SOURCE: Willam S. Anderson, in Barbarian Play: Plautus ' Roman Comedy, University of Toronto Press, 1993, 179 p.

[In the following two chapters from his book-length analysis of Plautus's work, Anderson first examines the way in which Plautus subverts the conventional love plot in order to transform Greek romantic comedy into Roman comedy. Next, Anderson traces the development of the concept of "heroic badness "—the immoral tendencies shared by humanity and acted on by Plautus's "heroic rogues "—throughout Plautus's comedies.]

Plautus' Plotting: The Lover Upstaged

When classical scholars began to develop an interest in New Comedy, then to pursue that interest with fervour under the stimulus of the new papyrus finds of this century, they themselves were living in a period of sentimentality. Tastes in the Anglo-American cultures agreed with the romantic ideals of Victorian society, and parallel romanticism affected the judgment of other European classicists. Thus, it is common to find in general comments on New Comedy that the plot focused on love: 'The central theme was usually the course of true love, and the action depicted the efforts of a youth to obtain possession of his mistress, often in the face of the determined opposition of a parent or guardian, and with the assistance of a tricky slave.'¹ Even the diction of this sentence by Ashmore, which dates from 1910, sounds Victorian. Once it became conventional to treat New Comedy as romantic comedy, it also became easy to see how it anticipated the romantic plots of Renaissance, Italian, and Shakespearean comedy² and how it has continued to exert its influence on the romantic scenarios of Hollywood (especially of the 1930s and 1940s) and of the various so-called situation comedies (sitcoms) of postwar television.

Although I am suggesting that classical scholars, children of their own sentimental age, were predisposed to find and value romantic love plots in Greek New Comedy and to minimize the significance of exceptions, I hasten to add that earlier ages, also sentimentally inclined, made the same generalizations. It was a commonplace, for instance, that love was the 'breath of life' in Menander's plays. Ovid said it in the first decade of the first century AD (as he defended his own use of love topics in his poetry): fabula iucundi nulla est sine amove Menandri ('No play of delightful Menander exists without love'). Later, in the same century, Plutarch, a great admirer of the Greek playwright, declared that in every play of Menander the breath of life comes from love. The sententious and sentimental Stobaeus cited Plutarch's comments with full approval in the sixth century.³ Plutarch also commented with great admiration on the propriety of Menander's love plots. Menander always left his audiences with a good feeling about love, an optimism about marriage and the commitments of mutual affection.⁴

Plautus did not agree with Menander on this point, as on so many others, and in this chapter I review the ways in which he sabotaged the love plot and its amatory themes and upstaged the lover, determined not to write romantic comedy but Roman comedy with an emphasis on humour derived from intrigue, roguery, wit, and outright romantic parody. We can watch him taking the Menandrian originals, which centred their attention on the positive worth of love, and warping them into a new anti-romantic theme. The changes which he introduced in The Double-Deceiver, as he adapted it into the Bacchides, involved, among other things, denying the fathers the authority to control their sons' irresponsible love and instead subjecting them to the same irresponsible urges as their immature progeny. Plautus' final scene does not point towards responsible domestic love, but towards sexual promiscuity.⁵

The two fathers, Nicobulus and Philoxenus, storm up to the house of the courtesans where their two sons, they now know, are royally entertaining themselves with the money fraudulently gained from Nicobulus. When the two Bacchides open the door at their loud pounding, angry Nicobulus faces one, and the other makes Philoxenus, a milder and more impressionable old man, her target. As the women seductively tease the men, Philoxenus begins to melt. Here is the conversation of the two greybeards: Philoxenus: 'Do you see that one?' Nicobulus: 'Yes.' Philoxenus: 'That's a woman who's not bad.' Nicobulus: 'Damn it, she is bad, and you're a scoundrel.' Philoxenus: 'Why waste words? I love her.' Nicobulus: 'You in love?' Philoxenus: 'Certainly' (spoken in ostentatious Greek, like French mais oui). Nicobulus: 'You decrepit human being, do you dare to become a lover at your age?' Philoxenus: 'Why not?' Plautus has let these characters bandy around the word for love—amare—as their theme, but the context makes a joke of Philoxenus' foolish infatuation. In the two different connotations of the word mala ('bad,' lines 1161-2), he produces a clever comic assessment of this love. Whereas Philoxenus ignores entirely the ethical nature of the courtesan and sees only her physical attractions and her pleasing manner, Nicobulus insists on her essential badness. But … a woman's badness (malitia) has special positive value in Plautus' world, and so, although Philoxenus is weak and ridiculous in 'loving' his Bacchis, he also strikes the Roman audience as thoroughly in line with the comic 'virtues' supported by Plautus: not romantic love, but sensual love that can be gratified by old and young alike.

Did Greek New Comedy Always Feature Romantic Love?

Before I examine the ways in which Plautus lets the lover be upstaged, it would be well to modify somewhat the seemingly stark opposition between what I have called the romantic love of Menander (and, by implication, of all Greek New Comedy) and the anti-romantic, Roman enjoyment of sensual love in Plautus. Although it may be convenient to attribute to the Greek writers of comedy a single sentimental attitude towards love, even our fragmentary acquaintance with Menander's main rivals obliges us to admit that they treated love differently. Whereas Menander built up plots where love meant a serious commitment and ultimately found deserved success in marriage and family, love breathed a different life in Philemon's and Diphilos' comedies.

Charinus of Philemon's Emporos (Plautus' Merchant) does not win the sympathy and interest of the audience in the way that Menander's lovers do.⁶ He seems so helpless and so full of histrionic, 'tragical' self-pity, and his love, for a courtesan whom he has rashly bought, has no possibility of depth or long duration. In his opening soliloquy, he talks at length of all the faults (vitia) that accompany love (lines 18 ff). But this interminable and one-sided list is introduced by the statement that Charinus fell in love with a woman of outstanding loveliness while trading on Rhodes. Thus, his words about love's faults seem inconsistent with his confession of love: evidently, he does not really accept the fact that love amounts to a catalogue of negative qualities. But he has nothing very cogent to say about love on the positive side, and the woman he has suddenly become enamored with cannot offer him a lasting relationship such as those developed by Menander. Charinus will never be able to marry her, a foreigner and experienced prostitute. Nor does the love become any more valid when his foolish father suddenly abandons his strict principles and becomes Charinus' unknown rival. Philemon plots this love so as to create tensions between father and son, and between the two friends, and those tensions and resolutions constitute his primary interest: love is, in certain respects, only a comic gimmick.

Love occupies a still smaller part in the plot of Philemon's Treasure (Plautus' Trinummus), subordinate to the confusions of friendship between the two young men and the bumbling but well-meaning efforts of the older generation. Lesbonicus is no lover at all, and his friend Lysiteles seems to want to marry Lesbonicus' sister more out of friendship for Lesbonicus than for any affection for the girl (who is not allowed to appear on stage and impress the audience with the reality of this future wife). Like Charinus in Emporos, Lysiteles produces a soliloquy about love on his first entrance (lines 223 ff), and it also lays out the destructive, costly features of love. Lysiteles debates whether to commit his life to love or to practical advantage. As he slants it, there is no contest: Plautus makes him pun and say that love produces bitterness (Amor amara dat tamen, line 260), and that it will be no 'friend' of his (Amor, mihi amicus ne fuas umquam, line 267). Then, with an inconsequence that Plautus probably exaggerated, this same serious, practical, and reasonable young man suddenly proposes to his father (presumably the source of such wisdom on love) that he marry the dowerless sister of his chum Lesbonicus, merely as an act of friendship! We might think of this self-contradictory soliloquy on love's disadvantages, spoken by a young man who is taking on those admitted disadvantages, as a hallmark of Philemon and an indication of his special comic diminution of love and irrational lovers.⁷

Plautus … preserves the main lines of two comedies of Diphilos in his Rudens and Casina⁸ Neither makes significant use of romantic love. In the first, young Plesidippus does love the pseudo meretrix Palaestra, who eventually proves to be the long-lost daughter of Daemones and therefore marriageable. How little love contributes to plot and theme emerges clearly from the petty role of Plesidippus, the total lack of contact between the 'lovers' on stage, the absence of any words of love from either, and the careful attention devoted to other delightful details—namely, the wild behaviour and punishment of the pimp; the somewhat parodie Recognition; and all the comic excitement generated by the trunk, the rope, and the conflict of Gripus first with his fellow slave, then with the infamous pimp. If love is the breath of life for Menandrian comedy, for Diphilos it is a momentary gasp.

In the Casina (Diphilos' Lot-Drawers), young love has been removed from the play, so that the comedy can concentrate with raucous laughter on the crude lust of elderly Lysidamus, the witty obstruction and punishment contrived by the 'heroic' wife Cleustrata, and the rivalry between the slaves which Diphilos hilariously dramatizes in his inimitable scene of drawing lots. The Latin play now carries the name of the young girl who is the object of Lysidamus' lust (and supposedly of the honourable love of the absent son), but she never appears, and the title—which may replace Plautus' title, Sortientes, a translation of the Greek (line 32)—might well remind us of how far Diphilos has allowed himself to stray from the conventional romantic love-and-recognition plot. In short, Greek New Comedy does not present a standard attitude towards love: Menander tends to emphasize its humane qualities, both bad and good, and to plot his plays so that the lover earns a loving relationship by learning responsibility and commitment to family; Philemon isolates certain sententious views about love's disadvantages, then plays with somewhat foolish young and older lovers who nevertheless fall in love and cause complications that increasingly interest him; Diphilos rather quickly marginalizes love, in order to free himself to use his broader sense of comedy on more obviously funny situations, especially the brawling of slaves, the beating of pimps, and even the physical humiliation of wayward masters.

Plautus and Love that Eventuates in Marriage

The standard romantic plot, of which Menander made himself supreme master and which Terence regularly employed after Plautus, takes marriage seriously and channels love towards that recognized social institution. Usually, an impetuous and irresponsible lover, in the course of the drama, comes to recognize his personal and social duties so that the love, which seemed doomed by his choice of female partner—courtesan (who in fact will locate her father and so become a legitimate choice for wife), virginal victim of his sexual assault, or virgin daughter in a family of slight financial means—becomes earned and worthy of ratification in marriage. We know of a few plots, too, that involve a young couple in their first year of marriage—such as Menander's Arbitrants and Terence's Mother-in-Law (adapted from an original by Apollodoros)—and in which an act of rape before marriage, which results in an early pregnancy after marriage, has to be dealt with. (The rape occurred under amazing conditions—drunkenness and darkness—so that neither rapist nor victim can recognize the other afterwards; and by sheer coincidence the rapist and his victim have married each other, in ignorant good faith on both parts. Since being married for these few months has brought genuine love, the plot works to preserve marriage, love, and the family, i.e., the new baby.)

Plautus does not favour plots that channel love into marriage, and even those that he adapts from his Greek sources he alters so that neither love nor marriage becomes the true goal of the action or the romantic end that his Roman audience desires. Only five of his twenty comedies proceed towards marriage (Aulularia, Cistellaria, Curculio, Poenulus, and Rudens).⁹ Of these, only Aulularia involves a virgin who has been raped; the others portray the complications of a love that has been initiated with a courtesan who later proves to be the long-lost daughter of an Athenian, either kidnapped or abandoned as an infant, and, when 'recognized' during the play, capable of reintregration into legitimate society, and thus of happy marriage. Let us see what Plautus does with both these plot types and the ways in which he upstages the lover.

The Pregnant Virgin: Aulularia

In comedies where the initial complication is rape by an impetuous lover, the girl never appears, and her voice is heard only once: when she cries out with labour pains (e.g., Aulularia, lines 691-2).¹⁰ What love emerges, therefore, depends on the words and character of the young man and on the indirect description of others. Menander employed a significant device in The Samian Woman to introduce the lover and the serious quality of his commitment from the beginning: he had Moschion speak the prologue, explain the background, admit his rape, and sketch out the difficulties that were interfering with his determination to marry the girl and assume the role of father. In the Aulularia, a Household God delivers the prologue, and he concentrates on the miserly tradition of Euclio's family background. Euclio has a daughter who has proved to be a striking exception to the family's avarice: she has been reverent towards the god and has won his favor. Out of concern for her, the god has started the chain of circumstances that will lead to her happy marriage, one of love and financial security. The girl has been raped at a nighttime festival of Ceres, and, although the god does not admit that as part of his plan, he exploits the crime for her benefit. What he does insist is his doing is: a / Euclio's discovering a treasure buried by his grandfather; b / a rich older man, the uncle of the rapist, asking to marry the pious and seemingly virginal daughter. The girl has not recognized her assailant in the night, but the rapist, Lyconides, does know her identity and will (by the god's plan) marry her. What is lacking in this prologue is any clear indication of the young man's feelings and intentions.

Plautus might have remedied that lack and placed the theme of serious love in a key position in the play, had he desired to, by bringing Lyconides on early to declare his feelings in soliloquy or to indicate them in a scene with one of the principal characters.¹¹ But Plautus does not wish to distract himself or the audience with what he regards as insignificant and negligible amatory issues. He refuses to equalize the roles of the miser Euclio and the lover Lyconides so as to bring about a reasonable reconciliation of these two antagonistic irresponsibilities. Because the miser plays into his own comic sensibilities, whereas the lover leaves him largely alienated, Plautus lets Euclio upstage Lyconides, and he turns the play into a lively, hilarious comedy about a mad miser.

Lyconides first appears on stage after the mid-point of the plot development (lines 682 ff). In a short scene, which omits all mention of love and feelings (and, I assume, has been radically cut by Plautus), the 'lover' indicates that he has just confessed all to his mother and urged her to intercede with his uncle so that the older man will abandon his marriage plans. At precisely this critical point, the girl goes into labour, and the urgency of Lyconides' request becomes even more obvious. In fewer than twenty lines, he has departed, with no convincing words about the girl; his last five lines refer to his anxiety about his slave, and represent a bridge to the slave's entrance. (The slave has managed to steal Euclio's pot of gold and is carrying it off to his master.)

Lyconides does have one important scene before the manuscript became damaged and so deprived us of the final act. Euclio rushes on stage first, shrieking bloody murder and performing a wonderful routine with the lyric metres and language Plautus has invented for him. When Lyconides hears him howling outside his home, he comes out to see what is the matter, and the key scene (lines 731-807) begins. Up to this point, Euclio has hardly noticed his daughter and, incredibly but most significantly, he does not know that she has been raped or that she has become pregnant or that now she has given birth. For him, the loss of his gold alone counts. In contrast, Lyconides knows nothing about the treasure yet, and he concentrates exclusively on the marriage he desires. Thus, Plautus creates here the finest ancient example of comic cross-purposes and incomprehension (which so fascinated Molière and his admirer, the comic theorist Bergson).¹² Since Lyconides assumes that Euclio exclaims 'tragically' over the birth of his grandchild, he quickly confesses to the crime (facinus, line 733). But Euclio focuses on a different 'crime' and knows nothing of his domestic crisis. So the naïve honesty of Lyconides serves mainly to expose the weird extremism of a miser who has entirely ignored his daughter, who has cherished his pot of gold and tried to conceal it but never noticed the growing pregnancy of the girl—what we might call a more precious 'treasure.'¹³ In the course of his misunderstood confession, Lyconides declares that he acted under the force of love and wine (line 745), but Euclio angrily rejects such an excuse.

Having dismissed all discussion of love, Euclio soon breaks the comic framework of incomprehension by charging Lyconides with outright theft (line 759). Hereupon, Lyconides asserts himself for the first time in the play, and Euclio yields centre stage to a man of higher social status and wealth, not to a lover. Lyconides reveals to the miser two more disasters to climax the 'tragedy' of his lost treasure: namely, the decision of his uncle to break off marriage arrangements (line 783) and then the details of the rape nine months earlier (lines 790 ff). Assuming complete command of the wailing, seemingly broken old man, Lyconides sends him indoors to talk to his daughter and check on the details of his story. Although the comic extremism of the miser has been brought under some control at the end, Plautus has not balanced it with any convincing emphasis on Lyconides' love. The pot of gold, not the baby, remains the dominant symbol and interest of the comedy. As the manuscript fails, we find Lyconides talking with his slave and learning about the theft. How much Plautus elaborated this situation is unclear; but the slave tries to extort his freedom and is in the process of defying Lyconides when the Latin text ends. Two ancient plot summaries indicate that eventually Lyconides did resume possession of the pot and restored it to the overjoyed Euclio, who then happily assented to the marriage of his daughter.¹⁴ Thus, the comedy ends with the prospect of happy marriage, but Plautus has given Euclio and his avarice the dominant role, a role of such lyric and comic energy that no audience can pay much attention to Lyconides and his love.

The Kidnapped Or Foundling Maiden: Cistellaria and Curculio

The other plot type that led to marriage, when the girl has been kidnapped or abandoned and trapped into the world of prostitution (from which Recognition will rescue her during the play), had an advantage the dramatists quickly appreciated: the girl, not confined by family proprieties, but allowed the 'freedom' and the 'free speech' of the courtesan, could both move and speak in public and thus be shown in situations of dramatic action and dialogue to reveal her personality. Moreover, instead of making the father and family the obstacle to love, this type had the monstrous pimp (or bawd) as a much more unappealing killjoy, and the father became the saviour, the loving parent who searched out the daughter and finally rescued and restored her to happiness. Of the four such plays that Plautus has left us, one, the Rudens, derives from Diphilos; it dealt with a kidnapped girl. I have already sufficiently described the way Diphilos (and Plautus after him) diminished the love element by keeping the lovers apart and eliminating amatory language and themes. A second, the Cistellaria, seems to be a relatively early adaptation from Menander, completed during the Punic War before 200. In its presentation of a very sympathetic foundling, it reveals the anti-romantic Plautus confidently at work, even at that date.¹⁵

In the opening scene, which gave Menander's play its title (The Women Breakfasting Together) Selenium has invited two women to her house, and they chat about life as courtesans before coming to the business at hand, namely, Selenium's misery. Having fallen in love with the first man who hired her services, she has prevailed upon her mother to be allowed to 'live with him' rather than to seek many lovers/customers. For he swears he loves her and will marry her (line 97). This love idyll has lasted a while, but now it has been shattered by the necessity, imposed by his father, that Alcesimarchus, the ardent lover, face reality and marry a very eligible, rich young lady. Selenium is brokenhearted; her companions remark that women are supposed to be heartless (line 66). She laments the bitterness of being in love (line 68), using the same pun as in Trinummus, line 260: eho an amare occipere amarum est, opsecro? At the end of the scene, she goes off, bedraggled and in tears, leaving her courtesan-friend Gymnasium to face the faithless Alcesimarchus. And Gymnasium's mother, a hardened bawd, comments: 'Now that's why I keep pounding it into your ears, never love any man' (lines 116-17). With only a slight touch of cynical realism, Plautus has allowed the love of Selenium to be sympathetically presented, in contrast to the practical courtesans' denial of love and all feeling.

After the chatty details of a verbose delayed prologue, Plautus introduces us to the lover, Alcesimarchus, who has hurried back, he trusts, to Selenium after being kept for six frustratingly tedious days in the country at his father's manor. In an entrance soliloquy, to which Plautus gives his special emphasis by shaping it as a lyric monody, the young man declares at length how wretched he feels. Love, he asserts, must have been the inventor of torture, to judge from his own pains. He exceeds the agonies of all the men in the world (lines 203 ff). By the overstatement, where five Latin verbs replace one Greek, where repetition and alliteration invite us to savour sound more than meaning, and by the rollicking anapaestic metre, Plautus starts the process of undermining Alcesimarchus. From the fragmentary state of the text, it still is possible to infer that, when he found that Selenium had left him, he went momentarily wild in despair (again, comically exaggerated by Plautus), then charged after her to her mother's house.

Finding Selenium there, he tries in vain to explain the situation, but neither she nor her mother wants to listen to his 'lies.' Selenium goes indoors, and Alcesimarchus spends a long time pleading with her mother, Melaenis, to give him a chance to prove that he won't marry the girl his father has chosen for him, that he will remain loyal to Selenium. He launches into a long, incoherent oath, sworn by a series of gods whose relationships he gets wrong, forcing Melaenis to inter rupt repeatedly to correct him. 'You're bewitching me, and that's why I am making these mistakes,' he claims (line 517). When she remains unmoved, his oaths turn into threats, which Plautus also sabotages by Alcesimarchus' own admission of confusion (quid dicam nescio, line 520) and by the comic intrusions he adds. Here are his sworn threats: 'May all the gods, large, small, and even those of the platter [an irreverent reference to the Lares], deny me the chance while alive to kiss the living Selenium, if I don't butcher you both today, you and your daughter [i.e., Selenium!], then if I don't slaughter you both tomorrow at dawn's first light, and finally, by god, if I don't strike you dead in a third assault—unless you send her back to me. There, I've said what I wanted,' (lines 522-7). Anyone who desires to may try to figure out the logic of all that incoherence, all those repeated murders over a kiss, but it is clear that Plautus aims to make the audience laugh at this lover.

Alcesimarchus stalked away and returned to his empty house, full of anger, self-pity, and despair. Soon after, Plautus turns his attention to the process of getting Selenium recognized. Melaenis, who is not after all the natural mother of Selenium, overhears a conversation which enables her to identify the real mother and realize that she cannot hold on to the girl. 'Now,' she says, 'I must be good against my nature, even though I don't want to be' (lines 626-7), and she decides to restore Selenium to her true parents. Therefore, as she and the girl are walking down the street to the home of those parents, they pass Alcesimarchus' house. Without seeing them at first—though perhaps Plautus used some broad pantomime here to indicate otherwise—the desolate lover prepares to commit suicide there in public. As he loudly invokes Death, 'friend and well-wisher' (line 640), Selenium of course notices him and the sword he histrionically brandishes, in this parody of a tragic suicide (such as that of Ajax). She rushes to stop him; he welcomes her as his salvation; he picks her up and hurries back inside his home and orders his slaves to bar the doors. Thus, on the verge of the recognition, love has impetuously and comically asserted itself. This is the last we see of the two lovers.

The remainder of the play focuses on the melodramatic action which accounts for the Plautine title, Cistellaria. In the confusion caused by Alcesimarchus' violent removal of Selenium, the old servant who was carrying the identifying trinkets of the girl in a small casket (cistella) dropped it in the street. Plautus pokes fun at the sentimental stages which lead up to the moment of recognition: the old woman is bumbling; the true mother is tearfully anxious; and the servant is roguish, witty, and ribald. But having got us to this big moment of family reunion, Plautus sends everybody indoors, except the caustic slave Lampadio. He is there to greet the last interested character, the long-lost father of Selenium, who wants to know what is happening. Plautus makes sure we take this scene with suitable amusement. In answer to his master's question, the slave pompously declaims: 'I am delighted to inform you that by my efforts you have acquired more children.' 'That does not please me,' the master grumbles. 'I don't like to have more children created for me by another's effort,' (lines 776-8). And with that mild ribaldry Plautus brings down the curtain in another three lines. Menander's delicate love situation has been mocked; the family reunion has been turned into a ridiculous scene over a casket of trinkets; and finally comes a joke about illegitimate children (from the father who was the original sire of Selenium out of wedlock, as they say). And the lovers are ignored by Plautus for the final 125 lines of the comedy, which prefers to plot out of the play their amatory happiness, saccharine and silly to the playwright and his audience, and instead concentrate on foolery. The lover Alcesimarchus has been upstaged by the impudent slave, the pathetic Selenium by the bumbling old Halisca, and Plautus' new comic emphasis has earned Menander's comedy a new title.

In the Curculio (The Weevil), a play of Plautus' maturity, the love plot and the lover are presented as ridiculous from the opening scene. Again, the girl has been kidnapped as a baby, under the confusion of a storm (lines 644 ff). In this standardized situation, young Phaedromus and his brash slave Palinurus approach the house of a pimp at night. By the dialogue outside, Phaedromus acquaints his cynical slave and us with his silly feelings about love and with the trite details of his infatuation with a young courtesan who, he insists to the incredulous Palinurus, still retains her chastity and has awakened true love in him. Palinurus has no sympathy with such love and mocks all romantic sentiment. Knocking at the door, Phaedromus bribes a bibulous bawd with a jug of wine to let him talk with his beloved Planesium ('The Wandering Girl'). That should have been a brief and incidental bridge scene, but Plautus builds it up into a wonderfully animated comic routine, using his lyric genius to render the rhapsodies of the old soak with her wine and the equally foolish rhapsodies of the lover addressing the closed door. As the one personifies lovingly her wine and the other the bolts of the door, in operatic strains, Plautus and his audience laugh at their folly, the lover's no less than the crone's.

The old bawd leads Planesium anxiously out, trying to avoid any sound for her master the pimp to hear. She puts some water on the door hinges to prevent their creaking, and that provokes the sardonic Palinurus to sneer at her 'medical treatment,': 'She has learned to drink her wine straight, but she gives the doors water to imbibe' (lines 160-1). After that comic crack, Plautus gives Planesium her first lines—florid, alliterative, and artificial. The Latin might be partially captured with the following: 'Where are you who have summoned me to appear at the court sessions of sex?' (ubi tu's qui me convadatu's Veneriis vadimoniis? line 162). Phaedromus responds to her in the same high-blown diction, and the only realistic language during this scene of overacted passion comes from Palinurus, who is tired, bored, disgusted, and utterly disenchanted by these lovers. When he tries to break up their embraces and get his master to go home, he earns for himself a beating, which only increases his alienation at this 'crazy' pair. Eventually, Planesium has to go back indoors. The scene ends, then, with a nice contrast between lover and slave. Phaedromus moans emotionally: 'What a beautiful way I have died'; but Palinurus corrects him: 'Not I, who am dead with your beating and sleepiness' (lines 214-15). Down-to-earth reality puts the lover's verbiage in perspective. Although Palinurus may not exactly upstage his master, he prepares the audience to make light of the lover and his amatory plot, so that, when the parasite Curculio appears, he can indeed take over the lead.¹⁶

Unlike the slave, Curculio acts in a free and enterprising manner and owes no allegiance or advice to Phaedromus: he serves for the food he can get. Thus, he has no interest whatsoever in love for itself, only for what meals it can produce for him. He has a fine impudent entry, in which he assumes the officious airs of a noble, to whom all wayfarers should yield passage (lines 280 ff). And, indeed, all other characters let themselves be upstaged by this energetic and picturesque person. Though he has failed to borrow the money Phaedromus sent him to Caria to get, he has returned confidently with a stolen ring and the means of intrigue, the kind of plot that appeals to Plautus. Donning disguise and employing false documents sealed with this ring's signet, Curculio bilks the loanshark and then the pimp of Planesium. The entire centre of the play features his intrepid activities, and Phaedromus has only a bit part, Planesium none at the same time. Love and lovers have yielded, in Plautus' biased plotting, to intrigue and parasite.

To wind up the plot, it is necessary to make the courtesan an eligible virgin, that is, to have her recognized as a member of a suitable family and become marriageable. All this works itself out with considerable economy. The man whom Curculio defrauded in Caria of ring and access to the girl, a braggart soldier who typically serves as victim of the lover's henchman, enters furiously and grabs Curculio, who extricates himself neatly when the stolen ring identifies the soldier as brother of Planesium. The recognition, perfunctorily completed in twenty-five lines (635-58), gives the opportunistic and masterful Curculio the cue to stage his final triumph. He urges the soldier to celebrate the recovery of his sister at a banquet today, and Phaedromus to hold an engagement party tomorrow (lines 660-1). And he then presides over the of ficial words of engagement, throwing in his own quix otic 'dowry,' that he will let the groom feed him as long as he lives (line 664)! Curculio has taken over from Palinurus and carried out Plautus' purpose in the plot, to upstage the lover in the most flagrant and impudent manner. The crazy seriousness of the lover cannot hold its own, in Plautus' theatre, with the witty realism of down-to-earth rogues like Curculio the weevil.

Love where Marriage is Impossible and Irrelevant

In Graeco-Roman society, middle-class and upper-class families could not cope with unions that endangered the family's cohesion and economic well-being. Since the family constituted the recognized heart of society, New Comedy tended to contrive plots that enacted the justification and preservation of the family against such centrifugal forces as selfish passion, of young and old alike, and selfish extravagance. An ideal comic myth or scenario developed in which a young man (or, occasionally, a father of the family) fell in love with a courtesan, spent large sums of the family finances on her and even worked to buy her freedom, against the will or without the knowledge of the rest of the family—above all, that of the authority figure (father or wife). The problem of the plot then became to bring this irresponsible love under some control, so that the lover either abandoned it (having come to his senses) or continued it temporarily on a reduced and more practical basis. If he abandoned the courtesan in the play, he probably replaced her with a fiancée;¹⁷ if he was allowed to carry on for a while, it is implicit that eventually he will make the decision to opt for a marriage that benefits family and society. Among the Menandrian comedies that Terence chose for adaptation were several in which the playwright represented both types of irresponsible love, that which carelessly pursued a girl who could eventually be married (though of modest means, pregnant, or incorrectly thought to be a mere prostitute) and that which also carelessly but more dangerously involved itself with a girl who was unquestionably a prostitute with no possibility of change. In the various antitheses that these paired loves permitted, Terence (and Menander before him) threw a carefully angled light on the criteria of legitimate marriage.

Now, imagine a comic artist who perceives in this material, suitably manipulated, a richly comic vein of irreverence and a challenge to traditional romanticism—perhaps, too, to the exclusive dramatic concern with the family lives of the upper classes (of Greece more than of Rome?). He decides to make a mockery of the family and what he can present as its corrupt prejudices, so as to deny its traditional validity in comedy as the criterion and goal of all action. To replace it, he adopts its old enemy, namely, irresponsible love. Not that he views such love with benevolence and generosity, free of the social bias of fourth- and third-century Greek writers. On the contrary, it is the fact that it manifests irresponsibility rather than love that wins his enthusiastic assent, that it opens an avenue to a view of a comic world where the family has little validity, but pleasure earned by witty intrigue of social outcasts constitutes a valid and admirable goal, recognizable by everyone in the audience. Such a comic artist, or even comic genius, I suggest, is Plautus.

A Slave's Intrigue for His Own Prostitute: Persa

In one comedy, Plautus almost entirely eliminates the criterion of the family, and thus he simplifies the conflict to one between the roguish lover and the infamous pimp. He accomplishes this feat by making the lover a slave and confining his social range to the lowest level: slaves, pimp, parasite, and prostitute. Toxilus proclaims himself a typical lover in a brief opening lyric, and his companion, another slave, remarks with surprise: 'Do slaves now fall in love here?'(iam servi hic amant? line 27). Thus, Plautus deliberately calls attention to the way the slave apes the folly of the typical spoiled young Athenian. And Toxilus faces the usual crisis: he needs to buy his girlfriend's freedom from the pimp who owns her. To do this, since of course he lacks money (like the typical adulescens). he must resort to intrigue. As a rogue-slave, Toxilus finds intrigue easy enough, but he is a rare beneficiary of intrigue (which most frequently serves the helpless young master).¹⁸

The plot falls into two phases. First, his slave-friend from another household temporarily 'borrows' money he was supposed to spend on some cattle, and lends it to Toxilus, who then surprises the pimp by paying good cold cash for the girl. Having disarmed the pimp, Toxilus then can develop a plot against him, luring him into purchasing for the same sum a beautiful young girl in exotic dress, who is introduced to him by a pompously masquerading slave as a valuable Arabian captive. In fact, this girl is the freeborn daughter of a parasite, who has willingly cooperated in the plot, in order to earn a good meal. It is of course illegal to purchase a freeborn Athenian, and the purchaser loses both his purchase and the money he paid, once the identity of the girl can be established. Toxilus can then repay his loan, the other slave can buy the oxen, and all can celebrate their victory over the comic villain, the pimp.

The heroic slave Toxilus acts in a context that ignores his normal subservient position: for the duration of the play, his master is away (line 32), and he has the run of the house. His love hurts nobody and no family priorities. It is significant, I think, that his intrigue involves exploiting harmlessly the family situation of the parasite and his daughter. Her appearance as the beauteous 'Arabian' is a mark of her father's enslavement to food, and her typical female cleverness (malitia), a quality of all women in Plautus, slave or free. As a lover, Toxilus is a superb intriguer; but he never becomes the silly, helpless, self-pitying character we usually encounter among the free young lovers. And his energetic invention and participation in the deception of the pimp occupies Plautus' attention and dominates the audience's interest. After the first brief, lyric lover's effusion, the rogue starts to take over. Before the Act I has ended, he has set his companion slave to work and devised a plan that will make use of the parasite, as he confidently announces: 'I have worked out the entire plot, how the pimp with his own money will make her [i.e., his slave] today his freedwoman,' (lines 81-2). There is no further reference to love, amid the spectacularly developing intrigue, and only in the final celebration of victory does the love receive some attention again. Toxilus emerges with a lyric speech of victory, full of pompous Roman language that implies his free heroic status on a par with that of the great Roman generals of the century. No words about love there, as he elaborates the nature of his victory celebration (lines 756 ff). Feeling ignored, the girlfriend, who was ostensibly the reason for all this energetic scheming, asks why she and he are not doing something together (line 763). At that, Toxilus launches himself into an enthusiastic mix of love, drinking, and hilarity, which Plautus enlivens by more lyric. But after thirteen lines of that, the pimp emerges from his house, tragically emoting over his financial loss, and the remainder of the play abandons the love theme in order to exult over the pimp's misery. That comic situation merits almost one hundred lines of Plautine excitement, and the final word of the slave is from the triumphant intriguer, not the gratified lover: leno perit (line 857)—'The pimp is dead!' In a significant way, then, Toxilus the lover has been upstaged by Toxilus the rogue.

Gratifying Foolish Young Love: Pseudolus

The initial situation of Curculio and Persa, the desperate desire of the impecunious lover to buy free the beloved courtesan owned by the pimp, recurs frequently in the plays of Plautus where marriage is irrelevant. Buying free a woman whom one can never marry constitutes the height of romantic folly. Yet in Plautine comedy after comedy, the woman does get her freedom at great expense. However, that freedom proves to be less a tribute to the beauty and desirability of the woman than a means to assert Plautus' theme—that sensual pleasure achieved by unscrupulous roguery merits our applause, at least on the stage. In some plays, like Mercator and Mostellaria, the young lover has bought the beloved free before the dramatized action starts, and that unwise purchase provides an initial complication. In others, finding the money to free the girl provides an opening for the intrepidity of the slave or parasite. I shall consider Pseudolus in this light.

Pseudolus has no more respect for the romantic love of his young master, Calidorus, than does Palinurus for that of Phaedromus in Curculio. When Calidorus gets hysterical with helplessness and tries to borrow a drachma from Pseudolus so as to buy a rope and hang himself, the slave delights us by his practical question: 'Who will pay me back the drachma if I give it to you? Do you intend to hang yourself deliberately so as to cheat me?' (lines 91-3). Nevertheless, realizing how useless Calidorus is, Pseudolus promises to get him the needed money somewhere, somehow. And with the brashness born of years of successful roguery, he publicly proclaims to all his friends and acquaintances to beware today, not to trust him in any way, or else they will be bilked (lines 124 ff).

Plautus makes clear his concentration on Pseudolus, the ironic facilitator of love, but even more the mastertrickster (as his name implies), by giving no speaking part to Phoenicium, the prostitute so passionately desired by the young fool. After Calidorus fails to make any impression on the arch-villain Ballio the pimp, Pseudolus sends him off to find a clever man who will be able to get things done (line 393). In other words, Calidorus must locate a man who can do for him what he, in his ineptitude, cannot do for himself. Left to his own resourceful devices, Pseudolus improvises in several encounters, and actually has a workable plan by the time Calidorus returns with a friend who will provide the trusted helper (line 693). Calidorus has subordinated himself to Pseudolus, and at the end of this scene (line 758) he disappears from the comedy. Although the play is hardly half-finished, Plautus insists on so upstaging the lover as to remove him from the stage, so that the intrigue can have his and the audience's undivided attention.

When Calidorus vanishes from the play, Plautus makes it clear that the lines of thematic opposition do not focus on the family and pit father against son. Rather, they focus on money, on the stern father who wants to hold on to his wealth and his dubious ally, the pimp, who wants to make as much money from his exploited prostitutes as possible. This pair hopes to keep Pseudolus the trickster in check. As Pseudolus celebrates his triumph in Act V, he drunkenly describes the scene of sexual revelry in which Calidorus has participated, and Pseudolus, too. The slave has earned his pleasures, and it is appropriate that he be the one to report them. But his supreme pleasure involves his 'victory' over his cheerless and angry old master, Simo: to that Plautus devotes the finale of the play. Thus, not only does the young lover yield the stage to the slave, but the old master has to act out Pseudolus' superiority.¹⁹

Guilty Elderly Love Balked: Asinaria

The old man in love (senex amator) was a ridiculous figure, pursuing an activity which, by comic definition, was reserved for young men. To ensure our bias, the dramatist regularly insisted that this untimely lover was already married and thus had primary responsibility to his wife and household. We have already seen how Demipho in the Mercator unwittingly competed with his own son over a courtesan and finally was disgraced and shamed, though it was agreed that his wife would not know anything. In the early Asinaria, the father, Demaenetus, plays the role of a rather blackhearted rogue who cheats his wife out of money to buy a prostitute free for his son, then turns around and tries to exploit the situation so as to enjoy the girl before his son can. Theoretically, Plautus could have emphasized romantic love quite easily in such a situation, by contrasting the real affection of the son with the sleazy lust of the father. But the playwright shows his concern to ridicule both lovers and subject them and their warped passion to humiliation.

The son, Argyrippus, loves the courtesan Philaenium, but has no money to keep up the relation; and her greedy mother insists on a sizeable sum to guarantee Philaenium's exclusive services for a year. Although Philaenium seems to be an unwilling victim of her mother and, despite her cruel situation, eager to respond to Argyrippus' love, Plautus interrupts their single scene of romance (lines 590 ff) with a raucous series of pranks by a pair of slaves, who humiliate both lovers and show how much they will compromise their love for money. Argyrippus stands helplessly aside while Philaenium all but makes love to the slaves, as the price of the stolen money, then allows the slaves to ride him as a donkey, acting out the reversed roles in the household. Thus, young love is first upstaged, in preparation for the upstaging of older love and for the final feeling in the audience that love in general has yielded to something realer and better: roguish humour and wit.

When Demaenetus introduces himself and his purposes, he says nothing about his pursuit of prostitutes in his old age. Instead, he declares himself to be an unusual father, in that he expresses full support for his son's affair with Philaenium, the prostitute in the house next door (line 53). He sides with the son against his wife, who has full control of the money in the household—presumably, it all comes from her family—and keeps a tight rein on the son's sexual extravagances. (It also emerges later, but not here, that she has been cramping the style of Demaenetus as a would-be old lover.) With no sense of financial responsibility, then, well practised in cheating his wife to finance his own illicit pleasures, the father happily encourages the boy's loyal slaves to engage in any malpractice, with his full cooperation, to swindle the wife of the necessary money for Philaenium. 'I want to be loved by my family,' he grandly claims (line 67); but, since he doesn't include his hated wife, he really means: 'I want my son to love me, his father' (line 77). At first sight, then, if we ignore the culpable attitude towards the rich wife, it might seem that Demaenetus is one of those endearing contrasts to the stern and angry father: he seems like the kindly, supportive, and tolerant father (lepidus pater, senex). And, indeed, it is he in person, we are told, who acted decisively to ensure that the slaves' trickery actually succeeded. So the slaves admit as they praise his congenial nature (line 580).

In fact, Demaenetus is a hypocritical old reprobate, but Plautus has minimized the full facts about him so as to spring them on us suddenly at the end of the comedy. Family love means little to this father, much less than the lust he pursues at every opportunity, and notably here, in the case of Philaenium, whom he boldly tries to exploit at this opportunity. After Argyrippus has been forced to submit to humiliation from the slaves, he learns that he has more humiliation to accept. His good old dad has made the money available, the slaves are to report, on condition that Argyrippus allow his father to enjoy a dinner and night of sex with Philaenium (lines 735-6). Argyrippus' craven character cooperates, as Demaenetus knew he would, with his own baseness: he agrees to his father's terms. The servants, having had their fun and delivered their heartless but grotesquely amusing message, prepare to leave, and the young lover bids them farewell (valete). They reply, also using the plural: 'And you, too, love well' (et vos amate, line 745). That plural may apply only to Argyrippus and Philaenium, who stand there rather forlornly on stage: or it may include also Demaenetus (soon to appear). At any rate, the irony of the final remark is unmistakable and would no doubt have been emphasized by the roguish speaker.²⁰

The stage is set here for the reappearance of the father, now revealed as hypocritical old lover (senex amator rather than a kindly and indulgent paternal figure. But, before his entrance, Plautus introduces us to the angry young man who will bring about his punishment. Of about the same age as Argyrippus, but with the money to satisfy his own passions, this character shows the spunk absent in the son. He intends to inform Demaenetus' wife, Artemona, and thus humble the old lover for his robberies. In the finale, then, as Demaenetus starts to enjoy his pleasure in front of the pained but compliant Argyrippus, Artemona secretly enters, to watch and overhear with indignation her husband's outrages. He promises to steal a robe from Artemona for Philaenium, he kisses her lustily and comments on the sweet breath she has, which is so wonderful after his wife's halitosis; he wishes that the wife may be destroyed 'with interest,' so that he won't be interrupted while kissing; and finally, he invokes Venus to grant to him Philaenium and to his wife, death. At that, Artemona no longer restrains herself, but bursts into the corrupt celebration and commands Demaenetus: 'Get up, lover, and go home!' (surge, amator, i domum, line 921). He slinks off, totally humbled and terrified, awaiting the judgment that will be meted out to him at home (line 937). Enjoying their moment, Argyrippus and Philaenium taunt him and his promises. Not much can be said for romantic love after this comedy; and, indeed, the final comments of the assembled troupe to the audience urge the amoral moral, that anyone, if he had the chance, would act like Demaenetus and pursue his own satisfactions (lines 944-5). Plautus does not use untimely old love as a way of validating young love, but rather as a way of utterly discrediting romantic love: all love, young and old, is a prime target for his comedy.

The Courtesan Mocks the Lover: Truculentus

In the comedies we have been using as examples in this section, the impecunious young man—helpless, ridiculous, and far less interesting to Plautus than the rogues and scamps that both help and interfere with the course of his love—eventually gets to take his courtesan-friend to bed, for a while. The lover and his love have proved to be of minimal comic sympathy and regularly replaceable with characters and qualities that make a mockery of romance and rather validate an energetic, resourceful engagement with a more ordinary reality that thumbs its nose at feckless feelings. The audience's attitude can also be affected by the manner in which the courtesan behaves. We have seen Philaenium of the Asinaria play the naïve affectionate girl, at the start of the play, until she gets caught up in the tricks of the libidinous slaves and old father. Her natural innocence helps to put in the desired satirical perspective the hypocritical lust of the males, father and son. In the Pseudolus, Phoenicium never says a word and appears only once, to be led silently weeping and unknowing from the house of the pimp Ballio to reunion with Calidorus. Both she and her lover are suppressed, upstaged by the trickster slave. In the Bacchides, the courtesan sisters are delightfully seductive, but definitely not ruled by their affections. They seduce Pistoclerus at the opening, to escape an unwelcome debt to a soldier; throughout the play their seductiveness determines the efforts of Mnesilochus and his slave Chrysalus; and in the finale they complete their victorious campaign by seducing the two fathers. Therefore, although we can say that the young lovers, after being upstaged, have gotten their satisfaction at the end, Plautus' emphasis rests on the triumphant courtesans, who celebrate not love but their successful manipulation of men in the interests of security. In the Truculentus, which is a work of Plautus' old age, the satisfaction of young lovers and the sensual pleasures of all disappear from the comic plot: with a strong satiric tone, the comedy focuses on the materialistic success of the courtesan, gained at the expense of stupid would-be lovers. The lover has been conclusively upstaged, and deservedly so, by the totally self-serving Phronesium, the woman of ruthless intelligence. An independent operator, like the Bacchides, she owes nothing to any pimp, but works exclusively for her own advantage.

There are three lovers, and none of them gets to take Phronesium to bed, but each pays extravagantly for the vain hope that he will get his money's worth. The yokel Strabax comes to Athens from the country, shaggy, unkempt, and boorish, the last person in the world that anyone could love. But he serves Phronesium's purposes well: he is easily controlled by her, and his very unlikely nature can whet the jealousy of other potential lovers. When he appears from the farm, naively carrying money which belongs to his father (lines 653-5), the eyes of Phronesium's smart female slave fall on the money, and she invites Strabax indoors. An hour or so later, he emerges and complains that he is exhausted from having waited for his 'friend' inside, lying in the bed (lines 915-16). But that arrival plays into the hands of Phronesium, who is talking to the soldier Stratophanes and wheedling him out of money by lies about a supposed child of his that she has borne while he was absent on campaign. Stratophanes gets angrily jealous and plunges into a 'war' of rival gifts, which the courtesan, of course, brilliantly directs. Although the two go together into the courtesan's house then, promising themselves sexual satisfaction, we are not convinced, especially since Phronesium stays behind to exult before the audience on the success of her 'hunt' for silly bird-victims (lines 964-5).

The yokel and the soldier are two typical losers in the love plots of New Comedy, and we are not surprised to see them cancel each other out, even if Phronesium's materialistic exploitation seems unusually overstressed. But the third lover comes from the most respectable level of Athenian society. He has had a long, expensive relationship with the courtesan in the past, but been forced out when Phronesium got her hooks into the more extravagant Stratophanes. Just back from a minor diplomatic trip, he starts the play off with a soliloquy on the crippling cost of courtesan-love and the ruinous greed of pimps and prostitutes. On his return, he has incredulously heard that Phronesium has had a baby (lines 85-6); it does not seem likely to him that so clever a courtesan would ever permit herself to get pregnant and ruin her business. So it must be a trick to control the soldier, he thinks. And he is jealous and eager to become her lover again. Promising to bankrupt his estates, he gets himself admitted to the house (lines 175 ff). But he, too, is disappointed after a long wait: Phronesium is taking an interminable bath (lines 320 ff). He does eventually get to talk with her, and her friendliness (activated by her not too subtle greed) sends him off cheerily to pawn his property and buy her a lavish gift (lines 425-6).

Evidently, Diniarchus, the affluent young diplomat, is as much a fool for love as the rustic and the soldier. However, he emerges soon as more contemptible than laughable, a young man whose status has encouraged him into irresponsible and reprehensible self-indulgence. The baby, which Phronesium has confessed to him is not hers, much to his delight, and which he then laughs to see being used against the gullible soldier, turns out to be his, Diniarchus'. He had had an illegitimate affair with a respectable Athenian girl; she became pregnant and gave birth during his absence, and she abandoned or exposed the baby to avoid embarrassment. Thus, the baby proves to embarrass Diniarchus more than anybody, and, just after he has lavished presents on Phronesium, it obliges him to confess his paternity and accept marriage to the girl. Then, to emphasize how low Diniarchus has sunk, Plautus shows this new 'father' happily conspiring with Phronesium to lend her his baby so that she can complete her scam of the foolish soldier (and later, Diniarchus hopes, reward Diniarchus with a night or two of 'love').

Male love, accordingly, is totally discredited in the characterization of these two fools and of the scoundrel Diniarchus. Now, consider the object of their love in Plautus' satiric representation. Phronesium, whose name has nothing to do with love or physical attraction, the usual source of courtesan's names in Plautus, is the thinker or calculator. She herself never feels love—never expresses genuine affection for anyone, male or female—but easily manipulates the language of love in order to gain material profit. The fact that she has pretended to have given birth to a son, which we know from the prologue (line 18), symbolizes clearly her calculating exploitation of words, acts, and feelings of love. Indirectly introduced by the words of Diniarchus about his subjection to her and by the impudent remarks of her maid Astaphium (= Raisin), who has a lyric solo about the ruthless 'philosophy' of prostitutes (lines 209 ff), Phronesium finally makes her first entrance at line 352. She immediately starts her act, using calculated amatory language to enthral the easily duped Diniarchus. He has waited endlessly, remember, for her to finish her so-called bath, and he feels grouchy. 'Do you think my doorway will bite you, tell me, that you are afraid to enter, my sweetheart?' (lines 352-3). 'Why are you so grumpy on your return from Lemnos as not to give your girlfriend a kiss?' (lines 355-6). By the end of the scene, sullen Diniarchus has become putty in her artful hands. He calls her 'Sweetheart' at the very moment he happily succumbs to her wiles and declares it a 'profit' to himself when she asks him for a gift (lucrum hercle videor facere mihi, voluptas mea, ubi quippiam me poscis, lines 426-7). And he gullibly misconstrues, as she intended, her confession about the fake baby as utter proof of her deepest, most reliable love (lines 434 ff).²¹

The women of this comedy, Phronesium the heroine and her bawd-maid Astaphium, encourage the three foolish male lovers in their folly and deliberately exploit them and the trappings of love for personal material profit. Their real thinking assumes a hostile world and militant behaviour against lovers. 'A lover is like an enemy city,' says Astaphium. 'As soon as he can be taken, he is great for his girlfriend' (lines 170-1). 'A proper bawd should have good teeth,' reflects Phronesium, 'so that she can laugh and smoothly speak to every visitor, plotting evil in her heart, but speaking good with her tongue' (lines 224-7). 'The good lover,' she adds, 'is the man who abandons all his possessions and destroys his estate.' The women measure and value men for their money: the men throw away money in pursuit of their false conception of love, which they ludicrously identify with these mercenary women. It is not unusual or disturbing that the men get what they clearly deserve: no love and heavy losses. What is unusual is the total success of the unromantic and antihedonistic courtesans. There is no celebration at the end of this comedy, because, although Phronesium has scored a complete victory and, as she exults, had a wonderful 'hunt' (line 964), her grasping, insensitive nature does not open up to sensual indulgence and careless spending of any kind. Plautus has exposed the ways of love in the most uncompromising satire, making love, not the 'breath of life' in the comedy, but the touch of death. The courtesan sucks the wealth of the stupid lover (like Diniarchus) and considers him 'dead' when he has no more to give (lines 164-5). Her house resembles Acheron (the home of Death): once it receives anything, it refuses to disgorge it again to Life (lines 749-50).

Heroic Badness (malitia): Plautus' Characters and Themes

If you can remember your own childhood, or if you have watched and listened to children as they were playing, you perhaps have observed how very important to them are those simple moral terms 'bad' and 'good.' Not, I hasten to say, that children are entirely innocent, naïve, and narrowly puritanical about their use of such terms. Along with the powerful word 'No!,' they have been hearing parents, grandparents, and siblings smiling-and-cooing at them 'Good' and growling, shrieking, and roaring at them 'Bad,' often with gestures and various movements, including pats, spanks, and blows, that ought to have made the meaning of 'bad' and 'good' amply clear—that ought to have aligned them solidly and safely on the side of Good against Bad. Why is it, then, that the little imps get the message twisted and somehow, at an early age, show that they have a sneaking admiration of Bad, that they even want to play at being bad? Let us dismiss with contempt the child who has, alas, gotten the official message too well and says to his or her unruly playmate: 'You're bad; what you're doing is naughty; I'm going to tell Daddy or Mama, and you're going to get it.' There's a future supporter of Law and Order with the character of a skunk. No, the children I refer you to are those we overhear in a conversation like this: A (with a note of admiration): 'Mother said that was naughty. How can you hope to get away with it?' B (with bravado): 'I dunno, but it's fun being naughty.' These are children whom I think we all know (recalling our own behaviour in childhood) and probably rather like, for their humanity if not for their obedience. In this chapter I shall be considering how Plautus explored this fundamental 'immoral' tendency in all of us, children and adults, and gave it comic form as Heroic Badness, which is one of the great achievements of Roman and comic literature.

As parents know, the tendency in children to go astray over the words 'No!' and 'Bad!' starts somewhat before they reach the age of two. When my son approached that age, with his boyish energy and gusto he revealed just how stubbornly the human soul cherishes the simple idea of Bad. It did not matter to him whether what we called Bad was Dangerous, Hot, Cruel, Messy, Dirty, Tiresome, or What-have-you: if we said it was bad, then it had to have something interesting, pleasurable, and hence 'good,' about it. It had to be tried. And the threat and experience of spanking only increased the challenge. I think that, if my son had had a younger brother, the irrepressible way he went about playing with matches, climbing and falling from trees, opening and crawling out windows, etc., would have made him a 'hero' to his younger sibling at the same time that he was driving his parents and sisters to distraction. I am no psychologist and do not intend to explore the psychological motivations for this Original Sin in all human beings, but I am interested in the way, as Milton's Lucifer willed it, evil becomes good in comedy as well as in tragedy and epic, but with a very different plot and audience reception, above all, in Plautus. Among some teenagers today, one can hear exactly the words and note that the Roman poet long ago struck: admiration for what is called Badness. I wish to go back to Plautine Rome to see how he elicited that admiration in his comedies.

The particular kind of badness which I call 'heroic' turns up in the favourite form of Plautine comedy, that of intrigue, where a character or characters use various means of deception to swindle money or the possession of a slave-prostitute from the rightful owners. The deceivers, like the slave Chrysalus and the Bacchis-sisters of the play I reviewed in chapter 1, come from the lower ranks of the social order and can be declared 'bad' in social terms by those above them, their victims. But what is more important, for Plautus' presentation, is that social inferiority goes hand-in-hand with (and, to some extent, stimulates) a striking indifference to strict ethical tenets; an adaptability to conditions; an energetic curiosity; basic cunning and enjoyment of deception; a combative, anarchic attitude towards life; and total indifference to such ordinary things as property rights, duty, responsibility, truth, or authority—in other words, social badness merely covers a much more interesting and universal ethical quality, which might be labelled 'Badness' and praised or punished in the course of a comedy, but is, in fact, a compound of bad and good, as the most attractive comic qualities usually prove to be. It is an obvious fact that Plautus aligns his audiences on the side of the deceivers, for all their badness, against the people who usually control Law and Order, fathers, mothers, rich men, and property-owners (nicely symbolized by the frequent victim, the pimp, the slave-owner of certain desirable prostitutes).

If Plautus' main concern were the sociopolitical hostility between the deprived and the rich, between slaves and slave-owners, as some modern theorists have argued, who have read into Plautus contemporary political antagonisms, then the comic nature of Badness would have no function and not appear.¹ As it is, however, what dominates audience interest and made the plays of Plautus successful at all levels of society—and still does—is the way Badness represents the personal response of every member of the audience, the will to explore, experience, and enjoy what our parents and all authority figures brand as Bad, that is, what often looks to us as perhaps dangerous, but mighty Good. It follows that, if a bad goal appeals to our imaginations as somehow good, then the so-called bad man or woman who pursues and achieves it, even if briefly, appears not only good but heroic, a kind of paradigm of our pipedreams.

The basic scheme from which the plot started was the need of a young man for money to pursue a love affair, in Plautus regularly an affair that has to be 'illicit' and temporary and stupidly wasteful ('bad' from the viewpoint of parents and greybeards), but understandably appealing precisely because it is a reckless move towards sensual pleasure. Since the young man lacks worldly experience and street skills, he desperately turns to the domestic slave, who is usually five or ten years older than he, and centuries older in practical experience. This slave has defied his owner, the boy's father, before and is regarded as a typical 'bad slave,' often declared to be 'worse than any other slave' or simply 'the worst slave in existence' (servuspessimus).² To the young master, however, many aspects of this badness look hopeful and useful, and he implores and finally persuades this 'bad slave' to do what has become for the love-addled young man a definite good. In their conversation, Plautus rather typically has master and slave articulate this inversion not only of good and bad, but also of their own social roles.

The boy ends up by hailing the slave as his 'patron' as he himself assumes the subordinate role of needy 'client.'³ Then, the slave assumes masterful airs: he talks about his civil and military authority (Latin imperium), and he calls his companions into a senatorial session, to take counsel and plan their strategy. In other words, this base slave (whom we can imagine as originally foreign, non-italian, reduced to slavery as a result of military defeat) arrogates to himself the status of the highest political position in Rome, the consul, and treats himself as an official in wartime, about to lead his troops forth on a critical campaign on behalf of his country.⁴ The goals of this expedition, however, fall comically short of the level of nobility. To be consonant, after all, with the purposes of the deception, this

commander must come away with a considerable amount of money in the form of 'booty' or 'plunder' (Latin praedd). So there is no question about saving the country or avenging some defeat or some other misdeed of the enemy: this special army seeks booty.⁵ In due course, the deception achieves its end: the enemy-father or pimp is swindled out of the necessary money, which the slave-general triumphantly carries off as plunder to his anxiously waiting young master. Then, it remains to be seen whether reality catches up with this fantastic slave, whether he plunges back down from his improbably and tenuously won Good to his proper role as 'bad slave,' at the mercy of his humiliated and irate master.

In the great comedies of Plautus' maturity, the playwright managed to twist the plot so that, with full audience approval, reality was pleasantly deflected or excluded. I shall come back to that, but, for the present, it suffices to sketch out the Plautine pattern. To put it briefly, as soon as the tricky bad slave takes on the Mission Impossible of helping out his young master in a quest for money for love, he becomes 'good,' surrounded with symbols of freedom and Roman dignity and authority, admired by his friends and feared by his intended victims for the very same qualities—trickiness, deceptivity, plausibility, adaptability, and restless energy. His 'goodness' is merely 'badness' seen from a new viewpoint. Or, in the Latin terms Plautus employs to epitomize his comic ethical paradox, the clever intriguing slave, whose character can be summarized by the word malitia (badness), aims at a goal which in conventional Roman terms is the proud one of military conquest of a despised enemy, the highest achievement of manliness (virtus). Since virtus extends its meaning in Latin then to cover what we call 'virtue' and what the Romans meant by 'goodness,' the Plautine representation of intrigue is one of badness becoming, with our enthusiastic approval, goodness.⁶

The Plautine intriguer, as is obvious, falls into the class of wonderful comic characters that we recognize as rogues. There seem to be no rogues in Menander; I am not sure that there were any in either of the other masters of Greek New Comedy, Philemon or Diphilos.⁷ It looks, at any rate, as though this special rogue, who makes a virtue of his badness (malitia), is Plautus' contribution not only to New Comedy in Rome, but to the comic genre. Granted that Aristophanes had worked out the designs of a delightful rogue in the late fifth century, but that was an Athenian rogue, a free man or woman with a different manner of operation and a quite different ethical stance.⁸ So, even if Plautus did have some knowledge of Aristophanes—which remains doubtful to many scholars—his Roman rogue emerges as a strikingly new creation. It is the express emphasis on the dialogue between good and bad within the rogue, the focus on his Roman virtus, his 'heroic' military enterprise and success, that defines the comic invention of Plautus.

I think that I can make the nature of Plautus' heroic rogue somewhat clearer by turning to another marvellous rogue in his moment of roguish heroism. I refer to Shakespeare's Falstaff and his role during the Battle of Shrewsbury, in Act V of Henry the Fourth, Part I. Just before the battle starts, Shakespeare lets us assess the combatants in their respective camps. In Scene 1, we survey the King and his supporters, his princely sons Hal and John, and Falstaff. One by one, they leave the stage, solemnly prepared to do their best to fight bravely, and Hal, before departing, recommends to Falstaff, the last man, to say his prayers and farewell, to face the fact that he owes God a death. It is his simple heroic responsibility to be a man.

This, however, is no metaphorical battle of swindling, and Falstaff feels notably uncomfortable and out of his natural element. Alone, then, he delivers his famous soliloquy, a superb comic speech in the best Shakespearean vein: "Tis not due yet [i.e., the death mentioned by Prince Hal]: I would be loath to pay him [i.e., God] before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour pricks me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word, honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it: honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.'⁹

There is much common as well as comic sense in what Falstaff has said here. This battle is not simply a question of honour; the political values being contested are ambiguous; and the most obvious embodiment of honour, Hotspur, is ridiculed as a fool by his own closest, so-called friends. So when Falstaff rejects honour and advocates the traditional creed of the practical rogue—'he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day'—the audience sympathizes.¹⁰ But when the battle ensues, and other men fight, and some die for their partly honourable goals—including loyal Blount on behalf of the king and the enthusiast Hotspur for his personal glory—when Hal risks his life to defend his father, then Falstaff's words and roguish behaviour cannot withstand inspection, cannot continue to command approval. During the battle, although he finally engages in combat with Douglas, he suddenly falls down motionless and pretends to be dead, thus saving his life. Almost at the same moment, Hotspur, who has challenged Hal for supreme honour, falls to the ground mortally wounded and really dies.

The pejorative effect on our impression of Falstaff is obvious. But Shakespeare has worse to show about this rogue. As soon as Hal goes off to continue fighting, Falstaff gets up, easily and confidently, smoothly mouths his 'heroic' creed, that the better part of valour is discretion,¹¹ and then gets his supreme idea of roguish heroism: he stabs the corpse of Hotspur with his sword and starts to lug the body off, to claim it as his honour that the enemy is dead, to claim a reward for his 'valour.' It is a fraud that has to strike us as grotesquely ignoble and unfunny, especially since Prince Hal, who knows the truth, makes no effort to reclaim his own credit as hero; he shows his undoubted and well-earned moral superiority by dismissing the whole situation as the act of 'the strangest fellow' and allowing Falstaff to pose as noble and worthy of reward. We may have some questions about honour still, but Shakespeare leaves no doubt about what manliness has required here.¹²

Whereas Shakespeare drags the reluctant rogue on to the real battlefield and, by juxtaposing him with genuine warriors who accept war's creed, shows him up as a coward and rat, Plautus lets his rogue-plotter celebrate his success, the result of his witty deception over others' folly and avarice, and we recognize him as the 'best' person in the play. All the others, those who have been his victims and those who have shared in his intrigue, have been inferior to him. So the metaphorical language which has been building up during the comedy—that the master-plotter is like a consul at war, commander of an army on campaign against a powerful and rich enemy—properly soars to a climax at the moment of success, in a triumphant speech, typically in flamboyant lyric metre (clear proof that it is a Plautine production, not just a translation of the Greek).

The greatest of these triumphant effusions is spoken by the slave Chrysalus in The Bacchis-Sisters. It occupies more than fifty lines (925–78) and is a rollicking performance, an actor's dream and the audience's delight. Chrysalus is so full of himself that he compares himself favourably with the best heroes of the Trojan War, not only with Agamemnon who commanded the expedition, but also with his brother Menelaus (husband of Helen) and with Ulysses who, known by Chrysalus to have been 'bold and bad' (audacem et malum, line 949), provides the perfect heroic paradigm for his claim to heroism. But Chrysalus' monody is but the extreme example of a typical Plautine context. Accordingly, a short section of an anapaestic triumph-song from one of the less-well-known comedies, The Persian, will illustrate the general type: 'The enemy are beaten, the citizens are safe, the situation's calm, total peace is achieved, / The war's at an end, the campaign was well waged, without loss to the troops, without hurt to the camp. / Lord Jupiter, since it was by your kind help and the other gods mighty in heaven, / I feel and give thanks to you all in this hymn, that I fitly took vengeance this day on my foe. / For that reason now, to all who shared in the fight, I'll give shares of the plunder, division of the spoil' (hostibus victis, civibu' salvis, re placida, pacibus perfectis, / bello exstincto, re bene gesta, integro exercito et praesidiis, / quom bene nos, Iuppiter, iuvisti, dique alii omnes caelipotentes, / eas vobis gratis habeo atque ago, quia probe sum ultus meum inimicutn. / nunc ob earn rem inter participes dividam praedam et participabo [Persa, lines 753–7]).¹³

The speaker is the slave Toxilus who has engineered a scam against a pimp he hates, in order to cheat him out of a large sum of money, the purchase price of a prostitute. The scam has been a total success, and in these lines Toxilus, acting like a victorious Roman commander, proclaims verbosely his achievements—total, bloodless victory no less—gives thanks to the gods, and then proceeds to the final phase of a triumph—the sharing of the booty with the soldiers and the large-scale public celebration, with much food, wine, and love, of the war's happy conclusion.

This victory of Toxilus and the wild celebration that follows are wonderful comic action for Plautus' audience, and they enjoy without reserve the wild performance of this 'heroic' slave. That a slave should be the cleverest person in the comedy, that he should be able to make comic sense by posing as the supreme commander of the free Roman population, that he could wage a heroic campaign against a pimp and convincingly heroize what is nothing but fraud, is entirely acceptable to the audience of free Romans as a fantasy in which they can imaginatively participate: the ability of the little man to succeed by native wit. Let Dordalus the pimp enter raging against Toxilus as the worst of scoundrels (pessimus corruptor, line 779): we watch the slave and his fellow conspirators enjoy their physical well-being and even go on to tease unmercifully the helpless, furious Dordalus. The theme of war, triumph, and the honour of military success does not function as a corrective, to expose the base roguery of this slave, but rather to ratify his grandeur, to guarantee that we fall in with his wild fantasy. The lowest and 'worst' member of the population has earned the right, by his sheer energetic use of street wisdom, to be regarded as the best of all: a true Roman hero. Thus, Plautus' comic part for Toxilus differs radically from that designed for Falstaff. Falstaff had to be isolated, exposed as a basically bad man, and then dismissed from the final scene of victory; but Toxilus has, indeed, been the cause of this metaphorical 'victory,' and so becomes the very centre of triumphant celebration.¹⁴

This conception of 'heroic badness,' we may be pretty certain, did not come to Plautus from his Greek originals, nor was it fully developed in Plautus' imagination at the time he began his career as comic playwright—which, in turn, means that it did not come from his Roman predecessors, such as Naevius and Livius Andronicus, nor directly from some parallel native Italian form of farce. It is worth while, I believe, sketching out a line of development for this key theme, and I shall suggest that The Bacchis-Sisters, with which we are quite familiar by now, occupies a pivotal position in my proposed scheme.

One intrigue play has survived from Greek New Comedy in sufficient fullness (namely, in three acts) so that we know how the deceiver operated, and we can observe that, in accordance with expectations, he is neither bad nor a heroic rogue. Menander's comedy The Shield, which has been known for less than twenty years, since its lucky recovery from Egypt, depicts the efforts of an entire family to thwart the greedy scheme of a selfish uncle to claim money left by his supposedly dead nephew, a very successful mercenary soldier, and (since that is the legal condition on which he can get the money) to claim also the hand of his young niece. The uncle is the first surviving example of a Menandrian villain, and his villainy, whose symptoms are avarice and violation of the natural order of love, consists essentially in disruption of the integrity and good order of the family. The deceiver proves to be a slave, who indeed devises a very clever scheme and enjoys himself immensely in the process, but he functions as a loyal slave, devoted to his dead master and the welfare of the family. His deception is not anarchic at all, not designed to encourage the wasteful, unwise passion of an irresponsible young master, but it promotes the best interests of the household and frustrates the anarchic intentions of the bad uncle.¹⁵ It is only appropriate, then, that a good older member of the family (in fact, another uncle, the antitype of the villain) participates in the deception. We don't have the final two acts of the comedy and cannot assert exactly how the slave was handled at the end, but it seems pretty clear to me that he would not have stood out as a figure of 'grandiose badness,' or even as a very important character, once he had served his function in the intrigue. For the intrigue was only one thread in a complicated romantic plot which eventually brought the supposedly dead nephew back to Athens and then, we assume, climaxed in a betrothal of two young couples, thus ensuring the future happiness of the family. In those developments, the slave would play no significant part; it appears that he had the pleasure of welcoming his beloved master home in Act IV, but thereafter yielded to other family members.¹⁶

If we had more of The Double-Deceiver, the Menandrian comedy Plautus adapted for his Bacchis-Sisters, we might have a more useful example of the limits imposed by Greek comedy on the rogue. The prototype of the flamboyant Chrysalus, who runs verbal riot in the centre of Plautus' comedy and plays repeatedly on the various possibilities of his name, had the ordinary name Syros in Menander; that is, he came originally from Syria. We know that he told a story to the father that resembled the tale Chrysalus spins for Nicobulus on his arrival in port. But no evidence survives to prove how the 'second deception' went, or what then happened for an ending. I have conjectured … that Plautus has suppressed Menander's final act and replaced it with his own creation, that emphasizes the anarchic, irresponsible, anti-family qualities which I consider patently non-Menandrian. Menander, I believe, would have made a more sympathetic and valid authority figure in his father, who was able at the end, with the Greek audience's full assent, to reassert his authority over the anarchic son and his slave and to reunite the family. Syros would have had no magnificent speech of triumph—not in lyrics, of course, but not in iambics either—because Menander's thematic goal and structural plan had no place for such emphasis on the defiance of legitimate paternal concern for the family. The slave would have been brought up short in his deception, but the main focus of Menander would have been on the wayward son Sostratos. Although I believe that is a reasonable conjectural account of the way Menander would have restrained the operation of Syros as rogue, it cannot now be proved. Let us, then, go on to the early intrigue-comedies of Plautus, to see how he started off.

Two very early Plautine plays, which operate with intrigue, can serve as useful examples of the beginnings of 'heroic badness.' They are the Ass Comedy and Braggart Soldier. In the first, a young man needs money for a prostitute—the basic situation—and two household slaves take part in a plot of deception that swindles the mistress of money owed her for an ass. Once the swindles has succeeded, they control the finances for a while and are given a long scene in which they act out their exulation triumphantly, in order to demonstrate dramatically for the Roman audience their superiority.¹⁷ However, Plautus allows them to play no part in the dénouement of the comedy, and it is evident that he devised the slaves' moment of triumph as an episodic comic effect, not as a central thematic statement. In fact, the slaves did not really make the decision to help the young lover, or even carry through the plan of deception themselves: it was the idea of the father, who ordered them to proceed, and it was the father who performed the decisive deception that got the money. So when Plautus abandons his momentary delight with the impudent slaves, he comes back to the father, the arch-deceiver. The Ass Comedy, then, shows a basically subordinate role for slave-rogues, in conformance with the Greek original, I think, and with the general reality of Roman social practices. They are not heroes, though bad enough, and they occupy a distinctly inferior role (except for a promising sequence) in the total comic structure.

The Braggart Soldier is generally considered to have been composed a few years after the Ass Comedy, and it shows further development of the promise for a rogue of heroic badness. The problem is once again the love of a helpness young man for a courtesan, and again the slave helps him gain his girl by ingenious deception. Plautus certainly expands the role of this slave, Palinurus, by contrast with the previous play, and shows him plotting and carrying out his tricks. However, the target of the deception is a fool and knave, the braggart soldier, who combines within him all the relevant negative values for Plautus and his audience: he is a boastful coward, he is rich, he has kidnapped the prostitute, and he has become the illegitimate second master of Palinurus. When Palinurus disobeys and deceives this master in the interests of his original master, the young lover, to recover the kidnapped girl, his actions are not anarchic, but contribute to restoration of order and love.

Morever, the slave does not act without authority and numerous allies. His young master, like all such young lovers, is utterly helpless, but an older friend, at whose house he secretly is staying, proves energetic and supportive. He keeps urging Palinurus on, and he shares in the illegal moves of the deceptions, at his own risk, with an enthusiasm that delights us. Thus, with his cooperation, a common wall between his and the soldier's house is secretly opened up to allow clandestine meetings between the prostitute and her lover, his guest. Later, he offers his house as the place where the soldier will be trapped in supposed adultery (a hoax, since the woman who pretends to be a rich and dissatisfied wife is really a clever and compliant prostitute-friend of his, always ready for some fun). It is the witty old man who playfully attributes senatorial and military dignity to Palinurus.¹⁸ The slave himself makes no such claims, and he has no scene of triumph and plays no part in the final humiliation of the soldier: that, again, is the amusing task of the old man. In short, Plautus does not yet develop the opportunity for the comic transvaluation of the 'bad slave' into the heroic, central character; Palinurus functions as but one of the majority who are dedicated to punishing the knavish soldier and restoring legitimate order. It is true that, as the slave leaves the soldier and the play, Plautus has the foolish man aptly climax his folly with these words: 'Before this happened, I always used to think he was the worst of slaves [servum pessumum]; now, I realize that he is entirely loyal to me,' (line 1374). But that is a momentary ironic joke. Acting, as he does, on the side of the angels, Palinurus cannot really be designated as either a person of exemplary badness (malitia) or one of heroic Roman manliness. It turns out, indeed, that Plautus displaces malitia in this comedy to the characters who really show wonderful verve as actors in the plots to dupe the soldier. The courtesans each get credit as an exemplar of clever badness that elicits the admiration of Palinurus and the old man and helps out the weak young lover (cf. lines 188 and 887). Indeed, their action against the soldier becomes a competition of female badness (conlatio malitiarum, line 942).

A decade later, Plautus, at mid-career, had developed many possibilities of heroic badness. In The Haunted House, the slave Tranio clearly functions as the central character throughout the play, and the wonderfully improvised deceptions that he contrives to get money for his young master from the father are anarchic and like the heroic badness quite literally explored in later comedies. He is allowed to boast of his achievements as on a par with those of Alexander the Great (three iambic lines, 775–7), and he calls a 'senatorial session' of his supporters, but just as the plot is about to collapse, to make its ending more comic, not to magnify its beginning (line 1049). And, indeed, the plot fails, as we know from the start it must: Tranio takes refuge on the altar from his older master, who is furiously intent on punishing him, and only the intervention of an outsider buys the old man off from his fury and leaves Tranio for another day. Thus, the would-be hero is reduced to his proper role, and the father, though mocked and cheated, regains his authority.

The next step for Plautus is to allow the slave's badness complete success and to leave him heroically in power in the final scene. Examples of that fantastic scheme are two comedies composed in the late 190s, Pseudolus and Epidicus. For many readers today, Pseudolus is the quintessence of Plautine comic invention, and I would certainly want to view him as an exemplar of heroic badness." He is the most self-conscious of any clever Plautine slave, so he constantly calls attention, with impudent pride, to his badness, to the incredible way he undertakes superhuman tasks and then accomplishes them. He humiliates his older master, Simo (though he does not actually defraud him), and he cheats a pimp of the price of a prostitute, who of course is desperately desired by the young master. The finale of the comedy has been composed as a lyric scene of drunken triumph, in which Pseudolus rubs his victory, impudently and with impunity, into the face of old Simo. The slave reels around the stage, burps familiarly at Simo, goodhumouredly recites to him the victor's creed—'woe to the defeated' (vae victis 1317)—and confidently styles himself as vir malus, smiling as the frustrated Simo calls him pessumus homo (line 1310). Admittedly, Plautus presents it as a moment of temporary victory, but it is total in the special comic representation.

Epidicus similarly scores a triumph over his outraged master, and he has the pleasure of turning the tables on angry Periphanes in the finale, so as to outwit his fury and to convert it into such total compliance and abject gratitude that the old man frees him on the spot. Thus, Epidicus' wits have enabled him to escape permanently from his slave role as 'worst of men.' The epilogue puts it all in a nutshell: 'Here is a man who has gained his liberty by his badness,' (hic is homo est qui libertatem malitia invertit sua, line 732). The slave has been able to nullify his master's anger because, in the course of supporting his young master's double love affair and of cheating Periphanes out of the price of two girls, he has accidentally bought to freedom a long-lost daughter of the old man. Learning of his lucky work before Periphanes does, he can then pose as having planned this noble deed and piously claim the reward of freedom: that is true heroic badness!²⁰

Some five years later, Plautus staged The Bacchis-Sisters, which builds the slave Chrysalus up into a superlative epic hero of badness and gives him the perfect triumph song. Up to that point late in Act IV, we might have expected that Plautus was taking the slave of Menander's Double-Deceiver and turning him into another Pseudolus or Epidicus. But he deliberately stops short, abandons Chrysalus to his celebrations off stage, and refocuses his and the audience's attention on the courtesan sisters. Chrysalus has, it seems, gone as far as he can on his own, and he faces inevitable and painful reality—his master's rightful anger—unless someone can intercede for him (as for Tranio). As I said earlier, I believe that Menander did let the father restore order and authority in his threatened home, bringing Sostratos and slave Syros to heel. Plautus, however, lets the Bacchis-sisters take over the play, which thereby changes its title aptly, and the forces of badness, domestic irresponsibility, social anarchy, and sensual pleasure completely prevail, to the humiliation of paternal respect and family honour.²¹

The changes that Plautus made to Menander's play and to his own highly successful characterization of the heroic rogue-slave, by shifting the emphasis and title from the slave-deceiver to the artful courtesans, suggest that the line of development of heroic badness has still not reached its conclusion in Plautine comedy. The triumphant slave is but a phase in a longer, more ingenious scheme. As I noted in the case of The Braggart Soldier, Palinurus the slave cannot work his schemes without the help of an energetic older man and a pair of witty, enterprising courtesans; and Plautus applies to them what is for him a praise-worthy term, malitia. Similarly, Chrysalus may exult in his reputation as 'a bad one' (line 783), but it is Bacchis who talks of her malitia (line 54) at the beginning of the play and accordingly seems to prepare us for Plautus' new emphasis.²²

In Menander, if it is thematically necessary for the impudent slave to submit at the end to the older master's wise authority so that the home and family may operate under an intelligible hierarchy, it is even more necessary for the prostitute to yield to the interests of the family. Her erotic attractions and the money she demands of young lovers threaten the family, for she diverts the young master from taking a responsible role as husband of a suitable woman, father of the next generation, and careful steward of the family fortune. But Plautus does not treat the family as the essential measure of value for his comedy, and so, though he recognizes the stereotype of the 'bad prostitute' (mala meretrix: Captivi, line 57), he tends to change her character from that of negative menace to one of positive appeal: her 'badness' becomes the basis for her superiority to the male characters who share the stage with her. The Bacchis-sisters seduce the two young men; then, when the fathers of the young men storm over to the sisters' house to drag away the boys and Chrysalus, the sisters seduce the ridiculous old men. In Plautus' comic world, the appeal of sex, wine, and food is infinitely preferable to that of domesticity, and the Bacchis-sisters must dominate the old men and implicitly emerge as 'heroic'

Among Plautus' last comedies are the Truculent Man and Casina. The former takes the theme of the masterful courtesan to a point where the comedy turns—for Plautus—unusually satiric.²³ The woman, suggestively named Phronesium (perhaps best translated as 'Prudence'), juggles with great skill and profit to herself, as I described in chapter 3, three simultaneous affairs. Not one of the three men earns our respect. However, the character of Phronesium herself causes problems for readers of Plautus, for, while she is manifestly superior in wit and malitia to her three victims, she acts only from selfish motives and does not exhibit the usual Plautine roguish qualities of verbal wit, physical energy, and good-humoured self-importance that combine to win over the audience.

Plautus assigns her one lyric monody early in the play (lines 448 ff), but does not let her bewitch us by the performance. Phronesium lacks the flamboyance and fantastic attractions of the rogue-slave, and her imagery does not move her into the world of Roman politics or heroic myth: she is a predatory creature. She has no senate, no army of supporters, no enemy to defeat for the public good; instead, her lover becomes metaphorically like an enemy city, full of plunder (line 170). In the inflexible world of Plautine Rome, a prostitute could not hope to escape her cruel conditions and become rich enough to settle down in dignity and be socially eligible, because of wealth, for respectability and even marriage. So Plautus could not fantasize very far with the success of Phronesium. She remains a somewhat depressing example of a certain kind of malitia, no heroine, but demonstrably better than all three men with whom she is involved.

For a more appealing portrait of woman's badness (muliebris malitia), we need to turn to the last surviving Plautine comedy, Casina. As Plautus organizes the plot, there are no prostitutes and no young lovers; he uses two slaves, who appear strictly subordinate to their owners, one to the husband and the other to the wife.²⁴ The husband, Lysidamus, starts off as the would-be rogue: he has a plot to fool his wife and, by using the cover of his servant's marriage with an attractive housemaid, to sleep with the maid himself the first night. Cleustrata, the wife, instinctively opposes the marriage, because she claims it as her right to dispose of the maid from her area of domestic responsibility. As we saw, Diphilos and Plautus solved this marital dispute dramatically by the brilliant scene of the lot drawing, which gave Diphilos' (and, perhaps originally, Plautus') comedy its title. Cleustrata loses, and her roguish husband seems to have scored a complete victory. Then, when she discovers the real purpose and the extent of her husband's perfidy, she sets out energetically and maliciously (if you want) to frustrate his plans and to humiliate him so openly that he will have to crawl back home and behave in the future. She now preempts the role of rogue, and the victory with it. In this scheme, the wife stands on the side of good sense and marital fidelity, whereas the husband behaves like an adolescent, and his dishonesty and false acting are both ridiculous and highly punishable. In his frustration, the husband and his caretaker accuse Cleustrata and her supporters of being 'bad stuff (mala res, line 228), 'bad merchandise' (mala merces, line 754), and the worst kind of trickster (line 645). They mean what they say as pejorative, but Plautus invites us to take the terms otherwise, because he has inclined us to view the women's side as 'better.'

Cleustrata, then, develops a clever series of frustrating devices by which her husband is fooled and the audience entertained. In this respect, she removes herself far away from the merely mercenary tricks of Phronesium. She does not even resemble the usual angry wife (e.g., in The Ass Comedy), who is concerned to protect her property as well as to punish her husband; Cleustrata does not have a large dowry, and her inter est is in reordering the wayward household with the greatest number of laughs at her guilty husband. The key word for her activity is the Latin ludi, which refers to games, play, and stage performances. She 'plays games' (ludificem, line 560; ludi ludificabiles, line 761) with her husband, and she 'stages plays' (Judos nuptialis, line 856) for the audience. First, she acts the innocent herself and interferes with plans to make an empty house available for her husband's 'first night.' Then, she sends out a clever servant, Pardalisca, to act out a scene from tragedy, to terrify her husband with the story that Casina, like the operatic Lucia di Lammermoor, has gone crazy and is wielding a murderous sword and looking for him (lines 620 ff). And, finally, she organizes a comic performance, at which she as well as we are a laughing audience, where her husband goes to bed with her brawny slave (who is disguised as the bride Casina, of all things) and gets a bad beating for his lust, then rushes out in a state of considerable disrepair and publicly admits his disgrace. This is a special kind of triumph, and Cleustrata's 'badness' is also special. Neither a senator nor a victorious general in metaphorical terms (positions about which Plautus entertains some ambiguity), she is a creative artist, a veritable 'poet' (line 861), and that is probably the highest accolade that the poet Plautus can award to anyone.

In this chapter, I have attempted to describe the principal features of a special Plautine character, on whom he concentrates his comic attention: a rogue, male or female. Tracing Plautus' development of the rogue, I have shown how he starts tentatively with an uppity slave (servus malus) and, in successive plays, expands him into a superlative type, the worst of slaves (servus pessimus), a pyrotechnical scamp who can wrest freedom as well as gold from his angry, avaricious master. The Plautine rogue can also be female. She shows up supporting deception as a kind of 'wicked witch' or 'blasted bitch' (mala meretrix) among the courtesans of the early comedies, then develops to become the title character of The Bacchis-Sisters and almost the demonic principal of The Truculent Man. In his last play, Casina, Plautus heroizes the wittily independent wife Cleustrata (whom her scoundrel-husband considers mala mulier because she frustrates his infidelity).

Notes

Plautus' Plotting: The Lover Upstaged

¹ S. G. Ashmore, The Comedies of Terence, edited with introduction and notes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910), 5.

² See Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), and Karen Newman, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character. Dramatic Convention in Classical and Renaissance Comedy (New York: Methuen, 1985).

³ Ovid, Tristia, 2.369: Plutarch, Amatorius (Moralia 763b), cited by Stobaeus, 4.20.34, who, however, says more than our present text of Plutarch. He seems to attribute to his source this statement: 'One thing there is that gives birth to all the plays of Menander alike: love, which acts like a breath of life in common to them.' He then goes on to argue against the irrationality of love, citing the same passage of Menander that Plutarch does, but giving eight lines where Plutarch provides only two.

⁴ Plutarch, Moralia 777f, which I have discussed in 'Love Plots in Menander and His Roman Adapters,' Ramus 13 (1984), 124–34.

⁵ See chapter 1, 26. For Plautus' treatment of love in general, see P. Grimai, L'Amour à Rome (Paris: Hachette, 1963) [= Love in Ancient Rome, tr. A. Train, Jr (New York: Crown 1967; University of Oklahoma Press, 1986)], especially chapters 3 and 4, on love and marriage and courtesans.

⁶ See chapter 2, 40.

⁷ The similar lyrical soliloquy by the young lover at the opening of the anonymous Mostellaria is one of several reasons that lead some scholars to assign it to Philemon.

⁸ See chapter 2, 46.

⁹ Marriages do result from the developments in Trinummus and Casina; however, neither their Greek writers, Philemon and Diphilos, nor Plautus, their adapter, makes matrimony the essential goal of either plot.

¹⁰ Cf. Terence, Adelphoe, line 486. At line 473 in Andria, Glycerium (who has not been raped, but is pregnant) delivers her one line, which is so formulaic that suspicious old Simo assumes that she is faking a birth.

¹¹ At the start of the Dyskolos, Menander, who has used a god in the prologue, as is done in Aulularia, then introduces the young lover Sostratos and favourably characterizes his love.

¹² Molière borrowed and developed this comic scene in Act V of L'Avare. Bergson, in his admirable essay, 'Laughter,' described this device as one of 'reciprocal interference.'

¹³ It is Molière who expands the mutual incomprehension by letting each character use, in different ways, the word 'treasure,' the miser quite literally, the lover metaphorically.

¹⁴ One of these summaries states that Euclio (apparently having at last realized the negligible value of riches) gave the money (a kind of dowry?) as well as his daughter to Lyconides. I consider that ending (at least, as it is simplistically understood) unlikely. Molière may come closer to the intention of Plautus with his version, where Harpagon the miser, true to his 'idée fixe,' ignores all his family as he happily clutches his recovered wealth. Konstan (Roman Comedy [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983]), in his chapter on the Aulularia (pp. 33 ff), studies the miser's alienation from his community and the city-state.

¹⁵ For useful studies of this comedy, see W. Suss, 'Zur Cistellaria des Plautus,' RM [Rheinisches Museum fur Philologie] 84 (1935), 161–87; W. Ludwig, 'Die plautinische Cistellaria und das Verhàltnis von Gott und Handlung bei Menander,' Ménandre: sept exposés (Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1970), 43–110; G. Thamm, 'Zur Cistellaria des Plautus, ' (Dissertation, University of Freiburg, 1971); and Konstan, Roman Comedy, 96 ff.

¹⁶ Palinurus drops from the play after line 321; Curculio has just appeared, forty lines earlier, at 280, and rapidly taken over the chief role of comic energy.

¹⁷ I refer to the young man here. The old lover always had to give up his foolish love and return to his marriage.

¹⁸ For the basic anthropological formulation of Plautine plots, see M. Bettini, 'Verso un' antropologia dell' intreccio,' MD [Materiali e discussioni per I'analisi dei testi classici] 7 (1982), 39–101. Slater's analysis of Toxilus as lover and rogue (Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985], 55 ff) is useful.

¹⁹ On Pseudolus' diverse qualities as a rogue, see chapters 4 and 6.

²⁰ On the incipient rogues of the Asinaria, see chapter 4.

²¹ On Phronesium as a 'flawed rogue' in a satiric comedy, see chapter 4 and 6.

Heroic Badness (malitia): Plautus' Characters and Themes

¹ I particularly think of P. S. Dunkin, Post-Aristophanic Comedy: Studies in the Social Outlook of Middle and New Comedy at Both Athens and Rome (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1946) [= Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. 31, nos. 3–4].

² This is the soldier's description of the slave Palaestrio in Miles (line 1374). Pseudolus, in his final triumph, is called pessimus by his master Simo at lines 1285 and 1310, and he has the effrontery to call himself vir malus as he sardonically hails his master with the phrase viro optimo (line 1293). Pseudolus, in his turn, hails his ally Simia as a man who could not be worse (peiorem) or 'more deviously bad' (lines 1017–18). In the opinion of the pimp Dordalus, who has been victimized by him, Toxilus the slave is pessumus corruptor (Persa, lines 779). Lyconides rails angrily at his slave in Aulularia (line 825) as scelerum cumulatissume. The rogue, for Plautus, is superlative in badness.

³ E. Segal has carefully followed out this theme in Roman Laughter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), Ch. IV, 'From Slavery to Freedom,' 99 ff.

⁴ Military imperium and a campaign against 'enemies' constitute a key symbol in the intrigues of Bacchides (especially lines 925 ff), Miles, Persa (especially lines 753 ff), and Pseudolus. On the militant theme in Plautine comedy in general, see J. A. S. Hanson, 'The Glorious Military,' in Roman Drama, (ed. by T. A. Dorey and D. R. Dudley), 51–85. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965.

⁵ Cf. Bacchides, lines 1058, 1069, and 1075; Persa, line 757; and Pseudolus, line 588.

⁶ Pseudolus links virtus with his malitia at line 581; the slave Libanus boasts of the success achieved by himself and his fellow-slave and represents it as a total victory earned by their heroism (virtute, Asinaria, line 556). In later plays, when Plautus casts this 'victory speech' as a lyric hymn, the format itself, no doubt parallel to that of Roman victory announcements and inscriptions, implies the presence of virtus even in the absence of the word.

⁷ Menander's slaves regularly possess more experience and practical wisdom than their masters, and we have a fair number of sententious fragments in which it seems likely that slaves are lecturing their young masters. However, their actions appear to have been circumscribed. It is unfortunate that we lack the Greek passages that followed out the trickery of Syros, the inspiration for Chrysalus in Bacchides. But, as I argue below, the role of Daos in Aspis shows how a trickster in Menander is a loyal slave working for the family, not what Plautus would have made him: a rogue challenging the family structure and supporting anarchy and dissipation.

⁸ What I call the Aristophanic rogue has been ably analysed by C. H. Whitman in Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

⁹ Lines 128 ff. Note how Shakespeare abandons heroic verse as soon as the king leaves the stage; Falstaff speaks in unheroic prose.

¹⁰ The saying about 'he who fights and runs away' is not Shakespearean. In the thirteenth Centennial edition of Bartlett's Quotations (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1955), 69a, the first definite form of the expression is credited to Tertullian; but Menander may have used it four hundred years earlier. At the end of Scene 3, just before leaving, Falstaff declares: 'Give me life; which if I can save, so; if not, honour comes unlooked for, and there's an end.'

¹¹ Scene 4: 'The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part, I have saved my life.'

¹² It is significant that Shakespeare excludes Falstaff from the final scene (5), which he casts in heroic verse and uses to bring the battle to a dignified conclusion.

¹³ My translation

¹⁴ Similarly, Pseudolus is the heroic force in the play named after him, and so the 'victory celebrations' of the finale centre on him.

¹⁵ Soon after the Aspis was first published, I wrote an article in which I suggested that Daos, in lines 399–420, performs in his role as trickster like the servus currens of Plautus. See Phoenix 24 (1970), 229–36. Although I still believe that the excited and overacted running of Daos, as he mouths tragic lines from Euripides and other dramatists, anticipates the histrionic running entrance of the Plautine slave, I must agree with others now who argue that Menander himself was thinking back to the stereotype of the 'tragic messenger.'

¹⁶ In the tattered remains of Act IV, at lines 506 ff, the editors assume that the soldier knocks at the housedoor, which Daos opens and thus becomes the first to greet his returned master.

¹⁷Asinaria, lines 267 ff. Leonida moves briefly into military metaphors at lines 269–71. For recent studies of this play, see D. Konstan, Roman Comedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 47 ff, and N. Slater, Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 55 ff.

¹⁸Miles, lines 219 ff

¹⁹ See John Wright, 'The Transformations of Pseudolus,' TAPA [Transactions of the American Philological Association] 105 (1975), 403–16, and Slater's chapter (Plautus in Performance, pp. 118 ff) that develops and modifies the invaluable groundwork of Wright.

²⁰ In the light of Sander Goldberg's recent article on this play, 'Plautus' Epidicus and the Case of the Missing Original,' TAPA 108 (1978), 81–92, in which he argues the possibility that Plautus may have composed it without any specific Greek source (apart from the general conventions of New Comedy), the unique ending, freedom for the rogue-slave, makes sense as Plautus' invention. Slater (Plautus in Performance, 19 ff), in his chapter on this play, argues that it celebrates in the slave Epidicus 'the powers of self-creation.'

²¹ Nicobulus continues to demand vengeance against Chrysalus up to line 1187, after which he collapses under the seduction of Bacchis. In his analysis of the comedy, Slater (Plautus in Performance) emphasizes Chrysalus, and he explains the slave's departure as one of significant choice that defines the total superiority of his role. As he reads lines 1072–3 (pp. 112–13), Chrysalus declares his refusal to continue in his role. I prefer to think that Plautus himself is preparing us for the abandonment of the clever slave and his final stress on the courtesans.

²² Cf. the epithets (pessumae, mala) applied to the courtesans in Bacchides, lines 1122 and 1162, and the comic alliterative terms of line 1167, probriperlecebrae et persuastrices.

²³ Konstan (Roman Comedy), in his chapter on this play (pp. 142 ff), rightly calls it 'satiric comedy.' See also Cynthia Dessen, 'Plautus' Satiric Comedy: The Truculentus,' Philol. Quarterly 56 (1977), 146–58. See also P. Grimai, 'A propos du Truculentus. L'antiféminisme de Plaute,' Mélanges Marcel Durry (Paris: Belles Letters 1970), 85-98.

²⁴ On Chalinus, the slave who poses as Casina and thus promotes the disgrace of the husband, yet, in my opinion, plays a subordinate role, unlike the typical Plautine rogue, see my article, 'Chalinus armiger in Plautus' Casina, ' ICS [Illinois Classical Studies] 8 (1983), 11–21. Slater (Plautus in Performance), in his chapter on this play, ably traces the way Cleustrata seizes control of the plot in the second half (pp. 84 ff).

Bibliography

Anderson, W. S. 'A New Menandrian Prototype for the Servus currens of Roman Comedy.' Phoenix 24 (1970), 229–36

——'Chalinus armiger in Plautus' Casina. 'ICS 8 (1983), 11–21

——'Love Plots in Menander and His Roman Adapters.' Ramus 13 (1984), 124–34

Ashmore, S. G. The Comedies of Terence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910

Bettini, M. 'Verso un antropologia dell' intreccio: Le strutture semplici delia trama nelle commedie di Plauto.' MD 7 (1982), 39–101

Dessen, C. S. 'Plautus' Satiric Comedy: The Truculentus.' Philol. Quarterly 56 (1977), 145–68

Dunkin, P. S. Post-Aristophanic Comedy: Studies in the Social Outlook of Middle and New Comedy at both Athens and Rome. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1946

Goldberg, S. 'Plautus' Epidicus and the Case of the Missing Original.' TAPA 108 (1978), 81–92

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——'A propos du Truculentus: L'antiféminisme de Plaute.' Mélanges Marcel Durry, 85–98. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1970

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Konstan, D. Roman Comedy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983

Ludwig, W. 'Die plautinische Cistellaria und das Verhältnis von Gott und Handlung bei Menander.' In Ménandre: sept exposés, 43–96. Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1970

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