem auxiliumque ad hanc rem: propere hoc, non placide decet.
anteveni aliqua, aliquo saltu circumduce exercitum,
coge in opsidium perduellis, nostris praesidium para;
interclude inimicis commeatum, tibi muni viam
qua cibatus commeatusque ad te et legiones tuas
tuto possit pervenire.
(219-25)

Palaestrio accepts his imperium and storms Sceledrus with siege machines:

si invenio qui vidit, ad eum vineam pluteosque agam:
res paratasi, vi pugnandoque hominem caperest certa res.
(266-67)

Next he throws him from the bastions:

meus illic homo est. deturbabo iam ego ilium de pugnaculis.
(334)

Then after a new council of war (597 ff) Palaestrio leads his maniples against Pyrgopolinices:

quantas res turbo, quantas moveo machinas!
eripiam ego hodie concubinam militi,
si centuriati bene sunt manuplares mei.
(813-5)

Although he is viewed momentarily as a shipbuilder laying the hull of a fine trick (915 ff), when the time for launching comes he returns to his proper métier of imperator:

PLWUSICLES: oppidum quodvis videtur posse expugnari doils. date operam. ACROTELEUTIUM: id nos ad te, si quid velles, venimus

PALAESTRJO: lepide facitis. nucn hanc tibe ego impero provinciam.

ACROTELEUTIUM: impetrabis, imperator, quod ego potero, quod voles.

(1157-60)

Of all the speeches of these slave generalissimos, perhaps the most effective is that of Pseudolus just before he meets Harpax, the slave of Polymachaeroplagides.

Military activities are here combined with more serious attributes of the Roman nobility: dependence upon the virtus of one's ancestors and confidence in one's future fame, as well as high-minded concern for the citizenry (although 'vostrorum omnium' and 'meis civibus' become merely 'participes meos' when it comes to sharing the boodle). The para presdokian in the first lines is biting, with the long heroic phrases culminating in dolos, malitia, perfidiis, and Ballionem. Such in general is this Plautine heroic type, who with legions of perfidious machinations besieges the stronghold of an old man or pimp for the booty of a prostitute which he brings home in triumph to a dissolute and spendthrift young man. Boaster of his talents, he is clearly one of Plautus's most popular creations, on whom the playwright lavished his verbal imagination to a high degree. If one includes his parasite counterpart Curculio, he appears in nine plays, and it is significant that all but one of the plays in which a miles gloriosus appears also boasts a servus gloriosus. The exception is the Truculentus, and in this play the meretricious Phronesium and her maid Astaphium play the role usually afforded a Pseudolus or Palaestrio, devising the tricks and managing the action. They are in fact called gloriosae (157). The militia which forms a pendant to the stage soldiery of Stratophanes is here the militia amoris.

ASTAPHIUM: amator similest oppidi hostilis. DINIARCHUS: quo argumento?

ASTAPHIUM: quam primum expugnari potis, tarn id optumum est amicae.

(170-71)

ASTAPHIUM: numquam amatoris meretricem oportet caussam noscere, quin, ubi det, pro infrequente eum mittat militia domum.

(229-30)

As in the elegiac poets of Augustan times, where love is the preferred soldiery and foreign service is deprecated because it detracts from the service of one's mistress, so Plautus' young men may occasionally express their passion in military metaphor. The Curculio opens with the following dialogue between the young Phaedromus and his slave Palinurus:

PALINURUS: quo ted hoc noctu dicam proficisci foras cum istoc ornatu cumque hac pompa, Phaedrome?

PHAEDROMUS: quo Venus Cupidoque imperat, suadetque Amor: si media nox est sive est prima vespera, si status, condictus cum hoste intercedit dies, tamen est eundum quo imperant ingratiis.

(1-6)

If it is not quite true in Plautus that 'militat omnis amans', it is still the conquest of hearts or of money that motivates most of the heroism. Virtus is presented full-blown upon the stage. Whether it wins or loses is irrelevant: it usually does both. Palaestrio conquers, Pyrgopolinices falls; Chrysalus defeats Cleomachus; Phronesium cheats Stratophanes of his money but Stratophanes still gets his spoils of the girl. Both hero and dupe are gloriosus, and on both sides the gloria is perverted. (Falstaff and Hotspur lie side by side on the battlefield.) In Plautine comedy—and probably in all comedy—glory can only appear as vainglory. The tall tales of the hyperbolic stage soldier, as well as the pronouncements of slaves and mooning lovers, are equally incongruous settings for the language of official military dispatches. Critics have varied in interpreting Sosia's long announcement of victory in the Amphitruo. It has been considered both a serious ode of victory addressed by Plautus to his fellow-Romans and a comic parody of Ennius. It is both: a lavish pronouncement of official res gestae delivered in epic style through the mask of a cowardly slave who was drunk in his master's tent during the entire battle. Such is the mask of military glory in Plautine comedy, a mask assumed by other characters as well as the miles gloriosus himself.

The comic playwright deals as extensively with hybris as the writer of tragedy. Man boasts, and the hollowness of the boast brings terror or laughter, but is never allowed to stand unanswered. The mighty shall fall, whether they be mighty in wealth, manners, learning, or war. The sentimental shell is cracked, and what is left is that Ά man's a man'. In warfare the gap between the sentimental slogan and the reality behind it is enormous. The Roman legionnaire as well as the modern infantryman exists for the messy business of shedding blood and letting blood. Although there have been revolutions in the technique and even the sociology of warfare, this fundamental gap has never narrowed. War may still give rise to heroic sentiment and men may glory in a machine gun as much as in a machaera, may count the victims of an automatic rifle as proudly as those of a sword.

When lunchtime arrived on the front lines on Guam, a Marine automatic rifleman, picking off Japs caught in a pocket, mixed business with pleasure.

With precise rhythm, he fired, rolled over, took a mouthful of rations, rolled back, fired, rolled to the food, ate, and so on, until simultaneously both rations and Japs gave out.

Before we started it was great fun. We grinned and chortled…. I recalled Major Mill's instructions: 'We don't intend to neutralize the island. We don't intend to destroy it. We will annihilate it'…. At dawn our planes came in. We could see them disappear into the smoke and flame. We could hear the sputter of their machine guns. We could see the debris raised by their bombs. It was wonderful.⁵

One might have supposed that the trench warfare of World War I killed the romanticism of combat, but a new generation became aces with new weapons, and unfortunately there is no intrinsic reason to suppose that a button pusher might not boast of his expertize in some future atomic conflagration. If war appears on the comic stage, it appears perforce as alazonia, and the great soldier cannot be drawn otherwise than as the great boaster, the miles gloriosus. There may indeed be times in which war is not a subject for comedy. A defeated nation may be too depressed and a militant government too jealous.⁶ But there have been surprisingly few periods in the national literatures of Europe when the miles has been long absent from the stage, although, for example, Abraham Cowley felt it necessary in 1658 to append the following defence to the preface to Cutter of Coleman Street. This play was a revised version of The Guardian which he had produced in 1641; the years between had clearly been difficult ones for the spirit of comedy.

And it has been the perpetual privilege of Satyre and Comedy to pluck their vices and follies though not their persons out of the Sanctuary of any Title. A Cowardly ranting Souldier, an Ignorant Charlatanical Doctor, a foolish Cheating Lawyer, a silly Pedantical Scholar, have alwayes been, and still are the Principal Subjects of all Comedy, without any scandal given to those Honourable Professions, or ever taken by their severest Professors; And, if any good Physician or Divine should be offended with me here for inveighing against a Quack, or for finding Deacon Soaker too often in the Butteryes, my respect and reverence to their callings would make me troubled at their displeasure, but I could not abstain from taking them for very Cholerique and Quarrelsome persons. What does this therefore amount to, if it were true which is objected? But it is far from being so; for the representation of two Sharks about the Town (fellows merry and Ingenious enough, and therefore admitted into better companyes than they deserve, yet withall too very scoundrels, which is no unfrequent character at London) the representation I say of these as Pretended Officers of the Royal Army, was made for no other purpose but to show the World, that the vices and extravagancies imputed vulgarly to the Cavaliers, were really committed by Aliens who only usurped that name, and endeavoured to cover the reproach of their Indigency or Infamy of their Actions with so honourable a Title. So that the business here was not to correct or cut off any natural branches, though never so corrupted or Luxuriant, but to separate and cast away that vermine which by sticking so close to them had done great and considerable prejudice both to the Beauty and Fertility of the Tree.

Cowley further fitted action to his words by changing the description of Cutter in the personae from 'a sharking souldier' in The Guardian to a 'merry, sharking fellow about the town, pretending to have been a Colonel in the King's Army'. Such an elaborate protestation of innocence does far more than any citation of parallels to prove the relevance of stage soldier to his contemporary counterparts in real life. Although the best comic playwright does not explictly moralize, the comic vision is per se pacifistic. Shaw the essayist, however, annotates Shaw the dramatist. In the preface to the four 'pleasant plays' of Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, he writes thus of Arms and the Man, with its ironic Vergilian title:

In spite of a Liberal Revolution or two, I can no longer be satisfied with fictitious morals and fictitious good conduct, shedding fictitious glory on over-crowding, disease, crime, drink, war, cruelty, infant mortality, and all the other commonplaces of civilization which drive men to the theatre to make foolish pretences that these things are progress, science, morals, religion, patriotism, imperial supremacy, national greatness and all the other names the newspapers call them.

Neither Plautus nor Shakespeare wrote explanatory prefaces, and of all the alleged literary descendants of Pyrgopolinices none has perhaps raised more critical problems than Falstaff. To begin with, there is little agreement as to whether he is properly to be called a miles gloriosus. While the majority of literary historians would view him as a version, albeit a distinctive one, of the conventional miles, most critics feel that the appellation limits and lightens the more complex character of Sir John. They follow in part the lead of Maurice Morgann's Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, written in 1777 to vindicate his courage and deny the propriety of calling him a miles gloriosus. The particular arguments, however, which Morgann adduces indicate a misunderstanding, not of Falstaff, but of the Plautine miles. 'If Falstaff had been intended for the character of a Miles gloriosus, his behaviour ought and therefore would have been commented upon by others.' But except for the asides of the parasite Artotrogus which characterize Pyrgopolinices as a liar—a fact which the audience does not need to be told and which serves to characterize the parasite more than the miles—Plautus does not make use of other characters to point up the falsity of his soldier's boasted virtus. Further, Morgann feels that Falstaff's character is not that of a real braggart, because his lies are 'too extravagant for practised imposition', a description certainly equally apt for the Plautine feats of scattering legions with a breath (Mil. 16-18), breaking elephants arms with a fist (Mil. 25-30), bringing down 60,000 flying troops by shooting bird-lime at them with slingshots (Poeti. 470-87). Finally, the critic examines Falstaff s battle experience to show that it does not prove his cowardice. Yet none of Plautus's milites gloriosi are convicted of cowardice on the stage. The worst one can say is that they show Falstaffian 'discretion', like Terence's Thraso in his siege of Thais' house:

omnia prius experiri quam armis sapientem decet.
qui scis an quae iubeam sine vi faciat?
(Eun. 789-90)

In a scene which would have given a natural opportunity for a portrayal of real cowardice, the confrontation between the cook Cyamus and the soldier Stratophanes in the Truculentus, the soldier ought to have run off in fright at the sight of the cook's butcher knife, but he actually drives off the cook with his longer sword. Although Pyrgopolinices gets a beating at the end of the Miles Gloriosus, it is not a coward's but a lecher's punishment, and he is held by a group of slaves while he takes his blows. Despite the fact that the sensitivity of Roman audiences was not shocked by watching a good stage beating, there is nothing in Roman comedy to correspond to the cringing cudgelling in English Comedy of Bessus or Bluffe or Bobadill.

Although in his polemic Morgann takes too narrow a view of the dramatic values of the miles gloriosus before Shakespeare's time, he understands that Falstaff must be understood, if at all, in terms of the incongruities of his character and his relations with other roles in the play.

To this end, Falstaff must no longer be considered as a single independent character, but grouped, as we find him shewn to us in the play;—his ability must be disgraced by buffoonery, and his courage by circumstances of imputation; and those qualities be thereupon reduced into subjects of mirth and laughter:—his vices must be concealed at each end from vicious design and evil effect, and must thereupon be turned into incongruities, and assume the name of humour only;—his insolence must be repressed by the superior tone of Hal and Poins, and take the softer name of spirit only, or alacrity of mind; … he must thrive best, and flatter most, by being extravagantly incongruous; and his own tendency, impelled by so much activity, will carry him with perfect ease and freedom to all the necessary excesses.

What else is this but a definition of the comic alazon at his best, a definition which would fit Plautus's Pyrgopolinices or Shaw's Sergius equally well? Coward and no-coward, Falstaff is an embodiment of military glory who raises the question of cowardice. On his lips, 'the better part of valour is discretion; in the which latter part I have saved my life', may be a comic proposition, but it has a serious relevance to the corpse beside him. 'Zounds, I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy, though he be dead; how if he should counterfeit too, and rise? I am afraid he would prove the better counterfeit.' In a play which begins and ends with plans for war, Hotspur is the example which King Henry wished Prince Hal to follow:

He doth fill fields with harness in the realm;
Turns head against the lion's armed jaws;
And, being no more in debt to years than thou,
Leads ancient lords and reverend bishops on
To bloody battles and to burning arms….
Thrice hath this Hotspur Mars in swathing-clothes,
This infant warrior in his enterprise
Discomfited great Douglas.

Hotspur's first appearance in the play is in a short scene framed between the two parts of Falstaff's inglorious robbery, between the deed at Gadshill and the boast at Eastcheap. He enters reading a letter and reviling the cowardice of his correspondent: 'You are a shallow, cowardly hind, and you lie … What a frosty-spirited rogue is this…. O, I could divide myself, and go to buffets, for moving such a dish of skimmed milk with so honourable an iron.' Lady Percy reveals that even in his sleep he thinks of the heroics of war:

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars;
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed;
Cry, Courage!—to the field!—And thou hast talked
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.

At the tavern, while they await Falstaff's return, Prince Henry thus characterizes Hotspur:

I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the North; he that kills me some six or seven dozen Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, 'Fie upon this quiet life! I want work'. Ό my sweet Harry', says she, 'how many hast thou killed today?' 'Give my roan horse a drench', says he; and answers, 'Some fourteen', an hour after, '—a trifle, a trifle', I pr'ythee, call in Falstaff: I'll play Percy, and that damned brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife.

Enter Falstaff with Ά plague of all cowards'. The valorous boast of the comic miles—'Why, thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules: but beware instinct; the lion will not touch the true prince'—illumines the valorous boast of the historic miles. Which of the two glories is the vainer is decided on the battlefield: '… for worms, brave Percy'.

As Falstaff illumines Percy in Part I, so Pistol illumines Falstaff in Part II. Pistol, with his name, his military title—'Captain! thou abominable damned cheater, art thou not ashamed to be called captain?'—his learnedly heroic language—'shall packhorses, and hollowed pampered jades of Asia, which cannot go but thirty miles a day, compare with Caesars, and with Cannibals, and Trojan Greeks? nay, rather damn them with King Cerberus'—is the more obvious swaggerer, whose swaggering is both called and proved hollow by Sir John:

He's no swaggerer, hostess; a tame cheater, i' faith; you may stroke him as gently as a puppy greyhound: he will not swagger with a barbary hen, if her feathers turn back in any show of resistance.

Falstaff rises above his own vanity, as it were, to become the touchstone of the vanity of others. Yet the same extravagant mythology that was a part of Pistol's boast is turned immediately upon Falstaff in Doll's congratulations on his bravery in driving off Pistol:

ah, rogue! i' faith, I love thee. Thou art as valorous as Hector of Troy, worth five of Agamemnon, and ten times better than the nine worthies: ah villain!

Caveat lector. Again it is Falstaff who 'see's the bottom of Justice Shallow'. He is alazonia looking at itself. Like the milites gloriosi of Plautus, he remains detached from the central action of the play, yet concentrates in his own character the theme of the vanity of honour and military glory which is crucially relevant to the central action and reiterated in other characters. His range is wider than that of any Plautine miles, and in this he is rather more like the Plautine slave. That he is a greater figure than either is in part simply due to the fact that his creator is Shakespeare, but in part because his context is not comedy. The heroes with whom he shares the stage are Hotspur and Prince Henry, not the adulescentuli of the Roman stage.

Much of the same dramatic use, if less subtle, is made of the miles gloriosus in Beaumont and Fletcher's melodramatic treatment of incest between brother and sister, A King and No King. Bessus, 'valiant enough upon a retreat', opens the play by boasting of his accomplishments at a place now called 'Bessus' Desperate Redemption'. Mardonius, King Arbaces' friend and counsellor, informs the audience of Bessus' cowardice:

Thou knowest, and so do I, thou meanedst to flie, and thy fear making thee mistake, thou ranst upon the enemy, and a hot charge thou gavst, as I'll do thee right, thou art furious in running away, and I think, we owe thy fear for our victory; if I were the King, and were sure thou wouldst mistake always and run away upon the enemy, thou shouldst be general by this light.

His comic boasting continues to be displayed and convicted throughout the play. When the king twits him on his cowardice, he shows his sword and maintains: 'If I do not make my back-biters eat it to a knife within this week, say I am not valiant.' When he is later disgracefully beaten by Bacurius and has his sword taken from him, he begs at least for his knife back, so that he can show it to the king and assert that this was all that was left uneaten of his sword. When the king's sister asks for news of the king, he talks only of himself:

Panthea: And is he well again?

Bessus: Well again, an't please your grace: why I was run twice through the body, and shot i'th'head with a cross-arrow, and yet am well again.

Panthea: I do not care how thou do'st, is he well?

Bessus: Not care how I do? Let a man out of the mightiness of his spirit, fructifie Foreign Countries with his blood for the good of his own, and thus shall he be answered; why I may live to relieve with spear and shield, such a lady as you distressed.

Now styled a hero, he must defend his honour in duels, and all those whom he has boorishly insulted before the war come to challenge him. He joyfully proclaims in a monologue that he is really a coward and then escapes another duel by telling the challenger's second that he is already engaged

… 'upon my faith Sir, to two hundred and twelve, and I have a spent body, too much bruised in Battail, so that I cannot fight, I must be plain, above three combats a day: All the kindness I can shew him, is to set him resolvedly in my rowle, the two hundred and thirteenth man, which is something, for I tell you, I think there will be more after him, than before him, I think so; pray you commend me to him, and tell him this'.

After he has been kicked and cudgelled by Bacurius, two sophistical teachers of swordmanship attempt to prove by argument that he was really brave in being beaten, as long as he laughed enough to show that he contemned the beating:

If he be sure he has been kicked enough.
For that brave sufference you speak of brother,
Consists not in a beating and away,
But in a cudgelled body, from eighteen
To eight and thirty; in a head rebuked
With pots of all size, degrees, stools, and bed-staves,
This shows a valiant man.

Bessus: Then I am valiant, as valiant as the proudest,
For these are all familiar things to me;
Familiar as my sleep, or want of money,
All my whole body's but one bruise with beating,
I think I have been cudgelled with all nations,
And almost all Religions.

Through all this beating, the braggart buffoon learns no lesson, remains undaunted, since, as he himself remarks, Ά base spirit has this vantage of a brave one, it keeps always at a stay, nothing brings it down, not beating'. But King Arbaces, Bessus' heroic counterpart, does not 'have this vantage'. In him, because he is a brave man, the exaggeration of military boastfulness is no comic folly, but a tragic distortion.

Bessus: Come, our King's a brave fellow.

Mardonius: He is so, Bessus, I wonder how thou camst to know it. But if thou wert a man of understanding I would tell thee, he is vainglorious, and humble, and angry, and patient, and merry, and dull, and joyful and sorrowful in extremity in an hour…. Here he is with his prey in his foot.

Arbaces enters, glorying over the fallen Tigranes:

Be you my witness earth, need I to brag,
Doth not this captive prince speak
Me sufficiently, and all the acts
That I have wrought upon his suffering land;
Should I then boast! where lies that foot of ground
Within his whole realm, that I have not past,
Fighting and conquering; far then from me
Be ostentation. I could tell the world
How I have laid his kingdom desolate
By this sole arm propt by divinity,
Stript him out of his glories, and have sent
The pride of all his youth to people graves,
And made his virgins languish for their loves,
If I would brag, should I that have the power
To teach the neighbour world humility,
Mix with vain-glory? …

Mardonius: 'Tis pity that valour should be thus drunk.

Then Beaumont and Fletcher repeatedly display the braggart coward and braggart king together, with the effect of making the one more ludicrous, the other more pitiable. At first, the experience of seeing himself caricatured does not abate Arbaces' boastfulness. To Mardonius in defence of his earlier speech:

There I would make you know 'twas this sole arm.
I grant you were my instruments, and did
As I commanded you, but 'twas this arm
Moved you like wheels, it mov'd you as it pleased.

After promising not to insult the captive king Tigranes any further, he delivers another self-laudatory speech at his own triumphal procession. Yet as the drama is about to become tragic, as his vanity is about to ruin him irrevocably by making him flaunt moral law and make love to his sister, he once more confronts Bessus, whom he has asked to play the pander for him. Bessus' eagerness to be of service is expressed in what is perhaps the most shocking sentence in English drama: '… and when this is dispatched, if you have a mind to your mother, tell me, and you shall see I'le set it hard'. The king recoils at this incredibly vulgar image of himself, and the play begins to move toward the comic conclusion implicit in its title.

Falstaff and Bessus are unusual milites gloriosi in that the effect of their comic military boasting is enhanced by being set in the dramatic context of serious military heroism. Their alazonia finds both contrast and tragic counterpart within the play itself. More frequently the miles gloriosus in Western literature is less ambiguously comic in his setting. His military analogies lie in real life and epic literature, but his stage world is a world of pure comic bluster. His heroism need never be matched against heroism of another level of value, but only against other follies as comic as itself: flattery, pedantry, social pretentiousness, romantic sentimentality. Thus, for example, appear Bobadill in Jonson's Every Man in his Humor, Don Armado in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Cutter in Cowley's The Guardian, Bluffe in Congreve's The Old Bachelor, Matamore in Corneille's L 'Illusion Comique. They keep pace with the times in their weapons, their fashions in dueling, their historical allusions. Like the Plautine soldiers, they raise laughter with their incredible feats, their inaccurate arithmetic, their unfulfilled threats, their epic comparisons. Like Pyrgopolinices, they are perhaps most amusing when they combine military vanity with vanity in the amorous sphere.

Every reader will have his favourite exponent of such 'un-in-one-breath-utter-able skill'. Jacob von Tyboe, a creation of the eighteenth-century Danish playwright and scholar Ludvig Holberg, may serve as an example. In an explanatory prologue, Jesper Oldfux, a combination of counsellor, confidant, and spy, reveals that his young friend Leonard, currently penniless and in love with Lucilia, has two rivals for her hand.

The first one's name is Jacob von Tyboe, a man with a screw loose in his head, as far as I can tell. He says he's done service overseas, but can't show service papers or an honourable discharge. The other officers here in town put on a good face with him, and call him Captain, or Major, or even General, depending on his pretensions. When he talks about his campaigns, they pretend to listen with astonishment; when he gets in trouble with the law, they go to court for him; and when he needs some soldiers, they lend him some of their own and order them to treat him with respect and reverence. En somme, he is a divertissement for the whole garrison.

In encouraging Leonard not to lose hope, Jesper assures him that von Tyboe

is so stark raving mad that I can easily convince him that he has fought far greater campaigns than Alexander the Great, that Prince Absalom was no comparison for him in beauty, and that every time he hears the church bells ringing it's to bury some woman who has died of unrequited love of him.

The other rival is the Magister Tychonius, and the stage is superbly set for the confrontation of the braggart pedant and the braggart warrior by a debate between their respective servants, Jens and Peer, on the relative merits of the suffix '-us' and the prefix 'von' in ennobling Tycho and Tyboe. The real obstacle in the way of Lucilia, explains Tychonius, is her chambermaid Perniile, who is 'the outwork that must be stormed before one can reach the fortress, and this can only be accomplished aureis et argentis armis, id est with gold and coin'. Jesper, much as a Plautine slave might do, devises a trick to get each of the gloriosi in trouble with Lucilia. Since von Tyboe cannot read or write, but wishes to send his love a nameday verse in Latin, Jesper arranges to have an obscenely insulting verse written for him by a certain Petronius posing as a poet; Tychonius is cleverly disposed of by turning the aurea et argenta arma with which his servant is trying to bribe Perniile into copper pennies, the distinction of the deceit lying in the fact that Tychonius' servant himself is made to trade the sack of silver which he is carrying with the larger sack of worthless coins carried by von Tyboe's man Christoff, who pretends to be in a drunken stupor. Meanwhile the miles boasts in accordance with our expectations and assisted by Jesper:

Tyboe: Yes I guess they do know me all over Holland, what with the siege and the great engagement near Amsterdam, where I singlehandedly slew over six hundred.

Jesper: Oh, you must add another zero.

Tyboe: Let someone else do it. I've never been concerned about the count. In those days another hundred more or less didn't matter to Jacob von Tyboe. What I can't understand is how my broadsword held out so long.

Jesper: Oh, you could cut people in half with a penpoint. It isn't the sword that matters, but the hand of the man who wields it. I was reading in an old history book about Alexander the Great who could cut the head off the biggest English bull with one stroke. Alexander was Nebuchadnezzar's field-marshal at the time, and when he heard about this he wanted Alexander to lend him his sabre so that he could try it too. But Nebuchadnezzar missed and got mad and said, 'Das ist nicht die rechtet Sabel, Herr General', to which Alexander replied: Ί lent your Imperial Majesty my sabre, not my arm'.

Of the two braggarts, the maid Perniile prefers the military one, because she likes red clothes and the plumes in his hat send chills up and down her spine. His language of courtship follows the best heroic traditions:

I am no longer the invincible hero and lion-hearted von Tyboe of a moment ago. The cannons of your eyes have shot such a breach into the fortress of my heart that I am forced to surrender at discretion. I lay at your feet that sword with which I have brought a million men to their grave. If the King of Holland should see me in this posture, he would say, 'Where is your former courage, your Herculean bravery, Wohlgebohrener Herr von Tyboe'? And I would answer him that even Hercules, who had subjected the five zones of the world, had to have his Delilah to trick him.

The climax is reached in a stichomythy in which Tycho follows Tyboe boast for boast:

Tyboe: Perhaps you have not met Herr von Tyboe?

Tycho: Perhaps you have not met Herr Magister Tychonius?

Tyboe: I have won more than twenty battles.

Tycho: I have disputed absque praesidio more than twenty times.

Tyboe: Everyone knows me in Holland and Brabant.

Tycho: All literati know me in Rostock, Helmstad and Wittenberg.

Tyboe: I have laid the strongest heroes low with my bare hand.

Tycho: I have laid the strongest opponentes low with my bare mouth.

Tyboe: In half a second I can set a man like you on your rump.

Tycho: With half a syllogism I can reduce a whole army ad absurdum.

At the end, miles and magister line up on opposite sides of the stage with four soldiers each. Since neither wants to fight, Jesper easily arranges a truce, while preserving the pride of each. They decide to unite forces and storm Lucilia's house, but both armies are driven off by one pistol shot in the air from Leonard, who himself collects the booty.

Holberg's comedy was written in a period when Denmark was trying to disentangle herself from military alliances and simultaneously assert her cultural independence. He alone contributed much to both these goals through his History of Denmark and numerous other works, both serious and satirical. His comedies, although derivative in the same sense that Plautus's were, are not without relevance to these same goals. Holberg especially liked to ridicule the German orien tated culture of the bourgeois, as is apparent in von Tyboe. The satire of soldiery will have had a specific timeliness for his audience since Jacob von Tyboe was produced in 1723, only three years after the Treaty of Copenhagen had ended, ingloriously for Denmark, a series of political involvements with the Netherlands that had sent Danish troops into battle throughout northern Europe.

It is only natural that Shaw, who wrote, 'Idealism, which is only a flattering name for romance in politics and morals, is as obnoxious to me as romance in ethics or religion', should make use of the miles gloriosus in his 'general onslaught on idealism'.⁷ Sergius, in Arms and the Man, led a magnificent cavalry charge, which, like Bessus', succeeded by a lucky accident. As his fiancée's mother tells it:

You can't guess how splendid it is. A cavalry charge—think of that! He defied our Russian commanders—acted without orders—led a charge on his own responsibility—headed it himself—was the first man to sweep through their guns. Can't you see it, Raina; our gallant splendid Bulgarians with their swords and eyes flashing, thundering down like an avalanche and scattering the wretched Servian dandies like chaff.

As his less romantic opponents see it:

He did it like an operatic tenor—a regular handsome fellow, with flashing eyes and lovely moustache, shouting a war-cry and charging like Don Quixote at the windmills. We nearly burst with laughter at him; but when the sergeant ran up as white as a sheet, and told us they'd sent us the wrong cartridges, and that we couldn't fire a shot for the next ten minutes, we laughed at the other side of our mouths.

Shaw then confronts Sergius with his 'realistic' counterpart, and the stage directions define the contrast: The chest of drawers in Raina's bedroom 'is covered by a variegated native cloth, and on it there is a pile of paper backed novels, a box of chocolate creams, and a miniature easel, on which is a large photograph of an extremely handsome officer, whose lofty bearing and magnetic glance can be felt even from the portrait'. Into this room walks a man whose unromantic name, Shaw later informs us, is Bluntschli:

A man of about 35, in a deplorable plight, bespattered with mud and blood and snow, his belt and the strap of his revolver case keeping together the torn ruins of the blue coat of a Servian artillery officer. As far as the candlelight and his unwashed, unkempt condition make it possible to judge, he is a man of middling stature and undistinguished appearance, with strong neck and shoulders, a roundish, obstinate looking head covered with short crisp bronze curls, clear quick blue eyes and good brows and mouth, a hopelessly prosaic nose like that of a strong-minded baby….

With this, the 'chocolate cream soldier', the son of a Swiss hotel owner, begins to win the novel-reading Raina, while Sergius, true to his stage character and therefore convinced of his own intense attractiveness to women, wins the vulgarly practical maid Louka for his wife. Each deserves his match, and, with typical Shavian irony, the play ends as romantically as it had begun.

Shaw permits Bluntschli speeches of realistic bitterness relatively untempered by comic distance.

Bluntschli: You never saw a cavalry charge, did you?

Raina: How could I?

Bluntschli: Ah, perhaps not—of course. Well, it's a funny sight. It's like slinging a handful of peas against a window pane: first one comes; then two or three close behind him; and then all the rest in a lump.

Raina (her eyes dilating as she raises her clasped hands ecstatically): Yes, first One!—the bravest of the brave!

Bluntschli (prosaically): Hm! you should see the poor devil pulling at his horse.

Raina: Why should he pull at his horse?

Bluntschli (impatient of so stupid a question): It's running away with him, of course: do you suppose the fellow wants to get there before the others and be killed? Then they all come. You can tell the young ones by their wildness and their slashing. The old ones come bunched up under the number one guard: they know that they are mere projectiles, and that it's no use trying to fight. The wounds are mostly broken knees, from the horses cannoning together.

The fact that soldiers are 'mere projectiles' and a fortiori incapable of individual heroism, although it probably underlies any great comic vision of war since Aristophanes, has been more often implicit than explicit until modern times. An exception is Goldoni, whose La Guerra is perhaps the bitterest indictment of military glory possible within the framework of comedy. Here, a disillusioned courtesan and ruthless profiteer form the background against which romantic young braggart warriors fight duels and speak of the honour of war. The comedy was not successful, audiences having preferred the more gallant and less shocking L'Amante Militare. Yet the realistic tone of parts of La Guerra accurately predicts the way in which war has most often appeared in the twentieth century.

Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage has this same collocation of the boast of glory and the sordidness of reality. Eilif, the 'brave son' of the titular heroine, is as truly a miles gloriosus in his swagger as any Plautine soldier. Yet his alazonia is immediately negated on the stage, not by the impossibility of the boast, but by its frightful truthfulness. His great feat was the theft of cattle from peasants.

Eilif: The rest was a snap. Only the peasants had clubs—and outnumbered us three to one. They made a murderous attack on us. Four of them drove me into a clump of trees, knocked my sword from my hand, and screamed: Surrender! What now? I said to myself, they'll make mincemeat of me.

Commander: So what did you do?

Eilif: I laughed.

Commander: You what?

Eilif: I laughed. And so we got to talking. I came right down to business and said: 'Twenty guilders an ox is too much, I bid fifteen'. Like I wanted to buy. That foxed 'em. So while they were scratching their heads, I reached for my good sword and cut 'em to ribbons. Necessity knows no law, huh?

Mother Courage, while taking inventory of her provision wagon, disposes of the alazonia of another of the play's representatives of military glory.

Pity about the Chief—twenty-two pairs, socks—getting killed that way. They say it was an accident. There was a fog over the fields that morning, and the fog was to blame. He'd been telling his men to fight to the death, and was just riding back to safety when he lost his way in the fog, went forward instead of back, found himself in the thick of the battle, and ran right smack into a bullet…. I feel sorry for a commander like that—when maybe he had something big in mind, something they'd talk about in times to come, something they'd raise a statue to him for, the conquest of the whole world for example—Lord, the worms have got into these biscuits….

In Brecht's A Man's a Man, 'Nothing is sacred any more unless it's identity cards.' The porter Galy Gay has the makings of a miles gloriosus with his 'famous self-conceit'. 'So big and fat on the outside, you'd never guess he had an inside like a raw egg,' says Mrs. Gay. The transformation is easy, requiring only a uniform and a new identity card: 'A man like that does the turning all on his own. Throw him into a puddle and he'll grow webs between his fingers in two days.' And the transformation is complete: he accepts the identity of Jeraiah Jip, the attentions of the widow Begbick, his comrades' rations, and the crushing of the Sir el Dchowr fortress as his due. 'Then you're the greatest man the army has, Jeraiah Jip! The human fighting machine'. In a close structural relationship, reminiscent of the relation between slave and soldier in Plautus, Galy Gay's counterpart, Bloody Five, goes through precisely the opposite process, losing his identity, and then his literal manhood, because he loses his uniform. Early in the play, after he recounts the story of his heroics against the Sikhs, his men chorus, 'What a great soldier you are, Bloody! You give off sparks! Thrilling! The strength of those loins must be terrific too'! But after he is tied up and thrown on the transport train in civilian clothes, his powers are transferred to Galy Gay, and Bloody Five can only threaten and boast and worry about his name:

The eyes of the whole country are upon me. I was a big wheel. A cannon wheel. My name is Bloody Five. A name that is to be found three times over all through the pages of history! …

Galy Gay: On account of his name, this gentleman did something very bloody to himself. He shot his sex away. I was very fortunate to see it, for now I see where pigheadedness leads, and what a bloody thing it is for a man to be dissatisfied with himself and make such a fuss about his name!

The self-inflicted castration of Bloody Five, which might strike the reader as shockingly modern, is a literary reiteration of the threatened punishment of Pyrgopolinices, in the last scene of the Miles Gloriosus.

Brecht is enjoying enormous posthumous success in our generation, although we might seem to be living in a period when it is difficult to obtain a comic perspective on war. It is interesting to observe that in A Man's a Man, which has been produced several times in recent years, the figure of the miles gloriosus is still remarkably close to his Plautine ancestors. Eric Bentley has remarked that 'Brecht's final attitude would be vehemently antitragic. The newfangled notion of Epic Theatre can be construed as a synonym for traditional comedy'.⁸ Bloody Five and Galy Gay are not only 'synonyms' of the stock braggart warrior, but they are simultaneously a commentary on the possibility of this stock figure maintaining itself in the twentieth century, concerned as it is with the problem of preserving individual identity in the face of mass numbers and mechanization.

Notes

¹ One may refer, with gratitude, to several excellent studies which have laid the historical groundwork for this and any treatment of the miles gloriosus. Otto Ribbeck, Alazon—Ein Beitrag zur antiken Ethologie (Leipzig, 1882), collects the Greek material illustrating the various forms of alazonia, enabling one to see the predominance of the braggart warrior over other braggarts: doctor, cook, soothsayer, etc. Karl von Reinhardstoettner, Plautus, Spätere Bearbeitungen plautinischer Lustspiele (Leipzig, 1886), collects and liberally quotes from later adaptations of the Miles gloriosus, as of all the Plautine plays, showing incidentally the relative popularity of this particular comedy, second only to the Amphitruo and perhaps the Menaechmi. Daniel C. Boughner, The Braggart in Renaissance Comedy, A study in Comparative Drama from Aristophanes to Shakespeare (Minneapolis, 1954), although perhaps over-ambitious in its sub-title, discusses with critical insight the vast number of milites gloriosi who appear in Renaissance comedy in Italy, Spain, France, and England; the reader who is troubled by the jump in this present essay from Plautus to Jonson and Shakespeare will read Boughner with pleasure and illumination. The best guide through the morass of scholarly literature on Plautus is George E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, 1952), with its extensive bibliography. Of critical works published subsequently Raffaele Perna, L'originalita di Plauto (Bari, 1955), is excellent. My own views on the subject of Plautine originality are discussed in detail in 'Plautus as a Source-Book for Roman Religion', TAPA [Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association], XC (1959), pp. 48-60. D. C. Earl, in two recent articles, 'Political Terminology in Plautus', Historia, IX (1960), pp. 234-43, and 'Terence and Roman Politics', Historia, XI (1962), pp. 469-85, has had the courage to use Roman comedy to illustrate Roman political concepts, and I owe much to his example.

² The state of Plautine criticism previous to 1958 may perhaps best be described by imagining what Virgilian criticism would be if only a few scattered fragments of Homer and Apollonius of Rhodes were extant. It is still too soon (in 1963) to measure fully the impact of the Dyskolos, and in the light of announcements that more Menander is forthcoming it would show alazonia indeed to attempt in this essay a re-evaluation of the role of the braggart in Menander. Although there are a half-dozen passages in our fragments referring to a miles, this is scarcely enough on which to base any valid critical judgment.

³ The other four are Bacchides, Epidicus, Poenulus, and Pseudolus.

⁴ Twenty-three triumphs and ovations are known from the period 200-184 B.C.

⁵ Taken from Semper Fidelis: The U.S. Marines in the Pacific—1942-1945, edit, by Patrick O'sheel, USMCR, and Staff Sgt. Gene Cook, USMCR (New York, 1947), pp. 62 and 30.

⁶ The following sample may give one pause. In 1878 the German scholar J. Thummel wrote in an essay on the miles gloriosus: 'After the recent wars, which have clearly revealed to the people the seriousness of the situation and the significance of the army, we no longer have any taste for this sort of witless absurdity.'

⁷ In the preface to Volume II of Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant.

⁸Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht, edit, by Eric Bentley (New York, 1961), p. xvii.