While researching the significance of the various ways in which Latin speakers interpreted the phenomenon of grammatical gender, I spent a substantial amount of time examining ancient Roman scholars, in particular the Latin grammarians.1 Even a cursory reading of the accounts that these scholars have compiled about the masculine, feminine, and neuter soon reveals how they credit different poets with varying degrees of authority in the use and treatment of grammatical gender, even when that treatment may seem inconsequential to modern eyes. As one might expect, the grammarians regularly consider Vergil’s linguistic finesse indisputable, whereas they deem other poets, Lucan for example, to possess ‘lesser authority’ (minor … auctoritas).2 Evaluative remarks such as these prompted me to wonder what characteristics were thought to constitute the ‘poetic authority’ that informed scholars from antiquity in the evaluation and ranking of poets and whether these criteria affected the ways in which poetry was read and evaluated by ancient readers other than grammarians and other scholars.

Roman comedies transcend the isolated pockets of time in which they are set. Their characters have histories, and their plots are influenced by past events. The audience peers into these with voyeuristic curiosity, as does Periphanes, the senex (‘old man’) of Plautus’ Epidicus: ‘It would be good if people had mirrors … they could then think about how they lived their lives long ago in their youth’ (Plaut. Ep. 382–7). The suspense of comedy lies, however, in the vagueness of these very histories; if the figures of the Epidicus had truly possessed ‘mirrors’, Periphanes would have instantly recognised the slave-musician Telestis as his daughter and there would be no narrative to speak of. The complex relationship which comedy holds with its pasts is therefore advantageous to the audience, who derive no little laughter from watching comic characters grapple with their histories.

The opening chapter examines the forebears of Cicero’s notion of will in Greek thought and Roman usage in the period before his birth, with special attention given to the playwrights Plautus and Terence. There was no “will of the people” in classical Greece. The demos wielded power not by delegation but in active, autonomous decision. There is no special discourse of representation in classical Athens, because in classical democracy (unlike today) there is no permanent governing class. In the Republic, Plato proposes that reason and appetite reside in different parts of the soul; though we succumb to appetite despite “knowing better,” in a harmonious soul as in a just city, reason must rule. Plato’s star student is the first to propose a full theory of human action, but neither Aristotle’s boulesis (the desire for ends) nor his prohairesis (the choice of means) map onto the faculty that Latin speakers would call voluntas. It is the Stoics, and particularly Epictetus, who have been credited by some as inventors of the will due to their intense focus on regulating our inner responses to events and forming the correct intention.

During his lifetime and afterwards, Molière was frequently and favourably compared to Plautus and Terence by early modern commentators, despite the relative paucity of direct imitation or borrowing. Only three Molière plays have clear ties to classical sources: Amphitryon, L’Avare and Les Fourberies de Scapin. Even in these cases, Molière demonstrates a constant interest in updating, adapting, or even subverting his illustrious models, while also ostentatiously rejecting the authority of classical rules. However, in this regard Molière may be imitating the traditions of classical comedy more authentically than his early modern peers recognised. Terence and Plautus were criticised in their own time for their ‘contamination’ of sources, and their free use of prior plays and comedic tropes points to a freewheeling borrowing that is close to Molière’s in spirit. In addition, the Roman playwrights’ method of performing authorship, featured most prominently in the prologues to Terence’s plays, demonstrates a similar interest in stoking controversy and rejecting pedantic rules in favor of the audience’s pleasure. Molière may well have been classical, but precisely in those ways that most irritated his classically minded contemporaries.

The chapter uses the dialogues of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence) to examine the correlation between the characters’ perception of im/politeness and the practice of interrupting. By adopting the methods of Conversation Analysis, the study sets out criteria to distinguish interruptions from other non-hostile or non-salient types of interventions in a dramatic text without explicit stage directions. According to the main argument, proper interruptions – just like impolite behaviour – are constructed interactionally and their identification depends on how the affected party reacts to someone invading their speaking turn. The analysis of face work in various types of turn-taking incidents, either collaborative or disruptive and antagonistic, helps to justify why given talk is not handled as an interruption. After comparing some qualitative and quantitative data, the chapter shows that there are many examples of face-threatening and hostile interventions in the comedy corpus that cannot be analysed as interruptions but rather should be associated with the type of interaction (e.g. conflictual talk) or the speaker’s dominant position within.

Metapragmatic comments, that is, comments that reflect the understandings of speakers or lay observers regarding the ways and aims for which the language is used, are one of the main means of access to native ideas on im/politeness in corpus languages. This chapter analyses the metapragmatic comments on im/politeness that can be identified in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, as a mean to understand the Roman conceptions of im/politeness (that is, the emic perspective of this phenomenon), and the social and moral order underlying those conceptions. This approach facilitates a more detailed and integrated analysis of the speaker’s intentions and/or the interpretation of a particular utterance as polite (or impolite or overpolite) by the addressee, whether or not there are linguistic markers to indicate this intention.

Discussion of Cicero’s quotations from Roman comedy in the context of contemporary trends of Roman scholarship which used comedy as the site of linguistic and philosophical analysis. Discussion of Cicero’s preference for Terence over Plautus. Discussion of the influence of Lucius Aelius Stilo’s scholarly methods upon his students, Cicero and Varro. Discussion of Cicero’s use of Roman comedy to define “good Latin”, and to establish philosophical definitions in Latin.

Metrical patterns reveal that in Roman Comedy music and memory worked closely together. Roman audiences had distinct and clear memories of music they had heard in the theater. Plautus and Terence, in patterning the music of their plays, relied on spectators’ memory of earlier music in the play they were watching, musical conventions of the genre, and specific musical moments in earlier plays, and they employed music in ways reminiscent of the reprises and other techniques of musical repetition in American Musical Theater. The importance of musical memory is particularly evident in Plautus’ Amphitruo, where metrical repetition reveals four different musical motifs, surrounding, respectively, the play’s iambic senarii, trochaic septenarii, iambic octonarii, and bacchiacs. Each motif works because spectators would remember music from plays they had seen before and from previous scenes in Amphitruo itself. In each case Plautus’ play with musical memories contributes to the generic uncertainty surrounding this unique tragicomoedia, helping to make clear that in fact Amphitruo transcends all the generic categories with which its audience would be familiar.

In the opening of Plautus’ Casina the prologue warns the audience: ‘in case you’re waiting for [Euthynicus], he isn’t returning to the city in this comedy today. Plautus didn’t want him to. (64–6)’. The adulescens Euthynicus never becomes present onstage, and yet he is not completely absent either: his mother ‘knowingly supports him in his absence’, by supporting him against her lascivious husband. Euthynicus is not alone: Roman comedy is populated by a crowd of absent characters who are represented on stage by (guileful) proxies. Thanks to the poet’s imagination all these absent characters become present, and through their proxies they ‘benefit us in their absence as if they were present’, as the same prologue of Casina proclaims (20), with reference to the most important proxied absence of all, Plautus himself. There is something inherently theatrical about ‘proxiness’ and (Roman) comedy, a genre performed by actors proxying absent playwrights, featuring slaves proxying absent masters, and written by playwrights proxying both the Roman elite and the (lost) Greek models. The aim of the chapter is to delve into the world of proxied absentees in Roman comedy, investigating their meta-theatrical potential and the comic force of ‘proxiness’ in general.

Plautus’ Pseudolus plays upon the concept of ‘credit’, and reveals the similar nature of the belief that audiences grant to the stage-events and the belief in someone’s credit that underpins borrowing and lending. The Roman understanding of credit in both senses anticipates the modern emergence of the concept of fiction within a modern mercantile economyy.

Catullus features heavily in Chapter 21 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, but he is by no means the only Roman literary figure to have found in Sappho an important predecessor. Ovid, Horace, and others give powerful evidence of her influence in Latin literature.

This chapter explores the central image of currus (chariot), and its top-of-line model, quadriga (the four-horse car), which occupy the most commanding position within the rhetoric of Roman transportation. Already a symbol of unique power and prestige due to its built-in, inherited features, this Roman vehicle takes most distinct shape in two powerful and complementary forms, the four-horse currus triumphalis, in which generals proudly paraded in the triumphal procession, and the currus circensis, the breakneck-fast racing vehicle of Roman chariot-racing. The chapter analyzes the rhetoric of currus in oscillation, alternating between examinations of some its winningest portraits of victory (on the battlefield and in the circus), on the one hand, and uncovering a series of unsettling representations of the danger and violence it claims to transcend. Visions of victorious currus in Ennius, in the story of Ratumena, and in Cicero are counterbalanced by an investigation of ‘chariot-talk’ in Plautus, explorations of the meaning of winning in Roman didactic, and telling versions of the story of Phaethon.

This chapter investigates the significance that Roman augural practice, as a kindred practice to Greek theôria, held for Roman comedy and tragedy. Central to its arguments are notions of time and space, which ultimately show the broad importance of Aristotelian concepts to the broader Hellenistic world. This piece argues that augury-taking involved sitting in a terrestrial temple while gazing at a specially demarcated zone of sky or a ‘whole-world’ (mundus). This temporarily legible space in which the gods would direct the signifying flight of birds was more than a celestial backdrop; it was also itself a temple (templum caeli), and the technical term for this temple-gazing was contemplatio. The institution of Roman theatre has not generally been associated with practices of auspication, but because of the emphatic insistence on the temporary stage, the conventional ‘unity of time’ and the probable placement of audience seating, there was a suggestive similarity between the Middle Republican audience’s spectation at tragedies and comedies and traditional augural contemplation. The structural echo between augural and theatrical contemplation outlives the Republican temporary stage in Seneca, where it has become a distinctively Roman mode of construing the intersection of the cosmic gaze and philosophical or spectatorial theôria.