CHAPTER IVTERENCE AND HIS SUCCESSORS
Plautus lived in the most productive period of Roman comedy. He happens to mention only one rival, the aged Naevius, but from later sources we learn of Caecilius, Licinius, Trabea, Atilius, Titinius, and others who apparently began to write before the death of Plautus. That all of these actually staged plays we may be sure, since manuscripts had no chance of surviving unless they came into the official archives by way of purchase for production. So numerous were the old manuscripts in these archives that Plautus, who could at most not have written more than thirty or forty plays, was later credited with a hundred and thirty. Apparently unsigned plays were attributed to him because of the commercial value of his name. But the fact that so many stray plays were in existence is significant of the activity of writers. It is not surprising therefore that a guild of “writers and actors” flourished in the days of Plautus, and that the state recognized it and assigned it quarters on the Aventine.
Of the earlier men from whose works we have fragments, only two are in any way individualized in the scant remains. Titinius, who seems to have been a late rival of Plautus, was so thoroughly lost to his successors that Cicero seems not to have been aware of him. But Varro refers to Titinius in highterms in his work on the Latin language, written while he was gathering books for Caesar’s projected public library. Varro probably was the man who ferreted out his plays and name from the aediles’ archives. It is signal praise that Varro gives Titinius when he places him by the side of Terence as a delineator of character. An allusion to one of his plays by Horace seems to indicate that some of his work was actually staged in the early Empire (more than a hundred years after the dramatist’s death) for the poet refers to a scene that is visualized rather than to a line read, and he assumes that Augustus will recognize his allusion.[1]
What Titinius did was to follow a suggestion made by Naevius and write original comedies (togatae) with native plots, scenes, and characters. When we recall how Plautus found it prudent to cling to Greek plots for social and moral reasons, we see that Titinius must have had a vein of daring. That he was lauded among the very foremost for characterization is the more remarkable since he did not adapt characters already well outlined. It was no easy task to present before the old Catonian society comedies revolving about Roman men and women, and to rival the plays of Plautus which could legitimately appropriate all the attractive plots of Hellenistic Athens. Donatus remarks naïvely that realistic Roman comedy of the old day, unlike the Greek comedy, could not picture slaves as more clever than their masters. This statement, of course, does not go to the heart of the matter, but it is one way of saying that the Romans, who insistedon social decorum in home life, were in no mood to see themselves pictured as the gulls of spoiled sons and saucy slaves. If the togata had to eliminate all such scenes, it must have altered the whole tone of comedy. But that was not all. We have noticed how Plautus was compelled to change and attenuate feminine rôles because the Romans had nothing to put in the place of the semi-respectable Greek hetaerae with whom the youth of Athens associated freely. What was there for Titinius to do in writing Roman plays? It was out of the question to insult the dignity of the noble household with stories of boisterous love affairs; and yet he apparently did not wish to sacrifice such plots either by avoiding the female characters or by using those that Roman society disdained. He did want the love story and he wanted it both wholesome enough to attract Rome and natural enough to give a free play of emotions in an active plot, and he found it in a way that Plautus had not. He abandoned thejeunesse doréeof the standard Greek play and resorted to the natural and free society of the Italian village communities outside of the great capital, where, as in Italian villages of today, honest young men and women of humble circumstances worked together at daily tasks in shops, at counters, desks, and work benches. Titinius made a real discovery when he left the artificial society of aristocratic Rome because it gave no opportunity for treating of natural relations between the unmarried young of both sexes and went out into the near-by villages of Latium or the humbler streets of the city where more normal conditions obtained. He was perhapsthe first writer of Roman comedy who could draw his material from life and still base his comedy on a love story. Only fifteen titles of his plays have survived, but nine of these take their name from the leading female characters in the plays:The Maid of Setia,The Lady of the Dye Shop,The Girl of Velitrae,The Twin Sister,The Girl Who Knows Something about the Law,The Stepmother,Pyrrha the Weaver,The Dancing Girl of Ferentinum,The Flute-playerandThe Girl of Ulubrae. These heroines are folk in humble life but the fragments show that they are none the less sprightly, quick-witted and interesting creatures. Today we are sadly at a loss in trying to comprehend the life of the great masses of the people during the Plautine period. Plautus in his re-shapings of Greek plots reflects it only in his suppressions and intimations, and then very imperfectly. Livy in his dignified and voluminous history of this period strides majestically over it. We would gladly surrender much of both for the faithful and sympathetic picture that a volume of Titinius could give us. If Varro’s judgment was right in lauding the power of characterization of this author we might, if he were rescued, find him a place by the side of very modern realists.
Caecilius Statius is the other writer of comedy vying with Plautus of whom something is known, and he too deserves to be remembered with a keen hope that his works may some day come to light. He was more orthodox than Titinius, kept, like Plautus, more or less close to his Greek models, and obeyed the same social purpose of not offending puritanic taste by dressing his players in Greek garb.Strange to say, he was a Celt, the first in the history of literature. He had apparently been captured as a boy somewhere near Milan when the Romans were campaigning there during the Hannibalic war. That he was not a mere child at the time becomes evident from the fact that he never wrote Latin quite well enough to suit the discriminating ear of Cicero—who otherwise read him with pleasure. Yet he somehow received a good education—as bright slaves often did—for he knew Greek well. He also got his freedom somehow and became a close associate of Ennius. He lived long enough to give aid to Terence in the production of that young man’s first youthful play, theAndria, and was generous enough to recommend the play to the aediles when they hesitated to accept it. Ambivius, the loyal producer of Terence, remarks in one of the prologues which he spoke for Terence that Caecilius had had a discouraging series of rejections in his youth but that he, Ambivius, confident of the poet’s worth, had persisted in presenting the plays till success was assured.[2]A later critic, Volcacius—who, to be sure, takes no account of the togatae in this particular list—places Caecilius at the very head of the writers of comedy, giving Plautus second place and Terence sixth. Unfortunately we do not happen to know whether this critic was a man of sound judgment.
The plays of Caecilius were constructed much like those of Plautus, with the same dependence upon the Greeks in plot, and with the same devotion to Roman musical accompaniment and to arial monodies.His use of the splendidly rhythmical trochaic septenarii is everywhere noticeable in the fragments. Varro suggests that Caecilius was esteemed rather for his melodramatic effects than for his ability to create characters, in this matter regarding him less highly than Terence, and praises him especially for the composition of his plots. Just why Varro admired his plots he did not say, but if, as we may suspect, Caecilius was the first dramatist to abandon the Greek and early Roman manner of disclosing the trend of the plot in prologues and to focus the interest of his comedies more upon suspense and surprise, Varro’s judgment would be justified. We make this suggestion because, as we shall explain, Terence’s methods were unconventional in this respect, and Terence in writing his comedies had had the advice of Caecilius. If Caecilius was an innovator in this matter, it would account not only for Varro’s high opinion of his plots but also for the fact that Caecilius failed at first to attract an audience used to explicit preparation. In the end, however, Caecilius succeeded and it would seem that he wore well. Manuscripts of his plays apparently were dug out of the archives early for restaging, and revivals were frequent. Cicero knew his works well enough to quote from several of them even when far from his library. Horace alludes to a character of his in theArs Poetica, and in the second-century craze for the early Latin authors Caecilius kept his place among the foremost.
The six plays of Terence are so well known that little need be said by way of general characterization. It is generally supposed that they are more faithfulparaphrases of Greek originals than any of the Plautine comedies. This idea, based partly upon the fact that Terence used the older Greek dramatic form instead of adopting the Plautine custom of introducing cantica, and partly upon the fact that Donatus’ commentary mentions relatively few departures from the Greek, is probably correct. There is also good reason for supposing that Terence might care to reproduce his Greek model with more fidelity than Plautus could. Society had changed so much between 200 and 160 B.C. that the Greek plays could be presented without alteration, even to the point of placing on the stage attractive hetaerae. Moreover, education was general enough so that cultivated persons desired more finished plays and an elimination of some of the Plautine downrightness. The plays of Terence though less amusing than those of Plautus are on a higher literary plane and much of their beauty undoubtedly savors of the delicate humanity that may be found in the recently discovered plays of Menander. Nevertheless we must wait till the actual models of Terence’s comedies are discovered before we deny these graces to Terence himself. We happen to know from Donatus that three of the characters of theAndriawere introduced by Terence into his paraphrase of a Menandrian plot. While the rôles are somewhat stilted the characters give expression to some of those penetrating observations that critics are wont to attribute to the original.[3]This proves that Terencewas himself capable of very delicate feeling, and until we find his originals it is therefore scientifically defensible to acknowledge Terence as the possible source of some of the best passages in these six comedies.
It has frequently been noticed[4]that the writers of the New Comedy, including Plautus, were far more generous than present-day dramatists in “preparing” their audiences for every turn in the plot and that they depended less for their effects upon the elements of “suspense” and “surprise.” It is generally assumed that the expository prologue was adopted by comedy from tragedy in order that the unlettered spectators who crowded the theater at the festivals should not have any difficulty in following the play. It has also been noted repeatedly that when the interest of the play did not rest in comic situations, buffoonery, ludicrous characters, and the like, but rather in an intricate plot that was solved at the end by a “recognition” or some other unforeseen event, it was necessary to introduce an omniscient “prologue” to explain the situation in an expository monologue. Superhumans like Heros, Agnoia, Elenchus, Tyche, Aer, Auxilium, Arcturus, Fides, and Lar were used, or an abstract “prologus” who could be conceived of as knowing not only the complete situation but also the outcome of the play. Only when the plot was so simple that it unfolded without risk of misconception, could the exposition be trusted to characters or expository dialogue within the play.
Such observations may be accepted as correct so far as they go. However, they do not sufficiently explain the controlling purpose of over-explicit preparation, the consequences of it in dramatic effect, and a noticeable endeavor in Terence’s day to break loose from the limitations of the device. It is doubtful, for example, whether suspense and surprise were avoided merely because of certain intellectual limitations on the part of Menander’s spectators; indeed it is probable that explicit “preparation” was a convention that held the boards without serious objection till Terence experimented in a new method.
Greek New Comedy was shaped in the fourth century for audiences accustomed to the dramatic technique developed upon the tragic stage. Antiphanes reveals clearly in a well-known passage what the audience expected (Kock, II,Antiphanes191): “Fortunate the task of the tragic poet! Before a word is spoken, the spectator knows the theme ... at the mere mention of the name Oedipus he knows the rest.” Then he proceeds to say that the writer of comedy had to prepare the audience in every detail, since if a single item was missed the spectator started to hiss. This reveals the fact that in viewing a comedy the spectator expected not only to know the situation but also to have a clear clue to the solution, just as he had when viewing tragedies. The well-known prologues of Euripides did not have to foretell as well as prepare; a prologue in tragedy needed at most to remind the spectators of the main outline of the tale and to show the point at which action started. Euripides was wellaware that most of his audience would at once know what the end of the story would be.[5]Now if the outcome was foreseen, the ancient dramatist, unlike the modern, could obviously not make free use of suspense and surprise. The writer of tragedy had to draw his emotional values from the pity of a well-informed audience viewing “with a sense of fear or dread” the groping of characters involved in the meshes of fate. Thus the obvious consequence of the use of a known plot was of course dependence upon the theme offate, the constant employment of gloomy foreshadowing, the use with frequent reiteration of what has been called “tragic irony.” There seems to be a feeling in Aristotle that “pity and dread” are the essential elements of tragedy, but it is safe to say that had Greek tragedy frequently used invented plots Aristotle would have found that sympathetic suspense with catastrophic surprise would rather have been employed to produce the tragic catharsis, and would have been equally effective.
In studying the new comedy we may assume with Antiphanes, and on the basis of Menander, that the writer thought out his plot in terms of this well-established technique. In that case an omniscient prologue must give the situation and give it more explicitly than in tragedy because he had to do much more than remind. He must present the whole situation and in addition he must give explicit hints of the solution, if the spectator was to have the same advantage as he had in tragedywhere the solution was a matter of common knowledge. That is the new element forced upon the writer of comedy by fifth-century convention. In Menander’sPerikeiromene, for example, the deferred prologue, Agnoia, not only gives the situation but adds: “this was done ... in order to start the train of revelations, so that in time these people might discover their kin.”
So in Plautus, wherever we have an intricate play that develops to a conclusion which could not be revealed by the characters, the prologue, if it has survived, discloses the outcome to the audience. In thePoenulusthe prologus anticipates the solution when he says (line 245) that the father will come and find his daughter. In theRudensthe North Star not only has seen all that has occurred before the opening scene but he reveals the secret of the last act by saying that the girl is the old man’s daughter, and that the lover will appear presently (33 ff. and 80). In theAmphitruo, Mercury, one of the actors, can serve as prologue because he is omniscient. He tells the spectators how to distinguish the characters and says (140-48) thatAmphitruois about to come. The rest was known to the audience because this play, like the tragedies, was based upon a myth. In theAulularia, the Spirit of the Hearth narrates what it is necessary to know of the past and then adds, “I shall make our neighbor propose marriage to the girl so as to compel the young man to do so” (31 ff.). In theCaptivesthe prologue informs us that Tyndarus is Hegio’s unrecognized son who will come into his own presently and that the other son will also befound. The prologue of theCasinaconcludes the exposition by the revelation that the girl will turn out to be a freeborn citizen.
And this regard for the fullest preparation of the audience goes far beyond the prologue and the expository first act. Most of the intrigues devised to further the action are first explained, or at least discussed or suggested before they are actually carried out. Any student of Plautus will think of scores of examples: of how Mercury tells the spectators that he is going to climb to the roof to mock at Amphitruo (997), how in theMilesthe plan to rescue the girl is explained before it is carried out, how in thePoenulus(550) the trick by which the slave-dealer is to be imposed upon is worked out on the stage before it is played,[6]etc.
Now of course this sort of exposition is too explicit to satisfy modern taste.[7]It is sometimes excused with the reminder that ancient comedies were written for a single performance and must be understood at first presentation without the aid of reviewers’ comments or playbills; and it is sometimes explained as a concession to witless audiences—on whom Horace, following Peripatetic critics, blamed most literary crudities. Such explanations sufficed in the days when we could attribute this undue explicitness to Plautus, but now that we havediscovered Menander given to the same type of technique we ought to look farther. The important fact seems to be that the Greek audience was accustomed to preparation and to the devices which the consequent construction of the play demanded, and that the originators of the early New Comedy followed custom. And since in tragedy the general knowledge of the myths used in the plots obviated use of unexpected catastrophes and compelled writers to find compensation in tragic irony, so the adoption of the same method of plot construction for comedy eliminated the use of tension and increased the employment of a kind of comic irony. The effects of this comic irony range all the way from what Aristotle terms educated insolence (πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις) to genial and sympathetic fellow-feeling, according as the victim of the delusion is a villain, a braggart, a buffoon, or a harmless innocent. The foreknowledge which the audience has of what the players are unconsciously stumbling into provides both the “sense of superiority,” which Plato found to be an effect of comedy, and the enjoyment of the incongruous which moderns have often considered its chief ingredient. This comic irony, concocted like its counterpart in tragedy, is a large part of the stock in trade of Menander and of Plautus.
In theCaptivesof Plautus the audience knows that Hegio has his own son before him in chains, and notices that, not recognizing his son, he causes him much suffering. Throughout the play the attentive spectator will watch for the very effective incongruities that arise from the father’s ignorance.In theRudens, Daemones, not knowing that the girl who is trying to escape from shipwreck and the slave-dealer is his own daughter, at first seems to the informed spectator extremely insensitive to her suffering. The father’s sympathies are aroused only indirectly by his religious respect for a suppliant at the altar, then by the accident of being called in to arbitrate regarding her basket of birth tokens. Only when he has established her civil status by this accidental judgment does he learn the truth. In a more farcical form comic irony is freely used in the plays of self-deception, for example in the case of a bragging coward like theMiles Gloriosus, or in plays depending upon mistaken identity or some similar delusion, as in theMenaechmiand theAmphitruo. And in very nearly all the plays of Plautus, if it be not the chief mainstay of the plot, it appears at least here and there.
The new fragments of Menander prove that Menander had frequently constructed his plays with this effect in mind. Indeed it is the decisive factor in all that are extensive enough to permit of analysis. In theArbitrantsSmicrines all unconsciously arbitrates against his own child. In theSamiathe old man is misled by a chance remark into the belief that his son has betrayed him, and the resulting irony runs through the central part of the play. And even when the facts are disclosed the son immediately sets going another series of misunderstandings (disclosed beforehand to the audience, line 432) by threatening to go into exile. ThePerikeiromeneis built about the same device. Two men are in love with the same maiden. One is her unrecognizedbrother, the other is jealous of her attentions to the former. The girl knows that the former is her brother but may not reveal the fact. However, the deity, Agnoia, has informed the spectators of the relationship so that they are in a position to view the intricate play at cross-purposes, but there is little of what we should call suspense because they have also been informed that a recognition scene will end the play satisfactorily.
In theHerothe expository prologue is lost, but we know that the prologue was the omniscientHeros, who adequately prepared the audience for what was to follow.[8]Here a husband (unrecognized), his wife, their “exposed daughter,” not yet known as such, and two lovers of this daughter, one a slave, the other a rich neighbor, all enter a tangle of delusion to which the audience has the key. In theGeorgosa man expresses to a woman his desire to marry her daughter. He does not know that he is the girl’s father. As the woman—bound to secrecy—stands wringing her hands in despair, the audience—apparently informed of the secret—experiences a situation as poignant as that of theOedipus. And finally in the Petrograd fragment of thePhasmawe find a mother’s furtive visits to her daughter, born out of wedlock, and an entangled love affair, a situation which again involves the use of irony, since a fragment from the prologue shows us that the audience has been informed in advance.
It would be hazardous to say that Menander always lets the spectator into the secret beforehandso as to make use of dramatic irony, but it is striking that he does so in every instance where we possess enough of his plot in the original to test his methods. It is apparently his usual method of procedure. This is also in accord with his well-known predilection for Tyche, the counterpart in comedy of tragic fate. We need not suppose, as has often been done, that his constant reference to Tyche springs from his own philosophical doctrine. Such well-known passages as “Chance holds the helm; mortal forethought is but a delusion” (Frag., Kock, 482), etc., are, of course, comments of characters in the play. They need not be expressions of the dramatist’s own creed. But such comments would naturally come frequently in plays built on the conventional tragic form which required that the players grope their obscure way through the action in front of an audience which knew the end.
Now these observations are not meant as an attempt to rehabilitate Leo’s doctrine that the New Comedy merely borrowed all its devices of prologue, fate, recognition, and the rest from tragedy. Prescott’s incisive criticism[9]of that view must stand, with its insistence that we take Sicilian antecedents, Aristophanes, and environment into account. The new comedy was hardly as helplessly unoriginal as Leo held. The problem we have raised should rather be approached from the viewpoint of what the spectator expected and desired. It did not necessarily arise in the construction of plotless farces, in the presentation of ludicrous situations, buffoonery, and scenes centering about comicaland preposterous characters. When, however, the plot was involved and a long consistent story was to be unraveled, the spectators, who knew nothing of the story, desired to be put at the same point of vantage early in the play that they naturally enjoyed when anOedipus, aMedea, or anOresteswas presented.
When we turn to the Roman stage we seem to discover an attempt to break away from this convention, if not in Plautus[10]at least in Terence. We do not find conclusive evidence that Plautus seriously changed the construction of the Greek plots which he used except to remove the choral interludes and turn the plays into musical comedies, though it is likely that he usually avoided plays that had very intricate plots, and chose freely from those that contained laughter-producing situations. There is no evidence that he sought for suspense, or revamped any of his originals in order to attain it.
Terence, however, despite his fondness for the Greek originals and his outspoken claim of fidelity to them, seems consciously to have striven for a suspended dénouement. He does not entirely suppress dramatic irony, but he reduces its scope, he eliminates the expository prologue completely, he is chary about giving information to the spectator, preferring to keep him under tension for a part if not for the whole of the play.
A brief reference to theAdelphoe, his last play, will best reveal his procedure. Here two brothersemploy different methods in bringing up their sons. Micio, who has adopted one of Demea’s sons, is indulgent, Demea is severe. Both boys enjoy themselves, Micio’s confessedly, Demea’s secretly. In fact the latter throws the burden of his escapades on Micio’s son. Hence when the action begins (1. 182) Demea is found scolding Micio because Micio’s son is setting a bad example to his supposedly virtuous brother. This is completely in Menander’s ironic style, for, as we shall see, Menander in the original had a prologue informing the audience that Demea’s son was the rascal of the two boys.
In Terence’s version, however, there is no expository prologue; the audience does not yet know the secret that Demea’s son is the source of the mischief. The irony is not wholly lost to those who have a good enough memory to recall half an hour later how misplaced Demea’s rebukes actually were. Terence is accumulating effects by suspending the revelation which Menander gave at once. But he goes even further in increasing tension. The prologue of the original had explained the bold deed that started the action, namely, that Micio’s son, in order to aid his brother, had forcibly taken from the slave-dealer the girl whom his brother loved but had not the money to buy or the courage to steal. That fact had to be presented somehow, so Terence, according to Donatus, inserts a scene in Act II which conveys the desired impression. Characteristically Terence still withholds the crucial fact that the boy is committing this crime not for himself but for his brother. Perhaps the shrewderspectators would suspect the truth. In Menander’s play they knew it from the first and laughed at Demea’s misplaced boasts. In Terence’s adaptation, however, they continue in doubt. It is not till a fourth of the play is over that Terence solves this mystery. He holds it back so long indeed that there is danger that the spectator may go too far on a mistaken clue. After the revelation, however, the audience, acquainted with a situation that Demea still fails to comprehend, can proceed for several scenes to enjoy the dramatic irony involved in this circumstance.
But Terence has one more surprise in store at the very end, to which Donatus again supplies the clue for us. At the end of the play Menander had suggested a partial conversion of Demea, while Micio went smiling to the final scene. Not so Terence. Writing for a more puritanic Roman audience, he felt the need of giving an appreciable rebuke to Micio for his lack of principle, and hence compelled him by way of consistency in his easy generosity to marry an unattractive widow.[11]In other words, with a minimum of changes in his paraphrase, Terence, without greatly reducing the dramatic irony inherent in the separate scenes, has so adapted a standard Menandrian plot based upon self-delusion (for which the spectator is prepared) that the elements of suspense and surprise have become vital factors. This seems to me to be Terence’s favorite procedure.
In theAndria, which was Terence’s first play, he apparently reveals the first hesitating attempt at this mode of constructing comedies. He tells us in the preface that he used Menander’sAndriain the main with suggestions from thePerinthia, and the Menandrian fragments of these two plays which can be identified in Terence are fairly well scattered through theAndria. Donatus states that the rôles of Charinus, Byrrhia, and Sosia were added by Terence. Charinus and Byrrhia are so involved in the action of five central scenes that Terence must have re-shaped the play very much in order to include these characters. Since in a recognition scene near the end the heroine turns out to be a citizen we now have a right to assume that Menander’sAndriaprobably had a prologue revealing this fact. Terence omits the prologue and, therefore, the usual key. But he does not dare, as in theHecyra, his next play, to rely upon his audience’s being patient until the recognition scene. In the middle of the second act (line 221) he drops the rather broad hint in a monologue: “they have set the story going that the girl is an Athenian.” That would be enough to prevent the spectators from following false leads. TheAndria, therefore, seems to reveal Terence’s first attempt at constructing a play in which a deferred hint took the place of full preparation. One wonders whether the aged Caecilius, who helped Terence with this play, may have used the device before Terence and suggested it to him.
In theHecyra, the second play of Terence, there is no preparation, and the delay in relieving thetension of the spectator is carried to extreme lengths. The old story of a maiden violated at the festival during a dark night provides the entanglement. In the end the guilty father of her child turns out to be the very man she has married. Even through the Latin text one can see that the early scenes of the original[12]presupposed an informed audience enjoying the delusions of characters working on mistaken suppositions. But Terence blotted out the information by deleting the prologue of the original. The semi-expository first act gives the immediate situation but reserves the key-fact for line 829 near the end of the play. If that fact—that the unknown violator was Pamphilus, the husband—had been revealed to the spectators at the beginning they might have enjoyed the dramatic irony of the scene (II, 1) in which Laches scolds his wife for imagined wrongs, and especially the incongruity of Pamphilus’ oath, by all that is sacred, that he is not to blame for the separation (line 476). Terence has done a very daring thing here in keeping the audience in doubt and in anxiety. He has assumed that the audience will patiently bear in mind these puzzling quarrels and asseverations and watch the mysteries accumulating without any key to the solution forseveral hundred lines. A modern, used to that kind of thing in detective stories, finds it less difficult to do, but our students usually have to read theHecyrawith unusually alert attention, and it is certain that they would miss much of the delicate play if they were to see it hurriedly acted on the stage without previous preparation. In fact, Terence commits the sin of hinting at incorrect solutions. Pamphilus (at line 260) learns of the child and only betrays bewilderment, which is apt to mislead the spectator; at line 517 Pamphilus’ father also learns of the child but draws an incorrect conclusion, giving a new starting point for a possible erroneous guess; at line 577 his mother, half-informed, imagines that her son has deserted his wife for ugly reasons. Only at line 827 does the resolution of the intrigue take place. There is not one ancient play before the day of Terence, so far as we know, where an audience was left in such complete suspense before an accumulating mass of perplexities; and this was an audience, it will be remembered, accustomed to be taken into the confidence of the prologue. It is not surprising, therefore, that this play—one of the most human in the classical repertoire—failed twice, and that the spectators rushed away from it to see a boxing match. But Terence apparently was proud of what he had done and insisted that the play have its chance. Only after he had established his reputation by the success of theEunuchuswas it at last played with success.
TheHeautontimoroumenos, produced two years after the failure of theHecyra, puts less strain uponthe audience, since half the secret—that Clinea’s sweetheart has proved faithful and worthy of him—is disclosed fairly early (line 243). From that point the spectators are permitted without too much anxiety to enjoy the dramatic irony involved in the delusions of the over-confident Chremes who bestows on his neighbor the pity that is his own due. Soon after the middle of the play (675 ff.) the spectators are admitted to the last important fact, namely, that Clinea’s sweetheart is freeborn, while the impossible courtesan seems likely to become Chremes’ daughter-in-law. Since, however, Chremes refuses to accept the evidence of his own eyes, the self-delusion only increases the irony, and the play continues from that point in the Menandrian style. The play is indeed one of the best in point of construction, since by abandoning the expository prologue[13]Terence was enabled to accumulate mysteries which he gradually solved in such a way as to substitute Menandrian satire for tension.
In theEunuchusTerence for once shifts to the Plautine manner, resting his play chiefly on buffoons, imposture, and ludicrous situations. Indeed he borrows caricatures from another play in order to cram in the fun. There is no prologue, but none was needed. Thais stands self-revealed from the first scene, while Pamphila’s station is more than hinted at in the second scene. The tricking of a braggart captain did not involve much anxiety, even though the preparation is slight. The play is full of fun and easy to follow. Terence had foronce yielded to popular demand and he was materially rewarded. It was the only play of his that was immediately put on a second time, and the aediles paid for it what was then considered the very high sum of 8000 sesterces.
ThePhormio, like theHeautonand theAdelphoe, employs a good mingling of suspense and preparation. There is no expository prologue. That one existed in the original is probable from the occurrence of such unconscious allusions to actuality as the story concocted in court that the girl was a kinswoman (line 117). The fact that Chremes has a daughter like the one in question is not made known to the audience till half the play is over—a restraint which is surpassed only in theHecyra. However, from line 570 the solution is surmised and it finally is evident at line 755. Henceforth the interest is provided by a series of quick though unprepared-for surprises.
Whether or not Terence should have all the credit for breaking away from the old conventional construction imposed on tragedy by the accident that the plots were known, we cannot say. It is not likely that Menander introduced this innovation, since all the plots that have recently been discovered seem to retain the older construction. Plautus, except in plays subsequently revised, like theEpidicusand theMercator, is true to the convention every time that his plot is intricate and ends with an important “discovery.” We have suggested that Caecilius, who was Terence’s critic in his first play, may possibly have shown the way since he somehow gained fame for his plot construction. But wehave no definite evidence of this. At any rate the modernization comes after Plautus and seems, therefore, to be a discovery of the Roman stage. It might be claimed that the discovery was due to the accident that the prologue was desired for the expression of the author’s personal opinion, so that it was not available for exposition.[14]However, this would not explain Terence’s procedure. In theAdelphoe, for instance, he seems to transfer some of the exposition from the eliminated prologue to the opening monologue of Micio. What is noticeable is that he here gives a very chary exposition in the monologue, gives some more details in the inserted kidnaping scene, and yet carefully withholds the secret—which could so easily have been disclosed—that the girl was stolen for the supposedly virtuous brother. In a word, Terence is conscious of what he is doing. He has apparently eliminated the expository prologue purposely in order to rid himself of an old convention and to intensify comedy by injecting into his plots the elements of surprise and suspense.
After Terence the aediles seem to have saved money by resorting freely to the archives and reviving old plays. At any rate many of the Plautine comedies bear signs of having been tampered with at this time. Long speeches were cut, explicit prologues were excised or reduced so as to introducethe element of surprise. In other words, the comedies were modernized in type and given speed. It is more than likely that this refurbishing of old plays discouraged young writers, since the generation following Terence left few names of dramatists to posterity. Only Turpilius, who worked in the Plautine tradition, was well known later. He died at a very old age about 103 B.C.
The togata, however, kept its place better through the voluminous contributions of Afranius, whosefloruitwas just before the Gracchan day. Of his works, praised by such fair judges as Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian, we have some seventy titles and over six hundred lines. By mere chance, we hear of a revival of a play of his in Caesar’s day and of another even in Nero’s time. Rome was now cosmopolitan enough so that a writer of comedy need not limit his range. In matter and sentiment Afranius reminded critics of Menander and Terence, yet his fragments show that, like Plautus, he availed himself of the advantages of very generous musical accompaniments. The most striking reference to him which has come down to us is that of Seneca who says that Afranius blended the spirit of comedy and tragedy in his work. If we may judge from this statement he may in this respect have been a precursor of Molière. After Afranius came Atta who has left us a dozen bare titles and little else.
But legitimate comedy was doomed at Rome. On festival days the populace had to be amused, and the Roman populace was rapidly changing in character as slavery was pushing out free labor. Even before the Gracchan reform Scipio the youngercould face the crowds of the Forum with the remark that most of them had come to Rome as slaves. The Gracchans did not improve the quality of those crowds when they instituted the corn-doles. The free manumission of slaves was creating a polyglot proletariat which corn doles now tended to keep in the city, where they were fed and amused. In response to the desires of such folk, chariot races were made more exciting and the gladiatorial shows, introduced from Campania, became more frequent and more gruesome. Needless to say the well constructed plots of Plautus and Terence could not hold such audiences in their seats. The aediles and praetors, who wished to keep the entertainment on as high a level as possible, still persisted in producing some respectable plays at every festival, but to save their popularity in view of future elections they were driven to admit an increasing number of the more trivial plays as well.
After Sulla’s time, though great actors like Roscius still played old rôles, the farce gained ground over the legitimate comedy. The farce, a more or less extemporaneous form, like thecommedia d’arteshaped as much by the actors as by the authors, had long been in use as a brief epilogue to performances of tragedies. The form most frequently used was the so-calledAtellana, named from an Oscan village in Campania which was captured by Rome during the Hannibalic war. At first Oscan players had presented these farces in the Oscan dialect. It is very likely that the many Campanians who were trying to make a living at Rome after they had been driven off their lands in 210 broughtthese amusing plays along to produce in the Oscan “colony” of Rome, and that in time the Romans discovered how entertaining they were and began to employ the players at festivals. One is reminded of how the producers of Vienna and Innsbruck have frequently invited the village players from the Tyrolese hill-towns to give their simple homemade comedies before sophisticated urban audiences.
The Atellan farces were usually spontaneous bits of improvised fun in which the witty players, unhampered by a fixed text, developed their own parts. There was much sameness of plot and rôle, usually a ridiculous situation at the expense of some extravagant character, the fat fellow, the old simpleton, the self-deluded wiseacre, the country bumpkin, or what not. There was also much display of countryside wisdom and frequently of broad and coarse wit. By Sulla’s day various city-wits—we know the names of some and have more than a hundred titles of their works—exploited this old form and wrote Latin farces on the Atellan models, obeying literary conventions so far as to employ verse instead of prose. Even Sulla, who was a devotee of the theater, tried his hand at writing this style of comedy.
But these plays also had to give way to something lighter, namely the mime. Simple realistic mimes had appeared at unofficial folk festivals for many years before literature became aware of them. They avoided such artificiality as mask and extravagant garb. They alone employed actresses for female rôles. They got their names from their special devotion to mimicry and caricature, but they proceeded to invade the whole field of comedy; andhad the respectable togata not been bound by convention to exclude actresses on the stage and to adopt the mask, there is no reason why the two should not have merged. In fact the mime came to be a more realistic togata, and as such might have played a dignified rôle in literature. And in Cicero’s day there were writers like Laberius and actresses like Arbuscula and Cytheris who revealed an ambition to elevate the mime into the region of serious art. The fate of the mime, however, lay at the mercy of the rabble who demanded ever cheaper amusement. And the scenario writers of the late Republic and early Empire supplied it. They wrote plots and created female rôles that not even Arbuscula would play, and that self-respecting Romans would not go to see. And so the mime—which indeed lived on for centuries—fell into the class of the tawdriest performances.
The farces and the mimes, while incapable of embodying careful characterization or lines of any real literary value, could at their best provide a vehicle for current ideas and a fruitful entertainment in skilful caricature and much rollicking fun. Their descent to the lower strata of amusement was not so much the fault of the forms as of the audiences that determined their content. It is not surprising, therefore, that these audiences—eager for entertainment which might exclude all possibility of having to exercise the intellect—finally demanded an extravaganza that appealed solely to eye and ear.
Horace lived to see and bemoan the discovery of the pantomime which, as its name implies, was wholly mimicry, with nothing to disturb a lazybrain. What Pylades did with tragedy, Bathyllus of Alexandria did with comedy. He silently acted his rôles using interpretative gestures to the accompanying rhythms of seductive music. There at last the rabble found supreme satisfaction. But Horace at any rate in reviewing the history of the stage did not argue that every new change had marked progress. In his opinion the stage had descended to the lowest depth of inanity.
At Rome, as elsewhere, the drama had proved to be a fairly accurate barometer not of the culture of the educated classes but of the populace. Nothing in the form of official censorship had at any time exercised any serious effect upon the theater. The praetors and aediles were not to blame for what happened. They had placed good plays on the stage as long as could be expected at the risk of offending the masses. Time and again, relying upon their convictions as to the worth of a comedy, they had staged plays that had failed; they were willing to pay very high salaries, partly out of their own purses, to great actors like Aesopus and Roscius who tried to revive the best plays and to win back to the theater an intelligent group of listeners; they had set aside reserved seats first for the senators and later for the knights in order to secure good audiences for literary productions of a high order. Nevertheless the drama declined. What the people demanded had in the end to be provided.
Individual criticism probably served its purpose to some extent, but could not prevent the ebb. Men like Cicero ridiculed the cheap entertainments and refused to attend them, they went out of theirway to encourage the better plays, and they did everything in public speeches, in their essays, and in their social functions to show their appreciation of serious actors like Roscius and Aesopus. Young poets like Asinius Pollio and Varius Rufus filed away at poetic dramas that were published for library shelves but never reached the stage. Critics like Horace wrote to prove that what the populace greeted at every change as a new and remarkable advance was nothing but a new step downward. And down it went. The drama in some form remained a necessity for the populace and they kept it at their level. The intelligent, who had in themselves, their companions and their libraries their own means of entertainment, deserted the theater which had grown unendurable to them.