Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Author's note on terminology, transliteration, translation, and texts
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I PRE-TRIAL PLAYS
- PART II RECONCILIATION AND ITS RHETORIC
- PART III PLAYING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE LAW
- APPENDICES
- 1 Official arbitration in the Attic orators
- 2 Private arbitrations and reconciliations in Athens
- 3 Remedies for enslavement, kidnapping, and slave stealing in Athens and Rome
- 4 Controversial summonses in Rudens and Persa
- 5 Threats of lawsuits and self-help remedies in Graeco-Roman New Comedy
- 6 Ambiguous arbitri in Roman Comedy
- 7 Moikhos and moikheia
- Works cited
- General index
- Index locorum
4 - Controversial summonses in Rudens and Persa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Author's note on terminology, transliteration, translation, and texts
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I PRE-TRIAL PLAYS
- PART II RECONCILIATION AND ITS RHETORIC
- PART III PLAYING ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE LAW
- APPENDICES
- 1 Official arbitration in the Attic orators
- 2 Private arbitrations and reconciliations in Athens
- 3 Remedies for enslavement, kidnapping, and slave stealing in Athens and Rome
- 4 Controversial summonses in Rudens and Persa
- 5 Threats of lawsuits and self-help remedies in Graeco-Roman New Comedy
- 6 Ambiguous arbitri in Roman Comedy
- 7 Moikhos and moikheia
- Works cited
- General index
- Index locorum
Summary
In Rudens and Persa, the slave-owners are summoned to court in highly dramatized fashion: in the former, the pimp Lab rax has been held at bay by lorarii (floggers) for the greater part of Act in before Plesidippus appears on-stage and hales him, plaintively calling for assistance, to court; in Persa, the court summons in iv 9 is the climax of the “legal plot” scripted and rehearsed by Toxilus and his friends. In each play, the alleged criminal reappears on-stage in the last act of the play. What happened in the interim – between the march to the courtroom and the reappearance of the accused on-stage? Are we to imagine, via the brachiology of dramatic time, that the praetor heard the claims and assigned the case (in iure) and that a hearing took place at which a verdict was given (apud iudicem)? That imagined sequence, however, is fraught with problems: do the procedures and penalties match the offense in each play? and are we to imagine the same sequence in the Greek originals – or is it possible, or even necessary, that different resolutions appeared in them?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Forensic StageSettling Disputes in Graeco-Roman New Comedy, pp. 409 - 424Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997