Incest and ridicule in the Poenulus of Plautus (original) (raw)
Related papers
Deception and Metatheatricality in the Poenulus
As has been discussed at length over the past fifty years, Plautus often glorifies the figure of the servus callidus. This is especially noticeable when the slave is the eponymous hero of the play; both the Epidicus and the Pseudolus centre round the slave figure and glorify it as the master exponent of cunning and creativity. When this fact is considered against the backdrop of metatheatricality that recent Plautine scholarship has highlighted, the glorification of the trickster figure takes on added resonance. In the Poenulus there is a crafty slave figure; but he is not the hero of the action, nor does he feature in the title of the play. Instead, the figure that dominates the prologue and the end of the play, the character who emerges triumphant, is Hanno, the Poenulus, the Little Punic. Hanno emerges not only as the most successful of the characters in the plot, but also as the deceiver and metatheatrical performer par excellence; it is through this criteria that he is a Plautine 'hero'.
Plautus' Rebellious Sons: the Whole Story
The relationship between father and son is one that figures frequently throughout new comedy, and has already attracted considerable research. 1 Only one kind of father/son relationship is usually considered, however, namely that of the stern father who is the obstacle to his son's achieving happiness by opposing his unsuitable love affair. Thus, for example, Segal states that, "sons are always overjoyed when their fathers are away…. [they] have no compunction about robbing and/or ruining their sires….there is always antagonism, direct or indirect, between father and son". 2 This is, however, far from being the whole picture of Plautus' depiction of the paternal-filial relationship. Of the eleven fathers 3 who appear with sons in the Plautine corpus, only four can easily be described as blocking figures who disapprove of their sons' romances and so oppose their happiness, and even in these cases, I would suggest that the issue is not quite as it has often been portrayed. The remaining fathers demonstrate a range of stereotypes, including the pater pius (virtuous father), the pater indulgens (tolerant father), and the pater amator, who is the sexual rival of the son. Plautine fathers comprise a variety of characterisations, and indeed may be a composite of more than one stereotype, or progress from one to another as the play progresses. I intend to analyse these various stereotypes and then to say a few words about the more commonly accepted stereotype of the stern father, and thus to show that Plautus' treatment of fathers and sons is considerably more varied than has been recognised until now. There are seven further examples of fathers in the extant Plautine corpus who feature with their daughters, but these fall outside the scope of this study.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
"Tale-type 754 in the standard folktale index of Aarne, Thompson and Uther (“Happy Poverty”) can be summarized as follows: A poor man lives happily despite his scanty means. His wealthy neighbour is amazed by this apparent contradiction or annoyed by the humble fellow’s felicity. He therefore gives a good sum of money to the poor man or secretly leaves a sack of gold coins at his threshold. As soon as the poor hero comes into possession of the money, he is plagued by anxiety about his new wealth. He is constantly afraid of robbers and cannot sleep. In certain versions he also fears lest other people think he has stolen the gold, and hence dares not use it for buying goods. He becomes so gloomy, that his neighbours notice the change. In the end, the wealthy man reclaims his money; or the poor fellow gives it back of his own free will, cursing the misery it caused him. He thus recovers his former felicity. This story was popular in the Middle Ages, especially as a moral exemplum in the context of religious preaching. From the Renaissance onwards, it found its way into entertainment literature (storybooks, novellas, fable corpora). In modern times it has been recorded as an oral folktale in various peoples. But the tale-type goes back to antiquity. Examples include Pheraulas’ life account in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (8.3.35–48), an anecdote about Anacreon transmitted by Stobaeus and other gnomologia, as well as Horace’s story of Volteius Mena (Epist. 1.7.46–95). Traces of it are found in Near-Eastern proverb-fables, including a couple of Sumerian specimens from the 2nd millennium B.C. A good deal of the plot of the Aulularia is based on this folktale. My paper offers a detailed comparison between the scenario of the former and the sundry variants of the latter. Plautus’ play essentially dramatizes a didactic fable or parable belonging to the “Happy Poverty” tale-type and concerning the possession and effects of wealth. This has been amalgamated with other motifs from the Aesopic tradition, especially from fables with a miserly main character (e.g. fable 225 Perry, Phaedrus 1.27 and 4.21). Although it cannot be definitively proved, it seems likely that the selection and dramatic treatment of all this folk material goes back to the Greek model of the Aulularia. If so, it offers indirect support to the widely advocated theory of its Menandrian authorship. The Peripatetic school, where Menander reportedly studied, was a centre of flourishing research on Aesopic lore. The morality of Aesopic fable is predominantly conservative and conformist. A standard idea running through the ancient corpora is that weaker or humbler persons should keep their place and not aspire to imitate their superiors; otherwise, they will bring ridicule and misfortune on their heads. The moral of the scenic fable unfolded in the Aulularia is similar. Men like Euclio, born and bred in poverty and accustomed to extreme parsimony throughout their lives, are better off without wealth. In Hellenistic Athens, under Demetrius’ mild dictatorship or Macedonian despotism, this was a palatable message, well serving the prevalent social order."
In Defense of Milphio: Aggressive Puns and Status Transactions in Plautus' Poenulus
Classical World, 2018
The famous "mistranslation" scene of Plautus' Poenulus, in which the clever slave Milphio seems to fail at translating Hanno's Punic remarks, should be interpreted as Milphio's attempt to increase his own onstage status through a series of revisory puns. Rather than indicating Milphio's failure to be clever, Milphio's "mistranslations" are consistent with his pattern of aggressive, revisory punning throughout the comedy. Milphio frequently retrojects ambiguity onto his interlocutors' speeches in an effort to increase his onstage status and sometimes to reject his master's control of both his person and his reality.
Devil in the Details: The Young Man of Plautus, Asinaria 127–248 Once Again (2016)
The inferior status of Asinaria has become virtually an article of faith in modern scholarship. In re-examining the identity of the youthful lover of lines 127ff., this study teases out elements of the play’s thematic structure, as well as its approach to plot and characterization, in an attempt to demonstrate that much has been missed in earlier discussions, particularly as regards the portrayal of the young lovers Argyrippus and Philaenium. The analyst readings to which this work has traditionally been prey have promoted an understanding of Asinaria, and of Plautine farce more generally, that is shown to be untenable. In the process, such readings have precluded an appropriate engagement with one of the most intriguing challenges posed by this work: the staging of lines 127ff. if indeed, as the text suggests, these lines are to be attributed to Diabolus.