George Fredric Franko (Hollins University)
Financial Foreplay in Plautus’s Mostellaria and Catullus 5
This paper explores how Catullus 5 establishes an intertheatrical dialogue with an amatory scene in Plautus’s Mostellaria, thereby enriching our understanding of both. When couples conflate kissing with counting cash before the gaze of spectators, the males embrace their role as young lovers, but their girlfriends resist being cast as meretricious.
In Mostellaria, bankrupt Philolaches invites his amica Philmatium to recline and drink (294-5). When Philolaches says “Em! That word’s cheap at twenty minae!” (297), em directs the actor to give an onomatopoetic kiss (“mua!”). In Philematium’s reply, “Please, give [cedo] ten” (298), cedo embeds the stage direction for kissing. Philematium’s very name means “little kiss.” Truculentus 373, with a meretrix coaxing an extravagant customer, stages a comparable counting of kisses: “Gimme a kiss?” “How ‘bout ten instead!” “Em!”. When Philolaches reminds Philematium that he purchased her freedom (300; see Glazebrook for the procedure), she, irked by the commodification of her person, balks. They pause to reassess their financial and emotional investments, declare their mutual love, and reckon that their accounts balance (303-5). They then canoodle in the street beneath the gaze of the older male theatergoers that Philolaches has directly addressed (281).
Catullus constructs many of his poems as New Comic scenarios (see now Polt, Hanses). Poem 5 opens with Catullus inviting Lesbia to live it up and make love as he adopts the role of the comic adulescens amans and perhaps egens (his purse is full of cobwebs, 13.8). He urges her to value at one as the disapproval of senes severiores (5.2-3), the rather stern old men of comedy (Segal). He begs for hundreds and thousands of kisses (5.7-10), counting them as if on an abacus. Catullus knows that he and Lesbia, like Philolaches and Philematium, perform before spectators. His wish to confound any evil spy who might envy them (ne quis malus invidere possit, 5.12) recapitulates Philolaches’ curse that the envious suffer deprivation (qui invident, ne umquam eorum quisquam invideat prorsus commodis, 307).
The women complicate the exchanges by strategically adopting or rejecting male-imposed roles. Philematium’s position is precarious. Her relationship with her liberator depends upon her compliance (morigera, 189-90), and her wealth now consists solely in her good reputation (228). Her objectives balance hope that Philolaches will continue to sustain her (224-6) with public displays to attract potential new lovers (231-2; cf. Vidović).
Lesbia’s objectives, ventriloquized through Catullus, are varying and opaque. By casting himself as a Plautine lover and deploying financial terms, Catullus in poem 5 implicitly reduces Lesbia to a New Comic meretrix. But neither Lesbia nor freed Philematium is a sex laborer. The salacious interruptions of Flavius with his scortum in poem 6 and drunken Callidamates with his girl Delphium in Mostellaria (311 ff.) show us true meretrices for contrast. Lesbia’s delay in accepting Catullus’s invitation, prompting a reply in poem 7, is not coy teasing but tactical resistance. In upcoming episodes, she and Catullus must negotiate their volatile physical, emotional, and moral bonds.