[In the essay below, Konstan analyzes the complex and contradictory views of love presented in The Eunuch, focusing particularly on the unresolved tension between love and commerce inherent in the situation of the courtesan Thais.]

Date operam, cum silentio animum attendite,
   ut pernoscati' quid sibi Eunuchus velit.
               —Eunuch, Prologue 44-45

Like all but one of Terence's comedies, the Eunuch has a double plot. One strand, which serves as the frame story, is based on a rivalry between two lovers: a more or less sympathetic young man, though not, in this case, destitute or subject to the control of a parsimonious father, versus the vainglorious mercenary soldier familiar in the genre (whose role here may derive from Terence himself rather than from Terence's Greek model, a play by Menander also called Eunuch). Terence mentions in his preface that he imported the character of the soldier, and also that of a calculating flatterer in the soldier's entourage, from another play by Menander, and it is possible that the rival in the original Eunuch was other than a soldier. However this may be, in Terence's version youth and soldier contend for the attentions of a courtesan, who, by the conventions of the genre, which in turn are grounded in Athenian social institutions, is a free woman of non-citizen status, and ineligible for marriage with a citizen. In our play, the courtesan, whose name is Thais, is self-employed, that is, she does not depend upon a procurer.

The competition between the two lovers takes the form of gifts. The soldier, called Thraso, has purchased an attractive and cultivated young maid, whom he sends to Thais in the escort of his hanger-on, Gnatho. Phaedria, as the young inamorato is called, commissions his slave Parmeno to deliver to Thais an Aethiopian slave-woman, who is decrepit and has no importance, and also a eunuch, from whom the play derives its title. The eunuch is, in fact, a poor specimen himself, and at the initial presentation by Parmeno and Gnatho, the soldier's side has the distinct advantage. When the transaction is complete, however, and both the eunuch and the young maid have been admitted into Thais' house, neither will be what they seem. For the maid, whose name is Pamphila, is really a free citizen, as so often proves the case in new comedy, and will, after she is recognized, be restored to her household, over which her elder brother now presides. The role of the eunuch, in turn, will be assumed by Phaedria's younger brother, Chaerea, in order that he may gain entry into Thais' establishment. His motive is an instant passion he conceived for Pamphila when he noticed her en route to Thais' house, and once inside he presses his affections upon her; that is, he rapes her. Later, when Chaerea, the pretended eunuch, is unmasked, and Pamphila's identity is revealed, the way is open to marriage between two citizens, which is duly arranged.

The motif of the gifts, then, which is a mechanism in the rivalry of Phaedria and the soldier Thraso, is the integument, so to speak, for the second strand of the plot, Chaerea's passion for Pamphila, which is resolved by the device of anagnorisis or recognition. The gifts have, one may say, a double value: as slaves, the maid and the eunuch have a price, and the competition between Thraso and Phaedria is commercial. The courtesan goes to the highest bidder. As persons, they figure in their own narrative, but the relations which they bear to other characters impose a special meaning on what Phaedria and the soldier bestow. Pamphila is not only a free citizen. Having lost her parents as a child, she was reared by Thais' mother as a kind of foster-sister to the courtesan. Thais, then, has a personal interest in recovering authority over Pamphila, and this automatically gives Thraso the edge over Phaedria in their competition, irrespective of the market value of their gifts. At the same time, to the extent that Thais' motives are not narrowly avaricious, Phaedria's claims too must exceed mere cash. On his side, he has love, not so much his own love for Thais, since this the soldier can match, but Thais' love for him; or perhaps we can say, their mutual love.

I have been sketching the way the plot of the Eunuch, or rather, the juncture between its two plot lines, produces a double aspect to the rivalry between the youth and the soldier. In one way, it appears as a commercial competition between Phaedria and Thraso, to be decided by the exchange value of their gifts. But the gifts have also another value, since by virtue of their hidden identities they are also persons. The position of Thais, in turn, varies according to the conception we entertain of the gifts she receives. Her role as courtesan corresponds to their material value, the cash interest. Her personal concern for Pamphila, however, opens a moral dimension in which two opposed motives, the need to oblige Thraso, and love for Phaedria, both operate. We may add that Thais' interest in Pamphila is itself a double one. Certainly, there is a sentimental bond, for as girls they had been raised like sisters; but there are also practical considerations, since Thais is a relative stranger in Athens, and has hopes of securing a patron in Pamphila's brother Chremes, who is a young man of breeding. These hopes are dashed by the rape, but all is made good by the proposed marriage with Chaerea. The episodes involving Chaerea and Pamphila, then, react throughout on Thais' fortunes, and on the delicate balance between love and security that the rivalry between her lovers represents.

The tension between love and constraint or interest is inscribed in the Eunuch from the very beginning, and in such a way as to oblige love to accommodate necessity. The first two scenes develop, in a remarkably clear and programmatic manner, several different conceptions of erotic passion which served as a source for later writers as different as Cicero and Catullus. What is more, these conceptions have a logic and a progress. They are presented in such a way as to suggest the solution to a dilemma. The solution may be seen, as one might expect in the case of a problem so close to the antinomy of freedom and necessity, as an ideological and overdetermined construct. In any case, it motivates, I believe, the surprising conclusion to the Eunuch, which has shocked and offended many readers of the play. It is a harbinger as well of a moment in the history of love that found expression in the elegists of the Augustan principate, and, after another transformation, in the mediaeval tradition of courtly love.

The play begins with the entrance of Phaedria, who is debating with himself whether to respond to a summons from Thais—similar lines survive as a fragment of Menander's Eunuch, which evidently opened in the same way. Phaedria resents that on the previous day Thais had barred him from her house. Phaedria's slave, Parmeno, counsels him against a show of independence, which, when he later submits, will only leave him more completely in Thais' power. He goes on to explain Thais' mercurial behavior as follows: "A thing that has neither sense nor measure you cannot control by sense. In love, these are all inbred vices: insults, suspicions, hostilities, truces, war, peace again; when you insist on making such unstable things stable by means of reason, it's exactly like trying to be rationally insane" (57-63). The equation of love with madness was proverbial at Rome, and is captured in a jingle that goes as far back as Plautus: amans amens. Nevertheless, it is worth teasing out the precise sense of Parmeno's analysis. If I read him right, Parmeno contrasts the mutability of passion with the fixed and constant nature of reasoned dispositions. Passionate states are unstable, incerta; reason cannot endow them with the stability characteristic of its own self-control. Associations based on reason or calculation (ratio) are not disrupted by arbitrary quarrels, any more than enmities are abolished by sudden reconciliations. Implicit here is a principle of Roman social morality: constantia, or consistency, which Cicero lauded in De Officiis. Rational behavior is settled and determinate. Love is in principle the reverse. Fights do not mean that love is over; they are simply part of the syndrome, as much as making up again. It is in just this compatibility of opposites, this collapse of sustained discriminations, that the irrationality of love consists. This is why it is fruitless to resist Thais' call so long as Phaedria is in love.

To this advice, Phaedria replies: "What a shameful business. Now I realize that she's evil and I'm miserable. I'm fed up and yet I'm burning with passion; conscious and aware, alive and alert, I'm dying, and I don't know what I'm doing" (70-73). There is a superficial similarity between Phaedria's outburst and Parmeno's theory, which it would seem to illustrate. But in fact, Phaedria takes rather a different line. His complaint is not about the irrationality of passion as such. What he laments is that his love is abused by a wicked woman, as he imagines Thais to be. Like Parmeno, Phaedria exploits the figure of oxymoron, but to a different effect. The source of the lover's contradictoriness lies not so much in the volatile nature of passion as in the tension between love and knowledge or moral awareness. To be sure, love will not be dominated, but that is because it is stubborn rather than mutable. While Parmeno identifies an opposition between passion and rationality—his terms are ratio and consilium—Phaedria sees simply an inconsistency between love and good sense, prudentia, scientia—an inconsistency that is problematic when the object of desire is undeserving.

We may call it a debate between an intellectual and an ethical view of love. For Parmeno, Phaedria's indignation is the vestigial scruple of reason that does more harm than good. He counsels his master to buy himself off as cheaply as possible, and adds: "Do not torment yourself (the Greek original had, "Don't fight the god"—me theomachei—but Terence consistently internalizes the source of passion, as Peter Flury has shown). "And don't," Parmeno continues, "add to love's own miseries; those it possesses, bear properly" (76-78). What Phaedria had read as criminal arrogance or hybris (surely the Greek behind contumelia, 3), Parmeno charges to the essence of amor.

At this moment, Thais emerges from her house. Parmeno notes her entrance with a metaphor drawn from agriculture that is very likely Terence's own touch: "There, out she comes, that blight on our property" (nostri fundi calamitas, 79). An entire theme is activated here that had been latent in Phaedria's complaint. Thais is, after all, a professional courtesan. Her motive is not passion but business, or, as the lover perceives it, greed. Phaedria is a type familiar in new comedy, the young wastrel who squanders his fortune on a high-class call-girl, like Diniarchus in Plautus' Truculentus (Parmeno's image recalls a formulaic phrase in that comedy). Thais' fickleness is not a symptom of love, as Parmeno pretended, nor a change of heart, as Phaedria had perhaps led one to imagine. It is simply a matter of profit and loss, and, on the pattern of the Truculentus, one supposes that Phaedria has come near to exhausting his resources, and that another customer, still flush, is on the scene. I do not mean, however, that Parmeno's caustic phrase cancels his little disquisition on love. I have already revealed, what in the Greek original was perhaps disclosed in a prologue, that Thais is not so mercenary. I am remarking rather how Terence, in the thirty-five verses of the opening dialogue, has adumbrated the complex of motives, mercantile and amatory, that we found implicit in the action by which the rivalry between Phaedria and Thraso was dramatized: the presentation of gifts, each of which contained, behind its value as a commodity, a meaning grounded in personal identity.

Thais makes her appearance worrying aloud that Phaedria may have misconstrued his exclusion from her house the previous day. By this, she undercuts the two accounts of her behavior so far proffered: Parmeno's suggestion of love's whimsicality, which derives, on the whole, from the lyric tradition, and Phaedria's intimation of avarice or malice, in the spirit of comic satire. The situation is thus set for the move to a third pattern. Phaedria begins by protesting the inequality of feeling between himself and Thais, such that he is wounded by rejection while she can be indifferent (91-94). Terence will pick up this motif again later, in connection with Thraso's passion for Thais, as we shall see. Thais explains that she did not turn Phaedria out because of love for anyone else, but rather because it had to be done (faciundum fuit, 97). We may note how Thais has modified the terms in the discussion of her motives. She allows two possible reasons for having excluded Phaedria: that she might have preferred another lover, which she dismisses, or that she is under compulsion. Constraint and passion form a cor-relative pair of motives, as opposed to the simple or quantitative character of greed or romantic moodiness. The tension between them gives Thais' character depth or structure. Her object now is to reconcile Phaedria to necessity without offense to his role as lover. Thais proceeds matter-of-factly, by describing Pamphila's history to the time when the soldier acquired possession of her. To recover the girl will be difficult, because Thraso has become suspicious of Phaedria, and may himself have an eye for Pamphila as well. Thais confesses that her interest in Pamphila is both personal, since she is called her sister, and practical, for she hopes to provide herself with useful friends by restoring Pamphila to her family. She asks Phaedria to grant her several days devoted exclusively to the soldier, to insure the transfer of the girl.

Phaedria is outraged. He pretends that the whole story has been fabricated, that Thais loves the soldier and fears Pamphila's charms. There is a momentary standoff, but Phaedria deflects the argument by asking: "Is he the only one who gives?" (163). Here Phaedria mentions his own offering of maid and eunuch, which of course signals the subplot. At the same time, Phaedria has put his case for precedence in terms of cash value—he specifies the cost of the maid and eunuch at twenty minae. The gifts are ambiguously a kind of purchase price and tokens of affection—an ambiguity that will, as we shall see, be exploited throughout the play, and inheres in the role of courtesan. Thais, however, cannot let the charge stand, and makes a bold move: rather than have Phaedria as an enemy (inimicum, 174), she will do as he bids, despite her own wishes. To which Phaedria replies: "If only you said that from the heart (ex animo) and honestly, 'rather than have you as an enemy' ! If I could believe that was sincerely said, I could endure anything" (175-77).

This is the crucial turn in the argument. Phaedria has demanded sincerity. With that, he can allow Thais freedom of action. The language is very careful here, and repays close attention. Phaedria puts his faith in the word: utinam istuc verbum diceres, "If you could speak that word (or phrase)," Phaedria says, and the slave Parmeno picks it up with the remark: "How quickly he collapses, conquered by a single word." It is a matter of belief whether Thais' words reveal what is truly in her heart or mind, her animus. Phaedria solves the problem of submitting to his rival by opening up a space between act and desire or feeling. It is the only solution that will preserve both the claims of love and a frank acknowledgment of the rival's power. Precisely this situation is paradigmatic for the notion of true or sincere love. Thais at once assures Phaedria that she is speaking ex animo, citing her previous favors toward him as evidence—she does not press an absolute division between deeds and words, or what they signify. Phaedria consents to two days apart, and Thais says: "I love you for good reason, you do me kindness" (186). There is a range of meaning in Thais' phrase, bene facis, that is difficult to capture, for it recalls beneficium, the kind of service by which one wins friends or supporters. When Thais spoke of providing herself with friends by restoring Pamphila to her family, beneficium was the term she employed. With Phaedria it occurs again in the same semantic ambience, since Thais's concern not to have Phaedria as an enemy, inimicus, betrays a quite practical interest, however Phaedria may choose to understand her.

"For these two days, Thais," Phaedria says, "good-bye." Thais responds with the coventional Latin interrogative formula of leave-taking, "Want anything else?"—which, like a common expression in Arabic today, requires no answer—but Phaedria responds with a soulful plea: "What do I want? That when you're with that soldier of yours, you not be with him (praesens absens ut sies); that day and night you love me, miss me, dream of me, wait for me, think of me, hope for me, rejoice in me, be totally with me—to sum it up, become my soul (animus), since I am yours" (191-96).

The idea of love as a communion or exchange of minds or hearts sounds romantic. It conjures up the kind of conceit the metaphysical poets would exploit. The paradox of absence in presence has for us a philosophical ring, and the jingle praesens absens appears later in spiritual contexts. These lines, together with his earlier expostulations about mutual and sincere love, establish Phaedria as a figure of deep passion. If we read it as sublime, we may experience some difficulty in reconciling such an emotion with the cross-bidding for Thais' favors represented in the offers of gifts. It has been suggested, for example, that the Roman comedians failed to understand the refined relations that Greeks might enjoy with a courtesan or hetaira, for there was no comparable convention or institution at Rome, and the rough Latin equivalent, meretrix, always retained the rather base connotation of whore, that is, scortum in Latin, or porne in Greek—quite a different thing from hetaira. Alternatively, the modern reader has been warned against sentimentalizing the courtesan who for Greeks and Romans alike remained a woman for hire. The controversy erupts over the final scenes of the Eunuch where Phaedria consents to an arrangement in which he will share Thais with the soldier, on the condition that Thraso foot the bills: a denouement that is startling and, to some scholars, objectionable, not because such arrangements are unheard of in Greece or Rome—for that is not the case—but because it appears degrading to Thais, who is represented as a good-hearted courtesan (bona meretrix), and inconsistent with the nature of Phaedria's love, for which our evidence is precisely the passages we have been examining. Phaedria has only a limited part in the rest of the action. He quits the stage to isolate himself in the country for the two-day interval he has pledged to Thais, and while, not surprisingly, he returns almost at once, his hands will be full with the problem caused by his brother Chaerea. He has no further meetings with Thais, and encounters the soldier only in the finale.

We have seen already how the tension between prices and passion is written into the first act of the Eunuch, and also how it operates in the structure of the plot, where the two movements, centering on Phaedria and Chaerea respectively, are spliced through the double function of the gifts to Thais. As I shall indicate shortly, Terence keeps both aspects present to the audience in Acts II and III. There is not only tension, however, but also a necessary relation between material constraints and the kind of inward love that Phaedria expresses and demands. The distinction between interior and exterior, between a disposition of the animus and behavior conditioned by compulsion, arises out of the interaction between Phaedria and Thais: it enables the simultaneous belief in their love and the propriety of Thais' submission, if only temporary, to the will of Thraso—a submission already enacted the day before. If Phaedria is to believe in Thais' love, he must detach act from feeling. But the reverse is equally the case: the notion of sincerity, of interiority, of the true love of minds and hearts, presupposes a rival whose claims are in some sense acknowledged by the lover himself. Far from being incompatible with concessions to a rival, the conception of love that Phaedria advances with such intensity and sincerity demands them. It is, we may say, the narrative form of true love.

When Phaedria completes his impassioned speech, he leaves the stage, without waiting for a reply from Thais. Thais, with the stage to herself, delivers a brief monologue. "Wretched me," she exclaims, repeating the cry that had escaped her when she first appeared. "Perhaps he has little faith in me and is judging me by the characters of other women. But I am conscious and know for certain that I have not invented any lies and that no one is dearer to my heart (cordi) than Phaedria" (197-201).

There is some reason to suppose that this monologue, and even the outburst of Phaedria that immediately precedes it, may have been the work of Terence, though the question cannot be resolved to the satisfaction of all competent scholars. The use of a soliloquy to reveal Thais' true feelings certainly deserves notice. She asserts that she has acted entirely in the interest of the maiden Pamphila, adding also that she is at the very moment expecting the arrival of Pamphila's brother, which would presumably clinch the case for the girl's citizen status. The monologue as a vehicle for inner feelings assumes, by an easy shift, an expository function, such as belonged customarily to Greek prologues. Whether there is evidence here for Terence's workmanship we may leave moot. Thais' brief monologue, in any case, responds formally to Phaedria's demand for sincerity, and the language in which she expresses her certainty and self-awareness (certo scio, 199) appears to answer Parmeno's indictment of love's instability (incerta, 61), as well as Phaedria's own contrast between loving and knowing (scio, 73), resolving by a kind of verbal closure the doubts about love which they had raised.

Until very near the end of the first act, Parmeno has remained on stage, introducing occasional remarks into the conversation between Phaedria and Thais. The ancient commentator on Terence, Donatus, perceived a difficulty here, since Parmeno can presumably surmise that Pamphila is freeborn, yet later he assists Chaerea in the scheme to gain access to her. Whether Parmeno has dismissed or forgotten the possible identity of Pamphila, or whether he did not imagine that Chaerea would go so far as rape, I shall not conjecture. Karl Biichner inferred that the role of Parmeno in the first act must have been Terence's own contribution, which is why, in Menander's original version, he can have abetted Chaerea's plan without scruple. It is certainly true that Parmeno has, in the second scene of Act I, no very important role. Thais asks Phaedria whether his slave can keep a secret before she proceeds with the facts in the case of Pamphila. Parmeno answers: "Me? Perfectly. But I warn you, this is the rule on which I pledge my good faith to you: whatever I hear that is true, I keep quiet and hold in perfectly; but if it's false or hollow or made up, it's immediately out in the open—I'm full of cracks, and I pour out this way and that" (100-05). Deleuze has mentioned the connection between imagery of perforated bodies and schizophrenia, in which surfaces break down, "the entire body is nothing but depth," and, as a corollary, words lose their meaning, or are experienced as false [Gilles Deleuze, "The Schizophrenic and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud," in Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies, 1979]. Parmeno is no schizophrenic. Quite the contrary, he is in perfect command of his own surface, which he can render porous at will. I should like to suggest, however, that his image of container and contained, and the association of truth with things held within, falsehood with the rupture of boundaries, may be a figure for the inwardness or subjectivity that Phaedria looks to in the love of Thais.

There is another exchange, almost certainly and by general consensus an interpolation by Terence himself, where the interpenetration of love and sale is exposed with caustic irony. It occurs between the soldier and his parasite. Thraso's first entrance, at the beginning of Act III, is with customary braggadocio, egged on by Gnatho. Then, with an abrupt change of subject, Thraso inquires whether he ought to clear himself before Thais of the suspicion that he is in love with Pamphila (434-35). Gnatho counsels against it: better to keep Thais jealous in order to have in reserve a weapon against Phaedria. Thraso submits a curiously modest and sober objection: "If she really loved me, then that would help, Gnatho" (446). To this Gnatho replies: "Since she looks forward to and loves what you give her, she has long since loved you, it has long since been easy to hurt her. She's constantly afraid that the profit she now reaps you may angrily bestow elsewhere." Thraso says, "You're right, that hadn't occurred to me." "Ridiculous," answers Gnatho; "you just weren't thinking" (447-52). This blunt equation of ava-rice and romantic love passes with the alazon figure of the soldier, because he is vain and dim enough to miss, or want to miss, the paradox. We have seen, however, that this contradiction is not an accident of the soldier's wealth and gullibility. Phaedria is in precisely the same position. In his case, the contradiction was finessed through artful transitions in the dialogue and by the professed sincerity of the lovers, to be elicited only by critical analysis. But sincerity does not abolish the contradictions of the courtesan's role, it merely contains them. The difference with the parasite and the soldier is that, for the soldier, Gnatho is free to unmask them.

When Thais comes out and greets the soldier, he at once puts Gnatho's theory to work: "My Thais, my pet, what's up? Do you love me on account of that harp-girl?" (455-57). Thraso's formulation is not quite so stark as the parasite's: appreciation of gifts is the cause of love, not love itself. But the coarseness is remarked by Parmeno, who is on hand with the Aethiopian maid and the eunuch, or rather, with his replacement, Chaerea in drag: "How charming! What a start he's off to" (455-58). But such delicacy does not prevent Parmeno from competing on the same terms: "Whenever you're ready, the gifts from Phaedria are here," he puts in (464-65). In an earlier scene, when he still had on his hands the genuine, decrepit eunuch, who was no match for the Pamphila whom Gnatho was bringing to Thais, Parmeno had admitted that the doors were open to the parasite because of the girl (282); but there, however Gnatho might take it, Parmeno had in mind the plot to rescue Pamphila, and even allowed himself to refer cryptically to the two-day period of grace that Phaedria had agreed upon (283-85). With the handsome Chaerea in tow, he is prepared to let gifts speak for themselves, and even to turn Phaedria's absence to advantage, giving it out as a sign of suave superiority that his master makes no exclusive claims upon the courtesan (480-81, 484-85). Phaedria and Thraso are on the same level here. The debonair want of possessiveness on Phaedria's part may seem a ploy of Parmeno's, and difficult to reconcile with the romantic intensity of Phaedria's love, but we may also understand it as an extension of the idea of love inaugurated in the first act, which requires the acknowledgment of the rival.

For all his good intentions, Phaedria does not succeed in retiring for as much as a few hours, and is soon back on the scene, if not to touch, as he says, at least to look (638-40). His return, however, does not precipitate a confrontation with his rival, nor does it, as I have said, discommode the scheme to recover Pamphila. By this time, the girl has been installed in Thais' house and raped by Chaerea into the bargain, and Phaedria, who is hard put to comprehend how a eunuch could have done the damage, has his hands full defending himself against the angry accusations of Thais' servants, who have discovered the deed. An interrogation of the real eunuch soon betrays Chaerea's part in it, despite Phaedria's attempts to corrupt his testimony, once he sees where it is leading. At this point, Pamphila's brother, Chremes, returns, having already searched for Thais at her house and then at Thraso's, where his arrival caused consternation for the jealous soldier (618, 623).

Chremes' role here provides an interesting indication of how Menander composed his plays. One might have expected that the intervention at the house of the rival—in Menander's Eunuch he was not necessarily a soldier—would be the work of Phaedria rather than of Chremes, Pamphila's brother, who has no amorous relation to Thais save in the mind of Thraso. Terence, in the interpolated passage mentioned above, has Gnatho prepare the soldier for just such an encounter—with Phaedria. Günther Jachmann, who, in a brilliant article, opened the whole question of contamination in the Eunuch, concluded that in the Menandrian original it must have been Phaedria, or his counterpart, who disrupted the rival's party, and it was Terence who transferred this function to Chremes. But Menander, in fact, chose to make Phaedria as good as his word, and he does not disrupt Thais' efforts to recover Pamphila through an untimely confrontation with Thraso. Thus, Chaerea's rape of Pamphila, which takes on this function, appears, for all the amplitude with which it is developed, as a complication in the story of Phaedria and Thais, as Walther Ludwig incidentally reveals in his masterly analysis of the structure of the Eunuch's plot. But the alternative possibility, that Phaedria himself might have disturbed Thais' scheme by a jealous intervention, while it is excluded from the Eunuch by the insertion of the subplot and by the subjective and therefore tolerant character of Phaedria's passion, remains available as a paradigm or scene-type which Menander, or perhaps Terence, adapted to the role of Chremes. The way in which Menander worked with scene-types and could exploit a single pattern in quite different contexts was demonstrated elegantly by Woldemar Gorier, in a comparison between a series of scenes in the Eunuch and in Menander's Dyscolus, shortly after the Dyscolus was first published in 1959.

After the episode at the soldier's house, which is reported indirectly rather than enacted on stage, Chremes meets Thais at her own house, where she at last has the opportunity to tell him about Pamphila, and to produce the birth tokens—which Chremes does not recognize. He prepares to summon his old nurse, who will know the trinkets, but is forestalled by the arrival of Thraso and a small army of slaves and cooks. With considerable encouragement from Thais and inspired by the likelihood, at least, that Pamphila is his sister, Chremes faces the soldier down, though he retires to bring on the nurse before Thraso's actual retreat. The frustrated or incomplete recognition of Pamphila here, which will require confirmation in a later episode, may be a stylistic device, if it is true, as Wehrli has suggested, that Menander liked to vary the anagnorisis and rarely staged such scenes straightforwardly (the Andria is the notable exception), but it also articulates the double movement of the plot, for Thais, still ignorant of the rape of Pamphila, believes that she has now succeeded in establishing the citizenship of the girl. When, after the departure of Chremes and of Thraso with his troops, she discovers what has happened, she will have to adapt her tactics, if not abandon her plan altogether, since Pamphila is no longer an acceptable or eligible woman by the conventions of new comedy, and Chremes will, presumably, have no interest in establishing his connection with her. Only marriage with Chaerea can save her, and this is achieved by the unmasking of Chaerea and the finally corroborated indentification of Pamphila, so that all obstacles to the union—Chaerea's father on his side, Chremes and Thraso on Pamphila's—are simultaneously eliminated.

After the revelations about Chaerea and Pamphila and a scene in which Parmeno, through a ruse of Thais' servant, is given a good scare for his part in Chaerea's masquerade, a love-sick and mostly humbled Thraso slips in once more—a bare seventy verses from the end of the play. Two brief scenes more, and he meets Phaedria for the denouement. This is engineered by Gnatho. Thraso has understood that he is defeated. He has lost Pamphila, and learned that Chaerea will marry her with his father's consent; the old man has also agreed to take Thais under his protection, which Terence expresses in terms of the Roman relationship of patron and client (1039-40). Thais is wholly Phaedria's. But Thraso's love increases with his despair (1053), and he appeals, rather pathetically, to Gnatho for help. In exchange for a permanent place at Thraso's table, Gnatho girds himself for action against the now arrogant Phaedria. His strategy is to recommend that Phaedria share Thais with the soldier, to which he persuades him with three arguments: Thraso will cover the expenses for Phaedria's affair; his silly self-importance will be a great source of general amusement; and there is no chance that Thais could fall in love with him. The soldier, at once grateful and harmlessly vain, thanks the parasite and remarks that everyone loves him wherever he goes. "Just what you promised," says Phaedria to Gnatho in the final line of the play.

Such festive inclusiveness is of course compatible with new comedy, but it is by no means demanded by the genre. It is quite conventional to drive out the discomfited rival, and Phaedria's self-regarding magnanimity again may seem at odds with his earlier idealized devotion, if not a downright lapse of taste on the part of Terence. But the point of the final scene is not to reward the soldier for having been a good sport, nor to extract a last bit of humor from his salvaged vanity. For it serves as a solution to the paradox of commercial love that has been in suspense since the beginning of the play—or, if not a solution, then at all events a new and explicit statement of it. The courtesan is in business. But the customer is a lover, and wishes to be loved. We have seen how Phaedria took refuge from this dilemma in the demand for sincerity, Which posits a division between one's role and one's true or inner self. Phaedria now has possession of Thais, but this does not alter the contradictory basis of their relation. There can be no question of marriage, both because of her profession and because of her alien status, which absolutely prohibit union with a citizen. The idea of love—Thais' love for Phaedria—is reimported by the cynical Gnatho, however, in order to mark the necessary distinction between Phaedria and Thraso (1080). The opposition between love and sale which Gnatho himself has collapsed in order to reassure the soldier of Thais' favor, is here exploited with comic abandon to undo Phaedria's possessiveness, enabling him to admit and profit from the double relation which had earlier been a cause of anguish. The spirit of elation that attends upon the victory of Phaedria and Chaerea and the humiliation of Thraso, who is a likable ass, make the conclusion palatable, and one might analyze according to a psychological theory of reception how such effects in comedy facilitate ideologically ambiguous resolutions. But the point is that the ambiguity here is, with respect to the plot, gratuitous. Just when the lovers have the power to be united, the rival is welcomed to share. The amatory division of labor which they enjoy rests precisely on the notion of love which Phaedria had raised at the beginning of the play. Love ceases to be a balm for the pain of a compromised allegiance and becomes instead the inspiration or rationalization for it. The hero's complaint about the courtesan's submission to material constraints is transformed into a frank and genial game with them. Sincere love, then, is not only compatible with the life of a courtesan, it is proper to it. The finale of the play is an emblem of this complex.

Before considering some of the implications or meanings of love as it is developed in the relations among Thais, Phaedria and Thraso, we may briefly examine the forms of passion developed in the counterplot of the Eunuch. When Chaerea dashes on stage where Parmeno is loitering, in pursuit of a maiden so beautiful she has driven all others from his mind, Parmeno dryly observes: "Here's the other one" (297). He knows his man. Phaedria had been a serious and sober character before he was transformed by love's disease (morbi, 225)—child's play compared to what a rabid Chaera will unleash (200-01). The plan is struck to have Chaerea impersonate his brother's eunuch, who is standing mutely by. Chaerea dismisses Parmeno's misgivings, arguing that it is better to trick a whore, who lives off deceit, than to turn his wiles against his father (382-86). We may fill in the argument implicit in this telegraphic disjunction: love must have its way; it is a matter only of means. Since the lover himself is without resources, comedy affords him two avenues to his object: he may raid his own estate, which is to say, most commonly, his father's; or he may cozen the girl's master or mistress. Here, Thais stands for the latter, as a self-employed courtesan whose house is as good as a brothel (domum meretriciam, 382). Hence she herself may be despised as a lena or brothel-keeper, fair game for force or fraud, like Sannio in The Brothers. Later, when he emerges from Thais' house, Chaerea exults in his conquest, narrating each step in his escapade to the delight and approbation of his friend Antipho, with whom he has fallen in. He is unashamed of his costume, since passion is sufficient excuse (574-75), and he explains how any scruples that might have lingered were banished by the chance view of a painting of Jupiter's seduction of Danae, which Chaerea, with trite irreverence, interprets as divine sanction for his stratagem.

While all of Menander's plays, as Ovid said, treated love, love was not all of a kind. Chaerea's passion is not an abiding and reciprocal affection such as Phaedria entertains. Indeed rape, while it is often in the background of new comedy—exõ tou dramatos, in Aristotle's phrase—is not normally a part of the action, and the characterization appropriate to such a motive is correspondingly unusual in the repertory of amorous roles. The lovers in new comedy may contemplate less than forever, but rarely only a day. Where a courtesan is involved, a fixed duration, such as a year, may be stipulated; most often, the term of the liaison is unspecified. Chaerea is the exception: his passion simply to possess the virgin, with no thought of consequences, summons up a novel persona. It is certainly a successful one. Chaerea is an engaging scamp, witty, frank, and ebullient, and it is easy to enjoy his ingenuous elation, despite the injustice to Thais, whom we know as sympathetic, and to her innocent ward. An untroubled empathy with the youth is licensed by the holiday mood of comedy, as well as by the custom of the genre, which will require that he accept as wife the citizen whom he has violated. A recognition scene suffices to establish the girl's legitimacy. But transforming Chaerea into a plausible husband will take art, for it involves an alteration of intention and of style.

Chaerea reenters crestfallen in the final act. The parents of Antipho both proved, as Chaerea relates, to be at home, and he was constrained to flee down alley after alley to escape encounters with acquaintances (840-47). His former bravado has deserted him, and when he sees Thais, who is fuming with indignation, he freezes in confusion (848-49). His object attained, the spell is now broken, and Chaerea is again subject to a sense of decorum and shame. This change of heart enables us to bracket his outrageous interlude as a transient impulse or aberration.

When he is charged by Thais and her excitable maid, Pythias, for having assaulted a citizen girl, Chaerea briefly takes refuge in his disguise: "I thought she was a fellow slave" (858). Thais then drops pretenses, addresses Chaerea by his proper name, and reproaches him for his offense against her, whereupon Chaerea takes another tack, intimating that his better acquaintance with the girl may announce a happy conclusion to bad beginnings. At all events, he did it "not for pride's sake, but for love" (877-78). Thais, who professes to understand the power of love, forgives him. "Now I love you too, Thais," he exclaims, which prompts a warning to her mistress from Pythias, and Chaerea's shocked reply, "I wouldn't dare." Chaerea pleads to have Pamphila as wife, on condition that she is a citizen (890; cf. 1036), and, after some further squabbling with the still skeptical Pythias, he is taken into Thais' house, unwilling to be seen in the eunuch's garb. "Ashamed?" asks Thais. "A regular virgin," Pythias puts in, as he and Thais withdraw.

Chaerea's disguise, and his willingness to sport it, are an index of his passion. The return of his sense of decency is coordinate with his intention to marry Pamphila. There is a transition from one mood to another, but no real moral or personal complexity in Chaerea. This is quite different, for example, from the function of disguises in Shakespeare, which, as Muriel C. Bradbrook explains, "provide a second dramatic identity which is superimposed upon the first, and interlaced with it. When Shakespeare puts his heroines into page's wearing, the two roles are sharply contrasted, giving an effect like shot silk, as the boyish wit or the feminine sensibility predominates. Both must be sustained …" [M. C. Brad-brook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy, 1973].

It is no occasion for surprise that Pamphila's feelings about the marriage are not consulted. She has, by the conventions of the genre, no other hope of respectability. In any case, marriage is the concern of her guardian, and with Thais' consent, Chremes will pose no objection. It is not a question of options. Sex between citizens is coded as marriage. Without marriage, sex expels Pamphila from the citizen community, precisely as though Chremes had been unable to recognize her (which, prior to Chae-rea's offer of marriage, is exactly the case). The meaning of Chaerea's passion varies with Pamphila's status, and there is no room here for personal conflict, or for the emergence of a subjective voice.

With respect to the status-based polarization of erotic relations on which Chaerea's affair with Pamphila is predicated, Phaedria's association with Thais appears as a third term: a free relation that depends on mutual assent and affection. But, as we have now clearly seen, that relation too has a double aspect in which passion is opposed to necessity, or, stated otherwise, sincere love is set against the courtesan's need to earn her living by the commerce of her body. The four terms suggest the semantic parallelogram designed by A.-J. Greimas, the corners of which we may label as rape, marriage, commercial love, and sincere love. While rape and marriage correspond more or less to the status division between slave and citizen, the tension between personal love and the courtesan's trade is inscribed within the courtesan role itself. It has frequently been observed, of course, that the practice of arranged marriages and the relative seclusion of women in Athens inhibited free romantic attachments among citizens, and that such sentiments found expression in liaisons with hetaira. These were not associations among equals, and the image of the courtesan as a professional engaged in business exposes her essential degradation behind the appearance of voluntary association. In the Eunuch, the simultaneous acknowledgment of both aspects of the courtesan's role invites a further inflection in the idea of love, which is carried in the notion of sincerity. Love is mutual and by consent, but assent in the lady is etherealized as an inward reflex of the mind, leaving the body in the control of other forces. This conception of love is evolved in the dialogue of the opening act, but the structure of feeling it expresses informs as well the bargain struck in the finale.

In the present state of our knowledge, it is impossible to say how much of the Eunuch as we have it is the work of Terence, and what parts derive certainly from his model or models. Opinions differ, for example, on the provenience of the conclusion, though the majority of scholars favor its attribution to Terence himself. I am inclined to believe that the structure of feeling that I have been describing is more Roman than Greek, and the theme we have been pursuing is most in evidence in those passages which may be plausibly assigned to Terence. One may recall once more that Rome had no institution comparable to that of the Greek hetaira, nor a status exactly analogous to that of the Athenian metic or resident alien—the term peregrinus, which Terence applies both to Thais and to Thraso, is a different matter. What was, by custom at least, a natural relationship in Greece may have been for the Romans, or at least for Terence, complex and contradictory.

If it permissible to venture a little further in the airy domain of speculation, we may also remark a difference in the Greek and Roman erotic vocabulary that bears upon our investigation. Samuel Richardson, in the Post-script to Clarissa, written when the ideology of love was evolving yet another structure, observed that "what is too generally called love ought (perhaps as generally) to be called by another name," and he offered as a substitute "Cupidity or a Paphian stimulus … however grating they may be to delicate ears." Now, Greek terminology for love or passion was rich and nuanced. Philia expressed the bond among friends and equals, storge that between parents and children, agape a strong affection, while eros denoted a powerful and ungovernable passion, such as that which inspired Chaerea to rape Pamphila. For all these feelings, or drives, Latin had the single term amor. The word called for specification, as fraternal or paternal love, love of country, true love. While in Greek, the expression alethes eros would be quite odd, and would certainly not suggest a deep or interior emotion, verus or sincerus amor is a natural phrase in Latin, discriminating a love that is genuine, in some sense, from a transient or base passion. A fact of vocabulary may inspire distinctions that assume an ideological importance.

In a famous epigram to Lesbia, Catullus imitated Phaedria's appeal to Thais for truth and sincerity. It was a happy inspiration. Catullus, too, was obliged to share the woman he loved with a rival whose claims he had per-force to acknowledge, since his rival was Lesbia's husband. In his frustration, Catullus assailed the motility of passion, as did Parmeno, and the wicked callousness of his beloved. I should propose also to locate in the tradition of the Eunuch the complex of themes that constitutes Roman elegy: the ambiguous status of the mistress, who remains aloof from marriage; the problem of greed and gifts; the necessary role of the rival; and the emphasis on sincerity and inner feeling, for which the Roman elegists have been honored as the inventors of subjective love lyric.

If we have rightly discovered in Terence's Eunuch an anticipation of elegiac subjectivity, we cannot fail finally to acknowledge its proper character as comedy, a genre whose creative phase at Rome did not outlive the second century B.C. I believe that it pertains to the essence of new comedy that it always presupposed, even when it was critical of, the recognition of status relations, which the elegists, a century later, could leave blurred or indistinct. Thais is, of course, both resourceful and dignified—Walther Ludwig has insisted that she is the heroine of the drama—and she acts as a kind of patron toward Chaerea and Chremes. Nevertheless, as George Pepe has pointed out in a very perceptive paper ["The Last Scene of Terence's Eunuchus," The Classical World 65, 1972], roles are restored when the father of Phaedria and Chaerea is introduced toward the end of the play and accepts Thais as his client or dependent. Pepe adds that "the disharmony of the final scene is that Phaedria's action"—sharing Thais with Thraso and thereby reducing her to the role of a common courtesan—"reasserts [the] pejorative, stereotyped picture of her." Pepe concludes: "If we accept for the purpose of analysis the view that the end of a comedy envisions a new society, we are in a better position to define the dissatisfaction felt at the end of the Eunuchus. Instead of a new society it reasserts the old even though that society is deficient in its treatment of Thais."

Yet Pepe's reaction to the conclusion is perhaps too severe. To be sure, Thais does not alter her station, but that is not the form in which comedy puts the challenge to convention. More often, comedy enjoys a confounding of social relations that are affirmed precisely to be cancelled through the evocation of an undifferentiated community—what we may call the saturnalian moment. If we look over the movement of the Eunuch as a whole, we may perceive how every character in the play is drawn to the house of Thais. Phaedria and Thraso contend over the right to enter, the latter resorting to an attack under arms; Chaerea and Pamphila gain access in the guise of gifts. Chaerea's father enters to rescue his son, when he learns that Chaerea has raped a free woman. By the end of the play, everyone is inside Thais' place, where all relations appear to coexist (one may compare the conclusion to Plautus' Bacchides for another instance of this festive formula). Thais' role as patrona and manager of the action, insofar as it reverses conventional status functions, suggests the pattern of inversion that Erich Segal, for example, has identified as characteristic of the Plautine moment in comedy. This inversion is not so much corrected in the finale by Thais' reduction to a common meretrix as it is sublimated: all forms meld, and Thais' roles as patron and client coalesce in a comic community characterized by the negation of structured relations. On this level, the subjectivity grounded in rivalry and constraint is dissolved in the very same crucible that distilled it into being, the pleasure-house of courtesan. If Thais nevertheless remains, as she does for many critics, an individual of personal worth who is somehow demeaned by such a merry arrangement, this is perhaps because the contradictions which gave birth to the genre of erotic comedy have not been entirely canceled in the Eunuch, but survive its factitious resolution. In the end, it seems, not even sincerity can mask the tensions inherent in relations of social exploitation.