Plautine Trends

Ioannis N. Perysinakis, Evangelos Karakasis

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110392722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Plautine Trends: Studies in Plautine Comedy and its Reception, a collective volume published as a Festschrift in honour of Prof. D. Raios (University of Ioannina), aims to contribute to the current, intense discussion on Plautine drama and engage with most of the topics which lie at the forefront of recent scholarship on 'literary Plautus'. 13 papers by experts on Roman Comedy address issues concerning a) the structure of Plautine plot in its social, historical and philosophical contexts, b) the interfaces between language and comic plot, and c) plot and language as signs of reception. Participants include (in alphabetical order): A. Augoustakis, R.R. Caston, D.M. Christenson, M. Fontaine, S. Frangoulidis, M. Hanses, E. Karakasis, D. Konstan, K. Kounaki–Philippides, S. Papaioannou, A. Sharrock, N.W. Slater, and J.T. Welsh. The papers of the volume are preceded by an introduction offering a review of the extensive literature on the subject in recent years and setting the volume in its critical context. The preface to the volume is written by R.L. Hunter. The book is intended for students or scholars working on or interested in Plautine Comedy and its reception.

Part I: Plot

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D. Konstan

Turns and Returns in Plautus’ Casina¹

Abstract: In the Casina, there are verbal indications of changes or variations in respect to the Greek original; these phrases, which sometimes take the form of a return to a previous path (cf. nunc pol ego demum in rectam redii semitam, v. 469), correspond precisely to themes that are introduced or inserted by Plautus into the play, above all in connection with homosexuality.¹

Keywords: Plautus, comedy, originality, homosexuality

(Pindar Pythian 11.38–9)

‘My friends, did I become confused at the place where the three roads meet, despite travelling on a straight path beforehand?’

(transl. P.J. Finglass, Pindar: Pythian 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 67).

All agree that the Casina, very likely the latest of the surviving comedies of Plautus, has a complex plot. The prologue tells us that the Greek model for the play was the Lot–Drawers (Klêroumenoi) of Diphilus, and no doubt this provided the armature for Plautus’ version. Here, however, disagreement arises among scholars. Some suppose that Plautus altered Diphilus’ comedy substantially, substituting among other things a farcical scene of his own for the original conclusion (a few, such as Paratore and Lefèvre, maintain that he made still more radical changes).² Others believe that Plautus reproduced Diphilus’ plot more or less faithfully, even as he embellished it with his usual array of songs, puns, slapstick elements, and other features specific to Roman comedy.³ I wish here to sidestep the question of Plautus’ relation to the Greek play, though I incline to think that Plautus did modify the original considerably, whether he was inspired by Italian farce, as many have held,⁴ or invented the final scene and other bits out of whole cloth, or borrowed material from some other Greek comedy – though nothing prevents us from supposing that Diphilus himself could have combined two plots he found in earlier Greek comedy: contaminatio need not be an exclusively Roman phenomenon.⁵ I wish rather to consider the effect of the superimposition of two story lines, whatever their source. What is more, I hope to show that the playwright planted some metatheatrical cues that signalled the intersection of the two paradigms.

The plot of the Casina ostensibly centres on the rivalry between a father, Lysidamus, and his son for an attractive slave – the Casina of the title. The motif of an erotic competition between father and son is not exceptional (cf. Plautus’ Mercator and Asinaria);⁶ in the Casina, however, the son never appears and his marriage with the girl is announced in just two verses in a coda addressed to the audience, with the additional information that Casina will turn out to be the daughter of the next door neighbours, Alcesimus and his wife Myrrhina (1013–4; the prologue had already revealed that the girl is an Athenian citizen).⁷ We are also told that a slave saw a baby girl being exposed sixteen years ago, begged to save her, and handed her over to Cleostrata, Lysidamus’ wife, who raised her as though she were her own child; but the slave is sick and so he too will make no appearance in the play. For the rest, Cleostrata’s husband and son are now madly in love with Casina and are secretly lining up their forces, the father planning to marry her off to the overseer of the country farm, Olympio, while the son seeks to wed her to his slave Chalinus, with intention, like his father, of taking possession of her on the first night and thereafter. The wife, however, gets wind of the old man’s passion and conspires with her son to block it; the father, in turn, cottons to the son’s desire and sends him out of town. In his absence, the mother will act in her son’s behalf. The prologue alerts the audience not to expect the boy’s return: ‘Plautus didn’t wish it; he broke the bridge that was on his route’ (65–6).

It is noteworthy that there is no apparent distinction between the son’s passion for Casina and the father’s: given that the son will marry her, one might have expected some contrast between the youth’s authentic love and the dirty old man’s hankering for a young virgin. Within the play, moreover, there is virtually no indication that Chalinus, as opposed to Olympio, sees his marriage to Casina as a mere ploy to make her available to the son, nor is it clear why the son would have to resort to such a device to gain possession of the girl, especially if he already has his mother’s consent. Cleostrata’s part in such a conspiracy is itself implausible: she has nurtured Casina as her own daughter, and while she cannot contemplate marrying her to a citizen, since she is a foundling, she would have no interest in prostituting her for her son’s benefit by arranging a sham marriage with a slave. The collusion of the son and mother is presented simply for the sake of making the contest between father and son symmetrical – or rather, between husband and wife: each seeks to arrange a proxy marriage with a slave, who will yield his rights to another man. The comedy thus develops on two fronts: a conventional movement toward marriage, with a recognition scene involving the neighbours and perhaps the sick slave, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the struggle of Cleostrata to marry Casina to a decent man, albeit a slave (we know that Chalinus had served as the son’s armour–bear-er, and so is a man in whom the family has some confidence), and in the process to block her husband’s plan to possess her through the charade of a union with Olympio.⁸

In blocking the son’s way back to the city, Plautus introduces the first of his references to detours. The audience would have recognised, I believe, that not just the son but the plot itself was being shunted off in a new direction: the theme of rivalry between son and father is deflected onto the contention between husband and wife over who has the right to determine the future of Casina. Both stories are compatible with the further theme of blocking Lysidamus’ access to the girl: in this way, Cleostrata prevents the adultery and keeps control over Casina, and at the same time she eliminates an obstacle to the son’s desire. Blocking Lysidamus is thus a means to attain the resolution of both plot movements. But this neat fusion of the two story lines does not obscure the distinction between them. On the one hand, Cleostrata has an independent motive for interfering with her husband’s scheme, and one that reflects her sense of her own status; on the other hand, she is a subordinate agent serving the interests of her son – but until she learns, late in the play, that Casina is a legitimate citizen, she cannot have marriage as her goal. Hence, the scheme of a phony union with Chalinus, but this project, as we have seen, is not compatible with her personal aims. Cleostrata thus plays a secondary role in one strand of the narrative, even as she acts as an autonomous agent in the other. It is almost as though, in representing so independent a wife and giving her such a strategic role in the play, the playwright – whether Plautus or Diphilus – wanted to play down the novelty of Cleostrata’s active defiance of her husband. Powerful women are acceptable in the classical ideology, provided they are acting in the service of a male.

The prologue goes on to register the audience’s surprise at the idea that slaves can marry, which was impossible under Roman law. Plautus pretends that this is in fact possible in Greece, Carthage, and his own Apulia, where slave weddings are celebrated even more lavishly than those of free people. This is a joke: Plautus offers to bet the audience that it’s true, provided the judge is Punic (proverbially known for lying), or Greek or Apulian. At this point, the prologue says: ‘But let me return [rev...

Table of contents

• Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I: Plot
• Part II: Plot and Language
• Part III: Plot, Language, and Reception
• List of Contributors
• Index locorum
• General Index