Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

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.