Plautus: Casina

David Christenson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350020535
• eBook ISBN: 9781350020559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

This is the first volume dedicated to Plautus' perennially popular comedy Casina that analyses the play for a student audience and assumes no knowledge of Latin. It launches a much-needed new series of books, each discussing a comedy that survives from the ancient world. Four chapters highlight the play's historical context, themes, performance and reception, including its reflection of recent societal trends in marriage and property ownership by women after the Punic Wars, and its complex dynamics on stage. It is ideal for students, but helpful also for scholars wanting a brief introduction to the play. C asina pits a husband (Lysidamus) and wife (Cleostrata) against each other in a struggle for control of a 16-year-old slave named Casina. Cleostrata cleverly plots to frustrate the efforts of her lascivious elderly husband, staging a cross-dressing 'marriage' that culminates in his complete humiliation. The play provides rich insights into relationships within the Roman family. This volume analyses how Casina addresses such issues as women's status and property rights, the distribution of power within a Roman household, and sexual violence, all within a compellingly meta-comic framework from which Cleostrata emerges as a surprising comic hero. It also examines the play's enduring popularity and relevance.

1

Introduction to Plautine Comedy

Plot summary of Casina

A husband (Lysidamus) and wife (Cleostrata) seek a marriage for a sixteen-year-old slave (Casina, who does not appear in the play) that Cleostrata raised like a daughter after finding her as an exposed infant. Lysidamus wants Casina to marry his farm-manager (Olympio), so that he can sexually exploit her. Cleostrata, who knows that her son Euthynicus (he also is absent in the play) desires Casina, seeks to marry her to Euthynicus’s military assistant (Chalinus), in order to frustrate her husband and help her son. Cleostrata and Lysidamus fail to dissuade each other’s proxies from pursuing marriage with Casina and agree to leave the matter to chance in a drawing of lots. Olympio wins the lottery and Lysidamus makes plans to sexually assault Casina at the neighbouring house of his friend Alcesimus, who is married to Myrrhina, Cleostrata’s close confidante. Chalinus overhears Lysidamus’s plans and reports them to Cleostrata, who launches a scheme against her husband. This scheme is in full swing when Pardalisca (Cleostrata’s slave/maid) delivers a fictional report to Lysidamus that an angry Casina wields two swords and is threatening to kill the old man and his farm-manager. Cleostrata, Myrrhina and Pardalisca engineer a play-within-the-play, in which Chalinus, dressed as the bride Casina, is married to Olympio. Olympio and Lysidamus are violently rebuffed by Chalinus during their ‘honeymoon’ inside Alcesimus’s house. Brought back onstage, both master and slave are shamed by the female characters, and Lysidamus is forced to apologize to Cleostrata. In the epilogue we learn that Casina is the free-born daughter of Myrrhina and Alcesimus and will marry Euthynicus.¹

‘Old situations, / New complications, / Nothing portentous or polite; / Tragedy tomorrow, / Comedy tonight!’ So runs a section of the opening song of the 1960s musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a lively pastiche of Plautine comedies including Casina that enjoyed great success on the stage and in its film version (see pp. 118–19). Just as Plautus served Roman theatregoers fresh treatments of the Greek comedies he was adapting over two millennia earlier, the modern musical, one more in a long line of Plautine spin-offs, promises its audience something new and funny. Who was this Latin playwright whose comedies continue to delight audiences?

Plautus the Latin comic playwright

The implausible-sounding moniker Titus Maccius Plautus – ‘Dick, son of Clown, the Mime-actor’ – is considered to be a pseudonym, not the name the future comic playwright we know as Plautus received at birth.² There is some evidence that the Roman first name Titus was the equivalent of ‘Dick’ in slang, and that Roman mime actors wore phalluses.³ Moreover, mime actors were nicknamed ‘flat-foots’ because they performed barefoot, and plautus in Latin means ‘flat’. The Casina prologue speaker’s joke about Plautus’s ‘barking name’ (34)⁴ plays on the description of dogs with flat, floppy ears as plauti.⁵ The stock clown of an Italian form of drama known as Atellan farce was named Maccus.⁶ All this points to ‘Plautus’ being as much a biographical construction as the actual name of an historical playwright. At most, we can hypothesize from Plautus’s name that he had experience in native Italian theatrical performances apart from his surviving work in the genre of Roman comedy based on Greek models.⁷ Plautus is the first Roman playwright we know of to specialize in this latter comic genre. We know nothing about Plautus’s social status, although the apparent fictionality of his name itself suggests that he might have been a freed slave. Ancient sources give Plautus’s place of origin as Sarsina, Umbria, which if true indicates that he was tri-lingual in Greek, Latin and Umbrian.⁸ The Plautine corpus (intertextually) demonstrates that the comic playwright read widely in Greek literature of various genres.⁹

We, like Roman scholars first starting to (re)construct their literary history in the first century BCE,¹⁰ know none of the particulars of Plautus’s life. The few dubious details that come down to us,¹¹ such as Aulus Gellius’s claim in his late second-century CE Attic Nights that Plautus earned money ‘in the occupation of stage-personnel’ (3.3.14), can be marshalled in support of various scholarly ‘narratives’ of Plautus’s life (low-status freed slave, non-Roman actor in native Italian drama, Greek actor touring with the Artists of Dionysus,¹² et al.). The accepted dates of Plautus’s life, 254–184 BCE, if not exact, accurately reflect a comic career spanning the last years of the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE) down through the 190s and into the 180s BCE (see pp. 19–23). Casina is dated securely to c. 185 BCE by Myrrhina’s reference to the Roman Senate’s emergency ban of Bacchic worship in 186 BCE: as she reminds the fabricating Lysidamus near the play’s end, ‘There aren’t any Bacchants revelling now!’ (980).

The beginnings of drama and literature at Rome

Latin literature traditionally is said to begin in 240 BCE, when at least one play based on a Greek model was performed by Livius Andronicus at the Roman Festival (Ludi Romani) in honour of Jupiter that year. If the date is correct, this inaugural performance closely followed Rome’s victory in the First Punic War (261–241 BCE) and its emergence as a Mediterranean military and geopolitical power. Other translations such as Livius Andronicus’s of Homer’s Odyssey soon followed. This fledgling literature in Latin, based on long-established literary genres of Greece, is thus inextricably bound with the enhancement of Roman nationalist identity and the acquisition of cultural capital.¹³ Literature primarily flourished among the educated elite. At the same time, Roman legions stationed in Sicily and southern Italy during the war had been exposed to various Greek entertainments, including drama. Details are sketchy, but demand for Greek-inspired drama certainly increased in post-war Rome, and the city’s politicians seized a new opportunity for self-promotion by sponsoring plays at state festivals. Playwright-translators also played a critical role in the establishment of theatrical shows in Rome based on Greek performances and scripts.¹⁴ Plautus belongs to the second wave of Europe’s first large-scale translation project.¹⁵ As we shall see, Latin writers such as Plautus enthusiastically embraced the ‘secondariness’ of their translated literature and typically converted this into a creative asset; contemporary studies of Latin poetry now largely focus on unravelling its sophisticated dialogue with Greek literature.¹⁶

Plautus and Italian comic traditions

Plautus’s fantastical name closely associates him – and his work – with mostly unscripted traditions of Italian drama. The term ‘Atellan farce’ reflects this ribald genre’s origin in the town of Atella in Campania.¹⁷ Only fragments of its first-century BCE literary form survive. In Plautus’s time, Atellan farce consisted of itinerant performances featuring improvised skits by masked actors. These actors seem to have developed stock, endlessly repeatable situations, with a cast of five stereotypical characters: Bucco (‘Fool’), Dossenus (‘Glutton’), Manducus (‘Jaws’), Pappus (‘Grandpappy’) and the ever-popular Maccus, who, like Bucco, was some sort of clown. Maccus appears to have been a master-impersonator, as is suggested by extant titles of farces such as ‘Maccus the Soldier’, ‘The Twin Macci’ and ‘Maccus the Virgin’. The last title suggests a mock marriage with cross-dressing as in Casina.¹⁸ What little we can glean from the scant evidence for performances of Atellan farce suggests a non-elite world that admitted obscene language, parody of various kinds, rustic situations and manners, slapstick and comedic banter. Extant fragments of Atellan farce show some of the same metres found in Plautine comedy, and performances seem to have included singing and dancing. We cannot determine if Plautus performed in Atellan farce, but his clan name ‘Maccius’ invites comparison of his plays with the improvisatory style of Atellan farce.

Mime broadly describes Italian dramatic forms of ‘low realism’.¹⁹ It survives only in its first-century BCE literary form through the preserved fragments of Decimus Laberius and Publius Syrus. Unscripted performances of Italian mime, which predate Plautus, seem to have featured vignettes of everyday life, sexual situations (especially adultery), politics, literary and other forms of parody, and broad satire of persons and institutions. The cast of characters includes such figures as flatterers, slaves, adulterers and jealous husbands, and its settings usually were low-status, for example the worlds of innkeepers and fullers. Mime actors did not wear masks and performed barefoot rather than in sandals or slippers. Troupes were itinerant, and their simple, portable sets probably required only a small performance space. The literary remains of mime suggest the use of spoken dialogue, song and dance. Italian mime became notorious among Roman elites for its obscenity and sexual explicitness; male actors wore exaggerated phalluses and mime unusually employed female actors, who sometimes stripped onstage. While Plautine comedy rarely, if ever, meets anyone’s definition of obscene, and sexual matters typically are treated euphemistically, the family name ‘Plautus’ suggests some connection, whether biographical or programmatic, between Plautine comedy and Italian mime. One of Plautus’s innovative treatments within the Greco-Roman genre of New Comedy is, for example, his amplification of the role of clever slave (seruus callidus) along with frequent representation of the demimonde of pimps, prostitutes, parasites et al., in which this trickster operates.

The reception of Greek comic theatre in Rome

Greek New Comedy, which flourished in Athens c. 325–250 BCE and today is represented primarily by the exta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Titles and Abbreviations: Plautus’s Plays
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to Plautine Comedy
• 2 The Social-Historical Context
• 3 Casina in Performance
• 4 Main Themes
• 5 Reception
• APPENDIX: The Structure of Casina
• Notes
• Guide to Further Reading and Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright