SOURCE: Roland G. Kent, "Variety and Monotony in Plautine Plots, in Philological Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 3, July, 1923, pp. 164-72.

[In the following essay, Kent outlines what is often said to be the "typical" Plautine plot and identifies the ways in which Plautus's plays vary from this stereotype.]

The amusing comedies of Plautus, despite their great influence on the comedy of later times,¹ have suffered diminished favor with the readers of Latin, to some extent, perhaps, because they are regarded as a low form of literature,² even apart from the indecencies of language and of situation in which certain of the plays abound, but even more, I suspect, because the several plays are believed to be only minor variations on one typical plot.

This plot would be summarized about as follows:³ An unmarried young man of good family, often during the absence of his father, has fallen in love with a slave-girl of dubious or more than dubious character, whom he desires to purchase from her owner and keep as his mistress. He is aided in his attempt to get the necessary funds, by a rascally slave; but his father, returning home (if indeed he had been away), detects the son and the slave in their schemes, and seeks to thwart them, though sometimes he remembers his own not impeccable youth and helps his son. In either instance, the young man's mother opposes the aims of her own husband. There is usually a rival for the girl's favors, not infrequently in the character of a miles gloriosus or braggart soldier. The play ends with the victory of the young man, while the young woman is often found to be of free birth and wrongly held in slavery, and her character is then redeemed by marriage to her lover. The scene of the action is usually Athens.

There are twenty plays of Plautus which have come down to us complete or so nearly complete that their plots may be analyzed with certainty. Let us examine them in the light of our typical plot:

1. An unmarried young man of good family: not true of the Amphitruo, the Casina (so far as the play itself is concerned), the Menaechmi, the Persa (where the hero is a slave), the Stichus (which has two young men, with their wives).

2. Often in the absence of the father: true only of the Mostellaria and of the Trinummus (here only the father of the secondary young man has been away). There are other absences: of the husband of the heroine, in the Amphitruo; of the young hero, in the Epidicus and in the Captivi; of the young man who is ultimately to marry the heroine, though that is not part of the story itself, in the Casina; of the slave-hero's master, in the Persa; of the husbands of the two heroines, in the Stichus.

3. Has fallen in love with a slave-girl of dubious or more than, dubious character: true of the Asinaria, the Bacchides, the Epidicus, the Miles, the Mostellaria, the Pseudolus, the Truculentus; and with qualifications, of the Menaechmi and the Persa. In the Casina and in the Mercator, the heroine is a slave-girl in a private family. In the Cistellaria, the Curculio, the Poenulus, and the Rudens, the heroine is a prospective meretrix who proves to be of free birth.

4. Whom he desires to purchase from her owner and keep as his mistress; not true of the Amphitruo, the Aulularia, the Captivi, the Casina, the Menaechmi, the Mercator, the Stichus, the Trinummus.

5. He is aided by a rascally slave: the hero always does have the assistance of a slave, though his energies are not always directed along dishonest channels.

6. In an attempt to get the necessary funds: true of the Asinaria, the Bacchides, the Curculio, the Epldicus, the Mostellaria, the Persa, the Pseudolus.

7. The father detects the son and the slave in their schemes: the father is not a character in the Amphitruo, the Aulularia, the Captivi, the Curculio, the Menaechmi, the Miles, the Persa, the Poenulus, the Rudens, the Stichus, the Truculentus.

8. And seeks to thwart them: true of the Cistellaria, the Epidicus, the Mostellaria, the Pseudolus. The father is opponent and rival in the Bacchides, the Casina, the Mercator.

9. Though sometimes he remembers his own not impeccable youth: true of the Asinaria, the Bacchides, the Casina, the Cistellaria, the Epidicus, the Mercator, the Mostellaria.

10. And helps his son: true only of the Asinaria, where the father is rival also, and of the Trinummus, which is a play of honorable love.

11. In either instance, the young man's mother opposes the aims of her husband: this feature is found only in the Asinaria and in the Casina, while a slight variation of it occurs in the Mercator.

12. There is usually a rival for the girl's favor: this is not the case in the Captivi (where there is no love-story), the Cistellaria, the Menaechmi (with a qualification), the Mostellaria, the Persa, the Rudens.

13. Not infrequently in the character of a miles gloriosus or braggart soldier: such is the case in the Bacchides, the Curculio, the Epidicus, the Miles, the Poenulus, the Pseudolus, the Truculentus, though the soldier sometimes plays a very unimportant part in the action, or even does not come upon the scene at all. Other rivalries are found on the part of the young man's father, or of another youth; less often of the young man's uncle, of the heroine's husband, of a fellow-slave.

14. The play ends with the victory of the young man: for various reasons, this can be called true only in part, or not at all, of the Amphitruo, the Bacchides, the Captivi, the Menaechmi, the Stichus, the Truculentus.

15. While the young woman is often found to be of free birth and wrongly held in slavery, and her character is then redeemed by marriage to her lover: this is true of the Casina, the Cistellaria, the Curculio, the Epidicus, the Poenulus, the Rudens.

16. The scene of the action is usually Athens: so in twelve of the twenty plays. The Amphitruo is laid at Thebes; the Captivi in Aetolia, which seems to be a city; the Cistellaria at Sicyon; the Curculio at Epidaurus; the Menaechmi at Epidamnus; the Miles at Ephesus; the Poenulus at Calydon; the Rudens at Cyrene.

Possibly the variations from our typical plot become clearer if we see how many points the plays score, out of the total sixteen; the highest possible score is fifteen, since points eight and ten are mutually exclusive. The Asinaria and the Epidicus each score thirteen, having eleven points in common; yet they are very unlike, for the Asinaria centers about the father's assistance to his son in cheating the rich mother out of the necessary sum of money and the discovery of the father by the uxor dotata at an unrestrained banquet with the girl, which was the price of his assistance to his son, and the Epidicus deals with a young man with two girls on his hands, a twofold swindling of the father, and a series of mistaken identities. The Mostellaria scores eleven, the Bacchides ten, the Pseudolus nine. A number of the plays score eight, but it is hardly worth while to list them, for not infrequently a play will show a feature in such a way that it is hard to say whether it is to be counted. Thus in the Epidicus the youth is freed of the one girl by finding that she is his own long lost half-sister, and he is free to keep the other as his mistress, she being frankly a meretrix, while the half-sister was a war-captive.

The plays may also be grouped by the heroines and the outcomes, in a way which will bring out the differences even more effectively.

I. The heroines are professional meretrices, held by a leno or by a lena: Asin., Epid., Miles, Most, Persa, Pseud.

a. She is sought and won by an adulescens of good family. In the Most., the youth purchases her in his father's absence, and has his difficulties when the father returns. In the Pseud., the girl is secured by an impersonation and some borrowed money, afterward repaid by the father as the result of a sporting bet that he would repay any money which the tricky slave might that day secure by his swindling. In the Epid., as we have said, the young man gets two girls on his hands, but when he finds that his war-captive is his own half-sister, he returns to his mistress, whom his slave had purchased for him in his absence on the campaign. In the Miles, the youth follows the girl to Ephesus, whither she has been taken by a miles, and with the assistance of a jolly old bachelor secures her without loss of money. In the Asin., the youth buys the girl for one year, with the assistance of his father, who bargains for a share of her favors, but is haled away just in time by his justly enraged wife.

b. She is bought and freed by a slave: Persa. The slave-hero swindles the leno himself out of the sum which he has taken temporarily from his own master's funds, which were to be spent fcr the purchase of cattle.

II. The heroines are free professional meretrices: Bac, Men., True. In the Bac, there are two sisters, loved by two youths; but the sisters lure also the fathers of the young men into rivalry with them. In the Men., the meretrix is finally deserted not only by her lover, but by his twin brother, whom none had been able to dis tinguish from one another. In the Truc., the meretrix has three lovers, none of whom she is willing to relinquish, though the hero of the play has become betrothed to the girl whom he has wronged, and the miles who had been her lover is evidently eager to escape from her blackmailing.

III. The heroine is a slave in the household of her master: Cas., Merc

a. She retains her slave status in the Merc, where she was purchased by the hero from a friend of his father, who was his host while he was traveling as a trader. On his return, the father tries to get the girl for himself, but after some merry misunderstandings he withdraws his claims.

b. She is sought by father and by son, in the Cas., as wife for a personal slave, which would then give the slave-husband's owner special claims upon her; but she is later found to be of free birth, and becomes the wife of the son.

IV. The heroine is a prospective meretrix, held by a leno or by a lena, but is really of free birth, as is later discovered: Cist, Cure, Poen., Rud. In the Cist., the girl is proved to be free by some crepundia, and is restored to her parents; she has already been living with her lover, but had run away from him because his father had wished to betroth him to a daughter of a friend. In the Rud., her freedom is proved by the same means, and she is similarly restored to her parents; but she had previously been quite inaccessible to the youth. In the Poen., the leno's slave betrays the truth about her origin, and her father comes in search of her. In the Cure, she recognizes a ring now belonging to a miles who desires to purchase her, as her own father's ring. In all these cases, the play ends with a prospect of legal marriage.

In the Epid., a similar discovery is made, but as the girl proves to be the young man's half-sister, the revelation merely sends him back to his first love.

V. The heroine is a free girl who has been wronged by the hero of the play and has born him a baby; when the facts are established, he marries her: Aul. In this play the hero's elderly bachelor uncle seeks to marry the girl, but withdraws in favor of his nephew. There is a similar situation in the Truc., where the hero is infatuated with a meretrix, but leaves her to marry the mother of his child, which had been stolen and used by the meretrix in an attempt to get money from one of her former lovers, a miles.

VI. The heroine is a free girl, sought by an honorable lover, and there is no problem but that of dower: Trin.

VII. The heroines are two sisters, young wives, faithful to their long absent husbands; there is a secondary story of the loves of two slaves for their fellow-slave Stephanium: Stichus.

VIII. The heroine is a wife, deceived by Jupiter's assumption of her husband's appearance: Amph.

IX. There is no love-story in the play: Capt.

Even this division does not bring out fully the diversity of the plots of the Plautine plays; and a survey of the chief features of each play will be a fitting supplement to what has been said.⁴ In the first place, there are four plays which are not only very different from all the other plays but also from each other. The Amphitruo is a travesty on the story of Jupiter and Alcmena, and finds its interest in the confusion of Jupiter and Amphitruo, and of their respective attendants, Mercury and Sosia; a confusion which is intensified by the ability of the god to divine the story of the mortal husband and to perform miracles of theft without breaking seals. A satisfactory conclusion is effected by the god's intervention in propria persona. The Menaechmi, with the twin brothers of identical appearance, is similar only in this point; for neither brother suspects the presence of the other, while Jupiter is aware of the doings of Amphitruo, and the Menaechmus of Epidamnus has both wife and mistress, both of whom he leaves at the close of the play, while Amphitruo has only a wife, with whom he becomes reconciled.

The third of these special plays is the Captivi, which has no love-story at all, but is a comedy of war-captivity and ransom, complicated by the exchange of characters by a free youth and his devoted slave, who had fallen together into the hands of the foe. The fourth is the Stichus, where two young wives remain faithful to their long absent husbands, despite their father's urgent pleadings that they remarry. There is also the comedy of the loves of two slaves for their fellow-slave-woman; but the plot is extremely slight, and perhaps centers more about the persistent failure of the parasitus to secure even a suggestion of an invitation to a dinner.

The Trinummus distinguishes itself by being a play of reasonably polite circles, as it contains no disreputable characters, except the brother of the heroine; but his profligacy is brought in only as the explanation of his inability to dower his sister properly when a very suitable proposal for her hand is made. The play resolves itself into a study in the problem of dower: the attitude of the lover, that of the lover's father, that of the girl's brother, that of the girl's father's friend, and finally that of the girl's father himself, who returns from abroad just in time to set matters aright. The Aulularia also has a problem of dower, but its interest centers about the terrors of the old miser, the girl's father, lest he lose his precious aula of money.

The Rudens stands out by itself for its seaside atmosphere, with its fishermen and its shipwreck, the casting ashore of the girls in the storm and their seeking refuge in the temple from which their owner seeks to tear them. The recognition of the heroine's freedom by her crepundia suggests, it is true, the Cistellaria; but this play is very different, for the heroine has been living with her lover and has deserted him when she hears that his father has betrothed him to the daughter of a friend; and the series of events which results in the discovery that she is really a half-sister of the other girl is very different from the events of the Rudens.

The Casina also stands by itself, with the sham marriage in which the husky young Chalinus is substituted for the fair young Casina, to the confusion of the bridegroom Olympio and of Olympio's master; though it ends in one of the conventional ways, with a discovery of her free birth and her marriage to the youth who loves her. The Poenulus is distinguished by the character of the old Carthaginian Hanno, seeking his lost daughters, and talking Punic to the amusement of his audience. The Miles is a study in the character of the braggart soldier, who believes himself irresistible in love, and allows himself to be deceived at every turn, even to the losing of his mistress and to his being caught in an amour with one whom he supposed to be his neighbor's wife.

The Curculio is distinguished by the nocturnal visit of the youth to the house where the girl is living, and the enticing forth of the drunken ianitrix Leaena by the fumes of the wine poured on the doorsill; by the deception of the miles and the discovery that the miles is the girl's brother, and the final requirement that the leno must refund the money paid for the girl. The Pseudolus is in certain points similar to the Curculio, but centers around the leno Ballio and his school of courtesans, and the promise of the youth's father to repay any sums which his son's slave might secure by trickery that day, a promise which he felt sure he would never have to make good. The Mostellaria is built around the concealment of the youth and his friend and their mistresses in a house which is locked and apparently unoccupied, under pretense of its being haunted, and the reputed purchase of the neighbor's house, which leads to many amusing contretemps. The Epidicus is a drama of a youth with two young women on his hands, and a series of mistaken identities. The Mercator represents the youth as bringing home from his business voyage an attractive young slave girl, whom his father desires for himself, and places in the home of his own aged comrade, where that comrade's wife, suddenly returning from the country, suspects her husband of misconduct.

The Persa is, as has often been remarked, a play without a single respectable character: a play in which a slave purchases and sets free his mistress, "borrowing" some of his absent master's money for the purpose until he replaces it by selling to the leno the daughter of a parasitus as a foreign war-captive of unguaranteed slave-status, who is then reclaimed as free, while the leno apparently must bear the loss without possibility of redress. The Truculentus is a drama of a free meretrix with three lovers whom she strives more or less successfully to keep entangled in her toils. The Bacchides is a play of the wiles of two sisters, meretrices, who by a mistaken identity cause their lovers to quarrel with each other, and then finally entice their lovers' fathers into rivalry with their sons. Finally, the Asinaria shows a dissolute father with a rich wife, helping his son to cheat his wife and to secure his mistress in return for a first share in her favors, in which he is thwarted by his wife's appearance on the scene.

In these plays we certainly find as great diversity of plot as in an equal number of plays or novels of the present time, analyzed in the same way, if allowance be made for the conditions of society and of scenic production. Both of these factors restricted choice and the treatment of the themes; but the infrequency of production of the plays made certain kinds of similarities less objectionable to audiences. Further, the rapid ity of the spoken dialogue is commonly forgotten by us moderns, who spread the reading of a Plautine play over days or weeks, while the ancient audience heard the complete play in two hours or less. When we read a whole play at a sitting, we do not feel the dragging of the movement nor the monotony of certain portions nor the use of similar devices; we get a keen impression of a witty dialogue, abounding in unexpected turns, which we enjoy quite in proportion to our ability to understand it quickly. Latin becomes then a truly living language, with natural turns of expression, and the apparatus for conveying all the ordinary ideas and thoughts of normal life of any time of the world's history. Plautus's plays are, therefore, deserving of much more attention from readers of Latin than they normally receive; and if they suffer from a reputation for similarity to one another, as I think they do, they suffer this wrongly.

Terence normally has two love-stories in every play; in the Hecyra, where alone this is lacking, the young man has two love-affairs, one with his wife, whom he had wronged before marriage without knowledge of her identity, and the other with a meretrix, who at the end is quite willing to bring about a reconciliation between him and his wife. This, then, is a combination of our Types I and V, with the same adulescentes in both. The Andria has loves of Types V and VI; the Eunuchus, of Types II and V (nearly); the Heauton Timorumenos, of Types IV and I, in the latter of which the youth abandons the meretrix for an honest marriage to a girl not previously mentioned. The Phormio has Types I and VI, the marriage taking place before the beginning of the play; the Adelphoe has Types I and V.

But these stories may be classified, or rather described, by some central theme. The Andria shows the youth consenting to an undesired marriage because he does not expect it to be acceptable to his future father-inlaw when certain facts become known. The Heauton Timorumenos shows the stern father repenting his sternness toward his son, which has driven that son away from home, and finally for this reason consenting to all manner of extravagance and irregularity: The Eunuchus shows a young lover disguised as a slave-eunuch, that he may gain access to his love. The Phormio presents a marriage based on a fraudulent application of the nearest-of-kin law, which turns out to be a true application. The Hecyra gives a separation between a newly married couple, for which the mother-in-law is wrongly blamed. The Adelphoe shows the outcome of strictness and of laissez-faire in the education of youth. The differences are truly impressive.

In the plays of Menander of which we have sufficient portions for the restoration of the plots, mainly through the happy discovery of papyrus copies in recent years, we find that in all cases the young woman is the mistress or the victim of the young man who later marries her. The Epitrepontes gives a situation much like that of Terence's Hecyra. The Samia presents the amour of a youth and a free girl, with their marriage after the facts about their baby have become known to the youth's adoptive father; the adoptive father himself has a housekeeper-mistress of supposedly foreign origin, who probably is found to be of Attic descent and therefore eligible to the position of legal wife. The Epiceiromene is the story of a poor girl, the mistress of a miles, who became jealous at seeing the advances of another youth who turns out to be her brother; and the miles marries her when her parentage is established. The Hero is the story of a foundling girl, who with her brother is working as a slave to pay off certain debts; she has been wronged by a youth of good birth and is sought in marriage by a fellow-slave, willing to overlook the matter, but when she and her brother are found to be the children of the master for whom they are working, a legal marriage with her free lover is in prospect. The Georgos, though somewhat more fragmentary, gives us a poor girl who has been wronged, but is later regularly betrothed to the young man.

In all three authors, it should be insisted, the variety is essentially in the treatment of the theme rather than in the theme itself; and yet the themes or plots have their own essential differences. In these plots, Plautus shows greater variety than either Terence or Menander: we speak of necessity on the basis of plays extant entire or in sufficient amount for the formation of a judgment. The two Roman dramatists were drawing from a large stock of Greek plays, and the greater variety in the Plautine plays may indicate that Plautus showed better judgment in the selection of his sources, than did the more polished, but less lively Terence.

In championing the reading of Plautus, of Terence and of Menander, perhaps one should speak of the moral tendencies or otherwise of the plays.⁵ Fairly rough and unrestrained they may be, but they represent at least the best morality of their time.

Notes

¹ Cf. for example Fowler's edition of the Menaechmi, pp. 26-8, with references to previous literature, and especially Karl von Reinhardstoettner, Plautus, Spätere Bearbeitungen plautinischer Lustspiele, 1886.

² Cf. W. W. Blancké, The Dramatic Values in Plautus, 1918.

³ Cf. for example the introductions of E. P. Morris to the Pseudolus, p. ii, and to the Mostellaria, pp. xiv-xix.

⁴ A detailed consideration is to be found in G. Michaut, Histoire de la comédie romaine, Vol. II, pp. 98-159.

⁵ Cf. Lamarre, Histoire de la littérature latine, Vol. II, pp. 473-488.