Plautus: Curculio

i
 BLOOMSBURY ANCIENT COMEDY COMPANIONS

Series editors: C. W. Marshall & Niall W. Slater

The Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions present accessible

introductions to the surviving comedies from Greece and Rome. Each
volume provides an overview of the play’s themes and situates it in its
historical and literary contexts, recognizing that each play was intended in
the first instance for performance. Volumes will be helpful for students and
scholars, providing an overview of previous scholarship and offering new
interpretations of ancient comedy.

Aristophanes: Frogs, C. W. Marshall

Aristophanes: Peace, Ian C. Storey
Menander: Samia, Matthew Wright
Plautus: Casina, David Christenson
Terence: Andria, Sander M. Goldberg

ii
Plautus: Curculio

T. H. M. Gellar-Goad

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Names: Gellar-Goad, T. H. M. (Theodore Harry McMillan), author.
Title: Plautus : Curculio / T. H. M. Gellar-Goad.
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iv
 for Mom and my students,
the two audiences I kept in mind
with each word I wrote

v
vi
 Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments x

1 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 1

2 What’s Going on in Curculio? 19
3 Major Themes and Humor in Curculio 35
4 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 47
5 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 65
6 Play Inside and Outside the Play: Curculio and Metatheater 87
7 The Speech of the Choragus 101
8 Curculio and Roman Life 117
9 Curculio after Plautus 135

Key Terms and Definitions 157

Notes and Recommended Reading 161
Works Cited 169
Index 177

vii
 Illustrations

Figures

3.1 A nut weevil. 36

3.2 Remains of the sanctuary of Asklepios in Epidauros,
Greece. 40
4.1 In this section of a fresco in the “Tomb of the Diver” in
Paestum, Italy, from approximately 470 bce , a partier (left)
plays the auloi, the Greek analogue to the Roman tibiae,
for his erotic companion. 48
5.1 Masks at a performance of a scene from Plautus’ Poenulus
by members of Compagnia Fondamenta Teatro e Teatri, in
Sarsina, Plautus’ hometown. 66
5.2 The “circuit of exchange” of Plautus’ Curculio, as originally
planned by Therapontigonus. 79
5.3 The “circuit of exchange” of Plautus’ Curculio, if
Therapontigonus were the ultimate object of the
deception plot. 79
5.4 The “circuit of exchange” of Plautus’ Curculio, as it
actually happens. 80
5.5 The stage layout of Plautus’ Curculio. 81
5.6 A diagram of character movement of the end of Plautus’
Curculio (lines 533–729). 82
7.1 The Roman Forum, mid-180s bce . Sites not mentioned
by the Choragus are in brackets. 105
7.2 The Roman Forum, mid-180s bce , with the Choragus’
itinerary mapped on. 109
7.3 The theater of Epidaurus. 114
9.1 “Footnote” breaking the fourth wall in the October 2019
Czech production of Curculio aneb Darmojed. 151

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 Illustrations ix

Tables

1.1 Key genres of Roman drama during the time of Plautus. 6

1.2 The principal stock types of Plautine comedy. 14
4.1 The musical structure of Plautus’ Curculio. 49
4.2 The musical structure of the canticum of Plautus’ Curculio. 53
7.1 The itinerary of the Choragus’ tour of the Forum
Romanum in Plautus’ Curculio. 106
 Acknowledgments

Top billing goes to C. W. Marshall and Niall W. Slater, for inviting me to

write this book and making it better by leaps and bounds. Sharon L.
James introduced me to Plautus and made me the comedy scholar I am
today. Timothy J. Moore gave me the courage and tools to dive into
Plautus’ music and meter. I gained so much from students in my Greek
& Roman Comedy course at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem,
North Carolina: insights, observations, questions, and inspiration over
six iterations of the course, starting in 2013. I am especially thankful for
the adaptors and performers of Plautus’ Curculio in 2019: Brigid Berndt,
Jackson Blodgett, Anna Campbell, and Cristian DeSimone. I couldn’t
have done any of this without the support, encouragement, and put-
together-ness of Julie Pechanek. My mom, Sandra Edwards Gellar, read
every word in drafts and gave invaluable feedback. Thanks also to Alice
Wright, Gamey Leather, Lily Mac Mahon, Roza I. M. El-Eini, Merv
Honeywood and especially Serena S. Witzke. My husband, Jake Gellar-
Goad, offered his support throughout the writing, and his patience with
the process—even knowing another book means I get another Classics
tattoo. The bulk of the manuscript was written on ancestral lands of the
Catawba, Keyauwee, Sappony, and Tutelo peoples.
I greatly appreciate Mathias Hanses, who shared a pre-publication
version of his work on the Choragus with me; both he and Katrin
Hanses generously allowed me to use their reconstruction of the Roman
Forum in Chapter 7. I could not have completed Chapter 9 without the
resources of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama,
housed at Oxford University, and the assistance of Zoë Jennings there.
I received support from the Dingledine International Faculty Fund
of Wake Forest University to trace the path of the Choragus’ speech in
the Forum Romanum in Rome. The university’s Archie Fund for the
Arts and Humanities allowed me site visits to theaters active in Sicily
around the time of Plautus. The university’s Nathan and Julie Hatch

x
 Acknowledgments xi

Research Grant for Academic Excellence sent me to the Summer

Research Institute of Harris Manchester College at Oxford University. I
owe thanks to Kate Wilson and Sue Killoran from Harris Manchester
College, Fran Heaney and Sandra Bailey from Wadham College, Oxford
University, and Elizabeth B. Dunn of Duke University, for research
support. The book’s completion was supported by a Wake Forest
University Summer Research Award.
xii
 1

Plautus, Curculio, and

Roman Comedy: The Basics

Imagine you’re living in Rome around 195 bce . City life is dirty,
cramped, and rough. It’s early April, but winter is lingering longer than
usual this year. There’s a biting chill every morning when you’ve been
waking up before dawn, to show up at your boss’ house for the day’s
work. But a break is in sight: today’s the first day of the Ludi Megalenses,
religious festival games in honor of Magna Mater, the Great Mother
goddess Cybele. No business can be conducted in the City for the next
seven days as the games go on.
You slept in a little later than usual this morning, but were already
awake shortly after daybreak—excitement about the events to come has
you feeling like a kid again. A religious festival is a public ritual, and that
means free food for you and everyone else in town. You attend the
sacrifice in the Forum, Rome’s big public square, with thousands of
other people: Romans and non-Romans, citizens and non-citizens, men
and women and children, young and old, speaking Latin and Greek and
Oscan and Umbrian and who knows how many other languages. The
people have diverse bodies, skin, hair, and eye colors, and none of them
are “white,” because the Greeks and the Romans weren’t white, and
whiteness is a modern racial construct. It’s unruly, colorful, tightly
packed, and smelly.
In a few years, the Temple of Magna Mater will be complete, and the
sacrifices and games will happen there instead. You faintly hear the
priest’s prayer to Magna Mater and all the gods from where you are in
the back of the crowd. (The priest is some political bigwig from the
Cornelius family, you think. They’re always going on about their
leadership in the long war against Carthage that ended a few years

1
2 Plautus: Curculio

back.) You see the ritual slaughter of what seems like a whole herd of
cattle, a fitting start to the festivities. And you wait with excruciating
anticipation for the meat to be butchered, cooked, and distributed to
everyone who’s here. This is a real treat: you only eat beef at civic events
like this. You can’t afford it otherwise.
But the thing you’re most looking forward to hasn’t happened yet!
Up next are the ludi scaenici, the theatrical performances that pulled
you out of bed this morning. You hustle across the Forum towards the
Comitium—where Roman citizen men vote on laws and elections,
which usually turn out exactly how the elites want them to. Today, it’s
where the aediles (government officials who’re funding the games) have
set up a temporary stage made out of wood. The stage is small and
flimsy, but brightly painted. It has the usual three house doors and the
altar out front. You’re too late to grab a good spot to sit and watch, but
that’s okay—what you’re about to see is worth standing for.
People in the audience are still chit-chatting away, when things start
up without fanfare or announcement. (Nobody turns down the lights,
either, because it’s ancient Rome, outdoors, and during the day, so the
only lighting comes from the sun.) Two actors walk on stage, pretending
to be in mid-conversation. You can tell by their Greek-style costumes
that this will be a comedy, most likely an adaptation of a Greek play
from Athens. And you can tell from their masks that one is playing a
young citizen man and the other a trickster, enslaved to the first. You’re
pretty sure, from your experience, that the young guy is in love with a
girl he can’t have, and the enslaved guy’s job will be to come up with a
scheme to obtain her for him. As the noise of the crowd dies down—
though not as completely as you’d like—the actor playing the enslaved
character starts speaking, loudly, in the rhythmic Latin poetry that
playwrights almost always use for plot exposition. The play has begun.

Something like this is what it would have been like for an average
Roman to attend a play such as Plautus’ Curculio, the shortest play by
the Roman comedian Titus Maccius Plautus that has survived in full
from the second century bce to today. (Boldface indicates first mention
 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 3

of a key term, and the back of the book offers a compilation of these, as
well as recommendations for further reading and notes on where I’m
taking my information from.) Curculio is the shortest complete play
from ancient Rome altogether. But it packs a lot of material into its 729
lines: sex, booze, deception, oppression, religion, law, the military, urban
tourism, disease, and a long-awaited family reunion. I think Curculio is
a perfect example of what Plautus’ comedies are like generally, and at
the same time an unusual play, even for Plautus.

Roman drama as a social institution

The vignette above depicts the social context for the original
performances of plays like Curculio. All works of Roman drama, both
comedy and tragedy, were usually premiered at ludi (public games),
either as part of a religious festival or else for the funeral of a wealthy
and politically powerful citizen man. This fact means that Roman plays
were religious activities, as was everything else that took place at the
ludi. That’s not to say everyone had to watch in silence, filled with
reverence, awe, or dread. Far from it: crowds at comedies seem to have
been pretty rowdy at times, and the Romans weren’t so solemn about all
of their religion anyway. Plays at festivals were consecrated to the god or
goddess honored by the festival, and ones performed at funeral games
were part of the larger funeral ritual. The altar on the stage, the sacrificial
meat in the audience members’ bellies, and frequent oaths to gods in the
plays’ dialogue would be reminders of the religious underpinnings of
the spectacle at hand. In our play, Curculio, religion plays a prominent
role in the plot and character development (Chapter 8).
Romans celebrated a variety of religious festivals throughout the
year. They didn’t have weekends or even really think much about days
of the week, but days when workers were generally let out for religious
festivals were numerous enough that a Roman would probably have
about as many days off in a year as someone nowadays working a
standard office job, and festivals would offer free or cheap food and
4 Plautus: Curculio

entertainment to rival a good weekend out on the town. It’s unknown

which festival Curculio premiered at, so my suggestion of the Ludi
Megalenses (in honor of Magna Mater) is just for flavor, although
evidence does survive that two other plays by Plautus were performed
at particular festivals, specifically his Pseudolus (the Ludi Megalenses)
and Stichus (the Ludi Plebeii).
What went on at a festival? The large, public animal sacrifices would
have been quite a sight, and feasts would follow, including the sacrificial
meat and more. Each festival began with a procession featuring a statue
of the god or goddess the festival was for. The procession could be
solemn and stately, or wild and noisy, depending on the god/dess.
Usually festivals would include ludi circenses, chariot-races down at the
circus (racetrack). Maybe also gladiatorial combats—generally a show
of skill to first blood, not a violent battle to the death—or man-vs.-beast
displays. Sideshows like acrobats and boxing weren’t unheard of.
People-watching had to have been part of the fun. People-meeting, too:
sex-laborers, both free and enslaved, both men and women, would
likely be offering their services somewhere nearby. And then there were
the plays, ludi scaenici, “stage games.”
The cost to put on these ludi were high, and the people in charge of
paying for some festivals were the aediles, elected officials tasked with
keeping Rome safe from crime and running festivals—at their own
expense. It took massive wealth to go anywhere in politics in ancient
Rome, either family money or maybe a loan from a friend. Being an
aedile was a great stepping-stone to higher office. The aediles were
divided into two groups, one with men from traditional aristocratic
families (patricians) and the other with men of historically humble
origins (plebeians), who, nonetheless, were rich enough nowadays to
host a giant carnival out of pocket.
Being aedile opened doors to government service and provided
opportunities to become famous and popular by putting on awesome
ludi. It also meant being in charge of picking the entertainment,
including the playwright and his acting troupe. The aedile may have sat
in on a rehearsal or sneak-preview showing to make sure he was okay
 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 5

with the play. He would hire a contractor called a choragus to lend

props and costumes to the actors, who didn’t own or keep any of the
stuff. The show-stealing scene of Curculio is the monologue of the play’s
Choragus (Chapter 7).
At the time of Plautus, no permanent theaters existed in the City, and
they weren’t allowed in for about 150 years after. So, the temporary
wooden structures for performance were small and cramped. They may
have incorporated a raised platform for the actors to stand on, and steps
for them to get up there from the audience’s level. A backdrop
represented a residential street with three buildings: two houses and
either a third house or, as is the case in Curculio, a shrine. Performers
could enter the stage from the sides, from any of the three stage doors,
or from the crowd. Curculio himself makes his first entrance a show-
stopper by running in through the audience.
The stage for Plautus’ Pseudolus—performed at the Ludi Megalenses
in 191 bce —was set up in front of the brand new Temple of Magna
Mater, so that the temple steps could offer some (limited) seating. But
seats weren’t guaranteed. Most viewers, except the rich, the lucky, and
perhaps the super-determined, could expect to stand.
The audience itself was as diverse as the City of Rome. There aren’t
any photos of ancient performances, obviously, or historical attendance
records. So, we base our judgments on the surviving texts of comedy
themselves. Plautus makes jokes and writes plots and characters that
appeal to all different sorts of people: elites, poor citizens, enslaved
persons, men, women, old folks, youths, parents, children, Romans,
foreigners, soldiers, farmers, politicians, sex-laborers, Greek literature
fans, and on, and on. His comedies are a something-for-everyone kind
of show, with jokes and plotlines and characters for all of Rome’s
denizens in Plautus’ plays. It wasn’t just a diverse crowd, but a rowdy
one, too. Some of Plautus’ plays—though not Curculio—begin with a
prologue. In some prologues, a guy heckles the audience and tells them
to shut up and pay attention. Plautus’ plays always have enough
repetition of key plot points that viewers won’t get lost if they’re
distracted every once in a while.
6 Plautus: Curculio

Roman comedy as a dramatic genre

The comedies that Plautus wrote were only one of five basic types of theater
in Rome in the third and second centuries bce . Avid theater-goers could
see two types of tragedy, two types of comedy, and mime (improvisational
sketch comedy acted barefoot and without masks by women as well as
men, in contrast to the men-only troupes of comedy and tragedy). Roman
tragedy and comedy were both divided into subgenres, depending on
whether they were set in Greece or Rome, as shown in Table 1.1.
Either way, all plays were in Latin, not Greek. Exceptions: character
and place names, a few words here and there, bilingual puns. Plays set in
Greece were usually adaptations of Greek plays, while plays set in Rome
were originals. The subgenres were named after the most emblematic
costume element in each one: comedies set in Rome featured characters
wearing what citizen Roman men wear, the toga, so they were fabulae
togatae, “plays with togas.” Plautus’ plays, on the other hand, are fabulae
palliatae, “plays with the pallium,” because his characters wear that
distinctively Greek cloak. (The tragedies took their names from Greek
acting-boots and the Roman magistrate’s fancy toga praetexta.) This
means that Curculio, like all plays by Plautus that have survived, is set in
ancient Greece, with a Greek-style plot and mostly Greek characters.
Plautus and other authors of fabulae palliatae adapted most if not all of
their plays, probably including Curculio, from comedies written in Greek
by authors living in the Greek world. Plautus was not the first writer of
Roman fabulae palliatae, but followed a few authors whose works have
mostly vanished over time: Livius Andronicus, Rome’s first playwright
(about 284–205 bce ), Gnaeus Naevius, Rome’s first satirist (about 270–
201 bce ), and Quintus Ennius, the father of Roman literature (about

Table 1.1 Key genres of Roman drama during the time of Plautus.

Comedy Tragedy

Set in Greece fabula palliata fabula cothurnata

Set in Rome fabula togata fabula praetexta

 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 7

239–169 bce ). For most of their source material, these authors drew on
the genre of Greek New Comedy, written mostly after the death of
Alexander the Great (late 300s throughout the 200s bce ). The only author
of Greek New Comedy whose work survives in any substantial amount
today is Menander, although fragments do remain of many other authors.
In some fabulae palliatae, the subgenre of Roman comedy that
Plautus was writing, the prologue says what Greek play and author the
Roman play is adapting. But Plautus’ Curculio has no surviving prologue
(it might have been lost somewhere along the way), so which author, or
whether it’s a Plautus original, is unknowable. In only one case is it
possible to compare a Plautine play side by side with substantial parts
of its original: Plautus’ Bacchides (“Two Sisters Named Bacchis”) and
Menander’s Dis Exapaton (“Double Trickster”). The evidence from
those two plays suggests that Plautus adapted his sources fairly closely
when it comes to the basics of plot and the shape of scenes, but took
plenty of liberty with banter, jokes, and poetic and musical art.
Way more Roman comedy survives—in both Plautus and the slightly
later author of fabulae palliatae Terence (Publius Terentius Afer)—than
Greek New Comedy. A major element of twentieth-century scholarship
on Roman theater was analyzing Roman practices of adaptation to try
to reconstruct the lost Greek original. I think this is essentially a fool’s
errand, especially because it undersells how great Roman comedies
themselves are. But decades of efforts by classicists committed to it have
produced a thorough understanding of what’s Plautine about Plautus’
adaptation, and what’s Roman about Roman comedy. As adaptors—for
they are not merely translators—neither Plautus nor Terence allows
himself to be constrained by the Greek original on any level. Both
playwrights often condense or expand scenes; add, delete, or replace
characters or whole scenes; and make plots simpler or more complicated.
Both of them convert certain everyday features of life in Athens into
analogous features of Roman life, such as turning a reference to the
Agora (the Athenian marketplace) into a mention of the Forum (the
public square in Rome). Similarly, they generally modify jokes that are
culturally specific, so that Roman audiences can appreciate them.
8 Plautus: Curculio

But Plautus and Terence have big differences in style and in

approaches to adaptation. While Terence usually keeps the character
names from the original, or else just uses very bland Greek names,
Plautus tends to replace them with longer, more hilarious, super-duper
Greeky names. For example, a blowhard soldier in one of Terence’s
plays is named Thraso, a plausible Greek name that means “bold
guy.” But Plautus names his own blowhard soldier in Curculio
Therapontigonus Platagidorus, a preposterous mouthful that (maybe)
means “Son of a Sea Monster [or “of a Slave”], Gift of a Noisemaker.”
When it comes to big-picture decisions about adaptation, Terence’s
specialty is contaminatio: fusing two plays together or grafting a scene,
subplot, or character(s) from one play onto another. Plautus seems to
do some contaminatio, but not as much as Terence and not to the
same degree.

Plautus as a Roman comedian

One of Plautus’ hallmarks is blending elements of native Italian comic

traditions into his adaptations of Greek New Comedy. The most
important of these traditions was Atellan farce, a type of slapstick
comedy named after a town in southern Italy (not far from Naples)
where it may have originated. Atellan farce was rough-and-tumble
sketch comedy, with stereotyped, clownish stock characters, predictable
stock plots, and lots of improvisation and comic routines. One recurring
lead character was named Maccus. This suggests that Plautus’ name
Maccius is probably not real but one made up to fit his profession as a
funny guy. Since Titus is a generic Roman first name (plus slang for
penis) and Plautus might mean “flat-footed,” Mark Damen has translated
Titus Maccius Plautus as “Dick Bozo Tapdancer.”
Aspects of Atellan farce can be found in Plautus’ plays, in certain
character types that don’t show up in Greek New Comedy or are
less prominent there—for instance, the trickster and the not-so-
humblebragger. We can also detect farce’s influence in comic routines
 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 9

added or expanded in Plautus’ adaptations. These routines include

scenes where somebody pounds on someone else’s door, two or three
people wage a duel of insults, somebody rushes on stage to deliver a
message to someone else, or two or more characters trade kicks and
punches. (Those routines form a theatrical tradition, by the way, that
passes from Atellan farce to Plautus to the commedia dell’arte of the
Italian Renaissance to the Three Stooges and Family Guy.) In Curculio,
in particular, the title character is a parasite, Greek parasitos, “someone
who eats with you.” In comedy, the parasite is a glutton who’ll do
anything for a free meal, especially flatter, tell jokes, and do demeaning
tasks. Although parasites and flatterers show up in Greek New Comedy,
the gluttony and obsession with food of Curculio himself probably
takes its inspiration from another regular of Atellan farce, the ever
hungry Dossennus. His big belly may also have inspired the costume of
the antagonist of Curculio, a bloated man named Cappadox.
Much of what is distinctively Plautine about Plautus’ comedies builds
on the fundamental elements of Atellan farce. Greek New Comedy itself
featured stock characters (young lover boy, grumpy old man, arrogant
soldier) and stock plots (guy trying to get the girl, long-lost siblings
reunited, mistaken identities). Plautus’ adaptations closely reflect that. If
you just look at plot summaries of Plautus’ plays, you’ll develop a good
sense of what he’s preserving from his Greek originals. But actually
watch or read his plays and you’ll find them filled with so much more,
stuff you can’t find on the Wikipedia page: intricate tricks and deception
schemes, witty banter and wordplay, wacky stage action, disguises, sex
jokes, fantastical language and imagery, misunderstandings and mockery.
These are the Plautine elements of Plautus, and they display the
influence of Italian comedy more than Greek. Plautus himself seems to
have been born not in Rome but in Umbria, in northern Italy. So, he was
not a native speaker of Latin but of Umbrian. Therefore, he was fluent
in at least three languages, since he was an Umbrian writing Latin
adaptations of Greek comedies, and possibly four, since Atellan farce
was originally performed in Oscan. And where Plautus’ Greek originals
are most interested in citizen families and marriage and legitimate
10 Plautus: Curculio

children, Plautus is much more interested in enslaved tricksters; sex-

laborers; puns and wordplay; twins and doubles; and song, dance, and
lively stage business.
Plautus’ style and language, in my opinion, are totally unique, in
Latin or any other literature. He is wild and wacky, conversational yet
archaic, quick to switch from dirty jokes to parody of high tragedy to
lowbrow puns. He writes lots of witty banter and fast back-and-forth
tomfoolery. Plautus shares some of these characteristics with the other
types of comedy from his time and before, from his culture and others.
His careful attention to comic style matches his Greek model Menander
and his Roman successor Terence. His adventuresome sketch comedy
matches Atellan farce. His fantastical wordplay and body-function
jokes match the earliest genre of ancient comedy, Greek Old Comedy,
whose most famous author nowadays is Aristophanes. But no other
ancient author melds all these features together like Plautus does, and
none of his Greek models or Roman contemporaries seems to have
done it to such an extreme or with such joy and verve.
The most essential part of Plautus’ style is probably his wordplay.
That’s also the hardest thing about Plautus to translate. Let’s take an
example from early in Curculio, lines 76–9. The young lover boy
Phaedromus is talking to his enslaved attendant Palinurus about an
enslaved woman next door. Try reading the Latin verse here out loud—
it doesn’t matter how you pronounce it, I just want you to have a feel for
the patterns of sounds and mouthfuls of syllables in Plautus’ words:

Ph. nomen Leaenaest, multibiba atque merobiba.

Pa. quasi tu lagoenam dicas, ubi uinum Chium
solet esse.
Ph. quid opust uerbis? uinosissima est.

Phaedromus Her name’s Wildcat, she’s a super-drinker and stupor-

drinker.
Palinurus It sounds like you’re saying “Wine Carafe,” you know, like
you’d put pinot noir in.
Phaedromus What else is there to say? She’s winetastic.
 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 11

In the space of three lines, Plautus gives us a pun and invents three new
words. Leaena literally means “lioness,” but Palinurus jokes that it
sounds like lagoena, a wine jug. Phaedromus calls Leaena multibiba,
“much-drinking,” and merobiba, “unmixed-drinking,” two alliterative
words Plautus has coined by smashing together smaller, familiar words.
After Palinurus jokes that Wildcat sounds like something you’d use to
hold expensive wine from Chios, Phaedromus describes her with a
novelty of a word, “super-full of wine.” Plautus’ plays are chock-full of
this sort of inventive, fast-and-loose wordplay, and it’s a challenge for
translators to keep up.
Plautine humor doesn’t end at wordplay, though. He creates laughs
through too many techniques to cover here. Two in particular might
make you uneasy, as they do me. The first is slapstick. In that same scene
in Curculio we just looked at, the enslaver Phaedromus smacks his
enslaved subordinate Palinurus any time he acts sassy, and at the end of
the play, the main antagonist is roughed up by Phaedromus and his
buddies (for both scenes, see the end of Chapter 3). These types of
scenes are common enough in Plautus that slapstick seems to have
worked for Roman audiences. The second technique unrelatable to
most modern senses of humor: jokes about torture of enslaved persons.
The Romans were an enslaving society. Roman wealth was built upon
forced agricultural labor camps akin to the “plantations” of the American
South. Roman citizens were complicit in abuses analogous to, and on
the scale of, those in America during and after the colonial period.
Torture of enslaved persons was a fact of life in ancient Rome. It shows
up on the Roman stage, as well (Chapter 8). In Plautus, these jokes are
usually made by one enslaved character to another, in the form either of
“you’ll get what’s coming to you” or “I can take more punishment than
you can.”
Curculio includes a moment of this type of imagery used by one
enslaved character against another. Palinurus tells Leaena, “I’d like to
stab you with a cattle-prod” (131), a particularly violent fantasy perhaps
pulling from his own experience of being abused. Phaedromus, who
may have been the abuser, tells Palinurus to “shut up” (132), and
12 Plautus: Curculio

apparently smacks him or threatens to, because Palinurus replies,

“Please, don’t! I’m shutting up!” (132). Phaedromus strikes Palinurus
two more times in this scene (195, 196) and Palinurus laments how
much he’s been beaten (215).
Another feature that sets Plautus apart is his use of music (Chapter
4). Plautus’ comedies are closer to modern-day musicals than to capital
“t” Theater, more Hamilton than Hamlet. Over 50 percent of the lines in
Plautus’ plays were sung to the accompaniment of a woodwind
instrument. In this, Plautus differs from the Greek New Comedy he’s
adapting, which had few songs besides short intermission-like interludes
between units of the comedy. Almost every play of Plautus has one or
many full-on song-and-dance numbers, with complex, shifting rhythms
and melodic variety. Curculio is no exception.
Plautus reveals his other dramatic interests by how he toys with the
stock plots of fabula palliata and by the character types that end up
being stars of the show. The basic tales of Greek New Comedy are all
about citizens: setting up a marriage to make citizen babies, reuniting
long-lost siblings or children, resolving a crisis that affects a citizen
woman’s ability to produce legitimate citizen children. Roman comedy
in general doesn’t spend as much time on these stories—it prefers to
explore the vulnerability of citizen daughters in Greek and Roman
society. Plautus in particular finds those marriage stories pretty
boring. He tends to use them as a backdrop for deception plots.
He gives the juiciest roles not to elite citizens but to tricksters who
happen to be non-citizens, enslaved persons, or non-elites. Many of
his plays are named after the lead trickster, who is often a seruus
callidus, literally “clever slave.” Our play is named this way, too, although
Curculio is a low-status citizen rather than a non-citizen or enslaved
person.
The tricksters come up with schemes, usually on the fly, and they
always outwit their foes—their friends, too, when it comes to competitive
banter. Erich Segal terms the flip-flop of social status in Plautus’
plays, where enslavers and elites are bamboozled by people with less
power than them, the “Saturnalian spirit” of Plautine comedy. The
 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 13

name comes from the Roman winter holiday Saturnalia, when enslavers
would “let” enslaved people pretend to be masters for a day. Think
about how twisted and cruel this is for a holiday: enslaved people
are supposed to pretend to be enslavers, but they can’t truly act
accordingly, because the very next day everything goes back to the way
it was before, and the enslavers can punish the enslaved people however
they please.
Plautus also loves twins and doubles. His most famous comedy,
Menaechmi, “The Brothers Named Menaechmus,” is about a guy who
comes to town looking for his long-lost identical twin and ends up
in trouble with a series of people who confuse him for that very twin.
(It’s the basis for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.) Another Plautine
comedy, Amphitruo, includes the first time on record that someone
encounters their own double or doppelganger. Lots of scenes in Plautus
use mirroring: two back-to-back speeches by different characters
saying the exact same or exact opposite things. Other scenes feature
duplicate sequences of action—the second on a smaller scale than the
first—or one group of characters eavesdropping on a second and
reiterating or refuting what they say. Part of the fun with doubles in
Plautus is the fact that actors would often have been doubling roles
themselves, playing two or more different characters at different points
in the play.
Finally, as I see it, Plautus is the ancient playwright most interested
in metatheater (Chapter 6). Metatheater is theater about theater. This
can take the form of a play within a play, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or
when one of Plautus’ tricksters has a buddy put on a disguise and act
like an out-of-town bigwig to pull off a heist. It can also take the form
of characters talking directly to the audience or acknowledge they’re
characters in a play. And it shows up when characters use theater-
related words as metaphors, like coming up with a “plot” to accomplish
what they want or “authoring” a plan. In Curculio, the most prominent
element of metatheater is the speech by the Choragus (Chapter 7). With
his appearance, somebody who is supposed to be part of the real-life
backstage crew is now coming on stage as a fictional character in order
14 Plautus: Curculio

to talk directly to the audience about how their real-world surroundings

are like the fictional world of the play.

Curculio as a Plautine play

The play we’re focused on is a great case study for Plautus’ style. It’s a
pretty typical Plautine plot: guy wants girl but doesn’t have cash to buy
her from the sex-trafficker next door. (In Roman comedy, the love
interest is frequently a sex-laborer, either free or enslaved; see Chapter
2.) But the show’s really about Curculio the parasite, his legendary skills
at scheming and swindling, and how he faces off against both the sex-
trafficker and a rival who’s also going for the girl. Like many plots in
Greek New Comedy and Roman fabula palliata, this one ends with a
recognition scene—the enslaved girl is identified as a citizen, she is
reunited with her family, and she’s given in marriage to the guy who’s
been trying for her all along. Curculio has it all, including characteristically
Plautine music and jokes and wordplay, as my earlier examples suggest.
Curculio is also remarkable for having one of almost every stock
character that shows up in Roman comedy. Check out the chart of the
usual suspects in Table 1.2. All we’re missing is Phaedromus’ mom and

Table 1.2 The principal stock types of Plautine comedy

Name Meaning Comments In Curculio
adulescens Young man in Technically the Phaedromus
amans love protagonist; usually
aided by trickster
seruus Clever slave Trickster figure; often Palinurus (kinda)
callidus the true protagonist
paedagogus Babysitter Enslaved guardian of Palinurus (sorta)
the adulescens; tries
unsuccessfully to keep
him out of love
seruus Errand-slave The feckless schmuck Curculio (first
currens in a hurry that the seruus callidus entrance)
plays off of
 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 15

parasitus Parasite/ Sometimes just a Curculio (rest of

mooch brown-noser, the play)
sometimes a trickster,
sometimes both
meretrix Sex-laborer Either an enslaved Planesium
sex-laborer (enslaved
or else a free, non- version)
citizen sex-laborer, who
is often a trickster; the
love object of the
adulescens
uirgo Unwed citizen What the enslaved
intacta girl who’s sex-laborer turns out to
never been be, implausibly
touched
senex Old man The father of the None
adulescens; Either stern
and angry or horny (or
both)
matrona Citizen wife The mother of the None
adulescens;
the voice of reasonable
conduct; sometimes an
uxor dotata, “wife with a
dowry,” who dominates
the relationship
miles Blowhard Also wants the love Therapontigonus
gloriosus soldier object;
rival of the adulescens
ancilla/anus/ Slave-girl/ Enslaved supporting Leaena (anus)
nutrix old woman/ character
nurse
cocus Cook Hired help; Cook (unnamed)
a shady character,
bombastic,
and kind of a klepto
lena/leno Sex-trafficker Owns or manages the Cappadox
love object;
universally reviled
danista/ Banker Another blocking Lyco
trapezita character;
also universally reviled
16 Plautus: Curculio

dad, otherwise it’s a complete set. Palinurus and Curculio each take on
two roles—doubling!—with differing degrees of success. In the play’s
opening scene, Palinurus switches back and forth between paedagogus,
complaining about Phaedromus’ romantic entanglement, and seruus
callidus, making witty wisecracks at Phaedromus’ expense. But Palinurus
never really settles well into the role of the trickster seruus callidus
(which in this play goes to the parasitus Curculio instead). Instead,
Palinurus follows the lead of every other comedic paedagogus, by failing
to keep Phaedromus on the straight and narrow. At any rate, he fades
into the background after the play’s early scenes. Curculio, on the other
hand, makes a memorable first entrance with one of the all-time greatest
seruus currens running scenes, despite not himself being enslaved; and
he plays gluttonous parasite and scenery-chewing trickster with equal
perfection for the remainder of the play. All of the other characters in
Curculio play exactly to type (except the sex-trafficker Cappadox:
Chapter 8).
What was the original play of Greek New Comedy that Plautus was
adapting into Curculio? Plautus doesn’t tell us, so we can’t know what it
was. Questions about the play’s relationship to its original, though worth
consideration, must remain shrouded in uncertainty, and ultimately in
my view are not the most interesting or important aspects of studying
Curculio. We can’t tell whether he was even working from an original, or
just writing a brand new play in the style and tradition of his genre, as
Eckard Lefèvre suggests. A key sign of Plautus’ heavy adaptation of the
original is the play’s length. No surviving play of Greek New Comedy
appears to have been as short as Curculio—presuming, of course, that
Curculio has survived to the present day without big chunks going
missing. One potential motivation for Plautus’ abridgement is that the
aediles who paid him to produce Curculio wanted him to keep it short.
Alternatively, Plautus could’ve been removing what he thought of as dull
fluff, to make room for improvised jokes and extensive monkey business
that fills up time on stage without filling up lines on the page. Some
features of Curculio can be interpreted as signs of compression of his
Greek original, as Elaine Fantham discusses. No prologue explains what’s
 Plautus, Curculio, and Roman Comedy: The Basics 17

going to happen, though this is common in Menander. (The Greeks and

Romans seemed to have wanted spoilers.) Meanwhile, Curculio’s pivotal
trickery of Therapontigonus is relegated to a backstory rather than
taking place in front of our eyes. And Curculio lacks a scene where
Therapontigonus recognizes Curculio and realizes he’s been had, but
instead includes merely a single line from him in a monologue.
The most obvious element of Plautus’ originality in Curculio is the
speech of the Choragus. Simply put, nothing else like it exists anywhere
in surviving Greek New Comedy and Roman comedy. It goes against an
unwritten rule of the genre: never do specific, political, present-day
jokes. We have no parallels for anything like this scene in Terence or in
what today remains of Menander. The Choragus as stage official does
not exist in the Greek theatrical tradition. And the Choragus’ speech is
like Plautus himself—built on a Greek foundation, but thoroughly
Roman, completely embedded in the City of Rome, and totally in sync
with everyday life.

In the next two chapters, we dive into the play’s plot, themes, and sources
of humor. Then, Chapters 4 and 5 will give a feel for what Curculio was
like in performance, with music, costumes, props, and stagecraft.
Chapters 6 through 8 cover important issues in this play: first,
metatheater; next, the Choragus; then, how Curculio illustrates the real
lives of Romans in the areas of sex, enslavement, religion, food, and
poverty. Chapter 9 connects the dots from then to now, tracing how
Curculio made it into the modern world, and how the modern world
has re-made Curculio.
18
 2

What’s Going on in Curculio?

In this chapter, we begin with a summary of Curculio from the

perspective of the audience watching it unfold. Then I’ll turn to three of
the play’s major building blocks: a “love” story, a deception, and a family
reunion.

Two characters come on stage in mid-conversation. The first person to

speak is an enslaved man, as indicated by his mask (Chapter 5). His
opening lines: “Where should I say you’re headed outdoors tonight with
that getup and this entourage, Phaedromus?” (lines 1–2). This tells the
audience to imagine a nighttime scene; provides the name of the young
citizen man being questioned; and draws attention to the line of silent
characters, all enslaved to Phaedromus, who follow him. (It will be
several minutes before anyone says the name of the person who asked
the question: Palinurus.)
Phaedromus answers, “Where Venus and Cupid order me to go,
where Love encourages me to” (3). Venus is goddess of love, Cupid her
son, the mischievous god of desire: it’s a love story, or something close
to one. When Roman comedies begin with a young man announcing
his infatuation with somebody, it’s usually for a young woman he cannot
have. (Don’t think that ancient comedy is totally hetero, though. Men in
Greek and Roman comedy express sexual attraction to other men with
some frequency: Aristophanes’ plays are full of it, and scenes with clear
homoerotic innuendo or expressions of homoerotic desire appear in
Plautus’ Asinaria and Casina as well as Terence’s Eunuchus. The men
who wrote most of surviving Graeco-Roman literature generally kept
silent about women’s homoeroticism.) Either the young woman is
enslaved to a sex-trafficker and he cannot afford to buy her for himself,

19
20 Plautus: Curculio

or she’s a free sex-laborer and he cannot afford to buy exclusive access

to her. Generally, in these kinds of tales, the lover boy (adulescens
amans) will scrounge up the cash via his enslaved attendant, who will
swindle the sex-trafficker or the lover boy’s dad.
Palinurus and Phaedromus continue their conversation (14),
indicating that the building between Phaedromus’ house and the house
they’re going to is a shrine to Aesculapius, god of healing, whose most
famous religious site is the Greek city of Epidaurus. Perhaps that’s where
this play is set! Phaedromus leads Palinurus and the rest of the
procession past the shrine and then does something odd: he says hi to
the door of the house he’s been walking to (17). Palinurus makes fun of
him—seems like Palinurus is turning out to be a seruus callidus.
But once he figures out Phaedromus has gone out at midnight to see
about a girl, Palinurus goes off on a rant about how Phaedromus needs
to avoid sleeping around with citizen women (27–38). Maybe Palinurus
is supposed to be the stern, moralizing paedagogus instead? Anyway,
Phaedromus quickly reassures Palinurus: the house belongs to a sex-
trafficker (leno, 39), and Phaedromus has fallen for one of the girls
enslaved to him. He claims the feeling’s mutual. He mentions that the
sex-trafficker is sick, bad enough to visit the shrine next door overnight
in hopes that Aesculapius will help him recover (61–2). The sex-
trafficker is saying Phaedromus will have to pay a high price if he wants
to buy his beloved sex-laborer. But, of course, Phaedromus, like all
citizen lover boys in these plays, has no cash, so he’s sent his parasite
overseas to try to procure a loan (67–9). (It goes unexplained how he
can afford to send someone overseas if he has no cash, but these kinds
of inconsistencies are common enough in Plautus’ comedies.) Yet, if the
parasite is taking care of Phaedromus’ cash problem, then Palinurus
probably won’t have much to do with the tricks and schemes—no
seruus callidus in this play.
Phaedromus continues being weird with the door: he sprinkles some
wine at its threshold, as if making an offering to a god, and talks to it
some more (79–89). Out comes an old woman, who’s caught the scent
of wine and has gone wild for it (96–109). This one in particular is
 What’s Going on in Curculio? 21

Leaena, the winetastic Wildcat. Leaena doesn’t speak, though—she

sings. She sings about wine, she receives wine, she drinks wine eagerly,
she cracks jokes about wine, then she goes inside to bring out the girl
Phaedromus has come to see. As she does, Phaedromus once again talks
to the door, this time with a song of his own, a weird hymn or magical
spell, which is also a paraclausithyron (a song sung by a lover in front of
a beloved’s door, 147–57; Chapter 4).
Leaena leads out the sex-laborer—her mask is that of a beautiful
young girl, as expected—and at last her name is spoken, Planesium
(“Little Wanderer,” a fitting moniker for a survivor of human trafficking.)
Phaedromus and Planesium banter and embrace, Palinurus and
Planesium exchange insults, and Phaedromus smacks Palinurus around
(162–202). Then the door to the shrine of Aesculapius opens (203), so the
lovers go their separate ways back into their separate houses, Planesium
accompanied by Leaena and Phaedromus by Palinurus. On his way out,
Phaedromus promises to free Planesium within three days (208–9).
The stage is empty for only a moment before someone exits the
shrine. The actor’s mask indicates that it’s the sex-trafficker, but he looks
odd, and he’s coming from the wrong door. The red skin tone of masks
depicting men is for this guy a bit greenish, and his costume includes a
grotesquely puffed-out belly. He’s moaning, apparently very sick. He
delivers a short monologue about how his illness is a sign Aesculapius
dislikes him (215–22).
Palinurus comes out of his house while giving some romantic advice
to Phaedromus (223–8). Palinurus sees the sex-trafficker—Palinurus
helpfully says his name is Cappadox (“man from Cappadocia,” in
modern-day Turkey)—and they banter. Then Cappadox asks Palinurus
to interpret a dream he just had in the shrine (245–7). Before Palinurus
can begin, yet another character emerges from Phaedromus’ house, this
time a cook (251). He takes over from Palinurus, sends him inside, and
gives Cappadox a rather obvious interpretation of the dream: if
Aesculapius was avoiding Cappadox in the dream, he must find a way
to placate the god (260–72). Cappadox and the Cook each go back
inside, leaving the stage empty once more (273).
22 Plautus: Curculio

Palinurus comes back out and says he sees Phaedromus’ parasite

returning home. He calls Phaedromus out. The two of them move off to
the side to watch the parasite’s entrance (274–9).
Here’s where things turn wild.
A ruckus breaks out at the back of the crowd. It’s the parasite! He’s
actually in the crowd! He’s shouting, pushing people aside, moving fast
without really going very far. As he makes his way towards the stage, he
goes on a tirade about how he’s too busy to have time for anyone, no
matter how rich or powerful (280–98). Phaedromus approaches him
and calls him by name: Curculio. They catch up with one another, and
all the while Curculio complains about how hungry and sick of travel
he is. Phaedromus turns the conversation to the loan he needs. Curculio
dashes his hopes for cash—but says he has a plan (335).
While he was off in Caria (also in modern-day Turkey), he says, he
met a soldier who said he’d contracted to buy a girl from Cappadox and
had placed money on deposit with the banker Lyco (336–48). The
soldier said Lyco would give it to whoever came to Epidaurus bearing
the soldier’s signet ring. (The inference that the play was set in Epidaurus
is correct, 300-plus lines later.) The soldier then invited Curculio out for
some wine and a game of dice. As they played, the soldier invoked
Planesium’s name for good luck (336)—so, Curculio’s story shows the
soldier is Phaedromus’ rival! Curculio kept drinking and dicing until
the soldier passed out, at which point Curculio stole his signet ring and
hightailed it out of there (360–3).
After telling this improbable story, Curculio heads inside with
Phaedromus to forge some documents (but only after Curculio talks
some more about food). Someone comes along the road, talking about
banking: this must be Lyco. After a few lines from him (371–83),
Curculio emerges again, but with an eyepatch on. (In a few moments,
he’ll give a fake name, “Summanus.”) The banker—he apparently doesn’t
recognize Curculio, either because of the disguise or maybe because
they’ve never met before—makes fun of Curculio’s apparent disability.
The two argue for a bit, until Curculio turns to business, passing off the
fake documents with some lies thrown in for good measure (392–454).
 What’s Going on in Curculio? 23

During their conversation, they mention the name of the soldier,

Therapontigonus Platagidorus, a preposterously Greek, preposterously
long name that Lyco mocks.
Cappadox enters and joins Lyco and Curculio in conversation (455).
He doesn’t recognize Curculio, either. Lyco tells him to send Planesium
along with Curculio. Cappadox mentions he’s sworn an oath to hand
her over only to the soldier, but Lyco persuades him to ignore the oath.
That’s typical behavior for comedy’s sex-traffickers: perjury and
oathbreaking are their favorite pastimes. All three enter Cappadox’
house to finalize the transaction (461).
Then something happens unlike anything comedy fans living in
Rome have ever seen. Someone comes onstage dressed like a Roman,
not a Greek, talking about how wily Curculio is and how he might not
recover the costumes he’s lent to Curculio. This is meant to be the play’s
choragus. He promises to show the audience where to find good guys
and scoundrels throughout the City—Rome, not Epidaurus—and then
goes on a kind of verbal tour of the Forum, right where the play is
taking place (467–86). From where he’s standing, he points out different
areas nearby and says which types of scumbags like to hang out in
each spot.
The crowd is loving it. After he’s hit all the most famous places, from
the Old Shops down to the Etruscan Quarter, he heads backstage.
And then the play continues like normal: Cappadox, Lyco, and
Curculio (still in disguise as “Summanus”) re-emerge with Planesium
in tow (487). Lyco and Curculio take turns reminding Cappadox of his
oath. Curculio rants about the corruption of sex-traffickers and bankers.
Possession of Planesium is formally transferred to Curculio. She exits
with him, and Cappadox and Lyco part ways (524–32).
A new character bursts on stage. His sword and cloak identify him as
a soldier—Therapontigonus Platagidorus himself. He’s raging at Lyco,
who’s following after him (533–54). They’re arguing about money.
When Lyco mentions “Summanus” as Therapontigonus’ agent, the
soldier is bewildered, and Lyco leaves. Cappadox then enters (557), and
Therapontigonus tells him to hand over Planesium. But Cappadox, too,
24 Plautus: Curculio

mentions “Summanus,” and Therapontigonus finally realizes he’s been

tricked by Curculio. Cappadox leaves the soldier perplexed and
frustrated (588–90).
Things are moving quickly now, the action is picking up and moving
towards a climax. Curculio returns, complaining that Planesium is
showing too much interest in his ring, the one he stole from the soldier
when they were overseas (591–8). Planesium and Phaedromus hurry
after him. She’s insisting they catch up and examine the ring—and then
she drops a big new piece of information. She was, she says, born
free (607).
At this point, Therapontigonus joins the conversation and demands
Planesium (610–15). She presses Phaedromus to ask Therapontigonus
where he obtained the ring Curculio stole. He says he was given it by his
dad. Planesium recognizes the symbol on the ring as her father’s seal—
and so recognizes Therapontigonus as her long-lost brother! She
gives him enough information on her backstory to convince him
she’s truly his sister (641–57). Curculio prompts Therapontigonus to
approve of Planesium marrying Phaedromus. Since their father is gone,
Therapontigonus alone has the legal power to arrange the marriage.
The big reveal and reunion have taken place, lover boy’s gotten the
girl, a wedding’s in the near future. All that’s left is to punish the sex-
trafficker, and that’s what happens for the final ten minutes or so of the
show. Cappadox comes on, and the rest of the characters mess with him
(679–728)—although Planesium does intercede on his behalf, asking
them not to be too rough, because he was not unkind to her. They force
him to pay Therapontigonus back. Then the cast asks for applause (729),
signaling the end of the play.

Plot points—Part one: Love is just a four-letter word

It’s pretty typical for plays by Plautus, for other plays in this genre, and
for plays in the genre of Greek New Comedy that Plautus adapts all to
feature a young citizen man infatuated with a girl or young woman he’s
 What’s Going on in Curculio? 25

having trouble gaining access to. Between a third and a half of Plautus’
surviving plays do this. Sometimes, it’s because she’s a sex-laborer and
he can’t afford to pay her. Rarely, it’s a freeborn girl he wants to marry
but can’t persuade her father (or his own) to agree. Often, as in Curculio,
it’s because she’s enslaved and he cannot afford to purchase her for
himself or buy her freedom from the sex-trafficker. (The purchase price
in this play—30 minae, mentioned at 63, 344, 492, 535, and 666—is the
standard price for a girl in Plautus’ comedy, and extremely expensive,
approximately ten years’ pay for a construction worker.)
So, is this play—or at least the parts focused on Planesium and
Phaedromus—a love story? Consider the evidence on each side. First, in
favor. The play opens with Phaedromus talking about offerings to Venus,
the Roman goddess of love and sex. The two young characters seem
smitten with one another in their first meeting on stage (163–214).
Even before that, Phaedromus is confident that Planesium has totally
fallen for him (“she loves me to death,” 46). The moment Phaedromus
realizes at the end of the play that Planesium is a freeborn girl, he’s
immediately ready and waiting to marry her, and when Therapontigonus
leaves the marriage question up to Planesium, she says she wants to.
But the Romans weren’t really about “true love.” The point of marriage
in ancient Rome was to form political, social, or economic alliances and
to ensure the production of citizen children. This basically holds true
for the Greeks whose comedies Plautus was adapting, too. Phaedromus’
interest in Planesium developed before she was identified as a freeborn
citizen girl, and so he certainly wasn’t initially thinking of her as a
potential wife. We should also keep in mind that Planesium was
enslaved to a sex-trafficker: isn’t it likely that Phaedromus first met
Planesium on a visit to Cappadox’ house, in effect a brothel, or at least a
showroom for sex-slaves? Phaedromus was probably on a sex-shopping
trip.
So, Phaedromus could be suspected of entering this relationship
from a position of erotic infatuation, not romantic affection. For
circumstantial evidence, we can also add the unbalanced exchange of
sentiments he initially describes between her and himself: “she loves me
26 Plautus: Curculio

to death; I, on the other hand, don’t want to share her with anybody”
(46–7). This sounds less like reciprocal romance and more like a guy
with an inflated ego who wants his chosen sex object all to himself and
is sure she feels that way, too. Granted, he subsequently says, “I love her
just as much, as well” (48), but his clarification comes up only in
response to a follow-up question, and so his headline is bound to be the
sexually greedy rejection of anything but an exclusive relationship with
Planesium. Phaedromus similarly does tell Palinurus early in the play
that he and Planesium have done no more than kiss (51–2). But this
detail is included mostly to make clear to the audience that Planesium
has not yet had sex with anyone and so can still qualify as a uirgo intacta
(see Table 1.1 in Chapter 1), eligible for marriage upon liberation from
slavery.
Lover boys in Roman comedy often go through a phase where they
have fun with free or enslaved sex-laborers, with the expectation that
someday they’ll finally grow up and start acting like real men by getting
married. This is how I think we should view Phaedromus at the opening
of the play. He’s a horny young guy, looking to obtain a sex object during
the no-strings-attached stage of his misspent youth. Only by chance
does it turn out that the girl he wants is what his society considers to be
marriage material, and so it’s only by chance that Phaedromus leapfrogs
his way into responsible, married adulthood by play’s end.
We can also observe the erotic calculus Phaedromus faces in an
exchange he has with Palinurus (25–38):

Palinurus Tell me you aren’t planning an ambush against some

chaste girl, or a girl who oughtta be chaste?
Phaedromus Of course not, and may Jupiter never allow me to!
Palinurus That’s how I feel, too. If you’re smart, arrange it so you
always have sex with what’s yours, so that if people find out what
you’re having sex with, you’ll look above-board. Always be careful
you don’t end up intestate [intestabilis].
Phaedromus Wait, what does that mean?
Palinurus That you should follow the path cautiously: whatever you
have sex with, do it with your testes [testibus] intact.
 What’s Going on in Curculio? 27

Phaedromus But c’mon, a flesh-peddler lives here.

Palinurus Well, nobody forbids or blocks you from buying what’s
openly for sale, if you’ve got the cash. Nobody blocks anybody from
walking on a public street. As long as you don’t blaze a trail through
private property, as long as you keep away from married women,
widows, citizen girls, young men, citizen boys—have sex with
whoever you want.

Palinurus warns Phaedromus against taking an erotic interest in

freeborn people, whether married, unmarried, or widowed, woman or
man. (He also makes a nice pun on the Latin word for “witness,” testis:
only men could bear witness, and testicles were considered one of men’s
distinguishing features, while in ancient Rome, castration was a possible
punishment for violating the rules of sexual conduct described in these
lines.) By contrast, Palinurus endorses erotic interest in people to whom
sexual access can be bought or who can themselves be sold. Palinurus’
moralizing rests on the assumption that Phaedromus hasn’t left the
house in the middle of the night in search of a wife, but rather a good lay.
In giving sexual advice to the young man he’s enslaved to, Palinurus
takes on the role of erotodidact, “teacher of love/sex.” Think of Cyrano
de Bergerac, or the iconic scene in sitcoms and romantic comedies
where a nerdy guy is on a first date and his smooth-talking buddy feeds
him lines through an earpiece—those are classic examples of
erotodidaxis. So is dating advice, or guides in men’s magazines about
sex techniques, and (in more toxic forms) “Pick-Up Artist” websites and
“locker-room talk.”
In Curculio, Palinurus’ pose as erotodidact comes out not only in his
explanations of the kinds of sex objects Phaedromus should avoid or
should seek, but also in his objectification of those objects. He repeatedly
uses the neuter forms of words in reference to them (e.g., id quod, “that
which,” 29; similarly, 31, 34, 38) instead of masculine or feminine forms.
He even compares a sex-slave to public infrastructure (“nobody blocks
anybody from walking on a public street,” 35). But his teaching of the
ways of love ends up being pretty tame. Unlike erotodidacts in Plautus’
successors (the enslaved assistant Parmeno in Terence’s play Eunuchus;
28 Plautus: Curculio

the narrator of Ovid’s satiric poem Ars Amatoria, “the Handbook for
Getting Laid”), Palinurus warns Phaedromus away from sexual assault
(23–6), especially by expressing concerns about an “ambush” (25)
Phaedromus might be planning against his sex object of the moment.
His rules at the end of the passage—don’t sleep with a citizen woman
who’s not your wife, don’t sleep with young citizen men or citizen boys
(37–8)—in fact, describe the basic, traditional code for elite Roman
citizen men’s sexuality.
What about Planesium? At each step of the way she is facing a life of
sex-slavery. We shouldn’t underrate the coercive power of her
circumstances. If Cappadox can’t sell her, he might consign her to
brothel enslavement or streetwalking prostitution, two of the most
brutal fates conceivable in the ancient world. So, it is in her utmost best
interests to find a man interested in buying her and able to afford it. This
alone could explain her performance of affection for Phaedromus in
her early scene: maximizing the chances that he will fall for her hard
enough that he’ll scrounge up the money to buy her off Cappadox. She
could just be doing her job: as an enslaved sex-laborer, pleasing her
enslaver entails attracting and snagging paying clients.
Later, once she’s been recognized as free, she is indeed given the
choice to marry Phaedromus or not. But here, too, it isn’t clear-cut.
As an unmarried citizen girl, Planesium knows her brother
Therapontigonus will eventually arrange a marriage for her. With
Phaedromus, she at least has a somewhat-known quantity, and someone
of roughly the same age.
An unusual feature of Curculio among Plautus’ comedies is the
absence of citizen parents. Phaedromus’ mom and dad are nowhere to
be found. In other plays, one or both parents might be an antagonist, or
might themselves be stars of the show. Their absence means Phaedromus
has no role models within the play for married life, and more importantly
has no father around to formally (and legally) approve the marriage to
Planesium. In Roman elite thinking, young men weren’t fully adults
until around age 30, and could be subject to their fathers’ authority until
marriage or even until the father’s death.
 What’s Going on in Curculio? 29

In Curculio we only have comparative evidence—how marriage

plots go down in other plays by Plautus and Terence and Menander—to
tell us that Phaedromus’ wedding will be okay with his dad, who
ultimately would make the decision. The absence of Phaedromus’
parents is, I think, more about keeping the focus on Curculio and on the
recognition plot (the rest of this chapter) than it is a thematic message.
Or maybe instead we should be disquieted about the missing parents,
and in the back of our minds question the legitimacy of the marriage
agreed to at play’s end, and worry about how Phaedromus will treat
Planesium since his own parents are truants (or dead?).
Finally, Phaedromus’ erotic rival for Planesium, Therapontigonus,
ends up being her brother. If Curculio’s schemes hadn’t worked,
Therapontigonus would have purchased his own sister as his sex-slave:
near-miss incest. This is uncomfortable, for Romans and even for
Greeks, and it would be a surprise for the audience. If we pay close
attention, we can find a hint of it early on in the play, when Phaedromus
is telling Palinurus how he and Planesium haven’t yet had sex: “she’s had
as little sexual contact with me as if she were my sister, unless kissing
counts as her being unchaste” (51–2). This isn’t the only near-miss
incest in Plautus; it nearly happens between two half-siblings in his play
Epidicus. But, if you’re shocked, watch Star Wars: The Empire Strikes
Back (1981), and you’ll see a sensual, eager kiss between Luke Skywalker
and Leia Organa, revealed as siblings in the next movie.

Plot points—Part two: Turning trickster

In Curculio, the title character takes on the role of trickster. In other

plays of Plautus, the trickster is often an enslaved person (for example,
the title characters of Pseudolus and Epidicus, Chrysalus in Bacchides,
Pardalisca in Casina) or a free sex-laborer (such as Phronesium in
Truculentus or the titular twin sisters of Bacchides). Only here and in
Terence’s Phormio among surviving comedies of this genre is the lead
trickster a parasite—and Phormio is influenced by Curculio (Chapter 9).
30 Plautus: Curculio

When the trickster’s a man and the cast list includes a lover boy like
Phaedromus, the trickster’s tricks are usually intended to help lover boy
get the girl: in this case, to help Phaedromus obtain the cash he needs to
buy Planesium. Before the time of the play itself, Curculio’s marching
orders were innocent enough: simply a journey to Caria to hunt for a
loan on Phaedromus’ account (67–8). Though he comes up short on his
mission, he’s in the perfect position to salvage the situation when
he encounters Therapontigonus. By a fantastical coincidence of the
sort that only happens in comedies, the soldier has business with
Phaedromus’ neighbor Cappadox and local banker Lyco, and has a
financial stake in none other than Planesium herself. Soldiers in
comedy—unlike lover boys—are loaded with cash, so Therapontigonus
instantly reads like the perfect target for Curculio. The parasite proceeds
to do what he does best: score an invite to hang with Therapontigonus
at the soldier’s expense (349–52). Chatting leads to dice, dicing leads to
drinking, and once Therapontigonus is good and drunk, Curculio shifts
gear from parasite to trickster and steals the soldier’s signet ring.
Therapontigonus tells the parasite that he’s arranged with the banker
to give Therapontigonus’ cash to whoever comes with tablets sealed by
Therapontigonus’ insignia (345–8). So when Curculio takes the ring, he
already knows what he’s going to do with it: forge a letter purporting to
be from Therapontigonus and seal it with the ring to give it false
credibility (365). The ring—the soldier’s proof of identity—is a magic
key that allows Curculio to thwart Lyco the banker and Cappadox the
sex-trafficker, the two formidable blocking characters who stand
between Phaedromus and Planesium.
The next step after forging the documents is to put them to use. Since
Curculio lives in Epidaurus, same as the two guys he needs to trick, he
plays it safe and puts on a disguise, an eyepatch. (If you think a simple
change in eyewear isn’t plausible enough to conceal a fictitious
character’s identity, file a complaint with Clark Kent.) He pretends to be
a freedman of Therapontigonus. In Roman tradition, once a formerly
enslaved person had been released from servitude by the enslaver, the
newly free still owed allegiance to their former master, so the soldier’s
 What’s Going on in Curculio? 31

freedman is a believable candidate to be his agent in buying Planesium.

Curculio adopts the fake name “Summanus” and successfully fools both
Lyco and Cappadox in order to take possession of Planesium (371–461,
487–532). The proof that Curculio’s deception scheme goes off without
a hitch is that first Lyco (522, 533–54) and then Cappadox (557–82) call
Curculio “Summanus.” It’s only after Therapontigonus has heard about
“Summanus” from those two that he realizes Curculio is to blame for
his loss of Planesium (583–4).
Curculio manages the pivotal deception plot with skill and ease. He
also brings a commanding presence to every scene he’s a part of while
the tricks are still afoot. Most notable, of course, is his grand first
entrance, probably coming in through the audience and delivering a
virtuoso version of the seruus currens “errand-slave” monologue. When
he’s reporting the results of his journey to Phaedromus, he plays up the
suspense, for Phaedromus and the audience both, by drawing out his
story about meeting and cheating the soldier (328–70).
Later, when hoodwinking Lyco, Curculio has to play the part of the
boastful soldier’s lackey persuasively. He does so by listing a preposterous
number of real and fake territories he says Therapontigonus conquered
(442–8):

He singlehandedly, in under twenty days, conquered the Persians,

Paphlagonians, the people of Sinope, the Arabs, Carians, Cretans,
Syrians, Rhodes and Lycia, Hunger-y and Wine Country, Centaurbattalia
and Fleetland, Singleboobistan and Libya, the whole Brownnosian
coast, half of all peoples everywhere.

Overblown, preposterous claims of military might are a standard

characteristic of comedy’s soldiers and their sidekicks, so Curculio is
pitch-perfect with this run-on sentence. And Lyco buys it hook, line,
and sinker, telling Curculio, “damn, you’re spewing out so much
nonsense that I totally believe you came from” Therapontigonus (452).
Curculio, playing the gopher of the miles gloriosus (blowhard soldier) in
order to pull off his ultimate trick, succeeds in being gloriosus (blowhard)
enough to fit the bill.
32 Plautus: Curculio

Plot points—Part three: Recognition and reunion

Let’s pause for a moment to admire the economy of plot in this play: the
“love” story hinges on the deception plot, and the deception plot leads
directly to the third big story element in Curculio, the reunion of long-
lost siblings Planesium and Therapontigonus. In writing this play,
Plautus has tied together three classic stock plots of Roman comedy
into a neat bundle. Curculio’s motivation for tricking the soldier, the
banker, and the sex-trafficker is to grant Phaedromus access to the
object of his erotic infatuation. At the same time, his main tool for
pulling off the heist—the soldier’s ring—becomes the way Planesium
recognizes she’s the soldier’s sister and therefore undeniably freeborn.
And that identification wraps back around to conclude the love story
with a not-so-unpredictable twist, the engagement of Planesium and
Phaedromus to be married.
Recognition scenes are so fundamental to Greek and Roman theater
that they have a technical term we take from Greek: anagnorisis. In
comedy, it’s usually recognizing a long-lost family member or discovering
someone’s identity in a way that allows for marriage between young
citizen woman and young citizen man. Sometimes, it’s just figuring out
that identical twins are roaming the neighborhood. In Curculio, we find
both types of comic recognition combined into one. Planesium and
Therapontigonus are reunited as sister and brother. This turn of
events simultaneously removes Therapontigonus as Phaedromus’
erotic rival, makes Planesium eligible for marriage to him, and accords
Therapontigonus the authority to approve said marriage. Comic
recognition scenes often depend on some sort of token—baby toys from
a long-lost child, a brooch or ring wrested from an assailant during a
sexual assault, an heirloom. For Curculio it is the signet ring belonging
to Therapontigonus, a gift from his father. Planesium’s father had a ring
just like it, she recalls. If Curculio hadn’t stolen it from the soldier as part
of his scheme to get the girl, he wouldn’t have been wearing it when in
Phaedromus’ house after bringing Planesium there, and she wouldn’t
have seen it and recognized it (the first stage in the play’s recognition).
 What’s Going on in Curculio? 33

But maybe this means that Curculio’s whole scheme didn’t really
matter in the big picture. If he hadn’t stolen the ring, Therapontigonus
would still have it and would buy Planesium without difficulty. She
would then see the ring when brought to his household as an enslaved
sex-laborer, and the reunion would happen there (but maybe only after
incest had occurred).
Regardless, the recognition/reunion plot touches on an anxiety that
might have been a common experience among the members of the
audience for Curculio. For almost an entire generation during the time
of Plautus’ plays, the Romans were engaged in the second and most
total of their wars with the Phoenicians of Carthage. During the Second
Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps, invaded
Italy, and soundly defeated Roman armies a number of times before
being pushed back. The average person living in Rome likely would
have known someone who did a tour of duty in the fighting; a lot of
those soldiers didn’t come back. Families in this period could easily
have been torn apart. Long-lost relatives returning—or never being
heard from again—were part of real life, not just sensational plot points
on stage. And human trafficking intensified during Rome’s military
expeditions and growing imperialism. The story of Planesium and
Therapontigonus could hit close to home for audiences in Rome, could
act out some of their unfulfilled desires, could help them grapple with
their greatest heartbreaks.
34
 3

Major Themes and Humor in Curculio

Besides the big chunks of the storyline, some recurrent motifs in our
play are worth noting. A big one, religion, connects in part to the play’s
setting, Epidaurus, a central site for the worship of the healing god
Aesculapius (Chapter 8). Let’s survey three other themes: animals,
commerce and law, and sickness.

Animals

The animal theme begins with the title of the play itself. A curculio in
Latin is a weevil, a kind of beetle that likes to hang out in grain storage
and eat through the stockpiles (Figure 3.1). This is a fitting name for the
most superb of Plautus’ parasite characters. Plautus jokes on Curculio’s
name near the end of the play: Therapontigonus asks Cappadox, “where
can I find Curculio now?” (586). Cappadox responds with some sass:
“Easy!: in a grain-heap, I can guarantee you’ll find not just one but fifty
curculios!” (586–7).
Leaena, the old door-keeper at the house of Cappadox, is “Lioness”/
Wildcat. She behaves more like a bloodhound, though. Phaedromus
informs Palinurus that she’ll recognize him from the smell of a few
drops of wine (80–1). In her first line of dialogue, Leaena says her nose
has caught scent of that wine (96), and she claims that wine’s odor
makes all other fragrances smell like what tanners use to strip hair off
oxhides (101), that wine is for her the same as sweet-smelling luxuries
(103–4). Palinurus outright calls her a hound (112). The actor playing
Leaena probably crawled around on all fours, sniffing and snorting and
cavorting like a dog on the trail.

35
36 Plautus: Curculio

Figure 3.1 A nut weevil. “Nut Weevil,” by Katrin Schulz, 2014, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The banker also has an animal name: Lyco suggests the Greek word
lukos, “wolf.” His name reflects the common portrayal of bankers in
Roman comedy as greedy, grasping, cunning, untrustworthy, and
opportunistic, just like the modern animalistic insult “loan shark.” Lyco
conforms to the stereotype. He argues, he cheats, he pushes Cappadox
to break his oath.
Two smaller moments round out the animal theme in Curculio. First,
when Phaedromus visits Planesium at play’s open, she complains that
Palinurus annoys her, and he doesn’t take it well in his reply: “What’re
you talking about, you dumpster fire? You, with your owl-lookin’ eyes,
are gonna call me a pain in the ass? Drunken munchkin! Trash!” (189–
92). Let’s set aside for a moment the surprising intensity of Palinurus’
vituperation. His insult about Planesium’s eyes uses animal imagery. The
mask representing Planesium may even have had stylized decoration
suggestive of her “owl eyes,” since persolla also means “little mask.”
 Major Themes and Humor in Curculio 37

Finally, the soldier’s signet ring invokes an animal. Lyco describes the
soldier’s seal for us when he’s doing business with Curculio disguised as
“Summanus”: a guy with sword and a shield, cutting an elephant in half
(424). Therapontigonus is a blowhard not just in person but in choice of
logo, too. Elephants were for Romans the most fearsome instrument of
war, closely associated with the formidable armies of that Carthaginian
general Hannibal, Rome’s arch-enemy. For Therapontigonus’ signet ring
to depict a soldier felling an elephant in one stroke speaks volumes
about his sense of self-worth.

Commerce and law

Financial and legal affairs form an undercurrent in Curculio.

Phaedromus’ basic obstacle to having Planesium is financial, since
he lacks the cash to buy her and isn’t legally old enough to receive
a loan, while the ultimate resolution—identifying her as freeborn
and thus a survivor of unlawful trafficking—is legal. Lyco the banker
is an obvious representative of the play’s financial elements.
Phaedromus ends up taking on a legal role as arbiter in the play’s
final scene, where he deceitfully agrees to be an impartial judge of the
dispute between Therapontigonus and Cappadox over payment for
Planesium. The financial entanglements between Cappadox, Lyco, and
Therapontigonus are sealed by a legal technicality, Cappadox’ oaths.
And whenever either Lyco or Cappadox think they’re in trouble, they
try to take the matter to the praetor, Rome’s chief judicial magistrate,
evidently because they think they’ll be able to talk their way out of
trouble in court.
In addition to overarching thematic elements, law and economics
crop up throughout the play. Palinurus repeatedly invokes law in the
play’s opening when he is warning Phaedromus to be careful who he
sleeps with. First, he raises the specter of stuprum, illegal sexual
misconduct, when asking Phaedromus whether his erotic adventure is
“a crime unworthy of you or your breeding . . . entrapment of a chaste
38 Plautus: Curculio

girl or someone who should be chaste” (23–6). Then, Palinurus alludes

to a potential punishment for adulterers, castration, with a pun on the
word intestabilis (“unable to make a will”/“without testicles,” 30–2, a
threat made more explicit in the final scene of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus).
Palinurus’ solution to avoid legal pitfalls? Commerce: going for a love
object that is openly for sale (33–5).
When Planesium joins Phaedromus on stage for their initial
nighttime encounter, she says the sex-trafficker will never keep her
away from him, “not unless death transfers my lifeforce away from you”
(174). Planesium uses an odd word, abalienauerit, a legal term that
refers to formal transfer or sale of property. This choice of imagery
reminds us that Planesium herself is legally property and is herself
threatened with being “alienated” from her current residence (with
Cappadox) to the soldier—but her words here defiantly assert her
humanness, her agency in having affection for Phaedromus. After
Planesium has spoken, Palinurus interjects with some more legal
language, suggesting he’d like to bring formal charges against
Phaedromus for making poor erotic life choices (175–6).
Much later, when Curculio (in disguise) is leading Planesium from
Cappadox’ house to Phaedromus’, the dialogue is filled with legal
terminology. Cappadox uses the phrase for formal denial of a charge in
court (it infitias, 489) as a colloquial figure of speech. When transferring
Planesium over to Curculio, Cappadox uses the Roman legal formula
for doing so (mancipio tibi dabo, 494), which sets Curculio off on a
jargon-filled rant about how sex-traffickers are oathbreakers and
lawbreakers by profession (494–8, 515).
Therapontigonus brings with him a financial and legal mess, which
is matched with financial and legal terminology. In conversation with
the banker, he refers to Planesium as “my merchandise” (564). When
Phaedromus confronts him about having tried to purchase a freeborn
girl, they enter into a dispute over going to court and Roman legal
procedure for summoning witnesses (620–3). Then, once they’ve
discovered Planesium’s true identity and set aside their antagonism,
they seal the deal of the marriage engagement (674):
 Major Themes and Humor in Curculio 39

Phaedromus Soldier, do you promise this woman to me to be my

wife?
Therapontigonus I do promise.

Though this interchange sounds redundant, it is equivalent to signing a

contract in the modern world.
One effect of the law and commerce motif is that the erotic plot
of Curculio (Chapter 2) is again marked as unromantic. From start
to finish, Planesium exists as a commodity. Phaedromus and
Therapontigonus window shop for her and haggle over her with
Cappadox, who treats her not as a human being but as a prized
possession. Once she is recognized as freeborn, Planesium remains a
commodity, exchanged between Therapontigonus and Phaedromus as
a symbol of their alliance and of resolution of the dispute between
Therapontigonus and Curculio.
At the same time, legal and economic language and plot points help
make the play seem more realistic. Struggling to secure a loan, worrying
over expenses and debts, trying to secure justice in the face of dishonest
conduct by disreputable characters: all that would have been familiar
aspects of daily life for many in the audience. And this thematic material
underscores the play’s message about uncertainty, both economic and
interpersonal. You don’t know who you can trust, who will trust you
with a loan, who is freeborn and who isn’t, who you can pursue a
relationship with and who you can’t.

Sickness

Disease both literal and metaphorical, both physical and psychological,

plagues the imagery of Plautus’ Curculio. The most prominent example
is Cappadox’ illness, which has him looking green in the face and
swollen in the belly when he first appears. Illness is a natural choice of
motifs for a play set in Epidaurus, the most important medico-religious
site in the ancient Greek world, headquarters for the worship of the
medical god Aesculapius (Greek: Asklepios): see Figure 3.2.
40 Plautus: Curculio

Figure 3.2 Remains of the sanctuary of Asklepios in Epidauros, Greece.

Photo by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, 2019.

The automatic connection between Epidaurus and medicine may

actually have motivated Plautus, or the author of the Greek original he
was adapting, to set the play in that town—or even inspired the play to
begin with. The shrine of Aesculapius takes a prominent place as the
center building represented on stage (and may be a joke for viewers
who know the town, if the huge medical complex is replaced by a single
house sandwiched between two others). Cappadox’ exits from and re-
entry into the shrine for medical rituals help drive the play’s action.
Cappadox’ disease doesn’t seem to be contagious, but his house
doesn’t make for healthy living, either. His enslaved doorkeeper Leaena
suffers from alcoholism. Although the ancient Greeks and Romans
didn’t talk about alcoholism as a pathology in the same sense as medical
professionals do today, they did understand the damaging effects of
addiction, including addiction to alcohol.
 Major Themes and Humor in Curculio 41

As Phaedromus approaches Cappadox’ house at play’s start, Palinurus

calls him insane (19) for greeting Cappadox’ door, and jokingly suggests
the door itself might be feverish (17). Shortly thereafter, Palinurus says
Phaedromus would make Venus (goddess of love) sick to her stomach
(74). When Planesium and Phaedromus have their clandestine meeting,
Palinurus calls Phaedromus “completely insane in love” (177).
The funniest bit of sickness motif comes from Curculio. In his first
entrance, after saying hello to Phaedromus but before telling him how
the trip to procure a loan went, Curculio looks pale from exhaustion
(311), complains of being in bad health (312), and specifically lists some
unusual symptoms (317–19):

I’m dying, I simply can’t see straight, my teeth are full of mucus, my
throat’s got pinkeye from hunger, that’s how I’m doing, arriving with
my tummy tired because of my lackitudiness of food.

These are some wacky medical terms. Curculio hilariously conflates

different ailments of different body parts into weird hybrid diseases. He
does so with alliteration typical of Plautus’ wild style (lippiunt fauces fame,
| ita cibi uaciuitate uenio lassis lactibus). He even invents a word: uaciuitas
exists only here in all of surviving Latin literature. Curculio’s self-diagnosis
matches the quackery you’ll find from doctors elsewhere in ancient comedy,
both “real” (as in Plautus’ Menaechmi) and “fake” (as with the sidekick
pretending to be a medic in Menander’s Aspis). Everyone knows that the
best remedy is to stuff a cold—and Curculio is hoping that whatever his
maladies are, Phaedromus will prescribe him a feast as his cure.
The theme of illness in Curculio asks us to step back and reflect on
our own lives and perceptions. Phaedromus’ affection for Planesium
might seem like a cheesy performance at first, but Palinurus’ commentary
recasts it as an acute bout of mental illness. His strange take on their
relationship makes space to reevaluate it, to think about the dynamics
of power and socioeconomic status that lurk beneath the surface of the
couple’s flirtations. Stern, traditionalist Roman moralists in the audience
might think it is indeed madness for a marriageable citizen youth to be
spending all his time fawning on an enslaved sex-laborer.
42 Plautus: Curculio

Leaena’s addiction, meanwhile, underscores the hazards enslavement

poses to your health. When we turn to the immediate source of these
ills, Cappadox, we find him ill, too. As he enters, he complains, “I’m
walking around with my spleen squeezing me like a girdle, I feel like
I’ve got twin sons in my belly. I’m super-afraid I’ll burst right in the
middle, poor me!” (220–2); Palinurus says he has “a swollen belly and
greenish eyes” (231); and he tells Palinurus, “my spleen’s killing me, my
kidneys hurt, my lungs are being torn apart, my liver’s torturing me, my
heart’s roots are dying, all my guts hurt” (236–8). In Cappadox’ case,
counterintuitively, the disease—disgusting and exaggerated though it
may be—reminds us that he isn’t an otherworldly monster or perfectly
villainous supervillain, but a human, with a human body not so different
from the bodies he buys and sells.

What’s funny in Curculio?

Curculio is hilarious, and much (though not all) of the humor continues
to resonate today. Throughout the play’s early scenes, Phaedromus
repeatedly tries to shut Palinurus up, with little success. At one point,
Phaedromus notices that Leaena is about to bring Planesium out, so he
says to Palinurus, “Shh! Shut up, shut up!” (156). Palinurus replies, “Jeez,
of course, I’m shutting up!” (same line). It’s hard to be quiet while
explaining how quiet you’re being. When Palinurus complains about
having to stay up late because of Phaedromus’ love connection,
Phaedromus tells him to shut up again, setting off this exchange (182–4):

Phaedromus Shut up!

Palinurus What, I should shut up? Why don’t you go to sleep?
Phaedromus I am asleep, don’t shout at me.
Palinurus Oh, come on, you’re totally awake.
Phaedromus Well, actually, I’m asleep, in my own way: this is how I
sleep.

Palinurus finds this sort of nonsense perplexing every time Phaedromus

throws it at him. The fact that Palinurus doesn’t have the perfect
 Major Themes and Humor in Curculio 43

comeback here is an early sign that he won’t turn out to be a seruus

callidus trickster.
When Curculio first rushes on stage, he delivers this epic rant about
all the people in town who annoy him when he’s in a hurry. When
Curculio meets up with Phaedromus, he pretends to be overcome by
physical weakness, as we just saw in discussing the theme of sickness.
Phaedromus asks him what’s wrong. His reply: “Shadows are overtaking
me, my knees are collapsing from lack of food” (309). This is precisely
the type of ailment you’d expect a parasite to have—lack-of-food
poisoning. Phaedromus’ rejoinder is understated: “dammit, I’m sure it’s
from exhaustion” (310). The banality of Phaedromus’ comment is
charmingly absurd. Plautus subsequently pulls another laugh line out of
the parasite stock type, by having Curculio describe how his belly has a
special compartment to store the leftovers of his leftovers (386–8).
Curculio keeps the laughs coming after he’s gone undercover as the
soldier’s lackey. His mention of the soldier’s ridiculously long name
elicits humorous acknowledgment from Lyco: “Blergh, I recognize that
name, ’cause I filled up four whole wax tablets with that name when I
wrote it out” (410–11). And Curculio’s own fake name is a joke: he says
he earned the name “because when I’ve fallen asleep drunk, I wet myself
[uestimenta . . . summano]” (415–16). “Summanus” is a plausible name
for a person, but also sounds like summano, “I make wet.” It also links to
the character of Palinurus, whose name can interpreted to mean “piss
into the wind” or “piss again.” Ancient potty humor can be matched
with modern: a 2019 production of Curculio by my Wake Forest
University students replaced the name Summanus with “Lou Sanis”
(switching urine for diarrhea).
Cappadox has a fair share of wit, too, which he brings to bear
especially against the soldier. At their first greeting, Cappadox pretends
he’s about to invite Therapontigonus to dinner with the formal “today at
my place . . .” (562)—only to assure the soldier, “. . . you’ll never even lick
a single grain of salt” (same line). Cappadox’ rude punchline provokes
Therapontigonus to emulate it, with middling results: “Thanks for the
invitation, but I’ve got plans . . . for things to turn out bad for you” (563).
44 Plautus: Curculio

Cappadox later plays on Curculio’s name meaning “weevil” (586–7).

Just before this, Therapontigonus complains that Curculio stole his ring
(anulus), which Cappadox intentionally misunderstands to mean “little
anus” (anulus), letting him turn it into a homoerotic sex joke (584–5):
“You lost your asshole? Neat, the soldier’s been commissioned into
a busted-ass battalion!” The switch from second person (“you’ve
lost”) to third (“the soldier’s been”) indicates that Cappadox has turned
to the audience to crack this joke. He’s doing stand-up comedy at
Therapontigonus’ expense.
Even when Cappadox suffers his comeuppance at play’s end, he still
brings the banter. After Phaedromus accuses Cappadox of breaking his
oath, an oath made with his tongue, Cappadox says, “Well, now I say I
didn’t, with the same body part. It was born to me for speaking, not for
losing cash” (705–6). The stock type of the sex-trafficker is always
assumed to be an oathbreaker by default, and here Cappadox explains
that tendency to perjure on pseudobiological grounds.
What about the original audience in ancient Rome? No evidence
survives about what ancient audiences thought about Curculio
specifically. We will probably never pick up a lot of funny things in the
play. At the same time, a lot of the jokes hold up, and a lot of what we (or
at least I) find funny in Curculio probably felt that way to its original
audience.
Something we can’t automatically understand the same way a Roman
audience would is parody, and Curculio includes some excellent
moments of parody, big and small. Phaedromus parodies a religious
hymn or magic spell when he sings to the bolts on Cappadox’ door in
hopes that they’ll open and let Planesium come out (149–55). Likewise
Leaena, once she’s taken her bribe of wine from Phaedromus, parodies
ritual and prayer formulas in giving a begrudging “first-fruits” offering
to Venus (125). The unnamed cook character also parodies religion
when he gives Cappadox a sham dream-interpretation (259–73).
Finally, after Planesium and Therapontigonus realize they’re family and
she is engaged to Phaedromus, Curculio hungrily talks about not only a
standard wedding feast (cena nuptialis, 661) but also a sibling feast (cena
 Major Themes and Humor in Curculio 45

sororia, 662), which is not actually a standard practice but something

Curculio invents in hopes of an extra free meal. These jokes play on
aspects of daily life that would be familiar to most members of the
audience, even if they require explanation and contextualization for us.
Plautus also writes jokes the original audience might have found
funny that I do not. Slapstick—by which I mean staged violence—
figures prominently in Phaedromus’ interactions with Palinurus in the
play’s opening scenes and in a brief fistfight between Curculio and
Therapontigonus near its close (623–7). Phaedromus hits Palinurus
whenever he talks back or says something rude about Planesium or
doesn’t keep quiet; in other words, Phaedromus abuses a man enslaved
to him for not complying with his demands. Curculio, still disguised as
Summanus, strikes Therapontigonus because the soldier suggests he’s
enslaved, not free. Therapontigonus reciprocates.
Free men in this play use violence to enforce status. This correlation
of status and physical abuse connects to the systematic use of torture to
enforce power structures in enslaving societies across history and
across the world, including the enslaving societies of ancient Greece
and Rome. Given the prominent role of enslaved characters in Plautus’
comedies, it’s no wonder that torture of enslaved persons crops up here
and elsewhere. But it should make all modern viewers of Plautine
theater pause, take a step back, and ponder the historical abuses of
countless humans that are reflected in the jokes and gags.
A final element of what’s funny about Curculio is something we can’t
derive from just reading the text. Theater is performative, and much of
its payoff comes in performance. Plautus’ plays feature lots of stage
action, costuming, slapstick, visual gags, song, and dance. Chapters 4
and 5 explore how Curculio might have sounded and looked.
46
 4

Curculio in Performance:
Music, Song, and Dance

The only thing about Curculio that survives is the text, 729 lines of Latin.
Nothing but dialogue, either: no stage directions, prop lists, song sheets,
or choreography. Yet, the performance included music, singing, dancing,
masks, costumes, scenery, and physical comedy. It would have been
bright and brash and ridiculous and hilarious. In this chapter, we’ll cover
music; in Chapter 5, what the actors wore and what they did on stage.

Plautus’ theater was musical theater. Over half of the lines he wrote
were to be delivered by the actors with musical accompaniment; I agree
with Timothy J. Moore’s argument that all accompanied lines would
be sung. In Curculio, about 55 percent is sung. Plautus composed the
music as well as writing the words. His actors and tibicen (musician
accompanist) might not know how to read, so they would have
learned all the music and dialogue by ear from Plautus, or from the
acting troupe’s leader, if Plautus himself wasn’t involved in rehearsing
the play. The tibicen played the tibiae, a pair of pipes with double-reed
mouthpieces: like an oboe but louder, reedier, and able to play two notes
at once (Figure 4.1). The tibicen would play in unison with the singers,
which means they would match up in melody and rhythm.
Rhythm is the fundamental building block of not only Plautus’
comedy but also all Greek and Roman poetry, including theater. Every
syllable of every word in Greek or Latin is either “long” or “short,” and
Graeco-Roman poetry consists of particular patterns of long and short
syllables. A long syllable is approximately as long as two short syllables.
Plautus’ metrical variety—and therefore his musical variety—is
unsurpassed in Roman literature. He uses dozens of different metrical

47
48 Plautus: Curculio

Figure 4.1 In this section of a fresco in the “Tomb of the Diver” in Paestum,
Italy, from approximately 470 bce , a partier (left) plays the auloi, the Greek
analogue to the Roman tibiae, for his erotic companion. Richard Mortel,
2019, CC BY 2.0.

forms, sometimes in longer passages of repeated meter (and thus

repeated melody), sometimes in virtuosic cantica (“songs” or “show-
stoppers”), where the meter changes as often as every line. Only one of
the “countless meters” (numeri innumeri, as described in an ancient
epitaph attributed to Plautus) is spoken rather than sung, the iambic
senarius. He uses different meters to express different emotions,
different kinds of characters, different paces of action. Imagine the
complex leitmotif in Wagner’s operas, or the character-specific melodies
in film scores from Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. The rhythms of
Plautus are on the whole more complex and less familiar than music in
movies or on TV—and, probably, same goes for the tunes.
Plautus tends to structure his plays into “arcs” organized by changes
in music. He doesn’t use “acts” or “scenes”; those are modern terms,
first applied to ancient theater in the Renaissance. The arc usually
consists of rising action in spoken meter (iambic senarius), followed by
falling action in sung meters. The sung parts are either extended
passages of a single meter, or a mixed-meter canticum, or both. There
 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 49

is no set number of arcs and no fixed length for an arc. The rising and
falling parts are not necessarily equal.
The musical structure of Curculio is unusual but not unparalleled for
a Plautine play. (My analysis here assumes that the text of the play isn’t
missing major chunks of what Plautus wrote: see Chapter 9.) Curculio
has four arcs, as shown in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1 The musical structure of Plautus’ Curculio.

Arc Action Music type Lines What’s happening
None (iambic Phaedromus and Palinurus
Rising 1–95
senarii) process to Cappadox’ house
Leaena receives wine from
Canticum 96–157 Phaedromus, who sings to
1
the door
Falling
Repeated section Planesium and Phaedromus’
(trochaic 158–215 encounter
septenarii)
None (iambic Cappadox seeks dream-
Rising senarii) 216–79 interpretation from
2 Palinurus and cook
Curculio enters, fills
Falling Repeated section 280–370
Phaedromus in
None (iambic Curculio persuades Lyco
Rising senarii) 371–461 and Cappadox to give
Planesium to him
Repeated section Monologue of the
False start (trochaic 462–86 Choragus
septenarii)
3 Repeated section Curculio, Lyco, Cappadox
Rising (iambic 487–532 transfer Planesium to
septenarii) Phaedromus’ house
Repeated section Therapontigonus argues
(trochaic with Lyco and Cappadox;
Falling 533–634
septenarii) Planesium pursues Curculio
to ask about the ring
None (iambic Recognition, marriage
Rising 635–78
senarii) arrangement
4 Repeated section
Falling (trochaic 679–729 Punishment of Cappadox
septenarii)
50 Plautus: Curculio

Four arcs is a common setup for Plautus, who has that many also in
Aulularia, Casina, Mercator, Mostellaria, and Pseudolus. What is more
unusual is that Curculio has only a single canticum, in arc 1. All of
Plautus’ plays have at least one canticum, and besides Curculio only
Asinaria and Miles Gloriosus have just one. The third arc is the longest
in the play. The final arc is the shortest, at just 95 lines.
Another noteworthy feature of Curculio is that almost all of the sung
sections after the initial canticum use the exact same meter, trochaic
septenarius. (The exception is a passage in arc 3 that uses the iambic
septenarius, the meter of love and love objects, 487–532.) Trochaic
septenarius is the single most common line type in Plautus, at 41
percent of Plautus’ total lines, more even than the spoken iambic lines
in Plautus’ comedy. Here’s a sample line of English trochaic septenarius
that I just came up with:

— ๰ —๰ — ๰ —๰ — ๰ — — —๰ —
Plautus uses complex meters. Don’t despair: they’re really cool!

In part because of its frequency, trochaic septenarius can convey a lot of

different things to the listener. Chief among its effects are forward
motion in plot or characters, false starts that emphasize important
words, and the endings of plays.
In Curculio specifically, trochaic septenarii predominate—
accounting for 41 percent of the play (297 out of 729 lines), same as
Plautus’ overall average. As a result, they serve as a central structuring
element of the play, the architectural foundation of its music. Once the
canticum in arc 1 is done, trochaic septenarii show the play is really
getting started. When the music cuts out with the last bit of trochaic
septenarii, we know we’ve moved on to the next arc; and when it cuts
back in with another stretch of trochaic septenarii, we know we’ve
reached the turning point of the current arc, and are headed towards
the arc’s end. This technique is not unique to Curculio among Plautine
comedies, but the regularity of it is. Curculio has the simplest musical
structure of any play by Plautus. This is not simply a byproduct of its
length, since some of Plautus’ most musically complex plays are on the
 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 51

shorter side, while some of his simplest (sometimes thought to be

evidence that they were composed early in his career) are among his
longest. In a play whose storyline divides into three mostly distinct
subplots, with most characters involved really only in one or maybe two
of them, the reliable sequence of meters helps bring a sense of unity and
cohesion to the comedy as a whole.

Music and meter in the play’s opening

Arc 1 opens with a spoken section as long as the entirety of arc 4. These
first 95 lines include lots of plot exposition, good to set out clearly in
unaccompanied speech: Phaedromus is after Planesium, but the sex-
trafficker is demanding cash that Phaedromus doesn’t have, so he’s sent his
parasite off to seek a source of funding overseas. Of speaking characters,
only Phaedromus and Palinurus appear in this initial run of spoken verse.
The canticum that follows (96–157), initiated by Leaena in her first
appearance on stage, runs almost as long as the spoken “rise.” It contains
Leaena’s entry monologue; some interchanges between the three about
wine and Planesium; Leaena’s exit to fetch Planesium; and Phaedromus’
song to the bolts on Cappadox’ front door. The trochaic septenarii of arc 1
(158–215) showcase the meeting of Planesium and Phaedromus, and the
arc ends as everyone goes back into their own houses.
Interestingly, arc 1 both begins and ends with an empty stage. Leaena
brings the music with her when she comes out of Cappadox’ house and
the music stops when the stage clears. Shortly before the canticum
begins, Phaedromus draws our attention with his address of the door
(88–9):

C’mon, my dear doors, drink, drink up, and willingly be propitious to me!

๰ ๰๰ ๰ ๰ ๰ — — — ๰—
agite bibite festiuae fores;
๰—๰ —๰ — ๰— — ๰ ๰๰—
potate, fite mi uolentes propitiae.
52 Plautus: Curculio

The long string of short syllables, the alliteration and other repetition of
sounds, and the rhythmically emphatic ending all mark Phaedromus’
words as important, as not-quite-everyday speech. It might also signal
that a more metrically elaborate canticum is just around the corner.
This canticum has never before been fully analyzed in English-language
scholarship, so I’m going to provide a lot of detail.

The sole canticum of Curculio

Leaena enters, tracking down the scent of the wine Phaedromus has
brought for her (96–100), using four different line types in her first five
lines: diphilius, anapestic quaternarius, iambic dipodium with cretic
colon, and iambic quarternarius. You don’t need to worry about what
the specific words indicate, and I won’t list the meter of every single line.
These give a taste of how rhythmically sophisticated and complex
Plautus’ songwriting is.
The canticum can be broken down into three parts: Leaena’s solo
(96–109, Part A); the long segment featuring her, Phaedromus, and
Palinurus (110–46, Part B); and Phaedromus’ song outside the door that
separates him from Planesium (147–57, Part C). But I think that, when
you look at the meter more closely, a finer-grained subdivision into 10
musical units makes more sense, as shown in Table 4.2.
From this schematization, we can make a number of observations
about how Plautus has composed this canticum.
First, there isn’t really a trio to speak of, since Leaena and Palinurus
never have any back and forth. Phaedromus is their intermediary, or
perhaps just the center of the scene’s attention. Second, the choice of
meter fits neatly with what’s going on during the song. Palinurus and
Phaedromus converse in anapests ๰๰—. The parody of religious music
(Leaena’s ode to wine, Phaedromus’ hymn to the door, both to return to
us in Chapter 7) employs cretics —๰—, and Leaena’s begrudging offering
to Venus, an actual deity, comes in iambs ๰—. Interactions between
Leaena and Phaedromus are less regular and rhythmically more
 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 53

Table 4.2 The musical structure of the canticum of Plautus’ Curculio.

Unit Lines What’s going on Predominant meter(s)
1 96–100 Leaena hunts down and None: mixed meters
finds wine
2 101–9 Leaena’s ode to wine Mostly cretics —๰—
3 110–13 Palinurus and Phaedromus None: iambics ๰— and
banter Trochaics —๰ create a
hybrid cretic/anapestic feel
4 114–22 Leaena and Phaedromus Bacchiacs ๰— — and cretics
talk
5 123–4 Palinurus and Phaedromus Anapests ๰๰—
banter
6 125–7 Leaena makes offering to Iambics
Venus
7 128–33 Palinurus and Phaedromus Anapests
banter
8 134–9 Leaena and Phaedromus None: mixed meters
talk; Leaena exits
9 140–6 Palinurus and Phaedromus Anapests
banter
10 147–57 Phaedromus’ hymn to the Mostly cretics
door

jumbled—perhaps a subtle sign of the conflict between Phaedromus and

the head of Leaena’s household, Cappadox. Third, cretics and anapests
dominate the canticum, and other meters that show up often have a
cretic or anapestic feel to them (or elements of both cretics and anapests).
In Plautus, in general, cretics can communicate surprise, jumpiness,
bounce, and farce; anapests, meanwhile, can communicate exuberance,
discoveries, panic, fury, joy, and seduction. In the canticum of Curculio,
in particular, these associations are borne out. Mock-religious speech is
farcical, as is Leaena, so both are good fits for cretics. Meanwhile, anapests
are a good choice for Palinurus and Phaedromus, because one is furious
at staying up late and losing wine to the sex-trafficker’s doorkeeper, while
the other is anxious and horny and desperate.
54 Plautus: Curculio

Let’s dive into the units in a little more detail.

[1/Part A] The diphilii — ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — — — ๰๰ — ๰ ๰ — we hear from
Leaena as she enters (96–7) have a pretty regular, anapest-like feel to
them: boom-ba-dah boom-ba-dah boom boom boom-ba-dah boom-ba-
dah boom. Anapests are the classic meter for when a Greek chorus
comes on stage, with a marching cadence and beat, and Plautus may
pick up on that association here. Even if not, the sense of vigorous
motion in the rhythm helps emphasize Leaena’s hound-dog pursuit of
the wine. These first two lines consist each of two identical units
symmetrically flanking a single central long syllable:

The flower of old wine has been launched at my nostrils. Love for it
draws me out here through the shadows. I want it bad.

— ๰ ๰ ——— — —๰ ๰ — — —
flos ueteris uini meis naribus obiectust:
—๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — — —๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ —
eius amor cupidam me huc prolicit per tenebras.

Her subsequent lines leading up to the ode to wine show similar

symmetry, but it’s not perfect like it is in these first two. After an
anapestic entrance with two diphilii plus an actual line of anapests (98),
two iambic lines allow Leaena to rhythmically shift gears towards
cretics as she prepares to sing her ode.
[2] The ode to wine is mostly made up of cretics, which can
bring a solemn atmosphere to the stage. This ode divides into
two “stanzas” (forgive my anachronism): 101–4 and 105–9. The first
stanza is punctuated with an ithyphallic coda — ๰ — ๰ — — (“I want to
be buried [whenever you, wine, are poured out],” peruelim sepultam,
104). This ending is jokey—Leaena loves wine so much she’s ready
to die on the ground it’s spilled on—and the same ithyphallic rhythm
is used for two more wine punchlines later in the canticum,
when Phaedromus tells Palinurus that Leaena’s wine-drinking is
limited to only a few gallons at a time (100), and when Leaena says it’s
been far too long since she’s had a drink (121a). The second stanza of
the ode to wine is remarkably regular, with twenty cretics in a row, only
 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 55

one (the nineteenth) appearing as anything other than the usual —๰—
rhythm.
[3/Part B] In Palinurus and Phaedromus’ first bit of chatter, iambic
and trochaic lines are combined with a cretic line for a mixed cretic-
anapestic feel, which blends together the two principal forms that have
appeared in Leaena’s solo. Line 112a furnishes the only instance of
catalexis in the play. Catalexis refers to the cutting-off of the final
syllable or beat that’s “supposed” to occur in a line of poetry. It often
conveys closure, and in this scene of Curculio, it marks the end of
Palinurus and Phaedromus’ eavesdropping. The very next line is
Phaedromus saying, “I guess I have to get this old lady’s attention”
(113).
[4] When he does draw Leaena’s attention, Phaedromus addresses
her in bacchiacs (114, 117–18), which have a ๰ — — rhythm that comes
off as mock-solemn. It is almost as if Phaedromus is experiencing a
divine epiphany, as if Leaena is a goddess visiting him down here on
earth. 116–117 stand out in particular, with lots of alliteration on S and
a tricolon in the first line (“[the god of wine] is coming to soothe your
thirst, since you’re sputtering, so thirsty, semi-sleepy,” tibi . . . screanti,
siccae, semisomnae | . . . sitim sedatum). Leaena will soon echo
Phaedromus’ alliteration when Phaedromus greets her with a customary
“hope you’re well!”: “how could I be doing well when I’m parched with
thirst?” (egon salua sim quae siti sicca sum?, 120).
But Leaena quickly persuades Phaedromus to switch from bacchiacs
to cretics, by using cretics of her own (115, 119–21). I think we might
consider that cretics—and the now lost melodies that would have gone
with them—are the motif of Cappadox’ household. Leaena, and
Phaedromus following her, use notably regular cretics, with few
substitutions to the default —๰— pattern. The side chatter between
Palinurus and Phaedromus is, by contrast, more anapest-like: moving
the plot along, rushed interjections and side conversations, anxiety and
excitement and impatience. Or maybe cretics in Curculio are the rhythm
of praise, since they appear in both Leaena’s ode to wine and Phaedromus’
hymn to Cappadox’ door.
56 Plautus: Curculio

[5–6] Palinurus quickly tires of the conversation between

Leaena and Phaedromus, so he tries to move the action along
with anapests (123–4). He prompts Phaedromus to give Leaena the
wine they’ve brought, which, in turn, prompts her offering to Venus
(125–7):

Venus, from my little bit, I’ll give you an itty-bitty little bit, and I’m not
happy about it. ’Cause lovers and drunkards, when they’re trying to get
on your good side, they give you wine, but I don’t often get this kind of
jackpot.

๰ — — —— — ๰ — — ๰ ๰ ๰ — ๰— —
Venus, de paulo paululum hoc tibi dabo haud lubenter.
— ๰ ๰ ๰ — — ๰ ๰ ๰ —— — — — — — —
nam tibi amantes propitiantes uinum dant potantes
— — ๰ — — — ๰ — — — — — ๰— —
omnis, mihi haud saepe euenunt tales hereditates.

Leaena sings in iambic septenarius, the meter of love in Roman comedy,

a fitting choice for an offering to the goddess of love and sex, and a
divergence from this scene’s use of cretics for ritual-esque speeches. The
second line comes with rhyming (amantes, propitiantes, potantes) and
another tricolon (underlined). These features and especially the
abundance of long syllables in Leaena’s song generate a sense of
solemnity, of ritual weight as she intones her offering to her goddess.
On the third line, the enjambment of omnis—how it spills over from the
end of the previous line—underscores the abundance of Venus’ wine in
contrast to Leaena’s.
[7] Palinurus interrupts the mood with more banter in anapests
(128–33), with lots of fast syllables. This is most prominent in the only
direct interchange between Leaena and Palinurus in the whole canticum
(131):

Leaena Whoa!
Palinurus ’Sup? You liking it?
Leaena Totally liking it!
Palinurus Well, I’d totally like to stab you with a cattle-prod.
 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 57

— ๰ ๰ — — ๰๰ ๰ ๰ ๰๰— — ๰ ๰
le . ah! pa . quid est? ecquid lubet? le . lubet! pa . etiam mi quoque
๰ ๰— ๰ ๰๰ ๰ — —
stimulo fodere lubet te.

The word lubet, “like it,” recurs a lot here, with three repetitions, and
another to follow at 136.
[8] When Leaena exits into the house to bring out Planesium (139),
she does so in anapests, again giving a rhythmic drive to her motion on
stage. The exact rhythm of her line is perfect for grabbing attention and
conveying the importance of her exit:

Just make sure I don’t go thirsty and I’ll bring out what you’re in love
with.

— — — — — — ๰๰ ๰ ๰ ๰ ๰ ๰ ๰ — — — — —
tu me curato ne sitiam, ego tibi quod amas huc adducam.

Palinurus and Phaedromus pick up on these anapests in their ensuing

chitchat. Here, as before, Phaedromus seems to take his musical cues
from Leaena.
[9] Right after Leaena’s exit, Phaedromus promises to build a statue
in her honor, “I’ll set up not a golden statue but a wine-y one” (140a):

—๰ ๰ — ๰๰ ๰๰ — ๰ ๰ —
uineam pro aurea statua statuam.

This line, cut down the middle, is a perfect mirror image, two dactyls
—๰๰ followed by two anapests ๰๰—. The anapestic second half is a
doublet of its own in terms of both rhythm and content. It is a rhetorical
device known as figura etymologica, “etymological phrase,” since statua
refers to the statue and statuam to building the statue.When Phaedromus
turns to Palinurus to talk about how lucky he’ll be if he can see
Planesium (141–41a), he stays in the same meter but uses more
spondees —— instead of short anapests ๰๰—, emphasizing the weight
of his emotion.
Lines 143–4 are similarly spondaic, slow, and deliberate—a good
fit here, since Phaedromus is telling Palinurus and the audience a
58 Plautus: Curculio

key plot point, that he’s sent Curculio out for cash. Plot exposition
within song is unusual. Typically, it is spoken clearly in the one non-
sung meter of Roman comedy, like all the love-story explanation at
the beginning of the play. It makes sense to slow down the music
when we’re hearing something important for the first time; and the
music speeds back up right after the plot exposition is done (145–6).
These lines also feature a rhythmic call and response between the
two men:

Phaedromus How about I go to the doors and sing at them?

Palinurus If you want. I don’t prohibit it or encourage it, master,
since I’ve figured out that your character and nature have totally
changed.

— ๰๰ — ๰๰ — —— — — ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰—
ph . quid si adeam ad fores atque occentem? pa . si lubet, nec ueto nec iubeo,
— ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — ——— — ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰—
quando ego te uideo inmutatis moribus esse, ere, atque ingenio.

Phaedromus’ half of the first line gives a jaunty rhythmic model of two
dactyls —๰๰ and two spondees — —, and Palinurus responds with a
close parallel, replacing the first spondee with a dactyl and cutting the
second half of the second dactyl. Then, in a whole line to himself, he
uses the same exact rhythm as he and Phaedromus had in the previous
line. This likely means the melody is the exact same for each line, too.
Take note of all the elisions in this passage, marked with curved lines
under the words: elision is where the final vowel in a word is cut out
when the next word begins with a vowel, and in this dialogue, it shows
how hurried and excited Phaedromus and Palinurus both are.
[10/Part C] Finally, the first eight lines of Phaedromus’ hymn to
the door (147–54) are unusually regular. Each line is the same (four
cretics —๰— apiece), with almost no variations (only a single instance
of ๰๰ substituted for a — at 149 and 152). Each line divides neatly in
two, with a break in the meaning or grammar of the words between the
line’s first two and last two cretics. Other interesting poetic features: the
first two lines (147–8) repeat “door-bolts” twice and “you” in reference
 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 59

to those bolts four times. Line 149 has a lot of alliteration on m sounds
(gerite amanti mihi morem amoenissumi, “be delightful and do what I
desire!”). And in the second half of 153, when Phaedromus becomes
irritated at the bolts because the door’s not opening, he rhymingly calls
them pessuli pessumi (“Worst. Bolts. Ever.”).
Phaedromus’ hymn to the door is important not only to the canticum
and to Curculio but also to the history of Roman literature. It is the
earliest surviving example in Latin of a paraclausithyron, “a song in front
of a locked door.” The paraclausithyron is a song type that originated in
ancient Greek erotic drinking poetry: a young man—infatuated with a
woman who’s giving him the cold shoulder, not letting him in for sex—
gets drunk, goes to her house, and sings (that part is the paraclausithyron
itself). Plautus often writes paraclausithyron-like scenes, but no other
songs as we have here in Curculio. The paraclausithyron scenario
becomes an archetypal and recurring component of later Roman erotic
poetry, especially in the works of Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid.
Phaedromus finishes his part of the song, and Plautus wraps up the
whole canticum, with three lines consisting of more rare metrical forms,
a wilamowitzianus and a cretic colon. This metrical arrangement unifies
the song’s overarching use of anapests and cretics. Doing so helps
provide closure for the canticum, and allows for a rapid-fire threepeat
of tace, “shut up!,” in six short syllables in a row at 156. Another tool for
closure is Cappadox’ door, the very same one that Phaedromus has just
been serenading. The first time it opens during the play, when Leaena
comes out hunting for wine, is the start of the canticum and the play’s
music altogether. The next time it opens, when Leaena comes out again,
this time with Planesium in tow, the canticum stops, physically book-
ended by the door.

Music in the rest of the play

Arc 1 concludes with a longish section of trochaic septenarii (158–215),

the go-to meter for sung sections in Curculio. Trochaic septenarii can
60 Plautus: Curculio

always signal that plot action or character development is picking up

speed, and trochaics here mark the big reveal, Planesium’s entry on
stage. The music in this section underscores the fact that we’re watching
a centerpiece of the comedy’s storyline, the romance (or “romance”)
between her and Phaedromus.
Two more quick notes are in order on poetic effects in arc 1. First, the
anapestic feel of the canticum occasionally returns, as when Planesium,
exiting back into Cappadox’ house, leaves Phaedromus with these
words (213):

If you really love me, buy me, quit asking about it, I’ll make sure you get
your money’s worth.

๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — ๰ ๰ — — — — ๰—
si amas, eme, ne rogites, facito ut pretio peruincas tuo.

Planesium rushes inside to avoid being caught by the sex-trafficker as

he returns from his visit to the shrine next door, and she does so with a
fast-paced line that mimics the marching cadence of anapestic meter.
Second, a little earlier in the scene, Phaedromus expresses his joy at
seeing Planesium with a poetic priamel, a common technique in lyric
poetry, consisting of a list of alternatives that lead up to the item of real
focus (178–80):

Let kings keep their kingdoms to themselves. Let the wealthy have
their wealth, their elected office, their courage, their fights, their battles.
As long as they don’t hate on me, let every person keep for themselves
what’s theirs.

Phaedromus is making an allusion to the sixth-century Greek lyric poet

Sappho—or, at least, Plautus is. One of the most famous surviving
fragments of her poetry opens with the statement, “some say an army of
horses is the best thing upon the black earth, some an army of infantry,
and some a fleet of ships. But I say it’s whatever someone loves” (16.1–
3). This allusion, to probably the most famous erotic poet in Plautus’
(and Phaedromus’) own time, hammers home the love story of this
portion of the play, elevates Phaedromus’ dalliance with an enslaved
 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 61

sex-laborer to the eternal beauty of Sapphic verse, and reminds the

audience how far Phaedromus veers away from the norms of Roman
(toxic) masculinity, with its high valuation of warfare, politics, and
aristocratic wealth generated from enslaved labor in agricultural
concentration camps. It also imports a lyric sentimentality to the music
of the nighttime tryst between Planesium and Phaedromus.
Arc 2 begins with the first appearance of Cappadox (216). He comes
on stage with spoken iambic senarii, as the music stops. This often
happens with blocking characters like the sex-trafficker, because the
audience is more likely to side with somebody who’s singing. Cappadox’
whole scene lacks music (216–79). It is Curculio himself who brings
back the music, performing his grand entrance in trochaic septenarii
(starting at 280). I find cosmic justice in the music of arc 2: Cappadox,
the major obstacle, has no music, whereas Curculio, the character at the
center of the plot, restarts the action at high speed when he arrives in
town, singing up a storm.
Music leaves the stage along with Curculio (370) as we enter the
play’s long third arc (371–634). Once again, the music stops for the
entrance of a blocking character undeserving of the audience’s empathy:
Lyco the banker. Like Cappadox, Lyco is involved in a trade that the
Roman citizen elites found distasteful. To make matters worse, he is,
like Cappadox, involved in the oppressive economics of sex labor and
enslavement that are keeping Planesium unfree. And like Cappadox, he
receives no musical accompaniment. Fittingly, Cappadox joins in on
this music-less scene towards its end (455–61).
The next music to arrive continues the play’s pattern, as the Choragus
(Chapter 7) performs trochaic septenarii. His entry might seem like it’s
a standard usage of this meter to keep things moving, but it’s actually a
false start. The short length of the passage, only 25 lines (462–86), is at
heart a bunch of funny business, a kind of intermission from the plot.
In the longer scene that follows (487–532), the sense of a false start is
confirmed, because the music doesn’t cut out but switches into a meter
that Curculio only uses elsewhere in the canticum of arc 1 for Leaena’s
short offering to Venus (125–7): iambic septenarii, the meter of love
62 Plautus: Curculio

and love objects. This scene shows the successful conclusion of

Curculio’s plot to extract Planesium from Cappadox’ house and into
that of Phaedromus next door. Curculio himself brings the change
of meter, just as he brought music at the opening of arc 2. This scene in
arc 3 has both Cappadox and Lyco sing. Since Curculio has tricked
them, they are no longer blocking characters, so they give in to the
music rather than stop it. The fact that they sing iambic septenarii in
particular demonstrates that they have been conquered by the play’s
erotic subplot.
Once Planesium is safely inside Phaedromus’ house, we finally begin
our falling-action passage of trochaic septenarii (583–634) that will fill
out the rest of arc 3. At 102 lines, it’s the longest stretch of one meter
type in the entire play, spoken or sung, and more than half again as long
as the canticum. The music is introduced this time by the arrival of the
soldier Therapontigonus. This may signal to the audience that, despite
appearances and the expectations of the genre, he’s not going to be
much of a blocking figure. This is Therapontigonus’ time in the limelight:
he careens from an argument with the banker to an argument with the
sex-trafficker to an argument with Curculio to an argument with
Planesium. If trochaic septenarius is the meter of action and resolution,
Therapontigonus is using it to the fullest.
Arc 3 stands out not only for its length but also for its structure. Arcs
1 and 2 begin and end with an empty stage: all characters have gone off
somewhere or not yet entered. (Since Plautus didn’t have a stage curtain
he could bring down and pull back up to mark off units of action, an
empty stage is one way to send a signal to the audience about the play’s
structure; in Curculio, the stage is empty before lines 1, 216, 274, 371,
462, 487, 533, and 590.) The transitions within those arcs between
spoken and sung, between canticum and trochaic septenarius, take
place while characters remain on stage. In arc 3, by contrast, every
internal transition—from spoken to sung trochaic septenarius, from
trochaic septenarius to iambic septenarius and back to trochaic—
happens with an empty stage, largely facilitated by the once-in-a-
lifetime appearance of the Choragus. Even more remarkable is that arc
 Curculio in Performance: Music, Song, and Dance 63

3 doesn’t end with an empty stage, but the transition to unaccompanied

speech occurs in the middle of a scene. As Planesium entreats
Therapontigonus, with increasing urgency, to tell her how he came by
his ring, Therapontigonus transitions into spoken verse—stopping the
music—to tell the tale (635). The switch mid-scene is an unexpected,
powerful sign to the audience that serious business is afoot, and that
we’re about to hear an important backstory.
By the time we reach the end of arc 4’s spoken section (678), the
matter has been resolved: Planesium and Therapontigonus are reunited,
Phaedromus and Planesium engaged, Curculio anticipating lots of free
food in reward for his tricky work. As if taking a cue from the transition
between arcs 3 and 4, the musical transition within arc 4 takes place on
a full stage. Cappadox enters as the music begins (679), signaling the
play’s grand finale. Here the trochaic verse is doing its job as meter of
closure. Cappadox’ introduction of it signifies not only that he is an
obstacle no longer, but also that he’s doomed to the usual comeuppance
sex-traffickers suffer at the ends of several plays by Plautus.

Dance

In closing, let’s take a moment to think about the visual partner of

music, dance. Unfortunately, this piece of the puzzle must remain
mostly a question mark. The evidence for Roman practices of dance
and gesture—both visual evidence from artistic representations and
textual evidence from treatises about performance—is much later than
the time of Plautus. Plautus’ scripts rarely mention dance or indicate
clearly how exactly the actors are embodying their movements. And yet,
dance and gesture are two of the most powerful items in the theatrical
toolbox, and I believe it was a big part of Plautine comedy in
performance.
Dance in Roman comedy seems to have been generally a solo affair,
and included many mimetic gestures (acting out specific actions).
A good example is Curculio’s entry monologue, where he plays the
64 Plautus: Curculio

enslaved errand-runner, rushing on stage in song, possibly pushing

through the audience on his way. He calls out lots of people he has no
time for while he’s on his mission, from magistrates (285–6) to
sleazebags hanging out downtown (296–8). He probably has specific
dance moves as he mentions each of them—imitating or mocking them
in a stylized way. The last group in particular, “those slaves of scoundrels
who play back and forth” (295), might itself refer to a kind of dancing.
Or the “playing” might be homoerotic: men taking turns being top and
bottom. Either way, the line practically begs for Curculio to mime some
dance action as he sings it.
Similarly, when Phaedromus sings to the doors of Cappadox’ house
earlier in the play, he specifically mentions dance. He asks the
door-bolts to turn into “non-Greek dancers” (150). The word I’ve
translated as “non-Greek,” barbarus, comes into English as “barbarian”
and literally means “speaking-a-language-that-sounds-to-Greeks-like-
barbarbarbarbar.” In Plautus, it’s often an inside-joke way of saying
“Roman,” as opposed to Greek. Native Italian traditions of dance seem
to have involved a fair amount of jumping and leaping, which is what
the bolts would need to do to unlock the door for Phaedromus. The
term ludius can mean dancer or actor, so we have here a metatheatrical
reference, as well. At the same time as Phaedromus of the Greek city
Epidaurus asks the bolts to jump like a Roman (or other non-Greek)
dancer, he is also asking them to become Roman actors, just like the
person speaking from behind Phaedromus’ mask.
 5

Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft

Recreating the performance of an ancient drama from the bare remains

of its text is a particular kind of detective work. It starts with several
hundred lines of poetry in Latin (or Ancient Greek) and has to end in a
multimedia extravaganza of song, dance, brightly painted masks,
costumes, set, and energetic stage action. Luckily for us, Plautus was one
of the world’s great wordsmiths, and the words he smiths are key to
unlocking what his plays were like in performance.
The rhythms of his language tell us about his music and, from there,
about his choreography. His choice of stock characters determines
masks and costumes, while the things those characters say help flesh
out the particulars of mask decoration and costume accessories. Plot
and characters both necessitate certain props, while others are directly
mentioned in dialogue or are implied by how characters interact.
Entrances, exits, and the speeches and conversations of characters in
the play communicate staging, blocking, and action.

Masks

All ancient Greek and Roman scripted drama was masked. Actors wore
full-face masks, sort of like the ones in Figure 5.1 (ignore the costumes,
though).
They likely were a little bit larger than normal-sized human heads,
which would help people watching from far off or with bad eyesight.
Amy R. Cohen has shown it’s possible they were made in a special way
that wouldn’t muffle your voice but would instead make it clearer and
make it carry better, sort of like how the wooden sounding box of a
violin or guitar increases the audibility of its strings.
65
66 Plautus: Curculio

Figure 5.1 Masks at a performance of a scene from Plautus’ Poenulus by

members of Compagnia Fondamenta Teatro e Teatri, in Sarsina, Plautus’
hometown. Photo by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, 2019.

The most prominent thing about masks, though, would be how they
were decorated. Paint, fake hair, and other visual elements of a mask
would quickly allow any viewer to identify the gender, age (young or
old), and status (free or enslaved) of the character it portrayed. For
gender, the key component is skin color: red for men, white for women.
(Yes, the Greeks and Romans adhered to the gender binary and the
essentialism of sex and gender.) These colors are not realistic ones. The
Greeks and Romans were not white. Rather, the colors represent elites’
sexist ideology that men should have skin darkened from being outside
in the fields, the Forum, or the battlefield, while women should be pale
from staying home, spinning wool, and making babies—plus maybe
some pale-ifying makeup made out of powdered white lead.
Age would be easiest to tell from a mask’s hair. Hair could be
represented in a variety of styles and colors, but white hair is a clear
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 67

signal of age. Greeks and Romans tended to have curly, unreflective

black hair, so deviations from that norm, such as reddish hair (a feature
associated with enslaved Thracians, for example), could identify a
character as not born locally, and thus as either a non-citizen immigrant
or an enslaved person.
The masks would be shaped and decorated in a wide variety of ways
so that they could be distinguished from each other. With recurring
stock characters like parasite or sex-laborer, masks in Roman comedy
would also have been stereotyped. After seeing a couple plays, someone
would know a character’s type and maybe their personality well before
learning their name. The reliability of stock masks allows for fun gags
based on cheating audience expectations. In Plautus’ Persa, for example,
an enslaved character starts the play by whining about sex and cash like
a citizen lover boy. In our own play, Curculio’s first entrance has him
acting not like the parasite’s mask he wears but like an errand-boy
seruus currens.
Masks are remarkable objects. Really skilled mask-actors, like the
now unknown originals who performed Plautus’ Curculio, can take a
mask’s static depiction of a face and make it come alive. Through body
language, posture, gesture, movement, and head position and angle, the
same mask can communicate a whole range of emotions, from basic to
nuanced. Theater-goers swear that they see a mask change expression.
Ancient masks’ exaggerated physical features would help with this
lifelikeness. Masks of clever characters might even have asymmetrical
features, so that a turn of the actor’s head would change the mask’s
entire look and mood.
Another crucial feature of ancient masks is their giant mouth-holes.
Other than aiding sound transmission, mouth-holes can also direct
audience attention. If one character is speaking, mouth-hole pointed at
the audience, other characters on stage would naturally look at the
speaker, pointing their mouth-holes in that direction. In effect, masks
can act as spotlights, no electricity required. If one character is
eavesdropping or sneaking up on another, the actor can show his
character has no idea what’s happening by never pointing his spotlight,
68 Plautus: Curculio

his mouth-hole, towards the sneaky character. Or she can suddenly

“snap” her mask towards the eavesdropper, showing they’ve been caught
red-handed.
No actual masks used in ancient Graeco-Roman theatrical
productions survive; so, what am I basing all this on? First, ancient art.
Stone and ceramic representations of theater masks survive from all
over the territories of ancient Greece and Rome, and they give a great
sense of facial expressions and hairstyles. Mosaics and wall-paintings of
scenes from Greek drama were popular and have survived in a number
of different archaeological sites, especially Samos, where a whole house
is essentially a fan shrine to the comic playwright Menander. Mentions
of masks appear occasionally in ancient literature, including a couple
times in Plautus, and discussions about masks survive in the Greek
authors Theophrastus and Pollux.
Modern scholarship has pushed the possibilities of masks ever
forward. Classics professors who have staged performances of ancient
drama with masks, such as C. W. Marshall, have contributed experiential
knowledge about how masks work and what they can do. Comparative
studies of ancient theater alongside theories, techniques, and practices
of modern acting have helped us fill in gaps in the historical record with
educated guesses about how ancient actors would have used their
masks. And experimental scholarship—attempts to reconstruct ancient
masks with different materials and methods consistent with ancient
visual evidence as well as the limitations and opportunities of ancient
technology—offer a way for experiential and comparative work to fit
plausibly into the original performance contexts.

Costumes

What about the rest of the actors’ bodies? Like masks, clothes serve as
markers of gender and status. Enslaved characters were dressed
differently from citizens, although enslaved and free members of the
same household may have dressed similarly (so someone enslaved by a
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 69

soldier might have martial accoutrements, and so on). The basic

costuming was as follows. Everyone wore a one-piece coverall, a tunica
(Latin) or chiton (Greek). Women would additionally wear a palla, an
overgarment often translated into English as “mantle,” a word I think
I’ve only ever seen actually used in English when it’s translating the
Latin word palla. Men would wear a cloak called pallium (Latin) or
himation (Greek). Young men, and especially soldiers, would wear
a chlamys, a shorter-length coat good for traveling. Travelers would
wear a distinctive broad-brimmed hat called a petasus. In our play,
Therapontigonus the soldier definitely wears a chlamys (632) and
maybe a petasus, too; Curculio also may wear a petasus, as he makes his
entry, returning to Epidaurus.
Costuming could also provide clues to character types. Think
alluring clothes for a free non-citizen sex-laborer, chlamys for a soldier,
and the like. It seems to be the case in Rome itself that acting troupes
would rent or borrow costumes from the aedile in charge of the festival
or from a choragus (see the end of the next section). Otherwise,
costumes might have been owned by the troupe, to be reused as much
as possible, and tweaked as needed.

Masks and costumes in Curculio

No evidence survives about masks and costumes in Curculio beyond the

text itself. So, the following is based on my educated guesswork and that
of Plautus scholars before me. Masks and costuming in Curculio could
support the play’s key themes. The animal theme, in particular, opens up
lots of creative mask ideas. Curculio, the weevil, could have a long nose
like the proboscis of his namesake, and jaws ready to gnash like
mandibles. Lyco, the wolf, could boast lupine features, perhaps with
prominent canines in the mask’s mouth. Leaena, the wildcat, should have
a leonine mask—and, maybe, given her advanced age, some whiskers.
Planesium might have an animalistic mask, too, given what Palinurus
says to her about her “owl eyes” (191; Chapter 3) when she insults him.
70 Plautus: Curculio

The theme of sickness actual and metaphorical can show up in

masks and costuming both. Cappadox is the obvious one: he complains
about a swollen liver and other characters remark on the discoloration
of his skin, so his mask would be painted an unnatural color and his
clothes would be comically overstuffed. If, as I suspect (see Chapter 8),
the sex-trafficker is feeling better after his second stay in the shrine of
Aesculapius, his re-entry on stage could feature a fresh mask (one that
looks exactly like the earlier one but with the reddish skin typical for
the mask of a healthy man) and normal clothing—or the actor could
just move in a manner that expresses less pain and discomfort.
Phaedromus’ lovesickness, too, can be represented visually. Maybe
his symptoms include paleness, suggesting a mask paler than the usual
man’s red. Such an artistic decision would make Phaedromus stand out
among other men, almost but not quite crossing the boundary line
between the two genders. It would suggest he’s spent too much time
indoors—either at home pining over Planesium or in the sex-trafficker’s
den of sensual pleasure—and has endangered his manliness because of
his erotic obsessions.
The title character, meanwhile, has his fair share of the costuming
limelight. His rowdy running first entrance features a disparaging
comment about “these damn Greeks with their damn cloaks” (288). This
line is funny because it features a low-status (non-citizen?) actor in Rome
playing a character who is literally a Greek in a pallium, a Graecus palliatus,
complaining about Graeci palliati. His mention of their clothing is
metatheatrical (Chapter 6), since the subgenre of comedy that Curculio
belongs to is named comoedia palliata after that exact type of cloak.
Curculio is half in character, half in real life—and he has no time or
patience for any of it. He’s too important to Phaedromus, to the play’s plot,
and definitely to himself to deal with a run-of-the-mill comoedia palliata
scene or scenario. Curculio gives a wink and a nod to the audience here,
revealing a little self-awareness that he’s just a character in a fictional world,
and acknowledging the important role of costuming in shaping that world.
This moment is hilariously meta—and also racist, as can be seen from
Denise McCoskey’s work on Roman anti-Greek invective more generally.
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 71

Curculio, who is supposed to be a Greek himself living in a Greek city,

whines about the Greeks clogging up his city streets, in a way that sounds
very Roman, with a flavor of distaste for immigrants that might remind
you of a xenophobic relative or acquaintance. He is, after all, a character
in a Roman comedy being performed in Rome, where Greeks were
plentiful but often subjected to suspicion and outsider status.
Curculio takes advantage of his knowledge about costuming in a big
way later on, when he disguises himself as “Summanus” right before he
meets up with Lyco the banker (391). He puts on his disguise in a
hurry—literally in the middle of a line—and immediately becomes
unrecognizable as himself. Since Lyco greets him with “hey, one-eye!”
(392), we know the disguise consists of an eyepatch. (Let’s pause briefly
here to note again an unpleasant pathway of Roman humor, making fun
of non-normatively bodied people.) Once more, I think Curculio is
acting outside the comedy as well as within it: he knows that putting on
a distinctive and unusual costume element will automatically qualify
him as a different character, even if all the rest of his gear is the same.
This is how doppelgangers are kept separate in another of Plautus’ plays,
Amphitruo. And Curculio signals his costume-awareness by using a key
word for acting, “I’ll pretend” (391 again). Curculio here is again being
metatheatrical.
Costume accessories take center stage at one point in the play, when
Therapontigonus the soldier faces off against Cappadox the sex-
trafficker. They’re fighting because Therapontigonus is shocked that
Cappadox has already handed Planesium off to somebody else, and
Cappadox is certain he gave her over to Therapontigonus’ authorized
agent (574–80):

Therapontigonus So help me, by my sword and shield [and . . .?] that

help me in battle—if I don’t get the girl back, I’ll turn you into
something the ants can carry away in little bits.
Cappadox Well, so help me—by my tweezers, comb, mirror, curling-
iron, clippers, and wipe-down cloth, I don’t care about your fancy
words and your big damn threats any more than the slave woman
who cleans my toilet.
72 Plautus: Curculio

Therapontigonus makes his oath via a list of the standard props of a

soldier character (though something’s lost from 574, probably further
recitation of his military gear).
Many read Cappadox’ reply as an inversion of the soldier’s kit—
cosmetic rather than martial, domestic rather than external to home
and city, and, most importantly from a patriarchal Roman perspective,
effeminate rather than hypermasculine. That assumes Cappadox has
those things for his own personal use. To me, it makes more sense
to think of them as tools of his trade, as the essential gear of a sex-
trafficker. In that case, he won’t be using them on himself, but on his
wares, the humans he enslaves as sex-laborers, to enhance their physical
allure and therefore his profits. From this perspective, Cappadox is
going toe to toe with Therapontigonus, matching his gear with the
soldier’s.
Something masks and costumes together would make clear is just
how many different stock types are in Curculio. The ten different masks,
each distinct from the next, would bring Epidaurus to life on the stage,
giving it a feel of an actual town really populated by all types of people.
Most would be wearing clothes typical of their gender and status. But
Therapontigonus would be in military get-up, the more exaggerated
and outrageous, the better. Cappadox would probably have more
“exotic” costuming to represent his immigrant background—for a
Roman audience, this might mean a pointy Phrygian cap, since that’s an
identifiable, stereotyped piece of garb associated with Asia Minor
(modern-day Turkey/Anatolia, where both Phrygia and Cappadox’
namesake land of Cappadocia were located).
A reason to think that Curculio is a comedy where the actors go all
out for their costuming is the appearance of the Choragus (Chapter 7).
He is literally supposed to be the guy that the theater troupe is renting
or borrowing their costumes from. And he comes on saying he’s worried
Curculio won’t return them (464). The Choragus is the bridge between
the audience’s world and the fictional world of Plautus’ comedy—or
maybe I should say he’s the enchanted wardrobe that is a gateway not to
Narnia but to Plautinopolis. If we haven’t already been paying close
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 73

attention to the actors’ wardrobe up to now, we sure will be for the rest
of the play.

Props

Theatrical props—stage properties—can perform a variety of functions,

with three key categories identified by Robert Ketterer. First is labeling.
A prop can tell us who a character is. Someone walking with a cane is
an old person, and someone carrying a sword is a soldier. In Curculio,
Therapontigonus the soldier would definitely have a sword, and Lyco
the banker might have a prominent bag of cash or some scales to weigh
payments.
The second category is the mechanical function of props. These
items drive the plot forward. The sleeping potion in Romeo and Juliet
fulfills this function, since it both foreshadows and facilitates the tragic
demise of the title characters. The most important prop with a
mechanical function in Curculio is Therapontigonus’ ring, which has a
pivotal role in Curculio’s deception scheme, since it enables him to forge
documents to extricate Planesium from Cappadox’ household, and is
the crucial token for the recognition scene. When Planesium sees it and
learns that it’s the soldier’s, she realizes that he’s her long-lost brother.
The third major function that props can take on in drama is
symbolic. Such props communicate on a deeper level something about
the characterization of the people in the play, or the play’s mood, or the
significance of the play’s plot and themes. For example, during the
procession at the beginning of Curculio, Phaedromus carries a candle.
(Side note: the fact that he’s carrying a light source tells the audience
that it’s nighttime, an instance of labeling.) Palinurus makes fun of him
for carrying his own light: “you’re your own slave boy, you’re all dressed
up and yet you’re shining your own candle” (9). These lines suggest that
the sight of a citizen man carrying his own lighting would seem
incongruous. So, Phaedromus’ prop symbolizes how out of sorts he is
because of his infatuation with Planesium. Erotic desire has made him
74 Plautus: Curculio

forget his status—or maybe we should even take the candle to

characterize him as enslaved to love.

Stage properties in Curculio

Let’s do a comprehensive analysis of props in Curculio. To begin with,
here’s an essential prop list:

candle (9)
ritual offerings for Venus (“breakfast”), maybe barley-cake (72)
wine jug (75)
water jug (60)
chair (311)
another water jug (312)
Therapontigonus’ ring (first mentioned at 346)
tablets sealed with wax bearing the symbol on Therapontigonus’
ring (347, 369, 412, 549, 551)
moneybag, supposedly containing 30 minae (a huge amount)
sword (567, 574, 632)
Planesium’s ring (first mentioned at 653)

This list omits costume elements, some of which are important (for
example, Curculio’s eyepatch disguise), as well as props that aren’t
explicitly mentioned by the text but are probable or possible for a comic
presentation of the play. A lot of the props are connected to each other
in some way, especially through a series of exchanges.
We’ve already covered the candle that Phaedromus carries in the
play’s first scene, with its labeling and symbolic functions. It could also
help with “spotlighting,” drawing attention to whatever is the focal point
on stage at any given moment, and it’s a gift a poor Roman citizen client
would give his wealthy Roman citizen patron, so it doubly underscores
Phaedromus’ surrender of status. Palinurus carries the wine jug, and
someone from the procession (2) of enslaved attendants who follow
Phaedromus probably carries the offerings to Venus, goddess of love
and sex.
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 75

The wine jug is a double of the offerings, because Phaedromus

initially sprinkles some of the wine onto Cappadox’ door as if making a
ritual libation (88–9), and because Phaedromus gives the jug to Leaena
as a propitiatory offering, a gift to make her favorably inclined toward
him as if she’s a benevolent deity (122). While Phaedromus is offering a
libation to the door, Palinurus mocks him by offering the door olives,
meat, and capers (90); it could be funny if Palinurus had some snacks
on hand that he just randomly pulled out. The gift of wine also initiates
the first exchange of the play: wine in exchange for Planesium, albeit on
a temporary basis. (Planesium, it turns out, is involved in a lot of these
exchanges as an object, a troubling truth about the treatment of
trafficked persons.) It also marks Leaena’s shift from doorkeeper loyal
to Cappadox to ally of Phaedromus. Leaena goes on to offer some of the
wine to Venus in an actual libation (125–7), thus confirming the
connection between the wine jug and the earlier “breakfast” for Venus.
Leaena returns to the stage with a jug of her own (160), with water to
keep the door from creaking when she brings Planesium out—never
mind that she’s already opened and closed it twice for her own two
entrances. The water, which she applies like medicine (161), can be seen
as yet another libation. Taken together, the candle and the two vessels
function as parodic versions of actual items that would be used in a
religious ritual, a torch and a patera (a special kind of vase).
The next major props pop up in Curculio’s first scene, where they are
brought to help him recover from his running entrance. The chair
marks Curculio as the center of the scene. Everyone else flutters around
him like clients around a patron, a callback to Phaedromus as client
with a candle in the play’s early lines (another example of “Saturnalian
inversion,” Chapter 1). The water jug, meanwhile, connects this scene
with Leaena. It’s even possible that the same actor would have played
both Leaena and Curculio, and if so, it could be funny for the actor as
Curculio to be brought water from the same container that he, as
Leaena, had previously brought on stage.
The real star of the props list is revealed for the first time at the end
of this scene: the ring Curculio stole from the soldier (360). Since the
76 Plautus: Curculio

design on the ring is so central to the recognition scene at the end of the
play, Curculio probably has an oversized, even giant version of it to
show off. That will help communicate to the audience how important
the ring will be to what happens later. After all, the ring is the thing that
ties together the three subplots of Curculio: it’s stolen while Curculio is
on an errand in support of Phaedromus’ erotic entanglement, it’s the
tool that makes Curculio’s deception feasible, and it’s the recognition
token that reunites Planesium and Therapontigonus.
The wax on the tablets Curculio forges calls back to the wax of the
candle Phaedromus carried in his first appearance. Curculio tells
Phaedromus he will have to write the forgeries based on Curculio’s
instructions. On the one hand, this probably means that Curculio
himself is illiterate, a common experience for non-elites in ancient
Rome. On the other hand, it puts Phaedromus into the (Saturnalian
inversion-style) position of Curculio’s amanuensis (“by-hand person”),
an enslaved scribe who would write out what an elite Roman dictated,
since elites tended not to do much of their formal writing in their own
hand.
Therapontigonus’ sword not only labels him as a soldier but also
symbolizes his theatrical impotence. He brandishes and boasts about it
again and again (567, 574, 632), and it features prominently in the design
on his ring (“a man with a shield is cutting an elephant in half with his
sword,” 424). But, ultimately, despite being the only character with a
weapon, he can’t force anybody to do what he wants. Lyco brushes him
off. Cappadox matches his sword with cosmetics equipment. Phaedromus
legally outmaneuvers him, then takes over control of the scene to make
sure Therapontigonus gets his money back from the sex-trafficker.
The money itself closes out the play. We see an onstage transfer, from
Cappadox to Therapontigonus, in the second-to-last line of Curculio
(727). Earlier, in an argument with Curculio, the soldier has explicitly
equated the money with Planesium: “give me back the cash or the girl”
(612). Therapontigonus turns out to be unsentimental about Planesium,
until he discovers she’s his sister: he’s fine, so long as he receives a refund.
His cold, calculating approach to Curculio lays bare the dehumanizing
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 77

series of exchanges in which he is willingly—and Planesium

unwillingly—involved.
The money, the tablets, and the soldier’s ring are the most structurally
significant props in Curculio as a whole. In fact, they represent the play’s
three subplots in reverse. The ring shows up first, and represents the
recognition plot at the end of the play. The tablets are the physical
instantiation of the play’s second storyline, the deception. And the
money, as we have seen, is equivalent to Planesium as sex object, the
motivation for the erotic subplot at the beginning of the play. Each prop
also connects thematically to its paired subplot. The ring was stolen by
Curculio, just like Planesium was kidnapped from her family long ago.
The tablets are forged, just like Curculio is disguised—a fake for a fake.
The money issues from Cappadox’ house into the possession of the
citizen men, just as Planesium does. Finally, Planesium’s and
Therapontigonus’ rings are like theatrical magnets, pulling the two of
them together for their inevitable recognition and reunion.
The centrality of the ring in Curculio can be seen in its connections
to other props. Every key prop in the rest of the play links back to the
ring. The tablets are sealed with an impression of the ring’s design. The
design on the ring is what guarantees Lyco’s delivery of the moneybag.
The soldier’s sword is itself depicted on the ring. And Planesium’s ring
is its duplicate. Therapontigonus’ ring also serves as the mechanism for
the plays’ most important exchanges. The ring allows Curculio to forge
the tablets, which are how Lyco knows to give the money to Cappadox,
who hands Planesium over to Curculio.
One last note on the ring of Therapontigonus. Curculio shows it off
in his first scene, but afterwards he must take it off. Otherwise, he
couldn’t trick Lyco and Cappadox into thinking he’s the soldier’s agent,
since said agent is supposed to have tablets sealed by the ring, not the
ring itself. To that end, the tablets likely have a visible, oversized
impression of the soldier’s ring on them. It isn’t strictly necessary for the
play to work, but the visuals will be a useful (and, given the absurdity of
the seal, comic) way to underscore the description in the dialogue.
Curculio will subsequently put the ring back on while he is off stage,
78 Plautus: Curculio

allowing for Planesium to see it (595). The size of the ring will provide
visual reinforcement of Curculio’s jokey dismissal of Planesium when
she asks him about it: “what, like I’ve got your mom and dad hidden
away under the gemstone?” (606). The ring is also a three-in-one
package of prop functions. When we first see it on Curculio, it’s
mechanical, making the deception plot possible. When we learn it
belongs to Therapontigonus, the ridiculous image labels him as a
blowhard soldier. At play’s end, the ring is not only mechanical—
facilitating the recognition between Planesium and Therapontigonus—
but also symbolic of new family bonds between former rivals
Phaedromus and Therapontigonus.
Planesium possesses a copy of Therapontigonus’ ring, but I don’t
think she wears it when we first see her. She definitely doesn’t wear it all
the time in her life generally—otherwise, presumably, Therapontigonus
would have seen it when he was picking her out for purchase to begin
with—and often the recognition tokens of a uirgo intacta like Planesium
are hidden away in a chest or casket. In the play itself, she definitely has
it on her at 653, but the fact that it’s not been mentioned before then
suggests she didn’t have it in the earlier scenes. After all, since it would
have to be big enough for the image to be legible to the audience, her
wearing it would distract from the action of earlier scenes and would
take away some of the recognition scene’s dramatic power.

Curculio, a comedy of exchanges

Let’s take a look at some diagrams of the exchanges in this play. First,
here’s how Therapontigonus planned for things to go, as can be seen in
Figure 5.2.
Therapontigonus lodged money with Lyco, who was to release it
when someone came to him bearing tablets with the soldier’s seal. The
money, once released, would go to Cappadox, who would then transfer
Planesium to the seal-bearer, who would bring her back to
Therapontigonus. This would complete what Robert Ketterer has called
the play’s “circuit of exchange.”
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 79

Figure 5.2 The “circuit of exchange” of Plautus’ Curculio, as originally

planned by Therapontigonus. Illustrator, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad.

Figure 5.3 The “circuit of exchange” of Plautus’ Curculio, if Therapontigonus

were the ultimate object of the deception plot. Illustrator, T. H. M. Gellar-
Goad.

Curculio’s tricksy intervention short-circuits the planned exchanges.

A hypothetical, alternate-universe version of Curculio would make
Therapontigonus the ultimate object of Curculio’s deception scheme. In
this version, he’d never recover his money, and the sex-trafficker would
simply receive payment for Planesium and wouldn’t end up in any
trouble, as illustrated in Figure 5.3.
In this scenario, Therapontigonus loses two things (money and ring)
and receives nothing in return, while Phaedromus obtains Planesium
(and Curculio the ring) without losing or spending anything. Cappadox
receives money in exchange for Planesium. The balance in the theatrical
economy has shifted towards the right side of the diagram, and the
circuit of exchange is open rather than closed.
Instead, Plautus has chosen to incorporate Therapontigonus into
the social network of Planesium and Phaedromus, and thus he has
chosen Cappadox rather than the soldier to be the dupe of the play.
80 Plautus: Curculio

Figure 5.4 The “circuit of exchange” of Plautus’ Curculio, as it actually

happens. Illustrator, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad.

Here’s the commerce map of the play as it actually transpires, shown in

Figure 5.4.
All the economic resources flow away from Cappadox, and
everybody else breaks even or gains something for free. Cappadox loses
Planesium, has to give Lyco back the money he received from him, and
has to pay the soldier back, too. Curculio will probably end up returning
the stolen ring to Therapontigonus, but he’s pretty confident he’ll secure
lots of free meals out of the whole situation anyway (659–65, 675).
Phaedromus takes Planesium from Cappadox, but then by advocating
for Planesium on the matter of the ring, he facilitates the recognition
between her and Therapontigonus, and restores her to him as his sister.
Therapontigonus reciprocates by approving of her marriage to
Phaedromus, and, in so doing, he transfers her back to Phaedromus’
household. Therapontigonus technically “breaks even” in the circuit of
exchange, but he actually does better than that, since a byproduct of all
the circulation is reunification of his family plus a marriage alliance
with Phaedromus’ household.

Staging

Just as the text tells us what props show up in Curculio and how they’re
used, so also what the characters say informs what the actors must have
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 81

done on stage. At the simplest level, when characters use a demonstrative

pronoun such as “this” or “that,” they are likely also physically pointing
at something close to them (this, hoc) or farther away (that, istud/illud).
Similarly, the entrances and exits of characters give a sense of blocking,
of who stands where during each scene. It is a standard convention of
Roman comedy that one side entrance of the stage leads to the Forum
and the other leads out of town, either to the port (as in Curculio) or the
countryside. The script indicates that Phaedromus’ house is next to a
shrine of Aesculapius that is, in turn, next to Cappadox’ house, which
itself has an altar to Venus out front (14, 33, 71). We can visualize the
stage layout as shown in Figure 5.5.
Let’s look at how a sequence from Curculio might be staged.
Specifically, I’ll start from the scene where Lyco the banker and
Therapontigonus the soldier argue (533), through to the finale, with
closer analysis of the blocking in the recognition scene between
Planesium and Therapontigonus. Here’s a rough sketch of how character
entrances and exits take place in this sequence, as shown in Figure 5.6.
We start with an empty stage. Therapontigonus and Lyco the banker
enter in the middle of a dispute (533, #1). They’re coming from the
Forum, the business center of the city, where bankers mostly would

Figure 5.5 The stage layout of Plautus’ Curculio. Illustrator, T. H. M. Gellar-

Goad.
82 Plautus: Curculio

Figure 5.6 A diagram of character movement of the end of Plautus’ Curculio

(lines 533–729). Illustrator, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad.

be—indeed, Curculio locates bankers there during his rant against

them in the previous scene (507). After Therapontigonus and Lyco have
argued, Lyco leaves, presumably back to the Forum (554, #2). This leaves
Therapontigonus at a loss, lingering on stage, with no idea where he
should go next (555–6). He is given some guidance when Cappadox the
sex-trafficker emerges from the onstage shrine to Aesculapius (557, #3).
I know Cappadox is coming on stage by this route because he’d
previously told us he’d go into the shrine to offer a thanksgiving sacrifice
after successfully concluding—or so he thought—the sale of Planesium
(527). Cappadox says he’s headed to find Lyco (558–60), so, again,
presumably towards the Forum. But, Therapontigonus, seeing
Cappadox, goes up to him to start another fight (560, #4). After they’ve
had their argument, Cappadox heads out to find Lyco (588, #5). This
once more leaves Therapontigonus at a loss, lingering on stage.
Curculio then enters from Phaedromus’ house to complain about
Planesium (591, #6). Next Planesium enters, dragging Phaedromus
behind her, hot on Curculio’s tail (599, #7). Phaedromus catches up to
Curculio and physically grabs hold of him (601). Shortly thereafter,
Therapontigonus finally notices the commotion going on one door
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 83

over from him, spots Curculio, goes up to him, and starts another
altercation (610, #8). Phaedromus joins in, and the three argue, including
some physical activity related to the formalities of legal procedure
(621–3) and a couple of punches thrown (624–7).
Planesium intervenes in the totally derailed conversation to refocus
the men (628) and ups the stakes of the scene by dropping to her knees
and clasping Therapontigonus’, in a traditional gesture of supplication,
the most desperate of social customs (630). Therapontigonus pulls a
typical blowhard-soldier move and brandishes his military gear (632),
but subsequently tells Planesium to “stand up” (635) so he can tell her
the backstory of his ring. After hearing what he has to say, Planesium
tries to embrace him as her own sibling (641), but he pushes her away
out of suspicion. Once Planesium has given her own backstory, though,
Therapontigonus finally does embrace her as his own sibling (657),
allowing her to embrace him back with the exact same words she’d said
before (658). The verbatim repetition does a nice job of book-ending
the story of Planesium’s kidnapping.
After this climactic moment, the play is on a downhill path to the
conclusion. Therapontigonus and Phaedromus likely clasp hands or
otherwise physically mark their agreement to a wedding between
Planesium and Phaedromus (675), and the four characters may be
embracing in celebration when Therapontigonus notices the approach
of Cappadox (676/678, #9). The sex-trafficker is coming from an
encounter with Lyco in the forum with other bankers present (679–85).
Cappadox is headed towards his house (685), but Therapontigonus and
Curculio interrupt him (lines 685–6) and draw him over to them for
the arguments and abuse he’ll suffer through until play’s end.
Again and again, I have appealed to the text as guide for stage action.
Plautus includes in his dialogue almost all the stage direction one would
need, either explicitly or by implication. He wasn’t doing this for us,
obviously, but rather for his actors—some were probably illiterate, so
would have had to memorize the script by ear, and couldn’t have read
blocking instructions slipped between lines of speech. What they
learned had to contain most of the cues they would need for what to do
84 Plautus: Curculio

in performance (and in reperformance, without Plautus around to

direct). For example, the interactions between Palinurus and
Phaedromus in the opening scene of Curculio give the actors (and us)
guidance for how to stage the scene. Palinurus’ opening words (1–2)
indicate a scene with not just two speaking characters but a whole
“entourage” (1) following Phaedromus, who himself is in some sort of
outrageous outfit (2). Phaedromus has to be carrying a candle (9). The
repeated use of the pointing-word “this” (14, 15) suggests gestural
action, with Phaedromus pointing pointedly at the two stage buildings
he’s telling Palinurus about (so also with the “here”s, 33 and elsewhere
throughout the scene).
When Phaedromus greets the door and Palinurus makes fun of him
for doing so (16–18), Phaedromus may give the door a familiar
salutation traditionally used between humans, with Palinurus parodying
Phaedromus’ gestures. The testicle pun (30–2) practically begs for some
naughty miming to reinforce the double entendre. Likewise, when
Palinurus asks Phaedromus whether Planesium is still a virgin with the
agricultural euphemism, “is she already carrying the yoke?” (50), he
probably mimes something sexual, in line with the metaphor of ox-
plowing implied by “yoke.” Phaedromus is probably trying to act like his
nighttime erotic escapades are totally normal, while Palinurus is
overacting, to draw attention to what he sees as violations of his
traditionalist moral sensibilities.
At 75, the physical action picks up, as Phaedromus says to Palinurus,
“hey, slaveboy, gimme the wineskin”—Palinurus has been carrying a
wineskin all along. Their subsequent argument over the wineskin (82–
7) probably involves lots of brandishing and ogling of it. Thereafter
(88–94), the text tells us that Phaedromus adopts the words (and the
actions) of a person making a ritual offering, including pouring a
libation of wine upon the threshold of Cappadox’ door (92), with
Palinurus again mocking and parodying Phaedromus’ behavior. As
the scene ends, they extinguish the candle and retreat, to make room
for the grand entrance of Leaena: “shut up, let’s conceal the light and
our voices” (95).
 Curculio in Performance: Stagecraft 85

We’ve spent a lot of time by now within the play-world of Curculio. But
there’s a whole world outside the play, too, a world inhabited by
theatergoers, ancient and modern—and Curculio knows it. Chapters 6
and 7 examine how Plautus’ metatheater brings spectators into the play
and the play out into real life. Chapter 8 makes connections between the
play and the historical lives of the inhabitants of ancient Rome.
86
 6

Play Inside and Outside the Play:

Curculio and Metatheater

Sometimes the people in the movie or show or play don’t play by the
rules. Sometimes they acknowledge that they’re fictional characters.
They turn right towards you and talk directly to you. They try to use
their awareness of being in a fiction to reshape the story to their
advantage. When this happens, the invisible barrier between you and
what you’re watching—the transparent “fourth wall” you’ve been
viewing through—is broken. You can no longer pretend like you are an
unseen observer, eavesdropping on their lives.
This phenomenon is a classic example of metatheater, the topic of
this chapter. Metatheater is when what you’re watching goes meta. It’s
theater about theater. Plautus wrote long before the advent of film, so he
didn’t have a fourth wall to break—but he is one of the most skilled
and exuberant users of metatheater. In this chapter, I present an
overview of four basic types of metatheater, followed by a survey of
minor metatheatrical moments in Curculio and then, in chapter 7, a
close look at the metatheatrical magnum opus at the center of the play,
the Choragus.

Type 1 metatheater in my typology is when there’s a play within a play,

or a TV show within a TV show. An obvious example of this is
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the title character puts on a literal play,
with actors and everything, to try to trick his uncle into showing signs
of a guilty conscience. In Plautus, the play-within-a-play routine is most
common when a character acts as another character, often in disguise.
In Curculio specifically, we watch Curculio give a virtuoso performance
as “Summanus,” complete with eyepatch disguise. He fools both Lyco

87
88 Plautus: Curculio

the banker and Cappadox the sex-trafficker with ease. He possibly

bamboozles even Therapontigonus the soldier: Therapontigonus has
already met Curculio (in the dice-and-drinking backstory Curculio
describes at 337–63), and so the soldier knows Curculio to be a freeborn
hanger-on, but Therapontigonus suggests near the end of the play that
he thinks Curculio (who is maybe still wearing the eyepatch) is an
enslaved person (623). This might be a sign that the soldier is confused
by the parasite’s disguise.
Type 2 metatheater is when a play or movie is about the craft of
playwrighting or moviemaking. So, for instance, the ancient Greek
comedian Aristophanes’ play Frogs is a drama with a plot centered
on the question of whether Aeschylus or Euripides (both tragedians)
was the better dramatist. Plautus’ later comedic colleague Terence
likes to use the prologues of his plays to express opinions on issues
of theatrical style, adaptation techniques, and controversies in the
world of acting and producing. The most famous instance of Type 2
metatheater in Plautus is probably this one-liner from the enslaved
trickster Chrysalus of Bacchides: “even Epidicus—a play I love as much
as I love myself—I never want not to watch it so much as when Pellio is
starring in it” (214–15). This low blow to Pellio’s acting ability has a
character in one Plautine play aware of the existence of another Plautine
play!
Type 3 metatheater is when characters acknowledge that they’re
in a play or TV show or movie. This can come in the form of looking
directly at the camera or audience and addressing the viewers. Type 3
metatheater can also show up in dialogue. For instance, a couple of
times in Plautus’ Pseudolus (387–8, 720–1), one character says to
another something like, “I’ll fill you in later, I’m not gonna repeat myself,
the audience has already heard, plays are long enough already.” In
Curculio, Planesium asks Curculio to tell her where his ring came from,
the one he stole from the soldier. We already know this, Phaedromus
does as well, but Planesium hasn’t heard it yet. When Phaedromus
presses Curculio to tell her, Curculio replies, “I told you already where I
 Curculio and Metatheater 89

got this from. How many times do I have to tell you?” (608–9). This bit
of irritation nods at how Curculio here is repeating the important plot
point, for the audience’s benefit as much as for Planesium’s.
Finally, Type 4 metatheater is when a character acts like a producer,
director, or playwright. In contrast to Type 1, Type 4 does not actually
involve a play within a play. Instead, a character will behave this way
metaphorically, by instructing other characters on how they should act
or stage-managing them, or by describing a clever scheme in terms of
plots, storylines, or fictions. In Pseudolus, the title character says he’ll
behave like a playwright (poeta) and invent the cash he needs. And a bit
later he directs a sidekick on what to perform during an upcoming
scene with his arch-nemesis.
The bulk of metatheater in Curculio, besides the Choragus, is Type 3
and Type 4 metatheater, as we’ll see in a few moments. The Choragus
himself blends all four types. Most clear is Type 3, in his direct address
of the audience. His mention of the mechanics of performance
represents Type 2. Meanwhile, his tour through the Forum in search of
comedic low-lifes combines Type 1 (his monologue is kind of like a
comedy within a comedy) with Type 4: he is a stage official, after all, and
is directing the audience along the path of his tour.

Type 1 metatheater in Curculio

The first kind of metatheater, the play within a play, doesn’t appear in
full in Curculio. There’s a vague gesture at it in the language Cappadox
uses when seeking an interpretation of his dream: “I’ll tell you the story”
(246, echoed by the Cook at 256). Perhaps here we could imagine that
Cappadox is giving the setup for a small-scale drama of some sort. But
the play doesn’t dwell on Cappadox’ dream, so it doesn’t really go
anywhere.
Clearer is Curculio’s run in disguise in arc 3 of the play. He signals to
us that he’s putting on a show when he first sees Lyco, with the words,
90 Plautus: Curculio

“I’ll pretend like I don’t know the guy” (391). In a sense, all scenes in
which Curculio is tricking people under the pseudonym Summanus
become plays within the play. Lyco, Cappadox, and Therapontigonus
are the spectators, and their failure to perceive that they’re watching a
performance means they easily fall prey to Curculio’s schemes.
Perhaps the most interesting bit of Type 1 metatheater in Curculio
comes towards the end of the play, in Planesium’s story of being
kidnapped as a child. Her backstory involves theater (643–50):

She [Planesium’s nurse] had taken me to the Dionysia to watch a

show. After we’d gotten there, just as she’d set me down, a whirlwind
stirs up, it knocks over the whole theater, I get real scared. Then
somebody snatches me up—I’m terrified and afraid, I’m neither living
nor dead.

Planesium was kidnapped while watching (spectatum) a show

(spectacla) during the festival in honor of Dionysus. Dionysus is the
Greek god not only of wine but also of theater—Bacchus is another
Greek name for him, the Roman name is actually Liber—and the
Dionysia festival in ancient Athens involved performance competitions
of drama. So, the spectacle at which Planesium met with misfortune
was specifically a theatrical performance.
Moreover, the Dionysia is part of one of the archetypal plots of the
Greek genre of New Comedy that Plautus adapts. A disturbingly
commonplace backstory to these comedies is that the young woman
protagonist was raped, and much of the plot surrounds the identification
of the rapist and the resolution of the crisis precipitated by the sexual
assault. The standard circumstance for the rape? While the young
woman was returning home from a religious festival, often specifically
the Dionysia (as in, e.g., Plautus Cistellaria 156–9). The mention of the
Dionysia receives only a single line in Curculio, but it sets up the
potential for a mise-en-abîme (mirror-reflecting-mirror) situation. It
pushes the audience to think about festivals as sites for theater, sites
about theater, and sites within the fictional worlds of theater. It’s Dionysia
all the way down.
 Curculio and Metatheater 91

Type 2 metatheater in Curculio

One way that comedy in particular can import the literary dimensions
of theater into its own theatrical world is through paratragedy.
Paratragedy is parody of tragedy. It’s when a comedy makes fun of
tragedy by doing an exaggerated or lowbrow version. It can take
place with a great deal of specificity—Aristophanes’ Women at the
Thesmophoria parodies Euripides’ Andromeda, Helen, Palamedes, and
Telephus—or it can come in the form of generic riffs on tragic style,
tragic situations, and tragic stereotypes.
It is in paratragedy that I see the main piece of Type 2 metatheater in
Curculio, and it involves the title character. Curculio’s tale of his
encounter with Therapontigonus (335–63) reads to me like parody of
tragic messenger speeches. Your typical Greek tragedy has a momentous
turn of events take place during the play—but off stage. The audience
learns what’s happened only from a messenger, usually a bit character,
who describes the events in detail, often gory. So it is with the death of
Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae, Heracles’/Hercules’ murder of his wife
and children in Euripides’ Heracles, and Heracles’ own death in
Sophocles’ Women of Trachis. The messenger speech is a pivotal moment
in the tragedy, the signal of the story’s tragic turn.
Curculio’s arrival and story are likewise pivotal, although they set up
a comic deception rather than wrapping up a tragic crisis. His speech
begins with heightened emotion: before he even makes it to the main
thing, Phaedromus interrupts to say, “you’re destroying me with your
words!” (335), and Curculio presents himself as feeling “all doom and
gloom” (336). Curculio spins a long yarn, with a vivid narrative including
direct quotations of conversations he had (342–8, 351–3). Curculio is
really playing up the suspense throughout his speech, and once
Phaedromus interrupts him to try to move the story along (357),
Curculio seems to draw it out even longer.
The paratragedy here could have appeared in the original Greek
comedy Plautus has adapted into Curculio, if indeed an original existed.
It’s also possible that this scene is new in Plautus and plays off Roman
92 Plautus: Curculio

tragedy rather than Greek. Either way, the emotion and staging and
tension would, I think, have been obvious enough that an audience
would pick up on it as being parodic—just like you might be able to tell
when a TV sitcom is making a reference to a famous movie or
something, even if you’re not familiar with the source for the reference.
And we should keep in mind that, even though Curculio’s speech takes
place in a comedy, the tension and suspense is real for the audience.
Curculio’s tale could very well have ended tragically for Phaedromus,
with no money and no help and no options from Curculio upon his
return to town. We wouldn’t in that case be dealing with a tragedy, but
Curculio’s deception plot would have instantly become an order of
magnitude harder.

Type 3 metatheater in Curculio

Plautus really likes his characters to know that they’re characters. A

couple moments in Curculio feature somebody explicitly or implicitly
acknowledging that they’re not real but in a play. When Phaedromus
tells Palinurus he’s making an offering to Venus, and Palinurus
deliberately misunderstands him as sacrificing himself to Venus,
Phaedromus replies, “myself, you, and all these people” (74). As he says,
“these people,” Phaedromus probably points to the audience, at once
breaking the illusion that the spectators are flies on the wall and
drawing the viewers themselves into the world of the play. Similarly,
when Therapontigonus hits Curculio during their legal argument near
play’s end, Curculio calls out for the help of his fellow citizens (626).
This appeal is directed straight out into the crowd; we, the spectators,
become citizens of Curculio’s Epidaurus, or he of our Rome.
A spectator with an ear for metatheater can detect subtle
metatheatrical winks and nods elsewhere in the play. So, for instance,
since the action of Plautine comedy almost always takes place within
a single day (Curculio is unusual, as I noted in Chapter 4, for
opening with a nighttime scene), mention of “today” (143, 207) can be
 Curculio and Metatheater 93

understood as meaning “during the plot of this play,” while promises

to do something “tomorrow” (526, Lyco’s guarantee to pay Cappadox
what he’s owed) come to mean “after this play is over,” i.e., never.
Palinurus lectures Phaedromus about which erotic adventures are
okay and which aren’t. His key recommendation is to stick to the kind
of sex objects who won’t bring shame to him or his family “if the public
finds out” (29; Chapter 2). The characters are on stage in front of a large
crowd of spectators, though, so, of course, the public will find out! I take
Palinurus’ words as an acknowledgement that all the romantic
infatuations of comedy’s lover boys are always already subject to public
scrutiny. Palinurus is laying out for Phaedromus two main pathways for
young men in Plautus’ genre of comedy. First, a relationship that fits
elite men’s normative values and ends in marriage—as will eventually
happen in Curculio, after the implausible recognition of Planesium as a
citizen, and as happens with the courtship storyline in Menander’s
Greek play Dyskolos. Second, a sexual dalliance that may survive the
play, but ultimately can only be a phase in the young citizen man’s
progress from youth into adulthood, as with lover boys purchasing or
freeing enslaved sex-laborers in Plautus’ Pseudolus and Asinaria.

Rome-specific metatheater
A subtype of Type 3 metatheater is particular to cross-cultural
adaptations such as Roman comoedia palliata. Plautus and Terence are
adapting, for performance in Rome, comedies that were written and
performed in Greece. As a consequence, they can play on cultural
differences between Greece and Rome in their comedies. In so doing,
they may not be doing outrageously overt metatheater, but they are
winking at meta matters. Plautus plays with the cultural crossover in
both directions in Curculio, by both inserting Rome-specific references
and exaggerating the Greekness of the play.
Though adapted into Latin for a Roman audience, Curculio is still
notionally set in Greece, and, in fact, has one of the clearest senses of
place—Epidaurus specifically—of any play by Plautus. Maybe references
94 Plautus: Curculio

to the Forum, Rome’s central public space (502, 507), should be taken
simply as a translation of the Greek word agora, “marketplace,” basically
the Greek equivalent of the Forum. But the mention of the Capitoline
Hill is harder to write off (269). Cappadox is cracking a joke about a
lack of room on the Capitoline for all the oathbreakers in town. No
good parallel exists in Epidaurus or in Greek city-states generally for
Rome’s Capitoline Hill, a center of government and religion. Sure,
Athens has the Acropolis, and many other city-states had one, too, but
they are only rough equivalents at best. The particular content of
Cappadox’ joke, the bit about oathbreakers, really depends on the fact
that the Capitoline was home to a major temple of Jupiter, keeper of
oaths.
Another joke in Curculio requires Rome-specific location data. Lyco
and Curculio are doing some light verbal sparring (400–3):

Curculio Please don’t be obstinate with me.

Lyco Well, can I have Congress with you if I can’t be of Senate with
you?
Curculio You sure as hell aren’t going to have congress with me, and
I damn sure don’t like your Congress or your Senate.

Curculio tells Lyco not to bother him with a word, incomitiare, that
comes from the name comitium, where Roman citizen men assembled
to vote on laws and elections. I translated it as “ob-stinate”/“of-Senate.”
Lyco picks up on the place name and puns on it with a word, inforare,
that literally means “poke a hole in,” but also sounds like it comes from
the word forum, just like Curculio’s came from comitium. I translated it
as “have Congress with.” Lyco’s “poke a hole in” is an innuendo, asking
Curculio if he can put it in his end-o. Curculio’s response explains the
joke for anybody who didn’t catch it right away. Uniquely based on and
in Rome, the joke reminds viewers about where they are in real life as
they watch the play, and since Curculio was probably first performed in
the Forum itself (Chapter 7), the joke hits super-close to home.
A final strand of Roman intrusions into the play’s Greek setting
comes in the form of mentions of Roman law (Chapter 3). Lyco (376),
 Curculio and Metatheater 95

Cappadox (684, 722), and Therapontigonus (723) all refer to the praetor,
chief judicial magistrate in Rome. Lyco and later Cappadox suggest
they’d like to use legal proceedings as a way to dodge their creditors.
Again, no good parallel exists for this in Greek law, so we’re left with a
distinctly Roman plot device that blurs the divide between the
Epidaurus of Curculio and the Rome of Curculio.
Another recurring Roman preoccupation is the legal requirement
for witnesses to verify initiation of a lawsuit. To take an offender to
court, you would find the person in public, issue a verbal summons, and
make sure another citizen witnessed your doing so. This is precisely
what occurs in Phaedromus’ initial confrontation with Therapontigonus
(620–5): Phaedromus summons Therapontigonus, who refuses.
Phaedromus then calls on Curculio as a witness. Therapontigonus
objects because (as he suggests) Curculio is enslaved, and therefore
ineligible to witness. Phaedromus, annoyed, tells Therapontigonus he’ll
be summoned without a valid witness, intestatus (622), a verbal callback
to the no-testicles pun Palinurus makes to Curculio at play’s beginning
(intestabilis, 30). The play-ending confrontation between Cappadox
and Therapontigonus echoes the legal arguments and castration humor
(694–5); in this scene, Cappadox is not only deprived of due process but
also of his masculinity. All this procedural wrangling with witnesses
and legal formulas may make the characters seem less Greek, and thus
less convincing as denizens of their fictional world, but it also makes
them seem utterly familiar to Roman viewers.

Metatheatrical jokes about Greekness and

about the genre of comedy
At the same time as Curculio uses metatheater by adding Roman
features to a supposedly Greek setting, the play also underscores its
comedy-ness by over-Greekifying its Greeks, in two back-to-back
moments at the beginning of Curculio’s first monologue. Included in
his list of people who need to stay out of his way are numerous Greek
officials: nec strategus nec tirannus quisquam nec agoranomus | nec
96 Plautus: Curculio

demarchus nec comarchus (a general, a tyrant, a market-regulator, a

neighborhood leader, a village leader, 285–6). The chances are pretty
slim that someone like Curculio would ever actually run into all of
those types on his way through town, so this litany of Greek words is
really just ratcheting up the “Greek” feel of the scene and the stage—as
when you’re watching a movie or TV show set in Paris, they have to
show you the Eiffel Tower. Two lines later, Curculio starts complaining
about the people in town more generally, and he describes them as
“those damn Greeks with their damn cloaks” (288, a metatheatrical
moment familiar to us from Chapter 5).
Curculio also uses the terminology of stock character types for
metatheatrical ends. When Palinurus catches sight of Curculio ahead of
his first appearance on stage, he describes him as a parasitus, Curculio’s
stock type (277), but also as “running” (currentem, 278). The term
“running” indicates that Curculio will be playing the part not only of
the brown-nosing glutton parasite but also of the seruus currens, the
enslaved errand-boy, who’s always rushing about in a comic hurry—
precisely what Curculio’s show-stopping first monologue does.
Likewise, Phaedromus initially describes Planesium as “an enslaved
young woman” (ancillula, 43), and then goes on to say that Cappadox
“wants to make her a sex-laborer” (eam uolt meretricem facere, 46). Both
ancilla and meretrix are character types in Roman comedy. With these
words, Plautus is communicating to us that Planesium not only faces a
horrific change of living situation but also a wholesale transformation
of stock type. The specter of this transformation—the forced conversion
of a most fundamental element of comedic characters’ identities—
underscores the fragility of and lack of permanency for people’s
identities in a society organized around the enslavement of human
beings.
On a lighter note, Palinurus’ injunction to Phaedromus not to do
anything “unworthy of yourself or your type” (23) makes me wonder
whether genus, “type,” might here be understood as “stock type.” Perhaps
Palinurus is begging Phaedromus not to bring shame on Plautine lover
boys everywhere. Of course, the stock type of the adulescens amans isn’t
 Curculio and Metatheater 97

particularly well-known for virtuous or mature upstanding behavior,

so with the metatheatrical sense of genus, Phaedromus could take
Palinurus to mean he should go wild and have a good time, consequences
be damned.
In at least one part of Curculio, Plautus uses Type 3 metatheater to
peek past a major generic taboo. Telling Palinurus about his relationship
with Planesium, Phaedromus reassures him that she is a virgin (57–8):

Phaedromus But she’s decent and hasn’t yet started sleeping with
men.
Palinurus I’d believe that, if any sex-trafficker could have decency.

“Decent”/“decency,” Latin pudica and pudor, means sexual modesty or

sense of shame. For a citizen woman in Rome, it means no sex outside
of marriage (before, during, or after). But calling an enslaved sex-laborer
pudica is a category error, because they are legally ineligible for marriage.
That was a right exclusive to citizens. So, Phaedromus’ words subtly
foreshadow the play’s ultimate denouement, that Planesium will be
recognized as a citizen and therefore as marriageable. Establishing her
pudor early on is crucial for the genre of comoedia palliata, since if she’s
already had sex before marriage, even if enslaved and coerced, she
becomes unmarriageable, according to the dictates of the Roman
patriarchy.
While the rules of the genre require Phaedromus to emphasize
Planesium’s pudor, Palinurus’ reply pushes us beyond the taboo. By
rejecting the notion that someone who is enslaved by a sex-trafficker
can possibly have pudor, Palinurus reminds the audience of the grim
realities concealed behind the stock characters and plots of Roman
comedy. A uirgo intacta—an enslaved sex-laborer who has miraculously
never had sex—is a highly implausible theatrical fiction. And even
without sexual activity, Planesium’s mere presence in Cappadox’ house/
brothel/showroom is a threat to her pudor, much more so given how
long she has resided there.
The idea behind pudor is that the elite men who ran Roman society
wanted to be certain that citizen women are producing citizen babies, in
98 Plautus: Curculio

a continuation of citizen “bloodlines” (a racially motivated concept

then as now, only Romans knew nothing of genes or DNA and thus
couldn’t weaponize them for their racial formations). So, being
completely certain about when, where, and with whom their daughters
and sisters and wives had sex was a central preoccupation for elite
Roman citizen men. With Palinurus’ offhand rejection of Phaedromus’
claim that Planesium is a virgin, Plautus has set up a collision course
between the comedic stock types of uirgo intacta and sex-trafficker,
whose profession and whose very archetype both entail maximizing the
profit to be gained from the sale for sexual use of said uirgo intacta
(Chapter 8). Palinurus even gives us Cappadox’s stock character type,
leno, by name.

Type 4 metatheater in Curculio

I see two subcategories of Type 4 metatheater in Curculio: when

characters act like actors, and when they use language of the theater.
Most obviously, after he first arrives on stage and fills Phaedromus in on
the results of his mission abroad, Curculio announces that he will script
for Phaedromus how to forge documents from the soldier for the
transfer of Planesium (369–70). Curculio even does some stage-
managing, as he directs Phaedromus to make his exit. Earlier, Palinurus
played Phaedromus’ director, when he told him “you’re your very own
slave, you’re shining a candle so fresh and so clean” (9; Chapter 5). Props
make the man. Later in the same scene, when Palinurus lectures
Phaedromus that “undercover love is bad” (49), viewers may take
“undercover” (clandestinus) not only literally but also metatheatrically—
it’s the kind of love affair that one has while disguised in a costume as a
character in a comedy with an erotic plot.
Theatrical language pops up occasionally throughout Curculio. Early
in the play, Palinurus insults Planesium by calling her an ebriola persolla,
“drunken munchkin” (192; Chapter 3). The word persolla also means
“little mask,” and thus metatheatrically acknowledges the mask
 Curculio and Metatheater 99

Planesium’s actor wears—and ones the other actors wear, as well.

Likewise, at the very beginning of the play, Palinurus asks Phaedromus
what’s the deal with his outfit (ornatu, 2). The word ornatus is also the
technical term for costume, which means that Palinurus is drawing
audience attention to what is probably a pretty outlandish costume that
Phaedromus’ actor has on.
The Latin noun ludus and its related verb ludo have lots of senses:
“play” as in what kids do, “play” as in theater, “game,” “trick,” even
“school.” Any time the word shows up in Plautus, it holds the potential
for Type 4 metatheater, often reflecting something about actors
themselves or their process of staging a comedy. Let’s look at two
examples from Curculio’s grand entrance. First, Curculio warns
Phaedromus not to play around with promises of food: “you’d best not
be tricking me” (325–6). But the verb ludo here serves as a potent
reminder that the food really is a trick. They go inside to eat in this
play—no onstage banquet scene, like in some other plays of Plautus. So,
Curculio, as well as his actor, never actually eats any food.
Second, when narrating his encounter with Therapontigonus the
soldier, Curculio says, “he invites me to come play dice [ut ludam], so
I take off my cloak” (355). By itself, ludo in this instance might not
activate our metatheatrical senses. But it’s followed by a mention of the
cloak, pallium, that is the hallmark costume element of Plautus’ genre,
comoedia palliata. Maybe we’re meant to imagine dice-playing as
something actors do backstage, once they’ve taken off their costumes
(their cloaks). Maybe also we can interpret ut ludam not only as, “he
invites me to play dice,” but also as, “he invites me for dice so that
I can trick him.” Curculio is, after all, about to lay his hands on
Therapontigonus’ ring, which will be instrumental in pulling off
Curculio’s big deception plot.
Finally, a couple other words can, I believe, carry metatheatrical
weight: miser (“poor guy”) and nugae (“trash” or “trifles” or “blather”).
In Roman comoedia palliata, lover boys are always whining about how
sad and unfortunate (how miser) they are that they can’t get the girl
they want. So, when Cappadox in this play tells Palinurus not to make
100 Plautus: Curculio

fun of him by saying,“it’s easy to mock a poor guy” (240), he is describing

not only a basic avenue of ancient Roman humor—laughing at people
less fortunate and less healthy than you—but also a sizable chunk
of Plautus’ comic routines, built around laughing at a ridiculous,
exaggeratedly sad lover boy. With nugae, which shows up in the
colloquial phrase “you’re talking nonsense” (451), we can see another
summary of the job of an actor in a comedy. It’s an even more compelling
bit of metatheater in an interchange towards the end of the play (604):

Planesium You’re blathering nonsense.

Curculio I usually do, ’cause that’s the easiest way for me to make a
living.

This works on three levels. It’s a good verbal riposte to Planesium’s

trash-talking. It also encapsulates the job of the comedic parasite, to
flatter and entertain well-off patrons in exchange for food to live by.
And it offers a snapshot of what actors do and what Plautus himself
does—bring home the bacon by speaking or scripting banter and
fictional lines designed to entertain a crowd for a day and no more.
But the main event when it comes to metatheater in Curculio is the
Choragus.
 7

The Speech of the Choragus

The Choragus delivers a surprise monologue about two-thirds of the

way through the play (462–86). It’s totally unique in ancient Greek and
Roman comedy, and it’s the part of the play that has attracted the most
attention from scholars. After an overview of the speech and a look at
the character of the Choragus, we’ll walk the path of his tour of Rome,
discuss the mechanics of performing the scene, analyze how his speech
takes metatheater to new heights, and investigate what all the meta
means.
The monologue begins with the Choragus praising how clever
Curculio is (462–3), and worrying he might not recover the costumes
he lent to the troupe (464–6). He then says that while Curculio’s busy
inside, he’ll give the audience a summary of where to find different
kinds of people to meet up with (466–9). At this point, he launches into
a list of types of people and locations in central Rome (470–85). In his
final line, the Choragus says that the door to Phaedromus’ house is
opening and that he needs to stop talking (486).
It isn’t until the first line of the Choragus’ “where to find people”
section (470) that Rome is explicitly mentioned (specifically the
comitium, the site for voting assemblies). Up to that point, the audience
has been hearing from a clearly metatheatrical character who is doing
some mid-play theater criticism, and talking about costume rental—
two metatheatrical acknowledgements that it’s not real but a play. But
when Rome itself is brought into the speech, the metatheater hits a new
level, and the audience would realize they’re watching something truly
special and unique.
This is the earliest example in Latin literature of a narrative
constructed out of references to physical spaces and place. It’s the

101
102 Plautus: Curculio

longest passage in Plautus that refers to Rome. It parodies the familiar

Roman political activity of a public speech by a statesman, called officia
oratoris (“orator’s duties”). It’s also a parody of a genre of literature that
would be familiar to Greeks and learned Romans in the audience:
didactic, or teaching poetry. And it is marked off as special and different
in terms all spectators could understand, because a whole musical
segment, a section of trochaic septenarii, is devoted to it (Chapter 4).
The monologue of the Choragus is a leading candidate for Plautus’ tour
de force, because it’s unparalleled in any play by him or by any other
author from ancient Greece and Rome.

The Choragus as professional and

as theatrical character

What is a choragus? I can’t say anything with absolute certainty, other

than that the choragus was a kind of professional involved in the
production of a play at Rome. The Latin word choragus is used only
twice outside of Plautus in all surviving ancient Roman literature. A few
things the choragus seems not to have been: a director, a stage manager,
a member of a single acting troupe. The choragus was not like the Greek
figure from which the Latin word comes, the khorēgos, a wealthy citizen
man assigned to finance the production of a play or series of plays,
instead of income tax. A primary responsibility of the Roman choragus,
by contrast, was providing costumes and props for plays.
The choragus was contracted separately from the playwright and
acting troupe. The contract was issued by the aediles in charge of the
festival where the play was to be performed. Since the choragus was
paid by the aediles, the acting troupe wouldn’t have to worry about
paying for, storing, or transporting equipment for plays they put on—a
welcome bit of assistance for itinerant bands of actors, who might need
to travel light and perform plays with wildly different props and
costumes. In Rome, the choragus might even have been responsible for
building the stage.
 The Speech of the Choragus 103

Curculio isn’t the only time a choragus pops up in Plautus, although

it is the most significant. In both Persa (159–60) and Trinummus (858),
characters who are involved in trickery mention the choragus as the
source of disguises needed for their schemes. Type 3 metatheater is
active here, since the characters are indicating awareness that they’re in
a play. In the prologue of Plautus’ Captiui (61–2), the word choragium,
“choragus-hood,” is used to describe terms on which the acting troupe
was hired—for a comedy, not a tragedy, in this case.
In Curculio, the Choragus is an actual speaking character, not just a one-
off reference. But his role within the play is not completely clear. Is he a bit
part, a character who comes on, does a weird little speech as a kind of
intermission from the action, and then leaves? Or is he one of the silent
characters in an earlier scene in the play, who reveals himself to be the
Choragus once he’s all alone on stage? Does he have a special mask for
the Choragus character, or does he come on without a mask (or take off the
mask he was wearing while disguised as a non-speaking character)? Maybe
he’s meant to be a choragus in Epidaurus, the setting of the play itself.
Regardless, no character in the play ever speaks with him, nobody is
on stage when he speaks, nobody mentions him, and nobody needs
costumes from him. Curculio is the only character who wears any sort
of disguise, and it’s just an eyepatch he pulls out at random, not
something he’d previously checked out from the Choragus. It would be
an interesting inversion of the normal order of things if our Choragus
first appears disguised as a normal character—in a mask and costume
borrowed from the real-life choragus—and removes his disguise right
before launching into a speech that removes the fictional facade of the
play, to examine the real Rome where it is being performed.
The Choragus does have a connection to Curculio. He talks about
Curculio in the monologue and presents the monologue as filling space
while Curculio is off stage. Curculio is the last person to speak before
the Choragus’ solo and the first to speak after the Choragus is done. On
a deeper level, the Choragus’ speech is the twin of Curculio’s opening
monologue. In that speech, Curculio goes on a rant about sleazy Greeks
(280–98), though he’s supposed to be a Greek himself; in this one, the
104 Plautus: Curculio

Choragus, a Roman, takes his Roman audience on a tour of Roman

sleazebags. The two passages are approximately equal in length, they
correspond to one another, and they complement one another. It’s even
possible to see them as structurally important together:

Before Curculio’s speech 279 lines

From Curculio through Choragus 207 lines
After Choragus’ speech 243 lines

The play divides roughly into thirds, cutting before and after the two
monologues. These thirds in turn roughly match the play’s three
subplots of “love” story, deception, and recognition.

The Choragus’ tour of Rome

The speech of the Choragus walks us through some major sites in the
Roman Forum, central meeting place and marketplace of the ancient
City. What makes this moment all the more magical is that Curculio was
itself performed in the Roman Forum. The audience is hearing about
locations in the same area of town they’re watching the play in, and can
probably see most or all of the places the Choragus mentions.
The Roman Forum was in a state of transition at the time of Plautus’
Curculio. Figure 7.1 shows a reconstruction of how it looked just a little
while after the time of the play.
In the twenty-ish years before the play was first put on, Rome had
experienced two major fires (213 and 210 bce ), to be followed by
another fire as well as an earthquake in the same decade as the play’s
production (both disasters 192 bce ). Mathias Hanses suggests that the
festival at which Curculio was performed may even have been held to
celebrate the restoration of Forum buildings—perhaps including
buildings that appear in the Choragus’ monologue. This period was also
marked by increasing political competition between elite citizen
families, who had become rich off the spoils of the recently won war
against Carthage. And what better way to show your family’s wealth,
 The Speech of the Choragus 105

Figure 7.1 The Roman Forum, mid-180s bce . Sites not mentioned by the
Choragus are in brackets. © 2019 Mathias Hanses and Katrin Hanses.

power, influence, and importance than urban development and

monumental public works?
As a consequence, when Plautus was composing Curculio, his
performance space—the Forum—was a bustling construction site with
new and improved buildings all around. At the same time, the way the
Forum was being developed didn’t have a single coherent theme or
propaganda message to it, a coherence it would gain 150 years later. The
Choragus can imbue the buildings with the meanings and associations
he pleases.
An exciting aspect of his speech is that it actually gives scholars
some evidence for historical Rome at the time of Plautus, evidence that
exists nowhere else. These lines include the oldest surviving reference to
the Lacus Curtius in the center of the Forum (477); the earliest
description of the shops (tabernae) as “the old ones” (ueteres, 480), and
a specific government building as the basilica (472); the most ancient
106 Plautus: Curculio

mention of the worship of Venus Cloacina, Venus of the Sewers, in

Rome (471); and potentially an older name for what eventually became
known as the “meat-market” (macellum), here called “Fish Forum”
(forum piscarium, 474). The mention of a certain person named
Leucadia Oppia at 485, meanwhile, appears to be a rare instance in
Plautus of naming a real-life, living person, and doing so, the line
preserves a little slice of life from Rome at the time, in the name of a
woman who was evidently a drain on the finances of married men
(“[you’ll find] rich men on a spending spree at Leucadia Oppia’s house”).
Table 7.1 gives the itinerary of the Choragus’ jaunt through the
Forum.

Table 7.1 The itinerary of the Choragus’ tour of the Forum Romanum in
Plautus’ Curculio.
Where What you’ll find Line(s)
Comitium Perjurers 470
Sacrum Cloacinae (shrine of Liars; braggarts 471
Venus Cloacina)
Basilica Wealthy husbands on a spending 472–3
spree; aged sex-laborers;
bargainers
Forum Piscarium Potluck dinner-goers 474
Lower part of the Forum Rich noblemen 475
Middle Forum, near the Canal Showoffs 476
Lacus Curtius Chatty, mean smartasses 477–9
Tabernae Veteres (“Old Lenders 480
Shops”)
Temple of Castor Loan sharks 481
Vicus Tuscus People who sell themselves 482
Velabrum Bakers; butchers; fortune-tellers; 483–4
people who transform
themselves or others
Leucadia Oppia’s house Wealthy husbands on a spending 485*
spree
* Line 485 repeats most of 472, and so was probably not original to Plautus’ premiere performance,
but rather used as an alternative in some performance of Curculio—possibly long after the
premiere, even after Plautus’ death.
 The Speech of the Choragus 107

The Comitium is where the citizens of Rome (men only) would meet
to vote on laws and elections. The Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer
system of Rome, ran under the Forum, so a shrine to Venus Cloacina,
protector-goddess of the sewers, is fitting. It was located near the
Comitium. Further in the same direction was the Basilica, a government
building that in later times would be used for legal proceedings. At the
time of the first performance of Curculio, the famous Basilica Aemilia,
sponsored by one of the most powerful families in Rome, had not yet
been constructed, but the Basilica mentioned by the Choragus may
have rested on the same site. It’s also possible that the Choragus’
“Basilica” actually refers to an entirely different building: the Atrium
Regium, or “royal hall,” an obscure place-name that may or may not
refer to the Regia. The Regia was the building in the Forum that served
as the headquarters of the Republic’s chief religious magistrate, the
Pontifex Maximus.
Around the corner from the Basilica is the Forum Piscarium. From
there, the Choragus leaves his initial cluster of sites to move across the
Forum towards the Canal, part of the sewer system running right
through the Forum’s middle. Close by the Canal was the Lacus Curtius,
commemorating a Roman legend: a certain mythic young nobleman
named Marcus Curtius acted in accordance with a prophecy by
mounting a horse in full armor and jumping, horse and all, into an
abyss that opened up at this location. (Or maybe when the Choragus
mentions the “Lacus,” he instead means the Lacus Iuturnae, a pool built
near a spring as part of a shrine to the water-nymph goddess Juturna.)
From there we jump to the Tabernae Veteres, a complex of permanent
stalls that could be rented out for use as shops. One of the more
impressive structures in the Forum at that time would have been the
Temple of Castor, next on the Choragus’ journey. Castor and Pollux
were divine twins, sons of Jupiter king of the gods, and they were
renowned boxers and horsemen, viewed as divine protectors of
everyday people.
From the Temple of Castor, the Choragus heads off to one edge of
the Forum, the Vicus Tuscus, “Etruscan Alley.” The Etruscans were a
108 Plautus: Curculio

people living in Etruria (modern Tuscany), north of Rome. In Roman

legend, they had been kings of Rome, until the Romans kicked them
out, founded a Republic, and went to war with them. In history,
Etruscans were a major cultural-exchange intermediary for Greek
influence on Rome. In Plautus’ day, Etruscans were a subject people of
Rome, known by Romans foremost for their religious knowledge and
skill in ritual. The Vicus Tuscus was the Etruscans’ neck of the Forum. It
was associated also with Vertumnus, a Roman adaptation of an Etruscan
god, a divinity of the woodlands and a shapeshifter.
The last stop on the Choragus’ tour is the Velabrum, a low-lying area
near the Forum that the Vicus Tuscus passed through, and another busy
place for commerce. The Velabrum was a major site for building, for
gathering, and for political jockeying among the most powerful factions
in Rome after the war with Carthage. It was, in other words, one of the
most happening places in town. The Choragus uses the word uel (“or”)
a lot in saying who hangs out in the Velabrum—he’s punning on
the name of the place, like saying “in Orlando you can find theme
parks or copyrighted characters or rollercoasters or monorails or
merchandising . . .” The tour ends with another pun, as the Choragus
tells us the doors (fores) are opening, in the very moment his stroll
through the Forum has come to a close.
Figure 7.2 is the same map of the Forum as before, but now with
the path of the Choragus’ monologue indicated on it, starting at the
Comitium on the right side of the map, with the white dot, and
meandering around until we arrive at the black dot in the Velabrum at
the top left.
Now’s a good moment for me to admit that I’ve begged a question,
by calling what the Choragus gives us a “tour.” That word implies
movement, as does the path that I’ve drawn on the map above. Scholars
before me have tended to treat the Choragus’ speech as more like a
panorama: he’s pointing, they say, to things the audience could see, by
craning their head from place to place. That line of interpretation
depends on knowing where the audience was seated, and where the
stage was built, since a panorama only works if the viewer can take it all
 The Speech of the Choragus 109

Figure 7.2 The Roman Forum, mid-180s bce , with the Choragus’ itinerary
mapped on. © 2019 Mathias Hanses and Katrin Hanses (lines added by
T. H. M. Gellar-Goad).

in. Scholars have offered several different conjectures on where it was.

For my part, I think it all has to be anchored by the Comitium, since
that’s where the wealthy apparently had their reserved seats.
But more importantly, I don’t think we need to rely so heavily on the
exact site of the stage and stands. The Choragus is talking about Rome’s
downtown during a play performed in Rome to an audience of Rome’s
denizens. By and large, they’re going to know everywhere he’s talking
about like the back of their hand. Being able to see the exact spots the
Choragus is talking about isn’t really that important. Everyone will have
an easy mental image already, perhaps even from when they were
walking in to watch the play. This point is especially pertinent when we
recall that most playgoers would be standing, which makes for poor,
crowded viewing conditions; and when we remind ourselves that the
Romans didn’t have corrective lenses to help with difficulty seeing, so
110 Plautus: Curculio

some parts of the Forum would have been quite blurry for many people
in attendance.
By the same token, it’s not important that audience members are
themselves standing in the places mentioned by the Choragus, either.
For one thing, I don’t think that’d be possible, because some of the
places are too far apart to be plausible audience areas for a play produced
without electronic amplification. For another, most spectators would
have no problem envisioning themselves in the places he’s talking
about, since they’d have been there often in the past, going about their
normal downtown business. That’s why I’ve chosen to talk about the
Choragus as giving us a tour, instead: viewers can see or imagine a stroll
around the Forum they know so well, filled with all the lowlifes they’ve
encountered on their own trips through it and the ones they’ve seen on
stage today.

Who’s who on the Choragus’ tour

Why does the Choragus locate the kinds of people he does in the places
he does? In some cases, it’s because of a good fit between locale and
lowlife, and in others, it’s the opposite, a great contrast. In the first
column, we find potluck dinner-goers at the Forum Piscarium, a fitting
hangout for gluttons; rich noblemen in the lower Forum, near the Via
Sacra (“Sacred Way,” which at this time was crowded with elite families’
mansions); lenders and borrowers at the Tabernae Veteres, a commercial
hub; and a crowd of people in the crowded Velabrum. It lay at the edge
of the Etruscan quarter (marked by the Vicus Tuscus, Etruscan Alley),
so the fortune-teller, hariolus, a figure associated by Romans with
Etruscan religious knowhow, was an obvious choice. Likewise, a statue
of Vertumnus stood in the area along the Vicus Tuscus, which fits the
people who transform themselves and others. The “transformation”
could refer to human trafficking, in which case it connects to Vertumnus
as overseer of commerce; or to the shifting of personal identity, in
which case it connects to Vertumnus as shapeshifter and god of social
 The Speech of the Choragus 111

metamorphosis. Etruscans were, to some extent, a marginalized ethnic

group in Rome at this point, so it’s not unlikely that they might end up
holding low-status jobs like baker or butcher, too. The hardest-up
among them might have to resort to selling themselves, as do the people
that the Choragus says hang out on the Vicus Tuscus.
Matching the five “good-fit” locations on the Choragus’ tour are six
“contrast” sites. Perjurers are to be found in the Comitium, which is
supposed to be the place where Romans make laws, not break oaths.
The shrine of Venus of the Sewers is riddled with liars and braggarts, a
contrast of human dishonesty with divine purification, of private falsity
and public cleanliness. At the Basilica, possibly a seat of civic justice in
Rome, we find hagglers, and husbands ready to waste their money (or
their wives’ money?) on sex-laborers past their prime. The only thing
“pure” about the showoffs near the Canal, the major conduit for the
sewer system, is their fakery (the Choragus calls them “pure showoffs,”
476). The smartasses at the Lacus Curtius behave much differently from
the site’s legendary namesake, a man of heroic action. Similarly, at the
Temple of Castor, a god viewed by the Romans as a helper and guardian,
we run into loan sharks—literally, “the kinds of guys you’ll immediately
regret trusting/giving credit to” (481).
These aren’t just generic sleazebags we’re encountering as we follow
the Choragus around the Forum, though. They’re also stock characters
from Roman comedy. In Plautine theater, sex-traffickers are
stereotypically perjurers, a dead match for the guys the Choragus places
in the Comitium. The braggarts (gloriosi) at the shrine of Venus
immediately call to mind the miles gloriosus, the blowhard soldier, of
Curculio and other plays by Plautus. At the Basilica, the husbands on a
shopping spree refer to the horny old man (senex amator) of comedy,
while the sex-laborers and bankers/bargainers nearby can also be found
in Plautus, and in Curculio specifically. Cooks, butchers, and fortune
tellers, denizens of the Choragus’ Velabrum, live in Plautus’ comedic
towns, too. By the time the Choragus gives them a shoutout, we’ve
already seen a two- or three-in-one on stage, the Cook hired by
Phaedromus who gives Cappadox a dream-interpretation (259–72)
112 Plautus: Curculio

of the sort an Etruscan haruspex (fortune teller) in the Forum might

offer.
We end up with what Marcela Alejandra Suárez has called the
“Forum Plautinum”: part Forum of Rome, part Forum of Plautus’
comedies. Lines are blurred between reality and comedy in multiple
directions. A fictional character talks to a real audience and invites
them to look for theatrical characters in real places they can see around
them. The comedy is bursting off the stage and into the City, at the same
time as the real world is bursting on stage to take over the comedy (for
the duration of the Choragus’ speech). And the play’s text creates and
preserves a specific portrait of the historical Forum Romanum, a
Plautine memory of the civic arena, to be performed and imagined by
actors and spectators and readers ancient and modern.

Why this monologue?

The speech is an inspired magnum opus of comedy. It draws on

the audience’s surroundings, something immediate and familiar and
shared. It pushes limits by putting disreputable characters into the
vicinity of the performance, in some of the most respectable places in
Rome—and into spots spectators themselves may have been watching
from. The tour of Rome is a tour de force.
The Choragus’ speech also connects to other parts of Curculio,
as well as forging links between the world of the play and the world
outside it. Rome’s landscape appears not only in this speech, but
also twice before it. When the Cook tells Cappadox he should be
praying to Jupiter the oath-keeper rather than Aesculapius the healer,
Cappadox replies, “if everyone who’d broken oaths wanted to do an
overnight ritual [to Jupiter], there wouldn’t be enough space available
on the Capitolium” (268–9, Chapter 6). The Capitolium was the most
important of the Seven Hills of Rome, and was the site of the Temple of
Jupiter Optimus Maximus (“the best and the greatest”). The joke here is
that Rome itself, like the Epidaurus of Cappadox and Curculio, is
 The Speech of the Choragus 113

overcrowded with cheats and liars. Later, when Lyco the banker is
making fun of Curculio’s missing eye (this is while Curculio is disguised
as “Summanus”), they exchange Rome-related puns and barbs about
the Comitium, the Forum, and sexual penetration (400–3, again
Chapter 6).
These references to the City are specific to Rome. They’re too
particular to be mere translations or analogies for something in the
Greek original. They remind the audience of their physical location and
thus prime us for the Choragus’ deeper, metatheatrical delve into Rome.
His appearance in the play breaks and blurs the boundaries between
fictional Epidaurus and actual Rome. He enters with commentary on
Curculio’s trickster skills, which suggest he’s been watching the play, a
spectator like us. But he’s also a character within the play—but, then
again, his character is a theatrical technician, someone who belongs
backstage, not on stage or in the audience. The Choragus asks spectators
to notice, and to find comedic character types, in the real-world
locations in Rome they’re supposed to be pretending aren’t there, since
the play is telling them to pretend they’re watching something unfold in
Epidaurus.
Epidaurus is home not only to a major healing center of Asklepios
but also to an important Greek theater, one still in use today, as shown
in Figure 7.3. Perhaps the Choragus is meant to be the choragus for that
theater. In that case, we could wonder whether he’s watching a spectacle
in Rome or in Epidaurus—and maybe the Rome he’s telling us about is
as fictional to him as Epidaurus is to us.
All this metatheatrical business is a lot to take in, and it’s doing a lot
of work in the play. The Choragus, as he stands on stage doing his stand-
up routine, may be near the Lacus Curtius, where he locates chatty
windbags. If so, it’s a nice moment of self-aware self-mockery. Regardless,
two main motifs lurk behind his tour of Rome: politics and sex-labor.
The whole passage could fairly be described as a political satire, one of
the earliest pieces of political satire surviving from ancient Rome. It’s
not just average people or everyday life being mocked here, but elites
and their core values. For instance, seats may have been reserved for
114 Plautus: Curculio

Figure 7.3 The theater of Epidaurus. Photo by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, 2019.

senators and their families in the Comitium, exactly where the Choragus
says you’ll find oath-breakers. The untrustworthy men hanging out at
the Temple of Castor may be equites, the wealthy non-political bigwigs
of ancient Rome, placed by the Choragus at the Temple because of an
annual procession of equites that passed by there. The contrasts hint at
modern Romans not living up to the greater generations of ancestors
who built the Forum’s monuments.
At the same time, as Amy Richlin notes, the Choragus’ Rome features
a perhaps-surprising number of sex-laborers. We find them near the
Basilica and in the Vicus Tuscus. They are possibly being trafficked in
the Velabrum (484), or these men might be engaged as free or unfree
sex-laborers. The line at the end about Leucadia Oppia—a woman
not attested elsewhere in surviving Roman texts—perhaps refers to
a particularly renowned sex-laborer at some point in Rome, or a
successful brothel-keeper. The recurrent presence of sexual labor in
what the Choragus shows us of Rome may be mainly about comedy,
 The Speech of the Choragus 115

since much of Plautus’ theater revolves around sex-laborers, either as

desired objects or clever tricksters or long-lost citizens or some
combination. Or maybe it’s another metatheatrical moment,
acknowledging that actors and sex-laborers were not very different in
their occupations: sex-laborers, like actors, have to put on a show and
conceal what’s going on behind the scenes, while actors, like sex-
laborers, are dependent upon pleasing the crowd.
The Choragus’ Forum is filled with sleazebags—but why? In part, it
reflects the comedy in which the Choragus appears. Curculio is a liar
and a thief. In his triumph, he turns out to be just like the targets of the
Choragus’ satire. On a deeper level, though, as Timothy J. Moore has
argued, the Choragus seems to be questioning one of the core values of
the ancient Roman patriarchal elite: fides, “trustworthiness.” Throughout
the play, but especially in the behaviors of Curculio, Lyco, and Cappadox,
it is clear that nobody is to be trusted in Plautus’ version of Epidaurus.
Then the Choragus ties untrustworthy Epidaurus with Rome, in a speech
that blurs the boundaries between theater and real life, and that situates
the hucksters of comedy in the real-life Forum. Audiences wouldn’t be
off-base if they came away from Curculio a little less confident in the
civic credibility they could count on from their fellow citizens.
One of comedy’s superpowers is that it can hold up a mirror to our
lives, our societies, and ourselves. Plautus uses metatheater to hold up a
mirror to the mirror of comedy, and what we end up with is a funhouse
mise-en-abîme. The theatrical fiction acknowledges its fictionality to the
audience, and in doing so, it draws the audience into the world of
theater. Or/and: the comedy brings Rome and Roman society into itself,
with the result that the audience can reinterpret Rome itself as a
comedic set. Nobody in Roman comedy does metatheater like the
Choragus does: a behind-the-scenes worker jumps into the scene in
order to demolish the pretense that it’s anything other than a scene—
and then goes around town in real life, pointing out all the scenes
already on display.
Something about Plautus made him fascinated by metatheater. It’s
not unique to him; meta can be found in the other major surviving
116 Plautus: Curculio

playwright of Roman comedy, Terence, and all across Roman and

Greek literature. For Plautus in particular, though, attention to the
processes of comedy emphasizes the similarity between playwright and
star trickster, between the deception plot within the play and the
deceptive act of acting the play out. And Plautus’ bending, breaking,
and obliterating the divisions between actors and audience pushes his
viewers to think about the performances and dramas that they
encounter and are involved in themselves.
 8

Curculio and Roman Life

Comedy reflects actual lived experience. The reflection may be like in a

funhouse mirror, distorted and strange and hard to believe. But that
core of real life, and usually of daily life, is still there, waiting for us to
recognize it. Or to recover it. Objects in that mirror may be closer than
they appear.
Plautus isn’t just an expert jokester and cleverly plotting playwright.
He’s also a valuable source of information on what life might have been
like in the Rome, where he lived and wrote. The fact that his comedies
feature everyday situations and non-elite characters gives us a window
onto ancient Roman lived experiences that aren’t described in other
texts and art and monuments that survive from Roman antiquity.
We have to handle Plautus with care, though. He’s not an objective
reporter. He’s going for laughs. But a lot can be gained by reading
Plautus with an eye for social history, the stories of past cultures that
don’t revolve around wars or governments or large-scale movements.
This chapter will look at a few categories of ancient Roman daily life:
enslavement and sex-labor; food insecurity, poverty, and low-status
work; and religious practices. Knowing about Roman customs in each
category helps us better understand what’s going on in Curculio, and
examining Curculio gives us special insights into the phenomena of
Roman culture.

Enslavement and sex-labor

Plautine comedy is theater by and about enslaved persons. At least

some of the actors themselves were enslaved, and the stars of most of

117
118 Plautus: Curculio

Plautus’ surviving plays are enslaved characters. Even in a play like

Curculio, whose title character is a freeborn citizen, enslavement is
a preoccupation, with Palinurus trying to play the enslaved clever
trickster, Planesium seeking liberation from enslavement, and Curculio
disguising himself as “Summanus,” a man supposedly formerly enslaved
by the soldier Therapontigonus. Each of Plautus’ twenty-and-a-half
surviving plays includes at least one enslaved character. Jokes about the
torture of enslaved persons, often from the perspective of enslaved
persons, are a frequent element of Plautus’ humor.
Rome was an enslaving society. By 201 bce , the end of the second
war with Carthage, the number of persons enslaved in Rome far
outnumbered the number of citizens. Rome’s economy was built on
enslavement. Curculio, therefore, is the product of an enslaving society,
and we can see as much in how it represents everyday life and interactions.
Phaedromus starts the play off by entering with a veritable entourage of
enslaved attendants following him. He repeatedly abuses or threatens to
abuse Palinurus physically (132; an extended assault sequence at 193–9)
and verbally (7, 45, 130). Palinurus and Phaedromus live two doors
down from Cappadox, a human trafficker, a man whose job is
enslavement. Leaena, the doorkeeper enslaved to his household, has a
craving for wine that is played up for laughs on stage, but it’s also a
glimpse of one of the many cruelties of a life enslaved: to deal with the
physical and emotional traumas to which she has been subjected, Leaena
self-medicates with alcohol, which leads to addiction and further trauma.
Much of the play’s action is predicated on trafficking Planesium.
Therapontigonus and Lyco are involved in the sale of a human being.
Phaedromus is complicit in the trafficking, and only becomes indignant
about Planesium’s enslavement when he figures out she wasn’t born into
it but was born free (608). Curculio, meanwhile, will disguise himself as
someone formerly enslaved (413)—but the moment somebody suggests
he is, in fact, enslaved, he responds swiftly and with violence (624/625,
furthermore using liber, a term meaning freeborn, as opposed to
libertus, freed). Even the suggestion of a status lower than you possess
can pose an existential threat to your identity and standing. Within
 Curculio and Roman Life 119

Plautus’ comoedia palliata, Curculio is perhaps doubly at risk, since he is

fulfilling the trickster role that in many other plays is performed by an
enslaved person, the seruus callidus.
Curculio grapples extensively with sex-slavery. Planesium is enslaved
to a sex-trafficker, although her character type, uirgo intacta (freeborn
citizen girl wrongfully enslaved), means that she has, miraculously and
implausibly, been spared from coercive sexual labor so far. This point is
insisted on by multiple characters in the play (57–60, 518, 698). It has to
be this way, because if she weren’t a virgin, she would, according to the
sexist ideologies of the patriarchal elite, be unmarriageable. One reason
why she might plausibly be a virgin, despite living in a sex-trafficker’s
household since youth: Cappadox might be keeping her “pristine” to try
to extract a higher price for her when he sells her.
Another term for Planesium’s character type, pseudo-meretrix,
means “sex-laborer but not really.” Planesium is technically in the status
of an enslaved meretrix (sex-laborer), but she has never had sex and so
is not a practicing sex-laborer. In ancient Rome, the term meretrix
literally meant “woman wage-earner” and designated several different
categories of sex-laborers. One category of meretrices encompassed
those who, like Planesium, were enslaved to a sex-trafficker with plans
to sell them off to a buyer in a one-time transaction. Others were
enslaved in a brothel, still others enslaved and forced to serve as
streetwalking prostitutes.
A final category consists of free meretrices: non-citizens, often
immigrants, who turned to sex-labor to feed themselves. Although free
meretrices were not subject to the oppressive abuses of enslavers, they
were nevertheless still in a vulnerable position in their society, because
they did low-status work and lacked legal rights or protection. As a
result, they would often need to seek the patronage or goodwill of well-
to-do citizen men.
Planesium begins the play enslaved to Cappadox and contracted for
sale to Therapontigonus. But without the impossible luck of finding her
long-lost brother to prove she was born free, she could have ended up
in any of the other categories of meretrix. In this alternate universe, if
120 Plautus: Curculio

Phaedromus had bought her, he may have freed her, but he could never
have married her, and eventually would have broken things off with her
in order to marry a citizen and make babies. This would likely relegate
Planesium to the position of a free meretrix, dependent upon sex-labor
to survive without a regular, committed client. If Therapontigonus
bought her, or if Phaedromus did but didn’t free her, each would likely
tire of her eventually and either reduce her to the menial tasks of
enslaved domestic laborers, or would have sold her off to another sex-
trafficker (or even back to Cappadox himself—at a reduced price, of
course). If neither sale had gone through, she would be left with
Cappadox, who might have decided that she was not enough of a luxury
commodity to sell at a high price. He would then have forced her into
the brothel or streetwalking prostitution, a fate threatened or implied
against enslaved sex-laborers in Plautus’ Pseudolus, his Rudens, and the
late Roman novel of Apollonius King of Tyre.
Planesium’s backstory and possible future, as well as Curculio’s
strong reaction to the insinuation that he’s enslaved, testify to the
fragility of freedom in a culture of enslavement. If it weren’t for a
whirlwind all those years ago, Planesium would never have been
kidnapped and enslaved. If he changes his name and his outfit even just
a little, Curculio can be mistaken for a currently or formerly enslaved
person. These status threats are not mere theatrical fictions particular to
the world of the play. The audience of Curculio would have included
people enslaved and formerly enslaved, people who had been kidnapped
by slavers or born into enslavement or taken as war captives in Roman
conquests. And Roman citizens in the audience, some of them enslaving
people in their own household and some not, would all be aware that
Romans abroad could also be captured, kidnapped, or taken in battle
and sold into enslavement elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Another of
Plautus’ plays, Captiui (“The Captives”), deals with this issue more
explicitly—but it lurks behind every one of Plautus’ plays, including
Curculio, because all of his plays, including Curculio, reflect ancient
Mediterranean realities and inequities by depicting enslavement and
enslaved persons.
 Curculio and Roman Life 121

Food and hunger

The figure of Curculio himself touches on another of these topics where

it’s played up for laughs but conceals a more serious concern underneath.
Curculio, as a parasite, is a hanger-on and a glutton. He’s willing to do
whatever it takes to glean a free meal off Phaedromus. But there’s no
such thing as a free lunch. Curculio has to go abroad on an erotic fool’s
errand for Phaedromus—in a world where overseas travel is long,
uncomfortable, and easily fatal. Curculio, like all parasites in Plautus, is
so desperate for a feast that he’ll take on any task, no matter how
challenging or humiliating.
One obvious point we can make here is that the comedic version of
Curculio—the glutton—veils a darker real-world anxiety. Food
insecurity, hunger, and malnutrition are simple facts of life for non-
elites in the ancient Mediterranean. In Athens, in Rome, and across the
ancient world, many people couldn’t consistently know how or when
they’d have their next meal. (Don’t think it’s so different now: in the city
where I live, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, almost one in five people
experience food insecurity, and almost one in four children do.) In the
City of Rome at the time of Plautus, thousands of people, both citizens
and non-citizens, lived in poverty, and during food-shortage crises (as
during wartime) they could be dependent on government distributions
of imported grain. Behind the mask of the parasite lies a figure familiar
to Plautus’ audience, someone driven by the specter of starvation to
undesirable labor for a well-off family.
Connected to this subtext is the Roman practice of patron-client
relations. Wealthy Roman citizen men would act as a patron for
poor Roman citizen men—they’d provide food, money, and legal
representation. In exchange, the poor men would serve as clients
subservient to their patron, who might require them to run errands, or
vote the way the patron wants, or join the patron’s gang to intimidate or
beat up clients of a rival bigwig. It seems like Curculio is Phaedromus’
client, and what Curculio does at Phaedromus’ behest, particularly
disguising himself as a freedperson to trick Lyco and Cappadox, marks
122 Plautus: Curculio

Curculio’s low social status in a way neither he nor the audience can
forget.

Poverty and the Roman underclass

Curculio plays the part of Summanus and so is of low status: both of these
traits are ones he shares in common with the actor portraying him on
stage. The actor was likely enslaved, and while Curculio is free, Phaedromus
talks about ordering him around almost as if Curculio is enslaved by him
(“I’ve sent my hanger-on to Caria to beg my buddy for a cash loan,” 67–8).
The audience also learns that Curculio is poor from how he talks about
his paycheck-to-paycheck livelihood: “I’ve got nothing to my name,
’cause what I had I used up real quick” (600). When Curculio tells
Phaedromus that they’ll be forging documents using Therapontigonus’
stolen ring (“I’ll tell you how to write,” 370), the way he phrases it
suggests that he himself cannot write (Chapter 5). Curculio is, like a large
proportion of non-elite people living in Plautus’ Rome, illiterate.
Cappadox the sex-trafficker, Lyco the banker, and the unnamed
Cook are all involved in professions that bourgeois Roman citizens
scorn. Sex-trafficking, though legal, was universally reviled by the
Roman elite—even as they made ample use of the sex-labor that such
trafficking made possible—and sex-trade was often left to non-citizens
to handle. Cappadox’ name suggests that he is not Roman but from
Cappadocia.
Wealthy Romans, like aristocrats in many times and cultures, held
moneychanging and banking in disdain, even as they were often
necessarily dependent upon it. Elite Romans tended to say honorable
men spent their time on governing, the military, farming (well,
possessing agricultural forced-labor camps run by enslaved persons),
and intellectual pursuits—not merchantry or money-handling. Lyco,
then, is also on the outs with the hoity-toity in the audience. You can
witness the distaste current in Rome for the two trades in Curculio’s
rants against Cappadox and Lyco for their professions (494–511).
 Curculio and Roman Life 123

The Cook, despite his high opinion of himself, is not some revered
expert, but in essence a hireling. Sometimes in Plautus the cooks are in
fact enslaved characters. In Curculio, the Cook seems to be about on par
with Palinurus, enslaved in Phaedromus’ household, and another
member of the play’s social underclass. Leaena and Planesium round
out the roster, two more people enslaved and consigned to labor, the
one menial and the other sexual.
The only characters not on this list are Phaedromus, Therapontigonus,
and the Choragus—and the last of those three might also be low-status,
tainted by being involved in the theater business, another profession
that Roman elites scorned. With Curculio, Plautus has decided to present
a play featuring the lower classes, in contrast to the focus on well-to-do
citizen families in the Greek comedies he adapts. Without Phaedromus’
parents around to worry about his moral development, the marriage at
the end is kind of a surprise, and the play remains mostly focused on
trafficking Planesium, with all the hijinx and wrangling it entails.
Putting Rome’s (or Epidaurus’) underclass onto center stage allows
Plautus to shine a spotlight on the shady parts of Roman society, the
unseemly and oppressed underbelly that the upper echelons exploit to
maintain their own comfort and privilege. This take is confirmed by the
speech of the Choragus, who links Plautus’ theatrical exposé of the
Roman down-below with a revelatory tour through the exact public
space in which the audience has gathered to watch the play. I’m not
suggesting that Plautus is calling for a Marxist revolution, but he is, I
believe, confronting elites in his audience with depictions of social
realities that many would rather ignore. At the same time, he’s giving
onstage representation to people who perhaps wouldn’t often see
themselves in public works or public art.

Religious practices

Viewers of Curculio are reminded of the performance context of a

religious festival by the mention of the Dionysia, another religious
124 Plautus: Curculio

festival featuring theatrical performances, in Planesium’s tale of being

kidnapped (644/645). Outside the play, the context is one of religious
observance and celebration, and the public buildings of the Forum
that surround the performance space include shrines and temples
(such as the Temple of Castor, name-checked by the Choragus, 481).
Within the play, too, much religious activity takes place, more so than
in most comedies by Plautus or his later contemporary Terence. The
ritual and theological elements of Curculio are not always mere
jokes. By focusing on what this play says about religion, we can examine
some forms of individual, personal religious experience apart from the
public and state religions that are well-documented in other ancient
sources.
The religious theme begins even before Palinurus and Phaedromus
first walk on stage, because the set includes a stage door representing
the entrance to a shrine of Aesculapius the healing god (mentioned at
14, 204, 699), and an altar to Venus, goddess of love, in front of Cappadox’
door (71). Aesculapius’ shrine door would probably be decorated with
symbols of his worship, so it would clearly be his site. He’s the right
choice for a play set in Epidaurus, most famous in antiquity for its
sanctuary of Asklepios. The onstage shrine, a single “building” within
the fictional world of the theater, is probably not meant to be the giant
temple complex in Epidaurus where Romans and Greeks and others of
Plautus’ time could go for a one-stop medico-religious resort. Instead,
this is meant to represent an average street in Epidaurus, almost like the
whole city is an Aesculapius theme park.
Curculio isn’t a medical story, though, it’s a “love” story, at least in part
(Chapter 2). Besides the altar to Venus, theater-goers hear at the very
beginning of the play a mention of her plus Cupido and Amor, “desire”
and “love,” two divinities associated with Venus. (The Romans liked to
take abstract concepts and make divine personifications of them—gods
and goddesses embodying the ideas.) The early scene where Phaedromus
and Palinurus encounter Leaena and Planesium is filled with Venereal
moments, including Leaena’s offering of a libation to Venus (125–7), a
legal/religious erotic metaphor of “the summons of Venus” (162), two
 Curculio and Roman Life 125

references to the peruigilium Veneris (an all-night vigil in honor of

Venus: 181, 196), and a reference to Planesium as “my Venus” by
Phaedromus (192). Note also this Venus-involved joke-off between
Palinurus and Phaedromus (72–4):

Phaedromus I’ve vowed I’ll provide Venus’ breakfast.

Palinurus Hmm? You’re gonna feed yourself to Venus for
breakfast?
Phaedromus Me, you, and [gesturing to audience] all these people
here.
Palinurus Then you’ve got a verve for Venus to vomit.

After this scene, Venus fades into the background. But her altar remains
on stage through the end of the play. And the Choragus, near the
start of his tour of the Forum, directs the audience’s attention to
the nearby shrine of Venus Cloacina (471), purifier of Rome’s water
system.

Religious ritual
The back-and-forth between Venus and Aesculapius involves religious
ritual. Greek and Roman religion was less wrapped up in concerns of
orthodoxy—whether you have the “correct” beliefs, like that Jesus is
your lord and savior—and more about orthopraxy, doing the right
practices in the right way. What made someone a member of the
religious community was not whether they were a believer, but whether
they were a practitioner. In Curculio, Venus receives ritual offerings
from Phaedromus (71–4) and Leaena (125–7). Leaena herself receives
a sort-of libation from Phaedromus (80–1 and 92), and she parodies
libations when she pours water on the hinge of Cappadox’ door to keep
it from creaking (160). The purpose of all these offerings is to propitiate
their divine (or mortal-treated-like-divine, or door-treated-like-divine)
recipients, to make the recipients favorable to the person making the
offering. Phaedromus needs to feel like Venus is on his side if he’s going
to achieve erotic success—but, more pragmatically, he also needs
126 Plautus: Curculio

Leaena on his side if he wants a chance to see Planesium. His offering to

Leaena is successful not only because she helps Phaedromus out but
also because she says that, for her, the wine is like incense (stacta, 102),
another standard ritual offering in ancient Greece and Rome.
When it comes to Aesculapius, the main ritual event is “incubation”:
spending the night sleeping in his shrine in hopes of being healed, or of
receiving a propitious dream that will show the path to healing. This is
precisely what Cappadox the unwell sex-trafficker is doing on the night
the play begins (61–2). He does obtain a dream from his incubation,
and then seeks out another ritual, a dream-interpretation (coniectura,
245–50, 253–73).
Later in the play, when Lyco first appears on stage, before he even
speaks a word of dialogue, he does a formal ritual greeting (salutatio) of
Aesculapius at the entrance to the shrine (389–90). Curculio, who spots
him doing it, says his head is covered (389). This is not incidental detail,
but a key component of Roman ritual practice: when Romans were
engaged in religious rites, they covered their heads. The phrase, “with
head covered,” is used twice earlier in Curculio, during the title
character’s first monologue, in a rant about Greeks (288, 293). In that
context, Curculio may simply be saying the Greeks look shady because
they are trying to keep their faces hidden. More likely, he could be
hitting the Greeks for being too eager to do religion all the time, or
being ostentatious about it when they do it.
The Choragus makes mention of a particular ritual official in his
tour of the Forum: a haruspex (483). The haruspices were Etruscan
experts who practiced haruspicy, the inspection of entrails. Someone
undertaking an animal sacrifice could hire a haruspex to inspect the
liver and other internal organs of the sacrificial victim after it was
slaughtered. The haruspex would identify any special markings or
irregularities, and interpret their religious or prophetic significance. In
Curculio, the haruspex is one of the hirelings crowding the Velabrum in
the Etruscan Quarter. Haruspicy is a job the Romans outsource to
Etruscans, because they have a tradition of expertise in this sort of
religious ritual.
 Curculio and Roman Life 127

Gods
Romans—and Greeks, too—were totally okay with adding new gods to
their pantheon. When Romans were conquering a new town or in times
of crisis, they might import a foreign deity to signify their victory or
salvation. So, it’s fun and noteworthy, but not sacrilegious, when
characters in Plautus compare themselves or other people to gods.
Phaedromus, when he sees Planesium on his nighttime visit, wastes no
time in calling himself and then her divine: “I’m a god . . . what have you
ever seen or ever will that’s more godlike [than her]?” (167–8). Curculio
later calls Phaedromus his Genius, “guardian spirit” (301), and
Phaedromus in turn calls Planesium his Genius (628); Phaedromus
calls Curculio his Opportunitas (305), a divine personification sort of
like “Mr. Right Time, Right Place.” The name Curculio chooses for
himself, Summanus, was the name of a Roman god, but one not well
understood nowadays and not even by some Romans of later periods.
He might be the god of nighttime thunder—and, if so, that makes for a
good namesake for a trickster who wreaks havoc under cover.
Characters also associate themselves with the divine through patron
deities. Liber, the Roman god of wine, is an obvious choice for Leaena,
and he’s mentioned twice in connection with her (99, 116). Curculio
refers to Hercules as his “nurse” (nutrix, 358)—a great patron for Curculio,
because Hercules had a huge appetite, especially in Greek comedy, and
possibly some cross-gender humor, since nutrix is a feminine noun.
Planesium calls upon the divine personification of her loyalty to her
family, her Pietas (639–40), when she is finally reunited with
Therapontigonus. Behind the jokes and the drama is evidence for people
feeling personal connections to individual gods in their daily lives.

Language
Religious language in Curculio takes the form of oaths, curses, a vow, a
prayer, an invocation, a blessing, and some words peculiar to Roman
religion. By paying attention to how Plautus uses religious language, we
can glean a sense of how the denizens of Rome in his time likely talked
128 Plautus: Curculio

about religion, in ways both serious and playful, both familiar and
foreign to our own societies’ conversational uses of religious concepts
and terminology.
The gods figure mundanely into the everyday speech of Plautine
comedy, in oaths like “for Pete’s sake” or “goddammit,” with almost
content-less emphasis. In Plautus, three common oaths involve gods:

pol/edepol (Pollux, demigod, twin of Castor)

castor/ecastor (Castor, demigod, twin of Pollux)
hercle/hercule/mehercle/mehercule (Hercules)

The first is used by both men and women characters, the second only by
women, and the third only by men. Surprisingly, neither of the women
characters of Curculio, neither Leaena nor Planesium, uses castor, even
though the Choragus will mention the Temple of Castor looming over
the Forum, where the play is being performed. Leaena uses pol once
(135), and Planesium doesn’t swear at all. All of the men characters do
swear, with the exception of the Cook (a total of 20 uses of hercle and 9
of edepol across the play).
Oaths—ones that are much more deliberate than the default edepol
or mehercle so common in comedy, and represent a strong invocation of
divine authority for a particular statement—can be used to express
surprise, shock, or outrage, such as when Palinurus, catching sight of
Curculio in the distance ahead of his first appearance, shouts “by the
immortal gods!” (pro di immortales, 274). At the end of the play, as
Cappadox is seized by Therapontigonus, the sex-trafficker appeals to
“the trustworthiness of the gods and mortals” (pro deum atque hominum
fidem!, 694). With these words, Cappadox protests the due-process
violation that Therapontigonus is committing, since he has not formally
summoned Cappadox to court. The surprise reunion between sister
and brother prompts an identical oath from each, Planesium at the start
of the recognition scene and Therapontigonus at its end (“by Jupiter!,”
pro Iuppiter: 638, 655).
Oaths also can help intensify claims that characters make.
Phaedromus does this twice, early in the play. First, he protests to
 Curculio and Roman Life 129

Palinurus that, contrary to Palinurus’ fears, his love object Planesium is

not a marriageable or married citizen woman: “and may Jupiter over
there never allow me!” (27). Phaedromus’ “over there” may indicate that
the actor playing Phaedromus is gesturing beyond the stage in the
direction of the Temple of Jupiter, keeper of oaths, on the nearby
Capitoline Hill. Later, promising to Planesium that he will somehow
purchase Planesium’s freedom, Phaedromus shows he’s serious by
saying “so help me Venus” (208). This is a fitting divinity for Phaedromus
to appeal to, given that he’s making an erotic promise as part of an erotic
storyline while standing near an altar consecrated to Venus.
The flipside of oaths is curses, four of which appear in Curculio.
When Palinurus defeats him in a bout of banter, Phaedromus says the
equivalent of “go to hell”: “may the gods do you ill” (130). Palinurus does
something similar when Curculio out-banters him (“may Jupiter and
the rest of the gods destroy you!,” 317), and Phaedromus repeats
Palinurus almost exactly to curse Therapontigonus for not complying
with his legal summons (622). Once Cappadox discovers that
Phaedromus was not a neutral party at the time he offered to serve as
arbiter between Cappadox and Therapontigonus, the sex-trafficker
hurls another imprecation of this sort against Phaedromus (720). When
men in this play are bested, either in verbal jousts or legal wrangling,
their last resort is to hope the gods will damn their opponents.
The nighttime sequence at the opening of Curculio is a hotbed for
religious speech. Palinurus encourages Phaedromus to greet the gods
formally (70). Phaedromus, talking about offerings to Venus (71–4) and
making a libation of wine to summon Leaena (76–87), utters a prayer
not to a god but to Cappadox’ doors: “go on, drink, sacred doors, drink
and become ready and favorable for me” (88–9). Once Leaena goes to
fetch Planesium, Phaedromus makes a vow to her. A vow is the ritual
promise of an offering to a divinity, in thanksgiving for a boon hoped to
be granted by that deity. Phaedromus makes his with a jokey twist
(140–40b):

If you uphold your end of the bargain with me, I’ll build you a wine-y
statue rather than a gold one, to be a monument to your gullet.
130 Plautus: Curculio

Instead of the usual gold-standard offering—the sort that

Therapontigonus would want for himself, according to Curculio (439–
41)—Phaedromus figures he’s found something more up Leaena’s
alcoholic alley. Phaedromus also sings a song to the bolts on Cappadox’
door (147–55; Chapter 4). It is a ritual invocation, with flavors of both
prayer and magical incantation. At the moment Planesium and
Therapontigonus recognize one another as long-lost siblings,
Phaedromus confers his blessing upon them: “I want the gods to make
sure this turns out well for y’all” (658–9). Other than Cappadox himself,
Phaedromus is the most religiously oriented character in the play.
Religion inflects the dialogue of Plautus’ characters in less-overt ways,
too. When Lyco makes a random guess that Curculio/“Summanus” lost
his eye from a stray ember kicked up while cooking, Curculio notes in an
aside, “this guy’s a prophet, he predicts the future—’cause those’re the
kinds of catapults that launch at me most frequently” (397–8). The word
I’ve translated as “prophet,” superstitiosus, literally means, “full-of-awe-
inspiring-wonder-as-if-caused-by-divine power.” The religiously tinged
idea in these lines matches something like “mindreader” in modern
colloquial English. Along the same lines, Lyco and Therapontigonus use
religious imagery in their fight later on in the play (537–9):

Lyco Goddamn, I’m not making you an offering of some run-of-the-

mill misfortune, but the same stuff I usually offer somebody I don’t
owe nothing.
Therapontigonus Don’t get all fierce with me and don’t imagine I’m
going to get on my knees and beg.

Lyco uses a word for religious offerings (macto, mactare) that has come
to mean simply “to present,” and Therapontigonus responds with a verb
about begging (supplicare) that derives from a ritual of formally
entreating a god or a mortal for help.
The best use of this sort of language in Curculio, I’d say, is how
Curculio himself says he responded when the soldier invited him to
dinner during his overseas trip. “It was a matter of religious scruples, I
was unwilling to refuse” (350). As a gluttonous parasite, it is a question
 Curculio and Roman Life 131

of piety and religious obligation for Curculio to take a free meal always
and forever. This is a hilarious bit of playing around with Roman
religious customs. It’s a much less serious form of religious scruples,
religio, than what Curculio’s adversary Cappadox displays throughout
the play.

A pious sex-trafficker?
The most religious character in Curculio is also the most reviled, the
non-citizen sex-trafficker Cappadox. (Lyco the banker is similarly reviled
yet pious, performing a salutatio of Aesculapius with head covered at
389–90.) Cappadox is unique among surviving instances of his stock
type in Greek and Roman comedy, not only for his ritual activity but also
for his comparatively substantial respect for laws, oaths, and Planesium.
Sex-traffickers in other Plautine plays (Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus,
Rudens) are generally sacrilegious or blasphemous or indifferent to
divine matters. Sex-traffickers in Plautus are likewise fraudulent and
oathbreaking by default. But not Cappadox, who seems committed to
the legal promises he has made (490–4) and expresses reluctance to
commit perjury (“what about the fact that I swore an oath?,” 458).
Before the sex-trafficker even appears on stage, Phaedromus
mentions that he “is sick and doing an incubation ritual in the shrine of
Aesculapius” (61–2), and spectators learn that the onstage altar belongs
not to the shrine, but to Cappadox himself. In his first appearance,
Cappadox indeed exits from the shrine, upset about receiving
unfavorable omens from Aesculapius (216–18). He complains
extensively about his illness (219–22). He then asks Palinurus for a
coniectura, a dream-interpretation (245–50). After Palinurus passes
him off to the Cook, he shares his dream (260–3), eagerly listens to the
Cook’s interpretation (270–2), and then, in accordance with the Cook’s
recommendation, heads off to offer renewed prayer to the god (273).
When Cappadox re-enters a couple hundred lines later, he makes no
mention of his illness, and instead happily greets Lyco with a
conventional, yet religiously tinged, hello (“may the gods love you,”
132 Plautus: Curculio

455). I think that Cappadox is feeling less sick by this point, and that the
actor playing him may have changed costuming while back stage to
appear less greenish and less bloated. Once Cappadox has transferred
Planesium over to Phaedromus’ house, the sex-trafficker heads back
into the shrine to offer sacrifice: “since I’ve handled this business well, I
want to make an offering in the shrine over here. . . . Now I’ll turn my
attention to sacrifice” (527 and 532).
Cappadox returns not much later with talk of successfully completing
his sacrifice (557–8). When Therapontigonus and Curculio accost him
at the end of the play, he calls upon the gods for protection (694) and
invokes them in his curse of Phaedromus for not being an impartial
arbiter (720). Cappadox talks religion in every scene he’s in. He spends
more time inside the shrine of Aesculapius than everywhere else
combined, including on stage and in his own house. Out of his seven
total entrances or exits in the whole play, five are motivated by religious
observances.
What are we to make of this pious sex-trafficker? I see a direct
connection between Cappadox’ religiosity and his treatment of
Planesium. When handing her over to Curculio, Cappadox says, “please
take good care of her. I raised her well and in chastity at my house”
(517–18). His expression of care for Planesium goes beyond a peddler
making sure his merchandise is delivered intact. Planesium herself
later echoes Cappadox verbatim (698), confirming the truth of his
assertion. Therapontigonus’ response to his sister’s statement is
dismissive (698–700):

It’s not like he [treated you kindly] willingly—you can thank Aesculapius
here for your chastity, ’cause if that guy’d been healthier, he’d’ve long
since sold you off wherever he could.

Of course, the person Cappadox would have sold her to is the soldier
himself. The fact is that Cappadox didn’t sell her to just anybody, and didn’t
put her into the brothel or the streets just as soon as he could. That’s as it
must be, since Planesium’s chastity is an essential precondition for her to
be eligible for marriage once she’s been identified as a freeborn citizen.
 Curculio and Roman Life 133

The pious portrayal of Cappadox works in two directions at once.

First, it humanizes him. Spectators see him doing something familiar
from their own lives, something fundamental to their own societies and
worldviews. This makes him less of a supervillain, more of a nuanced
personality. At the same time, his religious activity makes things a little
grimmer for the citizens in the crowd. They see him doing something
familiar from their own lives, something fundamental to their own
societies and worldviews. Cappadox is a nasty reminder that, in the
Rome of Plautus, just as in his Epidaurus, some of the worst-dealing
people are always to be found nearby, with more of a place in the
physical and social and spiritual life of the City than the locals might
like to admit.

The world that Plautus lived in shapes and is revealed by the world he
creates on stage. Some of the most unsavory and gloomiest aspects of
life in Rome pop up in Curculio, unexpectedly or otherwise. The
traumas and horrors of enslavement, sex-labor, economic oppression,
and poverty lurk behind this comedy of deception, desire, and family
reunion. At the same time, as we examine the role of religion and ritual
in the play, we uncover a portrait of a vibrant religious life day to day in
the ancient Mediterranean, for the entire cross section of society, not
just the elites.
It is my hope that over the past seven chapters you have gained a
keen sense of what it might have been like to watch Plautus’ Curculio:
not only particulars of performance and wonders of the spectacle,
hilarious action and ridiculous characters and clever plotting and
subplotting, but also the experience of watching Curculio in Plautus’
Rome, a wild and wooly and dirty and dreadful and exciting and
upsetting City that—even if not truly Eternal—still claims a slice of
immortality from its place in Plautine theater, a literary time capsule
and time warp between two millennia ago and today. The last chapter
will explore the time warp of Plautus’ Curculio itself: how it survived
from his day to ours, and how it has been reworked, revisited, and
reimagined over the twenty-two centuries since it was written.
134
 9

Curculio after Plautus

Well, dear reader, we’re nearly at the end of our time together. For the
past eight chapters we’ve been living in early second-century bce
Rome. In this chapter, we begin by hovering around the time of Plautus
himself, to explore what the immediate afterlife of Curculio might
have been after its first performance. Then we travel the timeline
between Plautus’ day and the advent of the printing press in Europe.
Finally, we switch gears to observe how Curculio has been performed,
adapted, and reimagined in the modern world, from the Renaissance to
2019.

How plays like Curculio were produced

in the time of Plautus

The religious festivals at which Plautus’ plays were performed were

often organized by aediles, magistrates who had to arrange and pay for
the events at their own expense. The aedile would be the one who hired
Plautus to write a play, and the aedile would hire the acting troupe to
perform it. The troupe might have been Plautus’, in which case the aedile
would just have to hire Plautus and he’d take care of the rest. Another
important person was the choragus (Chapter 7), who had a collection
of costumes and props available to lend to the troupe, and could
probably be persuaded to purchase new ones when needed for a special
purpose or a new play.
We can uncover a small economy of play production, all simply from
the text of Plautus itself. It was a play, so it required actors, costumes,
props, a stage. The stage wasn’t permanent and so had to be constructed—

135
136 Plautus: Curculio

work for carpenters and painters. Props and costumes had to be made
by somebody, too. Let’s not forget the musical accompanist, the tibicen.
Some or all of these laborers were enslaved, and the benefits of their
labor and skill in this theatrical economy would accrue not to the
people doing the labor but to the people who enslaved them.
Rome was likely where Plautus premiered his plays, but Rome wasn’t
Broadway: plays didn’t happen all year ’round, even though festivals
were pretty frequent. The actors would need to do something for work
between big shows at Rome—and if the actors were enslaved, the troupe
owner would want to be profiting off of them all year long. Meanwhile,
Italy at the time of Plautus was full of nearby towns with Roman citizens
and Italian allies who spoke Latin, the language of Plautus’ plays. So, you
should imagine that, after the premiere in Rome, the troupe would take
the show on the road. A play like Curculio is a great traveling show. At
each stop, the actor playing the Choragus could swap out the Roman
references for local shout-outs. The troupe might plug its play into local
festivals or might just set up shop and perform for as long as it seemed
like people would pay.

Early receptions of Curculio

Evidence exists for the popularity of theater, both tragedy and comedy,
across time and space in the ancient Mediterranean. What about
Curculio? Was it a critical success and were people talking about it for
weeks afterward? There’s no way to know. No performance records
survive, if any were ever even kept. No reviews by theater critics to tell
us what elites thought, either. The best we can do for any of Plautus’
plays is look for evidence of reperformance in the scripts themselves,
and pay attention to references to Plautus in later authors. The prologue
of Plautus’ Casina, for example, makes clear that the text you can read
today is from a revival of the play after Plautus’ death. The later Roman
author Cicero, meanwhile, claims (De Senectute 50) that Plautus himself
in his old age most enjoyed Truculentus and Pseudolus; and Cicero’s
 Curculio after Plautus 137

contemporary Varro, Plautus’ biggest fan ever, alludes to situations from

Plautus’ Amphitruo and Epidicus in his satire “Bimarcus.”
The most important early reception of Plautus’ Curculio is another
Roman comedy, Terence’s Phormio, a generation after Plautus, and
earlier than Cicero or Varro. The title character of Terence’s play is, like
Curculio, a parasite, and is, like Curculio, the play’s star trickster. The
prologue of Phormio explains, “the guy who’ll play the central role is
Phormio the parasite, who’ll be mostly responsible for what happens”
(27–8). This description of the play might prompt regular viewers of
Roman comedy to think about Curculio.
Terence’s Phormio echoes Plautus’ Curculio on a couple different
levels, from plot to character to specific theatrical moments. Young
lover boy has fallen for a girl enslaved to a sex-trafficker, but doesn’t
have the cash to pay for her, and his father’s not around, so the parasite
comes up with a scheme to make it happen, while the enslaved attendant
fails to play the trickster role. Am I describing the plot of Curculio or of
Phormio? Both, actually. A key twist in Terence is that dad comes home
partway through the play, complicating things further for Phormio.
Phormio, like Curculio, ends up involved in some legal wrangling
(Phormio 125–34). In Phormio, a man named Geta—like Palinurus in
Curculio—is enslaved in the young lover boy’s household, tries and fails
to be the callidus (for instance, he needs Phormio’s help to swindle cash
from dad to purchase the beloved sex-laborer, 560), and is an ineffectual
paedagogus (babysitter) for the young men in his care. Like Curculio
himself, Geta willingly plays the role of enslaved errand-runner (seruus
currens) to share bad news with the lover boy (177–230, reprised at
844–5).
When it comes to particular moments, the discussion in Phormio of
how the young man can’t secure a loan to pay for his girl (301–3) might
remind us of a similar plot point in Curculio (329–34; or maybe a
similar moment in Plautus’ Pseudolus 80–6, 295–305). Elsewhere, when
the lover boy is making an impassioned plea to the sex-trafficker, he
says to him, “in my eyes, you’re a relative, you’re a parent, you’re an ally,
you’re—” (497), at which point the sex-trafficker interrupts to shut him
138 Plautus: Curculio

up. This sounds like it might be modeled on how Leaena in Curculio

addresses her wine: “in my eyes, you’re incense, you’re cinnamon, you’re
roses, you’re saffron and another-kind-of-cinnamon, you’re fenugreek”
(103–4). Finally, towards the end of Phormio, the title character falls
into a scuffle with lover boy’s dad, and when dad instructs his enslaved
henchmen to attack Phormio, the parasite says, “why don’t you carve
out my eye?” (989). This is a very specific injury to invoke, and I think
Terence is reminding us of Curculio’s stint as the one-eyed Summanus
(starting at 371). It’s a metatheatrical wink (heh) at the Plautine model
for Phormio and for Phormio.
From Terence we can move ahead to the time of Cicero and Varro,
and look at the most famous poetry from the Late Republic, the
countercultural erotic lyric and attack-poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus
(84–54 bce ). Christopher B. Polt argues that Catullus finds in Curculio,
and in Plautine parasites more generally, a model for subverting elite
Roman sensibilities about social norms. In the speech of the Choragus,
meanwhile, it’s possible to find keywords for Catullus’ own poetic
values: “charming” (lepidus), “trifles” (nugae), and wit (sal, or rather the
Greek cognate halophanta in the Choragus’ speech). But I think that
the connection goes deeper, and our play specifically is influential in
the creation of the witty, wily, misbehaved “Catullus” character of
Catullus’ poetry—because Curculio, uniquely of Plautus’ surviving
plays, gives us a clever character who is a citizen, unlike the more
common enslaved tricksters or clever non-citizen sex-laborers.

How Curculio got from ancient Rome

to your bookshelf

The actors who performed the plays of Plautus were most likely illiterate,
and had to learn their lines and songs by ear, from Plautus himself or
else someone involved in the production who could transmit Plautus’
writing and musical composition to them. This tells us that the text of
Curculio as we can read it today probably began life not as a rehearsal
 Curculio after Plautus 139

script for the actors but as some kind of a performance transcript, a

record of how the play turned out. Additional evidence for this
hypothesis comes from occasional spots in Plautine comedies where a
joke is repeated or a routine of funny business goes on disproportionately
long—signs of actors improvising material to add onto the play as
Plautus wrote it, or extending in performance a bit that went over
particularly well.
Plautus was popular enough in his own time that at least some
Romans elite enough to be literate wanted copies of his comedies to read
at their leisure. Terence probably had access to a text of Curculio when
he was writing his own Phormio. Printing presses and publishing houses
didn’t exist in ancient Rome, and every text—literary or bureaucratic,
important or forgettable, highbrow or vulgar—had to be written down
by hand (often by enslaved scribes). Literate Plautus fans wanting to
read Curculio might buy a copy, or instead borrow one from a friend and
make a copy of it. We can talk about the works of Plautus (or of any
other Greek or Roman author) being not published but circulated.
This is basically the story of the survival of Curculio in its first
hundred or so years. People wanted to read it, so they would find copies
of it and buy them or bootleg them. If Curculio hadn’t been popular
enough to stimulate such behavior, it wouldn’t have had enough of a
copying tradition to survive into the modern world.

The first Plautus director’s cut

The first big milestone in the history of the text of Curculio is the Noah’s
Ark moment for Plautine comedy. A Roman named Marcus Terentius
Varro Reatinus (116–27 bce ) was Plautus’ biggest fanboy. Varro was a
scholar, soldier, satirist, and statesman. He liked to figure out where
things came from, especially words (etymology) and religious practices.
His most important work of scholarship on Plautus was a critical
assessment of which plays were truly Plautine and which weren’t. By
Varro’s time, more than a hundred plays were circulating under the
name “Plautus.” He was such a popular comedian that any good comedy
140 Plautus: Curculio

could plausibly be attributed to him, and any bad comedian could put
their work out there by slapping Plautus’ name on it. Varro took it upon
himself to study the supposedly “Plautine” works out there and narrow
them from the hundred-plus circulating under Plautus’ name down to
just the authentic ones.
What Varro actually wrote about this topic didn’t make it into the
modern world, but I can still tell you which plays he said were really
Plautus’ handiwork. They’re the twenty-one (well, twenty-and-a-half)
that have survived the process of copying, over and over again. And
those twenty-one have survived because of Varro’s judgment. He was
“the most learned man in Rome” in his time according to the later
Roman author Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 10.1.95), and his
collection of twenty-one plays, the ones he and everyone he consulted
said for sure were authentically Plautine, became the definitive
collection in Roman culture. The rest were eventually discarded and
lost to the metaphorical Flood of passing centuries.

The manuscript tradition

Varro’s selection of Plautus was copied—and thus Curculio was copied—
by Romans and their enslaved scribes again and again throughout the
centuries of Roman dominance in the Mediterranean world. When
later authors refer or allude to Plautus, that means they’re reading him,
or maybe even seeing revival performances. Varro’s contemporary
Cicero specifically discusses actors playing parts in Plautine plays, and
another contemporary, Catullus, fills his poetry with characters and
scenarios that sound like they’re straight from Plautus. In the generation
after Varro, the poet Horace (65–8 bce ) mentions both Plautus and
Terence. On and on, through the Roman Empire’s rise, reign, and fall.
There’s even a fourth-century ce comedy, Querolus, that adapts a play
of Plautus, with Christian elements added in.
Plautus doesn’t disappear in the Middle Ages, but his influence and
popularity are on the wane. While his texts haven’t disappeared, they
have become fewer and farther between. The manner of transmission
 Curculio after Plautus 141

of Latin literary texts during the Middle Ages is much the same.
Scribes—mostly Catholic monks, working in monasteries—laboriously
copy each text word for word by hand. (Arabic scholars in mediaeval
Baghdad and elsewhere did the same with many translations of classical
texts, especially Greek philosophy, medicine, and science.) This process
of textual transmission across the ages is called the manuscript tradition.
But a lot of the conditions of copying have changed between Rome and
the mediaeval monks. Monks live austere lives, so you should probably
imagine them making copies while sitting on a hard bench in
uncomfortable clothes in an unheated, poorly lit room during the cold
midwinter, with little in the way of hearty food and no caffeine to ease
their toils. In fact, the monks copying these manuscripts occasionally
scribbled complaints in the margin: about illness, hangovers, crummy
writing utensils, and the shoddy work of their peers.
Medieval monks knew Latin, to be sure, but the Latin of the Romans
was not the monks’ native language, and the Latin of Plautus is, even for
Roman-era Latin, archaic, colloquial, and simply wild. So, sackcloth
copyists would have had difficulty understanding what they were
reading, and Plautus’ music and meter would have been totally beyond
most of them. Plautus’ comedies, with their overt sexuality and
polytheism, crossed several moral and religious boundaries for the
poor monks.
Bad working conditions, inadequate Latin skills, and divergent
worldviews took their toll on the text of Plautus during this period.
Unlike the Roman poet Vergil, whose epic Aeneid survives in dozens of
copies from as early as the fourth century, only one copy of Plautus
survives from within a thousand years of Plautus’ own time. That one
(from the fifth century ce ) and the next-oldest-surviving copies are all
plagued with many problems: spelling errors, missing chunks, messed-
up line breaks, additions that aren’t authentically Plautine (bogus bonus
material), garbled passages, and even literal holes in the paper. One play,
Plautus’ Vidularia, was unlucky enough to be last alphabetically in
Varro’s collection, and most of it was lost somewhere along the way,
never to be read again.
142 Plautus: Curculio

Curculio does not survive intact in the oldest, fifth-century

manuscript of Plautus, which was held in an abbey in northern Italy
and did not resurface until 1815. Of the three next-oldest manuscripts,
all from the mediaeval period, Curculio is contained in only one, from
the tenth century. But from that manuscript, a number of copies that
include the text of Curculio survive, among them one from eleventh-
century Italy, two from eleventh-century France, another from twelfth-
century Italy, and one from twelfth-century England. How thin the
thread from which our play dangles.

From manuscript to modern translation

Once Europeans figured out how to do something that Chinese
inventors had introduced centuries earlier—the printing press with
moveable type—the biography of the text of Curculio changed
dramatically. It wasn’t necessary any more to spend long, long hours
writing out a copy of the text by hand, with lots of opportunities
for mistakes along the way. The editio princeps is the first printed—
rather than handwritten—version of Plautus’ plays. The editio princeps
of Plautus was produced by Giorgio Merula in Venice in 1472; printings
of Plautus’ first eight plays alphabetically, including Curculio, seem to
have been made before Merula’s edition, but none of those have
survived. Escaping manuscripts and entering print kickstarted
Plautus’ popularity both among fans of Roman literature and, more
importantly, as a model for authors of comedy in the fifteenth to
twentieth centuries.
By this point, the centuries and centuries of hand copyists had done
their damage to Varro’s collection of Plautine comedy. Printing the
words that appeared in a manuscript wasn’t enough to get close to the
text as Plautus might actually have written it. It entails reflecting on all
potential sources of error in order to realize that the manuscript
tradition alone is insufficient. But eventually scholars started working
on critical editions of Greek and Latin texts, including Plautus. Putting
together a critical edition of a text requires looking at as many
 Curculio after Plautus 143

manuscripts of that text as possible, especially the earliest manuscripts

that still survive. You compare their readings—what they have for each
given word or phrase or line—and try to determine which reading is
best, which reading is most likely to be what the author originally wrote.
You may also make conjectures to replace readings that you think the
manuscripts have messed up, based on your knowledge of Latin, of the
author’s style, and of the sorts of errors that copyists tended to make
over the centuries. You might even try to fill in gaps in the text where
the manuscript tradition has lost something.
A lot of subjective thinking is involved in doing a critical edition, so
one person’s critical edition is never enough. The first critical edition of
Plautus came 80 years after the editio princeps. It was produced in 1552
by Joachim Camerarius in Basel, Switzerland. In the 468 years between
when that came out and when I’m writing this, many scholars have
pored over the manuscripts and the texts, the conjectures of earlier
scholars and the most cutting-edge criticism of Plautus’ style, in order
to try to approximate better what Plautus actually wrote. The most
recent critical edition of Curculio, quoted throughout this book, was
published in 2008 in Italy, the work of Settimio Lanciotti, part of a
multi-decade undertaking by the University of Urbino to produce new
critical editions of each of Plautus’ plays, which as a whole haven’t had a
new one since the early 1900s.
But not everybody knows Latin. Scholars who wanted to bring
Plautus to a wider readership translated his works into vernacular
languages, the languages people actually spoke and read. Since Plautus’
language and themes are so down to earth and colloquial, it’s hard to
evaluate translations of him from times distant from our own, so I won’t
undertake an exhaustive translation history. Suffice it to say that
Curculio isn’t the most-frequently translated play by Plautus, and tends
to be translated anew only when someone’s doing a complete set of all
21 surviving Plautine works. As a result, while the first translation of a
play by Plautus (his Menaechmi) into English appeared in 1595, no
complete English translation of Plautus, including Curculio, was
produced until the 1700s.
144 Plautus: Curculio

The 2006 translation of Curculio by Amy Richlin is the most

adventuresome translation of Curculio I know of in any language. Her
approach to translation emphasizes the immediacy and fleetingness of
the experience of Plautine humor: jokes that land right away, without
explanation, but jokes that keep on coming and don’t wait for you, don’t
last beyond the day, and often won’t age well. Richlin also focuses on
how Plautus shows us the anxieties, oppressions, wartime mindset, and
prejudices of his audience, with its diverse cross section of Roman
society. One illustration of this approach is her translation of the long
list of peoples that Curculio (as “Summanus”) says Therapontigonus
has been conquering (442–6): Persians, Paphlagonians, Cretans, and so
forth become “the Iranians, the Kurds, Tehranians, Arabs, Palestinians,
Jordanians,” and so on. Richlin seeks to translate not just at the level of
words, but at the level of cultures—so she translates real, actual places
that Roman imperialism was sending Roman soldiers in Plautus’ time
with real, actual places that American imperialism has sent American
soldiers and covert operatives in our own era. Similarly, she puts her
Choragus not into the Roman Forum, but in New York City, whose
landmarks are as familiar to American readers as the Forum’s were to
Roman viewers, even if they’re spread across Manhattan rather than
concentrated within the same small part of Rome’s downtown.

How Curculio has been adapted and

performed in the modern world

Curculio on the modern stage has a history that stretches back to the
late 1400s. We begin with Curculio as first performed after Roman
times. Several works from the last five hundred years adapt or reimagine
or allude to or build on Plautus’ Curculio. Finally, I will consider
performances of Curculio from 1490 to 2019. (The initial draft of that
sentence ended with “2020,” but the COVID-19 pandemic cancelled a
performance of Curculio by my students at Wake Forest University
scheduled for April of that year.)
 Curculio after Plautus 145

The earliest recorded performances of Curculio

The first performance of Curculio isn’t documented. Neither are any
others that may have taken place in the ancient Roman world. We have
to jump 1,700 years to find the first one that is. In 1479, a humanist in
Verona by the name of Guarino or Guarini translated Plautus’ Curculio
and Aulularia into Italian and sent it to Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.
Both plays were performed in Ferrara in 1490 and 1503. The translations
are lost, so it’s nearly impossible to say anything about the performances,
other than that the translator described his translation approach to the
Duke as “I force myself to follow the words of the text,” which I take to
mean that he aimed for a close, literal translation, even if it meant the
jokes weren’t quite as funny as they could have been, or the dialogue
didn’t sound quite as colloquial as it would have to Plautus’ audiences.
The next performance of Curculio on record is in 1563, at Jesus
College, Cambridge University, performed in Latin. This was during the
reign of Elizabeth, and, in fact, she saw a performance of another
Plautine play, Aulularia, during her visit to Cambridge in 1564.
Cambridge University and its rival Oxford University have a long
tradition of performing Greek and Roman plays in their original
languages, and Curculio is one of the earliest plays performed at Jesus
College specifically, only two years after the college began staging
ancient plays. It’s the first known performance of Curculio on a college
campus, a popular site for revivals of the play. After the 1563 performance,
the next one of Curculio I could find reference to was in 1981.
Performances that occurred in the meantime have been lost to history.

Literary reboots of Curculio

Even if the recorded early performances of Curculio are few and far
between, plenty of evidence exists for the influence of the play in
another arena: plays that adapt or allude to or draw on Plautus’ comedy.
A good example is the Italian Renaissance-era commedia dell’arte, a
semi-improvisational routine-based comedy with stock characters and
146 Plautus: Curculio

stock plots heavily indebted to Roman comedy. One such stock

character, Ligurio, is, like Curculio himself, a parasite and a trickster, on
par with Plautus’ greatest serui callidi.
But perhaps the earliest reworking of Curculio in the modern world
is, surprisingly, the work of the man who would become Pope Pius II
(reigned 1458–64), Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini. Fourteen
years before ascending to the papacy, Piccolomini wrote a comedy in
Latin, Chrysis (“Goldie”), one of the few works from his pre-pope life he
didn’t burn. In it, he draws heavily on Plautus, imitating or even directly
copying lines or whole passages at once. Piccolomini uses Curculio in
particular for the winetastic cameo by Leaena, ported into his play for
the drunken old woman Canthara, whose name refers to a large ancient
Greek drinking vessel. Similar imitations and borrowings crop up in
Annularia (“The Play about the Ring”) and Bophilaria (“The Play about
the Cowherd”), two Latin comedies published in 1505 by Egidio Gallo,
an Italian humanist from Rome.
Similarly, A Very Woman, or The Prince of Tarent, an English
tragicomedy written by Philip Massinger and John Fletcher (published
1655, probably written between 1619 and 1622) has a scene involving a
trail of spilled wine meant to draw out a guardian named Borachia (her
name possibly a reference to “borracha,” a Spanish word for “drunk
woman”?), and all of Borachia’s scenes may be modeled on Curculio.
Ben Jonson, in his 1610 English play The Alchemist, alludes to something
Palinurus says about Leaena. Then, as a wink and a nod to anybody who
caught his Curculio reference, Jonson punningly hints at the play’s title
by writing in the words “corns” and “worm,” because another word for
curculio is “corn-worm.”
For Stephen Gosson, an anti-theater activist in sixteenth-century
England, Curculio functions as a sign of how smart he is: in Schoole of
Abuse (1579), he name-drops our parasite in a passage about how plays
in his own time would filter Plautus to be inoffensive to contemporary
sensibilities. Likewise, while praising the food of England’s inns, even in
poor villages, Fynes Moryson’s 1617 An Itinerary remarks, “if Curculio
of Plautus should see the thatched houses he would fall into a fainting
 Curculio after Plautus 147

of his spirits, but if he should smell the variety of meats his starveling
look would be much cheered.” In George Chapman’s 1602 English
comedy The Gentleman Usher, a character named Sarpego says he once
played the part of Curculio in a performance in Italy—and then he goes
on to put on a costume and do Curculio’s opening lines in Latin!
For the French playwright Molière, Curculio supplies a major
theatrical plot point. Molière’s L’Étourdi ou les Contretemps (“The
Blunderer, or the Counterplots,” 1655) is a comedy generically in the
style of Plautus, with different tricksters interfering with each other’s
schemes. The ultimate resolution is very specific to Curculio, because it
depends on one rival for the beloved turning out to be her long-lost
brother instead. (Molière’s play was directly modeled on Niccolò
Barbieri’s 1629 play L’Innavertito, “The Careless Guy,” and then was
itself the model for Dryden’s hugely successful 1667 play Sir Martin
Mar-all.) About a century earlier, Giovanni Maria Cecchi’s I rivali (“The
Rivals,” uncertain date; Cecchi lived from 1518 to 1587) borrowed the
Cappadox/Planesium/Phaedromus storyline from Curculio, shifting
the sex-trafficker to a low-status innkeeper, and making the young
man’s goal marriage all along. In 1772, the German playwright Jakob
Michael Reinhold Lenz wrote an entire play modeled on Curculio,
which he titled Die Türkensklavin, “The Enslaved Woman from Turkey.”
His approach is to focus on the comic action and plotline, while cutting
out Plautus’ signature banter, metatheatrically self-aware characters,
and clash of styles and statuses.
Jump ahead 200 years and we find the Dutch illustrator Magda van
Tilburg’s graphic novel of Curculio, originally published in 1980 and
republished digitally in color in 2008. The 2008 version, vibrantly garish,
features Latin dialogue with English translation in the margin. The
Choragus scene is cut out, but otherwise the action of every scene is
faithfully represented, while dialogue is abridged and condensed; most
of the jokes are gone, as are some key bits of plot-related information.
Planesium gives off vixen-like, femme-fatale vibes. Lyco, Cappadox, and
Curculio convey fear of Therapontigonus in their arguments with him,
unlike in Plautus. The quality of the whole graphic novel is marred by
148 Plautus: Curculio

the intensely anti-Semitic depiction of Lyco the greedy banker—not a

young man as in Plautus, but an old, somewhat effeminate, balding man
with an unrealistically large nose.

Plautus goes to Broadway, then Hollywood

The biggest moment for Curculio in the twentieth century was A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a musical by Burt Shevelove,
Larry Gelbart, and Stephen Sondheim that premiered on Broadway in
1962 and was made into a feature film in 1966. Funny Thing is a Plautus
mashup, with a lot of the familiar stock types (Pseudolus the enslaved
trickster from Plautus’ Pseudolus; Miles Gloriosus the blowhard soldier,
after Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus) and a blend of stock plots from a few
plays, including Curculio. In the program for the 2004 production by
the National Theatre, Sondheim (who wrote the songs) says that
Shevelove gave him the Loeb Classical Library translations of Plautus,
which include Curculio, to read when they were preparing the musical.
Gelbart’s introduction to the 1991 publication of the script of Funny
Thing doesn’t mention Curculio, but it only mentions two plays of
Plautus, leaving out plays that were unquestionably influential on the
writing of the Broadway show.
The basic plot of Funny Thing is this: lover boy wants enslaved sex-
laborer (miraculously a virgin) from next door, but doesn’t have the
cash, and meanwhile a soldier is on his way to pick her up. Deception
plots and hijinx ensue. Thanks to signet rings—the recognition tokens—
soldier turns out to be enslaved sex-laborer’s long-lost brother. (The
movie version also adds in a chariot chase scene, in a nod to the sword-
and-sandal film genre so popular in the 1950s and 1960s.) Plenty comes
from other Plautine plays, including a supposedly haunted house from
Mostellaria, a horny old dad and cross-gender-disguise subplot from
Casina, and those title characters from Pseudolus and Miles Gloriosus.
But, as with Molière, the recognition scene at the end is specifically,
pointedly Curculio—as is the fact that Funny Thing keeps quiet about
near-miss incest between sister sex-laborer and brother soldier. With
 Curculio after Plautus 149

Curculio in mind, you might even take the musical’s title, A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum, as a description of the monologue
of the Choragus.
Funny Thing was an instant hit, and has been an enduring favorite
for fans of musicals over the past sixty years. It’s been done and redone
all across the globe, translated into other languages, and is a solid choice
for student and professional productions. At the time it was produced,
it was a piece of countercultural resistance. It fused Plautus’ theater of
the lower classes with actors and writers from marginalized groups in
the mid-century United States. It featured Jewish-American actors and
starred Zero Mostel, who had been blacklisted during the Red Scare in
the 1950s. It has loads of camp: a self-aware, over-the-top style of acting
that plays with social norms about sexuality and gender expression. For
the director of the film version, Richard Lester, Funny Thing aimed to
push against Hollywood tropes and stereotypes by showing the dark
side of ancient Rome, with particular attention to enslavement and
oppression (although the movie itself is guilty of exoticized, sexual
depictions of two enslaved sex-laborers of color). Here, too, I think it
draws on Curculio, which sheds similar light on oppressive conditions
in Plautus’ Rome.

Curculio on college campuses

Curculio has turned out to be quite popular to perform on college
campuses over the past few decades. In 1981, a performance was put on
at Wellesley College (in Wellesley, Massachusetts) by students of the
Departments of Greek and Latin. It was performed in Latin, and the
program included lists of “words to listen for,” a guide to Latin-learners
and -enthusiasts as they watched the performance. The program’s cover
featured rings, in a nod to the play’s most important props: one was
labeled, in Latin, “the ring of Curculio the parasite,” the other “the ring
of Therapontigonus the soldier.” Therapontigonus’ ring had a big sword
and an elephant split in half, as described in Plautus’ script (424), plus
the Latin legend “I fight, therefore I am,” while Curculio’s ring had a
150 Plautus: Curculio

depiction of dice and the mottos, “don’t be tricked, do the tricking” and
“I’m hungry, therefore I am.” A decade later, the Rugby School (Rugby,
England) put on its own Latin production of Curculio, in mid-June,
1991. This was early in a series of annual Rugby performances of Plautus
plays in Latin under the direction of Keith Maclennan, with a focus on
staying close to the Latin text but updating the costumes to a roughly
1930s aesthetic.
Most recently, in April 2019, some of my own students at Wake
Forest University put on a 9-minute, heavily adapted version of Curculio
that intentionally drew out some of the awkwardness of the near-miss
incest between Planesium and Therapontigonus, rather than sweeping
it under the rug like Funny Thing did. Meanwhile, 2018 saw a full-scale
production of Curculio, translated into Czech, at Masaryk University in
Brno, Czech Republic. This performance is notable for its introduction
of a new character, Footnote, an outside-the-story, fourth-wall-breaking
figure, who patiently and humorously explains (Figure 9.1) historical
context, untranslatable puns, stock characters, and plot details. She
sometimes argues with characters inside the story, or actors peeking
their heads out from backstage, too. The Czech production was reprised
in October 2019.
The most play Curculio has had in the last hundred years is at the
Virginia Governor’s Latin Academy, a three-week intensive summer
program held each year for the state’s top 45 high-school Latin students,
on a college campus somewhere in the state. The Academy did a
performance specifically of Curculio every year from 1992 through
1999, with reprises in 2005 and 2011–13; at least six different directors
have helmed the productions over the years. The performances were in
Latin, working from the same script each year (Allan G. Gillingham’s
1968 abridgement Plautus for Reading and Production, which cuts out
the Choragus entirely). Minor changes reflected occasional cross-
gender casting (e.g., Palinura instead of Palinurus when played by a
woman), and cuts to bring the runtime down to 45 minutes, plus reduce
the number of lines to memorize. Plenty of bit parts and extras, too, to
accommodate students who didn’t want to act but did want to wear a
 Curculio after Plautus 151

Figure 9.1 “Footnote” breaking the fourth wall in the October 2019 Czech
production of Curculio aneb Darmojed. Photo by Marek Augustin, retrieved
from http://classics.phil.muni.cz/Plautus.

costume and run around (or, in at least one case, tap-dance, and in at
least one other, play the tuba). Starting in 1996, most roles were given
masks and split between two actors, because the performers, not being
trained actors, found memorizing their lines too taxing.
The best documented performances of Curculio have been
productions at St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minnesota). Almost every
year since 1982, the Classics department at St. Olaf has put on a play by
Plautus; in 1995, 2005, and 2016, the play was Curculio, under the
direction of Anne H. Groton. The target audiences are middle and
high school Latin students, as well as some colleges. As a result, the
adaptations are extensive, removing sexual content and alcohol
references—but often retaining enslavement, as fits our twisted
American sensibilities—and inserting more-relatable jokes and
character types. The plays are performed mostly in English, though
some Latin is included, usually with an English translation right after;
over time, the scripts have tended to become shorter, with less Latin.
152 Plautus: Curculio

Music comes in the form of ditties written by Groton herself, sometimes

varying between English and Latin verses, often with the audience
invited to sing along to the chorus. In 2005, the cast was large, so the
Cook role was played by four people, with four “apprentices” added, and
Cappadox was given an entourage of four singing nurses. The 2016
production superimposed an animal theme (specifically, cats and dogs)
onto the play, in order to hold the attention of the youngest members of
the audience.
Finally, for my money, the most influential production of Curculio in
the last century took place at Trent University (in Peterborough,
Canada) in March 1996, under the direction of C. W. Marshall. Working
from a new translation of the play by Peter L. Smith, Marshall attempted
to replicate as best as possible the original performance conditions of
the play, with an impromptu stage outdoors in a heavily trafficked area
on campus. Actors wore masks and improvised, and all roles were
played by just six actors. All characters were represented by half-masks
in the style of renaissance Italian commedia dell’arte, and only Curculio
had a full-face mask, with a long, phallic, proboscis-like nose. Leaena’s
entry song was set to the tune of Strauss’ Blue Danube, and each
character was distinguished not only by their mask but also by
distinctive, recurrent gestures. As for why I rate this production so
important: Marshall tells me that producing Curculio is what prompted
him to write his book, The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman
Comedy—one of the most important books about Plautus (and Terence)
in a generation.

Why Curculio?
The obvious answer to the question is that it’s short. It’s manageable, not
too many lines to memorize, won’t test your audience’s patience. A
utilitarian answer, to be sure. But remember that utilitarian things can
be, you know, useful, and so our play rises to the top when directors are
looking for a quick-and-dirty splash in the Plautine pond. That’s not the
whole story, though.
 Curculio after Plautus 153

Interestingly to me, the answer does not seem to include the speech
of the Choragus—something that we’ve seen is fascinating in and of
itself and also perfect for adaptation. Many of the productions I’ve
surveyed simply cut the monologue and the character out, or replace
them with an unrelated song. For instance, a 2014 Spanish-language
youth community theater production of Curculio (produced by the
Asociación cultural Taetro in Chiclana de la Frontera, Spain; Eufrasio
Jiménez Verdugo and Miguel Ángel Bolaños, directors) cut out the
Choragus scene to make room for a new character: the god Cupid, who
gave an introductory prologue previewing the erotic plot of the play
about to be performed, and delivered a wrap-up monologue added on
after Plautus’ final line. A notable exception is a 2016 student production
at Brigham Young University (BYU), Provo, Utah, newly translated and
directed by Seth Jeppesen, in which the Choragus shows up as a nervous
backstage techie who stalls for time by reading her poem, a series of
rhymes about where you can find students with different majors on
BYU’s campus. Marshall’s 1996 Trent University production similarly
adapted the Choragus’ lines to the campus setting, while the 1981
Wellesley performance seems to have retained the Choragus’ monologue
unchanged.
Curculio, like other plays by Plautus, is a common choice for
performances of plays, in Latin or English or a hybrid, aimed at Latin-
student audiences. This is the case for some of the campus productions
we’ve just encountered, such as St. Olaf ’s; for a 1962 production of
Curculio in adapted Latin at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts;
and a 1998 production by Theater Ludicrum at the Strand Theater in
Dorchester, Massachusetts (newly translated and directed by George
Bisanstrin, original music by Matthew Wulff, with special showings for
Latin students). On the one hand, we could say these didactic
productions of Plautus just boil down to cultural tourism, a fun but
shallow and short-term visit to a foreign place whose worst problems
are swept under the rug for our benefit as viewers and voyeurs. Not just
metaphorical tourism, but actual tourism, too: Curculio has been
performed (Giancarlo Sammartano, director) in the archaeological
154 Plautus: Curculio

sites of ancient Graeco-Roman theaters and amphitheaters at Fiesole in

Italy, Syracuse in Sicily, Carnuntum in Austria, and Mérida in Spain (all
in 1991), and at Segesta and Morgantina, again in Sicily (1993, with
music composed by Stefano Marcucci). On the other hand, Curculio—
with its full cast of stock characters and mashup of typical plotlines—
can be a great introduction to the complexities of Plautine comedy,
Roman humor, and Roman society, as I think this book has shown.
Call me biased, but I think it’s high time for a full-fledged, professional
production of Curculio. Sure, it’s captured some very niche audiences,
but it deserves to break into the theater world more broadly. Curculio is
a tightly constructed tour de force of comedy. Its showcasing of the
underbelly of Roman society practically begs its audiences to examine
their own. And its Choragus prompts us to think about place, space, and
the interactions between the world of comedy and the world of real life
in a way that few plays can manage to do.

Conclusion: A round of applause for Curculio

Curculio sure does have a lot to say for itself, for such a short play. It
draws us immediately into the action with a curious nighttime
procession, and keeps up a fast pace of action and jokes as it runs
through three classic Plautine plots. Along the way, it showcases Plautus’
unrivaled musical technique, demonstrates just how much theater
depends on props, messes around with metatheater and the boundaries
between fiction and reality, and takes a deep dive into the ugly side of
life in Epidaurus and Rome. Curculio does it all in 729 lines of the most
rambunctious Latin you can find.
I’d like to end on a note of wonder. When you grasp a copy of
Curculio in your hands, you’re holding onto a time capsule of funny
business that made people laugh more than twenty centuries ago. If you
read it like I do, then you know it can still make people laugh today. (As
my mom said to me when we were going over edits of Chapter 2, “It just
feels so current!”) Curculio is a connection through time and space, a
 Curculio after Plautus 155

link across the ages between cultures that are very foreign to one
another—after all, what would Plautus have to say about NASCAR or
cat memes?—but that still share some common ground for what tickles
our funny bones. Curculio is a time traveler, journeying two millennia
through untold perils and countless hands to make us chuckle. And I
expect Curculio will, if climate chaos doesn’t first turn our planet to ash,
still be at it two millennia from now.
156
 Key Terms and Definitions

alliteration A stylistic device involving repetition of consonants,

especially at beginnings of words.
blocking Stuff that happens during a play that isn’t dialogue or
scenery: actions that actors take, from movement to gesture to use
of props to facial expressions.
blocking character An antagonist: someone who prevents the play’s
main character from accomplishing their goals.
breaking the fourth wall When a character in a play or TV show or
movie acknowledges the existence of the audience, and thus
metatheatrically shatters the spectators’ illusion that they are
eavesdropping unnoticed.
cantica Rhythmically elaborate songs (showstoppers) in comedies of
Plautus.
choragus A person contracted to provide costumes (and possibly
build the stage) for theatrical performances; in Curculio, a
surprising and showstopping onstage character.
elision In Latin poetry, elimination of the final syllable of a word; it
happens when the word ends in a vowel (or vowel + M) and the
following word begins with a vowel (or H + vowel). Sort of like
contractions in English (don’t, wouldn’t, I’d’ve, wanna, imma).
fabulae palliatae The subgenre of Roman comedy that Plautus writes.
fourth wall See breaking the fourth wall.
Greek New Comedy The genre of theater that Plautus translates and
adapts.
iambic senarius The second most common pattern of poetic line
rhythms in Plautus; the only line rhythm that was spoken, without
accompaniment by the tibicen.
labeling function of props When props are used to denote a
character (e.g., a sword for a soldier) or other aspect of a play (e.g.,
a candle to show it’s nighttime).

157
158 Key Terms and Definitions

libation A religious ritual in ancient Greece and Rome that involved

pouring wine out onto the ground (or atop an altar) in honor of a
deity.
mechanical function of props When props are used to advance the
plot of a play forward, such as when a signet ring is used to forge
documents or certify the identity of a long-lost sibling.
Menander The chief surviving author of Greek New Comedy, and
one of a number of authors whose plays were adapted by both
Plautus and Terence.
meretrix The Latin word for sex-laborer, and a stock type in Roman
comedy.
metatheater When theater talks about theater, or acknowledges that
it is theater, or there’s a play within a play.
parasite A stock character in ancient comedy: glutton, mooch,
hanger-on, brown-noser. Resorts to whatever flattery, trickery,
witticisms, or self-debasement is required for a free meal.
paratragedy Parody of tragedy.
Plautus The reason you’re reading this book. THM’s favorite
comedian.
seruus callidus A stock character in Plautus’ comedy: an enslaved
trickster, often star of the show.
sex-laborer (1) A free person who has sex for money, whether by
choice (a “sex-worker”) or, as in the ancient Greek and Roman
worlds, because of coercive economic conditions. (2) An enslaved
person forced to have sex for the profit of the person enslaving
them.
stock character A stereotype or archetype, a familiar personality with
a set of expectations that individual instantiations of the character
will depart from or play around with, like the jock or nerd in
high-school TV shows, or the seruus callidus or parasite in Roman
comedy.
stock plot A stereotypical, routine plot that some works of literature
use as a basis for creative storytelling, with individual twists and
innovations.
 Key Terms and Definitions 159

symbolic function of props When props are used to symbolize

something about a character or play, such as when a soldier’s
extremely oversized (or undersized) sword indicates his self-
importance (or impotence).
Terence Publius Terentius Afer (195–159 bce , maybe?), the second
major surviving playwright of Roman Comedy after Plautus.
tibicen The accompanist in Roman comedy, who played the tibiae, a
pair of double-reed woodwind pipes.
tricolon A stylistic device consisting of a series of three words or
phrases, often increasing in length from first to third.
trochaic septenarius The most common pattern of poetic line
rhythms in Plautus; sung to the accompaniment of the tibicen.
160
 Notes and Recommended Reading

For the Latin text of Plautus’ Curculio, I use the edition of Lanciotti
(2008). All translations are my own. There isn’t a fantastic English
translation of Curculio out there, but the translation of de Melo
(2011) is a mostly reliable guide to what the Latin actually says, and
Richlin (2006) provides a slangy rendering with a focus on how the play
communicates Roman racial prejudices about peoples to the east of
Italy. Wright (1993) offers a Latin text with a commentary in English
aimed at intermediate Latin students.

Chapter 1

For a start on the topic of ancient Greeks and Romans not being white,
see Bond (2017) and McCoskey (2012). For an evocative description of
the messiness of daily life in Rome, see Wiseman (1985: 1–14). Shelton
(1997) furnishes an excellent compilation of ancient sources on Roman
daily life.
A great general reference for the ancient Greek and Roman worlds is
Hornblower, Spawnforth, and Eidinow (2012); I have referred to it here
and there in my description of Roman festivals in this chapter. The idea
that Curculio enters through the crowd belongs to Marshall (2006: 76).
Exactly who the audience was of Plautus’ plays has been the subject
of significant debate among scholars of Roman comedy. I side with
Richlin (2017), who argues for an inclusive cross section of society, with
plenty of material written specifically for enslaved and low-status
spectators.
For an overview of any aspect of Latin literature that’s more detailed
than what I give here for Plautus, consult Conte (1999). For an
introduction to Roman drama, read Moore (2012b); for a deeper dive
into the details of Roman comedy, Duckworth (1952). The most

161
162 Notes and Recommended Reading

important work on what makes Plautus’ adaptations distinct from his

Greek originals is Fraenkel (2007), whose title, Plautine Elements in
Plautus, I allude to in this chapter.
“Dick Bozo Tapdancer”: Damen (2012). Pieczonka (2019) discusses
connections between the Plautine parasite and the Dossennus of
Atellan farce. Plautine comedy’s “Saturnalian spirit”: Segal (1968).
I take the observation about Curculio having almost every stock type
from von Antonsen-Resch (2005: 82). Curculio as a Plautus original:
Lefèvre (1991). The possibility that Plautus has eliminated scenes from
his Greek original: Fantham (1965).

Chapter 2

I discuss the “love” plot in Curculio also at Gellar-Goad (forthcoming a),

in Italian. On Plautus and the marriage plot, see James (2020). An
iMessage chat with Patrick J. Dombrowski gave helpful insight on my
point about the “witness”/“testicle” pun at Curculio 31. On “Pick-Up
Artists” and their misuses of Roman literature for misogynistic
purposes, see Zuckerberg (2018: 89–142). My thinking on near-miss
incest between Planesium and Therapontigonus was shaped by Witzke
(2015b) and Slater (2001). On Plautus, war, and Roman imperialism,
see Leigh (2004) and Burton (2020).

Chapter 3

The animal theme is laid out in brief by Wiles (1991: 137). For the
identification of the scent at 101, I rely on Gitner (2016). Studies of
banking in Curculio have been undertaken by Andreau (1968) and
André (1983), both in French, and Giangreco Passi (1981), in Italian.
Scafuro (1997: 175–80, 429–33, 442–3, 457–8) discusses law in Curculio
(in English!). Stuprum can be committed against married or unmarried
 Notes and Recommended Reading 163

women or against citizen youths of any gender: see Fantham (1991).

The theme of illness is detailed by Philippides (2018). For the urinary
etymology of Palinurus, see Papaioannou (2008/2009).

Chapter 4

The definitive work on music and dance in Roman comedy is Moore

(2012a), along with Marshall (2006: 203–44); much of my discussion
here relies on these two sources. For a user-friendly introduction to
music and meter in Plautus, read Gellar-Goad (2020); for a guide to
Moore’s work on music in Roman comedy, see Gellar-Goad (2014). For
anything having to do with the rhythms of the cantica of Plautus,
consult Questa (1995). On music in Curculio specifically, there’s Ludwig
(1967), if you can read German, and Augello (1983) and Moore (2005),
if you can read Italian, plus a couple of tidbits (in English) in Moore
(1998a: 245, 258–9). To learn how to recite trochaic septenarii without
a lot of hassle, consult Moore (2012–13).
I take the “arc” concept from Marshall (2006: 207–8). All of my
statistics on the frequency of metrical types in Plautus, and descriptions
of the theatrical effects of the different meters, derive from Moore
(2012a). For the scansion of the canticum, I rely on Questa (1995).
The mock-solemnity of bacchiacs and cretics in Curculio is noted
by Moore (2005: 20–1). Ketterer (1986: 196) makes the observation
that Phaedromus’ hymn is the earliest Roman example of the
paraclausithyron. The structural role of the door in this scene’s music is
discussed by Moore (2005: 22).
I learned about the allusion to Sappho at Curculio 178–80 from
Radif (2005). My discussion of dance in Curculio is indebted to Moore
(2012a: 105–34). Habinek (2005: 116–17) argues for Curculio 295 being
about a dance battle, while Richlin (2017: 158 n. 29, 206, 206 n. 3) takes
it as a sexual reference. The observation that ludii at 150 can mean both
“dancer” and “actor” is made by Moore (2012a: 106).
164 Notes and Recommended Reading

Chapter 5

The best discussion of the stagecraft and performance of Roman

comedy is Marshall (2006), aptly titled The Stagecraft and Performance
of Roman Comedy. I learned much of what I know on this topic from
scholars and participants in the 2012 National Endowment for the
Humanities institute, “The Performance of Roman Comedy,” Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, directed by Sharon L. James and Timothy J. Moore.
Cohen (2007) has experimented with mask-making techniques that
would have been possible in ancient Rome and that result in masks
with loudness-increasing effects. The rest of my discussion of costumes
and masks depends largely on Marshall (2006: 56–66, 126–58).
Animalistic masks for Curculio is the suggestion of Wiles (1991: 137).
On racism and Roman attitudes towards Greeks, see McCoskey (2012:
39, 73–4, 119, 153–4). The lightning-fast eyepatch disguise of Curculio
is noted by Marshall (2006: 60). The term “Plautinopolis” was coined by
Gratwick (1982: 104).
Ketterer (1986) offers a groundbreaking analysis of props in Curculio;
from there, I have borrowed the terms “labeling,” “mechanical,” and
“symbolic,” as well as a number of this chapter’s particular observations
on props in Curculio. The play’s “circuits of exchange” also comes from
Ketterer (ibid.: 204). Sharrock (2008) uses props as a launching-point
for meditation on the materiality of things in Curculio.
It’s been debated whether Therapontigonus leaves the stage at 590
or hangs back during Curculio’s short monologue; see Gellar-Goad
(forthcoming c) for my argument that he stays the whole time. I assume
that Curculio participates in the final scenes of the play, but this is not
unambiguously clear: because of questions in the textual tradition,
many editions of Curculio have the title character not speaking, perhaps
not even on stage, at the end of the play, which, indeed, would not be
unusual for a Plautine comedy. But I follow the line assignments of
Lanciotti (2008), who does give Curculio speaking parts, as does de
Melo (2011); Lowe (2011) argues for an even larger role for Curculio in
these lines.
 Notes and Recommended Reading 165

Chapter 6

Slater (1985) is the founding father of scholarship on metatheater in

Plautus; Bungard (2020) is an introductory essay to the topic. My
typology of metatheater originally appeared as Gellar-Goad (2019) in
the North Carolina Junior Classical League’s newsletter, The Torch,
edited by Haylie Paulin, oversight by Danetta Genung.
Fontaine (2010: 72–7) explains the incomitiare/inforare sex joke that
Lyco makes at Curculio’s expense. If you can read Italian, you can find a
scholarly debate about the witness-summons sequence in Tandoi
(1961) and Paratore (1962); I offer my own take (in English) at Gellar-
Goad (forthcoming b).

Chapter 7

For my discussion of the speech of the Choragus, I have found

particularly useful the work of Moore (1998b: 131–9); Sommella
(2005), in Italian; Marshall (2006: 40–3, 197); Suárez (2010), in
Spanish; and Hanses (2020a). I build on their findings throughout this
chapter.
The idea that the Choragus’ speech parodies didactic poetry was put
forth by Kruschwitz (2005: 127–8). I draw my comments on the
profession of choragus from Marshall (2006: 26–9). Moore (2005: 32–4)
advances the notion that the Choragus may have already been on stage,
dressed as a silent character enslaved in Phaedromus’ household. The
structural parallels between Curculio and the Choragus are noted by
Kruschwitz, Mulberger, and Schumacher (2001).
Richlin (2017: 380) emphasizes how rare it is for the Choragus to
mention a real-life person. Welch (2003) argues that the Basilica or
Atrium Regium mentioned by the Choragus was a reception hall for
Greek kings, distinct from the commercial (and then judicial) functions
of the later basilicas. Bettini (2015: 129) points out the connections
between the Vicus Tuscus and the god Vertumnus. “Forum Plautinum”:
166 Notes and Recommended Reading

Suárez (2010: 56–7). Richlin (2006: 61) calls attention to the recurrence
of sex-laborers in the Choragus’ speech.

Chapter 8

The three major studies of Plautus and enslavement are Richlin (2017),
Stewart (2012), and McCarthy (2000). Richlin (2020) and Stewart
(2020) offer new takes for general readers. On Plautus, sex-labor, and
sex-trafficking, see Witzke (2015a), James (2010), and Marshall (2013);
for an accessible entry point on the topic, read Witzke (2020). On
parasites in ancient comedy, the definitive works are Tylawsky (2002)
and Damon (1998).
Long after Plautus, actors would have the formal, legal low status of
infamia. But one way to understand the Roman historian Livy’s
comments about the early actors of Atellan farce (7.2.12) is that actors
were low status and scorned. Brown (2002: 225) remarks that: “it is
likely that infamia developed formally out of longstanding informal
prejudices.” I’m not claiming legal infamia for actors in Plautus’ time,
merely low status and scorn.
Religion in Plautus is an up-and-coming area of scholarly inquiry,
long overlooked; start with Jeppesen (2020), and from there consult
Slater (2011), Fulkerson (2018), and Gellar-Goad (2008, 2011–12,
2013). On religion in Roman daily life, see Flower (2017). Feeney (1998:
85) discusses the Roman and Plautine practice of divine personification
of abstract concepts. The point about the gendered pattern for divine
oaths comes from Adams (1984). I argue the case for Cappadox as a
pious sex-trafficker more extensively in Gellar-Goad (2016).

Chapter 9

On Varro’s allusions in his “Bimarcus” to Plautine plays, see Gellar-Goad

(2018). Catullus: Polt (2020, forthcoming); thanks to Chris for sharing a
 Notes and Recommended Reading 167

pre-publication version of his book with me. On the literary afterlife of

Plautus and Terence, see Hanses (2020b, forthcoming). On improvisation
in Plautus, see Slater (1993) and Marshall (2006: 245–79).
I was introduced to monks’ complaints in the margins of manuscripts
by Angland (2014). The data on manuscripts of Vergil and Plautus
comes from Reynolds (1983). For the editio princeps and early critical
editions of Plautus, see Ferri (2020: 414–16).
For performances of Curculio, the website of the Archive of
Performances of Greek & Roman Drama is invaluable, at: http://www.
apgrd.ox.ac.uk/. Their physical holdings underpin my comments on
performances at Wellesley, Rugby, the Virginia Governor’s Latin
Academy, St. Olaf, Dorchester, and Mérida. The details of Guarino/
Guarini’s translation and performances come from Bertoni (1903: 131)
and Coppo (1968: 33), and I’m indebted to Metello Mugnai for help
with the translation of the quote from Guarino/Guarini’s letter. Gray
(1902: 94), Boas (1914: 18), and Smith (1988: 138) attest to the Jesus
College, Oxford University, performance of Curculio. I take the point on
early English translations of Plautus from Franko (2020: 446).
On Ligurio in commedia dell’arte and Plautine models, see Schironi
(2013). On Piccolomini’s Chrysis, Liu (2018). On Massinger and
Fletcher’s A Very Woman and Curculio, Gill (1967: 144). On Jonson’s
The Alchemist and Curculio, Cervo (1997: 128). Northrop Frye believed
Curculio inspired the name of the trickster Brainworm in Jonson’s
Every Man in His Humour: see Dolzani (2006: 181). My source for the
Moryson quote is Pritchard (2010: 6). On Chapman’s The Gentleman
Usher and Curculio, see Franko (2020: 453–4). On Cecchi’s I rivali and
Curculio, Corrigan (1958: 80). On Lenz’ Die Türkensklavin and Curculio,
Kes-Costa (1993: 165–72) and McInnes (1994). The anti-Semitic
graphic novel is van Tilburg (2008), brought to my attention by John
Oksanish.
The publication of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
is Shevelove and Gelbart (1991). On countercultural aspects of Funny
Thing, see Cull (2001: 180). On its connection to New York Jewish
stand-up, Malamud (2001).
168 Notes and Recommended Reading

Daniela Urbanová kindly shared with me video of the Masaryk

University performance of Curculio (at: https://medial.phil.muni.cz/
Player/3492) and authorized reproduction of the photograph of
Footnote. For the Virginia Governor’s Latin Academy performances of
Curculio, I am thankful for observations in personal correspondence
from George Fredric Franko, Bartolo Natoli, Brent Cavedo, Nikki
Carroll, Emily Jusino, and John Henkel. Same goes to Anne H. Groton
for the St. Olaf performances, C. W. Marshall for the Trent University
production, and Seth Jeppesen for the BYU performance. Jeppesen’s
BYU production is on YouTube, at https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=RLLPmdamiEk, as is the Chiclana production, at https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcIJLLi2El8.
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 Index

Note: page numbers in bold refer to the tables.

ableism 22, 71, 100, 109–10, 113 characters

adaptation 7–10, 12, 16, 88, 93, 123, of Curculio, see Cappadox;
147, 153 Choragus; Cook; Leaena;
adulescens amans 2, 14, 20, 24–5, Lyco; Palinurus;
96 Phaedromus; Planesium;
see also Phaedromus stock characters;
aediles 2, 4–5, 16, 69, 102, 135 Therapontigonus
Aesculapius/Asklepios 20, 21, 35, stock 8, 9, 14–16, 65, 67, 69, 72, 73,
39–40, 70, 81, 82, 112, 113, 96–7, 111–12, 113, 145–6
124–6, 131, 132 see also adulescens amans; Cook;
see also Epidaurus danista; lena; leno; matrona;
alcoholism, see under wine meretrix; miles gloriosus;
anagnorisis, see recognition and nutrix; paedagogus;
reunion parasitus; senex; seruus
ancilla 15, 96 callidus; seruus currens;
animals 10, 35–7, 69, 152 uirgo intacta
cat memes 155 choragus (and Choragus) 5, 13, 17,
anus 15 23, 61, 62, 69, 72–3, 87, 89,
see also Leaena 100–16, 123–6, 128, 135,
Aristophanes 10, 19, 88, 91 136, 138, 144, 147, 149, 150,
audience of Plautine comedy 5, 11, 153, 154
23, 24, 33, 39, 115–16 Cicero 136–7, 138, 140
Clark Kent 30
blocking 80–4 clients, see patrons and clients
close-talker 263
Cappadox 9, 20, 21–4, 28, 30, 31, colleges and universities 43, 144, 145,
35–9, 41–4, 51, 53, 55, 149–52, 153
59–63, 70–3, 75–7, 79–83, Comitium 2, 94, 101, 106, 107–9, 111,
88–90, 93–5, 97, 111, 112, 113, 114
115, 118–22, 124–6, Commedia dell’arte 9, 145–6, 152
128–33, 147, 152 commerce 37–9, 110
Carthaginians 1, 33, 37, 104, 108, exchange 74–80
118 money 20, 25, 60, 74, 76–8, 122
Castor and Pollux 106, 107, 111, 114, Cook (and cocus) 15, 21, 44, 89, 111–12,
124, 128 122, 123, 128, 131, 152
castration, see testicles costumes 6, 9, 23, 68–73, 99, 101, 102,
Catullus 59, 138, 140 132, 151
Chapman, George 147 see also choragus; eyepatch

177
178 Index

Cupid 19, 153 Family Guy 9

Curculio (character in Curculio) 5, farce, Atellan 8–9
12, 14, 16, 17, 22–4, 29–33, festivals, see under religion
35, 37–9, 41, 43–5, 58, 61–3, food 1, 44–5, 75, 80, 99, 146
67, 69–71, 75–80, 82–3, hunger 22, 41, 43, 121–2
87–92, 94–6, 98–101, meat 2–4, 75, 147
103–4, 112, 113, 115, 118, see also hunger
120–2, 126–30, 132, 137, Forum 1, 7, 23, 81, 82, 93, 104–15,
138, 144, 146, 147, 149–50, 124–6, 128, 144
152 Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
Cybele (Magna Mater) 1, 4, 5 the Forum, A 148–9

dance 63–4 genre 6–8, 17, 70, 97, 99

danista 15 gods, see under religion
see also Lyco Gosson, Stephen 146
deception, see trickery Greek original of Curculio, see under
diarrhea 43 New Comedy
Dionysia, see religion: festivals Greeks 2, 6, 23, 54, 59, 64, 70–1, 93–6,
Dionysus 90 102, 103, 108, 126
disguise 13, 103, 118, 120 see also Aristophanes; New
see also costume; eyepatch; Comedy; Sappho; tragedy
trickery
doors 9, 20, 41, 44, 51, 52, 55, 58–9, Hamilton 12
64, 75, 84, 108, 124, 125, hangovers 141
129, 130 Hercules/Heracles 91, 127, 128
see also music: paraclausithyron homoeroticism 19, 44, 48, 64, 94, 113
doubles and twins 13, 14, 32, 42, 71, camp 149
75, 77, 103, 107 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)
Dryden 147 140
hunger, see under food
Ennius 6
enslavement 2, 4, 11, 12–13, 28, 30–1, illness, see sickness
38, 42, 45, 61, 68–9, 96, improvisation 8, 16, 139, 152
117–20, 122, 136, 149, incest 29, 33, 148, 150
151 inversion, comic, see Saturnalian
see also Leaena; Palinurus; spirit
Planesium; sex-laborers;
sex-traffickers; joke
violence see also puns
Epidaurus 20, 22, 35, 39–40, 64, 69, Jonson, Ben 146
92–5, 103, 112, 113, 115, Jupiter 26, 94, 107, 112, 128, 129
124, 133 Juturna 107
see also Aesculapius
Etruscans 23, 107–8, 110–12, 126 law 24, 27, 28, 37–9, 83, 94–5, 111,
eyepatch 22, 30, 71, 74, 87–8, 103 124, 128, 129
 Index 179

Leaena 10–11, 21, 35, 40, 42, 44, 51–7, Naevius 6

59, 61, 69, 75, 84, 118, New Comedy, Greek 7, 8, 9, 12, 14,
123–30, 138, 146, 152 16–17, 24, 90, 123
lena 15 Greek original of Curculio 7,
leno 15, 20, 98 16–17, 40, 90, 113
see also Cappadox Menander 7, 10, 17, 29, 41, 68, 93
Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold 147 nutrix 15, 127
Liber 90, 127
literacy 47, 76, 83, 122, 138 oaths, see under religion
Livius Andronicus 6 Old Comedy, Greek, see Aristophanes
Lord of the Rings 48 Ovid 28, 59
love, see “romance”
ludi, see religion: festivals paedagogus 14–16, 14, 20, 137
Lyco 22–3, 30, 31, 36, 37, 43, 61, 62, Palinurus 10–12, 14–16, 19–22, 26–8,
69, 71, 73, 77–83, 87–90, 35–8, 41–3, 45, 51–8, 69,
93–5, 113, 115, 118, 121, 73–5, 84, 92, 93, 96–9, 118,
122, 126, 130, 131, 147–8 123–5, 128, 129, 131, 137,
150
manuscript tradition 139, 140–4 paraclausithyron, see under music
masks 2, 19, 21, 36, 64, 65–72, 98–9, parasitus 9, 15, 16, 96, 100, 121,
103, 152 130–1, 138
Massinger, Philip 146 see also Curculio; Terence:
matrona 15 Phormio
Menander, see under New Comedy parents 14, 28–9, 123, 137
meretrix 15, 96, 119–20 THM’s mom v, 154
see also Planesium; sex-laborers parody and paratragedy 44–5, 52, 53,
metatheater 13, 64, 70, 87–116, 147, 75, 84, 91–2
150 patriarchy 72, 97, 115, 119
miles gloriosus 8, 15, 31, 111 patrons and clients 74, 75, 119, 121–2
see also Therapontigonus Phaedromus 10–11, 16, 19–32, 35–9,
mime 6, 64, 84 41–5, 51–64, 70, 73–6,
mise-en-abîme 90, 115 78–84, 88–9, 91–3, 95–9,
Molière 147, 148 101, 111, 118, 120–32, 147
money, see under commerce Planesium 21–6, 28–33, 36–9, 41, 42,
music and meter 12, 21, 47–63, 138, 44, 51, 57, 59–63, 69, 71,
141, 148, 152, 153, 154 73–84, 88–90, 97–100,
cantica 48, 51, 52–9, 62, 152 118–20, 123–9, 132, 147,
catalexis 55 150
false start 61 Plautus, Titus Maccius
paraclausithyron 21, 59 name 8
structure of Curculio 49, 53, other plays by
62–3 Amphitruo 13, 71, 137
tibiae and tibicen 47–8, 136 Asinaria 19, 50, 93
trochaic septenarius 49, 50–1, Aulularia 50, 145
59–60, 62, 63, 102 Bacchides 7, 29, 88
180 Index

Captiui 103, 120 festivals 1–2, 3–4, 90, 102, 104,

Casina 19, 29, 50, 136 123–4, 135; see also
Cistellaria 90 Saturnalian spirit
Epidicus 29, 88, 137 gods 3, 4, 55, 124, 127; see also
Menaechmi 13, 41, 143 Aesculapius; Castor and
Mercator 50 Pollux; Cupid; Cybele;
Miles Gloriosus 38, 50, 148 Dionysus; Hercules;
Mostellaria 50, 148 Jupiter; Juturna; Liber;
Persa 67, 103, 131 Summanus; Venus;
Poenulus 131 Vertumnus
Pseudolus 4, 5, 29, 50, 88, 89, hymns/spells 44, 52, 58–9, 130
93, 120, 131, 136, 137, 148 libation 75, 84, 124, 125, 129
Rudens 120 oaths 3, 23, 36, 37, 44, 112, 127–9,
Stichus 4 131
Trinummus 103 Pontifex Maximus 107
Truculentus 29, 136 ritual 1–2, 44, 56, 74, 75, 83, 92,
Vidularia 141 108, 110, 125, 126, 130–2
style 8–13, 14 sacrifice 1, 3, 4, 82, 126, 132
plots 13, 14, 148 shrines and temples 5, 20, 21, 40,
of Curculio 19–33, 76, 77, 104, 137 60, 81, 82, 106, 107, 111,
stock 8, 9, 12, 90, 145–6 124, 126, 131, 132
see also trickery see also gods
Pope Pius II 146 rings 22, 24, 30, 32–3, 37, 63, 73–80,
poverty 111, 122–3 88–9, 122, 148, 149–50
prologues 5, 7, 88, 153 “romance” 14, 19, 24–9, 39, 60
Propertius 59 Rome 1, 17, 23, 71, 92, 93–5, 101–15,
props (stage properties) 73–80, 84, 121, 123, 133, 136
102
see also rings Sappho 60–1
puns 6, 10–11, 27, 38, 84, 94, 95, 108, Saturnalian spirit 12–13, 75, 76
146, 150 senex 15, 111
THM’s 10, 43, 94, 138, 141, 146 seruus callidus 2, 8, 12, 14, 16, 20, 43,
119, 137, 146
Quintilian 140 seruus currens 14, 16, 31, 64, 67, 96,
137
race and racism 1, 66–7, 70–1, 98, sex-laborers 4, 14, 20, 25, 97, 106, 111,
147–8, 149 113, 114–15, 117–20, 149
rape and sexual assault, see under see also meretrix; Planesium
violence sex-traffickers 14, 19, 23, 25, 97–8,
recognition and reunion 14, 24, 32–3, 122, 131, 137–8
73, 78, 83, 97, 127 see also leno; Cappadox
religion 123–33, 141 Shakespeare 12, 13, 73, 87
altars 2, 3, 81, 124, 129 see also eurotrash
dream-interpretation (coniectura) sickness 20, 39–42, 70, 131–2, 141
21, 44, 111–12, 126, 131 see also Aesculapius
 Index 181

slapstick, see under violence tragedy 6, 88

slavery, see enslavement see also parody and paratragedy
smells 1, 20, 35, 54, 126, 138 translation 10, 143–4, 145, 148
soldier, see miles gloriosus trapezita, see danista
Sondheim, Stephen, see A Funny trickery 12, 13, 16–17, 22, 24, 29–31,
Thing Happened on the 77, 79, 91, 99, 116, 138,
Way to the Forum 147
song, see music and meter see also Curculio; seruus callidus
spoilers 16 twins, see doubles
stage action, see blocking
stage building 2, 5, 81, 102, 108, uirgo intacta 15, 26, 78, 97–8, 119
135–6 urine 43
Star Wars 29, 48
statues 4, 57, 110, 129–30 Varro 137, 138, 139–40, 141, 142
Summanus (and “Summanus”) 22–4, Venus 19, 25, 41, 44, 52, 56, 61, 74, 75,
31, 37, 43, 45, 71, 87, 90, 81, 92, 106, 107, 111, 124–5,
113, 118, 122, 127, 130, 138, 129
144 Vergil 141
Superman, see Clark Kent Vertumnus 108, 110–11
violence 21, 56–7, 83, 92, 118, 138
Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 7–8, rape and sexual assault 28, 32,
10, 19, 29, 88, 116, 124, 140 90
Eunuchus 19, 27 slapstick 8, 11, 45
Phormio 29, 137–8, 139 torture 11–12, 45, 118
testicles 26–7, 38, 84, 95
Therapontigonus 8, 16–17, 22–5, war 1, 33, 61, 104, 108, 118, 120, 121,
28–33, 35, 37–9, 43–5, 62, 127, 144
63, 69, 71–83, 88, 91, 92, 95, see also Therapontigonus
99, 118–20, 122, 123, Wikipedia 9
127–30, 132, 144, 149, 150 wine 10–11, 20, 22, 35, 44, 51–6, 59,
tibiae and tibicen, see under music 74, 75, 84, 118, 127, 129,
time travel 133, 135, 154–5 138, 146
trafficking, human, see enslavement; alcoholism 40, 42, 118, 130
sex-laborers; sex-traffickers wordplay, see puns
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