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Terence

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto*

Terence’s texts

Publius Terentius Afer, generally known as Terence (185 to 160 BC), died at the very young age of 25, having written just 6 plays which, however, are preserved in numerous manuscripts. So, unlike Plautus (who wrote 120 plays of which only 20 survive) a) his oeuvre is very small and b) we have it all.

Not only that but some of the manuscripts contain unprecedented detail for ancient texts – a prologue by the author plus notes giving the date of the play’s composition and notes on its first production. (These notes were written in the mid second century AD by Gaius Sulpicius Apollinaris of Carthage.)

We also have a short life of Terence by the noted historian Suetonius, written about 100 AD i.e. about 250 years after Terence died, with some later additions; plus a set of comprehensive notes on the plays by a later grammarian (the Commentum Terenti of Aelius Donatus). In other words, as ancient authors go, we have an unprecedented wealth of information about Terence and his work.

Biography

Publius Terentius Afer is said to have been born in 185 BC (or 195, accounts vary). He was born either in Carthage or south Italy to a slave woman from Carthage. Romans had three names. Terence’s last name or cognomen, Afer, in Latin meant ‘from Africa’, a term which Romans applied very broadly to all the lands on the south shore of the Mediterranean, generally meaning modern Tunisia and Libya.

Terentius was a slave belonging to the senator Publius Terentius Lucanus, who brought him to Rome, gave him his forenames, a good education and his freedom. Whatever his mother or family may have called him, Terence entered Roman society bearing the first two names of his owner and a cognomen denoting his origin.

The circle of Scipio Aemilius

As a young adult Terence is said to have been a member of ‘the Scipionic circle’, a group of intellectuals who met under the patronage of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Aemilianus (185 to 129 BC), known as Scipio Aemilianus, the Roman general who supervised the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BC.

The existence of such a circle is attested solely by two works of Cicero written a hundred years later in the 50s BC, and is now questioned by some scholars. If it did exist, young Terence would have been mixing with leading Roman intellectuals and philhellenes of the day, including the noted historian of the Punic Wars, Polybius.

Cicero records the circulation of scurrilous rumours that Terence’s plays were far too good for an ex-slave to have written and so must have been written by others in Scipio circle, and we also know this from the remarkable prefaces to the plays which he himself appears to have written and which cite and refute this rumour. The modern scholarly view is that Terence did write all the plays attributed to him.

Terence compared with his predecessor, Plautus

Terence adapted Greek plays from the late phases of Attic comedy, also known as the New Comedy, written by Greek playwrights such as Menander and his contemporaries. This genre of adaptation had a name of its own, fabulae palliatae (‘adaptations of Hellenistic comedies played in Greek dress’).

In this Terence was much like his famous forebear, the comic playwright Plautus (254 to 184) but with importance differences. Plautus’s plays are characterised by:

  • extensive use of complex verse forms, often intended to be sung, a little like operetta (‘the high spots of his plays are often his musical cantica‘)
  • dancing to music
  • clever comic wordplay
  • fast-moving, often slapstick plots

Plautus’s plays are loosely comparable to modern pantomime, in their zany slapdash humour and frequent speeches directly to the audience. By contrast, Terence’s six plays:

  • use simple, conversational Latin rather than elaborate wordplay for its own sake
  • have more plausible plots i.e. the characters aren’t made to do improbable things just for the momentary lols
  • place more emphasis on consistency of character, less on zany slapstick moments

More sophisticated, more philhellenic

In her introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of Terence’s complete plays, the translator Betty Radice points out that the shift from Plautus to Terence was not just a generational one (if Terence was born in 185 that was more or less the same year that Plautus died). It was a cultural shift away from the broad farce which had its roots in Italian peasant life (lots of farms are referred to in Plautus) to a much more refined and intellectual and consciously philhellene culture shared by an urban, cultural elite.

Radice emphasises the sophistication and attention which Terence plays demand of their audience. They tread a line between, on the one hand, the lowbrow, rustic humour of Italian peasant life and, on the other, the deeply conservative, puritanical values based on a reverence for family tradition exemplified by a conservative spokesman like Cato the Censor.

Terence was equidistant from both, promoting the values of an aesthetic circle which valued the merits of the Greek originals but wanted them combined with a more sophisticated reading of character and more believable plots, all conveyed in a refined and purified Latin style.

The double plot and other characteristics

Radice says that Terence’s main contribution to drama was the double plot, and that this allowed him to pursue his chief interest, which was the impact of plot on character. By having a double plot he could experiment with the contrasting impact on differing characters of the same situation. On this reading, plot isn’t something cobbled together to create as many farcical situations and lols as possible, as per Plautus; but a device to explore different types of character through a new kind of clear, expressive Latin verse. Terence:

  • created a simpler, purer Latin style than anything written before
  • made his plays more ‘realistic’ by removing the discursive explanatory prologues of Plautus – instead you have to infer the backstory from the characters’ dialogue alone
  • dispensed with divine intervention, setting his plays entirely in the human world
  • moved away from caricaturing minor characters (think of all those grumpy cooks in Plautus)
  • gave more respect to the older generation who are no longer just fuddy-duddies standing in the way of young lovers
  • was more respectful of women – for example, The Mother in Law is almost entirely a woman’s play

Stage conventions

As with Plautus, Terence’s stage sets showed the front doors of two (occasionally three) buildings. It was the convention of the day that characters exiting left were heading to the countryside or the city harbour, while exiting right was to go to the town centre or forum.

The acting style was declamatory i.e. loud and formalised, as were gestures and movements. It’s probable that, as in Greek comedy, the actors wore masks to indicate typical characters. These included the character types Terence himself mentions in a throwaway remark in his prologue to Heauton Timorumenos:

  • the running slave
  • the angry old man
  • the greedy sponger
  • the shameless imposter
  • the rapacious slave trader

Although Terence didn’t use the sung aria which was one of Plautus’s most notable features, nonetheless his spoken dialogue was entirely in verse which was rhythmically recited to the music of a pipe player. (Because of the survival of the production notes we even know the names of the composers: for example, the pipe music for Andria was composed by one ‘Flaccus, slave of Claudius.’)

The occasional aria is thought to have been mimed by the actor and performed by a professional singer who stood to one side of the stage next to the pipe player. Possibly this was the same person as the cantor who ended every play by inviting the audience to applaud.

It’s hard to think of an approach to theatre more different from our modern style of microscopic realism, where exposure to countless movies and TV dramas has taught us to look for the slightest frown or smile or movement to convey meaning. These guys wore heavy masks, stood still and bellowed at the audience, or broke into song or dance.

Terence’s huge legacy

Terence has a claim to have created ‘problem’ comedy i.e. light-hearted plays which address fairly serious issues. He is routinely described as ‘a major influence on European drama’.

The purity of his Latin quite quickly made him a model for students learning the language, in the ancient world and beyond, which helps to explain the survival of all his texts through the long Middle Ages in numerous copies. Radice gives a long, detailed and fascinating summary of the afterlife of Terence’s plays, through Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages when they were valued enough to be extensively copied – the scholar Claudia Villa estimated that 650 manuscripts containing Terence’s work date from after AD 800.

Due to his clear and entertaining language, Terence’s works were heavily used by monasteries and convents during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Scribes often learned Latin through the meticulous copying of Terence’s texts. Priests and nuns often learned to speak Latin through re-enactment of Terence’s plays. (Wikipedia)

The dawn of the Renaissance in Italy saw the extensive revival, translation and new performances of his plays. The Renaissance humanist Erasmus included no fewer than 250 references to and quotes from Terence in his Adages, which were designed to prove that the best values of Antiquity were perfectly aligned with Christian morality. The German church reformer Martin Luther not only quoted Terence frequently but recommended his comedies for the instruction of children in school. Terence was translated by numerous eminent Renaissance authors, including Machiavelli.

* Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

This is Terence’s most famous quote, from the play Heauton Timorumenos. It means literally:

  • I am a human being; of that which is human, I think nothing estranged from me.

More smoothly as:

  • I am human, and think nothing human is alien to me.

I prefer the implications of the latter because it reinforces one of my core principles, which is a frank acceptance of human nature in all its gruesomeness. We are, after all, only animals which, through a quirk of evolution, happen to be able to ‘think’, sort of, sometimes.

Most history is horrific, most humans are disappointing, many are terrifying. We must make the best of life based on a realistic assessment of human history and behaviour. Denying these realities distorts our understanding of human nature, human history and human society, and undermines assessments of what realistic change and reform we can hope to effect.

Therefore I accept it, accept it all, all human behaviour, the killers and rapists, the paedophiles and génocidaires, the greedy billionaires and the drug addict muggers, alongside the sugar and spice and all things nice which the sentimental, naive and wilfully blind want human nature to consist of – and the huge territory between these extremes, where people are confused, uncertain, generally nice, sometimes stressed, angry or inexplicable and unpredictable. And that is what this quote means to me. It signifies a complete, Nietzschean acceptance of the gritty reality.

Radice, on the other hand, translates it as:

  • I am human myself, so I think every human affair is my concern.

Which may be a true translation but whose last few words seems to me to drastically expand the thought, making it far more pro-active and empathetic than my preferred version. Radice’s translation implies that all human affairs are my concern i.e. that I ought to be actively involved in them. Turns it from the detached and rather analytical acceptance of my version into a motto for Amnesty International.

I prefer the second translation, which implies that I should take note of and take account of all human affairs – but not be so foolish as to get caught up in them.

Credit

All page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on April 1, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 1, 2022

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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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Mostellaria (The Ghost Story) by Plautus (c.210 BC)

The plot

We are in Athens in front of the house of Theoproprides, a Greek merchant, and his neighbour Simo. Theoproprides has a son, Philolaches, who is in love with a courtesan Philematium (who has an elderly woman attendant, Scapha). Philolaches recently bought Philematium her freedom for 3,000 drachmas which he borrowed off a moneylender for the purpose. He also has a best friend, Callidamates, who has a girlfriend of his own, Delphium.

The play opens with a rough country slave up from the family’s farm, Grumio, giving us a bit of backstory – telling us that the master, Theoproprides, has been away for three years and during that time the family’s servus callidus (clever slave) Tranio has been living high on the hog and corrupting the master’s son, Philolaches.

This is confirmed in a scene where we see Philolaches eavesdropping on his pretty courtesan and her maid chatting, and even more so then when his friend Callidamates turns up, drunk off his face and continually falling over or falling asleep, only propped up by his irritated girlfriend.

Tranio had gone off to the harbour to buy fish, but now he rushes on the disastrous news traditional in this sort of plot – after a three years’ absence, during which they’ve eaten him out of house and home, the master has returned!!

From this point onwards the play turns into one sustained improvisation by the clever slave Tranio, designed to prevent the old master, Theoproprides, from discovering the truth that his debauched son has been eating and drinking away the family fortune.

Improvising in a mad hurry, Tranio tells Philolaches et al to go inside the house, lock the door and be silent.

This is so that, when Theoproprides arrives a few moments later, Tranio can tell him a cock and bull story that the house is haunted by a ghost, the ghost of a man cruelly murdered by the previous owner. He claims that eight months earlier Philolaches saw a vision of the ghost in a dream and so the entire family packed up and locked up and left. So it would be terrible bad luck for Theoproprides to even touch the doorknob.

While Tranio is developing this whopping fib, a shabby moneylender comes along demanding back the 3,000 drachmas he loaned Philolaches. This is the money the latter used to buy the freedom of  his courtesan girlfriend, Philematium. Including interest it now amounts to 4,400 drachmas, a very large sum.

Tranio desperately ad libs, telling Theoproprides that the money the moneylender is talking about was given to Philolaches to use it as a deposit on a house. Now his father approves of this because it indicates his son plans to become a man of property, going into business. So, he asks Tranio, where is this new house? Tranio falls back on the desperate expedient of saying it’s the house next door.

Having dug this hole, Tranio has to corner the owner of the next door house, Simo, as he emerges from his house planning to go for a nice stroll. He buttonholes him and talks him into letting Theoproprides have a tour of his house. Why? Well, he explains that the master is back and that he and the dissolute son are for the high jump but…er…er…the master is thinking of extending his house and would like to see how Simo’s done his house up? Would that be OK? Simo takes a while to be talked round, but then reluctantly agrees.

So Theoproprides is shown round Simo’s house under the impression that the house has been sold to his son, while Simo is under the impression he’s doing him a favour and showing him his improvements and extensions – all the while Tranio is on tenterhooks lest either of them give his scam away.

The tour goes off without too much of a hitch and Theoproprides is persuaded that his son has made a wise investment. So Tranio now offers to go to Theoproprides’s and fetch the young master (the one who is, in reality, hiding silently inside the locked-up house). So he exits.

So the ghost scam and the buying a house scam are working alright when a new complication arises. Along comes the slave of Philolaches’s very drunk friend, Callidamates, in fact two of them, a refined one and a coarse brutish one (echoing Theoproprides’s two slaves Tranio and Grumio).

These two slaves start banging on the door of Theoproprides’s house and when the latter, undirected and unconstrained by Tranio’s presence, asks them what the devil they’re doing, they swiftly give the entire game away. They say they’ve come to collect their young master, that he’s continually at this house where there have been wild parties every day for the past three years while the young master drinks his father’s wealth away, that Philolaches spent 3,000 drachmas on buying the freedom of a slave girl, that he’s never put down a deposit for the house next door, and that the leader of his revels is the disreputable slave Tranio.

Well, you can imagine how Theoproprides takes this series of hammer blows, physically recoiling from this devastating news!

At this moment Simo, the neighbour re-enters and Theoproprides asks whether it’s true that his son has put down a deposit on his house. First he’s heard of it, Simo replies, thus confirming that everything Tranio has said has been an outrageous pack of lies.

In the denouement Tranio reappears to tell the audience that he’s just slipped round the back of Theoproprides’s house, unlocked it and let the son, lover and the others get away. But when he tried to recruit them to his tricks they refused. So Tranio shares with the audience that’s he’s pretty hacked off by this disloyalty. After all the hard work he’s put in to save them! So he reckons the time has come to be straight with Theoproprides and throw himself on his master’s mercy.

In fact Tranio has returned to the stage just in time to overhear Theoproprides telling Simo he now knows the complete truth, and asking Simo to borrow some slaves and some whips which he’s going to use to chastise Tranio!

In a comic piece of business Tranio sidles to the front of the stage to where an altar has stood throughout the play. He is taking pre-emptive sanctuary from punishment for a slave who clung to any altar of the gods was inviolable.

Theoproprides spots him and asks him to come away from the altar but Tranio very nicely and politely refuses. At which point Theoproprides reveals that he knows everything (but, as the audience knows, Tranio already knows that Theoproprides knows) and threatens him with torture, crucifixion, fire and faggots!

At which point the play ends very simply when Philolaches’ friend Callidamates enters, now sobered up, and apologises to Theoproprides on behalf of his friend/Theoproprides’ son, and generously offers that he, Callidamates, will pay Theoproprides the 4,000 drachmas his son has spent. Please forgive him.

And when Theoproprides persists in his wish to gorily punish Tranio, Callidamates begs him to forgive him too. ‘Oh…alright,’ Theoproprides grudgingly agrees. And that’s the end, with a dinky little epilogue addressed to the audience.

Spectators, there our story ends.
Give us your hands, and be our friends.

Trickster strategy

Tranio has a neat speech about the strategy of the trickster slave in these kind of plays:

Well, if I’m going to be sold in my own shop [i.e. be let down by his colleagues in trickery] the best thing I can do is to do what most other people do when they find themselves in a dangerous and complicated situation – make everything a bit more complicated and never give things a chance to settle down!

Surely a lot of the pleasure of this kind of plot, from Plautus to the city comedies of Ben Jonson, is enjoying the sheer energy and inventiveness of the trickster servant. Very often they whip up such a fantasia of interlocking scams that there’s a kind of peak moment when they hug themselves with sheer glee at how clever they are – and the same happens here when Tranio declares:

TRANIO: Alexander the Great and Agathocles, so I’ve heard tell, were the two top champion wonder workers of the world. Why shouldn’t I be the third – aren’t I a famous and wonderful worker? (p.63)

By Hercules!

A small detail but I’m struck by the way that all the character swear oaths by Hercules, and how Tranio at one point calls himself the Hercules of tricksters. No other gods and no other legendary figures are referred to at all. Hercules dominates the field. It’s true of his other plays, too, and then, of course, Plautus wrote an entire play about Hercules. So what was it about Hercules?

When Tranio in a brief outburst begs Hercules for help, a footnote to the 1912 translation by Henry Thomas Riley reads: “Hercules having slain so many monsters, was naturally regarded as a Deity likely to give aid in extreme danger.”

To the remark, ‘He’s the Hercules of money-spenders’, Riley notes: “It was the custom with many to devote to Hercules the tenth part of their possessions. Consequently, the revenues belonging to the Temples of this Deity would be especially large.”

Fair enough, but it doesn’t explain the plethora of other invocations of the legendary demigod.

(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 a recurring them in Richard Miles’s history of Carthage.)

Crucifixion and torture, fire and faggots

Theoproprides to Tranio: ‘I’ll see you’re taken off to the cross; that’s all you deserve.’ (p.82)

Tranio is subjected to threats of a whole series of dire physical punishments, and from the play as a whole radiates a strong sense of the physical abuse and punishment slaves were vulnerable to. In Mary Beard’s book about ancient Rome she says that the ease with which they could be physically abused was the real defining aspect of slaves, hence the expression whipping boy. That’s true with a vengeance here.

In the early scene Philolaches eavesdrops on his mistress being lectured by her old serving woman, and every time the latter says something against his interests Philolaches soliloquises that he will:

  • make her starve and thirst and freeze to death
  • scratch her eyes out
  • choke her with a quinsy

I suppose this can be considered comic hyperbole, but it’s worth noting that the comic style of these Roman plays (and presumably their Greek originals) included extreme physical abuse.

This is even more true of Tranio who worries on every other page about the physical punishment he’s going to incur and when his scams are uncovered. In his speech announcing that he’s spotted Theoproprides at the Piraeus, he says the game’s up and he’s going to be punished. Presumably the following is spoken directly to the audience:

Anybody ready to be crucified in my place today? Where are all the punch-takers, chain-rattlers – or the chaps who are ready to rush the enemy’s trenches for threepence? Anybody used to having his hide perforated with a dozen spears at once? I’m offering a talent to anyone prepared to jump onto a cross, provided he has his legs and arms double-nailed first. (p.42)

Then, at the climax of the play, Theoproprides threatens Tranio with a whole array of punishments – to be whipped, crucified, hanged, beaten with a cudgel and burned alive, and Simo joins in:

Simo: ‘In that case, the cord will be stretched for you; thence to the place where iron fetters clink; after that, straight to the cross.’

Although played for laughs, this is quite a litany of hair-raising physical abuse and gives the ‘comedy’ a very dark or complicated flavour.

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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Plautus (254 to 184 BC)

Biography

Titus Maccius Plautus (254 to 184 BC), generally referred to as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Republican era. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. It is said he moved to Rome and became a theatre assistant and actor who became successful with comic parts. However, as soon as he had the capital, he went into business as a merchant shipper. However, his business went bust and sometime around the age of 40 he used his knowledge of theatre to turn to playwriting. Plautus is a nickname meaning flat-footed or broad-footed.

Plautus published a large number of plays from 205 BC to his death in 184. He claimed simply be to importing and translating original Greek plays rather as a wholesaler imports Greek olives for the Roman market. However, although none of the direct sources have survived, scholars believe Plautus often amended and rewrote his models, sometimes changing the plot or combining plot elements from two original Greek works into one new play. And Plautus himself indicates as much when he refers to himself and his own practice in some of the plays’ chatty prologues.

Plautus wrote around 130 plays. Twenty of these plays survive in their entirety, with small fragments from 30 others, making him the most prolific dramatist from the entire ancient world, Greek or Roman, in terms of surviving work

Greek old and new comedy

Plautus freely borrowed his plots and characters from the Greek comedy of his day. This had come to be referred to, generically, as the New Comedy to distinguish it from the older style, which was referred to, unsurprisingly, as Old Comedy. The difference is simple: old Greek comedy tackled big political  and social issues and the new comedy didn’t. An example of Old Comedy is Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata in which the womenfolk of Athens go on a sex strike to force their men to call a truce in the ruinous Peloponnesian War. That play dates from around 410 BC i.e. 200 years before Plautus.

Greek New Comedy came in about a hundred years later and is most associated with the playwright Menander (c. 342 to 291 BC). The difference is that New Comedy dropped political themes, satire and serious moral or intellectual subject matter in order to focus solely on comic situations. These are generally set in domestic households and featuring a stock set of characters, usually an objectionable father who argues with his wastrel son, a scolding wife/mother, a young woman from a neighbouring household who the son is in love with, and a clever servant who outwits his master and fixes everything. So stock and standard were these character types that the Romans had special words for them:

  • adulescens = young man, the hero
  • virgo = maiden, the love interest
  • senex = old man, generally presenting an obstacle to the true love of the young couple, often with a particular humour or foible for example the miserliness of Euclio
  • servus callidus = clever slave, whose nimble footwork in helping
  • servus stultus = foolish slave
  • parasitus = parasite or sycophant – in his introduction to Captivi E.F. Watling says a more accurate translation might be paid ‘table companion’
  • miles gloriosus = braggart soldier
  • meretrix = courtesan
  • cooks – thrown in for comic moments

E.F. Watling, the editor and translator of the Penguin edition, speculates that Plautus may in fact have been a slave, when he started in theatre, which was only an occasional and low class occupation (most plays were only performed once at festivals they were written for; many actors belonged to slave masters). This would explain one of the distinctive features of his plays, which is the wide variety of slave types which appear in them, and the sympathetic lines about a slave’s miserable lot in life which he gives to many of them. And the way witty and canny slaves often come of the plays very well. Maybe. But maybe not.

Three points

1. Although Plautus was Roman and wrote in Latin and all his plays were performed in Rome, they are all actually set in Greek locations and the characters have (often ludicrously contorted) Greek names. That said, the plays freely invoke Roman ideas, customs and laws, creating a sort of cultural hybrid.

2. The plays were written in verse, quite complicated verse. As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it:

Plautus’s plays are written in verse, as were the Greek originals. The metres he used included the iambic six foot line (senarius) and the trochaic seven foot line (septenarius), which Menander had also employed. But Plautus varied these with longer iambic and trochaic lines and more elaborate rhythms. The metres are skillfully chosen and handled to emphasize the mood of the speaker or the action. It is possible that now lost Greek plays inspired this metrical variety and inventiveness, but it is much more likely that Plautus was responding to features already existing in popular Italian dramatic traditions. The Senarii (conversational lines) were spoken, but the rest was sung or chanted to the accompaniment of double and fingered reed pipes, or auloi. It could be said that, in their metrical and musical liveliness, performances of Plautus’s plays somewhat resembled musicals of the mid-20th century.

3. As the sheer volume of his output suggests, Plautus wrote in a hurry and his plays work in a hurry. They are full of slapstick, pratfalls, ludicrous situations. Later literary critics were (and still are) snooty about this but it makes them feel incredibly modern and accessible.

E.F. Watling’s translations

Watling was commissioned to by Penguin to translate nine of Plautus’s plays, four in this volume and five in its sister volume ‘The Pot of Gold and other plays’. The two volumes were published in 1964 and 1965 (the introduction is actually dated 1963, ‘between the Lady Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP’). Penguin wanted to make the world’s greatest literature as accessible as possible to the widest possible audience. Therefore they asked Watling to produce versions which were ready to produce for the stage. So:

Prose not verse

1. All his translations are in prose. There are only occasional attempts to capture the complex verse of the originals or the comic or dramatic effects Plautus created by having characters switch between different Roman verse forms.

Rather mind bogglingly ‘a considerable part’ of the original texts were designed to be sung to the accompaniment of a flute (!). As Watling says, it’s hard to see what kind of contemporary theatrical idiom, that could possibly be translated into. So his versions for the most part don’t even try, apart from long soliloquies, such as the prologues or speeches on specific subjects, which he casts into very loose iambic verse, and for a handful of short songs. Instead they aim for a fluent, fast-moving, rangy, continuous 1960s prose and are very enjoyable for it.

No notes

2. There is a complete absence of notes or scholarly apparatus, no footnotes explaining references or indicating gaps in the text or problems with the manuscript or all the other editorial issues old texts are  so often cluttered with. You’re meant to pick his translations up and start reading them out loud and performing them straight away.

Watling explains that the plays have come down in the manuscript tradition neatly divided into acts and scenes. He thinks these are much later scholarly interferences so has dumped them. On the other hand, Watling has added stage directions and these are very useful. He points out that almost all the actions that occur in a Plautus play are described in the dialogue, so much so that, as he strikingly puts it: ‘a blind audience could follow every move in a Plautine play’ (p.17). Still. It saves time and mental effort to have them written out explicitly so you’re free to concentrate on the comic plots and witty wordplay.

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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