GREEK COMEDY ON THE ROMAN STAGE
The theme of Roman _gravitas_ has perhaps been overworked. The impression
seems to be current that Roman schoolboys cheered at the ball games
in periodic sentences, and that Roman babes begged for the moon in
quantitative hexameters. It appears to be difficult to imagine that the
Romans took a very special pleasure in rollicking comedy. Only twenty-six
of their comedies have survived, but it is safe to say that if we now had
all the respectable literature of the period before 100 B.C., including
the epics, the tragedies, the minor verse, and even the artistic prose,
the shelves that held the comedies would easily outnumber all the rest.
Of what other nation is that true? We have the titles of over four
hundred of these plays for the Republican period and there is no reason
to suppose that we have even an approach to the full list.
As we have said, the Romans, like all the peoples who followed the
Greeks, had to take cognizance of what had been done before. Livius and
Naevius were the first to adapt Greek comedies for the Roman stage, as
they had been the first to adapt Greek tragedies. Of their work, however,
we have again only fragments, saved usually by late grammarians to
illustrate archaic grammar. Of Naevius we know the titles of thirty-four
comedies, an average of one a year during his period of activity—but
since many of these have come to us by the merest coincidence we should
not assume that we know all the names of his comedies by any means. Most
of these thirty-four plays were adapted from the Greek, but not all.
The man who wrote the first Roman epic and the first Roman chronicle
play (praetexta) was probably never a slavish copyist. We have noticed
how he came to grief for his daring in attacking the powerful Metelli
during a critical period of the war. Such criticism would presumably
appear in Roman plays. The fragments of his comedies also show many local
references that are best explained as coming from plays purely Roman,
and such titles as _Hariolus_, _Tunicularia_, and _Agitatoria_ suggest
independent work. However, so long as we have only about a hundred
complete lines rescued from all the plays we can hardly speak with
certainty on this point.
In discussing tragedy we suggested that Livius and Naevius were probably
the men who shaped the “operatic” form of Roman tragedy, and it is likely
that they too were the men who carried this form into comedy, though
its final development seems to be due to Plautus. The distinctly lyric
lines are rare, to be sure, but the fragments are too few to permit us
to expect many. The majority are iambic, the Roman equivalent of the
Greek originals, and they have of course the free Latin form. One line
is anapaestic; the old Roman trochaic septenarius, well suited to song,
is frequent and so is the iambic octonarius, which Naevius seems to
treat like a septenarius with anacrusis. Indeed Cicero[1] calls it a
septenarius and indicates that it was sung to the accompaniment of the
flute.
These were the comedies which entertained the Romans at their festivals
during the gloomy years of the Punic war, those years that are so vividly
pictured for us by Livy. If we could recover these plays and interpolate
them between the harrowing scenes of Livy’s history we should know more
than we do of Roman society during that most critical epoch of the
nation’s history.
Plautus, from whom we have twenty plays, had staged a few of them before
Naevius went into exile, in fact in the _Miles Gloriosus_ he refers to
the imprisonment of his fellow-poet. In his plots Plautus kept rather
close to the Greek plays, translating, paraphrasing, and adapting as
suited his mood. We shall presently discuss his reasons for doing so.
What these themes were we need not repeat. The Greeks of Menander’s day
had shaped the comedies of intrigue and of romance fairly well on the
lines these have followed ever since. Shakespeare’s _Comedy of Errors_
is very close to Plautus’ _Menaechmi_, and though it departs from its
original in its search for further entanglements, the construction, the
type of humor, and the dramatic devices are the same. In the _Merry Wives
of Windsor_, Falstaff illustrates the Menandrian use of self-deception,
from his first boasting to his leap into the basket. The Wives are more
in evidence than they would have been in Menander but there is little
else to distinguish the play from the standard New Comedy. From the
Greek, via Plautus and Terence, came practically all the types and all
the tricks in which Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy delighted.
Here it is my task not to discuss Roman comedy as such, but rather to
indicate what in Rome’s life and experiences made itself felt through
these plays. In the Plautine adaptations of Greek comedies we find two
seemingly inconsistent purposes, one to rewrite in such a way as to make
the exotic comprehensible, the other to keep a Greek atmosphere in order
not to offend Roman taste by permitting the inference that the author
approved of the behavior which he presented. The first purpose required
simplification, the second avoided it. It is necessary to dwell upon this
distinction for a moment since historians frequently fall into error by
assuming either that Plautus reproduced a Greek milieu without alteration
or on the contrary that he represented Roman life as he found it. In
point of fact he did both or either, as best suited his purpose.
In technicalities of law, to take a simple illustration, Plautus’
procedure was to simplify with little regard for consistency. At times
when it did not matter he substituted Roman officials or institutions for
Greek ones without concern as to whether they were exact equivalents.
If in presenting the details of a lawsuit a literal translation of the
Greek would seem obscure to a Roman audience, Plautus substituted some
comprehensible point and reshaped the whole passage to conform to his
illustration. In short, he used mere common sense in adapting foreign
plays for stage production. Had Plautus been translating for a reading
public he might have given a literal rendering and inserted a note of
explanation. But plays written for a single presentation have no occasion
for employing explanatory notes.
Scholars have also been troubled by the fact that the plays of Plautus
bristle with Greek words. There is an average of about ninety occurrences
a play, counting repetitions of the same word. How would our comedies
fare on the stage if foreign words were used with equal lavishness?
Not a few of these words—like _amphora_, _ancora_, _epistula_—had of
course been acclimated through commerce, and would cause no trouble. A
few technical names that could not be translated—of Greek magistrates,
for instance—were illumined by the context. In a few instances Plautus
literally dumps in Greek words for amusement, as when an irate husband
reels off the items of the bill he has received from the modiste, or
reads the menu that will cost him more than he is able to pay. Such
words the audience were hardly expected to know. The very outlandish
extravagance of the list is intentional. But after we have made these
subtractions, the bulk remains.[2] Are we to assume that Plautus
addressed his plays to the score of cultured gentlemen who had had Greek
tutors? If he had, the aediles would hardly have gone to the expense
of buying the plays and presenting them, for the purpose of the games
was to attract and amuse the holiday masses. Can it be that Plautus
indolently neglected to invent Latin jokes in place of the Greek ones
of his models? That is hardly a satisfactory solution in the case of
a writer who inundates his scenes with rollicking fun. Another common
explanation—too frequently hazarded—that the streets were already
overrun with Greek captives who had spread a knowledge of Greek, will
hardly serve. In neither of the Punic wars had many Greek captives been
taken—the captives had been chiefly Carthaginian, and their Spanish,
Gallic, and Ligurian mercenaries—and these are not noticed in the
Plautine plays.[3]
The simple explanation is that most of the Roman populace had served in
many campaigns in Greek cities and with Greek contingents and had become
familiar with a great number of colloquial Greek expressions, in the same
way that American boys acquired not a few French phrases some years ago
in their one brief campaign overseas. The older generation had served in
Sicily in the First Punic War and had been billeted in Greek towns for
periods of from six to twelve years. The younger men had all served in
the Greek districts of southern Italy before Hannibal was finally driven
out in 203 B.C. Both of these wars strained Rome’s man power to the very
limit so that practically every adult male saw service in Greek-speaking
communities. And finally, during the last years of Plautus’ activity, a
dozen legions were sent across the Adriatic for the campaigns against
Philip and Antiochus. Plautus could probably assume therefore that at
least ninety per cent of the able-bodied men of his audience had served
in campaigns among and with Greeks. Those retired soldiers were happy
to be complimented with reminders of their services to the state, and
Plautus did it by frequent references to the language they had acquired
in the wars.[4]
The liberal use of military terms like _machaera_,[5] _ballista_,
_catapulta_, _phylaca_, _techina_, _machina_, even in all kinds of
figurative senses; of exclamations and terms of abuse that the soldiers
would hear when out prowling for extra rations: _barbarus_, _harpago_,
_dierecte_, _latro_, _morus_, _plaga_, _colapus_, _mastigia_, _ganeum
gerrae_, _apage_, _pax_, _papae_, _babae_, _eia_, _eugepae_, and the
rest; of canteen phrases convenient on pay-days in Sicily: _drachuma_,
_danista_, _trapezita_, _opsonium_, _cyathisso_, _crapula_, _oenopolium_,
_macellum_, _comissatum eo_ (and shall we add _gynaeceum_?), this tells
an unmistakable story. A large number of these expressions were little
used at Rome after the period of general campaigning among the Greeks.
Many point directly to Sicily. The word _lautumiae_, for example, reminds
us of the convict quarries of Syracuse, _basilike_ (“right royally”)
seems to betray the soldiers’ respect for the lavish court of King Hiero,
as _Siculi logi_ reflects their impression of a talkative people. A
large number of the words are Doric in formation, deriving apparently
from Sicily or Tarentum: _choragus_ (used in an un-Attic sense and
sound), _plaga_, _machina_, _zamia_, _catapulta_,[6] _colapus_, _ganeum_,
_gerrae_, _sumbola_, and many others. Not a few words were demonstrably
adopted by speakers rather than by writers, as _phylaca_, _gerrae_,
_balineum_, _lanterna_, etc.
This is but a brief indication of the linguistic evidence that the
soldiers returned home with a convenient Greek vocabulary of no small
scope. How freely Plautus could assume its ready use is revealed by
his lavishness in compounding such Greek words with Latin termination
as in _athletice_, _dulice_, _euscheme_, _inanilogista_, _morologus_,
_pultiphagus_, _pancratice_, _opsonari_, _plagipatidae_, _elleborosus_,
_ulmitriba_, and even in the use of Greek oaths (μὰ τὸν Ἀπόλλων) of
semi-Greek puns (_opus est chryso Chrysalo_, etc.), and Greek slang
(_argentum_ οἴχεται). But we may be sure that Plautus knew very well
the precise limits of this camp language. He does not venture to employ
the common colloquialisms of the literary Greek of Menander if they
are not a part of the military store of his day. For those he finds
Latin substitutes. Very likely Plautus had himself served as a soldier
in southern Italy during the Hannibalic war and had there acquired an
accurate knowledge of the diction that could be intelligible to his
audience of soldier folk.
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.
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.
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.
The economic and social factors that we have mentioned account for the
fact that Plautus had to continue the Greek habit of doubling rôles
even though he did not employ masks, and though he was not bound by any
old tradition as to the proper number of actors.[16] Of course the rule
of the three actors had broken down even at the time of Euripides, and
Menander probably allowed himself five actors at times. Plautus often had
ten or twelve characters, but he seems to get along with about four or
five actors and in several instances with only three. This accounts for
the somewhat artificial excuses that characters are constantly giving
for leaving the stage when the actor has to scurry off to dress for a
new rôle. Needless to say, this deficiency of actors must have exerted
a restraining influence upon Plautus which he had to bear constantly
in mind. It kept many scenes rather thin. When, for instance, in the
_Rudens_ after the young man has been searching for his sweetheart
through three acts, and after he has just learned that she has been
rescued from a shipwreck and a thieving slave-dealer, he suddenly comes
face to face with her at last, one naturally expects at least a cheerful
exchange of greetings. But he has not a word for her. It takes us aback
unless we notice that the girl must be represented on the stage by a
mute, because the actor who has been playing her rôle must now be engaged
in playing another part. Or again, in the _Pseudolus_, where Ballio
heaps abuse upon three characters, sends them off, engages in a futile
monologue, and then calls out three others and continues his tirade,
one comprehends the strange interruption by noticing that the second
trio cannot exist until the first three actors have gone in and changed
their garbs and voices. It will be remembered that Shakespeare suffered
from the same technical difficulty. At the end of the _Winter’s Tale_
we see far less of Perdita than we desire and we are hardly consoled by
the knowledge that the actor who has been playing her rôle is now busy
playing Hermione. Terence was not hampered to quite the same extent
as Plautus by a lack of players, but the Greek convention reasserted
itself later and was foolishly accepted in Horace’s _Ars Poetica_ to the
detriment of the later drama.
As we have said, the early Roman dramatists did not use masks and in fact
employed the most simple make-up in quickly adjusted garments and wigs.
With the extensive doubling and trebling of rôles there must have been an
uncomfortable amount of recognizing of the actors. The late scholiasts
like Donatus, who discuss these matters, wrote when masks were again
unusual but when actors were more plentiful. They are therefore somewhat
obscure about the earlier custom. Their guess that Roscius introduced
the mask[17] to hide an ineffectual countenance may be true, but it is
very likely that the Greek masks were introduced on the Roman stage—this
happened about the Gracchan time—in order to facilitate the doubling of
rôles and to remove the confusion that arose from the easy recognition
of the actors. By that time Rome was so large and the theater crowd so
extensive that the play of features would at any rate be missed by a
large part of the audience, and the well-marked masks served the useful
purpose of distinguishing the characters at a distance. Opera glasses
have now removed that necessity.
There seems to be some misunderstanding about the social status of the
Roman actors because our sources of information are late and do not
always distinguish between the various periods. The facts now available
seem to warrant the statement that slaves were not employed as actors
during the first hundred years of the drama when most of the great
comedies were written and produced. At that time the authors usually
acted themselves, and authors and actors were united in a common guild,
honored by the state in the Alexandrian manner by being assigned an
official meeting place at Minerva’s temple. Livius and Terence were
freedmen, to be sure, but out of respect for their art both were highly
honored by the foremost men of the senate. The day when slaves had
stigmatized the professions by their participation was still far off.
Even in Sulla’s time the great rôles of legitimate comedy and tragedy
were assumed by distinguished men like Roscius and Aesopus,[18] men whom
Cicero was pleased to number among his friends. Actors gradually lost
their position in society only by the deterioration of the drama—of which
we shall speak later. It was apparently when the standard plays had to
give way to farces and mimes that slaves had to be trained to take rôles
which self-respecting citizens refused to play. Then the social brand was
marked on the few who demeaned themselves by playing with the slaves.
And thus in the late Republic we hear not a little of the cheapness of
the actor’s profession. However, that stigma did not even then apply
to the great actors who confined themselves to the parts of the good
old plays. The exact story of the fall of the profession is lost to
us. Cicero is quoted as having said in his _De Republica_ that at Rome
actors and others who took part in a profession of entertainment were
deprived of their civic rights and had their names struck off the tribal
registration list by the censors.[19] These words are assigned to Scipio
in a dialogue whose dramatic date is 129 B.C. but, as in several other
instances, Cicero may be allowing himself an anachronism. Livy happens to
say, without specifying a date, that actors could not serve as soldiers
in the Roman legions.
Now there are two possible explanations for this censorial stigma. It is
possible that at one of the several puritanic assaults on the theater in
the second century B.C.—and during one of these periods of reform the
censor Nasica ordered a partly constructed theater to be torn down—a
censorial brand may have been placed on the actors in order to discourage
citizens from entering the profession. But it is quite as possible that
in the early days when actors were difficult to secure for the public
festivals some praetor in charge of the festival induced the censor to
excuse actors from army service and that, following the Roman practice
of using the military rôle for the voting list, he also struck the
names of actors from the lists of the tribus. Later when the state was
demoralized and slaves had filled the profession, the cancellation of the
name, at first effected for practical purposes, may have been continued
as morally appropriate. In Roscius’ day the stigma was associated not
with appearance on the stage but with playing for remuneration, so that
when Roscius ceased to accept a fee he could be raised to the knighthood
by Sulla. This fact proves how unstable the theory of the actors’
disability really is and rather supports the view that removal from the
tribal list was not at first intended so much as a stigma as an excuse
from performing service away from Rome. At any rate the social brand did
not apply to recognized actors in the standard drama.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Cic. _Tusc._ i. 106-7.
[2] Leo, _Plautinische Forschungen_, 106; Fraenkel, _Plautinisches im
Plautus_, 157; Kahle, _De Vocabulis Graecis Plauti aetate_: and Hoffmann,
_in_ Stoltz-Schmalz, p. 813, have made some interesting observations
regarding the use of Greek words in Plautus but have failed to note the
pertinent historical facts.
[3] The greeting _ave_ is a curious instance of borrowing from the Punic.
The word was perhaps brought back by the soldiers from their camps in
the Punic parts of Sicily. The Romans had besieged the Punic forts of
Lilybaeum for eight years.
[4] Plautus likes to address the soldiers of his audiences, cf. _Capt._
68; _Cist._ 197; _Cas._ 87; etc.
[5] It is difficult to say when the great vowel-shift took place
in Latin. It is clear that Greek words in Plautus like _calamus_,
_colaphus_, and _hilarus_ had not come under the influence of the shift.
Either they were very recent arrivals or had been used so little in
Latin folk-speech (like _barbarus_, a Greek term of abuse) that Plautus
could spell them in the Greek fashion. Words like _oliva_, _Hercules_,
_Massilia_, _Tarentum_ were of course acclimated long before and took
on the regular vowel changes of Latin. However it is probable that many
Greek words that were adopted during the Pyrrhic and first Punic wars
felt the full influence of the great shift. This shift seems to have
begun after the twelve tables and the Duenos inscription and it was by no
means over when Plautus wrote: cf. the inscriptional spelling _mereto_,
_soledas_, _Esquelino_, _Arimenese_, _popolom_, _saxolus_, etc. It is
difficult to see how _Acragas_ (Agrigentum) could have got into frequent
Latin usage before 262 B.C. It is highly probable that the vowel-shift in
Latin, like the similar change in English, marks a politico-social shift,
an emergence of a social group that pronounced certain vowels in a way
not considered correct in aristocratic Rome. We may possibly associate it
with the elevation of the plebeians after the Publilian and Hortensian
laws of 339 and 287 B.C., which made the tribal assembly supreme in Roman
legislation. The new tendencies in pronunciation would then be a strong
factor in speech during the First Punic War. Furthermore, the fact that
the dramatists could transform Δήμοφων to Demipho at one stroke shows how
quickly a word would adapt itself to Latin custom. I feel sure that we
have placed the arrival of most of the Greek words too early.
[6] _Catapulta_ was probably not very old in Latin since only the third
syllable shows a change, and that a relatively late one. In words like
_sumbola_ we doubtless have the Doric pronunciation of _u_; in the short
penult of _gynaeceum_, _balinea_, and _platea_, the cause need not lie
wholly in a Latin tendency to shorten one vowel before another but in
part perhaps to the similar tendency found in Greek and especially in
Sicilian. In Latin _latro_, _barbarus_, _choragus_, and the like we
certainly have not standard Greek meanings but such as might have been
heard in Sicily during the Punic war. Sturtevant’s interesting discussion
“Concerning the Use of Greek in Vulgar Latin,” _Trans. Am. Phil. Assoc._
(1925), quite misses the heart of the question when it speaks of the
“Romans consciously mocking the Greeks of the city.” There were very few
Greeks there then, and they were not significant enough to invite mocking.
[7] Fraenkel, _Plautinisches im Plautus_, chap. III; unfortunately he has
failed to comprehend the nature of the Plautine public. Legrand’s _Daos_
makes the more serious mistake of treating the Greek and Roman New Comedy
as a single phenomenon.
[8] Sedgwick, _Class. Quart._ 1927, 88.
[9] _Stich._ 448, _licet haec Athenis nobis: Men._ 7-9. At the end of the
_Bacchides_ Plautus becomes very apologetic for the immoral last scene.
[10] Selenium in the _Cistellaria_ and Adelphasium in the _Poenulus_ are
favorably portrayed so as not to disappoint the audience when they are
later to be revealed as freeborn.
[11] A. Gellius, II, 23, 6.
[12] Leo, _Plaut. Cantica_: Fraenkel, _op. cit._, chap. X, who, however,
draws upon Ennius more than the dates permit. The so-called epitaph of
Plautus apparently credited him with special praise for his elaborate
songs (_numeri innumeri_).
[13] There were theaters at least in Syracuse, Tauromenium, Segesta (the
seat of a Roman garrison throughout the period of the war), Agyrion,
Tyndaris, Akrae, and Catania; see Bieber, _Denkmäler d. Theaterwesen_,
50. _Choragus_ is a Doric form that might readily have come from Segesta.
[14] Cf. Fraenkel on the “Versus quadratus,” _Hermes_, 1927, 357.
[15] Ter., _Eunuch._ 20 and _Hecyra_, 14.
[16] Cf. C. M. Kurrelmeyer, _Economy of Actors in Plautus_. The
well-known Horatian rule was a later reversion to a Greek rule. Choral
singers were apparently imported from Greece in large numbers in the
days of Accius; there was a _Societas cantorum Graecorum_ at Rome then:
see _Raccolta in onore G. Lombroso_, 287. In England the early companies
that played the interludes seldom numbered over four, and yet they had at
times to take care of sixteen or more rôles. Doubling was less drastic
in Shakespeare’s theater but it sufficed to allow the dramatist the
privilege of producing diversified effects by using many rôles for only
one scene or act. In _Hamlet_ alone there are some ten rôles of this
type. Plautus and Terence do not hesitate to dismiss a character after
the first scene or indeed to introduce one in the last.
[17] Diomedes, in _G. L. K._, I, 489, _quod oculis perversis erat_. The
late commentators seem to have had very little information on the subject.
[18] On Roscius, see Von der Mühll _in_ Pauly-Wiss. _sub. voc._, 1123.
There is no evidence whatever for the traditional conjecture that
Roscius and Aesopus were freedmen. The sister of Roscius married into a
well-known family. Aesopus was probably a Greek who, like Archias, had
been given citizenship in some municipality as an honor. His position at
Rome was such that it is impossible to suppose that he had ever been a
slave.
[19] Cic., _De Rep._ iv 10; Livy VII, 2, is full of anachronisms. Cf.
Warnecke, _Neue Jahrb._ 1914, 94. However, Warnecke fails to note how
late the evidence is and how completely it disagrees with the known
circumstances of the early Roman drama. Plautus, _Cist._ 785, which
promises a flogging to the incapable actor, is of course one of the
jokes of the play. The ninth article of the recently discovered charter
of Cyrene excuses from certain public service various people (including
doctors and teachers of music) who are engaged in professions of public
welfare. Since the actors’ guild at Rome was based upon Alexandrian
models, it is not unlikely that certain Ptolemaic regulations were also
taken over.