SOURCE: K. C. Ryder, "The Senex Amator in Plautus," in Greece & Rome, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, October, 1984, pp. 181-89.

[In the following essay, Ryder discusses Plautus's use of the stock character the senex amator, asserting that Plautus's handling of the lecherous old man who falls for a young girl differs in each of the six plays in which the character appears.]

Of the twenty-nine senes in the Plautine corpus, seven may legitimately be called senex amator—that is, an old man who for some reason contracts a passion for a young girl and who, in varying degrees, attempts to satisfy this passion. They are Demaenetus (Asinaria), Philoxenus and Nicobulus (Bacchides), Demipho (Cistellaria), Lysidamus (Casino), Demipho (Mercator), and Antipho (Stichus). Two others—Periplectomenos (Miles) and Daemones (Rudens)—still, perhaps, feel the sap rising, but they keep their instincts within acceptable limits, and both are regarded as senes lepidi, a description which usually denotes approval of a character.

I

What is interesting is that Plautus' handling of the senex amator always differs. In the Asinaria the characterization and behaviour of Demaenetus are carefully and methodically orchestrated so that each stage of the play (corresponding with the Act divisions, as it happens) represents a different stage of his debauch. Very early we have established for us his relations-with his wife—he dreads her, he wishes her dead, he finds her difficult to get on with, and she keeps him powerless.¹ The rest of the first scene exists to open up the idea that Demaenetus should arrange for his slave Libanus to swindle him out of the money which will eventually buy the girl that his son is after²—the girl that in due course Demaenetus himself will fall for.

The only way that Demaenetus can get his hands on this money without his wife's knowledge is by tricking the Merchant who has come to buy the two asses (hence the play's title) into paying the money direct to him, or a slave acting on his behalf, rather than to his wife.³ It is this subterfuge which forms the second part of the play. It is only later (735ff.) that his own desires towards the girl are revealed for the first time, when we learn that he expects a night with the girl as reward for helping his son. His expectations are so far advanced, in fact, that he has already entered the house where she is, undetected by his son—or his wife's servants:

In 812ff. we are given the first of several insights by the playwright into how he expects an old fool to behave with a young girl:

Finally, and predictably, his wife finds out, but not before we ourselves have seen him in action. It is quite a shock to her—she had thought him 'frugi … siccum, frugi, continentem, amantem uxoris maxume', but now she knows him to be 'ante omnes minimi mortalem pretii, madidum, nihili, incontinentem atque osorem uxoris suae'. (Incidentally, those who complain that Plautus is unsubtle, and little more than a peddlar of slapstick and farce, should note how finely poised these two opinions on Demaenetus are, each element balanced and cancelled out by another.)⁴

Like anyone else wise after the event, she puts two and two together and makes sense of previous odd behaviour on his part, which he has always excused on the grounds of appointments with business colleagues, all of whom are remembered and recited more or less alphabetically by his wife⁵—how many times has she been over this list in her mind before, we wonder?

The focus of our attention now switches back to the old man and his antics with the girl—his embrace with her has been a long one, much too long for his son's comfort!

Quid modi, pater, amplexando facies?
(882)

He is totally besotted with her, nothing would persuade him, he says, not to steal his wife's palla for the girl. Not surprisingly, the girl does not think much of his amatory talents: he is 'osculator carnufex, capuli decus' (895), and he has almost killed her with boredom (921). Her final insult to him comes when, Demaenetus having been confronted by his wife, the girl throws in his face three times his promise concerning the palla (930, 939, 940). His riposte is most ungallant—Ί in crucem!'

Before this Artemona (the wife) has burst in on the scene, and he expresses fear (921), shame (933), and embarrassment (939). For him, quite plainly there is to be no forgiveness as he is tersely ordered: 'Surge amatori I domum!' (921), and again in 940. All in all, we cannot help feeling a little sorry for him—he is not a nasty man, merely rather pathetic; and his wife is something of a dragon.

II

In the Bacchides the situation is totally different. For a start the amatory behaviour only becomes an issue in the final 95 lines of the play, when Nicobulus and Philoxenus go to the two Sisters to complain about the influence that the sisters are exerting over their sons (1118ff.). As soon as they see the old men, the two women begin a series of oblique insults round the idea that the old men are 'oves … balitantes', maintained until 1149. The men themselves join in in this in the end, proclaiming that they will prove a pair of rams if their sons are not returned safely to them (1147-8).

Events take a new turn when the Sisters decide to try to placate the old men by flirting with them:

senem ilium tibi dedo ulteriorem, lepide ut lenitum reddas;
ego ad hunc iratum ingrediar.
(1150ff.)

They will take one each. The suggestion is not received with enthusiasm by the other Sister—'quam odiosum est mortem amplexari'—but immediately Philoxenus is hooked, though at first he is ashamed to admit it (1155a). A few lines later, when he does admit it, Nicobulus' immediate reaction is one of shock—'flagitium est'—though he himself recognizes that they are 'perlecebrae et persuasitrices' (1167). The attraction becomes even stronger for him a few lines later—'ut blandiloquast!', but he still fears to give in.

Philoxenus, meanwhile, is enjoying himself. He is described as 'magis tranquillus' (1174), and begs to be taken inside by his particular Sister. Nicobulus stoutly resists and continues to disapprove:

Vidi ego nequam homines, verum te neminem deteriorem
(1180)

and Philoxenus is quite pleased and proud to acknowledge this—'Ita sum!'

At last the blandishments of the Sisters prove too much for even stout-hearted Nicobulus—'caput prurit, perii, vix negito' (1193); he wants to succumb, but is still afraid (1196), until suddenly he collapses (1199-1200), recognizing that through their efforts he has become a wicked man. The play closes with Nicobulus abandoning himself completely to the will of the Sisters, becoming their abject slave:

Ducite nos quo lubet tamquam quidem addictos.6

In the two plays examined so far we see similar patterns and attitudes—the sense of shame, the feeling of wrong, the contempt of the young woman for the old man—but the way in which the situation is created, its whole motivation, is different; and in the case of one old man (Nicobulus) the blame for his 'fall' lies squarely with the woman and her corrupting influence.⁷ Is there a hint here of a stronger moralizing purpose than Plautus is usually credited with?

III

The senex in the Cistellaria provides us with a cameo picture of lechery in old age, difficult to decipher exactly on account of the corruption of the text. What we are able to deduce from the seventy or so lines that he is on stage is interesting. As soon as he spots Gymnasium at the moment of his entry he is fascinated by her:

mulierculam exornatulam. quidem hercle scita
(306)

He proceeds to declare his desire for her as if he were a horse:

quamquam vetus cantherius sum, etiam nunc….
adhinnire equolam possum ego hanc, si detur sola soli.

The extent of his desire, and of his absurdity, is shown clearly in 310-15 by the way in which he listens in to her remarks, and interprets everything she says almost as an invitation to love. When she says that there is not a woman alive who loathes being alone more than she does, his response is 'me vocat' (310). When she comments on the attractiveness of the house, his riposte is that the house is bound to be lovely if Venus herself is there (311-12). And so on.

As soon as he realizes, though, that she is the woman who is corrupting his son (316-17), his reaction is the usual bluster and abuse. He first addresses her as 'mali damnique inlecebra' (321), then accuses her of driving him and his family to rack and ruin (365-6). Shortly afterwards he leaves, and the episode closes with Gymnasium's gloss on one aspect of the usual behaviour of old men in love:

IV

Lysidamus, in the Casino, is—with Demaenetus from the Asinaria—the leading exponent of the ars amatoria by a senex. Forehand⁸ and Cody⁹ have both published useful and interesting expositions of the part played by Lysidamus. The former draws attention to the degree of his lechery, and the stupidity this involves him in; the latter talks at length about the three homosexual encounters in the play. Plautus himself tells us early in the play what is going to happen: we are to see a father in opposition to his son (another new aspect of the type), commissioning his bailiff not only to act on his behalf but also to marry the girl, in order to ensure access for him, the old man (48ff.). His wife finds out, so determines to act in support of the son.

The role of the wife is another new development: when she has found out, she does not immediately wade in, punishing her husband with her tongue, or with financial or sexual restraints. Instead she enlists the help of another slave to work against the old man and promote the interests of her son. Gross deception is practised on the old man—'gross' in degree and in nature—which he falls for completely. Indeed, he will stop at nothing to achieve his ends—he bribes his bailiff, borrows his neighbour's house, and is prepared to submit entirely to the whims and wishes of the bailiff, Olympio. At 567 we are told that Lysidamus stands 'advocatus cui cognato meo', so that presumably he is invested with a certain measure of dignity and authority; and yet at 733ff. we have a revolting picture of him grovelling, with not a scrap of pride, to Olympio: 'servos sum tuos' (738) … 'Opsecro te … mi pater, mi patrone' (738-9) … 'Tuos sum equidem' (740a). Once he finds he has been fooled, he experiences confusion and shame (937ff.), is abject in front of his wife (1000ff.) and is finally forgiven by her (1005).

The portrait is interesting too for the description it includes of the behaviour of a senex in love. At 217ff. he gives foolish expression to his love: he is unable to think of anything which has 'plus salis plusque leporis'; 'fel quod amarumst, id mel faciet'; 'magis niteo, munditiis munditiam antideo'. At 226 and again at 228 we find references to the use of perfumes. At 467 the portrayal takes a grotesque turn as he pictures himself making love to Casina:

ut ego hodie Casinam deosculabor, ut mihi
bona multa faciam clam meam uxorem.

There are also two drooling instances of the language of the doting lover—at 836 'meum corculum, melculum, verculum', and at 854 'belle belliatula'. If there are any genuinely unpleasant senes in Plautus, Lysidamus is surely the unpleasantest, a characteristic also noted by Forehand.¹⁰ It is difficult to find even a hint of a saving grace in him, and we are bound to conclude that for his wife to forgive him (as she does) is itself unforgivable. Perhaps in the end she has realized that nothing is going to change this lecherous old fool, and she may as well make the best of a bad job and follow the sort of liberal course recommended by her friend Myrrhina in 204ff.:

noli sis tu illi advorsari,
sine amet, sine quod libet id faciat, quando tibi nil domi
delicuom est.

V

Demipho in the Mercator is an example of the old man who falls for a girl after a chance encounter, with the added complication this time that he does not realize that it is his son's mistress he has fallen for; nor is the son willing to release the information for fear of his father's reaction to how he has spent the money entrusted to him to do business with abroad. As a further complication, the old man tries to house the girl with his next-door neighbour, with the result that the neighbour's wife thinks the girl has been installed for her husband's benefit. The novel aspect this time is the lengths the old man goes to to dissuade his son from having the girl enter their house (385ff.), and in fact to hide from his son any inkling of his own involvement.

At 2O3ff. we come across another gloss on the behaviour of the lecherous old man—as soon as Demipho has seen the girl on board his son's ship, 'subigitare coepit'. We can hardly believe Lewis and Short here, incidentally, where we find that the verb means 'to lie with illicitly'—not even an old lecher like Demaenetus would get down to it so quickly, and on board a strange ship! Presumably the meaning that Plautus would have us understand here is 'to excite sexually by fondling; to coax and cajole',¹¹ a meaning supported by Miles 652 and 1402, and Casina 964. The word is rendered quite clear by Heauton 567, when Clitipho is reproved by his father on the grounds that it is outrageous to invite your friend to stay and then 'subigitare amicam'. The 'clue' occurs 4 lines earlier, when the old man claims to have seen his son 'manum in sinum … ingerere'.

A detail of the senex amator 's behaviour that we find nowhere else in the canon is to be found at Mercator 692ff., where we learn that Demipho is seeking to impress the object of his attentions, and lure her, with lavish preparations of food. His neighbour Lysimachus is amazed:

decem si vocasset summos ad cenam viros, nimium obsonavit.

Earlier there have been other examples of the language of the senex in love. At 262ff. Demipho declares that what he has experienced has immediately driven him to distraction:

quam ego postquam aspexi, non ita amo ut sani solent,
sed eodem pacto ut insani solent

and five lines later he repeats the idea. At 292 he describes himself as a 'puer … septuennis', again to his neighbour's bewilderment, and at 304ff. continues in the silly, love-conundrum way that lovers have:

Lysimachus' response is savagely dismissive: 'Tun capite cano amas, senex nequissime?'

The final display of lovers' language occurs at 547ff. when Demipho, with an outlook that would please Horace, asserts 'breve iam relicuom vitae spatiumst: quin ego voluptate, vino et amore delectavero,' further maintaining that old age is the fit time to have your fling, when you are no longer tied up with business and money-making, and that you should devote yourself to leisure and love while you can.

Another point of interest, similar in nature to the sheep imagery noted in the Bacchides, is the repetition of the 'goat' motif, which first occurs in Demipho's account of his dream at 225ff., recurring at 575. (The 'sheep' idea is used in fact at 567, when Lysimachus describes him as vervex.) Plautus has also made comic capital out of the goat imagery at 272ff. Lysimachus enters speaking to an off-stage farm-slave, saying that he wants the hircus that is such a nuisance castrated—Demipho, overhearing, woefully sees this as what his wife's reaction will be if she catches him, Demipho, carrying on with the girl.

VI

The last senex in this category is different again, and rather pathetic: Antipho, in the Stichus. The situation arises at one isolated point, 540ff., and continues for only 30 lines. Meeting his two sons-in-law on their return from abroad, he cooks up a tale of a 'friend' he once had who was in a similar situation to his now—old and lonely—and whose sons-in-law provided him with a flute-girl for having furnished them with wives. Moreover, if one was not going to be enough, they had been willing to offer two more, and two more on top of that. Antipho considers that his 'friend's' request had been a fair one, and leaves the stage a few lines later, happy in the belief that he is to receive the same sort of kindness himself.

Once he has gone, the young men are cruelly, but realistically, dismissive of him: they will send him a girl—to sing to him in bed!

edepol aliud quidem illi quid arnica opus sit nescio!
(573)

I have looked in detail at the senex amator in the belief that it will have thrown considerable light on the range of variation which can be applied to a seemingly stock character in a stock situation. It is true that all seven of the senes examined have fallen for a young girl, and that certain patterns have emerged—the ridicule with which their attempts are viewed; the imagery which suggests that they are motivated largely by animal passion; the childish behaviour and the reversion to the love-language of their youth. The fact remains though that all their cases are different. At the very sketchiest level we have one who desires his son's mistress through having helped the son to her in the first place, behind his wife's back; one who desires a girl as soon as he has seen her, though he went there in the first place to complain against her; one who accompanies him and is at first scandalized, but himself eventually and reluctantly succumbs when the girl turns on her charms specifically to placate him; there is a little picture of an old man who pathetically turns everything he hears from the lips of the girl he desires into what he wants to hear, before turning round and abusing her; there is an old man who will stop at nothing, and is prepared to degrade himself to any lengths, to encompass his desires, and underlines for us just how unsavoury his passion is by seemingly enjoying making sexual attempts at his slave (male), in the belief that this will induce his slave to help him; another senex sets himself up as rival to his son, without either of them being aware of the other's sexual intentions; and finally one who seeks to cure his loneliness and lust by indicating that he expects others to find women for him, as a reward for favours he claims he has done.

All seven in the end share one desire. All seven arrive at the situation by different routes, and attempt to fulfil their desires by different methods. It is the variety achieved within one basic situation which makes this such a fascinating study, suggesting as it does that in Plautus there is far more subtlety of approach and execution than that playwright is usually credited with.¹²

Notes

References to the text are from OCT⁹ (Oxford, 1959).

¹Asin. 15ff., 42ff., 62ff, 85ff.

²Asin. 88ff.

³Asin. 333ff.

⁴ The Prologue tells us that Demophilus wrote the original of this play (Onagos), and of course it is possible that Plautus here has merely translated what he found before him; even if that is the case, the fact that he has kept what he found (we know from elsewhere that he was quite capable of changing his source material) argues an appreciation of the balance anyway.

⁵Asin. 864ff.

⁶ Lewis & Short: 'Addictus: one who has been given up or made over as servant to his creditor.'

⁷ One enjoys the irony of course, as it is this very corrupting influence that the old man has gone there to complain about in the first place.

⁸ Walter E. Forehand, 'Plautus' Casino: an Explication', Arethusa 6 (1973), 233-56.

⁹ Jane M. Cody, 'The senex amator in Plautus' Casino', Hermes 104 (1976), 453-76.

¹⁰ Op. cit., passim: Lysidamus is 'only concerned with encompassing his plans for his lechery' (238). 'This old fool develops no qualities or explanations to win even a small measure of our sympathy' (242). 'The old man is a lecher, pure and simple, without redeeming virtues' (244). 'He is a lecher to the manner born' (245). ' … the old man remains a thoroughly objectionable character from beginning to end' (253).

¹¹Oxford Latin Dictionary (1983).

¹² Much has been written concerning morality in general, and adultery in particular, in Ancient Athens, and one has to conclude that the dice were very heavily stacked against the woman. Two very readable and authoritative accounts appear in W. K. Lacey, The Family in Classical Greece (London, 1968), and A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens (Oxford, 1968). There seems not to be available the same quantity of authoritative information concerning Rome, and what there is mostly covers the late Republic and after. Presumably, though, adultery in old men must have been a recognizable and fairly commonplace feature of Roman life in Plautus' own day for the situations created in the plays to have had any comic point.