The Roman Comedy known as palliata consists of ‘‘translations’’ of Greek plays for the Roman audience of the second century. Its most popular playwright was Plautus, an Umbrian born in the mid-third century, who is said to have died in 184. Twice he refers to his art of translation as ‘‘a barbarian transformation’’ (As. 11, Trin. 19) and here we will be interested in what that ironic self-description means and entails.7 His drama takes place in a hybrid world of Greek cities, Latin puns, Roman morals, and a mixture of Greek and Roman institutions. Nevertheless, there is little agreement about what makes his plays Roman. At the level of style, it is easy to speak of his exuberant energies: drama marked by wordplay and metrical variety, by song, and farce, and set pieces like the ‘‘running slave’’ and the ‘‘overheard plot.’’ Throughout there is a ‘‘metatheatrical’’ awareness on the part of the characters that they are characters in a play. All of these elements, however, except the lyric aria, can be found to some degree in Greek plays he translated. What, then, is Roman about Plautine comedy? And what version of Roman identity does this hybrid genre present?
An early play, The Swaggering Soldier, provides some clues. Plautus tells us that it is a translation of a Greek play, The Braggart, and we can note that already in the title Plautus has turned the emphasis from social morality to individual character. Furthermore, in the Plautus play braggadocio is hardly a fault in itself, since it characterizes the clever slave who runs the show. Further, the soldier with his pretentious name, Pyrgopolynices (‘‘Victor MultiTowers’’), or his opponent, Bumbomachides Clutomistharnikarchides (‘‘McMercenaryFameKing, son of BoomBattle’’), may easily remind the audience of both arrogant Greek mercenaries and the self-important Roman aristocracy with names like Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus. What this suggests is that Plautus has turned his attention away from the moral concerns of Greek comedy toward the psychological problem of selfimportance. And when in the course of the plot the clever slave convinces the swaggering soldier that he is an ‘‘adulterer,’’ we may see that the drama is concerned with how others exploit our self-images. In fact, Plautus offers his own analysis of this concern early in the drama when the slave Palaestrio is about to convince another slave, Sceledrus, that he did not see his master’s girl visiting the neighbor. As part of the trick, this girl pretends not to know Sceledrus, which of course confuses the slave. Palaestrio warns: ‘‘The trick is, Sceledrus, to discover if we are our own selves or someone else’s. Someone of the neighbors may have changed us when we were not looking.’’ And, in fact, this is exactly what happens in the play: Palaestrio turns Sceledrus into a bad slave, Pyrgopolynices into an ‘‘adulterer,’’ and himself into a free man. This is the insight of an acquisitive culture with a rhetoricized sense of identity, and in transforming the Greek play Plautus transforms his own audience into characters who know about and laugh at the way the world transforms us whether we are on our guard or not.
Until 1976, we had no means of comparing a Plautine play with its Greek ‘‘model.’’ Now, however, we can compare some lines from Plautus’ Bacchides with the parallel lines from Menander. The comparison reveals much that we already suspected: Plautus invents and expands, disregards the easy ellipses of conventional conversation and replaces them with extended jokes, turns serious melodrama into farce, and so on.8 But in doing this, Plautus also discovers aspects of interaction that Menander overlooked.
In the scene we have, a young man thinks his friend has betrayed him by taking up with his girlfriend. Menander has the young man speak a few self-absorbed and selfprotective strategic lines: the girl’s to blame; I’d better return the money to my father; she’ll be sorry when I’m broke. Plautus’ young man, on the other hand, is confused, filled with hate and love; he tries to develop a strategy, only to collapse in selfcontradiction and psychological pratfalls (e. g., ‘‘she’s not getting the last laugh; I’ll go to my father and... steal something.’’). In Menander the young man is strategic and makes a choice; in Plautus, he refuses to choose precisely because he is really pulled between contradictory impulses and desires. Plautus, then, acts as Menander’s therapist, revealing and giving expression to the drives and contradictions that Menander suppresses. The young man in Menander represses his anger in his soliloquy, and comes right to the point when the friends meet. Plautus, on the other hand, develops a war-metaphor as the friends circle each other, one thinking the other is his heart’s enemy, the other (who has no idea what is going on) merely trying to help a friend in distress. The lover obliquely attacks his friend for the moral decay of the times while the friend sympathizes with the ‘‘betrayed lover’s’’ pain and also attacks the moral decay of the times. This is all quite brilliant and funny, but what scholars have missed is that it is not so much a translation, as a strong reading of Menander’s social world. Plautus finds in the niceties of that world repressed energies and contradictions as well as opportunities for self-invention and manipulation. Personal pain, commitment, and even morality are deployed in a game for position, a game in which the lover tries to turn his friend into a confessed criminal, while the friend turns himself into the faithful ally. This may be farce, but this farce allows the young men to discover the truth about their friendship (they are both moralists) and the audience to recognize that reality is made from the roles we play, the traps we lay, the tricks we plan.
The Plautine play celebrates the energies and the duplicity required when Rome was possessing and changing the Mediterranean. It celebrates those energies by finding them lurking everywhere: in the psychology of the duped and swindled, in the slippery characters who keep playing out of role, in the outrageous plots and exaggerated arias, but most of all in the way the plays interrupt the action, stop the plot, postpone the final victory just for the chance to play one more time with the psyche and symbolic systems of others. When at the end of The Swaggering Soldier Palaestrio can simply walk away to freedom (see also Chapter 14), he prefers to return to the soldier, to flatter him yet again, to run the risk of having the soldier refuse to free him. Why? It seems that the play is not about the nominal freedom of the slave or the recovery of the girlfriend. It is about the pleasure of playing with the symbolic, especially if it changes someone else’s world and puts you in control of them. This is real freedom.
The translator, the self-transformer, the betrayer of another are tropes of each other. In Plautus it is only the slave, known as a versipellis, or ‘‘skin-changer,’’ who can fully manipulate the illusion, but everyone has a stake in it. Everyone eavesdrops on everyone else, becomes the analyst of everyone else’s practice - just as Plautus is the analyst of Menander. This requires empathy, the capacity to get within another’s psyche, to see how another sees the world, and it requires the capacity to play roles and yet not to confuse oneself with those roles. This is what it meant to be Roman on the Plautine stage, just as it is what it meant to be Roman when Scipio at Utica pretended to an exhausted Syphax that the war had ground to a halt, that it was time for a peace agreement. While the generals met to discuss terms, Scipio’s lieutenants dressed shabbily as slaves, scouted the camp, found weaknesses and exits. Then Scipio suddenly and unilaterally broke off negotiations; the camp was torched and few escaped (Polyb. 14.1.1-6.5).
Terence (c.190-159), a comic writer of the next generation, a slave born in Africa, understood the Plautine achievement, but attempted to reinsert the very aspect of Romanness that was always in tension with symbolic manipulation: moral obligation. Thus, his Demea in The Brothers is a strict, moralistic, dyspeptic character very much like the grumpy men in Menander. Demea, however, is not finally forced to be sociable - the goal of a comedy of manners. Instead, Terence fashions a Demea who, like the clever slave, knows how to play the role of the ‘‘pleasant old man,’’ and to turn the desires and the pretenses of others (including his very pleasant brother Micio’s) against them, to make social facility a way to coerce moral rigidity (severitas). What is Roman here is not Demea’s severitas or even the time-honored opposition between ‘‘sociability’’ and ‘‘morality.’’ It is rather the distance between character and role which allows Demea to gain the upper hand. For Plautus as well as for Terence, the issue is representation: not who you are so much as how you represent yourself and how others represent you. Plautine comedy celebrates freedom: the freedom of characters from their roles, the freedom of the slave, even the freedom of language to proliferate in figures of speech and thought. Terentian comedy, which in many ways is more like what we know of Greek new comedy, reorients character as the-role-we-play in terms of larger moral issues. In Terence, character becomes part of the rhetoric of virtue.
World History
