Six Plautine prologues1 and six Terentian prologues are our earliest unequivocal proof of original titulature in ancient drama.2 The twelve titles these provide are also the only securely author-sanctioned titles we have for the entire republican period until Cicero.3 While any authorial title is revelatory, the titles of Roman comedies are especially so; we have just seen that the title of a translation can convey information about its relationship to the source text. Juxtaposed with “Thesauros”, “Trinummus” gave us a key to understanding not only how the playwright conceptualizes his own play but also how he has reconceptualized a Greek play.4 Plautus’ titular changes, then, are meaningful and we should be paying more attention – not least because the poet does not always give his translation a new name: of ten comedies in the corpus whose originals we know for sure,5 only six have new titles.6 What is the difference between plays with changed names and those whose Greek names have just been translated into Latin? Are the former more Plautine than the latter? Is Mercator closer to Emporos than Stichus is to Adelphoi?

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 sets out to query ancient scholars’ awareness of politeness phenomena as reflected in language and the metalinguistic tools they used to describe them. Particular attention is devoted to the terms charientismos and astimos, as well as to some specific acceptations of reticentia and expressions like grave or durum dictu.

Even if as a general rule ancient grammarians and commentators did not analyse the ordinary spoken language, since they mostly focused on poetry and the more exalted prose genres, it can be argued that all commentators of literary texts pay some considerable attention to ordinary language in interaction, and some attempt is made by them at identifying and labelling what they correctly see as speakers’ rhetorical strategies to reach a pragmatic goal while avoiding conflicts with an interlocutor or giving offence. These writers also make interesting deductions about the social and educational implications of the correct use of politeness etiquette and ritualization.

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.