Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

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.