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Incest and ridicule in the Poenulus of Plautus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

George F. Franko
George F. Franko
Affiliation:
Hollins College, Virginia
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Extract

Readers of Plautus’ Poenulus are struck by the generally ‘sympathetic’ portrayal of the title character Hanno, a portrayal somewhat surprising to us since the play was produced shortly after the Second Punic War.1 Contrary to what we might expect, Hanno the Carthaginian is neither villain nor scapegoat, and he even exhibits the Roman virtue of pietas.2 However, Hanno's portrayal is not wholly positive, for Plautus delineates his character principally by endowing him with the negative stereotypes of Punic physiognomy, dress, speech, and behaviour familiar to his Roman audience.3 Hanno's Punic ethnicity is not merely an incidental matter of fact, as it is with his relative Agorastocles, but an essential part of his characterization that serves to isolate him from all the other characters of the palliata. While some of Hanno's vices—deceit, licentiousness, and effeminacy—are not exclusive to Carthaginians and are shared by other Greek characters in the palliata, there is one vice peculiar to Hanno. In this paper I argue that Plautus ridicules Hanno through arecurrent insinuation of incest. The insinuation of incest has not, to my knowledge, been noted previously, but our text does imply it in three conspicuous places.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , May 1995 , pp. 250 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1995

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References

1 For criteria for dating, see Schutter, K., Quibus annis Comoediae Plautinae primum actum sunt quaeritur (Groningen, 1952), pp. 119–25Google Scholar. For ‘sympathetic’, see (e.g.)Gratwick, A. S., Cambridge History of Classical Literature ii (Cambridge, 1982), p. 94Google Scholar; Harris, W. V., Cambridge Ancient History 2 viii (Cambridge, 1989), p. 154Google Scholar.

2 Note the specific mention of pietas at 1137, 1190, 1255, 1277; see alsoHanson, J. A., ‘Plautus as a Sourcebook for Roman Religion’, TAPA 90 (1959), 48–101, at p. 92Google Scholar.

3 Punic stature mocked at 1309–10, odour at 1313–14, dress at 975–7, 1008, 1121, 1298,1303; speech parodied at 990–1028; deceit noted at 111–13, 1032–4, 1106–10, 1124–6, licentiousness at 106–8, 1303, effeminacy at 1311. For prevalent stereotypes of Carthaginians, seeBurck, E., ‘Das Bild der Karthager in der römischen Literatur’, Rom und Karthago, ed. Vogt, J. (Leipzig, 1943), 297–345Google Scholar;Dubuisson, M., ‘L'image du Carthaginois dans la littérature latine’, Studia Phoenicia 2 (1983), 159–67Google Scholar; Christ, K., ‘Zum Beurteilung Hannibals’, Historia 17 (1968), 461–95Google Scholar.

4 All quotations of Plautus taken from Ernout's Budé edition.

5 Cf. Truc. 49, where nodes ducit clearly means to spend the night with a scortum.

6 Gratwick, correctly notes the fulfilment of the prologue and shows that these lines should be retained (The Poenulus of Plautus and Its Attic Original, unpublished Oxford D. Phil., 1969, pp. 212–13)Google Scholar. The source for the suspicion of interpolation is the comment of Agorastocles at 1221–2: ‘ut pudice verba fecit, cogitate et commode! ut modeste orationem praebuit!’ Clearly, this remark is ironic, either a tongue-in-cheek joke or else the babbling typical of an adulescens amans blinded by love (cf. Gratwick). The jesting nature of Agorastocles' remark is apparent from 1219–20, where he scurrilously compares himself to Jupiter.

7 Pseud.1259–61: ‘nam ubi amans complexust amantem, ubi labra ad labella adiungit, / ubi alter alterum bilingui manifesto inter se prehendunt, / ubi mamma mammicula opprimitur, aut, si lubet, corpora conduplicant…’.

8 1310–11; for contrectare (‘fondle’), cf. Poen. 698; see also 1301, 1303.

9 E.g. in Epidicus, Stratippocles purchases his half-sister Telestis but then learns her identity (649: ‘quid? ego modo amator sum huic frater factus?’); in Curculio, the soldier Therapontigonus unknowingly tries to purchase his lost sister Planesium. Note, however,Aristophanes, Wasps 607–9Google Scholar, where Philokleon enjoys a French kiss from his daughter, who is fishing obols out of his mouth with her tongue. A tension stemming from the possibility of sleeping with long-lost members of the nuclear family is remote for us, and the chances of a father sleeping with his daughter exposed long ago may seem to us impossibly small; however, the recurrence of this theme in New Comedy may indicate a real tension for the Romans; seeBoswell, J., The Kindness of Strangers (New York, 1988), pp. 95–137Google Scholar.

10 I wish to thank the editors and referee for their helpful remarks, as well as those who read drafts of this paper: J. Zetzel, R. Mondi, A. Laidlaw, and P. Fosl.