Drama
Drama
Early Beginnings. The wellspring of Western drama, of course, was ancient Greece. From the start, Roman writers were fascinated by Greek tragedy and comedy, and they not only zealously translated these into Latin, but eventually began writing original plays of their own, based on these models. We know, for example, that Livius Andronicus (circa 284-204 B.C.E.) wrote both tragedies and comedies, and Titus Livius (known as Livy) tells us that he was the first Roman playwright to use actual plots for his onstage presentations. Gnaeus Naevius (circa 265-190 B.C.E.) not only based some of his Latin-language comedies on Greek originals (the so-called fabulae palliatae), but also was the first Roman to write serious plays on topics drawn from Roman history (fabulae praetextae). It appears that he may also have written fabulae togatae, low comedies on Roman life. Another genre of low comedy in early Rome, relying on the use of stock characters, was known as the fatfabula atellana or Atellan farce, so named after a town in Campania.
THE PERPETUAL GUEST
Roman drama was, from the first, based on Greek models. Plautus, one of the earliest authors writing in Latin whose work has substantially survived the wreck of time, was a master of the stage, creating stories and characters that can still make an audience laugh out loud in the theater. One of characteristic traits of Plautine comedy is his use of “stock characters,” or recognizable character-types who recur from play to play: the handsome youth, the nubile maiden, the courtesan, the dour old man, the clever slave. Among these is the parasitus or “parasite,” the irritating type who lives by sponging off the generosity of others. In this passage we meet one such:
PENICULUS : The boys all call me Peniculus, which may sound ridiculous
But just means Table Duster and shows How Able an Adjuster
I am to dinner and meticulous in clearing off the table:
You can call me Soft Hairbrush: It seems to be my fate
To be famous as a famished eater and wear such a tail plate.
You know, some men chain down their captives, and they shackle
The legs of runaway slaves. I think that’s ridiculous,
To load still worse weight on a badly enough burdened crate.
If you put pressure on him, the underdog wants to get up
And take off, and never do another stroke of work.
Somehow, they’ll always wriggle loose, file off the link
Or knock the lock to bits with a rock. Are chains worth the pains?
If you’d like to rope someone in, so he doesn’t feel
Like escaping, snare him with wine and a meal!
You’re putting a ring through his nose when you take him to dinner.
And as long as you keep him well stocked with food and liquor,
Regularly and the way he likes it, he’ll stick with you,
Even though he’s under heavy sentence. He’ll want to serve you;
As long as you’re bound to give him food, he’s bound to eat it.
The nets and meshes of food are remarkably strong
And elastic, and squeeze even tighter when they get long.
I’m off to Menaechmus’s at the moment, where I’ve signed on
To appear for dinner. I volunteer gaily for a jail
Like his, especially at meals. He doesn’t feed; he deals
With his guests, increasing their status; like a good restauranteur
He doesn’t diagnose, he offers a cure. This sharp epicure
Puts out a very fine spread; he doesn’t spare the courses;
He builds up skyscrapers of dishes—you see something delicious
And have to stand up on the couch and stretch out to reach it
Over all the other things that look nearly as luscious.
I’ve been out of commission for quite a long intermission,
Not in the preferred position at Menaechmus’s house, but at home,
Domiciled and dominated by my own little sweetmeats. Those treats
I provide for myself and my near ones have proved dear [costly] ones,
Thanks to my expensive tastes—and they all go to waist.
So I’m drumming myself out of those ranks, not burning up money
Trooping in with food for the group. Instead, I’m turning tummy
To Menaechmus’s place. He may just embrace my company. Here he comes now
Flouncing out of the house—looks like they’ve had a row.
Source: Phutus, Menaecbmi, from David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie, eds., Plautus: The Comedies IV (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Roman Comedy. One of the most successful and visible literary forms in the early Roman Republic was drama, with its main practitioner being Plautus. He based his comedies loosely on Greek “New Comedies,” with their limited scope of plots about impediments to true love or mistaken identity. A papyrus fragment of one of his Greek models still exists, which confirms that Plautus adapts the Greek plays freely: he cuts out the tedious moralizing, turns monologues into dialogues, expands the humorous passages, and adds music. In fact, his comedies are more like contemporary musicals than spoken theater. Entertainment was his primary aim, and laughter was his weapon of choice. For the sake of making people laugh he often sacrificed the consistency of the plot and patched scenes from one model play into another, even welding two Greek comedies into one Plautine production, a process commonly referred to as “contamination” (contaminatio). In spite of using Greek plays as his blueprint, and of keeping the Greek setting with Greek characters who, for his audience’s benefit, spoke Latin and lived largely in Roman circumstances, he had a keen eye for what his Roman audience would like. His favorite type of joke is one that still flourishes today; it follows the pattern of a puzzling question, a pause expressing bewilderment, and finally the punch line. Plautus’s favorite stock character was the trickster slave who comes to dominate his aristocratic Roman masters. This, of course, inverts the social roles to which the audience was accustomed. By keeping the Greek setting and names, Plautus creates an illusion of strangeness; this situation allowed the audience to laugh at a comic inversion of their own world, thereby questioning the lives they knew. While Plautine comedy is appealing at first for its sheer fun, one cannot deny that there is also a tendency to refuse to reestablish order at the end of a play. Pseudolus burps in his master’s face; Menaechmus sells his own wife! Plautus refuses to reaffirm the hierarchy of Roman society or its marital values, and thereby challenges the audience.
“Contamination” and Sophistication. Plautus’s younger contemporary Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) was much more refined than Plautus. As a member of a philhellenic circle centered around Scipio the Younger, Terence followed his Greek models more closely but still reserved the right to adapt freely rather than merely to translate. In his comedies we find much less slapstick and less music than in Plautus. However, Terence also felt the need at times to add some spice to his play by “contaminating,” for which he was fiercely criticized in his own day. While his plays feel much more civilized and “Greek” than Plautus’s, they are still thoroughly Roman. In one of his best pieces, Adelphi or The Brothers, two brothers’ education methods are pitted against each other: the liberal “Greek” Micio and the tough old “Roman” Demea. Micio has our sympathies throughout most of the play when Demea admits he has been far too restrictive with his son. On the other hand, Demea gets the last word and asserts that Micio has been far too liberal with his boy: “Let me tell you that I may show you the fact that those boys consider you easygoing and jovial does not come from real life nor so much from what’s right and just but from humoring them, indulging them and giving them presents, Micio” (Adelphi 985-8). Thus Terence preserves at least some Roman ideas about child-rearing by means of advocating a “Greek” middle road. Terence challenges traditional Roman values under the influence of Greek thought. However, he does not replace Roman ideals by Greek ones: rather he aims at merging the two value systems.
Imperial Tragedy. Born almost three hundred years after Plautus was Lucius Annaeus Seneca (commonly referred to by scholars as Seneca the Younger), tutor to the emperor Nero. Seneca wrote a number of tragedies based on Greek originals. The characters in these plays serve as negative examples of the emotions: Medea, Thyestes, and Hercules are deranged by anger, Andromache by fear, Phaedra by desire. These plays are the only complete Roman tragedies we have, and for a long time after the end of antiquity were the only ancient drama available in the West. They have therefore exerted a great deal of influence on people such as Shakespeare, but fell out of favor with the rediscovery of Greek tragedy. They are felt by many to be static and stilted, written for recitation rather than for the stage. While it is certainly true that Seneca was no man of the theater, his plays can be (and have been) successfully put on stage. That does not mean that Seneca ever had any hope of seeing them performed.
Sources
W. G. Arnott, Menander, Plautus, Terence: Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
E. J. Kenney and W. V. Clausen, eds., Latin Literature, volume 2, The Cambridge History of Classical Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).