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.