Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

FOOTNOTES

[1] Am. Jour. Phil., 1927, 105.

[2] Livius and Naevius were both very fond of the septenarii; the iambic tetrameter appears in the tragic fragments of Naevius once; cretics are found in the Equos Trojanus, and bacchiacs apparently in Naevius’ Danae and in his Lycurgus. Fraenkel, Hermes (1927), 357 ff., has shown that the trochaic septenarius (quadratus) was an old Latin meter. We need not, however, assume with him that it was derived from the Greek. As a marching rhythm it is too natural to require explanation. The assumption of an Indo-European Urvers needs to be exiled from our books. Song and dance are very old.

[3] See Cambridge Ancient History, VII, 644.

[4] See Duckett, Studies in Ennius, 56, who revises the views of Leo, De Tragoedia Romana (Göttingen, 1910).

[5] For a strophic system in Ennius, see Crusius, Philologus, Supp. XXI, 114.

[6] Gram. Lat. Keil, VI, 77, 7; Vollmer, Röm. Metrik, in Gercke’s Einleitung, I, 8, p. 6; however among the preserved fragments of Pacuvius there are several anapaests that resemble those of Ennius.

[7] Ennius, ed. Vahlen, Scaenica, 272.

[8] See Am. Jour. Phil. 1913, 326.

[9] Leo, Die plautinischen Cantica (1897).

[10] Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus (1922), criticized by Immisch, Sitz. Heid. Akad. 1923.

[11] Milne, Cat. of lit. pap. in British Mus. 1927 (no. 52); cf. Wuest and Croenert, Philol. 1928, 153 ff.

[12] See Marx’s ed. of Rudens, 254 ff.

[13] Crusius, Die Responsion in den plaut. Cantica (1929).

[14] See Bieber, Denkmäler d. Theaterwesen and Bulle, Abh. Bayer. Akad. 1928.

[15] If Horace’s strictures on the new music of the drama in the Ars Poet. 200-15 took a hint from Neoptolemus, we may suppose that Hellenistic critics had objected to this change.

[16] Robert Bridges, Ibant Obscuri. Such hexameters as

They were amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure

Walking forth i’ the void and vasty dominyon of Ades:

As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin’d—

do not represent what happened to Latin in Ennius, for the reason that in Latin pronunciation the quantity was the dominant element controlling even the accent. In English the reverse is true. Fraenkel, Iktus und Akzent, has recently committed a similar mistake in judgment, influenced apparently by the high respect that speakers of German must necessarily have for stress. He has resorted to daring hypotheses in trying to prove that Plautus always correctly observes a species of stress (see Sonnenschein in Class. Quart., 1929, 81). It is significant that the French, who feel little stress in their diction, go to the other extreme and find stress insignificant in Latin. Latin in fact was like neither; it resembled Hungarian in being primarily quantitative, and in its word accent had a moderate stress not without a rather noticeable pitch such as is found in some parts of Sweden.

[17] See Lindsay, Early Latin Verse, Leo, Geschichte Lat. Lit., p. 68. Fraenkel, Iktus und Akzent, seems to me only to have confused the results that have been summarized with consummate skill and good sense by Lindsay.

[18] In chap. I.

CHAPTER III
GREEK COMEDY ON THE ROMAN STAGE

The theme of Roman gravitas has perhaps been overworked. The impression seems to be current that Roman schoolboys cheered at the ball games in periodic sentences, and that Roman babes begged for the moon in quantitative hexameters. It appears to be difficult to imagine that the Romans took a very special pleasure in rollicking comedy. Only twenty-six of their comedies have survived, but it is safe to say that if we now had all the respectable literature of the period before 100 B.C., including the epics, the tragedies, the minor verse, and even the artistic prose, the shelves that held the comedies would easily outnumber all the rest. Of what other nation is that true? We have the titles of over four hundred of these plays for the Republican period and there is no reason to suppose that we have even an approach to the full list.

As we have said, the Romans, like all the peoples who followed the Greeks, had to take cognizance of what had been done before. Livius and Naevius were the first to adapt Greek comedies for the Roman stage, as they had been the first to adapt Greek tragedies. Of their work, however, we have again only fragments, saved usually by late grammarians to illustrate archaic grammar. Of Naevius we know the titles of thirty-four comedies, an average of one a year during his period of activity—but since many of these have come to us by the merest coincidence we should not assume that we know all the names of his comedies by any means. Most of these thirty-four plays were adapted from the Greek, but not all. The man who wrote the first Roman epic and the first Roman chronicle play (praetexta) was probably never a slavish copyist. We have noticed how he came to grief for his daring in attacking the powerful Metelli during a critical period of the war. Such criticism would presumably appear in Roman plays. The fragments of his comedies also show many local references that are best explained as coming from plays purely Roman, and such titles as Hariolus, Tunicularia, and Agitatoria suggest independent work. However, so long as we have only about a hundred complete lines rescued from all the plays we can hardly speak with certainty on this point.

In discussing tragedy we suggested that Livius and Naevius were probably the men who shaped the “operatic” form of Roman tragedy, and it is likely that they too were the men who carried this form into comedy, though its final development seems to be due to Plautus. The distinctly lyric lines are rare, to be sure, but the fragments are too few to permit us to expect many. The majority are iambic, the Roman equivalent of the Greek originals, and they have of course the free Latin form. One line is anapaestic; the old Roman trochaic septenarius, well suited to song, is frequent and so is the iambic octonarius, which Naevius seems to treat like a septenarius with anacrusis. Indeed Cicero[1] calls it a septenarius and indicates that it was sung to the accompaniment of the flute.

These were the comedies which entertained the Romans at their festivals during the gloomy years of the Punic war, those years that are so vividly pictured for us by Livy. If we could recover these plays and interpolate them between the harrowing scenes of Livy’s history we should know more than we do of Roman society during that most critical epoch of the nation’s history.

Plautus, from whom we have twenty plays, had staged a few of them before Naevius went into exile, in fact in the Miles Gloriosus he refers to the imprisonment of his fellow-poet. In his plots Plautus kept rather close to the Greek plays, translating, paraphrasing, and adapting as suited his mood. We shall presently discuss his reasons for doing so. What these themes were we need not repeat. The Greeks of Menander’s day had shaped the comedies of intrigue and of romance fairly well on the lines these have followed ever since. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is very close to Plautus’ Menaechmi, and though it departs from its original in its search for further entanglements, the construction, the type of humor, and the dramatic devices are the same. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff illustrates the Menandrian use of self-deception, from his first boasting to his leap into the basket. The Wives are more in evidence than they would have been in Menander but there is little else to distinguish the play from the standard New Comedy. From the Greek, via Plautus and Terence, came practically all the types and all the tricks in which Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy delighted.

Here it is my task not to discuss Roman comedy as such, but rather to indicate what in Rome’s life and experiences made itself felt through these plays. In the Plautine adaptations of Greek comedies we find two seemingly inconsistent purposes, one to rewrite in such a way as to make the exotic comprehensible, the other to keep a Greek atmosphere in order not to offend Roman taste by permitting the inference that the author approved of the behavior which he presented. The first purpose required simplification, the second avoided it. It is necessary to dwell upon this distinction for a moment since historians frequently fall into error by assuming either that Plautus reproduced a Greek milieu without alteration or on the contrary that he represented Roman life as he found it. In point of fact he did both or either, as best suited his purpose.

In technicalities of law, to take a simple illustration, Plautus’ procedure was to simplify with little regard for consistency. At times when it did not matter he substituted Roman officials or institutions for Greek ones without concern as to whether they were exact equivalents. If in presenting the details of a lawsuit a literal translation of the Greek would seem obscure to a Roman audience, Plautus substituted some comprehensible point and reshaped the whole passage to conform to his illustration. In short, he used mere common sense in adapting foreign plays for stage production. Had Plautus been translating for a reading public he might have given a literal rendering and inserted a note of explanation. But plays written for a single presentation have no occasion for employing explanatory notes.

Scholars have also been troubled by the fact that the plays of Plautus bristle with Greek words. There is an average of about ninety occurrences a play, counting repetitions of the same word. How would our comedies fare on the stage if foreign words were used with equal lavishness? Not a few of these words—like amphora, ancora, epistula—had of course been acclimated through commerce, and would cause no trouble. A few technical names that could not be translated—of Greek magistrates, for instance—were illumined by the context. In a few instances Plautus literally dumps in Greek words for amusement, as when an irate husband reels off the items of the bill he has received from the modiste, or reads the menu that will cost him more than he is able to pay. Such words the audience were hardly expected to know. The very outlandish extravagance of the list is intentional. But after we have made these subtractions, the bulk remains.[2] Are we to assume that Plautus addressed his plays to the score of cultured gentlemen who had had Greek tutors? If he had, the aediles would hardly have gone to the expense of buying the plays and presenting them, for the purpose of the games was to attract and amuse the holiday masses. Can it be that Plautus indolently neglected to invent Latin jokes in place of the Greek ones of his models? That is hardly a satisfactory solution in the case of a writer who inundates his scenes with rollicking fun. Another common explanation—too frequently hazarded—that the streets were already overrun with Greek captives who had spread a knowledge of Greek, will hardly serve. In neither of the Punic wars had many Greek captives been taken—the captives had been chiefly Carthaginian, and their Spanish, Gallic, and Ligurian mercenaries—and these are not noticed in the Plautine plays.[3]

The simple explanation is that most of the Roman populace had served in many campaigns in Greek cities and with Greek contingents and had become familiar with a great number of colloquial Greek expressions, in the same way that American boys acquired not a few French phrases some years ago in their one brief campaign overseas. The older generation had served in Sicily in the First Punic War and had been billeted in Greek towns for periods of from six to twelve years. The younger men had all served in the Greek districts of southern Italy before Hannibal was finally driven out in 203 B.C. Both of these wars strained Rome’s man power to the very limit so that practically every adult male saw service in Greek-speaking communities. And finally, during the last years of Plautus’ activity, a dozen legions were sent across the Adriatic for the campaigns against Philip and Antiochus. Plautus could probably assume therefore that at least ninety per cent of the able-bodied men of his audience had served in campaigns among and with Greeks. Those retired soldiers were happy to be complimented with reminders of their services to the state, and Plautus did it by frequent references to the language they had acquired in the wars.[4]

The liberal use of military terms like machaera,[5] ballista, catapulta, phylaca, techina, machina, even in all kinds of figurative senses; of exclamations and terms of abuse that the soldiers would hear when out prowling for extra rations: barbarus, harpago, dierecte, latro, morus, plaga, colapus, mastigia, ganeum gerrae, apage, pax, papae, babae, eia, eugepae, and the rest; of canteen phrases convenient on pay-days in Sicily: drachuma, danista, trapezita, opsonium, cyathisso, crapula, oenopolium, macellum, comissatum eo (and shall we add gynaeceum?), this tells an unmistakable story. A large number of these expressions were little used at Rome after the period of general campaigning among the Greeks. Many point directly to Sicily. The word lautumiae, for example, reminds us of the convict quarries of Syracuse, basilike (“right royally”) seems to betray the soldiers’ respect for the lavish court of King Hiero, as Siculi logi reflects their impression of a talkative people. A large number of the words are Doric in formation, deriving apparently from Sicily or Tarentum: choragus (used in an un-Attic sense and sound), plaga, machina, zamia, catapulta,[6] colapus, ganeum, gerrae, sumbola, and many others. Not a few words were demonstrably adopted by speakers rather than by writers, as phylaca, gerrae, balineum, lanterna, etc.

This is but a brief indication of the linguistic evidence that the soldiers returned home with a convenient Greek vocabulary of no small scope. How freely Plautus could assume its ready use is revealed by his lavishness in compounding such Greek words with Latin termination as in athletice, dulice, euscheme, inanilogista, morologus, pultiphagus, pancratice, opsonari, plagipatidae, elleborosus, ulmitriba, and even in the use of Greek oaths (μὰ τὸν Ἀπόλλων) of semi-Greek puns (opus est chryso Chrysalo, etc.), and Greek slang (argentum οἴχεται). But we may be sure that Plautus knew very well the precise limits of this camp language. He does not venture to employ the common colloquialisms of the literary Greek of Menander if they are not a part of the military store of his day. For those he finds Latin substitutes. Very likely Plautus had himself served as a soldier in southern Italy during the Hannibalic war and had there acquired an accurate knowledge of the diction that could be intelligible to his audience of soldier folk.

There has also been much speculation concerning Plautus’ relatively free use of Greek mythology, since the sophisticated new Greek comedy rather avoided any reference to it.[7] In the Bacchides of Plautus the clever slave compares his exploits in detail with the devices used in the capture of Troy (the theft of the Palladium and the building of the Trojan horse); in the Rudens, Charmides promises a “feast of Thyestes”; in the Captives, Tyndarus refers familiarly to Orestes and Lycurgus; everywhere the names of Achilles, Hector, Medea, and the like are spoken of as well known. This cannot be explained by recalling that the Odyssey had been translated into Latin, since reading was by no means general, nor by pointing to the use of these myths for illustrations on Etruscan vases and mirrors. Not one in a thousand of the auditors had come into contact with Homer or with such objects of art. But the crowds for whom Plautus wrote had for thirty years had free seats on the holidays when the tragedies of Livius, Naevius, and Ennius were played, and they knew the characters of those tragedies as well as the laboring men of today know the names of our baseball pitchers and cinema stars.

The Trojan cycle was particularly familiar from the theater because the dramatists, exploiting the tradition that the Romans were descendants of the Trojans, had presented all the good plays that they could find on this theme. Livius had produced an Equus Trojanus, an Achilles, an Aegisthus, and an Ajax, which must have told of every phase of the subject, and the Livian Hermione had familiarized them with some of the aftermath of the war. Plautus’ ready mention of Procne and Philomela is readily explained by recalling that Livius had presented the Tereus. The impression made by the Trojan cycle of Livius had been deepened by the several plays written on these myths by Naevius; the Hesione, Iphigenia, Hector, Equus Trojanus, and Andromache all dealt with characters of the Trojan cycle, while the Danae and the Lycurgus supplied adjacent myths that the Plautine audiences evidently knew. These plays—and of course there were many whose names have been lost—would account for most of the familiar references in Plautus. Furthermore, Ennius was producing tragedies at the very festivals for which Plautus wrote, and here and there we can actually recognize in Plautus certain lines that were spoken as parodies of Ennian lines.[8] We do not know the chronology of the plays of these dramatists. If we could synchronize them now we should probably find that the references to Andromeda, Alcumeo, Thyestes, and other characters of the Greek myths would fall in neatly with plays of Ennius on these themes which had been recently produced.

It is quite beside the point to ask how much “literature” the Plautine audience knew. They knew no literature as such, but they all attended the festival shows which were free. There they learned the stories of a large number of the plays of Euripides and Sophocles as easily as our working classes learn, without opening a book, about Arab sheikhs, Long Island drawing rooms, Roman chariot races, and Cleopatra’s wiles. To them in fact a play of Euripides was often the latest popular sensation.

Many years ago when Max Reinhardt first staged Oedipus in the Circus at Berlin at prices that attracted hundreds of laboring men I overheard these remarks: “This Sophocles, is he a Berliner?” “I don’t know; the name sounds Russian; but he knows how to make a good show.” Those two men had enjoyed the play all the more because they did not know they were being educated in the ancient classics; and that is how Plautus’ audience had innocently learned its Greek mythology. Naturally Plautus was too wise not to exploit this rich vein of interest.

So thoroughly un-Greek is Plautus in his type of rollicking humor, in his volubility, in his skurrying speed, and in his love for exciting intrigue—if we may assume that the recently discovered plays of Menander are typical of the Greek New Comedy—that we are surprised at his refusal to write original and purely Roman comedies. He invariably keeps the scene in Greece, dresses his characters in Greek garb, and gives them Greek names. What is the reason? Naevius had written plays on Roman themes. Why did not Plautus? That it was diffidence one can hardly believe after noting the originality he displayed in adapting the plays to musical settings and the success he achieved in writing the scenes that are demonstrably his.

The secret of Plautus’ behavior in this matter seems to me to lie in his appreciation of the fact that Rome was still too conservative to accept as Roman the intrigues and plots that would make the richest comedy. “Spoon River,” as we have learned, has its vices, but at Spoon River they are studiously hidden under a cloak of Sunday respectability. When a modern playwright wishes to add more piquancy to a play than an American milieu will unprotestingly support he lays his scene in Paris or on a South Sea island. There is enough human nature under the frown—or smile—to comprehend what is presented, and sins can be the more openly discussed and condemned—or laughed at—if the spectator is permitted at the same time to express his puritanic superiority to the mores of an exotic society admittedly going to its deserved ruin. This seems to be the reason why Plautus lets his amusingly extravagant slaves, demi-mondaines, and reckless young men play freely with moral values in a Greek setting, usually with an explicit condemnation of the villain at the end, and often with a reminder that “such things are possible at Athens.”[9] The characters of Plautus, therefore, are never Roman in outward appearance, and it is a mistake to assume that Roman manners are depicted in his plays, even if here and there he is compelled to take cognizance of Roman morals.

The spendthrift young men with the resourceful slaves who help them to their desires by concocting astute schemes are Greek. The Athens of Menander was sophisticated. There clever young men had penetrated beyond Epicurus’ ethical sophistry to the logical naturalism of his premises; they had even waved aside the forced idealistic definition of “nature” which Zeno was teaching them to follow and had learned to give allegiance to a simpler nature more responsive to immediate wishes. Pristine authority, filial respect, and the compulsion of academic ethics were all weakened by the prevalent discovery that no system of faith as yet invented had withstood penetrating criticism. Young men saw no valid objection in logic to doing as they liked. And many were in a position to do as they liked, since theirs was the generation for which Alexander had ransacked the treasures of the east, opened lucrative commerce to shrewd traders, sent hordes of cheap slaves to do the hard work of a civilized world, and caravans of music girls, dancers, and courtesans to entertain a sophisticated city. The jeunesse dorée of Athens, pleasure-loving, undisciplined, helplessly inexperienced, epicures living to the ragged edge of incomes and beyond, were fit subjects for a comedy whose god was luck. They were not yet brutalized, they usually had a gentlemanly code of a kind, and they were often generously devoted humans. But they had no anchorage in principles. Such were the young men in Menander, and such Plautus, who had an eye for color, preferred to keep them, despite their non-Roman aspect. But he was very careful to keep them Greek.

At Rome at the end of the great Punic war a young man’s life was a very different matter. For nearly twenty years the dreadful scourge of Punic raids had impoverished the people. Every able-bodied man of military age was in the trenches living on the most frugal fare; farms were mortgaged and lying waste; war taxes were growing; the state was pressing down with sumptuary laws that forbade luxury, limiting clothing to homespun, and food to a few cents a day. And even when the Punic war was over, the aftermath of campaigns against the rebellious Gauls, against Spain and Macedonia gave no respite till near the end of Plautus’ life. Doubtless the young men, who could see the Plautine plays on the three or four holidays each year when they were given, enjoyed vicariously a release of spirit which they could comprehend because they were human beings. But not one of them had actually lived at home in the atmosphere reproduced on the Plautine stage. It is not surprising, therefore, that Plautus kept the Greek setting. There was little to draw upon from Roman life. Had he put his people in Roman dress the incongruity would have been ludicrous; and the censors would have realized the danger to morality and suppressed the plays. As exotic myths they seemed less harmful—though the time was to come and sooner than could have been expected when the characters of these plays were to take on a semblance of realism even at Rome.

What is true of Plautus’ young roués is also true of the Plautine parasites and slaves. The amusing parasites, the Athenian wits who got their bread by providing entertaining talk, were as useful in the New Comedy as are the futile expatriate artists in the modern international novel, but there is no evidence that these creatures had as yet made their way to Rome. The Plautine slave is a mixed character. It has been customary to say that Rome’s culture depended more heavily on slavery than Greece’s and that therefore the comic slave is Plautine rather than Greek. But that assumption disregards a century of economic change. The slave of comedy usually is a very clever rascal, very loyal to his young master for whose least pleasure he will trick parents and police; he is amazingly resourceful, quick of wit, possessed of a sauciness that we cannot associate with early Roman custom, and capable of enduring blows if he has a good conscience from having successfully perpetrated his crimes. In sophisticated Athens this character is wholly plausible; at Rome in the day of Plautus he is not. It is true that Menander’s fragments use slaves less than the Plautine plays; this probably means that Plautus, in following some of the dramatists of the New Comedy, avoided Menandrian plays because they had not enough boisterous fun for him per page. It does not mean that Plautus in this respect is closer to Roman life. We used to be told also that scenes of slave torture in comedy were purely Roman, but we now have a scene in Menander’s Perinthia which goes so far in cruelty that Terence omitted this scene. Here again, therefore, we have not a Roman characteristic. The fact is that in Plautus’ day slaves were relatively scarce at Rome; the working classes in the city were still largely free natives, the farms were usually owned in small plots by working farmers, and the few slaves on them were still treated in the way that single farm hands are usually treated in our own simpler rural districts, that is, as members of the household. Bound slaves were very rare, the ergastulum was hardly known as yet, and the slave when set free still became a citizen with the same status as his master. It was not till the end of the Punic war that Rome for the first time knew what it was to possess non-Italic captives in considerable numbers—slaves who had to be bound and watched—and of course it required a generation or two of slave culture on large villas and estates before the saucy type could appear, the type familiar to us in the comedies. No, this type would perhaps be plausible at Rome in the Gracchan day, but not before. My feeling is that Plautus has not only given us the Greek type as he found it, but, since the morality of citizens was not involved in a slave’s rascalities, he has somewhat padded his plays with slave intrigue in order to speed up his action. Not from a single trait should we infer that he depicted the Roman slave of his own day. It is significant that when true Roman comedies began to be written the slave rôle was at once toned down because, as Donatus says, a Roman master ought not be represented as outwitted by a slave.

In the treatment of female characters Plautus’ procedure is somewhat different. Greek New Comedy had a type of woman in the rather respectable hetaerae well adapted to its purpose, and in fact the only type usable, since the Greek housewife was so bound to the dull routine of the rear-of-the-house that she was too devitalized for literary treatment. The metic companion—of Aspasia’s station and juristic standing—moved about freely in the city, could be placed in almost any social group, and could by an easy fiction and the proper birth tokens be discovered to be an unrecognized citizen. Since this was the only respectable class available for Menander’s intrigues, he naturally employed hetaerae for his many plays that contained love scenes. Roman adapters, however, encountering such heroines, who represented a social class foreign to Roman society, found considerable difficulty in transplanting them to Italian soil. It may be remembered that in the Victorian period the plays of Dumas fils could not readily be transposed into English, just as the romantic English plays of that day failed of comprehension in France, because the relations between the sexes were based on different customs in each country. What, for instance, would Plautus have done on the Roman stage with Habratonon, the shrewd but generously human hetaera of Menander’s Arbitrants, who, when she had to make her choice, surrendered her own advantages over her lover and restored him to his wife and child? Plautus if he had used such a play would have had to substitute for her a Roman courtesan or else destroy the plot. And if he did employ a courtesan, Roman realism would have demanded that she be depicted without generosity, for at Rome it would not do to let a woman of such a class seem virtuous. The matrons of Rome would have objected.[10] In the Roman society of Plautus’ day family relations were puritanic, divorce was almost unknown, and the Roman matron was her husband’s equal in the home and in society. She was not relegated to the spinning room in the back of the house as in Greece; she did not mope in her chamber while her husband went to dinner parties and to the theater with his boon companions. She was the companion. In such a society there may be and were some “daughters of joy” for pagan youth, but they were not spoken of, they did not appear, they were in the dark where generous virtues do not grow. One might suppose that Plautus could have abandoned the Greek scene, eliminated the demi-monde, and staged a normal Roman comedy. But if he were to keep the love story he would have had to resort to the postmarital triangle used in such circumstances by the French—a device unthinkable in the social atmosphere of his day—or to the romances of free adolescents—a theme not easily illustrated from the urban life of southern countries where young girls are carefully cloistered. In other words, Plautus was very nearly compelled to choose either to abandon the theme of love-making in a comic setting, or to adopt the Greek hetaera; and if he did the latter he was obliged to deprive her of various pleasant qualities that might have been hers in Greece or incur the enmity of Roman moral censorship. Plautus has been severely blamed, especially by French critics, for making his women futile twaddlers with no redeeming features. It is true that this description fits them well enough, but what was he to do? Titinius seems to have found a way out later, but it was not a very obvious way. The method of Plautus should not be ascribed to a coarse grain in the dramatist. It grew naturally from his comprehension of the real status of the Roman family. In adapting Greek slaves, parasites, and young men with little or no change, he might take a risk, but on the subject of Roman womanhood he could not compromise.

It is noticeable that Terence could. Bacchis in the Hecyra, who harks back to Habratonon in Menander, has an appealingly generous nature despite her station, and even the morose old man of the play has to admit it. But Terence wrote the Hecyra more than twenty years after Plautus’ death, at a time when Greek customs had invaded Rome. Today Terence receives the credit for a liberal humanity denied to Plautus, but it is safe to say that Terence would not have ventured to present his Bacchis a generation earlier. His respect for the position and the deserved rights of the women of old Rome would have made him feel that it was a cheap thing to do.

The most striking departure of Roman comedy from the Greek resides in the omission of the choral interludes and the substitution of long lyrical monodies in the place of spoken and recited lines. In the Greek plays the acts were separated by choral interludes, dances, revels, and the like. With the careful costuming as well as with the frequent doubling of rôles in the Greek theater, much time was required for changes of garb. Plautus had few trained singers available for an effective chorus, few dancers, and he needed but little time between the acts, since there was no scene-shifting and masks were not used in his day. A Plautine play was almost a continuous performance, and a performance with an abundance of music. The rapid dialogue that carried the most vital action was usually spoken without musical accompaniment in six-foot iambics. This dialogue usually constituted about a third of the play. Soliloquies, monologues (except in prologues), and scenes of tense emotion were apt to be sung to the flute in a variety of meters that kept changing to suit the mood and the emotion. These parts, called cantica, were rare in some plays and especially in the early ones, while in others they took up as much as a third of the play. To these cantica we shall presently return. Certain scenes composed of recitative were accompanied by the flute. Such scenes we are accustomed to even now, especially in sentimental plays where love-making and moonlight are signals for the muted violins to accompany the spoken words with a soft obligato. In Plautus the meters of such scenes, usually seven- and eight-foot lines, vary considerably from the normal dialogue verse.

There is only one passage in ancient comedy in which we happen to have the original Greek material re-cast into a Roman canticum. A late critic, Aulus Gellius,[11] quotes a song of Caecilius, and with it the original Greek to demonstrate what he calls the inadequacy of the Latin paraphrase. Gellius, however, misses the point. The substance of the Greek—the conventional complaints of a scold-ridden husband—was deliberately changed. The smooth narration of the original was not suited to song, and Caecilius wanted a text that would give the musician a chance to bring out effectively the constantly changing emotions of the speaker. In the Greek the husband simply informs the audience, with suitable comment, that his wife, jealous of her slave maid, has had her sold to get her out of the house. There is of course no great depth to the husband’s emotions, though the range from pity to sarcasm is well enough brought out. The Latin version stresses this variation of mood by a constant shift of meters, the verse running speedily from the tripping trochaic septenarii through cretics, bacchiacs, cretics again, and then iambics. The man comes on shouting to music that changes its rhythm with every line.

(— ◡ ) Always scolding, nagging, dinning she compelled me to obey:

(— ◡ —) Innocence goes for naught: the maid is sold.

(◡ — —) Now gloating and boasting my good wife appears:

(— ◡ —) Tell me pray, what am I? Who is master here?

The point made by the ancient critic that Caecilius did not adequately reproduce the original quality is wholly beside the point. He was not attempting to. He was making a plausible libretto for a brief song and dance in which melody, pitch, tempo, and gesture should aid in the expression of his varying moods. Menander indeed had written a readable play—he always did, and paid the penalty by seldom taking the prize. But Caecilius produced a musical comedy which, it is safe to wager, kept the audience physically responsive.

It has been usual to suppose that Plautus invented the musical comedy of this type.[12] I have already referred to Naevius’ introduction of the canticum into tragedy. It had the same function in comedy and I need only repeat that Naevius served in Sicily as a soldier in the First Punic War, and that in many of the Greek towns of Sicily where the Roman soldiers were billeted, or at least resorted on furloughs, Greek tragedies and comedies were being produced in the theaters, probably with reduced choruses.[13] That is where Naevius may have found his model of the canticum. It should also be remembered that a great variety of what may be called music-hall singing and dancing went on in such places at that time. If the Roman soldiers grew fond of such performances, it would not be surprising if Naevius tried to supply in his comedies as well as in his tragedies some substitute for what Rome did not have. Audiences may make insistent demands: even Wagner was compelled to insert ballets in his operas in order to satisfy the demands of his Parisian audiences. The fragments from Naevius’ comedies are few, and in them there are none of the purely lyrical meters so often found in Plautus—the cretics, the bacchiacs, and the glyconics. But there is a large proportion of trochaic septenarii, lines which are now assumed to belong to a native Latin song meter.[14] Our evidence is slight as yet but it is perhaps sufficient to support a suggestion that musical comedy may have grown up at Rome through the gradual adaptation of Sicilian forms of entertainment by Naevius and a constant improvement upon these innovations by Plautus. We have also seen that song and chant were a decided aid in the attempt to accommodate new meters to the Roman ear.

In observing how literature may be determined by externals we must not omit to notice certain customs of staging that affected the plays. The Roman ludi, at which the plays were first given, had formerly been devoted chiefly to chariot races. These races seem to have come in at first when, before and after campaigns, the army was purified. The knights and charioteers took part in the lustration and used the occasion to demonstrate the skill of their horses. At the Ludi Romani, held in September, which grew out of triumphal processions to Jupiter’s temple, the races were probably not considered in historical times as having any religious associations. They were held for purposes of entertainment, and the plays, the ludi scaenici, which were added to the races in 240 B.C., were also given for entertainment and had in themselves none of the sacred associations so persistently connected with the Greek performances.

Now these Roman games were directed by the magistrates, who used for them an appropriation granted by the state, an appropriation, however, which seldom covered the costs. The Senate in fact took advantage of the knowledge that men who had reached the aedileship by popular favor were likely to entertain the people well in order to hold that favor at the next election. Obviously the aediles who paid the costs would choose plays of a nature to please the average Roman citizen. In saying the average Roman we mean that most of the men and women of the middle and lower classes would expect to see the plays. Scipio, to be sure, tried to attract the nobility by setting apart the first rows for them, and he probably succeeded to some extent, at least when good tragedies were given, if we may judge from Cicero’s familiarity with the acting of Aesopus. However, had the majority of the senatorial nobles been enthusiastic attendants, Rome would not have had to wait nearly two centuries for a permanent theater. We must assume for most performances a crowd of holiday idlers from the streets and shops who looked for something at least as interesting as tippling at the bar, and who were quite well aware that the aediles expected defeat at the election if the plays were not satisfactory. We can therefore comprehend why Plautus, who quite regularly succeeded in pleasing his audience, packed a great deal more of joking, intrigue, and broad humor into his plays than did Menander, for instance; why his plots are simpler, reveal less characterization, and in general concern themselves less with the artistic unfolding of a story than Menander’s and, finally, why the song and dance scenes constantly increase in number in the late Plautine plays.

Conversely, when we think of the audience, and then compare these plays with the cinema shows sometimes given to entice crowds of voters to political gatherings, we can only be surprised at the relatively high grade of entertainment that the Roman comedies contain. Rome’s holiday crowds in Plautus’ day consisted of plain folk, but they must have been intelligent and unspoiled. The mimes and farces of a century later certainly reflect a decided deterioration in the theater-goers of that time. Horace was not entirely fair when he accused Plautus of writing down for the sake of filling his purse. Perhaps he did, but after all he did not stoop to the kind of audiences that later entertainers amused for profit. Horace in fact should have compared Plautus with Laberius and Publilius and not, as he did, with the nicer closet drama of his own day which never had a chance of being produced.

We may also recall that Plautus wrote for a single performance with no thought of publication, of a reading public or even of a revival of the play. He sold his manuscript and after the play was over the manuscript was placed in the state archives, perhaps never to be seen again. Plautus of course did not know that many of the plays would be dug up for reproduction a generation later when there was a dearth of good writers. We shall also do well to remember that there were no programs distributed at the performances. These circumstances account for the dramatist’s endeavor to make his plays self-explanatory and self-contained, for his willingness to continue the old convention of revealing the plot early, to keep its progress clear and explicit, to get immediate effects and not to concern himself too much as to whether an effective scene at the end is entirely consistent with the implications at the beginning. The spectator could not refer to a published copy, nor return next day to examine the play critically. Most scholarly guessing as to whether blemishes may have crept into these plays by successive revisions is based upon a minute analysis of them in the study, the very kind of analysis that Plautus never expected to receive. Plautus counted to a certain extent on the auditor’s capacity to forget as well as on his ability to remember. One curious result of this habit of presenting a new play at each festival was that a great many plays accumulated in the archives, and so when, in the time of Terence, officials began to resurrect old plays, the available stock glutted the market. At that time the authors of new plays must actually have been hurt by the competition of dead authors.

One of the greatest difficulties that the dramatists had to contend with in the old day was the securing of good actors. Not only did Livius begin without the aid of any trained actors, but for half a century at least the profession was not attractive. Livius seems to have formed his own troupe. Naevius may have depended somewhat on players from Campania who were trained in giving Atellan farces. At least that seems to be the implication of Festus in explaining the term “fabula personata,” and we know that Oscan Pompeii had a permanent theater at that time. Polybius, the Greek, found the acting in Roman tragedies very unsatisfactory. The chief difficulty was of course that the games came so rarely that in the early day no actor could possibly have made a living by the profession. For the first twenty years it is likely that at most only two tragedies and two comedies were produced a year at the annual Ludi Romani. In 220 a new festival, the Ludi plebeii, was added for November, but it is not likely that at first plays were given there. At least none are recorded till twenty years later. In 214 the plays were assigned four days of the Ludi Romani, and in 212 games, including plays, were voted in honor of Apollo. Hence we may assume that by the end of the Punic war there would be about six days a year set apart for dramatic performances, that is, about six tragedies and six comedies were played once each year.

Since the aediles (and praetors, in the case of the Apollo games) selected a new play for each performance, the annual offering of plays might be considerable, and some rivalries sprang up among the poets. For instance, a Terentian prologue[15] reveals an amusing situation in which, after the aediles had paid for the play and were inspecting it, a rival dramatist gained admission to the rehearsal and suddenly started to charge Terence with plagiary. In another prologue of Terence, Ambivius, the producer, reminds his audience of how he had in his youth insisted on re-staging rejected plays of Caecilius Statius till the audience learned to like them, adding that Caecilius had suffered unjustly from the criticism of rival poets. We may then assume a considerable activity and a not unwholesome rivalry among the dramatists.

But the serious danger to the profession in the early days was the rarity of the productions and the meager opportunity for good actors. Six days of work a year is not apt to create or nourish a specialized profession. Because of the scarcity of actors Livius, presumably Plautus, and also occasionally Atilius, acted in their own plays—as had been the old custom of the poets in Greece. Plautus mentions only one of his actors—Pellio—and says unpleasant things about him. Who the other actors were we do not know. Festus conjectures that Naevius had imported Oscan players for the comedy called Personata because of the scarcity of talent. Before the death of Plautus, L. Ambivius Turpio came out as actor-manager for Caecilius, and later we hear of Cincius, a Faliscan, Atilius of Praeneste (perhaps the playwright of that name), and a Minucius. Much later, in the time of Roscius, we know that the scarcity of actors led to the custom of training clever Greek slaves to act, but there is no evidence that slaves were used during the first hundred years of the Roman drama. Very likely the author himself at first took a rôle, brought in Oscan, Greek, and Faliscan actors to some extent, and induced amateurs who made their living by other, occupations to help during the festivals. It is quite certain that well into the second century B.C. there were not enough performances to persuade many Romans to enter the profession for a regular living, or to incur the expense of training or keeping slaves for the occupation, as was done later.

We must also take into account the fact that the performances at Rome were not, as in Greece, connected with old and sacred traditions, so that men were not induced to take up the profession because of its glamour and official honors. Plays were introduced at the games purely as an extra entertainment. In Greece where plays had grown up to interpret sacred myths, acting had some religious import so that the state was called upon to give prizes and honors to the profession.

The economic and social factors that we have mentioned account for the fact that Plautus had to continue the Greek habit of doubling rôles even though he did not employ masks, and though he was not bound by any old tradition as to the proper number of actors.[16] Of course the rule of the three actors had broken down even at the time of Euripides, and Menander probably allowed himself five actors at times. Plautus often had ten or twelve characters, but he seems to get along with about four or five actors and in several instances with only three. This accounts for the somewhat artificial excuses that characters are constantly giving for leaving the stage when the actor has to scurry off to dress for a new rôle. Needless to say, this deficiency of actors must have exerted a restraining influence upon Plautus which he had to bear constantly in mind. It kept many scenes rather thin. When, for instance, in the Rudens after the young man has been searching for his sweetheart through three acts, and after he has just learned that she has been rescued from a shipwreck and a thieving slave-dealer, he suddenly comes face to face with her at last, one naturally expects at least a cheerful exchange of greetings. But he has not a word for her. It takes us aback unless we notice that the girl must be represented on the stage by a mute, because the actor who has been playing her rôle must now be engaged in playing another part. Or again, in the Pseudolus, where Ballio heaps abuse upon three characters, sends them off, engages in a futile monologue, and then calls out three others and continues his tirade, one comprehends the strange interruption by noticing that the second trio cannot exist until the first three actors have gone in and changed their garbs and voices. It will be remembered that Shakespeare suffered from the same technical difficulty. At the end of the Winter’s Tale we see far less of Perdita than we desire and we are hardly consoled by the knowledge that the actor who has been playing her rôle is now busy playing Hermione. Terence was not hampered to quite the same extent as Plautus by a lack of players, but the Greek convention reasserted itself later and was foolishly accepted in Horace’s Ars Poetica to the detriment of the later drama.

As we have said, the early Roman dramatists did not use masks and in fact employed the most simple make-up in quickly adjusted garments and wigs. With the extensive doubling and trebling of rôles there must have been an uncomfortable amount of recognizing of the actors. The late scholiasts like Donatus, who discuss these matters, wrote when masks were again unusual but when actors were more plentiful. They are therefore somewhat obscure about the earlier custom. Their guess that Roscius introduced the mask[17] to hide an ineffectual countenance may be true, but it is very likely that the Greek masks were introduced on the Roman stage—this happened about the Gracchan time—in order to facilitate the doubling of rôles and to remove the confusion that arose from the easy recognition of the actors. By that time Rome was so large and the theater crowd so extensive that the play of features would at any rate be missed by a large part of the audience, and the well-marked masks served the useful purpose of distinguishing the characters at a distance. Opera glasses have now removed that necessity.

There seems to be some misunderstanding about the social status of the Roman actors because our sources of information are late and do not always distinguish between the various periods. The facts now available seem to warrant the statement that slaves were not employed as actors during the first hundred years of the drama when most of the great comedies were written and produced. At that time the authors usually acted themselves, and authors and actors were united in a common guild, honored by the state in the Alexandrian manner by being assigned an official meeting place at Minerva’s temple. Livius and Terence were freedmen, to be sure, but out of respect for their art both were highly honored by the foremost men of the senate. The day when slaves had stigmatized the professions by their participation was still far off. Even in Sulla’s time the great rôles of legitimate comedy and tragedy were assumed by distinguished men like Roscius and Aesopus,[18] men whom Cicero was pleased to number among his friends. Actors gradually lost their position in society only by the deterioration of the drama—of which we shall speak later. It was apparently when the standard plays had to give way to farces and mimes that slaves had to be trained to take rôles which self-respecting citizens refused to play. Then the social brand was marked on the few who demeaned themselves by playing with the slaves. And thus in the late Republic we hear not a little of the cheapness of the actor’s profession. However, that stigma did not even then apply to the great actors who confined themselves to the parts of the good old plays. The exact story of the fall of the profession is lost to us. Cicero is quoted as having said in his De Republica that at Rome actors and others who took part in a profession of entertainment were deprived of their civic rights and had their names struck off the tribal registration list by the censors.[19] These words are assigned to Scipio in a dialogue whose dramatic date is 129 B.C. but, as in several other instances, Cicero may be allowing himself an anachronism. Livy happens to say, without specifying a date, that actors could not serve as soldiers in the Roman legions.

Now there are two possible explanations for this censorial stigma. It is possible that at one of the several puritanic assaults on the theater in the second century B.C.—and during one of these periods of reform the censor Nasica ordered a partly constructed theater to be torn down—a censorial brand may have been placed on the actors in order to discourage citizens from entering the profession. But it is quite as possible that in the early days when actors were difficult to secure for the public festivals some praetor in charge of the festival induced the censor to excuse actors from army service and that, following the Roman practice of using the military rôle for the voting list, he also struck the names of actors from the lists of the tribus. Later when the state was demoralized and slaves had filled the profession, the cancellation of the name, at first effected for practical purposes, may have been continued as morally appropriate. In Roscius’ day the stigma was associated not with appearance on the stage but with playing for remuneration, so that when Roscius ceased to accept a fee he could be raised to the knighthood by Sulla. This fact proves how unstable the theory of the actors’ disability really is and rather supports the view that removal from the tribal list was not at first intended so much as a stigma as an excuse from performing service away from Rome. At any rate the social brand did not apply to recognized actors in the standard drama.