ANCIENT ROMAN COMEDY Although no contemporaneous physical evidence for the floruit of Roman comic theater (ca. 210–160 BCE) survives, the extant plays of Plautus (d. 184 BCE) and Terence (d. 159 BCE), later artistic representations of Roman theater, and other testimony suggest that a large part of its humor was immediate and visual. Roman comedy’s elaborate semiotics of masks, costumes, and associated stock characters instantly marked a performance as comic, specifically in the tradition of the palliata or “play in Greek dress,” as Roman comedies based on Greek New Comedy models were called, and so neither tragic nor a form of native Italian Comedy. For example, at least some of Roman comedy’s clever slaves sported grotesque masks with megaphone mouths, red hair, and clown’s feet, while old men might be instantly recognizable from their walking sticks and exaggeratedly slow gait, and pimps by their colorful attire and goatish beards. Unusual plays, such as Plautus’s Amphitryon, the sole surviving ancient example of mythical travesty, called for unusual measures: There the extremely pregnant Alcmena, played by a male actor (as was the case for all roles in the palliata), was costumed accordingly and is made the target of a barrage of pregnancy and satiety jokes whenever she appears onstage. Use of Stage-Space in Roman Comedies The painted backdrops of the temporary Roman stages of this period featured one to three houses and could have humorously highlighted differences between, for example, the domiciles of pimps and upstanding citizens that often were juxtaposed in the comedies. The stage space, whatever its precise configuration, and the audience’s area themselves no doubt were manipulated for humorous effect, as in Roman comedy’s ubiquitous eavesdropping scenes, or in the comic routine featuring a “running slave,” who probably moved through the theater and onto the stage to bombastically and sometimes metacomically (e.g., Plautus, Amphitryon 984–990) demand that audience members give way so that he can deliver a message from town, the harbor, for example. Broad and physical humor was regularly enacted at center stage, as when Roman comedy’s über-pimp Ballio in Plautus’s Pseudolus repeatedly cracks his whip as he orders the members of his household to celebrate his birthday in an absurdly tyrannical song (133–229), or when the enforcers Sparax and Turbalio forcefully keep the pimp Labrax from absconding with Ampelisca and Palaestra in Plautus’s Rope (706–891). Even in Terence’s generally less boisterous comedy, there is considerable commotion onstage, as when in Adelphoe, the sanctimonious pimp Sannio is pummeled there (155–253), or with the arrival of the braggart soldier’s mock-heroic brigade of slaves armed with household implements at Eunuch 771ff. Three plays of Plautus—Persian (753ff.), Pseudolus (1246ff.), and Stichus (641ff.)— end in scenes of drunkenness and dancing. While details are largely lost, it is clear that the complex synesthesia created by Roman comedy’s stage business amused its audiences in myriad ways. Plots of Roman Comedy The plots of Roman comedy, along with the characters it inherited from Greek New Comedy, were stereotypical and offered limited options for development, circumscribed as they were by established motifs, patterns of action, conventions, and expected behaviors that could be endlessly repeated. Maurizio Bettini reduces the plots of the 20 extant plays of Plautus to a fundamental opposition between possession and desire, which involves a transfer of goods and articulation of two basic themes: the distribution of women and the distribution of wealth. Most commonly, a female (a prostitute or a potentially free, marriageable person) is sought by a young man in love (adulescens) with the aid of a clever slave (servus callidus), a trusted subaltern who eagerly transgresses social norms to help secure his young master’s beloved. The typical obstacles to this “acquisition” include a pimp (leno), a soldier (miles) or some other rival, as well as a parsimonious patriarch (senex). 36 Ancient Roman Comedy While the outcomes of plots were fixed and predictable, there was scope for creative reworking of some plot elements and especially the character types themselves, in that those stock characters always could be written still larger than their real-life counterparts. Thus, in Plautus’s Merchant the adulescens Charinus mawkishly delivers a catalogue of love’s vices, which include not only “Anxiety, pain, and over-refinement” (19), but also “Insomnia, work, wandering, fright, and flight; / Foolishness, stupidity, and irrationality on top of all that, / Brainless insensitude and lack of control, / Recklessness and passion, spitefulness, / Slacking, greed, sloth, injustice, / Poverty, abuse, and financial loss, / And both nonand hyper-talkativeness” (25–31). Ballio ratchets up the stereotype of the avaricious pimp to new levels in a famous scene of ritualistic abuse (Pseudolus 357ff.) by welcoming a bombardment of insults with shocking aplomb, for example: CALIDORUS “Father-and-mother-beater!” BALLIO “Correction: father-and-mother-murderer. / Better that than having to feed them. Now, was that wrong?” (367–368). Plautus’s conventionally manipulative prostitute Phronesium in Truculentus is so mercenary that she vigorously asserts in song: “When I ponder it over in my heart, it’s a terrible lie that’s told about us women: / We are given far too little credit for being as wicked as we naturally are” (451–452). The vainglorious soldier is absurdly represented by Plautus’s Pyrgopolynices in Miles Gloriosus, who when asked the simple question, “Do you want anything else?” replies: “Yes, that I be no more handsome than I am, / seeing that my good looks bring me only trouble” (1086–1087). The senex Euclio in Plautus’s Pot of Gold is said to be so miserly that he places a bag over his mouth when sleeping, lest he suffer the loss of any air (302–303), for example. In addition to these well-over-the-top stereotypical characters, Roman comedy employed an assorted pack of clowns (bomolochoi), most often clever slaves or parasites, who were at hand to deflate an emotionally intense scene, as Sosia in Amphitryon, whose irreverent asides to the audience about Alcmena’s pregnant state undercut the seriousness of her husband Amphitryon’s charges of adultery against her and her earnest defense of her chastity throughout a potentially discomfiting scene (633–860). Metacomedy Metacomedy is an extensively utilized source of humor in Roman comedy. Literary self-awareness is a defining feature of Latin literature from its beginnings, given its derivative status from Greek literature, and the impulse to expose fictional constructs is perhaps all the stronger in a tightly circumscribed genre like Roman comedy. Plautine comedy has an especially pronounced tendency to broadcast its status as theater-in-the-process-of-being-performed: Characters often explicitly refer to the stock roles they are playing (e.g., Comedy of Asses 174–175; Pseudolus 1081–1083); comment on the audience’s reception of the play (e.g., Merchant 160; Carthaginian 1224); and directly refer to details of theatrical production (e.g., Curculio 462–466; Menaechmi 402–404). In Plautus’s Persian, the clever slave Toxilus enlists a parasite (Saturio) to lend him the use of his daughter in a scheme to entrap a pimp. When Saturio asks where he can obtain her necessary costume, Toxilus quips: “Get it from the stage-manager. / He’s obligated to provide it, as per the contract with the aediles” (the Roman officials who funded theater at public festivals) (160–161); the mise-en-abyme structure of this deceitful playwithin-the-play could not be clearer. Chrysalus in Plautus’s Two Bacchises unexpectedly merges a frivolous remark about a fellow actor’s skill with a critique of the performance of a famous contemporary actor in a previous play of Plautus’s: “It’s not hearing of his success that hurts me—it’s your acting. / Even though I love Epidicus as much as I do myself, / there’s no play I’d rather not see if Pellio’s in it” (213–215). There are marked differences between Terence and Plautus in their employment of metacomic effects. As the examples immediately above illustrate, Plautine characters reveal their theatrical underpinnings more frequently and explicitly than those of Terence, whose metacomic moves are more subtle. In Terence’s Andria, the senex Simo believes—mistakenly it turns out—that he is being duped by his clever slave Davus into believing that his son has impregnated another woman so that the son can escape marrying his father’s choice of a wife. Hearing her (actually) give birth offstage, a stock situation in New Comedy, Simo exclaims: “What! So soon? Ridiculous! Once she heard me / In front of the door she stepped it way up. / Your timing is a little off there, Davus” (474–476). Similar metacomic subtlety surrounds the figure of Parmeno, an aspiring clever slave in Terence’s Eunuch. Parmeno misjudges the character of Thais, Terence’s skillfully drawn “hooker with a heart of gold,” and arranges an elaborate ruse to allow his Ancient Roman Comedy 37 master Chaerea to gain access to Pamphila, a girl Thais has placed under her protection. The scheme results in the rape of the girl, which is brutally described by Chaerea during the play (580–605), and Parmeno is exposed as a bumbler when Thais’s slave Pythias misleads him into believing that Chaerea is being tortured and so tricks him into betraying his young master to his father, an egregious violation of the clever slave’s code (982–996). Adding metacomic insult to injury, Pythias pointedly gloats: “I actually used to think you were a very clever fellow” (1011), where the adjective callidus marks Parmeno’s utter failure to win the day as a clever slave directing an internal play. Illusion of Improvisation Another form of metacomedy that is widespread in Roman comedy, especially Plautus’s, is improvisation or, more precisely, the creation of an illusion of it within scripted drama. This device is most clearly illustrated by Plautus’s Pseudolus, a typical comedy in which the clever slave and the play’s namesake plot to obtain a beloved prostitute for his young master (Calidorus). The play opens with Pseudolus’s blustery promise to Calidorus that he has a foolproof plan to purchase the girl from Ballio, who has arranged to sell the girl to a soldier. Left alone on stage, Pseudolus informs the audience that he is clueless and must improvise: “Where to start weaving your web of deceit, / Or how to bring that design to completion? / But I’ll have to be just like a poet: / He takes up his tablet and though he searches for / What doesn’t exist at all, he still finds it, and / Makes complete fiction seem like the truth. / That’s it! I’ll become a poet and find / The twenty minae which are nowhere!” (399–405). “Poet” (poeta) here is both a generic word for “poet” and “playwright” in particular and points to Pseudolus’s larger theatrical power. Even though an abundance of stereotypical plots to “get the girl” is available to him, Pseudolus instead stresses the need for novelty within a circumscribed tradition, or as he puts it in a subsequent address to the audience: “Now, it’s the duty of every actor to be original / Enough to bring something original on stage: / If he can’t, let him step aside for someone who can” (568–570). Pseudolus even warns Calidorus’s father—the usual target for trickery of this kind—to be on the lookout for a scheme to defraud him of the needed cash (508–509). At roughly midplay, Pseudolus again playfully informs the audience that he has no plan: “I have a sneaking suspicion that you all suspect / I’ve only promised to do these daring deeds / In order to entertain you during this play, / And there’s little chance I’ll do what I promised . . .” (562–565). He then promises to devise a surefire scheme and leaves the stage empty, only to reappear shortly to triumphantly announce that he now has a concrete plan that is guaranteed to succeed (574–594). But as soon as Pseudolus’s celebratory song is finished, the soldier’s assistant fortuitously arrives, inspiring the slave to declare: “This new and sudden situation calls for a new and sudden solution. / First order of business: all my previous plans just flew out the window!” (601–602). A richly metatheatrical and ultimately successful play-within-the-play commences, and we never learn what Pseudolus’s supposedly ingenious plan was. Plautus has brilliantly duped his audience into believing that a scripted comedy is being improvised before their eyes. An equally vivid example of seeming improvisation on a smaller scale, and with a different tone and effect, occurs in Plautus’s Pot of Gold when the miser Euclio pathetically turns to audience members for information about his stolen treasure and even accuses them of the theft (713–725). Tragedy as a Target of Humor Tragedy based on Greek models flourished simultaneously with early comedy at Rome and so is a ready target of metatheatrical humor in Plautus and Terence. Plautus’s Rope even moves beyond mere mockery of the stilted language and sententiousness of tragedy (as it is seen through comic eyes) and engages it in a kind of dialogue, appropriately so in that Rope overtly addresses questions of human justice and fate (see especially the prologue). This process of pointedly juxtaposing the two genres is initiated in the opening scene when the gruff and uneducated country slave Sceparnio assesses the damage of the previous night’s storm through a reference to a scene from a lost tragedy of Euripides: “The wind unroofed the cottage! Did I say ‘wind’? / Hardly a wind, but it must have been an Alkmene of Euripides / That blew every last tile off the roof / And created all new light and windows for us!” (85–88). Throughout Rope, characters unexpectedly launch into tragic diction, as when the pimp’s friend and fellow shipwreck victim Charmides direly speculates about the girls they presume are lost at sea in the pronounced style of early Roman tragedy: “I believe they’re providing piscine provisions in the 38 Ancient Roman Comedy deep” (513). The question of whether or not comedy can, as with tragedy, engage in serious discourse about the human condition is eventually raised in a later dialogue (1235–1253). Terence, who parodies tragedy less frequently than Plautus, in a moment of extremely dark humor in Eunuch powerfully has Chaerea, in his detailed description of his rape of Pamphila, quote a Roman tragedian’s line about the omnipotence of Jupiter (the arch-sexual predator)— “He whose thunder rattles the lofty foundation of the sky” (590)—which clearly had empowered him to carry out the rape. Fathers as Targets of Humor While Roman institutions (e.g., legal, military, religious, culinary) and their associated figures are sometimes targets for parody or satire in Roman comedy, the most pervasively mocked figure in the genre is the senex, who as the champion of conservative moral values is closely associated with the allpowerful paterfamilias of everyday Roman life. Roman tradition granted absolute power over legal offspring to the eldest living male, including the right to sentence them to death. The paterfamilias only relinquished this power over his descendants at death (or marriage in the case of females who transferred their fathers’ power to their husbands), until which time the descendants technically owned no property. The legal status of Roman children thus differed little from that of slaves. Not surprisingly, much of extant Roman comedy reflects the tensions that informed relationships between patriarchs and their children, especially their sons. A good portion of Roman comedy’s humor comes at the expense of the father of the family, as in the standard plot wherein a son seeks to fleece his father to finance his love affair. Three extant plays of Plautus (Comedy of Asses, Casina, and Merchant) in fact focus on sexual rivalries between fathers and sons (cf. also Two Bacchises, where the motif is less central, especially its epilogue: “And we certainly wouldn’t have performed this play, if we hadn’t previously / Seen fathers become their sons’ rivals at brothels,” 1209–1210). In these amorous contests, the senex, in accordance with a comic code that makes love the province of the young, is doomed to failure, and he is typically depicted as physically and morally repulsive in his quest. Lysidamus, who lusts after a 16-year-old household slave in Casina, is persistently portrayed as a goat-like figure, associated with foul smells and insatiable lust, and at play’s end is hilariously humiliated by his wife’s devising a transvestite play-within-the-play to sexually denigrate him. In Merchant, Demipho initially is presented as a stereotypically harsh father, raised on the farm and allegedly endowed with its idealized, old-fashioned values. But counter to both tradition and the conventional wisdom of comedy, Demipho celebrates his uncontrollable passion for his son’s girlfriend as age appropriate: “Once you’re an old man, that’s the time / For love and leisure, while you’re still capable” (552–553). He eventually is chastised by his son’s friend Eutychus: “The idea that a man your age / Would steal your lovesick young son’s girlfriend that he bought with his own money!” (972–973), and, in reference to his behavior, the elderly slave Syra delivers a monologue denouncing the double standard for males and females in Roman sexual mores (817–829). A metatheatrical resolution (“this play will be shorter,” 1006) saves Demipho the further shame of his wife’s censure, and the play closes with the proposal of a comic law banning old men from love affairs and requiring them to support their sons’ affairs with prostitutes (1016–1024). The senex Demaenetus in Comedy of Asses, by contrast, is a milder father than Demipho but still appears ridiculous from the instant he calmly decides to support his son’s financially debilitating affair with a prostitute instead of raging about it “as other [typically comic] fathers do” (50). The ridiculous Demaenetus eventually insists on “a meal and a night” (736) with his son’s lover, a tryst that demands the son’s complicity against his mother, who nonetheless learns of her husband’s plan and prevents its realization by leading him home (937), that is, in language that playfully reverses traditional gender roles in Roman marriage ritual. In Adelphoe, Terence presents less farcical, and more psychologically nuanced Roman fathers, of both the harsh (Demea) and mild (Micio) varieties, and the play offers its audience a richly dialectical examination of competing parental philosophies, but Adelphoe nonetheless participates in the interrogation of traditional paternal authority that is so characteristic of Roman comedy. David M. Christenson