Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy

Chapter 1

THE CROWDED HOUSE

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.
--Czeslaw Milosz, "Ars Poetica?"

PLAUTUS is a poet whose house is open to a bewildering variety of guests. Earnest ing?nues and cynical tricksters make themselves at home there; both masters and slaves proclaim themselves to be honored inmates. The plots that focus on reweaving familial bonds and the triumph of love are often almost derailed by the emphasis on deception tricks and gags through which these plots are brought on stage; likewise, the socially conservative values of such familial plots, the ways that they support existing hierarchies, must coexist with the charmingly subversive intelligence of the clever slave. Conversely, the amoral genius that motivates these clever slaves is never really allowed to embrace its logical conclusion, that is, the revelation that the master's authority is merely arbitrary, and so this liberatory potential goes unrealized as well. In these plays neither the humane mode of naturalistic comedy nor the cynical mode of farcical comedy ever completely frees itself from the other; the two are engaged in an ongoing dialogue. This book is an attempt to interpret the literary and the social effects of Plautus' comedy by analyzing the complex instability that these two contradictory modes of comedy produce.

Let me make clearer what I mean by the difference between these two modes with an example from a familiar play. Early on, Plautus' Mostellaria advertises that its theme is the undoing of a young man in love. Through a famous monody in which he compares himself to a dilapidated house, the young lover reveals an intriguingly clear vision about what his amours have cost him, financially and morally (84-156). This monody prepares the audience for a play that will explore the psychological and social tensions between self-indulgence and self-respect. In other words, this young lover's speech fits perfectly with what we have learned to expect in New Comedy, a conflict of social paradigms that pits the erotic satisfactions of the individual against the moral norms of the community, a conflict that will be resolved in the end by a fortuitous twist that obviates the need for any real choice between the two alternative paradigms. But the Mostellaria, in important ways, is not a play that explores these psychological and social tensions. This monody is preceded by a farcical slapstick battle between two slaves, in which the slave who is advocating immorality clearly has the upper hand (1-83). Even more puzzling, after the first act, the Mostellaria completely abandons the young lover and develops instead the role of the fiendishly clever slave, a role that has no edifying moral or psychological lessons for us. Indeed, this style of comedy too, even though it is fundamentally different in tone and moral outlook from the tender troubles of the soul-searching young lover, is utterly familiar. In this farcical style of comedy, we are used to seeing downtrodden slaves and sons kick over the traces; they have no remorse for their misdeeds, and moreover they bring to rebellion the attitude that could be summed up in the Latin word malitia, a not-too-distant cousin of English "malice." Like the more sentimental mode of comedy, this mode too will sidestep the need for any radical changes in the household, but where naturalistic comedy avoids changes be "revealing" the conflict of values to have been illusory all along, farce acknowledges that conflict is permanent and unchanging: the master forgives the slave for tricking him, but neither does he change his policies of mastery nor does the slave learn the lesson of obedience. The end leaves them coexisting in their opposition just as they began:


TRANIO: Quid gravaris? quasi non cras iam commeream aliam noxiam: ibi utrumque, et hoc et illud, poteris ulcisci probe. (Mos 1178-79)

TRANIO: Why are you being so difficult? Don't you think I'll commit another wrong tomorrow? Then you can punish me properly for both of them, today's and tomorrow's.
Although it is possible to develop an interpretation of this play that involves explaining away the presence of one or the other of these comic modes, or subordinating one to the other, to do so would inevitably distort the reader's and spectator's experience of the play, which is that each of these modes is presented on its own merits, not as a strawman for the other.1

One of the major themes of Plautine scholarship has been the attempt to assert a reasoned basis for deciding what is really Plautine in Plautus, for separating out the signal from the noise.

Because Plautus adapted his comedies from Greek plays, and because the fragments we have from these Greek authors seem to fit cleanly the pattern of naturalistic comedy, the problem of inconsistency in Plautus has often been solved by invoking the scripts' foreign origins. If, as many earlier critics argued, Plautus was a semicompetent adapter of Greek New Comedy, then the silly antics of clever slaves in his plays could be seen simply as intrusions into the plots of familial crisis, as (at best) comic relief for the drama of humane values.2 If, on the other hand, as many more recent critics believe, Plautus was a sly parodist, who used his Greek models merely as a foil for his own carnivalesque wit, then the plots of young love and lost children serve only to provide grist for his mill, and a narrative framework for trickery and rebellion.3 But even this quick sketch of the Mostellaria shows that neither of these two views can account completely for the overall effect of this play, in which both comic modes perform positive functions. Furthermore, these explanations assume a neat boundary between naturalistic Greek comedy and farcical Roman Comedy, an assumption that relies heavily on the meager evidence for Greek New Comedy (of which we have many fragments but only one complete play, Menander's Dyskolos, and only one passage of about one hundred lines where a Greek original can be compared with its Latin adaption, Menander's Dis Exapaton with Plautus' Bacchides). If we explain the presence of naturalistic comedy in Plautus by appealing to reconstructions of Greek New Comedy, we reduce the complexity of both the Greek and the Roman texts, by ignoring the possible variation within the Greek corpus, and by assuming that naturalism has only a negative function in Plautus. What is needed is not a finer gauge for separating the genuine Plautus from the distracting accretions but a way of theorizing the text as we have it, as an irreducibly complex structuring of these varied elements.

I am suggesting two ways of thinking about the coexistence of these modes that will help us give a truer description of the Plautine genre. First, rather than seeing this genre as one of these two modes with the (welcome or unwelcome) intrusion of the other, I propose that the genre consists precisely of the combination of them. It is not that Plautus is trying to write Menandrian comedy and somehow his farcical style keeps intruding, nor that he wants to write Atellan farces but unaccountably bases them on Greek plots. The knitting together of the two modes is exactly what defines the pied beauty of this genre. The second proposal is to see the coexistence of these two modes as dynamic and self-conscious, a relationship that could be characterized by Bakhtin's concept of dialogism. That is, each mode represents itself in response to the other, with what Bakhtin calls "a sideways glance" (1981: 61). The essence of dialogism is not a polemical argument but rather the self-consciousness of discovering how one's own language and worldview sound and look to another language and worldview.4

What function could such a ragtag dramatic form have played in the civic life of the Romans, who gave these frivolous plays a place in some of their most important religious festivals?5 Especially since the two modes of comedy that constitute this corpus offer two very different attitudes towards authority, we must wonder what was the investment of socially and politically dominant Romans in having such plays performed. I hope to demonstrate here that the combination of the two modes allowed Plautine comedy to fulfill multiple and mutually contradictory fantasies for its audience. What this genre sacrifices in coherence and dramatic unity, it more than compensates for in the powerfully protean dreams it offers, dreams that are at once liberatory and deeply grounded in traditional authority. Thus my view of Plautus' audience also stresses an unresolved multiplicity: just as the plays do not present a unified dramatic mode, neither the audience as a whole nor each individual member of the audience can be assigned to a fixed point in the social network, an assignment that would allow us to label their interests as either in favor of or against maintaining social hierarchies. Because, as I will argue below, masters have a need for rebellion in their own lives, as well as anxiety about the possible rebellion of slaves, this form of comedy both promotes and undermines rebellious fantasies. What I am advocating in the following pages is a way of grappling with the question of elite investment in popular literature by finding a middle path between augmenting the ideological power of the elite (by accepting their own naturalized view of their domination) and giving way to a romantic impulse to see subversion where none existed.

Double Vision

It may seem that the description I am giving of Plautine comedy--the free dialogic interaction between two comic modes, without an overarching organizing structure--would make it impossible to think of these plays as literary texts at all. In this section, I will argue for a way of thinking about Plautus' literary activity that will explain how such texts could come to be and how they can be recognizable as dramatic comedy. I will also give a more detailed picture of the stylistic, thematic, and dramatic traits that characterize each mode.

The foundation of my argument is that the literary aesthetic that shaped Plautus' plays was in the strictest sense, "traditional." The fullest exploration of Plautine comedy as the product of a traditional dramatic style is John Wright's Dancing in Chains: The Stylistic Unity of the Comoedia Palliata, in which a thorough analysis of the extant fragments demonstrates that the style we think of as characteristically Plautine was in fact the common property of all the authors of this genre, the so-called "comedy in Greek dress." If we accept Wright's argument, we can see that Plautus' theatrical instincts allowed him to combine and recombine a relatively small vocabulary of comic forms into plays that were satisfying dramatic experiences; but this argument in favor of Plautus' traditional aesthetic also means that we should not assume that he wrote with the goal of self-expression. Plautus made his artistic decisions based on a subtle knowledge of the comic forms at his disposal. This is not to say that he knew or cared about the meanings of these forms, but he understood with precision how the audience wanted them to be used, combined, and modified. If the aesthetic that governed Plautus' work was traditional, shared by all the authors of the comoedia palliata, it might seem that this kind of tradition precludes the literary self-consciousness we are used to attributing to individual authors (e.g., Ovid). But it is possible that this traditional aesthetic was centered on a distinctively self-conscious stance towards language and literature.6

This self-conscious aesthetic can be seen especially in three characteristics of Plautine comedy I will discuss here: stylization (using language for its formal properties as much as for the content it conveys), secondariness (embracing Latin literature's epigonal relation to Greek literature), and dialogism (juxtaposing comic modes to highlight the incommensurability of languages and worldviews). This description of Plautus' aesthetic has implications for the literary analysis of his corpus, but I will also use it to lay the foundation for a methodology that will allow us to discuss the social effects of these plays without positing (directly or indirectly) the desire of an individual author to make a coherent statement. My thesis is that we can derive from these plays an understanding of the internal logic that governed Plautus' use of these comic forms, a logic that is itself shaped by his audience's broadly held assumptions about social relationships. In fact, because these plays are both traditional and popular, one could argue that they provide a clearer insight into Roman society than those dramas that are the product of an individual playwright who stamps them with his own mark.7

Stylization, secondariness, and dialogism are all products of a specific attitude towards language that subtends the peculiarities of early Latin literature as a whole and Plautus in particular. Although it has not been phrased in exactly these terms before, scholars have long recognized the influence that the material aspects of language, especially sound patterns, had on the style of early Latin literature.8 We can push these observations a little further by positing that this privileging of sound patterns is itself a manifestation of a deeper principle, the consciousness of language as a separate system that is never exactly coextensive with its function as a means of communication.9 Thus, form (language) and content (meaning) in Plautus and other early Roman authors are juxtaposed rather than unified. The familiar description of Plautus as stylized and secondary (in relation to Greek literature) can be understood in these terms, and these qualities can in turn help us to understand dialogism in Plautine comedy.

Stylization is Roman comedy's most striking characteristic, as Wright puts it, a "concentration on language as an object of interest in itself . . . " (1974: 36). Again and again in Plautine plays, we have the sense that the stream of words (dappled as it is with alliteration, homoioteleuton, figurae etymologicae, etc.) exists for its own sake, not for the expression of any thought but just because it sounds right. Throughout Wright's study of the fragments of the comoedia palliata, he repeatedly points to the patterning of language, rather than the content conveyed, as a guiding force in the work of all the authors, not just Plautus.10 Fraenkel's detailed study of Plautus comes to a similar conclusion. Comparing the opening of Menander's Heros and the opening of Plautus' Curculio, he writes, "Plautus' dialogue doesn't settle for being a medium; it is, to an extreme degree, an end in itself" (1922: 413 = 1960: 391 [my translation]). Fraenkel explicitly associates this emphasis on language with the centrality that archaic Latin literature grants to the perception of the senses and the experience of the moment.11 Stylization and the emphasis on sense perception differentiate these texts from those organized around abstract thematic principles and intended to convey ideas, not just dazzle the ear and eye of the beholder.

Like stylization, what I am calling secondariness (the choice to write in reaction to an existing text rather than to start fresh) has long been seen as a definitive quality of Plautus and other early Latin authors.12 I would argue that this quality, too, grows out of an attitude towards language that acknowledges the gap between form and content. Fraenkel makes only a negative connection between the richness of Plautus' linguistic resources and his use of Greek New Comedy as a model. He believes that Plautus' skills did not include the ability to create a plot line from scratch; in order to make up for this deficit, the Roman playwright turned to the well-made plots of Hellenistic Greek comedy (1922: 405 = 1960: 383). But we can also imagine a positive reason for his use of Greek models. The view of language and literature attributed to Plautus here is exactly the kind of perspective that would lead to an interest in translation, reworkings, parody, adaptation. All these forms of literature depend on the fact that language and the content it expresses are not coextensive: on one hand, content does not exist only in language, since it can be translated or expressed in different words; on the other hand, these new, secondary texts never just repeat the primary text but in reexpressing the content inevitably introduce new tones and emphases. These secondary texts derive their power from the difference between two kinds of meaning: the meaning that is expressed through form and the meaning that exists in form. The latter kind of meaning is, by definition, untranslatable. This literary perspective that exploits the gap between form and content differs profoundly from one that asserts the unity of form and content.13

This attitude towards form and content in language defines the genre in which Plautus works, creating a body of plays written in stylized Latin but based on Greek texts, which were originally composed with a very different attitude towards language; thus the dialogism I am positing for Plautus is a congener of the more familiar Plautine characteristics of stylization and secondariness. But even after the archaic Roman penchant for form, separable from content, has operated by using a foreign (in every sense) play as a model, its presence can be felt in the comedies themselves. The plays highlight the separability of form and content by exaggerating, rather than minimizing, the contradictions between the attitudes toward language embodied in Greek New Comedy and in its Roman adaptations.14 These two attitudes produce two very different modes of comedy, modes that differ in diction, meter, and characterization but also in their fundamental literary and moral orientation. Because the incommensurability of the two modes is the driving force behind this use of Greek models in the first place, the modes are left unsynthesized and allowed to coexist and interrogate each other. Plautus' text becomes a crowded house, populated by guests who do not necessarily agree either with each other or with their host.15

Although both these modes are present in each of Plautus' plays, there is a range across his corpus from plays that are almost entirely in one mode to those almost entirely in the other. To help clarify what I mean by each of these modes, for the moment I will be describing each as it would look if it were on its own.16 The literary mode of idealizing naturalism represents the familiar world of the spectators, but with all the rough edges smoothed away, and keeps this represented world seamless in itself.17 This is not to say that this mode is realistic; the occurrences and coincidences that move the plot forward are often extremely improbable. But these improbabilities are clothed in the garb of everyday life. This mode presents itself as somehow "truer" than real life, as if we are seeing the workings of both social life and divine will, without the distracting minutiae of life as lived. The plot device of recognition (anagnorisis) is virtually constitutive of this kind of comedy and perfectly expresses its worldview: in these comedies we find out in the end that the identities we took seriously were merely optical illusions, caused by the flux of appearances, and the real identities remained all the time hidden beneath this veneer. Resolutions in this mode have a profound and permanent effect on the characters' lives: families are reunited and marriages contracted. The language and dramatic style of this mode further emphasize this possibility of stripping away the distracting details of life that prevent us from perceiving the truth. The style of naturalistic comedy calls attention to the content of the plays rather than to the play itself, again with the sense that this elegant and self-effacing language is truer to the fundamental truths of life, even though it is, in the narrow sense, "unrealistic."18 The overall effect of this mode is to make the dramatic illusion as powerful as possible, as if we are spying on the characters through a one-way mirror, rather than watching a play scripted by an author and performed by actors.

The second mode, which I will call the farcical mode, both in its stylized language and in its frequent rupture of the dramatic illusion, draws attention to the theatrical artifice itself, undermining any attempt to focus on a transcendent meaning of the play.19 In this mode, form triumphs over content: the reader and the spectator are regaled by a stream of patterned language, slapstick bits, and stereotyped characters--all leading exactly nowhere, in dramatic terms. Just as the recognition scene revealed the idealizing mode's attitude toward truth, in the farcical mode trickery is given pride of place. This plot device presumes that the confusions of life are neither created nor dispelled by divine workings but by the tendentious and half-baked schemes of individuals. In sharp contrast to the resolutions of the naturalistic mode, those of the farcical mode never change anything fundamental to the characters' situation: the trick is revealed, but the clever slave remains a slave, looking forward to another round of trickery without consequences. This literary mode is obviously more fantastic than the other, relying on elaborate language and disguise tricks, and yet in its willingness to leave loose ends untied, it could be seen as more realistic; or at least, it is more faithful to a vision of reality that sees the details of life as the real thing, not as static that is clouding the picture of the real, underlying pattern. And yet, this mode continually reminds us of the play's status as an artifact, created by an author and embedded in a system of literary conventions, both through the emphasis on "artificial" language and dramatic construction and through the sometimes explicit identification of the playwright with the clever trickster.