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Hanno's Punic Heirs: Der Poenulusneid des Plautus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Extract
I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me.
If you like a right mess, then Plautus' Poenulus (‘The Little Carthaginian’) is the play for you. When it is not being slatered, it is konstanly passed by, rarely translated [& then only for completeness' sake: one series or another] and left out of the chiefest recuperations of the oeuvre, of the chicest innovations of the genre (viz. Konstan, 1983; Slater, 1985: but do see Endnote). Poen. gets written off as ‘One of the least successful…’. [Only successful, it may be, in getting waves of Orientalist experts to brush up our Mediterranean languages. If that counts: little Latine, lesse Greek—and now beginners' Punic.] Otherwise, study of Poenulus has centred on two projects: ‘logical’ analysis of the unacceptabihty of the structuring of the plot and ‘archaeological’ dialysis of the text as botched, contaminated, interpolated miscegenation. That is, in both cases, everything that can hardly be dumped on the Greek dramatist Alexis, if it was his lost ‘Karkhēdónios' play that first Plautus mauled and meshed, then in succession his theatre-companies thrashed and threaded and through time his scribes sliced and stitched. Even its warmest admirers must hack Poenulus to bits, for a start, in order to suture some sort of text to admire (Maurach 1975, Zwierlein 1990). And the finicky pundits of this play impugn away with impunity, their fun the display of pungent finesse. Try reading them for laughs—and smile through the Poen.
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- Copyright © Aureal Publications 1994
References
* Dylan, B., Bringing it all Back Home (CBS, 1965Google Scholar). For the record, my own immersion in Poenulus stems from learnèd scribal error: secretarial misreading of Pseudolus in a Tripos prescription. Only in Cambridge, or was this in paruo exactly the tragedy of all our late 1970’s? My thanks to Richard and Iris Hunter, for still more help, and an ‘AUO’ each to my globetrotting hospites Hanno-Boyle and Iahon Poenuillus. Bibliography on Plautine ideology is headed by Konstan, D., Roman Comedy (Ithaca 1983Google Scholar); on metatheatrical self-commentary and reflexivity, Slater, N.W., Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Princeton 1985Google Scholar); on cultural poetics, Gowers, E., The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (Cambridge 1993), 50–108Google Scholar. On the circulation of power through comedy, see Purdie, S., Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Hemel Hempstead 1993Google Scholar); on ‘Ideology, Interpellation, “Munchausen Effect” ‘, see Pêcheux, M., Language, Semantics and Ideology (Basingstoke 1982), 103–09CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘…the immortal baron who lifted himself into the air by pulling on his own hair’. For Poenulus, use the untiring edition of Maurach, G., Plauti Poenulus: Einleitung, Tex-therstellung und Kommentar (Heidelberg 1975Google Scholar); and see now Zwierlein, O., ‘Zur Kritik und Exegese des Plautus, I: Poenulus und Curculio‘, AAWM (1990.4), esp. 56–225Google Scholar, 288–96; cf. Gratwick, A.S., ‘Drama’, in Kenney, E.J. and Clausen, W.V. (edd.), The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, II: Latin Literature (Cambridge 1982), 94Google Scholar, 98–103, and Lowe, J.C.B., ‘Plautus Poenulus I 2’, BICS 35 (1988), 101–10Google Scholar, and ‘Plautus’ Choruses’, RhM 133 (1990) 274–97Google Scholar. For less fun in the Prologue, cf. Jocelyn, H.D., ‘Imperator Histricus’, YCS 21 (1969) 97–123Google Scholar. And in the end, see Slater’s, N.W. splendid ‘Plautine Negotiations: The Poenulus Prologue Unpacked’, YCS 29 (1992) 131–46Google Scholar, which marks the beginnings of a revaluation <not halfways messy enough> which would have influenced me greatly. Plaudite.
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