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 author examines how commands and requests are expressed in a corpus of Greek and Latin literature, in order to show how the politeness systems of ancient Greek and Latin may have differed.

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.

This chapter investigates impoliteness in subliterary texts, namely in bilingual teaching material for learning languages. It takes the Colloquium Harleianum, one of the conversation manuals in the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana (second to third century CE) as a corpus. The chapter studies both impoliteness forms and their evaluations from culture-internal speakers. The impoliteness forms, the metalanguage and the metapragmatic comments on the quarrel represented in this corpus are compared with quarrels represented in literary texts, mainly Roman Comedy (second to third century BCE) and the novel (second cetury CE). It relies on metapragmatic comments as the main entry to the emic evaluations of impoliteness forms and of offences present in the corpus. In this way, the chapter provides a diachronic perspective on ancient impoliteness in Latin by taking into account both literary and subliterary evidence. By dealing with teaching manuals, it provides a unique contribution on pragmatic competence for non-native speakers, and it offers insights on the etiquette norms for the elite, which is the perspective that the evidences in the corpus reflect.

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.