Ray Lahiri (Yale University)
Plautus’ Poenulus has served modern scholars as an invaluable archive of Carthaginian identity and alterity. The bilingual entrance speech of Hanno, who arrives late in the play to star as a Carthaginian merchant, has been plumbed for fragments of Punic. There has also been a rich debate over Hanno’s characterization (be it sympathetic, Starks 2000; mixed, Franko 1995, 1996; negative, Giusti 2018; or subversive of the drama’s program, Henderson 1994). This paper turns instead towards Agorastocles, Hanno’s nephew and a Carthaginian who does not pass as a Carthaginian, in order to re-examine the ways in which the play negotiates the constellation of citizen status, racial alterity, and Mediterranean connectivity in the immediate aftermath of the Second Punic War.
Before we ask whether authentic Punic survives in the Poenulus (Gratwick 1971, De Melo 2012), before we debate what those passages mean or which audience members might have understood them (Adams 2003, Richlin 2014, 2017, Brown 2019), we know for certain who hears but does not understand: Agorastocles, a iuvenis abducted from Carthage and enslaved, subsequently manumitted and adopted, now soon to meet his uncle and regain his freeborn status. For when Hanno approaches speaking in Punic, Agorastocles defers to Milphio, the “clever slave”: Nam qui scire potui, dic mihi,/ Qui illim sexennis perierim Carthagine? (986-7, “For tell me, how could I, who at the age of six was lost there in Carthage, know?”). In the ensuing trialogue, where Milphio’s comic punning-cum-interpretation aggressively misconstrues Hanno’s words (Moodie 2018), the figure of the Carthaginian emerges as kin, guest-friend, and foreigner vulnerable to violence.
To illuminate the significance of Agorastocles’ “forgetting” of Punic (Heller-Roazen 2005) within the frame of nascent Roman empire (Leigh 2004), I turn to the dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Abdelkébir Khatibi on (mono-/bi-)lingualism, (French) colonialism, and the Other (Khatibi 1983, 1999; Derrida 1998). The colonial education system ordains an alienated and alienating language order: for the Maghrebi colonial subject to speak in French is to speak in a language not one’s own (Derrida 1998: 1), a language on loan (Khatibi 2010: 1017).
The detour through Franco-Maghrebi critical theory reveals the slipperiness between other and self in the imperial encounter. The Poenulus simultaneously deconstructs and reinstates Carthaginian difference. Hanno is a spectacular, bilingual racial other. Adopted and assimilated, Agorastocles at first seems to model a safe, acceptable Carthaginian. Yet, as Fantham (2004) has argued, by Roman standards his adoption is legally invalid. Similarly, Hanno is a stranger. Yet he is tied by bonds of reciprocity to Agorastocles’ adoptive father, even before he is revealed to be the boy’s uncle. Mediterranean linkages reveal the foreigner to have been always-already present. The play’s continuous confusion of categories both foreshadows the much later abnegation of Punic language in Roman Africa (as witnessed in Apuleius’ Apology) and reveals the kernel of instability at the heart of Roman identity (as in Lowrie 2011’s reading of Propertius with Derrida).