The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence

Mathias Hanses, The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. ISBN 9780472132256.

Mali Skotheim, Ashoka University, mali.skotheim@ashoka.edu.in.

In this riveting volume, Hanses argues against the idea that the age of Roman comedy ended in the mid-first century BCE, and demonstrates that in fact, Roman comedy was not only widely appreciated as literature but also performed in Rome well into the Imperial period. He devotes the majority of the book to the impact of Roman comedy on a diverse range of Latin literary genres (oratory, satire, and love poetry). Recent work on Greek drama in the theatrical, intellectual, and social life of the Hellenistic and Roman eras has similarly revealed a continued interest in drama in text and performance across many contexts and media (e.g., Sebastiana Nervegna’s Menander in Antiquity¹), which Hanses has now shown is also true of Latin drama. One important contribution of Hanses’s study is to show the value of the historical study of performance (that is, when, where, and by whom Roman comedy was performed in the late Republican and imperial periods) to our understanding of the reception of Roman comedy in Latin literature. Considering this performance history widens our understanding of the audiences which Roman comedy reached in the late Republic and Imperial periods, and the status which it occupied in the Roman literary imagination.

In his introduction, Hanses points to two decisive factors in the adoption of comedy by elite authors from the late Republic onward. First, the language of Plautus and Terence, along with other early Latin authors, came to seem archaic and therefore respectable, and second, the rise of mime made comedy seem elevated by contrast (p. 4). He also covers some fundamental generic distinctions. In the late Republican and early Imperial period, he argues, fabulae togatae (comedies in Roman dress) and fabulae palliatae (comedies in Greek dress) were closely related, sub-genres of comoedia (comedy) (pp. 16–17). Mime was a distinct type of performance, although often alluded to alongside comedy in literary texts, due to the shared performance context of the ludi (games) (p. 25).

Chapter 1, “Reviving Roman Comedies in the Republic and Early Empire,” covers the performance of Roman comedy, primarily in Rome, from the mid-first century BCE to the mid-second century CE. A particular strength of this chapter is its reliance on many kinds of evidence: coins, graffiti, inscriptions, visual art, and literary texts. Inscriptions, including epitaphs of performers of comedy, attest to comedy as a lived experience and tell us something about the status of performers and their pride in their profession. Considering status from the perspective of the performer is an important intervention, as it resists essentializing elite Roman attitudes towards theatrical professionals.

Hanses finds that Latin comedy was performed at festivals into the late first century CE and, after that, in elite houses (p. 35). Roman comedies also continued to be written into the imperial period (p. 36). He also discusses terminology. Whereas the Greek κωμῳδός (comedian) refers to a lead actor of comedy, as opposed to the συναγωνισταί (co-competitors) in the troupe, he suggests, based on attestations of comoedi (comedians) in Latin literature, “the Latin term [comoedus] refers to a performer whose area of concentration is precisely in the fabula palliata [comedies in Greek dress]” (p. 38). Actors of the fabula togata (comedy in Roman dress), on the other hand, are called histriones (actors) or scaenici (stage people), but not comoedi (comedians) (p. 39). Hanses suggests that certain comoedi (comedians) adopted a more elegant style of performance, most clearly exemplified by Roscius, were of a higher status than histriones (actors), and aligned with tragoedi (tragedians) as higher-status performers (pp. 51–53).

Discussions of contemporary theater culture by Quintilian and Juvenal suggest that reperformances of fabulae palliatae (comedies in Greek dress) were still taking place at the Roman ludi (games) in the late first century CE. In the mid-first century CE, comoedi (comedians) begin to be attested at Roman banquets (p. 95). Although the first references to this practice are somewhat exceptional (in the house of Claudius and the fictional Trimalchio), certain developments in visual art seem to indicate that a shift was occurring towards private performance. One is the rise of theatrical themes in domestic art at Pompeii and Herculaneum (p. 96). In Pompeii, Hanses argues, wall paintings of Menander do not indicate performances of Menander, but that Menander was the origin of Greek New Comedy, and by extension, Roman comedy (pp. 99–100). Thus, the artwork celebrates the rise of the genre, which at the time of the paintings included a broader range of playwrights working in this style, such as contemporary Latin dramatists.

The next three chapters tackle the reception of Roman comedy in Latin literature in the late Republic and Empire. Chapter 2, “Roman Comedy and Ciceronian Oratory,” focuses on Cicero’s reliance on tropes, plots, and character types from the stage, which, Hanses argues, made his characters recognizable to audiences familiar with comedy in performance. Such tropes also set up expectations in the audience about where certain stories would lead. While references to mime are generally derogatory, he argues, character types drawn from comedy can be negative or positive. Thus in the Pro Caelio, Cicero portrays Clodius as a leno (pimp) and Clodia as a meretrix (prostitute), but Marcus Caelius as the adulescens amans (young man in love), and himself plays the part of the pater durus (harsh father) (pp. 129, 141). While many of these references could be interpreted as textual (e.g., the use of quotations from comedy), Hanses argues that performance is a significant part of the picture. For example, in the Pro Murena, Cicero ridicules the legal process, drawing not only on lawsuit scenes from Roman comedy, but also on the image of the tibicen (pipe player), evoking the music of comic performance (p. 176).

In Chapter 3, “Roman Comedy in Roman Satire,” Hanses considers the reception of Roman comedy in the satires of Horace and Juvenal. Like Cicero, Horace as satirist adopts the role of the pater durus (harsh father) (p. 207). Unlike Cicero, the satirist also draws upon the servus callidus (clever slave) (p. 230), who “provides a more world-savvy form of moral commentary” than the pater durus (harsh father) (p. 247). Juvenal not only draws upon comedy, but also complains about the theater culture of his own time, and by extension the corruption of Rome. In Juvenal’s third satire, Hanses notes, Umbricius rails against the prominence of Greek comoedi (comedians) in Rome, and celebrates rustic Italic performances of Atellan farce (pp. 262–64). With his conservative tendencies, the satirist is not opposed to comedy per se, but to mime and comedy acted by Greeks.

In Chapter 4, “The Reception of Terence’s Eunuchus in Roman Love Poetry,” Hanses focuses on the importance of the Eunuchus, a particularly popular play, across a wide swath of love poetry, including that of Vergil (the story of Dido and Aeneas), Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Horace, and Ovid (especially the Ars Amatoria). One important insight, relevant also to other genres like epic or historiography, is that not all evocations of comedy are funny. Dido evokes Terence’s Phaedria, clearly not as a joke, but to call to mind the painful emotions of love (pp. 290–93). Verbal echoes of the play are also present in Catullus, where Phaedria again appears as a model for the conflicted emotions of love (pp. 300–301). Returning to the question of the reception of lower-class characters like the servus callidus (clever slave), Hanses argues that Terence’s Gnatho, a “parasite,” and Parmeno, a slave, were “among Latin literature’s original praeceptores amoris [teachers of love]” (p. 335), and in this respect, models for Ovid and others who took on a didactic tone in relation to love. A brief conclusion to the book summarizes the arguments of the book and considers the continued interest in Roman comedy in the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Hanses amply demonstrates the value of considering performance when studying allusions to and intertexts with Roman comedy of the late Republic and early Empire. Indeed, his observation that comedy was performed alongside tragedy and mime leads to an assessment of Latin literary genres which takes into account not only the role of comedy, but also the relationships between performance genres. Throughout the book, he asks how each genre under consideration situates itself in relation to comedy and how comedy in this genre is situated in relation to tragedy and mime. This opens many avenues for future research, including the impact of Roman comedy on yet more Latin literary genres (e.g., historiography, the novel, and epic, which Hanses has written about in other publications), the reception of Roman comedy in Latin literature of Late Antiquity, and the relationship between Latin and Greek comedy after Plautus and Terence. The first chapter, in particular, would be a worthwhile addition to graduate seminars on Latin drama, or in survey courses, as a case study in how to use documentary evidence (such as inscriptions) to illuminate literary history.

Table of Contents

Introduction (1–32)
1. Reviving Roman Comedies in the Republic and Early Empire (33–122)
2. Roman Comedy in Ciceronian Oratory (123–200)
3. Roman Comedy in Roman Satire (201–76)
4. The Reception of Terence’s Eunuchus in Roman Love Poetry (277–355)
Conclusion (356–62)

Notes

1. Menander in Antiquity: The Contexts of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Discussion

1. You demonstrate that Roman drama continued to be performed into the imperial period, which suggests that illiterate or low-literate people also knew Roman comedy. In the case of oratory, it is possible to imagine mixed audiences with members who may have been more familiar with the plays through performance than through written text. Did satire also have sub-elite audiences, for whom such comedic references would have been made accessible through performance?

This is a very important question. We do have evidence for recitations of non-dramatic literature at public festivals, so what you have in mind is certainly possible. However, it is more important, I think, to realize that even if a work was intended for the appreciation of smaller, more elite circles, there would still have been heavy involvement of the enslaved or of freedpeople in getting those pieces of literature to their intended audiences. People of lower social and legal statuses would have taken the authors’ dictation, conducted research, made copies, and aided in the composition both in direct and in indirect fashions. What is more, any time that a member of the Roman elite listened to a reading of literature—be it in private, at a dinner, or in the semi-public circumstances of an event hosted within the house—there would frequently have been readers, often with a background in enslavement, whose voices conveyed the words. In these instances, the people in question, even if enslaved, would of course have been highly literate. But other enslaved members of the household would have been present as well, serving food, clearing tables, making music, and the like. Even if the elite guests barely perceived their presence, these men and women would still have had an opportunity to hear and engage with the performance. If the authorial persona of the text undergoing recitation—like that of Horace in his satiric works—explicitly presented himself as a “freedman’s son” or as the enslaved trickster Davus, then (but not only then) they could have taken particular interest. In short, I suspect that it would indeed have happened that people of lower social standing, including some from the illiterate or low-literate strata of Roman society, gained familiarity with satiric texts, repeated memorable passages to their friends and acquaintances, and picked up on comedic references within the works in question. In the latter activity, they would have been aided by the familiarity with comedy that they gained when attending the ludi and other performances.

2. You point to a gradual shift from public to private performance, with private performances of Roman comedy taking off in the mid-first century CE, and public performances of Latin comedy declining after the late first century CE. Juvenal was writing at a time when private performances in elite households were already underway, but public performances of comedy were still occurring. Did the rise of private performance impact the reception of Roman comedy in his works or others writing at the tail end of the period?

I believe it did! In Juvenal’s own case, it seems that the presence of Roman comedies at (semi-) private recitations provided the satirist with an opportunity to define his own works as, among other priorities, an updated successor of the traditional scripts. Like Roman comedies both old and more recent, his satires underwent recitation in these less public contexts but were much raunchier (i.e., more mime-like) and more openly moralizing. I wonder too if Juvenal’s apparently knowing a number of comoedi by name and commenting on specifics of their behavior has something to do not just with celebrity culture in the theater but also with more intimate familiarity gained at recitations.

3. You raise the possibility of interactions between Greek and Roman comedy and comedians in the late Republic/ imperial period. I wonder how you see this developing in Rome and the surrounding region over time, particularly in relation to the Technitai of Dionysus, who were active in Naples and also in Rome. Did the presence of the Technitai affect the status of the actor in Rome in the imperial period?

This is another very interesting question. E. J. Jory suggested in 1970 that Plautus himself may have been one of the Technitai, which would have put him in an advantageous position when it came to producing Latin versions of Greek scripts. After all, Gellius says that Plautus used to work in operis artificum scaenicorum (employed as a theater person) (3.3.14; cf. Cic. Arch. 10) and a later passage (20.4.4) suggests that Gellius meant by the latter term οἱ περὶ τὸν Διόνυσον τεχνῖται (the Technitai of Dionysus), among whom he lists comoedi, tragoedi, and tibicines. Even if this is not correct, Roman comedy still very clearly emerged from a rich interconnectivity between troupes and playwrights of different genres, regional origins, social statuses, and linguistic preferences. Within this colorful confusion of entertainments, the Technitai of Dionysus appear to have enjoyed relative prestige due to their devotion to the cultural exports of Athens and other Greek centers, including (but by no means limited to) comedy and tragedy. Members obtained honorary citizenship in various communities, and the larger association ultimately assumed a multi-continental position with a headquarters in Rome. From this moment in the early imperial era, pantomimes are found in their midst as well but never mimes. It seems therefore that what we know of the Technitai’s connection to dramatic performances/performers in Rome maps closely onto the aesthetic judgements that I trace in the book: among the elite, at least, comedy and tragedy were esteemed far more highly than mime; the pantomime held an intermediate position. Relatedly, the Technitai of Dionysus may well have influenced the emergence of comedy at Rome, and they assumed a position of relative privilege among the times’ entertainers. A mimus or mima would not typically have attained the same prestige. That said, even the Technitai were subject to the prejudicial treatment then commonly inflicted on performers—as is evident from such passages as the aforementioned note in Gellius (20.4.4), which provides an example of exaggerated devotion to the Technitai being considered disgraceful.

4. Thinking about students embarking on the study of Roman drama, what are some exciting areas where further research ought to be done, in your opinion?

In my opinion, there is great potential for insightful studies especially of the Roman mime. I would love to read a book that fully evaluates our material and literary evidence for the lives of performers engaged in staging (and improvising!) plays in this genre. Amidst the current boom in studies of the lives especially of the enslaved, we are, I believe, also well-positioned to speculate on how the actors might have related to the materials they performed, to the audiences who applauded or hissed, and to the elites who provided much of the funding, but who also fiercely oppressed them.