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Plautus and the People of Rome. The Society of the Middle Republic in its Comedies (Dr. M. Hinsch)

Abstract

The project takes a new approach to the social history of the Middle Republic (c. 280–133 BCE) by focusing on the plays of the palliata, Roman comedy in Greek style. Roman comedy contains information on all aspects of social life in Rome, while also presenting interpreters with methodological challenges. Drawing on the findings of philological research, the project develops methodological proposals for fully exploiting comedy as a historical source. Taking comedy seriously as a source means re-evaluating established views on the transformation of Roman society. The 2nd century BCE, the project proposes, did not witness the creeping corruption of a Roman cultural identity, but rather its genesis.

Overview

The Middle Republic was the most dramatic era in Roman history in terms of foreign policy. The expansion of the central Italian city-state into a world power triggered the transformation of the entire Mediterranean region. Consequently, ancient history research has paid particular attention to the political events and institutions, as well as the political culture, of the 3rd and 2nd centuries (Bleckmann 2002; Flaig 2004; Beck 2005; Heftner [1997] 2005; Hölkeskamp 2006; Eckstein 2008; Blösel 2015, 56–154; Walter 2017). This focus corresponds to that of ancient historiography, which was also particularly interested in the expansion of Rome and its political leaders and institutions (cf. Eigler (et al.) (eds.) 2003). By comparison, the social transformation processes of this period have been researched less systematically. Many modern accounts have indirectly followed the narratives of decadence found in ancient historiography when describing commercialisation and Hellenisation as factors in the erosion of the social value system (Toynbee 1965; Alföldy [1975] 2011, 36–84; Coarelli 2011, 237 ff.; on ancient narratives of decadence, see Biesinger 2016). More recent monographs on commercialisation and Hellenisation have painted a less bleak and more multifaceted picture (Wallace-Hadrill 2008; Kay 2014; Maschek 2018). Significantly, however, they shift their focus to the 1st century, where Cicero’s letters and orations, alongside a broader epigraphic and archaeological record, provide a wealth of sources for social and cultural history.

There is, however, also a rich source of social history for the Middle Republic: comedy. The plays of Plautus (c. 250–184) and Terence (c. 195/185–159/8) constitute the most extensive corpus of sources for the Roman Republic prior to Cicero. More than other sources, they offer insights into everyday life in the city on the Tiber. However, the exploitation of this source has so far been limited to case studies (Konstan 1983; Moore 1998; Leigh 2004) or specialised fields (cf. Hanson 1959; Andreau 1968; McCarthy 2000; Stewart 2012). This applies even to Amy Richlin’s interpretation of Plautus’ plays as ‘slave theatre’, the most ambitious attempt to date at a socio-historical interpretation of the comedy (Richlin 2017; see also Hinsch 2019). The reticence of classical historians contrasts with the lively philological debate surrounding the comedy (cf. for instance the more recent Companions: Augoustakis (et al.) (eds.) 2013; Perysinakis (et al.) (eds.) 2014; Dinter (ed.) 2019; Franko / Dutsch (eds.) 2020).

There are reasons for the reticence of classical history. Any attempt to use comedy as a historical source is confronted with two fundamental problems: the relationship between comedy and reality, and the relationship between Roman plays and their Greek models. The first problem is the more theoretically interesting one, but the second has led to greater doubts as to whether it can be resolved. The idea of the ‘exterritoriality of Roman comedy’ (Mommsen) has shaped the view. Since the 19th century, philological research has explored the ‘Plautine in Plautus’ in numerous individual analyses (Fraenkel 1922; cf. Leo [1895] 21912). In German-language scholarship, however, these analyses culminated in the judgement that the Palliata was l’art pour l’art and not a speculum vitae, neither for Athens nor for Rome (Lefèvre 2014; Stärk 2005).

The project questions the necessity of this conclusion. It argues, on the contrary, that it is precisely the literary-philological definition of the ‘Roman’ in the Palliata that makes it possible to evaluate the comedy as a historical source without resorting to hermeneutic circular reasoning. Although the Palliata was based on Hellenistic models, it was at the same time part of an Italic improvisational tradition whose stylistic peculiarities make Roman interjections recognisable as such. To provoke laughter, the poets of the Palliata had to playfully subvert the everyday expectations of their Roman audience. In this respect, it is precisely carnivalesque exaggeration and inversion that indirectly refer to Roman discourses and practices. The methodological aim of this work is not to dispense with the historiographical sources hitherto favoured, but rather to reverse the perspective. Taking comedy as a contemporary self-description, retrospective accounts of the Middle Republic can be classified and interpreted in a new way, with a critical eye on the sources.

Comedy was not merely a mirror, but at the same time part of Roman society. This holds true in the immediate sense that stage performances were an integral part of community-building religious festivals, which took up a great deal of time and space in Rome (Dupont 1985, 19–65; Marshall 2006, 16–82). Attending theatrical performances was part of being Roman. It also holds true in the sense that, in the 3rd century, theatre became perhaps the most important medium of social self-reflection. The beginning of Rome’s rise to become a Mediterranean world power following the victory over Carthage in 241 BC also marks the start of a veritable media revolution: buildings, pictorial monuments, inscriptions, coins and literature – beginning with stage drama in 240 – were utilised in new ways to convey messages to contemporaries within the urban space of Rome and to preserve them for posterity (Hölscher 1978; Rüpke 2000; Carbone 2020).

Plautus and the other poets of the Palliata experimented with theatre as a distorted mirror of societal normative discourses. By retaining the Greek setting of their source texts and exaggerating it into the grotesque with garish colours, they achieved a defamiliarisation effect (ostranenie in the sense of Viktor Shklovsky), which, on the one hand, immunised the transgression and inversion of the moral order displayed on stage through ambiguity. On the other hand, by confronting the audience with the ‘Greece of the stage’ as a ‘self-other’ (Dupont 2005), they encouraged them to reflect on what the ‘self’ actually consisted of. For the metatheatrical breaking of the stage illusion constantly reminded the audience that they were not really in Greece. The comedies thus do not merely reflect the Roman self-image during the Middle Republic; they constructed this normative cultural identity in the first place through interaction with the audience.

The theatre’s function as a kind of ‘mass medium’ of ancient urban society makes the comedies a unique source for moral concepts beyond the upper classes. They demonstrate that the canon of values usually described as ‘aristocratic’ was by no means restricted to the political ruling class. At the same time, through its mockery and humiliation of the political elite’s social misbehaviour, comedy constantly brought home the fact that acceptance of social superiority always depended on the fulfilment of the expectations of moral integrity placed upon it. And in the figure of the shrewd slave (servus callidus), who knows how to outwit the more powerful and the richer, it created a figure with whom the vast majority of the population could identify, a population that had to hold its own day in, day out in a society riven by steep hierarchies.

From a socio-historical perspective, the project examines four aspects of social change: the commercialisation of economic life, the Hellenisation of cultural forms of expression, the interdependent relationships within the household, and the relationship between the political urban community and its ‘globalised’ environment. The focus is on tensions and potential for conflict. Comedy is a particularly well-suited source for this, because it did not resolve contradictions in a one-sided, normative manner, but rather brought them to the fore and thought them through to their logical conclusion in the figures of exaggeration and reversal (Segal [1968] 21987; Gruen 1990, 126–157; Braun 2000). The triumph of sons over their fathers, wives over their husbands and slaves over their masters is a carnivalesque reversal of real conditions, but at the same time eloquent testimony to the fact that the social order of Rome was not a static construct, but the result of a ceaseless process of negotiation between unequal actors.

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