Sinito: Pudicitiam egomet comitem duxero.”
When at length her husband confesses that he was wrong, she is ready at once to receive him back into her affection, and restore him all the old love. The resemblance between her character and some of the circumstances of her life and those of Desdemona has struck some critics, and is worth examination. Both Molière and Dryden have imitated the ‘Amphitruo’ of Plautus, but there cannot be a doubt that the play of the Roman is the purest of the three and that of the Englishman the most impure, and that the character of Alcmena is not improved by Molière, if not deteriorated, and is certainly made worse by the handling of Dryden. There is another wife in Plautus whose character is very beautiful, so far as we have a glimpse of it. In the opening scenes of the ‘Stichus,’ there are two married sisters, bearing the names of Panegyris and Pinacium in the old editions, but those of Philumena and Pamphila in the Ambrosian palimpsest. Their husbands have been a considerable time away from them, and their father thinks that they might now come under his protection, and marry again according to a liberty allowed by law in the case of absconding husbands. Pamphila (Pinacium) has strong affection for her husband, and refuses. She thus urges her sister to continue faithful:—
“It is reasonable, in my opinion, that all wise people should attend to and do their duty. Wherefore, I, though I am younger than you, warn you to remember your duty; and if our husbands should be wicked, and should act otherwise than is right, so much the more, by Pollux, does it become us to remember to do our duty with might and main.”[245]
She is resolved also to be firm towards her father, but at the same time, as she has a true affection for him and respect for his authority, she will not have recourse to any other means than earnest entreaty. Unfortunately Pamphila disappears from the play after the introductory scenes, or if she appeared again, that portion of the play has been lost.
There is one other free woman who deserves special notice—the priestess of the Temple of Venus in the ‘Rudens.’ Priestesses, as Benoist has remarked, had much more liberty of movement than ordinary matrons, and could appear in public on many occasions on which the others could not. When Palæstra and Ampelisca flee to her temple for refuge, she is astonished to find that they have not come in white garments, and with victims, as visitors to a temple should; but no sooner does she learn the real state of the case than she remembers mercy, and not sacrifice, and gives them a hearty welcome. With all the power she possesses she will defend and help them.
“I don’t think,” says Ampelisca, in regard to her, “that I ever saw any old woman more deserving the blessing of gods and men. How tenderly, frankly, honourably, and ungrudgingly did she take us to herself—trembling, needy, wet, shipwrecked, and fainting creatures that we were; not otherwise than if we were her own daughters. How she tucks up her dress and herself warms the water that we may bathe.”[246]
A truly Christian woman, and not merely, as Benoist makes her, “Fere Christiana et Christianis sensibus animata.”
The second class of women were practically outcasts from society, and they knew it, and acted accordingly. Some might take to spinning and other feminine occupations; but a large number were either definitely set apart by the slave-dealers for the pleasure of men, or applied themselves to the trade as the easiest means of livelihood. Very frequently they strove to attain their liberty, and through their influence with their lovers they often succeeded. But they could not marry, and therefore continued to live the life in which they had been trained, or dealt in slave-girls. The whole mode of life of such women could not but brutalize them. And some of the characters which Plautus gives us exhibit the lowest coarseness and utter and irredeemable selfishness. They looked upon men as their victims. Men are the sheep that they have to fleece. The courtezan woman who would dream of being faithful to one man is a fool. She must have money. As soon as a man is ruined he must be turned out of doors; and the next rich idiot that comes must be fleeced in a similar manner. Such sentiments are common to the whole class; but there are shades of differences in the characters. Some are absolutely mercenary. They have no heart, and know and allow that they have none. They are fond of coarse language. They are strongly addicted to wine; and they have almost no interest in anybody. Others, on the contrary, are fond of one man above another, so long as he has money. They are cultivated and witty. They know how to dress well, and have studied all the arts that can attract. They can give nice little dinner-parties; they take an interest in their serving-maids; they have kindly feelings towards those who have brought them up. But there is still, in Plautus’s portraiture of them, a radical hardness of heart. They are selfish to the backbone, fond of dress, and inclined to wine, and will probably end like the others in becoming free, drunken, and traffickers in young slave-girls.[247]
There is one curious and notable series of exceptions to this degradation. The Greeks viewed these outcasts from society with a very friendly eye. They recognized the fact that it was their destiny that had put them into the difficult circumstances with which they had to struggle. And when these women happened to have great powers of mind, or were particularly pleasing, the Greeks chose them as companions for life, and if they could not make them their wives, they treated them as such, and were very kind to them. Thus Pericles lived with Aspasia, and Sophocles with the mother of the father of his favourite grandson. But in Plautus there is not one instance of such a connexion. There are, however, three or four beautiful characters among the slave-girls—Selenium, Planesium, Adelphasium, and Palæstra. They are modest and kindly. They wish to live with one man. Like the Mirah of ‘Daniel Deronda,’ they move about in bad society, and are exposed to every temptation, but by a miraculous providence they remain pure. M. Benoist, probably touched by compassion, thinks that Palæstra is the most lovely of these characters. We are inclined to give the palm to Adelphasium in the ‘Pœnulus,’—though perhaps she is somewhat prim—because we can judge her better, since the play affords more scope for the development of her character. All these girls are found in the end to be freeborn. They have been exposed or stolen in early childhood. Marks of identification go with them in their wanderings. And at last the happy father recognizes his long-lost child, and the lover is delighted with the thought that he can marry.
These, then, were the girls with whom the young Greeks and the young Romans had to fall in love, and fall in love they did. But this love was rarely anything else than a mad, headstrong, and even bestial passion. Rarely could the Romans have come in contact with such women that they could realize the fine remark of Steele, “To have loved her was a liberal education.” And indeed the Romans seem to have looked on love as one of those fits which come upon a man once or twice in his life, and which, like too much wine, made him stagger and reel for a time, and then left him in his older years a more sedate and indifferent person. Some such love intrigue occurs in almost every play of Plautus. There are three plays in which no female character appears—the ‘Captivi,’ the ‘Pseudolus,’ and the ‘Trinummus’; but even into two of these love is introduced. In the second the whole play is concerned with the acquisition of a courtezan girl, and in the ‘Trinummus’ Lesbonicus has lost his property through love, and Lysiteles has one or two long speeches on the ruin that attends the lover.