What's Roma Got to Do with It?

When Gratwick (1982: 113) coined the name “Plautinopolis” as a shorthand for the conventional setting of Plautine plays, he was highlighting the plays’ Greco-Roman cultural hybridity, universal in Plautus’ Roman Comedy but nonexistent in any real-world location. The intercultural phenomena in this “fantasy Plautinopolis” (Henderson 1999: 7), where Greek characters speak Latin on Italian stages and act out Greek plotlines laden with references to Roman cultural institutions, have been well-documented and studied (Gruen 1990, Moore 1998).

The fictional geographies of Roman comedy are, at least at first glance, entirely un-Roman. Following in the wakes of their New Comic forerunners, the characters of the palliata ricochet around the Hellenistic Mediterranean, from the Black Sea to Cyrenaica, and from Massilia to Ephesus, while Rome and Italy remain, with very few exceptions, over the distant horizon. Yet, I show in this paper, these translated trajectories also map out a set of distinctly Roman anxieties about the city’s uncertain position within the cultural world of the Hellenistic oikumene.

Plautus often uses comically long lists of nouns, or other words, to get an easy laugh out of his audience, a feature which Alison Sharrock calls, the "surfeit of nouns" (Sharrock 2009: 172). This paper proposes that when these lists are comprised of gods, it provides us with a perspective of polytheism that is characteristically Roman. In the Bacchides in particular, Plautus presents us with a view of Roman religion that is not normative and unified, but varied and incorporative.

Thanks to a didaskalia that identifies the ludi Megalenses in 191 B.C.E. as a known performance occasion for the play, Plautus’ Pseudolus presents scholars with a unique opportunity to connect the content of a Roman comedy to its immediate performance context. In spite of this prospect, the standard line that scholarship takes on this issue is that there is no substantive connection between the text and the festival.

In this paper, I examine how the depiction of Thebes in Latin tragedies from the 2nd century BCE reflects the social, political, and religious concerns of contemporary Rome. I focus on two specific themes that emerge from the fragments of Latin tragedies which staged the Theban cycle: a) the worship of Bacchus, b) the portrayal of female characters. An examination of these two themes — Latin songs of Bacchus, perceived female venality — strongly suggests an interconnection between the Latin stage of the 2nd century BCE, and the concerns faced by contemporary Romans during that time.