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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2011
Twenty-one plays survive under the name of Plautus. Add the six by Terence and the fragmentary record from Andronicus in the mid-third century to Turpilius late in the second, and the result is a significant corpus with something for nearly everyone: an extensive record of Latin at a key period in its history, a major arena for the Romans' ongoing struggle with Hellenism, a genre more central to later Western drama than anything Greek, and, however well scholarship may sometimes obscure the fact, plays that are genuinely funny and replete with the sights, sounds, and smells of what passes for daily life in the Roman Republic. Small wonder the comoedia palliata once attracted some of the great names in Roman studies. What Alison Sharrock was taught to regard as only ‘a stereotype-ridden exercise in lamentable literary secondariness’ (ix) must from the beginning have meant something quite different to Ritschl and Leo, not to mention Studemund, whose eyesight never recovered from the strain of transcribing the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus. How did the study of comedy ever become a literary backwater? And what has happened to it since?
1 G. Studemund, T. Macci Plauti fabularum reliquiae Ambrosianae codicis rescripti Ambrosiani Apographum (1889) thus ended his Prooemium with Catullus: ‘Ni te plus oculis meis amarem!’ It is no reproach to subsequent scholarship that Ritschl, F., Parerga zu Plautus und Terenz (1845)Google Scholar and Leo, F., Plautinische Forschungen (1895, 2 edn 1912) continue to command attentionGoogle Scholar.
2 The original German pagination is supplied, with the addenda to Franco Munari's edition, Elementi plautini in Plauto (1960) keyed to the new English pagination. The significance of Fraenkel's work is nicely summarized by the English editors, xi–xxii.
3 Doing so is no joke. The paragraph beginning on p. 113, for example, does not end until the bottom of p. 119, with the relevant notes found on pp. 336–40 and addenda on pp. 408–9. On the plus side, Greek and Latin quotations are translated, a particular kindness under the circumstances.
4 To judge the translation, p. 286, compare the original: ‘Wenn eine Verkettung günstiger Umstände diese Komödien erhalten hat, so danken sie ihr wahres Leben doch nur ihrem Wesen und ihrem Werte. Noch nach Jahrtausenden sind sie nicht Gerümpel und Kuriosität, sondern fortwirkender Ausdruck schöpferischer Kräfte. … Das Unzerstörbare, das sie in sich bergen, ist nicht so sehr der Stoff der attischen Dramen als der Geist italischer Sprache und italischen Witzes und darüber hinaus das Dichtertum des einen Mannes, des Plautus aus Sarsina’ (421–2).
5 Comparison of the two books from the standpoint of method and reception would be instructive. The first edition of Vergils epische Technik appeared in 1903, the third in 1915. A translation by H. and D. Harvey and F. Robertson appeared in 1993 as Virgil's Epic Technique.
6 Fraenkel's book, itself in dialogue with his teacher Leo's Plautinische Forschungen, was dedicated to Jachmann and Jachmann's to Fraenkel, but the three scholars brought different values to somewhat different questions. Duckworth, G., The Nature of Roman Comedy (1952), 384–5 unfairly conflates themGoogle Scholar.
7 Barber, C. L., Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959)Google Scholar, which based its own thesis on Shakespeare's ‘participation in native saturnalian traditions of the popular theater and the popular holidays’ (3), is Segal's explicit model: ‘if Barber's premise is at all valid for Elizabethan drama … how much more so would it be for ancient Rome’ (9).
8 So Gratwick, A. S., CR 20 (1970), 335: ‘they obscure the argument’Google Scholar; Richardson, L. Jr., AJP 91 (1970)Google Scholar, 371: ‘no real purpose other than ornament’, but note Collart, J., Latomus 28 (1969), 218: ‘c'est là un grand attrait de son livre, de montrer comment cet anti-conformisme plautinien se tempère par la suite sous forme de procédés comique chez les descendants de Plaute …’Google Scholar
9 Wright, 151. Segal was equally beside this particular mark: ‘Terence, of course, represents an entirely different tradition: drama for an aristocratic coterie’ (7). Segal tried to make amends in The Death of Comedy (2001), 220–54, but Terence still awaits his due from modern critics. The basics are set out with energy and acumen by Lefèvre, E. in Suerbaum, W. (ed.), Handbuch der lateinischen Literatur der Antike. Erster Band: Die archaische Literatur (2002), 232–54Google Scholar. See too the reliable, if somewhat conservative introduction by Kruschwitz, P., Terenz (2004)Google Scholar and the quite progressive essays commissioned for Ramus 33 (2004) by Boyle, A. J.CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 This casual arrangement was first argued in detail by Goldberg, S. M., ‘Plautus on the Palatine’, JRS 88 (1998), 1–20Google Scholar, building on the work of Hanson, J. A., Roman Theater-Temples (1959)Google Scholar. For reception of this idea, see Green, J. R., ‘Theatre production: 1996–2006’, Lustrum 50 (2008), 275–6Google Scholar. The seating initiative of 194 b.c.e. is discussed below, nn. 36 and 37.
11 I have put a fuller discussion of Marshall's strengths and limitations on record at Phoenix 62 (2008), 370–2Google Scholar.
12 Repetition gets a whole chapter, 163–249. On Callimachus and comedy, see further nn. 33 and 34 below. For more on Sharrock's achievement, see Dorota Dutsch's review elsewhere in this volume.
13 Wright's demonstration enables us to speak of a specifically palliata style: we should no longer be content with vague nods toward ‘archaic elements’ in Plautus. The essays by J. Blänsdorf in Suerbaum's Handbuch, op. cit. (n. 9), 170–82, 229–31, 255–9, greatly facilitate access to the fragmentary poets.
14 H., Ep. 2.1.170–6 made Plautus a benchmark, but he more commonly appears in the kind of ‘canon’ echoed at 55–9 and recorded for Volcacius Sedigitus (ap. Gell. 15.24), which ranks Plautus second (Terence sixth), and Varro, Men. 399 (fr. 50 Funaioli). The effort to define a Plautine corpus described by Gell. 3.3 is post-Terentian. See on all this Parker, H. N., ‘Plautus v. Terence; audience and popularity re-examined’, AJPh 117 (1996), 585–617, esp. 588–90Google Scholar and Deufert, M., Textgeschichte und Rezeption der plautinischen Komödien im Altertum (2002), 25–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 See too Gratwick, A. S., ‘Brauchen wir einen neuen Plautus?’ in Stärk, E. and Vogt-Spira, G. (eds), Dramatische Wäldchen. Festschrift für Eckard Lefèvre zum 65. Geburtstag (2000), 321–44Google Scholar. Whether the new Budé Terence being prepared by Benjamin Victor will represent a comparable advance is uncertain. For its prospects, see Victor, B., ‘New manuscript sources of the Terence-text’, in Kruschwitz, P. (ed.), Terentius poeta (2007), 1–14Google Scholar and ‘Terentiana’, CQ 57 (2007), 117–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 They also have some quirks, the most obvious being in orthography, which tends to follow the MSS even when this leads to inconsistencies. So Cist. gives us cum (preposition and conjunction), maximis but maxumus, Sicyone and Sicioni. For the operating principles, see Questa, C., ‘Per un'edizione di Plauto’, Giornate filologiche ‘Francesco della Corte’ II (Genoa 2001), 61–83Google Scholar, orthography on 68–73.
17 Two volumes of essays dedicated to the play have appeared: Raffaelli, R. and Tontini, A. (eds), Cistellaria (Sarsina, 27 settembre 2003), Lecturae Plautinae Sarsinates (2004)Google Scholar and Hartkamp, R. and Hurka, F. (eds), Studien zu Plautus' Cistellaria (2004)Google Scholar.
18 Initial findings were reported in W. Stockert, ‘Die Wiedererweckung eines Codex (Virtuelle Arbeit am Codex Ambrosianus des Plautus)’, RAL Ser. 9a 19 (2008), 407–34, with excellent illustrations. The multi-spectral techniques employed are similar to those applied with such spectacular results to the Archimedes codex. Full, illustrated explanation of the procedure is available at http://archimedespalimpsest.org.
19 So here, S. offers ‘postilla idem’ in the apparatus, a suggestion of Boris Dunsch. Further conjectures and discussion of them is promised in S.'s forthcoming commentary. The Sarsina convention of a double (sometimes triple) apparatus to report details of scene headings, speaker attributions, etc., then sources, then readings and variants is especially well suited to the unusual requirements of this play. There is unfortunately no provision for acknowledging the Greek model (Menander's Synaristosai), even when, as at 89–93, a fragment of the original almost certainly survives (PCG, fr. 337).
20 Identification of such passages goes back to Langen, P., Plautinische Studien (1886)Google Scholar, with important discussion by Thierfelder, A., De rationibus interpolationum Plautinarum (1929)Google Scholar. There is general consensus about most of them, though what they represent in the history of transmission and how editors should treat them are not equally clear.
21 See S. M. Goldberg, ‘Plautus and his alternatives’, in Hartkamp and Hurka, op. cit. (n. 17), 385–98 and Marshall, C. W., The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy (2006), 266–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The early history of the Plautine text is discussed most recently by Deufert, op. cit. (n. 14), 18–43, a valuable discussion, though probably too acceptive of ‘interpolation’ as defined by his teacher, Otto Zwierlein. S.'s explanation ad 708–22 ‘interpolatori debentur ut vid.’ will, I hope, be expanded in his commentary to embrace additional possibilities.
22 Scholarship has long struggled with the challenge of articulating mime's influence, e.g. McKeown, J. C., ‘Augustan elegy and mime’, PCPhS 25 (1979), 71–84Google Scholar; Fantham, E., ‘Mime: the missing link in Roman literary history’, CW 82(1988), 153–63Google Scholar; Wiseman, T. P., ‘Ovid and the Stage’, Unwritten Rome (2008), 210–30Google Scholar. Valuable work was also done by Cicu, L., Problemi e strutture del mimo a Roma (1988)Google Scholar. For the unreliability of generic labels, see most recently T. P. Wiseman, ‘Praetextae, Togatae and other Unhelpful Categories’, Unwritten Rome, 194–9.
23 cf. Jocelyn, H. D. (ed.), The Tragedies of Ennius (1969)Google Scholar, which devoted its first forty-three pages to the background of Roman tragedy before taking up Ennius. Both editions thus provide service well beyond the ostensibly narrow confines of their mission.
24 The equally clear-headed discussion of this problem by Lebek, W. D., ‘Moneymaking on the Roman stage’, in Slater, W. J. (ed.), Roman Theater and Society (1996), 45–8Google Scholar seems to have escaped his notice and should be added to the bibliography.
25 The letters printed with the fragment are metrical notation, not sigla. A traditional apparatus is also provided when required to record variants and conjectures in the actual words of Laberius, a further complication. Users will decide for themselves how much of the data provided is genuinely helpful.
26 p. 41, n. 73, where it is (rightly) taken seriously. Cic., ad Fam. 7.11.1 pairs Laberius and a Valerius as satiric writers for the stage, while Mart. 5.30.1–4, Juv. 8.185–6 and 13.110–11, and Tert., Valen. 14.4 mention a mimographer called Catullus. Wiseman, P., Catullus and his World (1985), 188–95Google Scholar draws the obvious conclusion.
27 The Latin alternative to planus is grassator, a term of abuse at least as old as Cato, ap. Gell. 11.2, and the words are eventually paired at Petr. 82.2, ‘sive ille planus fuit sive nocturnus grassator’. For the grassator-planus-scurra complex of words, see Préaux, J., ‘Caton et l’ars poetica’, Latomus 25 (1966), 710–25, esp. 717–21Google Scholar.
28 Fontaine, 61–8. Thus ‘gurguliost exercitor’ at Tri. 1014 refers not to a windpipe (gurgulio) but to this parasite, the equivalent of Ep. 592 ‘Epidicus mihi fuit magister’. If he is right about ‘Gorgylio’, the correct name was lost before Varro, who clearly knew the play as Curculio (L. 7.60, 7.71). No Plautine parasite, says F., has a Latin name: Saturio, not from satur but Σάτυρος, i.e. Satyrio (70–2), Peniculus = Penicylus (from πηνίκη ‘toupee + dim. –υλος’, 102–10). Similar arguments lead F. to restore numerous Greek spellings throughout the corpus, e.g. Grymio, Phallio, Pseudylus, Phrynesium.
29 F. meets the obvious grammatical objection by noting that Plautus commonly constructs conloqui and conuenire transitively. He has less to say about the scansion: comĕs could be brevis in longo, though as my colleague Brent Vine reminds me, ĕs (< ess) can be scanned long, as at Amph. 836, Ps. 610. See Leumann, M., Lateinische Laut- u. Formenlehre (1977), 220, 522Google Scholar.
30 So at Ps. 845, ‘si nusquam is coctum’. Also Aul. 325, 429, 457. Plautus much prefers coquo to coquino, but its supine also appears in the cook's grandiose entrance, Aul. 408 ‘ueni in bacchanal coquinatum’.
31 Fontaine, 82, but note Rey, A. et al. , Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. 1 (1993)Google Scholar, s.v. coquin: ‘le nom médiéval coquinus “mendiant” semble une latinisation du français.’ The Processus de vita … S. Yvonis is almost certainly the work of a native French speaker. F. adduces a similar sort of evidence for a verb furtare ‘to steal’, not attested in classical Latin (87), and merdicus (cf. Fr. merdique), ‘not attested in Latin before the Humanist period (fifteenth century and later)’ (155–7). He does not address the possibility of back formations into neo-Latin.
32 Bernstein, F., Ludi publici. Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Entwicklung der öffenlichen Spiele im republikanischen Rom (1998), esp. 234–51Google Scholar and Flaig, E., ‘Entscheidung und Konsens. Zu den Feldern der politischen Kommunikation zwischen Aristokratie und Plebs’, in Jehne, M. (ed.), Demokratie in Rom? Die Rolle des Volkes in der Politik der römischen Republik (1995), 77–127Google Scholar, esp. 100–6 are among those focusing on aristocratic interests. Wiseman, T. P. has long championed a more popular view, as in Roman Drama and Roman History (1998)Google Scholar. Literary critics rarely address the question of audience directly, but see Richlin, A., Rome and the Mysterious Orient (2005), 21–30Google Scholar.
33 Fontaine, 197–200, building on Farrell, J., Vergil's Georgics and the Tradition of Ancient Epic (1991), 296–8Google Scholar. Hunter, R. L., The Shadow of Callimachus (2006), 81–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar discusses the Hellenistic underpinnings of the Latin passage but doubts any direct link between Plautus and Callimachus (82 n. 6). Fontaine's discussion of Ps. is preceded by an analogous claim (192–7) that Mil. 1239–74 and Curc. 162–3 allude directly to Sappho.
34 Specifically of writing, Bac. 728 ‘cape stilum propere et tabellas tu has tibi!’ and more generally, Ba. 753, Mil. 130, Ps. 20. Leo, op. cit. (n. 1), 87–8 presumed translation here of the Greek model. (Traill, A., ‘Acroteleutium's Sapphic infatuation (Miles 1216–83)’, CQ 55 (2005), 518–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar sees ‘a Latin adaptation of a Greek comic parody’ (525) in the Miles passage, not direct parody of Sappho.) For the schemer as poeta, cf. As. 746–809, with its extended joke on writing and lying. The falsehood of poets is of course a Greek commonplace, though Fontaine specifically evokes Call., Hymn to Zeus 65. Sharrock, Reading Roman Comedy (2009), 78–83 makes a similar case for allusions to Callimachus in the Terentian prologues, but with a fuller array of literary arguments in support.
35 The elaborate arrangement of the poem's first fifteen books in triads is largely a scholarly presumption; that Ennius wrote chronologically with such a plan in mind from the beginning is only another one. The orthodox view is summarized by Suerbaum, op. cit. (n. 9), 134–7, but note the bracing scepticism of Zetzel, J. E. G., ‘The influence of Cicero on Ennius’, in Fitzgerald, W. and Gowers, E. (eds), Ennius Perennis (2007), 1–16, esp. 13–14Google Scholar. As often in the early history of Roman literature, one difficult question is thoroughly enmeshed in another, equally difficult question.
36 The source is generally thought to be Valerius Antias, but there are problems with that identification. See Ungern-Sternberg, J. von, ‘Die Einführung spezieller Sitze für die Senatoren bei den Spielen (194 v. Chr.)’, Chiron 5 (1975), 157–63Google Scholar, which should have been cited. Ascon. 70C comments explicitly on Cicero's inconsistency in reporting this initiative.
37 The motives and timing of the initiative (no lex is attested) of 194 b.c.e. are complex. See Gruen, E. S., Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (1992), 202–5Google Scholar, which should also have been cited. The sources speak only of loca senatoria: specific rows of seats in a formal theatre, hardly likely in the improvised venues of the second century, are not mentioned until the lex Roscia theatralis of 67 b.c.e. reserved fourteen rows for equestrians, and even that initiative is problematic. Discussion of the issue is invariably coloured by the Augustan preoccupation with status as embodied in the eventual (and almost equally problematic) lex Iulia theatralis. See Rawson, E., ‘Discrimina ordinum: the Lex Julia Theatralis’, PBSR 55 (1987), 83–114Google Scholar. How many senators would actually have availed themselves of their privilege is of course unknown, though F. seems to assume they were all present in state.
38 The complexity of the Collegium problem was already revealed by Horsfall, N., ‘The Collegium Poetarum’, BICS 23 (1976), 79–95Google Scholar; further discussion in Gruen, E. S., Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (1990), 87–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. What good things can happen when literary critics take historical evidence and historical argument seriously is well represented by Leigh, M., Comedy and the Rise of Rome (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Menaechmi 1, ‘Salutem primum iam a principio propitiam’, is thus represented: a B C D A / B C dd A bb c D. The system, introduced by Handley, E. W., The Dyskolos of Menander (1965), 56–73Google Scholar, was most fully adapted for Latin dramatic verse by Gratwick in his edition of Menaechmi (1993), 40–63.
40 The similarity was noted at least by the time of Caesius Bassus, himself a poet of distinction (GLK 6.250, cf. Quint. 10.1.96). See Gratwick, op. cit. (n. 39), 44–7. Yet podic analysis clearly informs Cicero's own representation of metre a century earlier, e.g. Orat. 173, 218; Tusc. 2.37.
41 Panayotakis, 67–76. Whenever feasible, the metrical scheme is printed with the text. P. does not, however, adopt Gratwick's use of sublinear dots to mark the onset of longa. The full system is adopted for Eunuchus by J. Barsby (1999), 301–4 and Amphitruo by D. Christenson (2000), 56–69.
42 Cicero notes that audiences knew by ear how verse should behave and did not require metrical training to recognize a false quantity (Orat. 173, De or. 3.196, Parad. 3.26).
43 As Fortson duly notes, ‘if progress is to continue to be made … it is essential that we combine the knowledge and methods of several disciplines in equal measure: Classical philology, Classical linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, and generative syntax and phonology’ (269). A tall order: my own limited competence to evaluate his work is itself symptomatic of the larger problem. A better overview from the Classicist's perspective is provided by A. Traill, BMCR 2009.08.41.
44 The Terentian ‘didascaliae’ record both the name of the tibicen, Flaccus, and the kind of tibia he played. The tibicen Marcipor is named in the production note to Pl., Stichus. For what these notes may represent, see Goldberg, S. M., Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic (2005), 69–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 See especially ‘Music and structure in Roman comedy’, AJP 119 (1998), 245–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘When did the tibicen play? Meter and accompaniment in Roman comedy’, TAPA 138 (2008), 3–46Google Scholar.
46 Completion of this essay in December 2010 coincided with the passing of W. G. Arnott, best known for his work on Alexis and Menander, but no less an admirer of Roman comedy and always a significant voice in the Latinists' discussions. His commitment too lives on in these works.