All posts tagged E.F. Watling

Moral letters by Seneca

What do you need to be a good man? Willpower.
(Letter 80, section 4)

Whatever you do, keep death in mind.
(Letter 114, section 27)

You must embed these thoughts deep in your heart, Lucilius.
(Letter 7, section 12)

Stoicism

The thing about Stoic philosophy is how wrong its premises are and how banal its teachings.

Stoics believed there is a God, that the universe or Nature is God, or God suffuses Nature. Human beings were created by God with a spark of Divine Reason within us. Our job is to clear away all the clutter of work, society, gossip, all relationships, friends and family, all the clamour which clogs up our lives, including all our own passions and emotions, love, anger and so on – in order to cultivate this fragment of the Divine Reason in each of is and, by doing so, bring our lives into alignment with the values of the universe/God. Then, by cultivating detachment from all earthly worries and passions, by strengthening our minds, we can prepare for the worst the world has to throw at us and defuse the ultimate terror, the fear of death.

That’s it. You can vary the wording and multiply the precepts with lots of specific examples (avoid gossip, avoid crowds, eat moderately, don’t get drunk, treat everyone with respect – ponder with the worst possible outcomes so nothing surprises you, analyse every situation with detachment), but it’s that simple and, after the initial novelty has worn off, that boring.

Seneca

The Roman author, tutor, Stoic philosopher, politician and immensely rich man, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC to 65 AD) is called Seneca the Younger because his father (54 BC to 39 AD) – author of a collection of reminiscences about the Roman schools of rhetoric (which survives) and a history of Roman affairs from the beginning of the Civil Wars until the last years of his life (which is lost) – had the exact same name, so is known as Seneca the Elder.

Seneca the Younger, much more famous than his father, is sometimes just referred to as Seneca.

Seneca wrote a prodigious amount; later critics said too much. E.F. Watling, in his Penguin edition of Seneca’s plays, says that his best-loved works are the letters he wrote to one specific friend, Lucilius. Seneca himself titled these the Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (‘Moral Letters to Lucilius’), also known in English as the ‘Letters from a Stoic’. Seneca wrote this collection of 124 letters at the end of his life, from approximately 63 to 65 AD, after he had largely retired as tutor and adviser to the Emperor Nero, a post he’d held since 49 – sixteen years.

The letters are addressed to Lucilius Junior who was then procurator of Sicily and is known to posterity only through Seneca’s writings. (Seneca also dedicated his dialogue On Providence and his encyclopedic Natural Questions to this same Lucilius.)

Scholars fret about whether these were ‘real’ letters, and what the structure of correspondence was – did Seneca only respond to questions sent him by Lucilius? Where is Lucilius’s half of the correspondence? etc. But whether or not they were ever part of a ‘real’ correspondence, it is clear that Seneca wrote these letters with a wider readership in mind. They contain numerous carefully crafted passages obviously aimed at posterity and are structured so as to cover a wide range of subjects dear to Stoics. The 124 letters were published grouped together into 20 ‘books’.

Philosophy as therapy

The letters amount to a series of short moral lessons, designed to help Lucilius achieve the wisdom and peace of mind (‘a calm and correct state of mind,’ Letter 4) promised by Stoic doctrine. In order to do this the letters focus on the traditional themes of Stoic philosophy such as removing oneself from the crowd; cultivating a contempt of death; learning to endure the ups and downs of life; acknowledging virtue as the supreme good, and so on.

The key point which the translator of the Oxford University Press edition, Elaine Fantham, makes in her introduction, is that the letters do not amount to a systematic exposition of Stoicism. Almost the reverse. They are like a series of lessons on ad hoc, specific topics, often beginning with an everyday experience and then extracting from it an insight or type of behaviour which Seneca tells Lucilius he can adopt in order to improve himself. Each letter contains ‘a little bit of profit’ (5) – like instalments in a self-help correspondence course.

Seneca wrote the letters not to promote a complete finished system of thought: he wasn’t necessarily interested in extrapolating a comprehensive system. As Fantham says, Seneca put moral impact before intellectual debate. He ‘puts the ability to avoid fear and desire ahead of any intellectual expertise’ (note, page 298). Seneca gave the work a new type of name, Epistulae Morales, and wrote them with a moral purpose to promote moral behaviour.

Philosophy is not a skill shaped for popular appeal or for display; it does not consist of words but of deeds…it moulds and shapes the mind, arranges one’s life, controls one’s actions, points out what is to be done and what to be avoided. (16)

Thus Seneca instructs Lucilius not about this or that point of abstract philosophical doctrine – but over and over again tells him that he must repeat certain thoughts in order to put them into practice, to make them part of his everyday waking thoughts.

Only Philosophy will wake us up, it alone will shake off our heavy sleep, so dedicate yourself wholly to it. (53.8)

Possibly the most consistent lesson (repeated so many times it gets a little boring) is cultivating a ‘contempt’ for death. When death comes it is over; it is nothing. We need to live with the idea of our death all the time, to get accustomed to it, so as to eliminate all fear and anxiety about it:

Let us order our minds so that we wish for whatever circumstances demand, and especially let us think about our ends without sadness. We need to be prepared for death before we are prepared for life. (61.3)
The more men have accustomed themselves to hardship, the more easily they will endure it. (76.34)
Whatever has been long anticipated comes as a lighter blow. (78.29)
Everyone approaches a hazard to which he has long squared himself with more courage and resists harsh events by contemplating them in advance. (107.4)

This accustoming to death takes effort so we must ‘practice thinking this over each day’ (4.5) and ‘ensure that what is now an urge becomes a lasting disposition’ (17.6).

Virtue does not come to a mind unless it is trained and taught and brought to its highest condition by constant exercise. (90.46)

Repeat, practice, memorise. The letters are lessons in how to think, in how to live life in order to maximise calm and reason, mental or psychological exercises which must be learned through constant repetition.

You must persist and build up strength by constant diligence until what is now a good intention becomes a good state of mind. (16.1)
These are things we must learn, in fact learn by heart. (123.17)

In this respect, the OUP is a good edition because Fantham precedes every letter with a short summary of its main topics, of its time and place of composition, and how it relates to other letters on the same topic. This is extremely useful. (Mind you, the 1917 translation by Richard Mott Gummere which is available online has something the Fantham edition hasn’t, which is attributing each letter a title such as ‘On saving time’, ‘On discursiveness in reading’ and so on. I imagine these titles aren’t in the original but they are extremely useful in remembering at a glance which letter is about what.)

There is some background information about Roman society, but not as much as you’d hope for, certainly nothing like the chatty detail you get in Cicero’s wonderful letters (Seneca consciously distances himself from Cicero’s style and gossipy subject matter in letter 118).

Like all Roman writers, Seneca now and then cites famous Roman heroes or historical figures as examples of ‘virtue’ (notably Marcus Porcius Cato, who committed suicide in 46 BC, as the example of fortitude in the face of death; or Gaius Mucius Cordus who unflinchingly put his hand into a fire to prove his bravery).

There is a description of the lives of the super-rich at Baiae (51), a fascinating portrait of the conditions of slaves (47), a vivid comparison of the spartan bathhouses of old with their modern luxurious equivalents (86), a description of the grand retinues of foreign slaves rich people insist on travelling with (123), a description of viticulture and grafting techniques (86). Mostly, though, the letters are disappointing from a social history point of view. Philosophy is drab.

This Oxford University Press edition does not contain all of the letters – it contains 80 out of 124 (introduction p.xxxv) – but still claims to be the largest selection available in print.

Epistolary traditions

In a throwaway remark, Fantham indicates that there were two types of letter, two epistolary traditions: the philosophical letter of advice (pioneered by Epicurus, born 341 BC, and into which these letters fall) and chatty personal correspondence (Cicero, born 106 BC). [She doesn’t mention a third type which occurs to me, which is the crafted verse epistle as epitomised by Horace’s Letters or Ovid’s Black Sea Letters.]

The problem of suicide

A major stumbling block is Seneca’s worldview, the classical Roman worldview, which promotes suicide as a noble, honourable and virtuous response to all kinds of social humiliations, setbacks, not least the threats from tyrannical power.

It is a noble thing to die honourably, prudently and bravely. (77)

Part of the reason for cultivating a contempt for death, for having death continually in your thoughts, is so that, when the moment comes, it will feel like only a small additional step to fall on your sword or open your veins in a hot bath.

How many people death has been useful to, how many it frees from torture, poverty, laments, punishment, weariness. We are not in any man’s power when death is in our power. (91.21)

The historical model Seneca invokes repeatedly is Cato, who committed suicide in 46 BC two years into the civil war, when he was governor of Utica, a city in North Africa, as Julius Caesar’s army was closing in. Cato killed himself to deprive Caesar of the power of either executing him or (more likely) humiliatingly pardoning him, meaning he would ignominiously owe the rest of his existence to a tyrant.

Desiring neither option, Cato stabbed himself. In the event failed to kill himself, a doctor was called who patched up his stomach wound, gave him medicine, put him to bed. In the night Cato placed his fingers into the stomach wound, ripped it open, and proceeded to pull out his intestines until he died of shock. This is held up by Seneca as exemplary behaviour.

This makes sense within the long Roman tradition of preferring honourable suicide to dishonour, but it is just not a worldview any modern person shares and Cato is not a role model any modern person would wish to copy. Of course, this strand in Seneca’s writings is magnified by the fact that Seneca himself did something similar, committing suicide on the orders of the emperor Nero, his one-time pupil, in an exemplary fashion, calmly dictating notes about Stoic resilience as he bled to death in a hot bath.

Thus he has gone down as a hero of high-minded Stoicism but there are numerous objections to this notion. One is that plenty, thousands, of other Roman notables killed themselves over the centuries, famous examples being Anthony and Cleopatra, and they weren’t Stoic philosophers. So Seneca’s high-minded end wasn’t unique, far from it, it was a very common behaviour among the aristocratic class in the ancient world, and not only under the Empire but the Republic, too.

So a) it was far from being an act unique to ‘philosophers’ but b) it is obviously something very remote indeed from modern society. Sure, people still kill themselves. But not many people kill themselves at the command of an emperor, or to demonstrate their high-minded command over their destiny and a Stoic rising above the petty concerns of life and death. This whole worldview is so remote as to be science fiction.

There seems to me something perverse, almost creepy, about a philosophy which is constantly preparing its followers for death and for suicide. The words ‘death’ or ‘die’ recur on every page. I infinitely prefer Horace’s encouragement to enjoy life to the full while we can.

Come, let’s
Go to the cave of love
And look for music in a jollier key.
(Horace Odes, book 2, poem 1)

Themes in the letters

Despise death

We start to die from the day we are born. When we die there is nothing. There was nothing before life and there will be nothing after. So be not afraid.

What I am recommending to you is not just a remedy for this disease but for your whole life: despise death. (78.5)
First free yourself from the fear of death. (80.5)

Freedom

Despising death means we are free from the threats of tyrants or society. What is the worst they can do to us if we despise the worst, consider it nothing? Nothing can harm the calm and virtuous mind. By welcoming whatever will happen, it creates its own freedom no matter what the external circumstances. With typical extremity of metaphor or rhetoric, Seneca continually contrasts freedom, not with being bogged down or caught up or hampered by obligations – such as most of us encounter in real life – but with full-on hardcore Roman slavery:

You ask what is liberty? To be enslaved to no object, no necessity, no chances, to reduce Fortune to a level field. (51.9)
We must busy ourselves with our studies and the sources of wisdom…this is how we should rescue our mind from a most wretched enslavement and restore it to liberty. (104.16)
We have enslaved our spirit to pleasure whose indulgence is the beginning of all evils. (110.10)

Now it makes sense that Seneca uses as metaphor the slavery which was, arguably, the central fact of Roman life. But as with the way his mind, when he wants to imagine examples of adversity, leaps straight towards images of torture and execution, it’s another example of the extremity of metaphor and argument which underpins his ‘philosophy’ and makes so much of it feel so alien to the modern mind.

True friendship

Gauge a man before making him a friend. Be cautious, test out friends. But once someone is a friend, bind them to you, share everything with them. True friends share everything, including misfortune. Seneca says you have to learn to be a friend to yourself.

Avoid crowds

‘Shun whatever pleases the common herd’ (8). One iniquitous example can adversely affect you. A crowd presents all kinds of bad examples. People are emboldened to behave badly in crowds. So withdraw into yourself and study philosophy, but not so conspicuously as to draw attention or criticism. Don’t draw attention to your retirement and quietism. Quietly disappear.

Your body

A great and cautious man separates his mind from his body and spends the better part of his time with his better and divine part. (78.10)

Provide it only as much as needed to preserve good health. Avoid excess. Consume as much plain drink as required to quench thirst, as much plain food as to quench hunger, the minimum clothes to protect you from the elements, a house sufficient to protect you from the weather.

Devote some days to eating as little as possible. Become familiar with the bare minimum needed to keep alive and healthy (so that if exile to a bare rock or sudden incarceration befall you, your body is ready for much reduced circumstances).

Don’t exercise to excess. Do as much as needed to keep healthy. Reserve your energy for cultivating the mind.

As to physical pleasures, avoid them like the plague; they enslave the body and then the mind.

Uproot pleasures and treat them with absolute loathing. (51.13)
First of all we must reject pleasures; they make men weak and effeminate and demand too much time and effort. (104.34)

Your house

Your house should be a size and contain only as much as needed to protect you from the elements. Despise ornament and decoration.

Possessions

Have as few as possible. ‘No one is worthy of God unless he despises possessions.’ (18.13) Have them, but adopt a mindset where you could happily dispense with all of them, where they are all taken from you and you don’t care a jot, because you are secure in the untroubled citadel of your mind.

Enough

Don’t overdo it: don’t mortify your body, don’t insist on eating bread and water, living in a hut, neglecting your body, like the Cynics who, following Diogenes, set out to punish their bodies. Live comfortably and sensibly, just not to excess.

So correct yourself, take off your burdens and shrink your desires within a healthy limit. (104.20)

How to be content

And cultivate contentment by being happy with what you’ve got.

I will tell you how you can recognise the healthy man: he is content with himself. (72.7)
This is what philosophy will guarantee you, something which nothing surpasses: you will never be dissatisfied with yourself. (115.18)

Excess

Similar to his thoughts about suicide and anger, in that it sounds reasonable of Seneca to tell his follower not live to excess, but what Seneca has in mind is Roman excess, the off-the-scale lavishness and baroque luxury of the Roman emperors and the richest in the known world (as described in the letters from the fashionable resort of Baiae, 49, 51).

Too many amenities make the spirit effeminate…The stricter discipline of a simpler place strengthens the mind and makes it fit for great undertakings. (51.10-11)

The general point is not so much that indulgence is morally bad in itself: but that people enslave themselves by indulging the pleasures of the senses, deform their minds, make themselves into addicts, by coming to rely on excessive behaviour, on excessive drinking, excessive eating, excessive sex, excessive gambling.

It’s not so much that moderation is good in itself but that it stops you developing addictions and so becoming enslaved to them. Moderation leaves your mind free to focus on more important, ‘higher’ things. Moderation sets you free from all the snares of the senses.

That is why:

We ought to concentrate on escaping as far as possible from the provocations to vice. One’s mind must be hardened and dragged away from the enticements of pleasure. (51.5)

Anger

Quite apart from the letters, Seneca wrote no fewer than three treatises on anger. Fantham makes a really profound point about this which depends, again, on the profound difference between us and Roman society. This is that Roman emperors had complete power over all citizens, and all citizens had complete power over huge numbers of slaves. In this society an angry citizen could order his slave to be tortured or killed, just as an angry emperor could order anyone he fancied to be exiled, thrown into gaol, tortured or executed. Therefore controlling anger was much, much more important than it is in our society. Anger is not a good emotion with us but could have catastrophic consequences in Seneca’s world.

The mind

‘Nothing deserves admiration except the mind’ (9). The mind alone is worth cultivating. No other skills, activities, pastimes are worth cultivating.

Control your mind so as to bring it to perfection in the most calm condition, a mind which feels neither what is taken from it nor added to it, but keeps the same disposition however affairs turn out. (36.6)
A great and cautious man separates his mind from the body and spends much of his time with his better and divine part. (78.10)

Moral behaviour

Imagine the most moral, honourable person you can. Then imagine they are watching everything you say or do.

Fear, anxiety, stress

All these are caused by worry that the worst is going to happen. Well, imagine the worst has happened. Live with the worst, imaginatively – prepare yourself for the worst. Once you dispel anxiety about unnamed and exaggerated fears, you can get rid of the panic and examine the issue rationally, restoring order and calm to the mind, allowing Reason to operate unhampered by over emotions.

Philosophy

Philosophy, for Seneca, isn’t the working out of a complex system or ideology: it is a psychological or spiritual practice. It is an exercise to attain an attitude, cultivated with the sole aim of making its practitioner mentally strong and resilient against tyranny, suffering and death.

Philosophy is not a skill shaped for popular appeal or for display; it does not consist of words but of deeds. It is not taken up to make sure the day passes with some enjoyment, to take the boredom out of leisure; it moulds and shapes the mind, arranges one’s life, controls one’s actions, points out what is to be done or avoided; it is seated at the helm and steers the course of those adrift among treacherous shoals. Without it no man can live without fear or anxiety; countless things occur each hour that need the advice which we must seek from philosophy. (16.3)

Philosophy may include technical aspects such as types of argument and syllogism (which he consistently ridicules and dismisses for its pedantry) but, far more importantly, Seneca sees ‘philosophy’ as a kind of mental fortress, a psychological redoubt:

So withdraw into philosophy as far as you may; she will protect you in her bosom and in her shrine you will be safe. (103.4)

In doing so, it can raise us above the level of mere mortals:

This is what philosophy promises me, to make me equal to a god. (48.11)

Slavery

As you might expect Seneca admonishes Lucilius to treat his slaves as equals because they are as human as you or I:

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave. (47.10)

But, just as predictably, Seneca doesn’t actually recommend actually freeing them. (In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Juvenal’s Satires, Peter Green says this attitude was typical of Stoics: ‘[Juvenal] attacked wanton cruelty to slaves, but did not query the concept of slavery itself (another characteristically Stoic attitude.)] Introduction, page 23)

Letter 47 is fascinating for giving an extended description of the types of functions slaves performed in an aristocratic household and the brutal punishments they were liable to for the slightest infraction.

(It is a secondary consideration that in the long letter 90, a detailed list of the technical achievements and innovations which make up civilisation, Seneca despises them all and considers all of them – agriculture and irrigation and milling grain to make bread and architecture and glass windows and all the rest of it – only worthy of slaves and freedmen [who, apparently, largely made up the artisan class of Rome] and so far beneath an aristocrat like himself and his friend Lucilius. Aristocrats needed to rise above these slave occupations in order to practice the only thing worthwhile activity for humans, to cultivate the mind, perfect reason, acquire wisdom, so as to rise above passions and fear of death. That is the primary aim of the letter, but in order to make the point what comes over is a contempt for the artisan class, for engineers and innovators and craftsmen, which makes me dislike Seneca even more. His assumption is that all the achievements of the thousands of people who had perfected all aspects of civilisation and raised it to the luxurious heights of his day only matter insofar as they allow him to perfect his wonderful mind. It’s a privileged narcissism which is, in its own arrogant way, every bit as corrupt as the decadent court of the arch-egotist Nero.)

Self-help slogans

The book is stacked with improving and inspiring thoughts of the kind which have become over-familiar in the subsequent 2,000 years, particularly the last 50 years or so of self-help books.

I think it is the first proof of a stable mind to be able to pause and spend time with oneself. (2.1)
The best measure of wealth is to have what is necessary and the next best, is to have enough. (2.5)
The man at ease should take action, and the man at action should take ease. (5)
Who is well born? The man well set up by nature for virtue…it is the spirit that makes one noble. (44.5)
Nature made us teachable and gave us an imperfect reason but one which can be perfected. (50.11)

Although Seneca’s long porridgey paragraphs have the heavy feel of ‘philosophy’, the quality of the argumentation is often weak and many of the actual injunctions feel more like daytime TV, self-help guru-talk than Hegel or Hume. Once or twice he came close to the banal catchphrase mocked in the old TV sitcom, Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em: ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’

I rejoice that you are studying with perseverance and abandoning all else for this one thing, to make yourself a better man each day. (5.1)

Critique

As with all philosophy, and especially ‘moral’ philosophy, there is no end to the debate, discussion, critique and commentary which the Letters from a Stoic have spawned over the past 2,000 years. A handful of themes struck me:

1. Simplistic values

The most obvious, for me, is the extreme difference in the social context between Seneca and us and in particular his concept of negative life events. For Seneca a bad turn of events is an ever-present threat under the tyranny of imperial rule. It is associated with prison, torture, enslavement and all the other dire possibilities of life under arbitrary Roman emperors such as Nero. Thus there is a misleading simplicity to most of his meditations. When he imagines something bad, it’s being thrown into prison or tortured or executed by the emperor. The conception of negative life events which he uses to underpin his entire Stoic system is disconcertingly simple and extreme – exile, torture, death – and so the mental lesson he is teaching is concomitantly simplistic: prepare your mind to be strong and noble under torture or the threat of death (see the harping on about torture and death in letters 67 and 70).

But not many modern readers of the letters are going to have the same concerns – that they will thrown into prison, tortured or forced to commit suicide at the whim of a Roman emperor. The worst things I can imagine happening to me are: being in a life-changing accident i.e. becoming wheelchair-bound or having a stroke; being diagnosed with a terminal or life-changing illness; something bad happening to my loved ones, especially my children. But my day-to-day worries are more humdrum, recalcitrant, fiddly, frustrating: worried about my performance at work, this or that bit of the house needs maintenance, I’m worried about money, about not being able to pay my bills – fuel bills, heating bills, food bills.

I know Stoic thought can be applied to these modern circumstances i.e. I should try to cultivate mental detachment and resilience so I am ready to face bad events and rise above them. But the extremity and the simpleness of the situations Seneca describes and which form the basis of his entire philosophy (arbitrary arrest, torture, execution) rarely if ever occur in modern Western life and so all his much-repeated lessons rarely if at all apply to me. Modern life is more complex and multi-faceted than Seneca’s philosophy allows.

Seneca’s ‘philosophy’ is worth reading as an extremely vivid insight into the mindset of the Stoic classes during the tyranny of Nero but is, in my opinion, of limited use or value to modern readers leading modern lives.

2. Hypocrisy

I’ve just read Tacitus’s Annals where Seneca is described as being one of the richest men in Rome, with mansions as big as Nero’s and gardens even bigger, hundreds of servants, immense wealth in gold and assets. (In fact Seneca’s extreme wealth became proverbial to later generations: Juvenal’s tenth satire describes how Seneca, ‘grown too wealthy’ lost his magnificent gardens.) So it’s pretty ironic, knowing the man was a byword for obscene wealth, to read Seneca’s continual recommendation of the plain, simple life, eschewing pleasure and cultivating virtue. It’s easy advice for the ridiculously rich to give. The hypocrisy is summed up by a character in John Marston’s 1603 play, The Malcontent, which Watling quotes:

Out upon him! He writ of temperance and fortitude, yet lived like a voluptuous epicure and died like an effeminate coward. (The Malcontent, Act 3, scene 1, line 28)

Not quite accurate (Seneca definitely did not die ‘like an effeminate coward’) but the first half, the epicure accusation, has force. This point was epitomised, for me, in a throwaway remark of Seneca’s in a letter which is intended to be about exercise and physical frailty:

I have just returned from my ride. I am just as tired as if I had walked as far as I have been sitting. It is an effort to be carried for a long time, and I rather think the effort is greater because riding is contrary to nature. (55.1)

It is an effort to be carried for a long time. (In a sedan chair, presumably.) Well, what about the slaves who were doing the carrying? Bet it was a bit of an effort for them, too. Seneca’s writings cannot escape from the taint of the astonishing level of privilege enjoyed by his class in general, and the extraordinarily privileged lifestyle enjoyed by him – according to Tacitus the richest man in Rome – in particular.

3. How Christians appropriated Stoic rhetoric

Many of the lessons Seneca spells out to Lucilius are very familiar from the long tradition of Western moralists, from Erasmus, through Montaigne, on into the Enlightenment and then diffused out into the broader culture by thousands of Victorian moralists.

My mum used to tell us kids, ‘Moderation in everything’. You don’t need to read Seneca to already know half of his nostrums and tags. I suggest that much of it seems so familiar because Stoic teachings were taken over wholesale by the early Christians and formed the basis of much Christian everyday morality. Obviously not the bits specific to Christian theology (the Fall, Original Sin, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection etc) but the fundamental theist worldview is often indistinguishable from Christianity:

No one is worthy of God unless he despises possessions. (18.13)
God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. (41.1)
What is enough for God is not too little for masters. (47.18)
The place which God occupies in this universe is the place which mind occupies in man. (65.24)
God comes to men. Indeed, what is actually nearer, he comes into men. No mind is good without God. (73.16)
Whatever is good for us our God and father placed at hand. (110.10)

My point is that in the advice about day-to-day living, the Christians appropriated Stoic teachings so completely that the advice to Lucilius to cultivate the mind, avoid the crowd and their superficial entertainments, practice virtue, despise the knocks of Fortune and cultivate a contempt for death – all these are the familiar background hum of Christian morality, the subjects of hundreds of thousands of Sunday sermons and public lectures, recycled on radio phone-ins and daytime TV and millions of self-help columns in magazines and newspapers and books. Which explains why when we moderns come to read Seneca we are so rarely surprised and so often find his nostrums familiar and reassuring.

4. Repetition

Above all, like any good teacher, he repeats the same key points again and again, in different formulations, approached from different angles, but coming back again and again to the same fundamental idea: rise above the fortuitous events of your life; rise above all emotions and attachments; cultivate ‘philosophy’, which means a Buddhist detachment from everyone else and even from yourself; live with the idea of death so continually that it eventually presents no fears. And then you will have conquered yourself, your fear of death and you will be…free.

I am forcing my mind to focus on itself and not be distracted by outside events…The real calm is when a good state of mind unfolds. (56.6)
The wise man is full of joy, cheerful and calm, undisturbed. He lives on equal terms with the gods…The wise man’s mind is like the universe beyond the moon: there it is always fine and calm. (59.14)
Abandon those distractions which men have rushed to enjoy; abandon riches, which are either a danger or a burden to their possessors; leave the pleasures of body and mind, which soften and weaken you; abandon ambition, which is a bloated, hollow and windy condition with no limit. (84.11)
There is only one way the dawn can come: if a man takes in this knowledge of things human and divine and does not just sprinkle it over himself but but steeps himself in it; if he goes over the same things repeatedly (110.8)

But repetition is not argumentation. Despite Seneca using the word ‘philosophy’ all the time, this isn’t really philosophy at all. It is, as I’ve said, more like exhortation to a good frame of mind, moral uplift, encouragement to develop a tough attitude, therapy for the anxious, a self-help manual. And incredibly repetitive.

Unvexed by terrors and uncorrupted by pleasures we shall dread neither death nor the gods. We shall know that death is not an evil and the gods do not exist for evil. What harms us is as weak as what is harmed; the best things lack the power to harm. What awaits us, if we ever emerge from these dregs to the sublime and lofty region, is peace of mind and liberty free from the errors which have been driven out. What does that liberty consist of? Not fearing men or gods; wanting neither what is base nor excessive; having the greatest power over oneself. It is an incalculable good to become one’s own master. (75.17-18)

5. Family and friends

In nearly 300 pages of relentless insistence that we rise above all attachments and emotions, nowhere does he mention family (in just one letter, 104, he mentions his wife, Paulina).

Family was a very big thing indeed for noble Romans, so it’s a striking absence in the context of Seneca’s own time. But regarded as instructions for modern readers, his insistence on boiling your life right down to a relentless focus on cultivating your virtue and your indifference to death completely ignores the scores of relationships most people have in their lives, starting with their family.

Most modern therapy involves getting to grip with your childhood experiences and your relationship with your parents. But parents, spouses or children are completely absent from Seneca’s teachings. His Stoicism is an impressively selfish concern, in which he endlessly exhorts Lucilius to forget about everyone but himself, to focus on his own mind and anxiety of death etc, to think about no-one but me me me.

This makes his ‘philosophy’ inapplicable, in practice, to anyone who has parents, partners or children and really cares for them, is involved in their day-to-day wellbeing and, especially when it comes to children, to their little triumphs or setbacks. None of that for Stoic Seneca. He is in his study toughening up his mind by envisaging torture in every detail so as to be able to rise above it, when the time comes.

But it struck me that this deliberate ignoring of family sheds light on and helps to explain the humanistic obsession with friendship. Seneca’s letters on the importance of having one, key soulmate-level friend are one of the sources for the obsession with friendship which is a central theme of humanist writings from the 15th century onwards.

Friends know that they have everything in common…the true friendship which neither hope nor fear nor self-interest can sever, the friendship with which men die and for which they die. (6.2)

It’s possible to interpret this obsession with Perfect friendship as the Stoic replacing the messy, uncontrollable web of family relationships, with all its unpredictable ups and downs, with One Relationship with One Special Friend. To use the modern buzzword, it’s a very controlling approach. When you read the great humanist works on this subject (Cicero, Montaigne, Bacon) what comes over is that you are only going to meet one or two soulmates in your life and that you will become identical in interests and affections with this one special person. In a science fiction kind of way, you and the True Friend of humanist tradition will become one person.

So, to put it crudely, humanist teaching about friendship a) is a way of ducking the uncontrollable mess of family ties and responsibilities and b) ends up with you looking in a mirror. Solipsistic narcissism.

Horace

As Roman ‘moralists’ go, I prefer Horace. He’s lighter, funnier, his affable tone is more persuasive, more inspiring for me, than Seneca’s dour and relentless lecturing. Seneca sounds like the tutor he was:

I hereby order you to be slow in speaking. (40.14)

Whereas Horace sounds like a friend offering gentle advice:

Try not to guess what lies in the future, but,
As Fortune deals days, enter them into your
Life’s book as windfalls, credit items,
Gratefully…
(Horace, Odes, book 1, poem 9)

Seneca thinks of himself as embattled – quick! time is short! the enemy is at the door! focus on the essentials!

I am being besieged right now…the enemy is at our backs…I need a heroic spirit (49.9)
Fortune is waging war with me but I will not do what she orders, I will not accept the yoke. (51.8)
A real man prefers his sleep to be broken by a bugle than a chorus. (51.12)

This sense of the world as a battlefield, a fight, a struggle against countless enemies all trying to seduce your God-given soul, was inherited by Christianity. It dominates the letters of St Paul who wrote the most influential letters in Christendom, and used rhetoric similar to Seneca when he urged his followers to ‘fight the good fight’ (First letter to Timothy).

To understand Paul, we must grasp that he is at war, with the angels of heaven at his back. The Acts of the Apostles is, at its base, a power-struggle between Christ and Satan, wrenching whole peoples away from Satan’s grasp. (Jesus Walk Bible Studies)

In contrast to this worldview of unrelenting embattled paranoia, Horace writes a letter to a friend inviting him to come round and try the new wine they’ve just bottled on his estate. There’ll be other friends there, and they’ll stay up late together laughing and joking. Seneca’s remedy for the fickleness of human existence is to be continually, constantly thinking about death all the time.

Give me courage to meet hardships; make me calm in the face of the unavoidable…Say to me when I lie down to sleep: ‘You may not wake again!’ And when I have waked: ‘You may not go to sleep again!’ Say to me when I go forth from my house: ‘You may not return!’ And when I return: ‘You may never go forth again!’

Well, you may win the lottery this weekend. You may run down the escalator and bump into the woman of your dreams. If you start speculating about things which may happen, the sky’s the limit. In which case – why focus only on the bad things which ‘may’ happen. Lovely things ‘may’ happen, too. Pondering Seneca’s use of the conditional to dwell only on the most extreme negative outcomes (torture, execution) makes the reader realise how much he is obsessed with the dark side of life, and so insists that we be brutally harsh with ourselves:

Cast out whatever desires are lacerating your heart and if they cannot be pulled out any other way then you must tear out your heart with them. In particular, uproot pleasures and treat them with absolute loathing. (51.13)
We believe pleasure is a moral failing…Pleasure is a shameful thing. (59.1-2)

What a stupid attitude. Horace has an equally frank acceptance of how time is limited and we are hurrying towards our deaths, but he draws the exact opposite conclusion, which is: carpe diem, enjoy the moment. Instead of considering yourself under siege from wicked temptations so that you have to harden your heart against all affection, think of life as a blessing, bless every moment it brings you, and savour the fleeting pleasures. Horace gets my vote.

Last word to Martial

Martial book 11, epigram 56, begins, in the translation by James Michie:

Because you glorify death, old Stoic,
Don’t expect me to admire you as heroic…

And ends ten lines later:

It’s easy to despise life when things go wrong;
The true hero endures much, and long.

Credit

Selected Letters of Seneca, translated and introduced by Elaine Fantham, was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 2010. All quotes are from this edition.

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by Simon on December 21, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Philosophy, Slavery, Translation

Tagged ancient Rome, ancient world, anger, Anthony and Cleopatra, Bacon, Baiae, Black sea Letters, Cato, Cato the Younger, Christendom, Christianity, Cicero, civil war, classics, contempt of death, death, divine reason, E.F. Watling, egotism, Elaine Fantham, emperor Nero, Epicureanism, Epicurus, Epistolary traditions, Epistulae Morales, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Erasmus, fight the good fight, freedom, Friendship, Gaius Mucius Cordus, God, Horace, Horace Odes, humanism, John Marston, Julius Caesar, Latin, Letters from a Stoic, Liberty, Lucilius, Lucilius Junior, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Montaigne, Moral behaviour, Moral Letters to Lucilius, moral philosophy, narcissism, Ovid, Oxford University Press, Philosophy, Pleasure, Repetition, resilience, Roman baths, Roman Empire, Roman Republic, Roman society, Rome, Selected Letters of Seneca, self-help, Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, Seneca's plays, Sicily, Slavery, slaves, Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, St Paul, Stoic, Stoic philosophy, Stoicism, suicide, the Enlightenment, the good, The Malcontent, theism, Therapy, torture, Translation, tyranny, Utica, Virtue

Posted by Simon on December 21, 2022

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Seneca’s Plays

What follows are notes on E.F. Watling’s introduction to his translation of Seneca’s plays, published by Penguin Books in 1966, then a summary with comments of the four Seneca plays it contains:

Seneca’s biography

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in 4 BC Corduba, Spain, the second son of Annaeus Seneca the Elder. His father had studied rhetoric in Rome and returned to Spain to bring his sons up with respect for the traditional virtues of the Roman Republic, which had ceased to exist a generation earlier, following the victory of Octavian against Anthony at Actium in 31 BC.

As a young man Seneca the Younger studied Stoic philosophy. He lived in Egypt for a while, probably due to ill health (tuberculosis?) and because his aunt was the wife of the prefect there. By 33 AD he was back in Rome, married to his first wife (whose name is unknown) and achieving recognition as a lawyer and teacher of rhetoric.

Seneca had run-ins with several of the early emperors. At one point he was forced to retire into private life due to the suspicions of Caligula. He returned to public life on the accession of the emperor Claudius but in the very same year, 41 AD, was exiled to Corsica, accused of adultery with the new emperor’s niece, Julia, probably at the instigation of Claudius’s scheming third wife, Valeria Messalina. Seneca spent eight years on Corsica during which he wrote a number of philosophical works.

In 48 Claudius had Messalina executed for (supposedly) conspiring to overthrow him, and married his fourth wife, the equally scheming Agrippina. But it was Agrippina who asked for the recall of Seneca and made him tutor to her 12-year-old son, Lucius Domitius, the future emperor Nero. When Nero came to power 6 years later, in 54 AD, aged just 17, Seneca became his principal civil adviser (Nero had a separate adviser for military affairs, Sextus Afranius Burrus).

Some attribute the fact that the first five years of Nero’s reign were relatively peaceful and moderate to Seneca’s restraining influence. According to Tacitus’s Annals, Seneca taught Nero how to speak effectively, and wrote numerous speeches for him to address the senate with, praising clemency, the rule of law, and so on.

However, palace politics slowly became more poisonous, Nero came to rule more despotically, and Seneca’s position and wealth made him the target of increasing political and personal attacks. In 62 Seneca asked to be allowed to retire from public life, a conversation with Nero vividly described (or invented) in Tacitus’s Annals. Emperor and adviser parted on good terms but, over the next few years, Seneca’s name was cited in various plots and conspiracies.

The largest of these was the conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso in 65, a plot to assassinate Nero which was discovered at the last moment (the morning of the planned murder), and which, as the suspects were interrogated and tortured by Nero’s Guard, turned into a bloodbath of the conspirators.

Historians think Seneca was not an active conspirator, and debate how much he even knew about the plot, but whatever the precise truth, Nero ordered him put to death. Hearing of this, Seneca, en route back to Rome from Campania, committed suicide with a high-minded detachment that impressed the friends who attended the deed, and made him a poster boy for Stoic dignity. Many classic paintings depict the noble scene. Nero himself was, of course, to commit suicide just three years later, in 68 AD.

The Death of Seneca by Manuel Dominguez Sanchez (1871)

Seneca’s works

Seneca was a prolific writer. He wrote 12 philosophical essays, an extensive work of natural science, and 124 letters of moral exhortation to his friend Lucilius. The letters are probably his most accessible and popular work.

But Seneca is also credited as the author of ten plays (though scholars bicker: maybe it’s nine; maybe it’s eight). The plays are all tragedies, loosely modeled on Greek tragedy and featuring Greek tragic protagonists. The Romans had a technical term for these, fabula crepidata, meaning a Roman tragedy with a Greek subject.

Seneca’s plays make a striking contrast to his philosophical works not only in tone but also in worldview. The Letters to Lucilius go into great detail about how to banish all attachments, emotions and feelings from your life in order to achieve a calm, rational, Stoic detachment. By contrast, the plays are full of gruesomely bloodthirsty plots and characters wrought to the utmost degree of emotional extremity. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance the works seemed so utterly different in worldview that scholars thought Seneca the moral philosopher and Seneca the dramatist were two different people.

Critics have been very harsh indeed about these plays. The editor of the Penguin edition, E.F. Watling, accuses them of ‘bombastic extravagance’, of ‘passionate yet artificial rhetoric’. The German critic Schlegel is quoted accusing them of ‘hollow hyperbole’, ‘forced and stilted’. Watling cites the consensus among scholars who condemn them as:

horrible examples of literary and dramatic incompetence, travesties of the noble Greek drama, the last wretched remnant of declining Roman taste. (Introduction, p.8)

And yet Seneca’s plays had a very important influence on Renaissance theatre, influencing Shakespeare and other playwrights in England, and Corneille and Racine in France.

Seneca’s tragedies are customarily considered the source and inspiration for what became known as the genre of ‘Revenge Tragedy’ in Elizabethan theatre, starting with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy of the 1580s, and continuing on into the Jacobean era (the reign of King James I, 1603 to 1625).

Their importance to Elizabethan drama explains why so fastidious a critic as T.S. Eliot, obsessed as he was with the period, praised Seneca’s plays, singling out Phaedra and Medea – although most critics consider Thyestes to be Seneca’s ‘masterpiece’.

Seneca’s tragedies

Agamemnon
Hercules or Hercules furens (The Madness of Hercules)
Medea
Oedipus
Phaedra
Phoenissae (The Phoenician Women)
Thyestes
Troades (The Trojan Women)

The Penguin paperback edition of the plays, edited and translated by E.F. Watling, contains four of the ‘best’ plays – Thyestes, Phaedra, Oedipus and The Trojan Women. (It also contains an oddity, a play titled Octavia, which resembles Seneca’s tragedies in melodramatic tone but, since it features Seneca as a character, and describes his death, cannot have been by him. Scholars guesstimate that it was probably written soon after Seneca’s death by someone influenced by his style and aware of the events of his lifetime.)

Watling’s critique

Watling’s introduction pulls no punches in detailing Seneca’s shortcomings:

He was not a constructor of tragic plots; his plays are not concerned with the moral conflict between good and good which is the essence of true tragedy: he only recognises the power of evil to destroy good. He does not delay or complicate the issue by any moral dilemma exhibiting the conflict of justifiable but mutually incompatible ambitions; his tragedy is simply a disastrous event foretold and anticipated from the start and pursued ruthlessly to its end. (p.25)

Seneca routinely stops the action of his ‘plots’ to give characters long, highly-strung, melodramatic speeches, which might not even be particularly relevant to the plot and often take no account of who else is on stage at the time.

His technique of dramatic speech is extremely narrow, having only two modes: either a character is delivering a long monologue, or he deploys stichomythia, where just two characters swap exchanges of dialogue; rarely anything more complicated than that.

Many of the long speeches and even some of the exchanges are so stock and stereotyped that they could easily be swapped from one play to another without anyone noticing. Watling names some of these stock topics – the ‘simple life’ speech, the ‘haunted grove’ speech and ‘the king must be obeyed’ dialogue, which all crop up in several of the plays.

The climax of all the plays is always a gruesome barbarity and Seneca uses the Greek conventions of having it take place offstage and described by a breathless messenger who comes onstage hotfoot from the scene. The messengers’ speeches all follow the exact same formula: the description of the place, the horror of the act, the stoical courage of the sufferer.

Seneca’s use of the Chorus is for the most part flaccid and unconvincing. (p.24)

The Chorus declaims its verse in a different metre from the rest of the play. They are known as Choric odes. The Choric odes’s main purpose is to comment on the main action but they often feature a clotted recital of myths or legends similar or related to the one we are witnessing.

The Chorus also often expresses ideas which contradict the worldview of the play and even of the main action. For example they will powerfully express the idea that death is the end of life and there is nothing after, except that… the plays feature ghosts and numerous descriptions of the classic souls in hell (Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion). There is no attempt at consistency – immediate and sensational effect is what is strived for.

The sense of unnecessary repetition is echoed at a verbal level where Seneca creates a drenched and intense effect by repeating synonyms for just one idea – Watling says examples in English would be larding a speech with the synonymous words anger-rage-ire, or fear-terror-dread. No idea is left to float subtly but is bludgeoned into submission by repetition.

Watling sums up Seneca’s plays as 1) sporting a bombastic, over-the-top rhetoric, deriving from 2) gruesomely bloodthirsty plots, which 3) are staged with a remarkable lack of dramatic invention i.e. very clumsily and straightforwardly.

But despite all these shortcomings, the sheer visceral intensity of his plays goes some way to explain why they were useful models for the earliest Elizabethan playwrights writing the first attempts at English tragedy, influencing Kyd, Marlowe and the early Shakespeare of Titus Andronicus (which contains several quotes from Seneca’s Phaedra).

To return to T.S. Eliot who I mentioned above, we can now see why Eliot (in an introduction to a 1927 reprint of Elizabethan translations of Seneca) made the characteristically perceptive remark that, foregrounding vivid rhetoric over more traditional notions of plot or characterisation as the do, might make Seneca’s plays suitable for what was (in 1927) the very new medium of radio – rhetoric i.e. the power of words alone, triumphing over all other factors. A surf of sensationalist sound. The bombastic power of words superseding all considerations of ‘plot’ or ‘characterisation’.

**********

Plots of the four plays

1. Thyestes

Summary

It’s a tragedy of two brothers who hate each other, Atreus who takes a horrific vengeance on his brother, Thyestes.

Background

Tantalus was a son of Jupiter. He killed, cooked and served up his own son, Pelops, at a banquet of the gods. For this atrocity he was condemned to eternal punishment in hell, fixed in a pool of water, dying of thirst but unable to bend down to scoop up any of the water, and dying of hunger, but unable to touch any of the fruit growing just out of reach above him. Hence the English verb to tantalise. Jupiter restored Pelops to life but he himself went on to win a wife and a kingdom by treachery. Pelops banished his two grown-up sons, Atreus and Thyestes, for the murder of their half-brother, Chrysippus. When Pelops died, Atreus returned and took possession of his father’s throne, but Thyestes claimed it too. Thyestes seduced Atreus’s wife, Aërope, who helped him steal the gold-fleeced ram from Atreus’s flocks which was said to grant the kingship. But instead of gaining the crown he was banished. Despite sitting pretty, Atreus wants to make his ascendancy over his brother complete, so he is now planning to recall Thyestes from banishment on the pretext of sharing the throne with him, but in fact carrying out an atrocious act of revenge.

Act I

A Fury raises Tantalus’s miserable spirit from the underworld. He moaningly asks if even more pain and suffering await him. The Fury delivers an extraordinary vision of the sins of the house of Peolops, ramifying out to undermine all the order in the world. The Chorus comes onstage. It consists of citizens of Argos. They invoke the presiding gods of the cities of Greece in the hope they can prevent the tragedy.

Act II

Atreus consults with his minister about the best way of carrying out vengeance on his brother. The minister wonders how he can do this, allowing Atreus to explain that he will offer forgiveness and a share in the crown to lure Thyestes back to Argos, where he can carry out his revenge; what it will be, exactly, he is still considering but it will be awful. The Chorus reproves the ambition of rulers, describing the character of a true king, before singing the praises of a retired life.

Act III

Thyestes, having been invited back to his homeland by Atreus, arrives with his three young sons and expresses his distrust and sense of approaching disaster. Atreus applauds himself: his plan is working. The Chorus, apparently oblivious of the preceding act, praises the fraternal affection of Atreus for putting aside the brother’s enmity.

Act IV

With no development of plot or character, with melodramatic abruptness, a messenger appears who describes to the appalled Chorus the grotesque climax of the play which is that Atreus had Thyestes’s three children killed, cooked and served up to Thyestes at the brothers’ reconciliation feast. It takes the form of a question and answer session, the Chorus asking what happened next, the messenger answering. The Chorus, observing the going down of the Sun, hysterically fears that this criminal act might tear apart the whole fabric of the universe.

Act V

Atreus congratulates himself on his cruel revenge. Thyestes trembles with premonition that something terrible has happened. The Atreus reveals to him that he has just eaten his own beloved sons.

(Incidentally, the curse on the house of Pelops was to continue into the next generation in the persons of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, who was murdered on his return from the Trojan War, by Aegisthus, son of Thyestes – the subject of one of Seneca’s other plays.)

Thyestes demonstrates the classic characteristics of a Seneca play. It maintains a continuous, shrill, hyperbolic tone. Hyperbolic exaggeration Here’s the Fury seeing the feud escalate into end-of-the-world anarchy:

Vengeance shall think no way forbidden her;
Brother shall flee from brother, sire from son,
And son from sire; children shall die in shames
More shameful than their birth; revengeful wives
Shall menace husbands, armies sail to war
In lands across the sea; and every soil
Be soaked with blood; the might of men of battle
In all the mortal world shall be brought down
By Lust triumphant. In this house of sin
Brothers’s adultery with brothers’ wives
Shall be the least of sins; all law, all faith
All honour shall be dead. Nor shall the heavens
Be unaffected by your evil deeds:
What right have stars to twinkle in the sky?
Why need their lights still ornament the world?
Let night be black, let there be no more day.
Let havoc rule this house; call blood and strife
And death; let every corner of this place
Be filled with the revenge of Tantalus!
(Fury, Act 1)

Here’s Atreus whipping himself up to commit the worst crime in the world:

Sanctity begone!
If thou wast ever known within these walls.
Come all the dread battalions of the Furies!
Come, seed of strife, Erinys! Come, Megaera,
With torches armed! My spirit yet lacks fire;
It would be filled with still more murderous rage!
(Atreus, Act 1)

In the introduction Watling talks up the discrepancy between Seneca the lofty Stoic and Seneca the author of blood-thirsty, amoral plays. But there is some overlap, some places where characters appear to speak the language of Stoic detachment, such as the second Choric ode which describes the true nature of kingship as not being power or riches but resilience and mental strength. The true king

is the man who faces unafraid
The lightning’s glancing stroke; is not dismayed
By storm-tossed seas; whose ship securely braves
The windy rage of Adriatic waves;
Who has escaped alive the soldier’s arm,
The brandished steel; who, far removed from harm,
Looks down upon the world, faces her end
With confidence, and greets death as a friend.
(Chorus, Act 2)

That’s the Chorus, but Thyestes himself also declaims an ‘advantages of the simple life‘ speech to his son as they arrive at Atreus’s palace:

While I stood
Among the great, I stood in daily terror;
The very sword I wore at my own side
I feared. It is the height of happiness
To stand in no man’s way, to eat at ease
Reclining on the ground. At humble tables
Food can be eaten without fear; assassins
Will not be found in poor men’s cottages;
The poisoned cup is served in cups of gold.
(Thyestes, Act 3)

(Words which resonate with Seneca’s experiences in the fraught court of the emperor Nero.) In the final act, just before Atreus reveals to Thyestes what he’s done, Thyestes feels a powerful, world-shaking sense of doom, very reminiscent of the same premonition characters experience in Shakespeare’s tragedies:

The table rocked, the floor is shaking.
The torches’ light sinks low; the sky itself
Hangs dull and heavy, seeming to be lost
Between the daylight and the dark. And why –
The ceiling of the heavens seems to shake
With violent convulsions – more and more!
The murk grows darker than the deepest darkness,
Night is engulfed in night; all stars have fled!
(Thyestes, Act 5)

Once the deed has been revealed, here’s the Chorus reciting a welter of classical precedents in an effort to capture the enormity of the event:

Are the Giants escaped from their prison and threatening war?
Has tortured Tityos found strength in his breast again to renew his old aggression?
Or has Typhoeus stretched his muscles to throw off his mountain burden?
Is Ossa to be piled on Pelion again
To build a bridge for the Phlegrean Giants’ assault?
Is all the order of the universe plunged into chaos?
(Chorus, Act 4)

These are all formulae or stock ingredients, which are repeated in all the other plays, and were to be enthusiastically taken up by the Elizabethan playwrights striving for sensational effects in the 1590s and early 1600s.

2. Phaedra

Background

Theseus was a typical Greek ‘hero’ i.e. an appalling human being, guilty of countless crimes, infidelities, murders and rapes. But the play isn’t about him, it’s about his second wife and his son. In his first marriage Theseus married the Amazon warrior Antiope, also known as Hippolyta, who bore him a son, Hippolytus. This Hippolytus grew up despising love, refusing to worship at the temples of Venus. He preferred Diana and the joys of the hunt. During this time, Theseus divorced his first wife and married Phaedra, daughter of Minos, king of Crete (following his adventure on Crete where he slew the Minotaur).

Now, Hyppolitus had grown to be a handsome young man and Phaedra was a mature woman when Theseus left his kingdom for a while to help his friend Peirithous rescue Persephone from the underworld. During his absence, the goddess of love, Venus, determined to take her revenge on Hippolytus for spurning her worship, inflamed his stepmother, Phaedra’s, heart with insatiable desire for the handsome young man.

Prelude (Hippolytus)

Hippolytus soliloquises on the joys of the hunt, delivering a long list of Greek hunting locations to his companions. It not only reveals Hippolytus’s character but impresses the audience with Seneca’s detailed and scholarly knowledge of Greek geography.

Act 1 (Phaedra and the nurse)

Phaedra soliloquy in which she laments that Theseus has gone off to the underworld, abandoning her in a place she has never liked, exiled from her beloved Crete. She wonders that she has recently become obsessed with the hunt.

(Her mother was Pasiphae, wife of King Minos who notoriously allowed herself to be impregnated by a bull, giving birth to the Minotaur. More relevant, though, is that Pasiphae was a daughter of Phoebus the sun god, and Venus the goddess of love has a long-running feud with him. Which explains why Venus is also against Phaedra.)

It is the nurse who makes explicit the fact that Phaedra has fallen in love with her stepson. Phaedra says her infatuation is driving her so mad she wants to kill herself.

Unreason reigns
Supreme, a potent god commands my heart,
The invincible winged god, who rules all earth,
Who strikes and scorches Jove with his fierce flame…

Interestingly, the nurse insists that all this talk of Venus and Eros is rubbish. There is no little god with a bow and arrow fluttering about in the sky. Instead it is the corruption of the times: ‘Too much contentment and prosperity and self-indulgence’ lead to new desires. In fact she states the Stoic theme that the simple life is best and luxury leads to decadence.

Then the Chorus delivers a long impressive hymn to the power of Eros or Love, as demonstrated by mating behaviour throughout the animal kingdom. As a Darwinian materialist I, of course, agree that the urge to mate and reproduce is the primary function of all life forms, including humans.

Act 2

The nurse describes to the Chorus Phaedra’s ever more miserably lovelorn state, pale face, tearful eyes etc. We are shown Phaedra in her boudoir angrily bossing her attendants about, despising her traditional dresses and jewellery, wanting to wear the outfit of a hunting queen and roam through the woods after her beloved.

Enter Hippolytus. The nurse tells him to stop hunting so hard, relax, find love, enjoy his youth. She counsels him to reproduce; if all young men were like him, humanity would cease to exist. Hippolytus replies not really to her points, instead declaring that he prefers simple rustic rural life in its honest simplicity to the deceit of courts and the city, mob rule, envy etc – turns into an extended description of that old chestnut, the sweet and innocent life of the age of Saturn, before cities or ships or agriculture, before war itself. Illogically this long speech ends with a swerve into his hatred of women, who he blames for all conflict and wars, and explains why he shuns women like the plague.

Enter Phaedra and metaphorically falls at Hippolytus’s feet, swearing she will be his slave and do anything for him. He mistakes, thinking she is upset because of the long absence of her husband, his father, Theseus in the underworld. He tries to reassure her, while Phaedra cannot contain her made infatuation:

Madness is in my heart;
It is consumed by love, a wild fire raging
Secretly in my body in my blood,
Like flames that lick across a roof of timber.

Phaedra describes how beautiful Theseus was as a young man when he came to Crete to kill the Minotaur and sue King Minos for the hand of his daughter, Ariadne. But all this leads up to Phaedra kneeling in front of Hippolytus and declaring her love for him. Hippolytus responds with end-of-the-world bombast:

For what cause shall the sky be rent with thunder
If no cloud dims it now? Let ruin wreck
The firmament, and black night hide the day!
Let stars run back and all their courses turn
Into confusion!..
Ruler of gods in heaven and men on earth,
Why is thy hand not armed, will not thy torch
Of triple fire set all the world ablaze?
Hurl against me thy thunderbolt, thy spear,
And let me be consumed in instant fire.

He rebuffs her. She throws herself into his arms, swearing to follow him everywhere. He draws his sword. Yes! She begs to be killed and put out of her misery. He realises it will defile his sword and all the oceans will not be able to clean it. (A very common trope in tragedy, originating with the Greeks, repeated in, for example, Macbeth, one thousand five hundred and fifty years later.)

Phaedra faints, Hippolytus flees. The nurse steps forward to comment and make the suggestion that, now Phaedra’s criminal love is revealed and Hippolytus has rejected her, to deflect blame she ought to accuse him of propositioning her. She yells ‘Help! Rape!’ as the Chorus enters, representing ‘the people’, showing them the sword Hippolytus dropped in his flight and the Queen, lying distraught on the ground, her hair all dishevelled.

The Chorus apparently ignores the cries of the nurse and instead proceeds with a 3-page hymn to Hippolytus’s matchless male beauty.

Act 3

Weirdly, act 3 opens with the self-same Chorus only now summarising the situation i.e. the queen intends to pursue her utterly false claim of rape against Hippolytus. But the Chorus hasn’t got far before who do we see arriving but Theseus, the mature hero, who describes how he has been in the underworld for four long years, only able to return because Hercules rescued him. But what is all this weeping and lamentation he hears?

The nurse explains her wife is distraught and some kind of curtain is lifted or something removed to reveal an ‘inner scene’ where we see Phaedra holding a sword as if to kill herself. Theseus interrogates Phaedra who refuses to explain. So – in the kind of casual mention of hyper violence to servants and slaves which always disturbs me – Theseus says he’ll have the nurse bound and scourged and chained and whipped till she spills the beans.

But before he can do this, Phaedra says Hippolytus tried to rape her, saying this is his sword which he left in his flight. Theseus now delivers the ‘Great gods, what infamy is this!’ type speech. Interestingly, he accuses Hippolytus not only of the obvious things, but accuses him of hypocrisy in his ‘affectation of old time-honoured ways’ i.e. Seneca has expanded Hippolytus’s traditional character of hunter to include this extra dimension of him being a proponent of the whole back-to-the-ways-of-our-ancestors movement, a view Seneca himself propounds in the Letters to Lucilius.

Theseus accuses Hippolytus of being the worst kind of hypocrite, in language which reminds me of Hamlet berating his uncle Claudius, then vows to track him down wherever he flees. He tells us that the god Neptune granted him three wishes, and now he invokes this promise, demanding that Hippolytus never sees another dawn.

The Chorus steps in to lament why the king of the gods never intervenes to ensure justice, why men’s affairs seem governed by blind fate, why the evil triumph and the good are punished.

Act 4

Enter the messenger with stock tears and reluctance to tell what he has seen. Theseus commands him and so the messenger describes the death of Hippolytus. The youth fled, jumped into his chariot, and whipped the horses off at great speed but that is when a strange enormous storm arose at sea, vast waves attacking the land, and giving birth to a monster, a bull-shaped thing coloured green of the sea with fiery red eyes. This thing proceeds to terrify Hippolytus’s horses which run wild, throwing him from the chariot but tangling his arms and legs in the traces, so that he is dragged at speed over the clifftop’s ragged rocks and flayed alive, his body disintegrating into pieces until he collided with a fallen tree trunk and was transfixed in the groin. Theseus laments that his wish has been so violently fulfilled.

The Chorus repeats the idea which I’m coming to see as central to the play, less about love or lust etc but the safeness of the humble life, not exposed to the decadent living, random lusts and shocking violence associated with the rich.

Peace and obscurity make most content,
In lowly homes old age sleeps easily…
For Jupiter is on his guard
And strikes whatever comes too near the sky.
The thunder rumbles round his throne,
But no great harm can come to common folk
Who dwell in modest homes.

If you think about this for a moment, you’ll realise it’s bullshit. Poor people living in lowly homes often have terrible lives, scarred by poverty, ignorance and, of course, the random violence of their superiors who might, for example, decide to start a civil war and devastate the homes and livelihoods of ‘common folk’ in entire regions. Think of Julius Caesar laying waste entire regions of Gaul, burning cities to the ground and selling their entire populations into slavery. It’s the kind of patronising crap rich people tell themselves to convince themselves that they, the filthy rich, living in the lap of luxury, eating at gluttonous banquets, waited on hand and foot by literally hundreds of slaves, and filling their day with sexual perversions, that they are the ones who have it rough.

Act 5

Barely has Theseus heard all from the messenger than Phaedra enters, wailing and wielding the sword. She begins her lament as the ruined corpse of Hippolytus is brought onstage and continues, lamenting his death, berating her treachery and falsehood, confessing to Theseus that Hippolytus was totally innocent, then stabbing herself to death.

Theseus then laments a) was it for this that he was allowed to escape from hell, into a hell of his own devising? And then lists all the ingenious punishments he saw in hell and says none of them are adequate for him.

The Chorus intervenes to advise that they honour and bury the body first and then, very gruesomely, specifically directs Theseus in placing the left hand here and the right hand over here, and so on, as they assemble his body parts, a ghoulish jigsaw.

In the final lines, Theseus orders his staff to a) go scour the landscape to find the last missing bits of Hippolytus and b) and as for the wicked Phaedra:

let a deep pit of earth conceal
And soil lie heavy on her cursed head.

3. The Trojan Women

Background

The Trojan War has ended. Troy has fallen. Outside the smouldering ruins of the city huddle the surviving royal women, rounded up by the victorious Greeks and awaiting their fate. The leading women are Hecuba, widow of King Priam, and Andromache, widow of the great Trojan warrior, Hector.

Act 1

Hecuba opens the play with a long lament about the fall of Troy, symbol of the uncertainty on which all pomp and power is based. She interacts with the Chorus of Trojan women. She makes them unbind their hair and loosen their tunics to expose their bare breasts which they then proceed to beat in lament for Hector, wall of Troy, and Priam its murdered king. But at least they are at peace now and will never be led as slaves to foreign lands.

Happy is Priam, happy every man
That has died in battle
And taken with him his life’s fulfilment.

(The literal baring and beating of their own breasts occurs in several of the plays. Was it performed literally in ancient times? Women mourning in ancient times were meant to not only beat their bare breasts but scratch their faces till they bled. If taken literally, surely this would be as difficult to perform persuasively onstage as a sword fight.)

Act 2

The Chorus wonders why the Greeks are delaying. Talthybius describes the momentous appearance of the ghost of Achilles, demanding the sacrifice he was promised before the fleet can sail. A prime slab of Senecan bombast:

A rift appeared,
Caves yawned, hell gaped, earth parted and revealed
A way from worlds below to worlds above.
His tomb was burst asunder and there stood
The living ghost of the Thessalian leader…

Pyrrhus, son of dead Achilles, takes up the case for his father, first listing his great victories before he even came to Troy, then insisting the Greeks fulfil their vow and make a human sacrifice at his tomb. Agamemnon sharply refuses, saying he regrets the blood and cruelty of the night of the sack of Troy but it was sort of justified by bloodlust. But now in the cold light of day, sacrifice a human being? No. This dialogue turns really bitter as the two Greeks insult each other, accusing each other of cowardice and crimes.

Agamemnon calls for Calchas the soothsayer. Enter Calchas who announces that the gods demand two sacrifices: a young woman dressed as a bride must be sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb; and Priam’s grandson must be thrown from the battlements of Troy. Then the Greek fleet can sail.

The Chorus delivers quite a profound speech about death: is there anything afterwards, does the spirit live on, or is this all? It concludes:

There is nothing after death; and death is nothing –
Only the finishing post of life’s short race.

Therefore, ambition give up your hopes, anxiety give up your fears. (This is the third play in which, contrary to Watling’s comments in the introduction, we find Seneca’s characters delivering very clearly Stoic beliefs, entirely in line with Seneca the philosopher.)

Act 3

Andromache berates the Trojan women for only just learning grief, whereas for her Troy fell and the world ended when her husband, Hector, was killed. Now she only resists the death she wants to protect their son, Astyanax. An Elder performs the function of the nurse in other plays i.e. asks questions and is a sounding board for Andromache’s thoughts. She tells how the ghost of Hector came to her in a dream warning her to hide their son. Now she has come to the tomb of her husband and pushes the boy to go inside it (through gates) and hide, which he does without a word.

Then the Elder warns that Ulysses approaches. Ulysses announces he has been drawn by lot to ask Andromache for her son. While the son of Hector lives no Greek can rest, knowing he will grow up to restore Troy and relaunch the war. Andromache pretends her son was stolen from her during the sack of the city and laments his whereabouts and fate. Ulysses sees through her lies and threatens her with torture. Andromache welcomes torture and death. Ulysses understands her mother love and says it is love of his son, Telemachus, which motivates him.

At which point Andromache, to the accompaniment of fierce oaths, makes the ironic lie that her son right now is entombed with the dead (he, as we saw, is hiding in the tomb of Hector). Ulysses detects that Andromache is still anxious, pacing, muttering, as one who had lost everything would not. She is lying. He orders his men to tear down Hector’s tomb with the aim of scattering the ashes on the sea.

Andromache agonises over whether to surrender her son to save the ashes of her husband. She places herself before the tomb defying the soldiers to kill her first. Ulysses orders them on. She falls to her knees and clasps Ulysses’ legs and begs him to have mercy. She calls forth the boy, who comes from the tomb, she tells him to kneel before Ulysses.

Andromache ridicules the idea that this poor boy but himself could rebuild the walls of the ruined city. She begs Ulysses to let the boy become his slave. But Ulysses ducks responsibility, saying it is not his decision but Calchas’s.

Andromache despises him, but Ulysses says time is marching on, the ships have weighed anchor. He allows her a moment to lament her son and Andromache gives a page-long speech describing Astyanax growing to manhood and being a wise and noble king, which will not now happen. Andromache bids him go with the Greeks, but the boy clings on to his mother and doesn’t want to leave, but Andromache says there is no choice and bids him take a message from her to his father. Ulysses, bored of all this yap, commands his soldiers to take him away.

The Chorus of Trojan women pulls back, as it were, from this immediate scene, to consider the general problem, what will become of them, where will they be sent, whose slaves will they become?

Act 4

Helen laments that she has been ordered by the victorious Greeks to lie to Priam’s daughter Polyxena, and persuade her she is to be married to Pyrrhus. It is, of course, a lie, she is going to be sacrificed, but Helen dutifully tells her to rejoice and dress as a bride. Andromache, hearing all this, is filled with disgust that anyone can think of rejoicing at this disastrous time, and at the unremitting evil Helen represents, ‘bringer of doom, disaster and destruction’.

Helen replies to this attack, saying she had no say in the matter, was handed over like an object won in a competition, has endured 10 years of exile, and is now hated by all sides. Andromache knows Helen is telling lies and orders her to tell the truth. Herself weeping, Helen comes clean and says Polyxena is to be sacrificed, burned, and her ashes scattered over Achilles’ tomb.

Andromache is shocked that Polyxena takes the news that she is about to die with alacrity and enthusiastically changes clothes, braids her hair etc. It means exit from this misery and avoiding a lifetime of slavery. Not so happy is her mother, Hecuba, who laments.

Now Helen tells the Trojan women have been parcelled out to, Andromache to Pyrrhus, Hecuba to Ulysses, Cassandra to Agamemnon. Hecuba rains down curses on Ulysses, hoping that storm and sea will plague his return to Ithaca. And, as Pyrrhus appears, she extends her curse of storms and shipwreck to the entire Greek fleet.

The Chorus of Trojan women point out there is comfort in numbers, it is easier to mourn or suffer with colleagues, and describes how it will feel to be rounded up into the ships and sail away and slowly lose sight of their homeland, the smoke rising from their ruined city, Mount Ida, all fading over the horizon.

Act 5

The messenger arrives and announces the boy has been flung from the tower, the girl has met her death. The women ask for a detailed account, which he gives them. Both died with tremendous bravery, shaming the Greeks.

The last word goes to Hecuba who laments that death has come to everyone in her family, but will not come to her, to ease her suffering.

Thoughts

The supernatural element of Achilles’ ghost rising up from the underworld is very unlike the chaste, restrained style of Euripides’ tragedy on the same subject. it feels closer in style to the Middle Ages or Gothic horror.
The choral ode in act 2 persuasively argues that there is nothing after death, death is the end, our minds expire with our bodies – which is flatly contradicted by everything else in the play, including Achilles’ miraculous appearance, the ghost of Hector, and so on.
The other plays feature a unified chronological plot. The Trojan Women is interesting because it has what feels like two plots, featuring two women (Hecuba and Andromache) running in parallel, though linking up at places. Its emphasis on the suffering of women reminds me of Ovid’s Heroides. It’s my favourite.

4. Oedipus

Background

The most famous Greek myth. A soothsayer tells Oedipus’s parents, Laius and Jocasta, the rulers of Thebes, that their unborn son will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, the royal couple deliver the baby, but then expose him in the country. To avoid the prophecy coming true they have the baby’s ankles pierced and joined together with a strap. (This caused the child’s feet to swell up and gave rise to Oedipus’ name, which literally means ‘swollen foot’.)

A peasant finds him and takes him to the king of the neighbouring realm, Polybus of Corinth who, being childless, considers him a providential gift from the gods and adopts him. As Oedipus grows to be strong and virile, his peers taunt him that he can’t be the son of the mild and gentle Polybus. So he travels to Delphi where the oracle tells him he is fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, Oedipus vows never to return to Corinth. On the way back he gets into an argument in a narrow path with an old man driving a chariot and hits him so hard he accidentally kills him. On the same journey he comes across the half-human, half-animal sphinx who won’t let him pass unless he answers the riddle: What walks on 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs at noon, and 3 legs in the evening. Oedipus answers correctly that it is Man. He travels on to Thebes to discover that the entire city had been terrorised by the Sphinx but he has saved them all. Not only that, but news has come that old King Laius has been killed. As saviour of the city, Oedipus is offered the hand of the widowed queen and marries Jocasta and becomes the new king.

The play opens as a plague is ravaging Thebes. A sequence of events, and messengers bringing news, slowly reveal to Oedipus that he was never the natural son of King Polybus, that he was adopted, that his true parents were Laius and Jocasta and then…that the old man he killed in the fight in the road was Laius and…he has been sleeping with Jocasta, his own mother, for years. At which point a) Jocasta hangs herself and b) Oedipus blinds himself.

Act 1

Oedipus outlines the situation i.e. he is king at Thebes, the city is stricken with plague which is striking down everyone but himself, he has sent to the oracle at Delphi which has sent back the horrifying prediction that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. He is pleased he fled his homeland and his father Polybus, but feels a terrible sense of dread.

I see
Disaster everywhere, I doubt myself.
Fate is preparing, even while I speak,
Some blow for me.

Of course the blight of the plague gives Seneca scope for some typical hyperbole, ‘the murk of hell has swallowed up the heavenly citadels’ and so on. The description of the plague goes on at length, describing people too sick to bury the dead and so on, reminding me of the vivid description of the plague which ends Lucretius’s long poem De Rerum Natura, premonitory of Albert Camus’s great novel about a 20th century plague. Oedipus says maybe he brought the bad luck, maybe must leave the city.

His queen (and unbeknown to him, his mother) tells him a true king grasps misfortune with a steady hand.

Oedipus describes his encounter with the Sphinx who is made to sound a hellish beast surrounded by the bones of those who failed her riddle. Well, he triumphed over her but now seems to have himself brought the plague to Thebes.

The Chorus is made up of Theban elders. It gives a 4-page-long, vivid description of the plague, how it first struck animals then moved to humans. With characteristic bombast it then shrilly describes:

Out of the depths of Erebus their prison
The Furies have rushed upon us with the fire of hell.
Phlegethon, river of fire, has burst its banks,
The River of Hades is mingled with the River of Cadmus.

The act ends as Oedipus sees Creon, Jocasta’s brother, arriving. He has been to the oracle.

Act 2

Creon described to Oedipus the mood of horror at the oracle, till a superhuman voice declared that only when the murderer of Laius is driven out will Thebes know peace. Oedipus then makes one of those ironic vows, vowing to all the gods that the murderer of Laius will never know rest but live in permanent exile, a wandering nomad, and find no pardon – ignorant of the fact he is cursing himself.

On a more mundane note Oedipus now asks Creon how Laius met his death. He was attacked and murdered at a crossroads out in the countryside, says Creon.

Enter the old blind prophet Tiresias, led by his daughter, Manto. He tells Oedipus he can interpret the situation through a sacrifice, so a bull and heifer are brought in and the sacrificial flame rises and parts in two parts which fight each other.

[This is a classic example of the way these plays would be hard to stage but work very well when read, or read aloud, or broadcast. The getting onstage of the animal, its execution and especially the behaviour of the flame would be impossible to create onstage but work pretty well when read out.]

Manto describes the strange behaviour of the flame which Tiresias interprets as the gods themselves being ashamed of the truth. Tiresias asks how the animals behaved when sacrificed and Manto tells him the heifer submitted but the bull shied and defied the blows. The heifer bled freely but the bull’s blood not at all, while dark blood poured from its eyes and mouth. When they examined the entrails, they were in bad shape, the heart was shrunk, the veins were livid, part of the lungs was missing, the liver was putrid. Far, far worse, the virgin heifer turned out to be pregnant and the deformed life in her stirred. The fire on the altar roared, the hearth quaked etc.

Oedipus begs to know what this all means, but Tiresias pushes the play deep into Gothic territory by saying they will have to perform a magic rite to call the soul of the dead king himself up from hell to tell them. Oedipus must not attend, so he nominates Creon to go in his place.

Incongruously, oddly, the Chorus sing a sustained hymn to the Bacchus, god of the vine, listing his adventures and achievements – notably the occasion when he scared pirates who had captured him into jumping overboard and being changed into dolphins, and the time he rescued Ariadne from Naxos and proceeded to marry her.

Act 3

Creon enters. Oedipus asks what he saw at the ceremony. Creon is so terrified he repeatedly refuses to speak until Oedipus forces him. Then Creon gives a terrific description of the dark and ill-fated glade where they took Tiresias and dug a ditch and burned animal sacrifices and chanted evil spells and a great chasm opened up and hordes of the dead appeared before them. Last of all came the reluctant figure of Laius, still dishevelled and bloody, who proceeds to give a long speech saying the plague on Thebes is due to the current king, who killed his father and has slept with his mother and had children by her. Only when he is cast out as an unclean thing will Thebes be cured.

Oedipus is appalled but refuses to believe it: after all, his father Polybus lives on at Corinth and he’s never laid a finger on his mother, Merope. Oedipus refuses to believe it and says Creon is conspiring with Tiresias to seize the crown. Creon, for his part, advises Oedipus to abdicate now, to step down to a humbler position before he is pushed. They proceed to have a page of dialogue which turns into a debate about whether a subject should stand up to the king, Oedipus dismissing these as typical arguments of the revolutionary.

The Chorus gives a potted history of the land of Thebes, and the wider region of Boeotia, populated by Cadmus in search of his abducted sister Europa, of the many monsters which have been spawned in this region, with a final mention of the myth of Actaeon, turned into a stag and ripped apart by his own hunting dogs.

Act 4

Oedipus is confused, he asks Jocasta how Laius died and is told he was struck down by a young man when travelling with his entourage at a place where three roads meet. It jogs a faint memory in Oedipus’s mind but then a messenger comes to interrupt his attempts to remember with news that his ‘father’, King Polybus of Corinth, has passed away peacefully in his sleep.

The old man/messenger requests him to come to Corinth to attend the dead king’s funeral, but Oedipus refuses, saying he is afraid of being alone in the company of his mother. The old man reassures him that Meropa was not his real mother and proceeds to tell the full story of how he, the old man, was given Oedipus as a baby, his ankles bound together with a metal pin. ‘Who by?’ Oedipus asks. ‘The keeper of the royal flocks,’ the man replies. ‘Can he remember his name?’ Oedipus asks. No, but he might remember the face. So Oedipus orders his men to assemble all the royal shepherds.

The old man warns Oedipus to stop probing while he still has time, but Oedipus insists he has nothing to fear and the truth will set him free. Poor dupe of fate.

Enter Phorbas, head of Thebes’s royal flocks. He begins to remember the old man. He confirms that he handed the old man a baby but doubts if it can have lived because its ankles were pierced through with an iron bolt and infection had spread.

Who was the baby, Oedipus demands. Phorbas refuses to say so Oedipus says he will order hot coals to torture him with. Phorbas replies with one line: ‘Your wife was that child’s mother.’

With that one line the truth comes flooding in on Oedipus. He is not Polybus and Meropa’s child; they adopted him; he is the child of Laius who he killed at the crossroads and of…Jocasta, the woman he has married and had children with. Oedipus is, understandably, distraught, and expresses it with full Senecan hyperbole:

Earth, be opened!
Ruler of darkness, hide in deepest hell
This monstrous travesty of procreation!

The Chorus continues its very tangential relationship with the story, not commenting on this amazing revelation at all, but instead wishing its ship of life was riding on milder waters to a gentler wind. And then goes off at a real tangent, briefly describing the story of Daedalus and Icarus to show that living in moderation, the golden mean, is best.

Act 5

The Chorus sees a messenger approaching. Never good news these messengers, and this one is no exception. He describes in great detail how distraught Oedipus went into the palace, grabbed a sword and made a great speech about killing himself, but then realised it wasn’t punishment enough, was too quick and easy. Something was demanded to placate the gods and end the curse and the plague, more like a living death, where he would die again and again every day. Then it comes to him to blind himself and the messenger gives a very gory description of Oedipus plucking his own eyes out.

The Chorus gives a brief didactic explanation that Fate is unchangeable, one iron chain of endless causes and consequences. No man can escape it.

Enter Oedipus blinded, freed from the light of the accusing sun.

The Chorus describes Jocasta coming onstage, distraught, uncertain whether to address her son and husband.

Jocasta addresses Oedipus who is horrified and says they must never speak, never be in the same country together. Jocasta seizes his sword and, after some debate exactly where to stab herself, stabs herself in her womb, seat of all her sinfulness, and falls dead.

In his final soliloquy Oedipus says he has expiated his sin and now will set out on his wanderings. He promises the poor suffering people of Thebes that he will take with him the capitalised allegorised figures of infliction and free them at last. What better companions and tormentors could he hope for on his endless wanderings and punishments.

Moral of the story

Even if you’re a childless couple, desperate for a baby, do not accept the gift of a little baby boy whose ankles are pierced together by an iron bar!

*************

Big ideas

When I was a boy reading these Penguin introductions, it was often not specific criticism of specific aspects of the play which stuck with me, but when the scholars and editors made throwaway generalisations which in a flash helped me make sense of an entire genre or period of history.

Thus, in among his detailed critique of specific plays or aspects, Watling offers three big, memorable ideas about Seneca’s influence on English Renaissance literature.

1. One is that Seneca is often blamed for Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights’ addiction to ghosts, ghosts of gruesomely murdered figures who return to the land of the living to trigger the action of the plot (p.28). The ghost of the dead Spanish officer Andrea appears at the start of the archetypal Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and ghosts are important in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar and central to the plot of his greatest play, Hamlet. In fact, Watling refutes this by pointing out there are only two ghosts in Seneca’s oeuvre, Tantalus in Thyestes and Thyestes in Agamemnon.

2. The other is the simple but illuminating comment that:

The language of Elizabethan drama would not have reached its height of poetic eloquence without the infusion of the classical voice – the Ovidian mythology and the Senecan rhetoric. (p.32)

Aha, Ovid and Seneca – so that was their influence and how they fit together to flow through all Elizabethan drama: Ovid for mythological stories, with their bucolic settings, flowers and curlicues; Seneca for accusing ghosts, characters howling for revenge and invoking the shadows of Erebus and darkest night.

3. There’s a third insight, not so striking as the first two, maybe, and this is that, despite the best efforts of scholars and academically-minded authors like Philip Sidney or Ben Jonson to import the so-called Dramatic Unities and impose them on contemporary drama, they failed; they failed to dent the English preference for ‘straggling narrative plays‘ which cheerfully ignore the cardinal unities of time or place or even action (p.35).

In Watling’s words 1) Senecan rhetoric of extreme emotions was grafted onto 2) plots which lacked Senecan focus and concision, to create a ‘fusion of classical uniformity with romantic multiformity in the Elizabethan theatre.’ (p.37).

In the greatest Elizabethan plays, the theme, the form and the language may have crystallised into an impressive whole:

but yet not so perfect as to tidy up all the loose ends or exclude the superfluities and irrelevances which make the Elizabethan drama of life a different thing from the Roman sculptured monument of death. (p.38)

Messy, mongrel literature has always been our style.

Credit

E.F. Watling’s translation of Four Tragedies and Octavia was published by Penguin Books in 1966.

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by Simon on December 19, 2022 • Permalink

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Pseudolus by Plautus (191 BC)

‘She was mine to do as I liked with.’
(Ballio the pimp about Calidorus’s lady love, the slave-courtesan Phoenicium, page 230)

Of the 20 or so plays by Plautus which have survived from antiquity, this is the longest. We have the precise date of production, 191 BC. As so often it is set in the street in front of two houses and the lead figure is a canny slave. Yet the real star of the show turns out to be Ballio, the wretched pimp.

Setup

Calidorus is the stock young man. He is in love with Phoenicium, who is a slave-prostitute ‘singing girl’ who belongs to the wretched pimp, Ballio. The play opens with Calidorus showing his father’s chief slave and loyal servant, Pseudolus, a letter he’s just received from Phoenicium telling Calidorus that she’s been sold by her master to a Macedonian officer who just has to complete the payment of 2,000 drachmas and will take her away forever tomorrow. After some banter, Pseudolus promises to devise some way of getting her back or else he’ll pay Calidorus 2,000 drachmas. They hide to one side as Ballio appears.

The plot

Enter Ballio

In one of the two houses onstage lives Ballio, the pimp. It’s his birthday today. He enters brandishing a whip and terrifying his male slaves. He calls them lazy good-for-nothings and whips at least one of them. Then he gives them all chores to do as he’s planning to hold a feast to impress some VIPs.

The slaves go off about their chores, then Ballio calls out his female slaves, presumably his ‘courtesans’ i.e. sex workers, among whom is Calidorus’s true love, Phoenicium. Ballio shouts at the women slaves that today he will set one of them free, but the criterion will be, which one can get her lover to bring him, Ballio, the most extravagant birthday presents. Otherwise what’s the point of keeping such a harem of greedy lazy slaves?

Ballio goes through each of his ‘girls’ by name, pointing out the sectors of the market they specialise, namely the corn merchants (Hedylium), the butchers (Aeschrodora), the olive oil men (Xystilis) and finally Phoenicium, who he characterises as a gentleman’s pet, always promising to bring him the fee for her freedom but never actually delivering it (p.224).

Ballio dismisses the women, while in their hiding place Calidorus and Pseudolus bicker about what to do. Ballio is just setting off for town with his boy when Pseudolus calls out to him. After some banter in which it becomes clear the Ballio knows and dislikes our boys, Pseudolus takes command of the conversation and says Calidorus is sorry for not having come up with the cash to buy Phoenicium. Ballio has no sympathy: he should borrow it from a friend or steal it from his father. After Calidorus has stopped being scandalised, Pseudolus takes the lead again and promises Ballio he’ll come up with the money somehow within three days.

Ballio teases Calidorus by telling him Phoenicium is not for sale…at which point Calidorus rejoices and says Ballio is a second Jupiter and he needs to send Pseudolus to buy a lamb whose giblets they can sacrifice to this wonderful fellow. But, Ballio continues, Phoenicium is not for sale because she’s already been sold (p.230).

In a comic passage Pseudolus and Calidorus stand either side of Ballio and call him every abusive term they can come up with, but it is water in a sieve, he doesn’t care: he happily admits he killed his own parents to avoid having to pay for their care, he is a worm and it doesn’t bother him. And in that spirit he tells them that the Macedonian officer has only put down 1,500 of the 2,000 drachmas he’s contracted to pay for Phoenicium. If the boys can being him, Ballio, the full 2,000 today, maybe he’ll change his mind. And with an evil grin he sets off for the market.

Pseudolus soliloquy 1

Pseudolus then explains to Calidorus that he has a cunning plan, but he needs Calidorus to provide a friend, an intelligent, reliable friend to play a role in his plan. So Calidorus exists to find one.

Pseudolus is left onstage to admit to the audience that he doesn’t have the slightest idea or plan he just wanted to get rid of Calidorus. Much more likely is that he might be able to wangle the 2,000 drachmas out of his master Simo, who just at this moment happens along with his neighbour Callipho.

Simo

Simo tells the audience his son Calidorus is the talk of the town, everyone knows he’s desperate to buy his courtesan girlfriend but doesn’t have the money. Callipho says he shouldn’t be so hard on his son after all he was a tearaway and libertine in his own youth. They both spot Pseudolus listening to them and approach and say hello.

A feature of this play is it is quite slow moving. This is because the characters spend quite a lot of time in extended conversation: first Calidorus and Pseudolus with Ballio, now Pseudolus with Simo and Callipho – extended pleasantries and banter. Basically Simo tells Pseudolus he knows all about his son’s plight and is well aware that Pseudolus is planning to extract 2,000 drachmas out of him, but assures him it won’t work. Pseudolus declares that, on the contrary, he will get it out of him, which both Simo and Callipho consider a cheeky threat.

CALLIPHO: ‘Ye gods! The man’s a living marvel – if he can be as good as his word.’

Not only that, Pseudolus assures the two sceptical old men that before the day is through he will have won not one but two victories: he is going to extract the 2,000 drachmas from Simo and he is going to remove the girl from Ballio’s grasp! Pseudolus says, if he manages in the former, will his master give him the money and his freedom? Reluctantly, Simo agrees.

Callipho finds all this very amusing and when Pseudolus announces he needs him for his plans, happily agrees to cancel his planned trip to the country to do so. What’s more, he cheerfully tells Pseudolus that if Simo refuses to give him the money he, Callipho, will. All very relaxed and amused. Callipho goes into his house, Simo goes off into town.

Pseudolus soliloquy 2

Pseudolus not only speaks directly to the audience, he breaks the conceptual fourth wall by talking about the play itself, saying he currently has no idea how he’s going to pull it all off but what’s a play without surprises, so he begs our indulgence while he goes for a think and, meantime, there will be a musical interlude.

Musical interlude with a flute player

Pseudolus re-enters and fools around making a speech in the grand style describing how he will mount a siege and storm the house of his enemy i.e. Ballio. He’s in mod flow when he spies someone coming, and hides.

Enter Harpax

Harpax is a soldier, the representative of the Macedonian officer who’s put a down payment on Phoenicium. He talks out loud as he tries to figure out which of these houses is Ballio’s which gives Pseudolus the opportunity to step forward and pretend to be Ballio’s steward, Syrus. Harpax says he’s come with a purse of the outstanding sum, 500 drachmas, plus a sealed letter and the personal token of his master, the Macedonian officer, as agreed with Ballio. Pseudolus says his ‘master’ Ballio is out right now, and tries to persuade him to give him the purse but Harpax isn’t that dumb. He does, on the other hand, give him the sealed letter to give to Ballio, before announcing he’s going back to his inn to have lunch and a nap and for Pseudolus to send a message to him when Ballio returns. And so he exits.

Pseudolus soliloquy 3

Pseudolus tells us this is the lucky break he needed and launches into extended philosophising about the best laid plans and Lady Luck and so on, when he spies young Calidorus returning with a friend.

Enter Calidorus and Charinus

Pseudolus likes putting on funny voices and so adopts a tone of royal grandiloquence to greet his master. But he quickly comes to have a low opinion of the friend, Charinus, who is nettled by his disrespect. Nonetheless he shows Calidorus the letter and token.

Pseudolus says he will need a man. A slave? suggests Charinus. Yes. Well Charinus just happens to know a slave his master has freshly sent from their country estate to here, in Athens, named Simia. Perfect. And is he a slippery eel and trickster? Yes. And might Charinus happen to have a soldier’s cloak at his house? Yes. Pseudolus has gained new respect for Charinus, he’s a veritable charitable institution.

The plan? They’ll dress up this newly arrived slave as a a soldier, give him the letter and token and 500 drachmas and he will pretend to the Macedonian’s man and secure Phoenicium from the pimp. Pseudolus tells the chaps to go and prepare him.

Pseudolus soliloquy 4

Two enjoyable features of the play:

Pseudolus amusingly uses military metaphors to describe how he is laying sieges and strategems to take Ballio’s fortress by storm.
Pseudolus in a very post-modern way keeps referring to the play he’s actually in. So when Calidorus and Charinus ask him how he got the better of Harpax, he simply replies that the audience has seen everything so there’s no point repeating it (p.245)

He also leaves the stage.

Ballio’s slave boy

A touching soliloquy from Ballio’s slave boy describing how being an ugly boy in a whorehouse is a miserable fate. Ballio threatened everyone with the whip if they couldn’t come up with fine presents for him, but he hasn’t got anything.

Ballio returns with a cook

Ballio has hired a cook and assistants for his feast. It is typical of this play that there’s quite a long passage of dialogue devoted entirely to fleshing out his character, in which Ballio insults the cook for being an evil looking wretch and the cook cannily defends himself by saying he is always last to be hired because is more expensive and better quality than the ruck.

As with the role of the ‘table companion’ in Menaechmi, this gives a vivid sense of the forum as the place where people went to be hired for jobs for the day.

Anyway, Ballio orders his ‘ugly boy’ to keep a sharp watch on the cook and his assistants to make sure he doesn’t pinch anything. When they’ve all gone into his house, Ballio gives a little soliloquy in which he explains that he bumped into Calidorus’s father in the market and the latter warned him that Pseudolus has got a cunning plan to wangle Phoenicium off him. So he’s going to tell all his slaves to be on the lookout for the tricky Pseudolus.

Pseudolus and Simia

Enter Pseudolus with Simia, the smooth, handsome young slave Charinus promised. He is dressed up in a soldier’s outfit and very pleased with himself, super confident of his ability to ‘fake and fiddle’, rather to Pseudolus’s irritation. Pseudolus keeps asking if he remembers what he is so say and Simia crossly says yes yes yes.

As with all the other scenes and exchanges in this play, the two pages of Pseudolus fussing over Simia and the latter getting increasingly irritated, are not really necessary to the plot, but add colour and depth.

Ballio comes out his front door, still fussing about the cook he’s hired and Simia steps boldly forward, pretending to be the soldier Harpax finding his way. Pseudolus stays in hiding, wincing at more or less every one of Simia’s cocky remarks. But, to cut a long story, short, Simia hands over the letter and token and succeeds in persuading Ballio that he is the emissary of the Macedonian officer. Ballio reads the letter (which is quite rude about him), Simia hands over the money, Ballio says, Right, come and get her, and they go into his house.

Pseudolus steps out of hiding. All is going well but his nerves are wracking, any number of things could still go wrong: his master might turn up, the real Harpax might turn up, or Simia might go over to the enemy for a cash reward!

In the event the door opens and Simia and Phoenicium emerge and are waved off by Ballio who goes back into his house. Pseudolus hurries to join them and says, Quick, quick, while the coast is clear! and so they make off. Worth noting that the military metaphors deployed by Pseudolus are echoed by Simia who is, of course, dressed as a soldier. The entire thing has a comic thread of military pastiche running through it.

PSEUDOLUS: ‘Forward march! For victory and the cup of triumph!’

Enter Simo

Simo is Calidorus’s father and the subject of the bet with Pseudolus. He now enters with a view to checking with Ballio how things are going. He says hello, they talk and Ballio is so confident that the deal has gone his way he hustles Simo into making a bet with him: Ballio promises to give Simo 2,000 drachmas (and a girl thrown in) if Calidorus gets possession of the girl today. Simo has nothing to lose so he shakes on the bet.

When Simo asks what this Harpax was like, Ballio, like Pseudolus, breaks the illusion of reality by saying Harpax used the usual type of gags used in this kind of comedy, and was used the stock terms given to pimps in comedies. Part of the enjoyment is the way the comic characters know they are in a play, readily admit it and play up to it.

Anyway, Ballio assures him on his life that Pseudolus won’t be able to pull one of his tricks, it’s too late, he has handed over the girl to the Macedonian officer’s man, who was bearing his letter and token, there’s absolutely no way anything can go wrong.

Enter Harpax

Oops. At which point the real Macedonian emissary, Harpax, arrives. He gives a little speech about how the good servant is always thinking of his master’s best interests, even if he’s not physically there, giving orders. This is interesting because it’s almost identical to the speech on the same subject given by Messenio in Menaechmi – the point being it’s obviously a stock sentiment given to the Good Slave in this kind of play.

Anyway, he waited at the inn for the fellow claiming to be Ballio’s steward (in reality Pseudolus) to come and get him, but he never showed up so here he is, taking the initiative in carrying out his master’s orders.

So comic misunderstanding. At first Ballio sees a stranger approaching and tells Simo here’s business for his whorehouse. He’ll take his money and be glad. But then Harpax declares his is the emissary of the Macedonian and has the money for the girl. At which point, instead of realising he’s been diddled, Ballio chats aside to Simo and declares that this must be a fake soldier put up to it by that rascal Pseudolus – well, he won’t fool old Ballio!

Ballio and Simo proceed to take the mickey out of Harpax, grabbing his cloak and hat and sword, and saying his officer must have rescued him from prison and insinuating that he’s gay and generally ragging him under the assumption that he’s a fake. But, inevitably, they begin to falter as Harpax sticks to his story and goes on to say he gave his master’s letter and token to a slave from this very house, one Syrus. Then Ballio asks Harpax for a description of this ‘Syrus’ and Harpax describes Pseudolus to a t. It’s interesting to learn what Pseudolus is meant to look like:

HARPAX: Ginger hair, fat belly, thick legs, dark skin, big head, sharp eyes, red face and very large feet. (p.263)

With horror Harpax realises what’s happened. Pseudolus has had him after all. It was the earlier Harpax who was fake, this is the real one. Not only that but Harpax now insists on having his 2,000 drachmas back and Simo chips in, insisting on Ballio coughing up the 2,000 drachmas he confidently bet him 5 minutes earlier.

Ballio realises he is lost. Harpax insists on marching him off to the bank to collect his 2,000 drachmas. Ballio just has time for an aside to the audience, bleakly saying ‘birthday’? This is more like his death day!

Simo soliloquises

Left alone onstage Simo tells us he’s going to spring a surprise on Pseudolus, but not the kind of one you usually get in comedies like this, a surprise of whips and chains. No, he is full of admiration at the canny trick Pseudolus has pulled off, putting Odysseus’s trick which won the war at Troy in the shade. No, he’s going to get the 2,000 drachmas he wagered him and have it read to hand over next time they meet.

Drunk Pseudolus

And rather than any more dramatic encounters or revelations or dialogue, the play ends with Pseudolus staggering onstage, plastered, and drunkenly telling the audience what a fabulous feast they’re having inside. Calidorus has gotten married to Phoenicium, everyone’s drinking and singing at the wedding feast – and Pseudolus does a drunken little dance onstage.

Anyway, drunk though he is, he’s come to see his old master i.e. Simo, and now knocks on his door. Simo opens the door prepared to be gracious but Pseudolus, very drunk, embraces him and burps in his face. When Simo hands him the big sack of silver coins he owes him, Pseudolus at first plans to drag Simo through the streets, as in a victory triumph, humiliating him. But Simo gets down on his knees and begs not to be humiliated and so Pseudolus, in a lazy drunken way, says: Of course, not, can’t have that can we? And instead makes it clear he’s inviting the old ‘master’ to the wedding feast of his son.

At which point they stop and ask themselves, as they always do in Plautus’s plays – what about the audience, are you going to invite them? And, as usual, one of them points out there are far too many to invite to a little house, so the next best thing – would they kindly applaud?

Thoughts

Not at all ‘boy meets girl’ comedy, is it? ‘Clever slave outwits pimp’ doesn’t have quite the same ring, but that’s what this is.

Not only is it not a ‘boy meets girl’ story but the girl in question – I wanted to write ‘doesn’t even appear’ but she does appear, and she does at least have a name, unlike the ‘wife’ and ‘father’ in Menaechmi who remain unnamed cyphers. But it’s the briefest of appearances, walking once across the stage as she’s taken away by Simia-posing-as-Harpax.

I’ve pointed out that most of the characters in Plautus plays are pawns in the machinations of the plot, but it’s hard to deny that the female characters are very often the pawniest of the pawns.

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Pot of Gold and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1965.

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by Simon on March 30, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Play, Slavery, Theatre

Tagged Athens, Ballio, Calidorus, Callipho, Charinus, comedy, courtesan, darma, E.F. Watling, flute player, Harpax, Messenio, Phoenicium, Plautus, Play, prostitute, Pseudolus, sex workers, Simia, Simo, Slavery, The Pot of Gold and Other Plays, theatre, whipping

Posted by Simon on March 30, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/30/pseudolus-plautus/

Miles Gloriosus by Plautus (c.200 BC)

The Latin title translates as The Boastful Soldier. It was based on a (now lost) Greek original titled Alazon or The Braggart (as Plautus tells us in the prologue). The play was so popular in its day and after, that the title gave its name to a stock character type, the miles gloriosus, the stereotype of the swaggering vainglorious but, in reality, cowardly soldier who featured in comedies for the next 1,500 years, appearing in Shakespeare and other European authors,

The characters all have Greek names and the play is set in the Greek city of Ephesus and, once you start reading the biggest surprise about the plot is how peripheral to it the boastful soldier is. The play opens with a short scene showing the boastful soldier, Pyrgopolynices, outside his house accompanied by his parasite or sycophant Artotrogus for some comic banter. As mentioned in previous reviews, parasitus is the word used for this character type but Watling thinks it is better translated as ‘table companion’ i.e. a man who sucks up to a rich patron, is flattering and amusing and is rewarded with a place at his table. The relationship is made crystal clear when, after flattering Pyrgopolynices with an account of the huge number of men he has killed in heroic encounters, Pyrgopolynices declares:

PYRGOPOLYNICES: Go on as you are doing, my man, and you will never go hungry. I give you the freedom of my table. (p.155)

The essence of the ‘parasite’s role is captured in this phrase. Anyway, Pyrgopolynices says he needs to round up his troop and go to the forum to pay some recruits he’s recently gathered for the King of Seleucia, so off he and Artotrogus go.

The plot

Enter Palaestrio

Enter the clever slave, Palaestrio, and he becomes the central character of the first half of the play, the prime mover of the plots and its scams.

Palaestrio explains in a lengthy speech that he previously lived in Athens where he served a young Athenian, Pleusicles. Pleusicles had a girlfriend named Philocomasium. Pleusicles was sent on a diplomatic mission to Naupactus and, while he was out of town, Pyrgopolynices ingratiated himself with the girl’s mother, bringing her presents, paying court to the young woman until one day, when the mother’s back was turned, Pyrgopolynices abducted Philocomasium, carrying off to the port and by ship back here to Ephesus.

The loyal slave Palaestrio tried to go to his master with this bad news but was himself captured by pirates and given (by an enormous coincidence) to the same soldier, Pyrgopolynices, as his slave.

Palaestrio secretly sent a letter to his former master telling him where he and Philocomasium were. As a result Pleusicles has now come to Ephesus and is staying with an old man, Periplectomenus, who lives next door to Pyrgopolynices.

So this play can be categorised as one of Plautus’s next door comedies, along with Trinummus, Aulularia, Menaechmi and Pseudolus, which all use the same device of situating the homes of the two main characters next door to each other.

So as the play opens, both Palaestrio and the abducted Philocomasium are living in Pyrgopolynices’s house in Ephesus – her lover Pleusicles is staying in the house next door – and Palaestrio has cut a hole in the party wall between the two houses to allow the two lovers to see each other another (p.157). And hug and kiss.

So deep down the structure is very simple. The ‘problem’ of the play is that although the lovers are pretty much physically reunited already, some way must be found to get Pyrgopolynices to formally relinquish his ‘ownership’ of Philocomasium so that she becomes free to marry Pleusicles.

Sceledrus sees the kissers

First, however, there is a problem which drives the first half of the plot. One of Palaestrio’s fellow servants, the ‘stupid slave’ Sceledrus, has spotted Pleusicles and Philocomasium having a snog. If he tells Pyrgopolynices, then the reunion of the lovers will be over before it’s started.

Therefore Palaestrio cooks up a holding manoeuvre, which is to persuade Sceledrus that Philocomasium’s identical twin sister has come to town with her fiancé and that it was this identical twin sister who Sceledrus saw snogging Pleusicles, her legitimate fiancé (p.161).

This triggers a lot of comic business such as Philocomasium lounging in the soldier’s house so Sceledrus can see her there, then nipping through the hole between the two houses (while Sceledrus keeps a close watch on the front doors of both houses) so that she can emerge from Periplectomenus’s house in the guise of a completely different woman, while the bewildered Sceledrus had close watch on the two front doors and so is utterly convinced she can’t have got from one house to the next.

It’s worth noting that Philocomasium plays a central part in creating and maintaining the illusion of the identical twin, calling herself Honoria when in the guise of the Pleusicles’ beloved in Periplectomenus’s house.This is an unusually prominent and leading role for a young woman in a Plautus play. (And obviously it’s another play featuring identical twins, as in Menaechmi, albeit fake or non-existent identical twins.)

Anyway, with Palaestrio, Philocomium and Periplectomenus all ganging up to assure Sceledrus that he saw Philocomium’s twin sister kissing Pleusicles – and with some comic business of him going into first one house then the other and seeing Philocomium in both, Sceledrus eventually, reluctantly, comes to believe it himself. He is forced to grovellingly apologise to Periplectomenus for manhandling Philocomium earlier, when he thought she was guilty of the kiss, and comes to fear the whole thing is some kind of plot to have him (Sceledrus) sold off in shame, allowing Palaestrio to take the position of top dog in Pyrgopolynices’s household (where he is already a favourite).

The conspirators

Once Sceledrus has gone back into the Captain’s house, enter canny Palaestrio, the young lover Pleusicles and next door’s Periplectomenus. It is clear they are all on the same page, all friends, and all determined to help young Pleusicles.

At first they all agree that Periplectomenus is the ideal host and Pleusicles is very grateful for all his help and goes on to sing Periplectomenus’s praises and Periplectomenus joins in, explaining that, at the age of 54, he is a considerate host and a well-mannered guest, a lovely man all round.

When one of them asks if he doesn’t miss his dead wife, this scene morphs into a disquisition on the evil of wives and the joys of bachelorhood, displaying the same general anti-women animus – call it sexism or misogyny – as all the other plays. Mind you, he also sings the praises of not having any children, so it’s more pro-male freedom than anti-women, as such. And anyway, a few minutes earlier, he was full of praise for the way Philocomium played the role of the innocent twin sister outraged at the slave Sceledrus’s accusations.

Periplectomenus is about to launch into a long disquisition on the deficient table manners of the poor when Palaestrio tactfully reminds them that maybe they ought to return to the business in hand i.e. plans to take the Captain down a peg or two and to help Pleusicles obtain his lady love.

Palaestrio’s plan

Palaestrio tells them his plan. He asks Periplectomenus is he knows of an attractive woman who’d be up for playing a trick, with a maid. Periplectomenus says he does, knows just the woman, very attractive and willing to do anything for pay.

Well, Palaestrio’s plan is to pay this woman to pretend for a day to be Periplectomenus’s wife, and live with him, but to take the pretence a step further by pretending she is secretly in love with Pyrgopolynices. What they’ll do is take a ring of Periplectomenus’s, say he has given it to his wife, then Palaestrio will say he has been asked by the wife to give this ring to the Captain as a token of her secret love. He’ll immediately be inflamed with the urge to seduce her, and the game will be afoot.

So Periplectomenus agrees to a) give Palaestrio a big ring he usually wears and b) go and get the woman (and her maid) who he thinks will be willing to play the role.

Palaestrio and Lurcio

Paleatrio knocks on the Captain’s door and it is opened by his servant Lurcio. There follows a rather laboured exchange in which Palaestrio establishes that Sceledrus has drunk himself into a stupor fuelled by the wine that the potboy, Lurcio, has provided him with. That’s to say they’ve been illegally drinking the master’s wine so when Palaestrio threatens to expose him, Lurcio decides to go into hiding for a bit. Good. That’s one more servant out of the way (given that Sceledrus is sleeping off his boozy lunch).

Introducing Acroteleutium and Milphidippa

An interlude in which Periplectomenus introduces to Palaestrio the two women he mentioned earlier, the clever, attractive, canny Acroteleutium and her maid, Milphidippa. Acroteleutium makes it clear that she totally understands the role she must play and is all-too-willing to take down that ‘public pest, that big-mouthed menace to women, that scent-reeking hairdressers’ delight, Pyrgopolynices (p.188).

Good. Palaestrio tells them to go into Periplectomenus’s house while he goes to find the Captain in the forum, there to tell him that Periplectomenus’s wife is madly in love with him and give him Periplectomenus’s ring as a token of her infatuation.

Palaestrio fools Pyrgopolynices

We witness the scene in which Palaestrio gives Pyrgopolynices the supposed love token from Periplectomenus’s supposed wife. That’s the easy bit. The next bit is more dicey. Palaestrio points out that Pyrgopolynices can hardly seduce Periplectomenus’s wife if that other girl, Philocomium, is hanging round. True, the Captain replies, what should he do? Well, Palaestrio says, he just happens to know that the girl’s twin sister and mother have arrived in Ephesus looking for her (the Captain is suitably surprised). Best thing would be to let her keep whatever jewels and clothes he’s given her to date, and hand her back to her family in a polite and respectful way (p.190).

Milphidippa and Pyrgopolynices

All this time they’ve been walking across stage to the Captain’s house and, at this point, see someone come out of Periplectomenus’s house. It’s the maid. Palaestrio tells the Captain to hide so they can see what she’s about. Milphidippa, perceiving that they are overhearing her, goes out of her way to play her part, loudly describing how desperately her mistress is in love with the legendary Pyrgopolynices.

Overhearing all this, Pyrgopolynices is tempted to have a shot at the maid but Palaestrio tells him to hold back and wait for the mistress herself. First Palaestrio nips over to the maid and has a few words to check she’s up to speed with the plot and will describe her mistress as swooning for love; then he nips back to Pyrgopolynices and advises him to play hard to get.

Then the maid is introduced to Pyrgopolynices for a comic dialogue, with both playing the roles Palaestrio has suggested for them, commenting all the way through and, in asides, mocking Pyrgopolynices’s preposterous posturing.

Eventually Milphidippa is dispatched to fetch her mistress. So this brings to a head the issue of what to do with the other woman, Philcomium. First some jokes. When Palaestrio tells the Captain that her twin sister is staying next door, Pyrgopolynices, wonders if he should have a shot at her, too; when Palaestrio says the twins’ mother is currently resting on the ship that brought them from Athens, Pyrgopolynices wonders about having a pot at her as well; and when Palaestrio says the twin’s chaperone is also staying next door (meaning Pleaucles) Pyrgopolynices asks whether he’s an attractive youth – to all of which Palaestrio ironically comments that Pyrgopolynices is an unstoppable bull, a veritable stallion! (p.197)

But no, first things first, they have to dispense with Philocomium and Palaestrio recommends it will be best coming from the captain himself. So Pyrgopolynices goes into his house to give Philocomium her marching orders.

The conspirators

Out of Periplectomenus’s house come the old bachelor himself, Acroteleutium, Milphidippa and Pleusicles i.e. the conspirators are all assembled and Palaestrio runs them once more through the parts they are to play and what they are to say. They decide that Acroteleutium is not merely to tell the Captain how much she fancies him, but to tell him she has divorced Periplectomenus and now owns the house next door. This is to allay any scruples the Captain might have about swiving a woman in her husband’s house (unlikely though the existence of any such scruples might be).

It also occurs to me that part of the pleasure of a scam like this, for the audience, whether in an ancient play or in modern scams like The Italian Job or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, is that there is a certain glee in watching comic conspirators come up with a comic plan and work through its details. We, the audience, become part of the fun.

A further element to the scam is that Pleusicles is to dress up as the captain of a ship (described in detail on p.200). He is to tell Philocomium, in front of Pyrgopolynices, that her mother has ordered the ship to set sail back for Athens and she must come straight away if she is to be on it. I.e. it is a scam to get her to leave immediately, thus clearing the way for Pyrgopolynices’s supposed conquest.

In case Pleusicles hasn’t guessed it yet, Palaestrio will come with them, ostensibly to help carry the girl’s luggage, but in fact to set sail with them never to return. At which Pleusicles promises to give the slave his freedom. (Freeing the clever slave is as central to the happy resolution of these plots as the marriage of the lovers.) They all go back into Perplectomenus’s house except for Palaestrio.

Re-enter Pyrgopolynices

Pyrgopolynices tells Palaestrio he has successfully persuaded Philocomium to leave his house. Took a while, comments Palaestrio. Yes, she refused to go until I gave her you, says Pyrgopolynices. She wouldn’t leave without you and so I give you to her and will set you free when all this is over. (Obviously this was a joke to the contemporary audience, but brings home just how central the freedom of the slave character was to these plots.)

Anyway, right on cue arrive Acroteleutium and Milphidippa, ready themselves to play their parts, and then speak up in loud voices intended to be overheard by the Captain and Palaestrio, who hide to one side of the stage. In a very funny series of exchanges Acroteleutium tells her maid how madly, foolishly she is in love with the great hero, while Palaestrio sycophantically tells the Captain such passion is only the due of such a great man.

Acroteleutium pretends to be able to scent and intuit that great man is not in his house but is outside, here, somewhere nearby and pretends to swoon with passion. She sends her maid to talk to him. Milphidippa approaches Pyrgopolynices and Palaestrio and says she has produced her mistress, as promised. Pyrgopolynices asks what she wants of him. Milphidippa replies her mistress wants him to visit her in her house. Pyrgopolynices is momentarily reluctant to visit her in another man’s house until the maid tells him, as planned, that Acroteleutium has divorced her husband and the house is now hers. At which Pyrgopolynices enthusiastically agrees and says he’ll be along in a minute.

Milphidippa returns to Acroteleutium, tells her the Captain’s message and they go back inside Periplectomenus’s house.

Pleusicles as ship’s captain

Next thing Pyrgopolynices and Palaestrio spy Pleusicles dressed as a ship’s captain coming along the street. He comes swaggering up and knocks at the Captain’s door. Pyrgopolynices and Palaestrio ask who he is and he plays his part perfectly, saying he is the ship’s captain and that Philocomium’ mother is waiting for her. Keen to get rid of Philocomium, Pyrgopolynices tells Palaestrio to get some slaves to carry all the girl’s gold and jewellery, clothes and valuables down to the ship.

So out comes Philocomosium pretending to be distraught at having to leave the Captain, who of course, takes her worship and distress as only fitting such a hero as himself.

The whole thing is nearly ruined when Philocomium pretends to swoon with tragic distress and Pleusicles catches her and take the opportunity of having a quick snog, and Pyrgopolynices thinks he catches sight of them and is momentarily suspicious. But Palaestrio manages to intervene with some bluster and the slaves appear carrying all her luggage and Pyrgopolynices is mollified and off Philocomium and Pleusicles go.

Palaestrio takes the opportunity for a prolonged and fake-impassioned farewell to Pyrgopolynices, telling him how much he will miss his inspiring example and, with heavy dramatic irony, how Pyrgopolynices will soon realise who were his true slaves and who his disloyal ones. Then he exits.

Pyrgopolynices’s come-uppance

Now the stage is set for the comic catastrophe. A slave boy comes out of Periplectomenus’s house and tells him his mistress is waiting within, overflowing with passion. But when Pyrgopolynices goes inside, the audience hears a rumpus and commotion. This then spills out onstage where Periplectomenus accuses Pyrgopolynices of seducing another man’s wife in his house, and gets his slaves to arrange Pyrgopolynices for a serious flogging by laying him out flat and spread-eagled and holding him down. Not only this but he has one of his cooks brandish a sharp knife and declare he is ready to gut Pyrgopolynices and use his intestines as baubles for the little slave boy (p.210). Or do they mean castrate him? It’s not totally clear.

They actually beat Pyrgopolynices a few times as he begs them to stop at which point Periplectomenus extracts from him a promise, a pledge, that he will never take revenge on anyone for this day’s events or the flogging he’s received. Pyrgopolynices desperately agrees, vowing to take no revenge on anyone or let him be impotent for life. He even agrees to hand over 100 drachmas to the cook for the privilege of not being cut open, and willingly hands over his tunic, cloak and sword into the bargain.

Thus the play ends with the young lovers safely escaped, the canny slave given his freedom, and the braggart soldier stripped and humiliated.

The final humiliation comes when Sceledrus returns with the slaves who have carried all Philocomium’s baggage down to the harbour, and tells Pyrgopolynices that the ship’s captain was none other than her long-term lover. At which point Pyrgopolynices groans and realises how completely he’s been had, and all arranged by that ‘double-dyed villain’, Palaestrio who he has just given his freedom.

At which point one of the actors, unnamed, turns to the audience and bluntly says:

Give us your applause.

THE END.

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Pot of Gold and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1965.

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by Simon on March 28, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on March 28, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/28/miles-gloriosus-plautus/

Menaechmi (The Brothers Menaechmus) by Plautus (c.200 BC)

Prologue

The prologue explains that there were once two little boys, identical twin sons of a merchant of Syracuse, named Menaechmus and Sosicles. One day the father took little Menaechmus on a business trip to Tarentum but while walking through a carnival together they got separated. A trader from Epidamnus found the little boy and took him home with him. The father fell sick with grief and died. His father i.e. the boys’ grandfather, back in Syracuse, renamed Sosicles Menaechmus (the name of the lost boy, who he had always preferred).

So we have now got identical twins both named Menaechmus, one living with his grandfather, one growing up far away in Epidamnus.

(Incidentally, you can see how the title The Brothers Menaechmus is a pastiche of Elizabethan or olde worlde word order. In modern English it would simply be The Menaechmus Brothers or, if this was a brat pack movie, The Menaechmus Boys.)

The years passed and the boys grew to manhood in their separate cities. Back in Epidamnus, Menaechmus reached manhood and the trader gave him a wife and dowry and, when the trader died, Menaechmus inherited his large estate, where he now lives. Anyway, that’s the back story, and now the play begins.

The plot

Enter Peniculus

Enter Peniculus, a prime example of the stock character, the parasitus. The editor and translator of this edition, E.F. Watling, has previously explained that the best way to understand this character type is as a kind of dinner companion for hire – educated men who go from patron to patron ingratiating themselves, trying to get invitations to dinner where they amuse with their witty conversation (the other characters call him a ‘table companion’).

As a result the parasitus is associated with comic speeches about food and Peniculus is no exception, entering to make a speech on the comic premise that, if you wanted to lock people up, to make them secure, you’d do better to give them stunning feasts each day rather than put them in chains. Who would willingly run off and lose the chance of a daily feast?

Thus Peniculus explains that he is Menaechmus’s ‘bond slave’ but willingly reports for duty at his villa for love of the amazing spreads.

Menaechmus the adulterer

Peniculus arrives just as young Menaechmus emerges from his villa, yelling back through the open door at his wife (a very characteristic position for a Plautus character). This opening speech establishes that he is not a noble character but a bad tempered adulterer. He accuses his wife of asking endless questions about his movements and spying on him. In the next breath he justifies her suspicions by revealing that he’s going to meet his mistress, Erotium, tonight and – in a comic manoeuvre – has smuggled out of the house his wife’s dresses by wearing it under his toga.

It’s at this point that Peniculus comes forward, they greet each other, shake hands and Menaechmus shows off to Peniculus his cunning little prank i.e. displays himself wearing the gown.

Menaechmus’ mistress, Erotium

Scared of Menaechmus’s wife, they move shiftily over to the house next door (as in so many of the plays, the set consists of two neighbouring houses) because, lo and behold, right next door is the house of Menaechmus’s mistress, Erotium. He knocks on the door, she comes out he declares his eternal love for her and gives her his wife’s gown, then declares they’re going to have a party at her place, Menaechmus, Peniculus and her, so can she get her cook to start cooking. And with that Menaechmus declares his off to town and exists, followed by his lackey Peniculus.

Erotium calls out her cook, Cylindrus, gives him three pounds and bids him go to the market to buy grub for lunch. When he hears one of them is Menaechmus’s table companion’ he complains that people like him can do the work of of eight men, but off he goes anyway, grumbling.

Quite obviously Menaechmus having a mistress is not designed to make any highfalutin’ moral or ethical points but to maximise the amount of confusion to be caused by the comic conceit of the identical twins: I predict not only his wife but his mistress will be thrown into turmoil by the arrival of the twin.

Enter Sosicles and Messenio

And sure enough enter Sosicles, or that was his original name until his brother was abducted and his grandfather renamed him Menaechmus. He’s just arrived by ship accompanied by his slave Messenio and a group (number unspecified) of slaves carrying his baggage.

Messenio is the grumpy sort of slave and complains to his master, and thus informs the audience, that Sosicles has been traipsing round the entire Mediterranean searching for his brother, calling in at the Danube, Spain, Massilia, Illyria, all over the Adriatic, the Greek colonies and the entire coast of Italy (p.111).

Messenio goes on to explain that the inhabitants of the place they’ve arrived at, Epidamnus, have a bad reputation.

Obviously they’ve arrived in front of Menaechmus’s villa while Messenio makes a long speech about how they haven’t a hope in hell of finding Menaechmus, he must be long dead. At which point Erotium’s cook, Cylindrus, arrives back from the market. When he sees Sosicles he of course thinks he is Menaechmus, the guest for the planned lunch party, waiting outside his mistress’s house. And so into the first of many comic misidentifications and misunderstandings.

Misunderstanding 1 Sosicles and Cylindrus

Cylindrus, of course, thinks Sosicles is Menaechmus arrived for lunch and engages him in casual conversation. Sosicles, of course, is completely bewildered at being addressed familiarly by a strange slave, and when he assumes he (Sosicles) lives next door, with his wife, Sosicles thinks he must be mad and gives him money to buy a sacrifice to make at the shrine of the god of lunatics. Of course, Cylindrus thinks Sosicles is mad – with Sosicles’ slave Messenio chipping in from the sidelines.

Misunderstanding 2 Sosicles and Erotium

Cylindrus goes in the house and is replaced by Erotium who appears and, of course, calls Sosicles ‘darling’ and carries on a normal conversation with him (p.115), reminding him that he a) brought her a gown of his wife’s b) asked her to prepare lunch for him and his table companion (p.116). Obviously, Sosicles thinks she is mad, though is puzzled how she knows his name.

N.B: It’s important to remember that the twins both have the same name. Menaechmus was always the name of the boy who was abducted, the other one, Sosicles, was renamed Menaechmus by his grandfather. So they both have the same name. When I refer to Sosicles in this summary it is to clarify who is who, but he isn’t referred to as Sosicles in the play.

All these confusions give Messenio the opportunity to say he warned his boss about Epidamnus – looks like the reputation is true, it really is full of lunatics.

After conferring with his slave Sosicles takes the decision that he’s going to play along with this pretty woman. If she wants to give him a free lunch and witter on about his non-existent wife, then, sure, he’ll play nice. So he apologises to Erotium for being confused and she, now mollified, invites him into her house. Messenion warns him to watch himself but Sosicles reckons he’s on to a good thing, a free lunch and then maybe some afternoon delight.

Misunderstanding 3 Sosicles and Peniculus

The table companion Peniculus has been at some public meeting all morning and arrives in a bad mood to spy Sosicles emerging from Erotium’s house, obviously drunk, with a laurel wreath at a rakish angle on his head and calling back to Erotium that he promises to take the gown (the one Menaechmus gave her that morning) to a dressmaker’s in town to have it adjusted.

When Peniculus steps forward to castigate Sosicles for starting (and finishing) lunch without telling him, Sosicles, naturally enough, says he’s no idea who he is or what he’s talking about. As in every one of these encounters, they each think the other must be mad. Peniculus vows revenge, swearing he’ll tell Menaechmus’s wife all about his affair.

Misunderstanding 4 Sosicles and the maid

Erotium’s maid pops out of her house and asks Sosicles one more favour. Can he please take these gold bracelets, the ones he stole from his wife and gave to Erotium, to a goldsmith and have some gold added and reshaped. Sosicles is no longer bewildered, he is master of the situation and milking it for all he’s got, so he willingly accepts gold bracelets.

Then the maid takes things a bit further by asking if he can get her some pretty little gold earrings, please. Then next time he pops over she’s be everso nice to him (flutter eyelashes). Sosicles says, Sure, where’s the gold? But when the maid says she doesn’t have any, she was hoping he’d buy her some as a gift he loses interest and, realising it, the maid goes back into Erotium’s house.

At which point Peniculus emerges from Menaechmus’s house with the latter’s wife. He has told her everything. She is furious and asks herself how much longer she has to put up with this insulting behaviour? They spot Menaechmus coming and hide.

Misunderstanding 5 Menaechmus and wife

Sosicles had exited the stage in one direction. Now from the opposite direction enters the real, or original, Menaechmus. He delivers a page long soliloquy about what a pain it is being patron to a number of clients; he’s wasted his whole morning sorting out litigation around a client of his, an obvious crook, but in a patron-client society that’s what you have to do. He laments not having got away earlier for lunch although hopes the gift of the gown he stole from his wife will placate her. His wife is hiding behind a bush and hears him say this!

She steps out and accuses him of being a slimeball, egged on by the irate table companion Peniculus (‘That’s the way to talk to him’). Menaechmus desperately back pedals, disclaiming any knowledge of a mistress or stolen gown. This goes on for some time with Menaechmus until the furious wife finally says he’s not getting back into their house till he returns the gown, and goes into the house slamming the door!

Misunderstanding 6 Menaechmus and Erotium

Oh well, if his wife’s locked him out at least Erotium will give him a warm welcome. She’s pleased to see him back so soon but, of course, when he asks for the gown she is confused: she gave it to him not half an hour ago. His insistence that she give it back infuriates her and she slams the door in his face. Oops. Now he’s locked out of both women’s houses. He says he’ll go back into town looking for a friend to cheer him up.

Misunderstanding 7 Sosicles returns

Menaechmus’s wife looks out the door and sees Sosicles return with the famous gown. She thinks he’s come to make up with her. But when she confronts him, Sosicles is, of course, completely non-plussed and denies any knowledge of her. At which point, understandably, she reverts to her former fury. When she tells him that an hour ago he promised to find the gown and give it back to her he has no idea what she’s on about. All Sosicles knows is he spent a nice time with Erotium who gave him a gown to be altered. Who’s this madwoman ranting at him?

She’s so furious she sends a servant to fetch her aged father. He’ll sort out her faithless husband! When he arrives he tells his daughter off for being a scold and keeping such a tight watch on her husband i.e. he takes Menaechmus’s side. But then…

Misunderstanding 8 Sosicles and the father

Then the father actually confronts Sosicles, thinking he’s Menaechmus and, like everyone else, thinks the latter must have gone mad when he denies all knowledge of him. In fact it occurs to Sosicles that if people keep accusing him of being mad, maybe there’s some advantage to actually behaving mad, so he starts ‘gaping and flinging himself about’ (p.133) and starts to rant and rave and claiming to hear the gods’ instructions telling him to beat this ‘bitch’ and the ‘old goat’ i.e. wife and father.

Terrified, she runs back inside the house leaving her father to grapple with Sosicles who pretends to be hearing instructions from Apollo himself telling him to run the old man over with a (non-existent) chariot and horses. They grapple till Sosicles falls to the floor. The father thinks he’s had a stroke so says he’d better hurry and fetch a doctor. Once he’s gone Sosicles gets up, dusts himself off, declares everyone here is mad, and decides he’d better get back to his boat while the coast is clear.

Misunderstanding 9 Father, doctor and Menaechmus

The father returns, out of breath, with a doctor who is just asking the symptoms of the patient when the real Menaechmus enters. Obviously he knows nothing of the encounter which just ended in which his identical twin feigned madness and fell to the floor. So he hasn’t a clue what the father is describing and the doctor is quizzing him about and answers all the latter’s impertinent questions rudely (‘Jupiter and all the gods blast you and your silly questions’, p.137). But he quickly becomes so angry, and answers so sarcastically, that he does himself appear mad, just like his twin had. So the doctor suggests Menaechmus is brought over to his house so he can supervise his treatment (hellebore seems to be the recommended drug). They exit to go and get some strong slaves to grab, bind and take Menaechmus away.

They both exit leaving Menaechmus alone. He sits down and a) wonders what on earth has possessed these two to accuse him of being mad and b) what the devil is going to happen now he’s locked out by both his wife and mistress.

Misunderstanding 10 Menaechmus and Messenio

Messenio is Sosicles’s slave. Last time he saw his master he told him to see the slaves and baggage settled at an inn, which he’s achieved. Now he re-enters and goes up to Erotium’s door because that’s the last time he saw his master, going in to have lunch with Erotium. But before he can knock on her door, he witnesses the father returning with four strong slaves. And then sees them set on Menaechmus, with a view to binding him and carrying him away.

Menaechmus calls for help and Messenio comes to his rescue and there’s quite a fight with our pair finally getting the better of the foursome who run away. Now, of course, Messenio not only expects Menaechmus to recognise him but asks for a big reward: will he set him free?

(I commented in my review of Captivi how almost all the plays include a slave who performs adroit services for his master and promptly asks to be freed, wondering if this was a reality of Roman life or just a hilarious staple of stage comedy.)

Menaechmus, of course, has now idea who Messenio is and thought he was a good samaritan coming to his aid. He tells him to his face he’s no idea who he is but, by all means, go free. Messenio takes this as meaning he has been liberated and cries tears of joy. He says he’ll go and get the purse of money, baggage and slaves from the inn and rushes off. Menaechmus refuses to be fazed by this but has no idea what he’s talking about.

He knocks on Erotium’s door with a view to trying to get the famous gown back and give it to his wife, completely unaware that Sosicles went off with it some time ago.

Misunderstanding 11

On the way to the inn Messenio has bumped into his real master, Sosicles. Now they enter arguing. Sosicles of course knows nothing about Messenio rescuing him from the four slaves and giving him his liberty. Oh no he bloody well didn’t, says Sosicles.

The catastrophe

In classical literary theory, the catastrophe is:

the final resolution in a poem or narrative plot, which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close. (Wikipedia)

It’s at this moment, just as Sosicles is telling his slave Messenio he has no idea what he’s talking about, that Menaechmus walks out Erotium’s front door and comes face to face with his identical twin, Sosicles. The comedy is dramatised by being seen through the eyes of a third party, Messenio.

The two brothers are slow to recognise each other but it is Messenio’s comic intervention, claiming to be the slave of each in turn and getting them muddled up, which is played for a few more laughs.

In fact it is Messenio who takes Sosicles aside and points out that this other fellow may well be his long lost twin brother. He suggests they ask him a few more questions and Sosicles readily agrees. The play then mutates into a kind of courtroom drama with Messenio playing the role of interrogating counsel as he asks Menaechmus a series of questions which confirm that he is indeed the little boy from Syracuse who lost his father in a crowd, was kidnapped and adopted by a stranger who raised him here in Epidamnus.

At each answer Sosicles cries out in wonder with Messenio impatiently telling him to wait his turn to question the witness. Presumably a) the conceit of being a courtoom was meant to be funny as was b) the idea of a slave like Messenio impersonating a magistrate.

There’s still a smidgeon of doubt at which point Menaechmus asks Sosicles what their mother’s name was. Sosicles replies Teuximarcha. All doubts are removed, they both realise they are each other’s twin brother and embrace in tears.

The resolution

If you remember, Sosicles has been on a vast 6-year-long odyssey round the Mediterranean looking for his long-lost brother. Now that quest is at an end. Menaechmus resolves to accompany him back to the family home in Syracuse. He says he’ll quickly sell up all his property here then they can depart. Oh and Menaechmus asks Sosicles to give Messenio his freedom, as a favour to him, seeing as how he stoutly defended him in the battle of the four slaves.

1. It is very striking that the catastrophe did not involve either of the women, Menaechmus’s wife or mistress. Surely there was a world of comic potential, not to mention some kind of reconciliation with his wife, waiting to take place here. But it simply doesn’t happen. As if the women really are just pawns in the plot, who can be dispensed with as soon as they’re not needed; as if the only reconciliation which counts is male, among men, between the brothers, and to some extent Messenio.

2. The very last passage of the play is when Messenio cheekily asks the brothers if he can be their auctioneer, they say yes, and this gives Plautus the opportunity to show the cheeky slave impersonating an auctioneer, using his patter to quickly describe the contents and effects of Menaechmus’s house – everything must be sold off, including his wife (‘should there be any purchaser’) – before quickly bringing the play to an end with the traditional request for the audience’s applause.

Roman slavery

As in most of the other plays the thing which catches my attention most is the ubiquitous condition of slavery, of ordinary, everyday, commonplace slavery which everyone took for granted. Messenio is given a speech in which he describes how he’s made a conscious decision to be a good slave, which he defines as one who attends to his master’s welfare, plans his business and organises his affairs as effectively in his absence as in his presence. OK. Then goes on describe what life has in store for slaves who are worthless, idle or dishonest, namely:

floggings, chains, the treadmill, sweating, starving, freezing stiff. (p.138)

Is this an accurate description? It brings home the way a master would be friendly with, spend most of his life with, joke, laugh, cry, share his ups and downs with a person who he also order to do everything for him, run errands, fetch and carry, serve and please and who, if he (all the slaves in these plays are men) upsets, irritates his master or falls short, can be submitted to a staggering range of physical punishment and abuse.

And, as in so many of the plays, the top thing on Messenio’s mind was winning his freedom. As soon as he’s helped Menaechmus fight off the four slaves, he asks for his freedom. Is this what it was like? Did slaves think all the time of how to get free, and pester their masters for requests to be freed? Did they ever make such requests? Was there a recognised time or occasion which might merit it? Were there social conventions and forms of words?

Interestingly, Messenio says that, if he is freed, his one-time master becomes his patron. Is that how it worked. Was ‘freedom’ the exchange from one recognised form of hierarchical relationship for another? Did a freed slave remain within the orbit and indeed the service of his master/patron, only with freedom of action?

Messenio, after he thinks Menaechmus has freed him, hurries to say he still wants to take his orders and go home with him and carry on living with him. Was this meant to be funny because it indicated what a poor notion of freedom Messenio had? Or was it a commonplace situation, that freed slaves continued to live in their former master’s houses but on new terms? How was that managed by everyone concerned, not least the other slaves who remained in their unfree condition?

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1964.

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by Simon on March 25, 2022 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on March 25, 2022

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Captivi (The Prisoners) by Plautus (c.200 BC)

Prologue

Hegio is a wealthy man living in the Greek city of Aetolia. Years ago his slave, Stalagmus, stole Hegio’s four-year-old son and ran off, never to be seen again. Hegio had one other son, Philopolemus.

Now, years later, Philopolemus is grown up. But Hegio’s city is at war with the Greeks of Elis and Philopolemus has gone off to fight in the war and gotten himself captured. He is a prisoner of war with the Elisians. So Hegio has been buying up prisoners of war from Elis with a view to finding one who is of such high status that he can be exchanged for his son.

Plot

This explains why the play opens outside the house of Hegio with the sight of two prisoners of war chained to the wall. These Elisian prisoners are Philocrates and his slave Tyndarus. Before the action of the play started they exchanged clothes with the idea that the noble master might be safer if he’s disguised as a slave. The play opens with them exchanging noble sentiments and respect for each other. In fact the play is dominated by very uncomedic sentiments of nobility and dignity from all involved, more like one of Shakespeare’s problem plays than a comedy.

Philocrates-posing-as-Tyndarus goes on his mission

Anyway, when Hegio lets Philocrates and Tyndarus know that his son, Philopolemus, is now a slave in Elis belonging to a doctor named Menarchus, the Elisian pair excitedly declare that they know this doctor and should be able to easily ransom him if one of them is sent back to Elis to bargain (p.68).

They keep the pretence of having each other’s identities so that when Hegio decides to send the slave, Tyndarus, while keeping the (more valuable) noble Philocrates with him, he is, in fact, all unknowingly, actually sending Philocrates and keeping the slave Tyndarus.

Once the decision is made and Hegio has left the stage, there is a great deal of noble ‘it is a far, far better thing I do’ kind of speechifying between the two noble Greeks, master and servant. And so Philocrates-posing-as-Tyndarus is sent back to Elis. Then Hegio declares he is going off to his brother’s to check on some of the other POWs he’s bought.

Ergasilus

The gap is filled by the arrival of Ergasilus. He is described in the text as a parasitus. E. F. Watling in his introduction explains that the straight English translation of this term, ‘parasite’, is too harsh. Ergasilus is a social type who has disappeared, a kind of professional table companion, a man who makes a living by hawking himself around in the forum as a dining companion available for hire, who has ‘nothing but his witty conversation to live on’. As a comic stereotype, because his main aim in life is to get invited to dinner, the parasitus‘s stock conversation is fantasies of gluttony.

(He reminds me a bit of the character John Beaver in Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust, who is always available for society hostesses when someone drops out of a dinner party at the last minute; a quick phone call to Beaver and he’ll be round in 20 minutes to make up the numbers, grovelling and grateful.)

Anyway, Ergasilus gives a comic soliloquy about what a wretched day he’s having trawling round the forum for work and how everyone’s ignoring him. He comically fantasises about bringing criminal proceedings against all the fine gentlemen who have ignored him in the forum, demanding they each give him ten dinners for free!

Enter Aristophontes

But really his scene was a filler to cover Hegio’s departure and return, for now Hegio returns with a fine Elisian prisoner of war who he’s recently bought, one Aristophontes. Aristophontes has told Hegio that he’s a good friend of old Philocrates (the master of the pair of Elisian POWs at the heart of the story) and would love to see him.

Except that Aristophontes is, of course, astonished when Hegio introduces Tyndarus as being Philocrates. Not being in on the ruse, Aristophontes begins to protest, telling Hegio that this isn’t Philocrates, this is his slave Tyndarus. Tyndarus, in a panic at having his cover blown, comes up with a comic excuse on the spot: he claims that Aristophontes is mad! Famous for it. Has epileptic fits. Once attacked his family with a spear! Don’t believe a word he says (p.76).

Hegio starts out by believing Tyndarus but Aristophontes’ indignation and anger and repeated impassioned oaths, swearing on his life that Tyndarus is not Philocrates, eventually wins him round and persuades him that he has been duped by the pair and sent the master back to Elis, not as he had intended, the slave.

Hegio punishes Tyndarus

Tyndarus is eventually forced to admit it’s the truth, he is Tyndarus, it was Philocrates the master who Hegio sent back to Elis. But he points out that he did it out of love for his master, ensuring his master Philocrates was sent home safe and sound to be reunited with his family while he, Tyndarus, bore the risk that he might not return even at the risk of his own life.

Tyndarus asks Hegio if he wouldn’t reward a slave who showed the same fidelity to him? Hegio grudgingly concedes that maybe he would, but nonetheless he is furious at being deceived. He has Tyndarus tightly bound with ropes and swears he’ll be sent off to have iron shackles set on him and then sent to the worst fate possible, forced labour in the underground stone quarries (p.82).

Far too late Aristophontes realises what a noble thing Tyndarus has done and how his insistence on blowing Tyndarus’s cover has consigned him to a wretched fate, but Hegio orders that Aristophontes, also, is bundled away.

Hegio’s disappointment

It’s maybe worth emphasising that Hegio’s towering rage has two sources: one is that he has been made a fool of; he had told his brother and his friends about how he’d released Philocrates-as-Tyndarus and sent him back to Elis to reclaim his son – so now he fears that he will exposed as a ‘laughing stock’ (p.84).

But the other spur to anger is that he had genuinely got his hopes up about his son – and now believes his one chance at getting him released has been foiled by these rascals. So it is bitter disappointment that he won’t be seeing his son again which also fuels his anger, and the audience can understand that. For a farceur, there are surprising depths of characterisation and feeling in this play.

Guess what Ergasilus has seen

He’s in the middle of explaining all this in a soliloquy when the parasitus Ergasilus comes bustling in very pleased with himself. Ergasilus insists that Hegio sends out for the best food available and whips up a huge feast and treats him as his best friend, puzzling Hegio who asks him what the devil he’s on about. Plautus has Ergasilus drag out his explanation of what’s going on for pages and pages until the audience becomes as restive and cross with Ergasilus’s obfuscation and delay as Hegio does.

Eventually Ergasilus bloody spits it out: down at the harbour who has he just seen getting off a boat but Hegio’s son Philopolemus!! And not only him, but also Hegio’s old slave Stalagmus, the one who ran away with Hegio’s first son when he was just 4 years old!!!

Ergasilus gets his reward

At first Hegio can’t believe it but when Ergasilus keeps swearing it’s true in a series of escalating oaths, Hegio finally believes it and tells Ergasilus to go into his house and run riot in the kitchen and stuff his face – in fact he makes him his butler! So Hegio exits, running down to the harbour, while Ergasilus goes into his house.

In scenes of broad farcical comedy, Ergasilus’s ingress is followed by sounds of mayhem coming from within until a boy runs out of the house to deliver a description of the chaos Ergasilus is causing, breaking down the pantry doors and ransacking the place for goodies. Again, like Ergasilus’s interlude earlier in the play, this is really just stage business, an interlude, to cover the notional time required for Hegio to make it down to the harbour and now, as he does, to return onstage.

The return of Philopolemus

For Hegio now enters accompanied by his beloved son Philopolemus, by the notorious slave Stalagmus and by Philocrates the noble POW, who has kept his word, freed his son and brought him home.

Hegio is, of course, overjoyed. But the finale of the play has an oddly unemotional feel: it is more by way of being a kind of logical distribution of just deserts. It is a sort of dramatised lesson in ethics. So:

For keeping his word and delivering his son to him, Hegio grants Philocrates anything he wishes which, of course, is his loyal slave Tyndarus. Hegio apologetically admits he’s had him consigned to the quarries (although, as this was only about 8 minutes ago, we can’t imagine he’s got very far; another example of the way the plays work in a kind of imaginary time, not real, logical time at all).

Mary Beard described Plautus’s plays as stereotypical ‘boy meets girl’ stories, but none of the ones I’ve read are like that. It would be more accurate to describe them as ‘master frees slave’ stories. The master-slave relationship is much more central to Plautus’s plays than ‘romantic’ love.

Stalagmus’s secret

Anyway, the noble Elisian Philocrates accompanies the recently freed Philopolemus into Hegio’s house, leaving the stage to Hegio and the surly slave who stole his son all those years ago, Stalagmus.

Hegio tells Stalagmus that if he speaks the truth he may avoid the heinous punishment which is otherwise looming over him. So Stalagmus, briefly, makes the startling revelation that he stole Hegio’s son, ran off to Elis and there sold him to a man named Theodoromides…who we know from conversation earlier in the play is none other than Philocrates’ father. For a split second I thought this meant noble Philocrates was Hegio’s long-lost son, but Stalagmus goes on to confirm with Philocrates that the latter received a little playmate-slave when he was 4, a boy known everyone knew as ‘Laddie’ but formally named Tyndarus (p.93)!

So that explains why Tyndarus has since the start of the play behaved (and spoken) with such super-aristocratic nobility – it is because, as in so many fairy stories, he is of aristocratic blood and good breeding always shows.

Tyndarus is released – happy ending

At which point Tyndarus arrives back onstage, shackled and carrying a crowbar and looking rough and dirty from what is implied has been years of suffering in the terrible stone quarries (which we saw him depart for only 15 minutes ago; we are operating in imaginary theatrical time).

And so Hegio and Philocrates tell a startled Tyndarus the full story: that he is Hegio’s son, stolen all those years ago, and now they are going to release him from the quarries and make him a free man and restore him to his father.

Stalagmus turns to the audience and makes the final speech. He points out the qualities of the play, namely that it contains no wenching, no intriguing, no exposure of a child, no cheating out of money, no young man in love without father’s knowledge or permission. On the contrary, it is founded on chaste manners, a rare example of a drama showing how good men might become better. And so he asks for the audience’s applause.

THE END.

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1964.

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by Simon on March 23, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on March 23, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/23/captivi-the-prisoners-plautus/

Aulularia (The Pot of Gold) by Plautus (c.200 BC)

Aulularia or the Pot of Gold

Aulularia literally means little pot but this play’s title is most often translated into English as ‘Pot of Gold’. It’s a classic ‘new comedy’ in that it is entirely domestic in focus and revolves around an obstructive father blocking a happy marriage of the younger generation although, as you’ll see, the focus is really on the psychological problems of the father, namely his monomaniacal miserliness, rather than his blocking tactics.

All the other characters are really incidental to milking the comic potential of this one obsessive old man. Thus the young ‘hero’ only appears three times and his daughter, Phaedria, the love interest, never appears at all, we just hear one line of her from inside Euclio’s house as she cries out in labour, something I was surprised by in this play but, once I came to read the same event occurring in other Plautus plays and even in plays by Terence, I came to realise was a stock convention.

From a translation/editorial point of view the most notable thing about this edition is that the editor, E.F. Watling, himself wrote i.e. invented, the final quarter of the play, which is missing from all manuscripts.

The plot

Prologue by Lar familiaris

Euclio is an old man and miser. His house is protected by a household god, Lar Familiaris, who knew his grandfather and father. This household god gives a prologue in which he explains that the grandfather was a miser who buried a pot of gold in the house. His son inherited the house but was mean and tight-fisted so the household god didn’t reveal his secret to him. When he died his son inherited, the current owner of the house, Euclio. He also is a tightwad, but his grown up daughter, Phaedria, is lovely to the god and brings offerings to his shrine almost every day and so the spirit has just revealed the pot of gold to Euclio solely so that the latter has a dowry with which his daughter can be married off.

For good measure, the household god tells us that she is already in love with the stereotypical handsome young man, Lyconides, that in fact they’ve slept together already. The god’s plan is for the old neighbour, the bachelor Megadorus, to propose marriage to Euclio, which will put the young man, Lyconides’s proposal in a favourable light and make it more likely to be accepted.

But in the short term the problem is that the discovery of a stash of gold in his house, far from delighting Euclio, has turned him into an over-sensitive, paranoid bundle of nerves, petrified that other people will discover it, steal it, are talking about it and conspiring behind his back. It is, he tells us, driving him off his head with worry (p.15).

Introducing Euclio

Which explains why the first scene opens with Euclio barging his elderly female slave Staphyla into the street and accusing her of spying on him. He threatens to beat her, send her to the gallows or poke her eyes out (!). She for her part is bewildered by his recent irrational tempers, which will make it all the harder to reveal to him that his daughter is pregnant!

Anyway, Euclio has to hustle off because the head of his ward is distributing a donation (no footnote to explain this, or any other historical references). Euclio is paranoid that if he doesn’t go along to claim his share everyone will realise he is rich, so he scuttles off.

Euclio’s neighbour Megadorus

The set consists of two houses next to each other. Out the front door of the other one emerges Euclio’s neighbour Megadorus being pushed by his sister Eunomia. Megadorus is a genial old confirmed bachelor. However, Eunomia gives him a hard time telling him it’s about time he got married. Megadorus nearly shrieks with horror and they argue. Finally, Megadorus says his sister can stop nagging him because, OK, yes, he will get married and he has his eye on someone – the beautiful daughter of his next door neighbour Euclio. Eunomia grudgingly accepts this and goes back inside.

At this moment along comes Euclio on the way back from his meeting and Megadorus politely greets him and starts chatting. But Euclio is convinced he’s only doing so because he’s heard about the pot of gold or is fishing for it and rudely bustles into his house to check the pot is still there.

Megadorus asks to marry Euclio’s daughter

He returns somewhat reassured, the conversation resumes and Megadorus makes his pitch, asking if he may have Euclio’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Ever paranoid, Euclio is convinced Megadorus, from a well off, high status family, is mocking him. Megadorus is politely trying to reassure him when Euclio hears the clink of a spade and breaks off to go running back into his house, convinced burglars are digging up and stealing the pot of gold.

When Euclio returns for a second time Megadorus reassures him that one of his men is digging in his garden, that must be what he heard. Anyway, does he agree to let him marry his daughter? Euclio does, but on the clear understanding that he is a poor man and so she comes with no dowry. Yes, yes, fine, says Megadorus, and they shake on it. And how about the ceremony? Can it be held later today? Certainly replies Euclio, setting up what will become the main setting or event of the second half, the preparations for a wedding party.

Strobilus and the cooks

We cut to a scene with Megadorus’s steward, Strobilus, who has been to market and returned with all the necessaries for a big feast, including live sheep, some flute-girls (Phrygia and Eleusium) and a couple of argumentative cooks, Anthrax (!) and Congrio. Strobilus has been ordered to split them up, assigning some to Euclio’s house to prepare the wedding feast, so he takes them round, knocks on the door and gets Euclio’s ageing serving woman Staphyla to accept them

Euclio comes home and, finding the door open and people’s voices inside immediately jumps to the conclusion that he’s being robbed. So he rushes inside and starts battering the cook and his assistants with a plank of wood. They all run out shouting, the cook Congrio running down into the audience, asking what the hell Euclio is doing while Euclio stands on stage shouting down at him that he’s a liar and a thief.

He nips back inside and re-emerges with the pot of gold under his cloak. Now he’s holding it he feels more confident and yells at the cook and his assistants to go back into his house and finish their work, which they grumblingly do.

Megadorus on the evils of dowries

Enter Megadorus who delivers an extended soliloquy about the evils of dowries, how a wife that comes with a big dowry expects her husband to treat her and lavish her with services from every kind of women’s parasite, the best clothes, make-up etc. No, there should be a national reform, dowries should be abolished, women should be married with no money so that they are entirely at the mercy and under the thumb of their husbands! (p.30).

Euclio thinks Megadorus must be after his gold

Euclio intrudes on this soliloquy but when Megadorus makes an ambiguous remark about his good fortune Euclio in his paranoia thinks he’s referring to the pot which Euclio is that moment holding under his cloak and becomes rude and angry. But I am sending you a lamb for the feast and cooks and flute girls and a casket of wine, says Megadorus – but Euclio ungratefully criticises each of these items. When Megadorus good humouredly says they’ll get rolling drunk tonight, Euclio in an aside tells the audience Megadorus wants him dead drunk so he can sniff out his gold and steal it. The play really should have been titled The Paranoid.

Well, Megadorus refuses to be made angry and goes into his house, leaving Euclio to tell us that he is going to stash his pot of gold in a shrine which has been onstage all this time, a shrine to Fide, the god of faithfulness. He goes into this little building.

Enter the canny slave

Enter the slave of Lyconides. Lyconides is the handsome son of Eunomia, Megadorus’s sister, making him Megadorus’s nephew. The slave is never given a name. He enters now and gives a little speech about how a good slave is always looking out for his master, anticipating h is needs, and heading off problems before they develop. Lyconides has just heard that his beloved Phaedria is contracted to be married to Megadorus and so has sent the slave to spy out the lie of the land and he takes a seat by on one side of the shrine of Good Faith.

At which point Euclio emerges by the other door from the shrine and gives a little speech explaining that he’s deposited his pot of gold in the shrine where it will be safe, then he heads off for his house. The slave overheard all this. ‘Well, well, well, a pot of gold, eh?’ So he goes into the shrine to find it.

Euclio and the slave fight

But at that moment Euclio comes running back, spooked by a raven which croaked on his left side, a bad omen. He runs into the shrine and of course discovers the slave who he sets about beating and hitting and accusing of being a thief, dragging him out of the shrine and onto the stage, where he fires accusations at him and thoroughly searches under his cloak and under his shirt. But the slave doesn’t actually have the pot, finally extricates himself from Euclio’s clutches and goes off cursing him.

Euclio emerges with the pot of gold and decides he’s going to bury it in a lonely grove of Silvanus outside the walls, and he sets off. The slave overheard this and rejoices, saying he’ll hide, watch where Euclio buries it, then steal it. It’ll serve him right for beating him!

Lyconides and his aunt Eunomia

Enter the young lover Lyconides talking with his mother Eunomia and telling her how much he loves Phaedria. At that moment they both her Phaedria shouting from inside Euclio’s house in her labour pains. She is giving birth! (This is very unlike the traditional comedy idea of the sweet virginal young maiden.) Lyconides begs his other to talk to her brother, Lyconides’ uncle, Megadorus, and see if he can be persuaded not to marry Phaedria after all. Eunomia agrees, and goes into Megadorus’s house to talk to him.

The slave has the pot of gold

Enter the slave bouncing with glee because he did, indeed, follow Euclio, watch him bury his pot of gold and depart, and then stole it. He is holding it now! He hears Euclio approaching and runs off.

Enter Euclio in the utmost misery, out of his mind with unhappiness. He went back to where he’d buried the pot and, of course, discovered it gone. Now he’s run onstage hysterical, and accuses everyone of stealing it, with a lot of fourth wall-breaking interaction with the audience, asking if they’ve stolen it or know who’s stolen it, and where it’s gone etc?

Lyconides asks to marry Euclio’s daughter

At this moment young Lyconides exists his uncle’s house and bumps into Euclio and there is a classic comic misunderstanding. Lyconides mistakenly thinks that Euclio is in such a state because he has discovered his daughter is having a baby, whereas he is of course, distraught about losing the pot of gold.

So there’s a page of comic verbal misunderstanding where Lyconides abjectly apologies for taking what is ‘his’ (Euclio’s) and laying his hands on ‘his property’ and there’s no excuse except he was drunk, and so on – with Lyconides referring to getting drunk and sleeping with Euclio’s daughter while Euclio thinks he’s referring to his gold!

The misunderstanding comes to an end when Euclio demands his property back and Lyconides, of course, can’t give back the girl’s virginity. Now Lyconides announces the startling news that he has persuaded his uncle not to marry Phaedria but to let him, Lyconides, marry her instead. The clinching argument being, of course, that she just happens to be having Lyconides’ baby right now!

Euclio is appalled, and further appalled to learn he will be attending the wedding as a grandfather as Phaedria is giving birth just about now. So off he goes back into his house.

The slave tells Lyconides he has the pot of gold

At which point the slave enters, very pleased with himself. He announces to Lyconides that he’s found a four-pound pot full of gold and stashed it back at their place and – now can he have his freedom?

(It’s worth stopping to reflect how many times slaves do this in Plautus, do a good deed for their masters, discover a fortune or secure the virgo for him – and immediately request their freedom. Did the millions of slaves in the ancient world live in hope of doing the one good deed which persuades their master to free them? Or is this entirely a stock situation and standard sentiment in comic plays – the slave who’s always banging on about being set free?)

Anyway, Lyconides rudely rejects the suggestion at which point the slave abruptly changes his tune and says he was just joking. Lyconides orders him to get the bloody pot of gold but his slave leaps out of his reach and runs off.

Watling’s reconstruction

At this point the original manuscript breaks off and the last eight pages, about a quarter of the Penguin text, has been ‘reconstructed’ by Watling. In his introduction he explains that manuscripts of plays by Plautus and other authors had ‘arguments’ added by later Roman editors, which summarised the entire plot. From these we know that Euclio recovered his money and made a present of it to his daughter and future son-in-law. On that slender basis Watling has concocted his own final scenes. It means we can’t use anything in these final 8 pages as evidence.

Watling’s reconstruction is much more lucid and logical than the plays often are. Thus in his next scene Megadorus encounters Lyconides and, instead of stumbling into even more convoluted complications, they both simply explain the situation to each other, namely: Megadorus has neatly got out of marrying Phaedria, which he was only doing to please his pushy sister, and Lyconides has gotten Euclio to agree to him, Lyconides, marrying her. So on the face of it the plot is resolved.

The pair cook up a resolution which is more balanced and elegant than those of Plautus’s actual plays. When Lyconides says he’s a shrewd idea his slave has stolen Euclio’s pot of god, Megadorus explains there’s a way that one simple pot can produce great happiness for three people: if Lyconides gets it back off his slave he can a) set his slave free for his good work, b) restore it to Euclio who will be delighted, c) it can be used as a dowry to accompany Phaedria and d) all this gets Megadorus off the hook of getting married which is the last thing he wants to do!

Lyconides runs off to find his slave, leaving Megadorus onstage as Euclio emerges from his house, chucking out all the cooks and their kit and yelling at them that the wedding’s off! He tells Megadorus that he and his family have made this the worst day of his life and goes on to accuse him of stealing his pot. Megadorus calmly demurs, saying it wasn’t him but he thinks he knows who did steal it.

And there is a comic quibble as Euclio turns to tell the cooks to finish dousing the fires, pack up and leave, upon which Megadorus immediately countermands his orders, and tells the cooks to go back into Euclio’s house and finish preparing the wedding feast – leaving Euclio muttering and grumbling that he is no longer even master in his own house!

But at that moment Lyconides enters with his slave and carrying the famous pot of gold. Euclio doesn’t see it, just turns his back and refuses to speak to Lyconides. So the latter hands the pot of gold to his uncle and asks Megadorus to present it to Euclio. He persuades Euclio to turn back to him and hands it over. Euclio is, of couse, ecstatic! He goes to thank Lyconides but Lyconides says it was actually his slave who found it and wished it returned (we know this isn’t true, but it sounds good) and that’s why, Lyconides declares, he has set his slave free!

There’s some comic business when Euclio recognises the slave as the lad who was hanging about the shrine of Good Faith and who he in fact beat up not so long ago. The slave is on the verge of telling the truth about how he followed Euclio, stole his pot of gold and very much didn’t want to give it back, but Lyconides nudges him and the slave remembers he’s only just been given his freedom and falls in line with the official story.

In a comic touch Euclio fulsomely thanks him for his honesty and, after poking around in the pot, gives him the smallest possible coin as a reward.

Lyconides then tries to move the conversation onto the topic of the marriage and suddenly, abruptly, Euclio hands him the pot. He has a charged little speech in which he declares how unexpectedly coming into a fortune has brought him nothing but misery. He’s been on tenterhooks of fear and anxiety every since it was discovered. Now he gladly hands it over to Lyconides as dowry for his daughter, saying: ‘Spend it wisely, my boy’. And now, for the first time in ages, he will be able to sleep soundly at night.

With that they turn to go into Euclio’s house to celebrate the wedding feast, till Lyconides nudges his uncle, asking hasn’t he forgotten something. Oh yes – Megadorus turns to address the audience, tells them he would gladly invite them to the feast but there isn’t quite enough for 600, so he merely wishes them good feasting once they get home and for their thanks and applause.

Thoughts

Greed

Well the soul-corrupting effect of greed is obviously the main theme, depriving the miser of sleep, making him over-sensitive to every sound and, above all, ruining his relationships with his fellow men, exemplified in the appalling way he treats his old housekeeper, Staphyla, the cooks, his neighbour, everyone. Greed isn’t just a personal failing, it is a socially destructive vice.

Freedom-wanting slave

Next and most striking for me is the role of slaves in all these plays, the way they all soliloquise to the audience about wanting their freedom, with some even achieving freedom as a reward for good deeds. Was real life like this? Were slaves always whining about wanting to be set free?

Invisible women

It is striking that the ‘love interest’ of the play, Euclio’s daughter Phaedria, doesn’t even appear onstage, though she does have the grand total of one line to cry out as she’s giving birth.

It would be easy to take a feminist view and write that women, young women in particular, are treated like commodities to be traded among the men. This is true as far as it goes, but is arguably only a sub-set of the larger truth which is that everyone is treated like a commodity by the author, pushed and positioned by the plot, often into very unlikely behaviour, and dropping out of sight once they’ve served their purpose, solely at the service of the plot and to get a laugh.

Improbabilities

In fact the silent woman issue is overshadowed by the huge improbability that Euclio lives with his adult daughter and has failed to notice that she is heavily pregnant. Compounded by the wild idea that she gives birth during the play itself and yet this a) doesn’t interfere with the smooth running of the plot, which carries on regardless and b) doesn’t interfere with the attitudes of Megadorus or Lyconides. I.e. his lover has just given birth to his child but he is utterly indifferent to the fact and more concerned with tying up the plotline around the pot of gold.

All the characters are mechanical functions of the plot which is itself a machine designed to elicit laughs.

In his introduction Watling says all this is excused in an actual production of the play by what he calls ‘optique du theatre’, a phrase I hadn’t read before and apparently means that logical holes in a plot are obscured by the immediate impact of scenes on stage. Later he refers to this as Plautus’s impressionistic technique whereby any kind of event, speech or joke is exploited for and justified by its immediate effect, regardless of logical inconsistencies.

Therefore the invisible woman Phaedria crying out in childbirth has no subtle implications. It is just used to intensify that particular moment onstage, to emphasise the housekeeper Staphyla’s momentary panic about what to do. Once that moment and that scene is over the entire issue of giving birth and the existence of a baby are simply forgotten in the headlong momentum of the performance.

The dowry

But in regard to women, another striking element is the important of the dowry. Living in a dowry-free society it’s almost more difficult for me to understand the concept that when a young woman got married she had to be accompanied by a large cash sum, than slavery. The notion that a woman can only be married if she is accompanied by a cash lump sum and that, if she can’t, it is a great shame on her, her father and the entire family (as in this play and also in Trinummus) comes from a world beyond my comprehension.

Ubiquitous and yet very casual slavery, and the way young women are treated like commodities and must be accompanied in marriage by a dowry – these are two elements which bring me up short every time they feature in a Plautus play.

By Hercules!

Characters swear by Hercules on pages 14, 21, 23, 28, 38 and 42, although they do invoke other deities, too, mainly Jupiter.

But Plautus wasn’t alone. From what I’ve read, Hercules was a dominating cultural presence all round the Roman world. Hercules is also the only deity invoked in Plutarch’s Life of Marius:

When [Jugurtha] had been thrust down naked into the dungeon pit, in utter bewilderment and with a grin on his lips he said: “Hercules! How cold this Roman bath is!” (Marius 12)

In Sallust’s Jugurthine War Hercules is said to have led an army in Spain (18) and also to have founded the Numidian city of Capsa (89).

Hercules’ ubiquitous presence around the Mediterranean is explored and explained at length in Richard Miles’s history of Carthage.

Moliere

Like all Plautus’s plays Aulularia was translated and/or copied by numerous other writers over the millennia. The most famous reincarnation of the miser Euclio is the miser Harpagon in the 17th century French playwright Molière’s 1668 version of the story, L’Avare (which is simply French for The Miser).

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1964.

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by Simon on March 21, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Comedy, Play, Slavery, Theatre

Posted by Simon on March 21, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/21/aulularia-the-pot-of-gold-plautus/

Amphitryo by Plautus (c.195 BC)

‘He’s a monster when he’s in love.’
(Mercury describing Jupiter, page 249)

Plautus’s one venture into myth and legend, this play is a comic take on the birth of Heracles, supposedly fathered by the king of the gods, Jupiter, on a mortal woman Alcmena.

The comedy derives from the fact that Jupiter impersonates Alcmena’s husband, Amphitryo, who is away serving as a general in the Theban army, and Jupiter’s fixer, Mercury, messenger of the gods, facilitates things by impersonating Amphitryo’s slave, Sosia. Double trouble!

Prologue

In the event this play feels a bit thin and forced. It opens with a very long prologue by Mercury in several parts and then morphs into Mercury hiding in the alley outside the house where Jupiter is taking his time swiving Alcmena. He is taking a great deal of time, because Jupiter has done a deal with Father Night himself to pause and prolong the night for as long as Jupiter requires.

Enter Sosia

Anyway, Mercury is portrayed as not much more than a sarcastic and aggressive slave. So when the real Sosia comes up the dark alley in front of his master’s house, telling the audience that his master, Amphitryo, is home victorious from the wars, is disembarking from their ship and has sent him ahead to notify his wife – Mercury confronts him, claiming to be the real Sosia.

When the real Sosia understandably disagrees, Mercury proceeds to give him a beating, so it’s pretty crude stuff. This squabble about who is the real Sosia could be elevated via critical theory into an investigation of notions of identity, but drags on too long (pages 234 to 246).

Misery of being a slave

Rather than be amused I began to feel genuinely sorry for the real Sosia, who is given some eloquent lines about the misery of being a slave:

It’s no fun being a rich man’s slave.
Work, work, work, from morning till night,
And night till morning. ‘Do this, go there, say that’ –
You can’t get a wink of sleep…
No, it’s no fun being a slave. And it’s not just the work,
But knowing you’re a slave, and nothing can alter that. (p.234)

And his back is striped by scars from whippings (p.245). Now I appreciate that these lines, like so many in the plays, are variations on stock sentiments which every single slave in every single play expresses at some point. Nonetheless, the prolonged physical and philosophical beating which Mercury administers to Sosia makes it somehow more real in this play than in the others. And when Mercury clarifies that his bullying and seeing off of Sosia is all so his father Jupiter can have another hour or so of shagging, it feels cheap and nasty. Maybe the audience found this funny, but it felt like the least funny of the four plays in this volume.

Mercury really dominates proceedings for, having a) delivered a long prologue and b) thumped and smacked Sosia into beating a retreat, he then c) explains to the audience that today is not only the day that Amphitryo is returning home but the day when Alcmena is giving birth – to Amphitryo’s son, but also to a twin fathered by Jupiter – the baby who will grow up to be Hercules (p.247).

Hang on. Doesn’t that mean that Jupiter asked Night to slow his course so that he could spend hours and hours having sex with a woman who is nine months pregnant!

Jupiter in the guise of Amphitryo emerges from Amphitryo’s house, with Alcmena crying and hugging and kissing him. She reproaches him for leaving her after one brief night; he, posing as her general husband, says he is needed back at the front, Mercury-as-cocky-slave-Sosia intervenes a couple of times with helpful phrases but Jupiter-as-Amphitryo threatens to beat him each time.

Enter the real Amphitryo

The real Amphitryo arrives. Sosia has told him all about the fake Sosia but Amphitryo not only refuses to believe it but threatens him with the typical hyper-violence everyone directs at slaves in these plays:

AMPHITRYO: I’ve a good mind to cut your damned tongue out.
SOSIA: Why not? I’m your property to do as you like with. (p.250)

This scene drags on for a while, as Sosia insists there are two of himself, one right here and the other one who’s inside the house. Amphitryo, not unreasonably, thinks Sosia must be made or drunk. Maybe the ancient audience would have been in stitches.

Here, as in the scene between the two Sosias, and throughout the play, a great deal is made of the same recurring joke, which is when either Mercury or Jupiter swear by themselves that this or that statement is true. Presumably this had the ancient audience rolling in the aisles.

Alcmena

Alcmena comes out of the house and, as you can imagine, there is all kind of confusion, for Amphitryo greets Alcmena for the first time, fresh home from the wars, and Alcmena is at first astonished that he’s returned so soon after bidding her a fond goodbye, and then mystifies Amphitryo by explaining that last night he showed up, had dinner, then went to bed with her… all of which, of course, the real Amphitryo very much did not do and vehemently denies. Each thinks the other is mad, or that they themselves are going mad, or dreaming.

There’s a little bit of stage business around a golden bowl which Alcmena says Amphitryo gave her last night. Amphitryo says, ‘Nonsense, it’s still in his bags which have only just been brought up from the harbour’. Alcmena gets a slave to fetch the bowl from the house and Amphitryo identifies it as indeed the one he took from his defeated enemy and when he and Sosia undo their luggage, lo and behold the bowl is gone! They both think it’s witchcraft or some kind of illusion, and Amphitryo ends up calling his wife a whore!

Finally Amphitro suggests he goes to fetch Alcmena’s cousin Naucrates who accompanied them back on the ship and will vouch for the fact that Amphitryo was with him, on board ship, last night. So he exits to go to the docks, while Sosia and Alcmena go into the house.

Re-enter Jupiter

Jupiter re-enters in time to hear Alcmena deliver a soliloquy lamenting how badly she’s been treated by Amphitryo – being called a whore and accused of infidelity!

Jupiter now steps forward in the guise of Amphitryo and tries to persuade her it was all a joke, a trick to find out how she would react to such accusations. Alcmena with dignity explains that she is not upset but she wants a divorce, he can have his things, and she will keep hers (p.268).

In a last ditch effort, Jupiter-as-Amphitryo swears by himself that he thinks Alcmena is innocent. Impressed by his oath she relents and they kiss and make up. He says he promised he would sacrifice to the gods upon his safe return and so asks her to go and prepare the altar. Meanwhile he sends Sosia to fetch the captain of the ship which the real Amphitryo has just arrived in (the captain being named Blepharo). Jupiter calls for Mercury to come disguised as Sosia and goes into the house to sacrifice to himself.

Enter Mercury

Mercury appears in a great hurry. His father Jupiter has tasked him with delaying Amphitryo any way he can think of. A few minutes later Amphitryo enters, hot and dusty and grumpy because he’s looked all over town and can’t find blasted Naucrates. He tries the front door of his own house only to find it locked and at that moment Mercury appears on the roof of the house, disguised as Sosia and pretending to be drunk.

Once again the same joke is played out at great length, which is that Mercury-as-Sosia denies that Amphitryo is Amphitryo by saying that his master i.e. Jupiter-as-Amphitryo, is inside with his mistress. Then Mercury-as-Sosia descends to ground level and comes out the front door to repeat it.

The real Amphitryo tries to contain his anger/confusion but then Alcmena comes out to join them because of all the noise. She is puzzled why he’s outside and not indoors at the family shrine making the sacrifices he promised to make and Amphitryo hasn’t a clue what she’s talking about.

At this point enters Captain Blepharo, tired from lumbering up from the docks. When he tells Amphitryo the latter invited him to lunch (Jupiter did) Amphitryo is, of course, bewildered. But at this point the real Sosia hoves into view and, for the first time, we have a pair onstage at the same time, the real Sosia and Mercury-as-Sosia.

Mercury does some quick bluffing, telling everyone that they are identical twins and threatening Sosia to keep his mouth shut. But this potential topic is quickly skipped by as Amphitryo asks Captain Blepharo to adjudicate whether his wife has not been monstrously unfaithful to him and describes the whole sequence of events and what she told him.

Alcmena then gives her side of the story which is that Amphitryo came home last night, then left, then returned claiming to know nothing about last night, then stormed off, then returned claiming it was all a joke and he didn’t mean it and went into the house to pay sacrifice, then appeared on her doorstep claiming to know nothing and making the same accusations of infidelity. Who’s the mad one now?

Jupiter appears

At which point the plot reaches its climax as Jupiter-as-Amphitryo comes out of the house. Now there are two Amphitryos for everyone to see. Alcmena thinks she is going mad and going to faint. Amphitryo asks Blepharo to judge who is the real Amphitryo but Blepharo says, not likely, this is too mad for him and exits. Jupiter-as-Amphitryo sneaks back into the house leaving Amphitryo to make a florid speech swearing by all the gods that he will have justice and nothing will stop him from entering.

But as he steps to the threshold he is struck down by a bolt of lightning from heaven. Lolz.

Bromia

A new character, Bromia the nurse, comes running out the house saying she’s going mad, the house is topsy-turvy, there was a bang and crash and flash of light and then they heard the voice of mighty Jupiter saying ‘Fear not, help is at hand’ and next thing they all knew, Alcmena had given birth to her twin babies with no-one ready with water or towels etc.

Bromia spots Amphitryo lying on the threshold looking like a corpse, runs over, recognises him, rouses him, helps him to his feet. As he gathers his wits, Bromia tells him of his wife’s miraculous birth, and it softens Amphitryo’s heart towards her.

Then Bromia tells Amphitryo the famous legend about Hercules that, as an infant, two snakes came into the house and made for his cradle but he leapt out of it, grabbed them by the necks and kills them! Well, Bromia saw him do just that, only a few moments after being born!!

And at that moment they heard the voice of Jupiter admitting he had slept with Alcmena in disguise and that the strong babe is his son, the other, normal, one being Amphitryo’s.

Amphitryo says he is blessed to be honoured with a son alongside a son of the mighty god and at that moment Jupiter appears to Amphitryo in his full divinity. He explains that he slept with Alcmena and fathered the strong babe. He warns Amphitryo to forgive and be kind to Alcmena, she had no choice, she didn’t recognise and could not resist Jupiter’s power/seductions.

The play ends with quite a nice joke as Amphitryo asks the audience to applaud ‘for great Jove’s sake!’ (p.284)

Thoughts

You can see why Christianity, when it arrived, spread so unstoppably. The pagan gods were, at bottom, ludicrous.

This was the least successful of the four plays in this Penguin volume, for three reasons:

the basic conceit is very contrived to me and very one dimensional
it doesn’t really develop – you get the joke in the first few minutes and then it doesn’t change but carries on being the same monotone gag

Thirdly, the confusion and unhappiness and hurt of Alcmena aren’t really funny – at moments it is upsetting. She is being toyed with by the god, unfairly and cruelly. This is presumably why Mercury in his prologue referred to it as being a tragi-comedy, though I wonder if that’s the precise Latin term Plautus used, or Watling’s interpretation of it. Either way it gestures towards a sense of uneasiness which runs throughout the play.

When humans play tricks on each other it is, in a sense, a fair fight. When the gods play tricks on humans it is too one-sided to be truly comic. It comes close to being bullying and abusive.

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1964.

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by Simon on March 18, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Theatre

Posted by Simon on March 18, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/18/amphitryo-plautus/

Trinummus (A Three-Dollar Day) by Plautus (c.200 BC)

‘Stick to the good old ways, my boy, and always do as I tell you.’
(Old Philto to his son Lysiteles, page 176)

Introduction

E.F. Watling’s brief one-page introduction points out the similarities and differences between this play and Mostellaria. Both involve a young adult son taking advantage of his father’s absence to squander the family fortune in riotous living. The difference is that in Mostellaria the father returns early ion the play which turns out into a series of evermore hilarious attempts by the son’s tricky slave to come up with cock and bull stories to cover the situation. Whereas in Trinummus the father doesn’t return till the end.

The comic exuberance of Mostellaria is replaced by the what Watling describes as an excess of moral edification, with no fewer than four elderly gentlemen taking it in turns to deliver words of advice or reproof for their contemporaries, juniors, or society in general (being the young wastrel’s neighbours, Megaronides and Callicles, his best friend’s father, Philto, and his own elderly slave, Stasimus).

Instead of the comic improvisation and verbal violence of the other plays I’ve read, this one overflows with worthy sententiae (plural of sententia, defined as: ‘brief moral sayings, such as proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, or apophthegms taken from ancient or popular or other sources, often quoted without context.’)

Ancient literature, whether the Bible, Greek or Latin, is packed with them. They are pleasurable to read and get approving murmurs and applause from the audience but, as Gripus remarks in Rudens, nobody has ever been known to put any of them into actual practice:

It is a far better thing to be what you ought to be than to be what you want to be.
A prudent man is the architect of his own fate.
The only virtuous man is the man who knows how far he falls short of virtue and honesty.
Prudence isn’t a matter of age, but of character.
Never speak ill of an absent friend.

Watling points out that the comic spur in many of these plays is provided by a deception – deception, deceit and disguise, more usually multiple levels of deception and disguise as various scams and deceptions are kept aloft by a skilled juggler, generally the trickster slave, till they all come crashing down in the final scene.

No women appear. Women, and the bad behaviour they inspire in men, are treated in a theoretical, moralising manner. The old geezers who dominate the text grumpily complain about their nagging wives, in a way which was humorously widespread in my youth (for example, Jerry being scared of his wife, Margot, in The Good Life) but which might nowadays be classed as misogyny.

Trinummus

The Prologue introduces herself as Luxury and it’s striking how candidly she tells the audience that this play was translated by Plautus from a Greek original by Philemon entitled Thesaurus or The Treasure. Very starkly she tells us she has been accompanying a young man while, in his father’s absence, he squandered his family’s wealth, and now it has just about run out, she (Luxury) is sending her daughter, Poverty, into the house.

Charmides is a mature man. He is away on business. In his absence his son, Lesbonicus, has been spending all his patrimony on food and booze and fancy women. The play opens as Megaronides emerges from his house and sets the tone of the play with a page-long lecture about the moral decadence of the times, while wickedness flourishes. He sets off to tell his new neighbour, Callicles, that he’s done a disreputable thing by buying the house of old Charmides (next door to Megaronides – several of the plays feature houses right next each other; must have kept the sets simple).

Callicles explains the reason behind it: Charmides told him he had stashed a box of gold in the house (3,000 Phillipics) and Callicles must at all costs protect it. Next thing he knew, young Lesbonicus had put the house up on the market. Should he, Callicles asks Megaronides, have let Lesbonicus sell it to just anyone, who would then have discovered the chest of treasure and claimed it as their own? Obviously not. So he stepped in and bought the house himself and is keeping it till Charmides returns. Lesbonicus, his sister, and his lover are now relegated to the annexe at the back of the house.

This explanation goes on for four or five pages and there’s nothing at all funny about it. It’s more like a problem in ethics which the two old men are chewing over.

‘Oh,’ says Megaronides, ‘so it was a worthy and honourable deed after all. OK.’ Megaronides rounds out the scene not with a comic twist but a page-long lecture about the wickedness of Rumour and Gossip who had falsely maligned Callicles.

Lesbonicus’s best friend is Lysiteles, and he now enters strolling long to his mate’s place. He bumps into his father, Philto, who delivers a barrage of moral advice, to which Lysiteles willingly agrees. He’s a good boy. This develops into Lysiteles saying he wants to help a friend. When he names Lesbonicus, his father his horrified because it’s known all over town that Lesbonicus is wasting the family fortune.

Lysiteles calms his father down by moralising that it is the duty of the upright citizen to help those less well off, even if it is their own fault. OK, his father asks, how you going to help him? Lysiteles explains he’s going to make everyone happy by asking for Lesbonicus’s sister’s hand in marriage – but insisting he doesn’t give her a dowry. This will take the sister off Lesbonicus’s hands while at the same time not burdening him with a massive financial obligation.

So this turns out to be the crux of the entire play which could more accurately have been titled The Dowry. Clearly, it was regarded as absolutely scandalous, to both families concerned, to have a woman pass from one to the other without a cash accompaniment (a concept I’m familiar with from history but is quite difficult to relate to the present day; maybe I should have demanded a dowry with my wife, how much would have been reasonable? £10,000? £100,000).

Lysiteles asks his father just one favour: can he (Philto) be the one to put the proposition to Lesbonicus? Oh, alright son, his dad says and Lysiteles strolls away.

Leaving old Philto to confront cocky young Lesbonicus and his older, responsible and sensible slave, Stasimus. What develops is a three way dialogue in which Philto puts the proposition to Lesbonicus, Lesbonicus is offended and takes it as an insult to his family not to be asked for a dowry, and the slave Stasimus gives a running commentary, half to the audience, half to Lesbonicus, telling him not to be a bloody fool, to swallow his pride and accept the offer because the family is going bankrupt.

Lesbonicus thinks a bit and then comes up with the suggestion that his sister will be accompanied by the family farm which they will give as dowry. Stasimus is horrified since this is the only source of income left in the family. So, in a rare bit of comic business, Stasimus takes Philto aside and gives a comically horrific description of the family farm, as built on a volcano whose fumes kill all the workers, all the crops die, the cattle have pestilence, and so on. With the result that Philto returns to the main conversation with Lesbonicus and politely turns down his kind offer.

Much against his will Lesbonicus is persuaded to accept the deal and stumbles off with Philto leaving the stage to Stasimus who delivers a slave / servant’s comic lament on the ruin of his master and how, the day after the wedding, he bets his master will enrol in the army and then God knows which end of the earth they’ll be sent off to.

Enter Callicles from the main house who asks Stasimus what’s up. When Stasimus expains that his master is being persuaded to let his sister be married to Lysiteles without a dowry, old Callicles says oh dear, oh dear, this will never do, the shame for the family, the shame for the poor young lady, something must be done and bustles off.

Onto the stage come the two ‘friends’, Lesbonicus and Lysiteles. They are arguing with Lesbonicus accusing his friend of insulting him. This irritates Lysiteles so much that he decides to tell his friend a few home truths about his behaviour and proceeds to rattle off a barrage of moralistic criticism of his wastrel lifestyle which could have been spoken by his father.

I see what Watling means, instead of jokes and scams, everyone in this play devotes their energies to lecturing each other.

Lesbonicus admits his friend is right and says he was undone by love. Lysiteles then has an entire page lecture about the irresponsibility of falling in love and how it sways a man from the path of correct living. But he still can’t reconcile himself to betrothing his sister without a dowry:

She would hate me for the rest of my life, and rightly. (p193)

Stasimus appears and once again gives a running commentary on the two men’s conversation. When they exit he is again left to bemoan the fact that in a week’s time he’ll probably be in some awful military camp somewhere.

Callicles and Megaronides come on, with the former telling the latter how Lesbonicus is set to shame his family by letting his sister be married without a dowry. At this point Megaronides comes up with The Big Deceit at the heart of the play. They’ll hire some foreigner from down at the docks and pay him to pretend to be a messenger from Lesbonicus’s absent father, Charmides, come with a sack of gold for the dowry and with two letters, one for Callicles ‘giving’ him the money and one for Lesbonicus telling him to take the money. And this will be some gold Callicles takes from the box of gold in the family house which he bought and is now living in. That way the circle will be squared and everyone will be happy.

Enter Charmides the absent father. How utterly unlike Mostellaria where this arrival causes a helter skelter of comic panic. Here Charmides addresses a two-page-long hymn of praise to the god Neptune for wafting him safely over the seas. Nothing remotely comic about it.

But he walks straight into the most sustained comic scene in the play because as he approaches his own house he sees the messenger hanging round it. This is the foreigner Megaronides hired down at the docks to pretend to be a messenger from…Charmides, the very many who now approaches him and who, of course, he doesn’t recognise. For maximum comic effect the messengers (who says his name is ‘Flip’) is dressed in a garish variety of national costumes. But the core of the scene is Charmides slowly wheedling out of him that he is a messenger from him, Charmides, come to give a message to his son, Lesbonicus, via a tangle of hesitation, obfuscation and lying.

When Charmides insists, despite the other’s denials, that he is the real Charmides, the imposter says he’s been paid for this stupid job and so doesn’t care any more and stomps offstage. So that is the relatively minor character, hired for 3 dollars, who gives his name to the play.

Now onto the stage comes Stasimus, who’d stopped for a beer on the way back from running an errand and is upset because the friend he lent a load of money to is refusing to pay it back. This gives rise to yet another long moralising soliloquy on the corrupt morality and bad manners of the day, which Charmides overhears with approvel.

Then Chramides steps forward and identifies himself as Stasimus’s master. But when he goes to enter his old house Stasimus tells him the bad news that his son, Lesbonicus, has sold it for 4,000 drachmas (p.214). At that moment Callicles comes out dressed to do some gardening, is delighted by the sight of his old friend and takes him indoors to explain to him how things stand.

Enter Lysiteles, Lesbonicus’s friend who is betrothed to the latter’s sister, Charmides’s daughter. At that moment Charmides comes back out of the house with Callicles who he fulsomely thanks for being such a good friend and stepping in to preserve the house. Charmides has just one question: who was the florid imposter he met who claimed to know him. Callicles laughingly explains that this was a man they hired to pretend to be a messenger from Charmides as a cover for using some of the gold in the buried treasure chest for Lesbonicus’s sister’s dowry. Capital idea! declares Charmides, amused and impressed, and Callicles gives credit where it’s due to Megaronides.

Lysiteles steps forward and introduces himself. Charmides is charmed by him and delighted to know he is to marry his daughter, and then insists that he accepts a thousand gold Philippics as dowry. Lysiteles demurs. Charmides insists. Lysiteles says alright. He asks of Charmides just one favour. Yes? That Charmides forgive his son his bad behaviour. Well… he oughtn’t… but he does!

Lysiteles bangs on the house door and Lesbonicus emerges to be confronted by his father. But rather than the mad capers of Mostellaria, in this play the father is all-forgiving, forgives his son and announces not only that his sister will have a dowry when she marries Lysiteles, but that their neighbour, Callicles, wants him (Lesbonicus) to marry his daughter.

All references to the wild women he’s been partying with, or one in particular I thought he had fallen in love with, evaporate like dew and Lesbonicus is thrilled to be marrying Callicles’ daughter and just like that the play abruptly ends.

Thoughts

Trinummus is kind of charming and has some comic dialogue and the one really comic scene when Charmides confronts the imposter who claims to have been sent from him. But overall Trinummus is not really a comic play. It’s amiable and well constructed but it’s more charming and good humoured than actually funny.

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1964.

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by Simon on March 16, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Slavery, Theatre

Posted by Simon on March 16, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/16/trinummus-a-three-dollar-day-plautus/

Rudens (The Rope) by Plautus (c.210 BC)

Prologue

Rudens is widely considered Plautus’s best play. The setting, a patch of rocky Greek coastline with a cottage and a shrine, make a change from the usual setting of a street scene in Athens.

Plautus’s plays often have quite a bit of backstory i.e. a lot has happened before the action actually begins. In this one a fairly long prologue in verse is delivered by a personification of the star Arcturus (note how E.F. Watling, the editor and translator of the Penguin edition, gives this and certain other long speeches in verse, in loose iambic pentameters):

You see me as I am, a bright white star,
Rising at my appointed time in heaven,
And upon earth. Arcturus is my name.
By night, a god, a bright star in the sky –
By day, a mortal, walking among men.

Arcturus explains that on this rocky coast lives an old man, Daemones, whose little daughter, Palaestra, was stolen from him 16 years ago, when she was three years old, by pirates and sold into the ownership of a ‘pimp’, Labrax (in Trachalio’s words, ‘a pot-bellied old Silenus, bald head, beefy, bushy eyebrows, scowling, twister, god-forsaken criminal, master of all vice and villainy’ p.102).

One day Palaestra was spotted coming out of music school by a young man, Plesidippus, who fell in love with her on the spot and asked to buy her off Labrax. The latter agreed, they signed a contract and Plesidippus made a down payment. But then Labrax reneged on the deal. A business colleague persuaded him to move to Sicily where business was good.

So one night in secret Labrax packed all his girls and his belongings onto a private ship he’d chartered. He made a covering excuse to Plesidippus, telling him he was only sailing round the coast to an isolated shrine of Venus to give offerings. He even made so bold as to arrange to meet Plesidippus there for lunch (here on this rocky shore where the scene is set, by the shrine of Venus which is visible onstage).

However the speaker, the minor god Arcturus, intervened to right this injustice. He whipped up a storm which smashed the ship to pieces on the rocks. The pimp and his Sicilian friend were thrown ashore on a reef of rock, while the beautiful young lady Palaestra and her best friend Ampelisca made it into a lifeboat. For a perilous moment this was heading straight for the rocks when Arcturus whipped up a mighty wave which carried their boat safely to land, just below the cottage of the sad old man Daemones which is the main feature of the set.

As it happens the storm stripped half the tiles off Daemones’s little cottage and the play now opens with his surly, insubordinate slave, Sceparnio, coming out of the house intending to dig up some clay and make some tiles to fix the roof. And with the end of that very detailed prologue, Arcturus retires and the play proper begins.

So the storm is central to the actions and the play could easily have been called The Tempest. And the restoration of justice to an exiled old man after a storm obviously reminds the reader of the Shakespeare play.

Rudens (The Rope)

Barely has the surly slave Sceparnio spoken before the young Athenian loverboy Plesidippus arrives with three of his friends who he a) dragged down to the harbour to try and prevent Labrax’s ship departing and now b) has dragged along to this remote shrine to Venus in the hope that the pimp actually meant it when he said he was just sailing round the coast to anchor here and give some offerings.

Plesidippus introduces himself to Daemones and asks whether they’ve seen a man answering to the description of Labrax. Slave and master both say no but then all three look down at the shoreline where they see some obviously shipwrecked men clambering ashore. Plesidippus and his mates run off to find out whether it’s Labrax or not.

Sceparnio points out to his master some women clambering up the rocks but Daemones complains that they’re continually bombarded with people visiting the shrine to Venus and expecting a meal, so they can look after themselves, and the two men go back into his cottage.

Palaestra clambers up the rocks onto the set where she laments her fate. But she barely finished lamenting how alone and forsaken she is before she is reunited with her friend (and serving woman?) Ampelisca amid much rejoicing.

They climb up onto the stage proper and notice the shrine to Venus and that moment its old priestess, Ptolemocratia, emerges. Surprised to see two wet damsels in distress, Ptolemocratia kindly says she’ll feed and dress them, and so leads them into the shrine.

Some fishermen come up from the short singing sea shanties just as Plesidippus’s servant, Trachalio, arrives. He asks them if they’ve seen Labrax and give his vivid description (quoted above) but they’ve seen no-one and exeunt.

At which point Ampelisca emerges from the shrine and is spotted by Trachalio. (Now, Trachalio loves Ampelisca so if he’s a slave, presumably so is she.) Anyway Ampelisca quickly fills him in about how she and Palaestra were being taken away from Athens by ship by Labrax but the how a storm struck and here they are, washed up and taking refuge in the shrine.

Trachalio goes into the shrine to find Palaetra, while Ampelisca goes over to the cottage with a jug to get water.

The rough slave Sceparnion is aroused by the sudden appearance of a pretty young woman on his front doorstep and chats her up, gropes her and, at one point, appears to refer to his erection. He crudely tells her that he certainly will fetch her some drinking water, if she does him a little favour! She agrees, he disappears into the cottage to go to the well out the back.

While he does so Ampelisca, scanning the shore, is horrified to see Labrax and friend emerging from the sea. She runs back into the shrine to tell her mistress with the result that, when Sceparnio emerges from the cottage with the jug full of water, she is nowhere to be seen. Sceparnio has convinced himself Ampelisca is in love with him and, reading the writing on the jug which says it belongs to the shrine and figuring that’s where she’s gone, goes over and also enters the shrine. Quite a few characters in there, now. Must be fairly big.

Enter Labrax the pimp and his friend Charmides. They lament their lot, cold and shivering, their teeth chattering. Labrax castigates Charmides for every persuading him to set out for Sicily. Now all his belongings are at the bottom of the sea. Sceparnio emerges from the shrine wondering aloud at the two pretty young women clinging to the shrine and crying. Labrax overhears him and, convinced they must be ‘his’ girls, storms into the shrine. Charmides begs Sceparnio for some clean clothes and for his to be dried but Sceparnio is his usual surly self and offers, at most, a roll of raffia matting.

At which point the clever slave Trachalio comes running out crying blue murder that Labrax is attacking the two girls and manhandling the priestess inside the shrine. Shocked, Daemones calls up his two toughest slaves and leads them into the shrine (must be quite a large building!).

Then Labrax is dragged out of the shrine and everyone threatens extreme violence and punishment against him but he defies them and insists the two girls are his property. The girls are clinging to the altar of Venus but Labrax swears he’ll prise them off it and Trachalio and Daeomones threaten him with dire punishment if he tries it.

As usual, the violent talk is very violent and graphic. Labrax threatens to burn the girls away from the altar, while Daemones threatens to knock his eyes out, or throw him into the middle of the fire. Daemones gives his two burly slaves clubs and tells them that if Labrax makes a move on either of the girls, they’re to beat him to a pulp, else he (Daemones) will have them (his slaves) killed. Violence upon violence.

Trachalio re-enters with his master, handsome young Plesidippus, who slips a noose round Labrax’s neck with a view to dragging him off in front of a magistrate. The girls are persuaded to take refuge in Daemones’ cottage where his wife is making dinner.

(In the timeless comic stereotype which has lasted over 2,000 years, Daemones is scared of his middle-aged wife who, he tells us, is always accusing him of looking at other women – so bringing two pretty young ladies home is not going to go down well.)

At which point up from the shore comes Daemones’ fisherman, Gripus. He’s pleased as punch because he’s dragged up in a net a wooden trunk from the sea. It’s very heavy so he’s confident it’s full of treasure with which he’ll buy his freedom and become a rich man, buy a yacht, maybe have a new town named after him which will become the capital of a mighty empire!

Unfortunately for Gripus, Plesidippus’ clever slave Trachalio is hanging round outside, offers to help him with his nets, spots the trunk and recognises it. He asks for half a share in order to keep the thing secret at which they have an extended verbal fight which turns into a tug of war, each one pulling on the main rope of the net (p.134). Trivial though this incident sounds, they’re argument becomes very legalistic, even philosophical, and is dragged out over 6 pages 130 to 135. Hence the title of the play. In fact the argument extends further as Trachalio suggests they get the owner of the nearby cottage to adjudicate their dispute.

It’s odd naming the play The Rope because it should really be titled The Trunk, as it’s the trunk and its contents which form the crux of the action. It certainly is the trunk belonging to the pimp Labrax and Trachalio now tells Daemones that inside it is a little trinket-box containing the lovely Palaestra’s few belongings in the world, a handful of toys she played with as a baby and which she’s kept all these years to help her find her parents.

What follows is a staged Recogniton Scene in which Daemones decides that if Palaestra can identify the items in the trinket-box she can keep it. He – Daemones – will examine them, while Gripus stands grumpily by and Trachalio tells him to keep his trap shut.

What’s a little odd is that the very first item she mentions, a little toy sword, has the name of her father on it. When Daemones asks what her father’s name was and she says ‘Daemones’, well, the game’s up. Daemones continues the identifying game as people in this kind of play do, but the essential ‘reveal’ has taken place.

Daemones is overjoyed, gives a speech of gratitude to the gods and takes Palaestra inside to meet her tearful mother. One last thing remains to be arranged, her marriage to a suitable young Athenian. In a comic scene Daemones tells the canny slave, Trachalio, to run off and fetch his master, but not before Trachalio has extracted from Daemones a promise to free him, and reward him for his good work, and set him up to marry Palaestra’s serving woman, Ampelisca.

Daemones delivers a moral lecture to Gripus telling him it is just as well he didn’t try to conceal Labrax’s trunk. Involvement in any kind of crime never pays. Gripus has a comic moment when he turns to the audience and tell them he often hears these kind of noble sentiments expressed in comedies, but has never heard of the audience going home and actually changing their behaviour as a result.

Re-enter Trachalio with his master who is all moony about his good fortune. Comic banter and Trachalio helps him psych himself to enter the cottage. To my surprise, that’s the end of the Palaestra-Plesidippus love affair. They don’t reappear, in fact they never appear onstage together and they aren’t referred to again. When Beard refers to Plautus’s plays as boy-meets-girl comedies, that’s not really true.

But first there is one last comic scene. Surly old Gripus has been sent outside to clean a spit for the marriage feast, just as Labrax the pimp stumbles up. The latter overhears the former grumbling because he lost the trunk and they quickly establish that it was Labrax’s trunk and full of treasure. Without it, Gripus says he’s ruined. Realising he’s on to a good thing Gripus extracts a promise from Labrax to give him a lot of money (2,000 sestercii, to be precise) if he tells him where the trunk is. And not just promise but lay his hand on the shrine and vow to Venus to give him the money.

So Gripus goes and fetches Daemones and they bring the trunk out. At this point there is a complicated deal. Labrax, like the reptile he is, now refuses to pay Gripus. Gripus asks Daemones to intervene and adjudicate. Daemones establishes that Labrax promised 2,000 sestercii. As the slave’s owner, the debt really falls to Daemones. Therefore he comes to the following deal with Labrax. He remits 1,000 of the debt, saying that in effect pays Labrax for Ampelisca’s freedom. Done. And the other 1,000 will pass direct from Labrax to Daemones, in respect of which he will grant Gripus his freedom. Thus Gripus won’t see a penny of money, but he is now free.

Gripus is distraught at having his phantom riches stolen away like this and wants to hang himself whereupon the play hurtles to an end with a final short speech from Daemones where he invites both Labrax and Gripus into his cottage for the feast and begs the audience’s indulgence and applause.

Slavery

Hiding in plain sight, the most mind-boggling thing about The Rope is that half the characters are slaves. It’s worth taking a minute to let that really sink in. According to Mary Beard between a tenth and a fifth of the population of Rome was slaves. According to her, slaves inhabited a huge variety of social positions from forced labour in the Spanish silver mines, to workforces in factories and on farms, to the kind of domestic slaves Daemones has (grumbling Gripus) through to highly literate, civilised assistants to senior politicians and writers.

This situation created all kinds of social dynamics and relationships which had to be handled at multiple levels and for entire lifetimes. What was it like to manage a household of slaves? What was it like to be raised by slaves, to have a slave or slaves as companions throughout your entire life, right through to your deathbed? And what was it like to be a slave in lifelong bondage?

And, with regard to Plautus’s plays, was the relationship between master and slave as rough and ready as between Daemones continual admonishing of grumpy Gripus? Or more like the lads together relationship between Plesidippus and canny, savvy Trachalio?

Casual violence

Related to the play is the way that, at the slightest provocation, the characters threaten each other with the most extreme violence – tearing the other guy’s eyes out, seeing his legs broken, promising a beating with a cudgel, beating black and blue, being burned alive, dragged by the hair, and so on. Even oaths and promise are accompanied by hair-raising threats of torture and pain.

At first I thought it was entirely masters threatening slaves – and it is mostly in that context that the direst threats are made, reminding me of Mary Beard’s point that the essence of slave status was the permanent liability to physical punishment for which you had absolutely no legal recourse. But all the characters threaten Labrax with just as much horrific abuse and he is a free citizen and businessman, albeit of a type universally despised. But he proves this kind of thing wasn’t solely restricted to slaves, it was a culture awash with the concept of extreme violence and physical punishment:

Thus when Gripus is assuring his master that he found the trunk by accident while out fishing, he vouchsafes his assertions by saying:

GRIPUS: What’s in that net I caught with my own hands, crucify me if I didn’t.

Crucify me if I didn’t!!

Hercules

Hercules is invoked in oaths on pages 100, 116, 124, 125 and 141. Was he really almost the only figure in Rome’s wide and varied pantheon that people swore by?

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1964.

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by Simon on March 14, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Slavery

Posted by Simon on March 14, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/03/14/rudens-the-rope-plautus/

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Seneca’s Plays

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Plots of the four plays

1. Thyestes

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Background

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

2. Phaedra

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Prelude (Hippolytus)

Act 1 (Phaedra and the nurse)

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

3. The Trojan Women

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Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

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4. Oedipus

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Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

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