Plautus: Miles Gloriosus

Miles Gloriousus (The Swaggering Soldier or: The Braggart Warrior) was written around 205-200 B. C.; in the monologue of Periplectomenus (an elderly bachelor of fifty-four [cf. line 654], the Soldier’s good-humoured neighbour), describing Palaestrio deep in thought (Palaestrio is the master-planner, a wily slave) says in lines 214-16: “I seem to have heard there’s a writer in a certain foreign country with his head supported on a stone block and two wardens holding him down day and night”, a typical topical allusion, something we often find in Plautus, and because of the Greek setting, “foreign” here means ‘Roman’, and the writer has been identified as Nevius, a dramatist and poet, who was imprisoned for his political views, and died about 200 B. C. So this makes it more or less certain that this is one of Plautus’ early plays, and the absence of metrical variety also corroborates that.

The comedy is in the category of the “well-made play”: the story we learn from the prologue is that not a very long time before, Pleusicles, a young Athenian and Philocomasium, his lover and concubine were living in Athens in great happiness yet the Soldier (usually referred to as “the Captain” in the play) kidnapped Philocomasium while Pleusicles was away on a diplomatic mission to Naupactus, and brought her to Ephesus. Palaestrio, Pleusicles’

slave immediately hurried to warn his master but pirates captured him and gave him to the Captain as a present. This happy coincidence provided opportunity for Palaestrio to send a letter to Athens secretly and call his master, Pleusicles to Ephesus. Pleusicles happens to know the Captain’s neighbour, a jovial elderly bachelor called Periplectomenus, and he pitches camp there, and with Periplectomenus’ consent and Palaestrio’s help they cut a hole in the party-wall of the two adjacent buildings and the lovers, Pleusicles and Philocomasium can meet when the Captain is not at home. Yet the girl has a jailer, a stupid but ambitious slave called Sceledrus, who one day went up to the roof to chase a monkey and happened to see that in the courtyard of Periplectomenus’ house, the lovers were kissing. This is where the play starts. The first task is thus to convince Sceledrus that what he actually saw he in fact did not see, and Palaestrio’s idea is to make the gullible slave believe that whom he saw kissing is Philocomasium’s twin-sister, who has recently arrived from Athens with her lover. The plan works, and in the second half of the play the only task remaining is to rescue Philocomasium from the Captain. Palaestrio is ready with another plan: Periplectomenus should provide a courtesan and her maid, the courtesan should pretend to be married to the old man; the maid takes a ring of Periplectomenus’ to the Captain with the story that the new wife has regretted being married to the old man, yet she cannot resist the charms of the “handsome”, “Achilles-like” Captain and is dying to sleep with him. The plan works: in order to get Periplectomenus’

“wife” (the courtesan called Acroteleutium), the Captain has to get rid of Philocomasium, the situation being especially ripe fro this, since her “twin sister” and “mother” (who exists in Athens but is in fact not there) can take her home. So the Captain allows Philocomasium to leave with all her jewellery and dresses, in the arms of the “sailor bringing news from the ship where Philocomasium’s mother is sick” (the Sailor is of course Pleusicles) and Palaestrio also leaves with them, given as a gift to Philocomasium. Finally, Periplectomeus, under the pretext that the Captain has tried to assault his “wife”, gives him a good beating and the Cook even swindles a hundred drachmas out of him. The play ends with the Captain promising to reform in a didactic little speech, ending as follows: “… justice has been done. Serve all lechers so, and lechery would grow less rife; the sinners would have more fear and mend their ways”

(lines 1435-36).

The motif of the twin-sisters can be taken as almost the opposite of Manaechmi and Amphitruo; there we have two identical male twins (in Amphitruo, one of each pair is played by the gods, Jupiter and Mercury; in Manaechmi, there are “real” twins), so we have two persons for one name, two selves for one self; in Miles, in the first half of the play

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Philocomasium plays the role of “Honoria”, too, so there is one woman for two names, one self for two selves. This is a farcical element, yet it is combined with motifs of the comedy of trickery, since mistaken identity is here deliberately arranged by Palaestrio, who is responsible for the whole plot (even in the second half of the play, he cooks up the plan; it is his duty to fetch certain characters, e. g. the Captain from the Forum, when the time comes; he tells Periplectomenus what kind of women are needed to play a trick on the Captain, he gives

“director’s instructions”, etc.) Thus, the title is slightly misleading (the protagonist, in the first place, is rather Palaestrio, who is not almost always on the scene, but organises everything) and this is the only weakness of the play; though in the first 78 lines we hear the conversation of the Soldier, and his ‘satellite’ or ‘parasite’, Artotrogus, the latter praising the former in disgustingly exaggerated terms in order to be able to keep his place at the dinner-table, the Captain soon disappears and he is not to be seen till the comedy’s middle (Artotrogus disappears for good). It is when the Captain leaves after line 78 that Palaestrio’s Prologue comes, introducing us, in the manner of Pan in Menander’s Old Cantankerous, to the scene (with two (twin-) houses, similarly to Menander’s stage), to the main characters, to the background to the present story and to the outcome (“And we’re going to play some laughable tricks on him [Sceledrus]”) and even the basic trick is didactically explained to the audience, with whom a kind of contract or allegiance is set up:

But we don’t want you to be deceived; so don’t forget, One girl is going to pretend to be two girls,

One from this house and one from the that: same girl, But pretending to be a different one – all right?

That’s how the jailer is going to be bamboozled (150-154, emphasis original).

So we might see some fine stock-characters of Roman New Comedy: the swaggering soldier himself: vain, gullible, telling exaggerated lies but basically cowardly; Artotrogus: a satellite or parasite (parasitos originally meant simply ‘guest’, then became the ‘guest who outstays his visit’ and then a parasite in the modern sense of the word, whose sole role is to praise the other, yet he does so with plenty of asides telling the opposite); Palaestrio: the clever slave (the former “Dossennus”), the plot-maker, who plans everything carefully, but is able to improvise as well, a wonderful talker, always in league with the audience and the lovers against a stupid, vain, elderly man; and there is also Sceledrus, the credulous, cowardly, foolish slave, the laughing-stock (the former “Maccus”).

The good-humoured bachelor, Periplectomenus, also plays a major role; he is a kind-hearted but cynical fellow, a helper for the lovers, yet he would never marry himself; he has a low opinion of women (but is on good terms with the courtesans); children for him are a nuisance, he enjoys his “freedom”, loves to eat, drink and to play a trick or two, and he is a real ‘Pander’. And much depends on Philocomasium, not a courtesan but a concubine, having all the trickery and guts of a maid; clever, devoted to her lover and plays her two roles beautifully and with great gusto. The gang of the helpers (considerably outnumbering the victims of trickery) is supplemented by the professional courtesan, Acroteleutium, who has a low opinion of women but even a lower of men but can act wonderfully; and Milphidippa, her artful maid, corresponding to Palaestrio in the female world. Plautus – like Menander – is also guilty of the proliferation of servants: there is also a certain Lurcio, a younger slave in a minor role, who plays the drunkard (cf. Trinculo in The Tempest), an unnamed Slave at the very end of the play, and a cook (Cario), always a farcical character, wishing to carve out a “certain part” from the Captain (but he does not).

Thus, Plautus’ play has a meta-theatrical interest in two ways: there are characters whose duty is to play tricks on others within the play; the deceivers are wonderful actors, their main duty being to personify somebody else than they are, or to arrange and direct the scenes,

providing stage-props etc.; Philocomasium will play the role of her own sister, Acroteleutium the role of Periplectomenus’ wife, Pleusicles, the true lover of Philocomasium, will get the role of a sailor, and Periplectomenus does not only provide the stage-setting (housing the lovers and allowing for a hole to be cut into the party-wall of the two houses so that Philocomasium may play her double role) but the disguise for Pleusicles as well (cf. lines 1182-89), and Palaestrio – as we saw – is the absolute pivot, the stone on whom the wheel turns. The deceived party, Sceledrus, who is not to be seen in the second half of the play, and the Captain, who takes his role, are a wonderful ‘audience’ in the sense that they take everything literally, they cannot even fathom that somebody wants to deceive them and they are blinded by well-definable human weaknesses, stupidity and vanity respectively. Yet the way one makes up a plan (writes and directs a plot) and the process whereby one loses his eyesight and believes that he has not seen what he has seen is several times commented on and even analysed as well; there is some aesthetic-philosophical interest in Plautus, especially in the first half of the play, yet he does not exploit the theme of one self playing two selves (‘self-es’); it has a function in the comedy but no depth for philosophy.

Periplectomenus describes the thinking Palaestrio, cooking up his plan, thus:

[to the audience] Watch him, do. Look at his attitude…scowling brow, deep in thought…knocking at his breast – to see if his wits are at home! Turning away now… left hand on left hip … doing sums with his right … slap, right hand on right thigh – a hard slap, too, he’s having trouble with his thinking machine. Snapping his fingers – that means he’s at a loss…keeps changing his attitude… shaking his head, ‘no, that won’t do’. He’s got something cooking but doesn’t want to serve it up half-baked – ants it done to a turn. […]

Hah! now that’s better … that’s a fine attitude… just what a slave in a comedy ought to look like. […] Wake up. Show a leg. It’s morning. (line 201 and passim)

Thinking is presented here as being in a trance, as dreaming, yet the speech – implicitly – also acknowledges that there is no way to enter the other’s mind; all we may do is to record the outward behaviour of the person, but that will not give us what thinking is; we might as well describe the working of a machine and then claim that it was ‘thinking’. This is especially interesting in the context of the first conversation between the Captain, and his parasite, Artotrogus:

Pyrgopolynices: You are as good as a thought-reader, my dear man.

Artotrogus: Well, it’s my job, isn’t it, sir, to know your mind?

Of course, it is not difficult to read the Captain’s mind – after all it is always on women and his own heroism – yet in this marginal exchange it seems to be suggested that only an ‘artful rogue’, a flatterer is able to read the other’s mind, as if the only thing we could know about the ‘inner’ life of another person is that he does not think about the others, and not even about himself but constantly of himself and, all what we can gather about the ‘outer’ – be it as detailed as Periplectomenus’ analysis, or not – will not reveal more than bodily movements which are still in need of interpretation, and they are nothing more than signs which might be taken (‘translated’) as signs of thinking. We see what we see, and if we are possessed by a harmful passion we might see things in the wrong way, and we might be deceived easily;

“facts” may be manipulated into their opposites, since it is more important what we believe to be true than what we actually see. These commonplaces of comedy almost get a deeper treatment in Plautus, yet he, especially towards the end, chooses to concentrate on farce and some conventional morality.

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4. 3. Terence

Terence (Publius Terentius Afer, c. 185-159, B. C.) belongs to the next generation of comedy-writers, yet he is one of the most mysterious classic authors. The first problem is his obscure origin: he seems to have been born in Carthage and to have been brought to Rome as a slave, soon to be liberated and educated by his master, the senator Terentius Lucanus, yet it is a mystery which people he belonged to (was he a Berber? was he Greek? maybe an Italian from the South of Italy, the son of one of Hannibal’s captives?) and it is even more mysterious how he became one of the greatest stylists of the Latin language (is it exceptional talent? or was his mother Italian?). It is a fact that he was a teaching manual for Latin composition till the 19^th century and his lucid and elegantly simple Latin had come closest to the admired Greek style for the first time in the literature written in Latin. His death is also surrounded with mystery; he simply disappears around 159-160, B. C., perhaps on an errand to Greece or Asia Minor, to find more plays by Menander.

What we know for certain is that soon after his liberation he became friendly with the so-called Scipionic Circle (Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus himself, then the Greek historian Polybius, the Greek philosopher Panaetius, the Roman satirist Lucilius, and, most importantly for Terence, Lucius Ambivius Turpio, who was an actor-producer and staged all his plays); his exceptional good looks surely played a part in that. But he was far less well-received than Plautus: he was charged, in his lifetime, and even after, with all sorts of intellectual crimes: that his noble friends wrote his plays, that he was simply “translating”

Greek plays, and that he was plagiarising from earlier Latin authors. In his prologues – which are already divorced from the plots and comment on his critics rather than telling the summary of the action – he boldly defends himself; he points out that nothing is ever said which has not been said before, that the real translators only turn a good Greek play into a bad Roman one, while he contaminates (contaminare) only in the sense of the great Plautus: he selects what he wants from any source he likes and he combines them, because inventiveness lies in precisely that. Terence is the first author who seeks something new, for whom novelty – in structure, content and style alike – is a great virtue. Thus, it might well be the case that he is much closer to Menander than Plautus and it is again a fact that out of Plautus’ twenty surviving plays only three are surely after Menander, while out of the six Terencian comedies four follow the Greek master. Yet Terence, an outsider for ever, is neither too Greek, nor too Roman, and this has given him his timeless quality. He is more serious, yet not only from a moral but also from a psychological point of view; he is passionately interested in both the darker and the lighter side of human character, but often he puts the features not into various, black or white characters but into a single person. He understands, yet he always criticises as well, preparing the way rather for the ‘problem play’ than for the full-fledged, vulgar, down-to-earth comedy. He was looking for what was genuinely human; it is no wonder that it is line 77 from The Self-Tormentor, “homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” (‘I am human, so any human interest is my concern’, spoken by Chremes) which has become proverbial.

There are several reasons for his not being as popular as Plautus, well beyond the envy of the older playwrights having less powerful patrons. One is that when he divided the prologues from the rest of the play, he could rely more on surprise than anticipation and this was very unusual then; he is less didactic; the farcical bawdy completely disappears from his plays (Terence’s slaves speak just as impeccably as their masters); he is more subdued and sophisticated; he dislikes conventions like off-stage births, conversations from the stage with people indoors and the revelations of secrets on the stage; there is no noisy song and dance;

he addresses a more aristocratic, attentive and educated audience (he himself belonging to the philhellenes, with the deliberate intention of following the Greek models more closely); he employs more dialogue instead of the monologue; he dispenses with divine intervention Back to the Contents

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(deus-ex-machina); his servus is not so much a trickster but a bungler, trying to keep his master from wrong-doing; and it is him who also introduces the intricately woven double plot (with the exception of Hecyra), in which often the lives of two or three young men are constantly juxtaposed, producing an interplay of character and giving the opportunity to the author to keep an ideal balance between a character-type and an individual, a kind of person, who, at the same time has a carefully drawn personal portrait.

The accepted order of his plays are:

Andria (The Woman of Andros, from Menander’s Andria, 166 B. C., performed at the ludi Megalenses)

Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law, based on the play Hekyra by Apollodorus of Carystus, 185 B. C., ludi Megalenses, a failure because people were attracted by a rope-dancer in a nearby side-show);

Heutontimorumenos (The Self-Tormentor, from a play by Menander with the same title, 163 B. C., ludi Megalenses)

Eunuchus (from Menander’s play with the same title, 161 B. C., ludi Megalenses, a big success the basis for Wycherley’s The Country Wife)

Phormio (based on another Apollodorius play, Epidikazomenos, ‘The Law-Suit’, Phormio is a helpful parasite, he is reborn as Scapin in Moliére’s The Cheats of Scapin; 161 B. C. ludi Romani) and

Adelphoe (based on a Menandros-play called Adelphoe but not the one used by Plautus in his Stichus; 160 B. C. at the funeral games for Amemilius Paulus).