So my blog went on another hiatus last week, this time because I was at the Classical Association of the Mid West and South. While there I had the opportunity to hear an excellent paper by Dr. Erin Moodie. She has counted all the meta-theatrical comments in all of Greek and Roman comedy: Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus and Terence. By counting and noting which kind of characters among the stock characters of comedy make meta-theatrical comments, Moodie is able to make very arguments comments about which characters are prominent and popular among the difference audiences of these comedies.
I found this paper particularly interesting because I realized that I could do the same thing with Greek and Roman comedy about a number of aspects of slavery. First of all, I can count the number of manumissions. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it sounds, because while sometimes manumission occurs on stage, such as in the Epidicus, often it does not because while the master has promised to free the slave, the manumitting is only implied to happen in the future, such as in the Miles Gloriousus. Other times a slave is freed during the course of the play but nonetheless the manumission does not occur on stage, such as in the Persia. In yet other situations, a slave inquires about manumission but it seems unlikely that he or she will ever gain it. Or maybe one slave ponders whether another will ever be free, which also occurs in the Persia.
You may be surprised by the number of different ways that manumission comes up in comedy. After all, New Comedy is renown for being a very strict genre in terms of conventions: there is a little number of possible characters and all the plots are fairly similar. Indeed, most of the plays share the same setting of Athens, including those by the Romans Plautus and Terence.
However all of these authors were very much aware of these demands of genre. They wrote this way very consciously, not because they couldn’t think of other possibilities. A consequence of this awareness is that they were very free to build upon and then twist, subvert and sometimes entirely ignore particular demands of the genre. These authors no doubt recognized the possibility of manumission as a motive for their slave characters. Therefore they decided to deploy it in a multitude of different ways.
The Persia demonstrates how complex manumission could be. In this very unusual play, the main character Toxilus is a slave who is determined to help himself, not his master. What he wants is to marry a certain slave woman named Lemniselenis. In order to marry her, he has to buy her freedom from her owner Dordalus. Note that is goal is not his own freedom, but that of his fiancée. Rather interestingly, this rather important plot point occurs completely off stage. The play ends with a communal celebration of this scheme’s fruition and the beating of the pimp Dordalus.
I found this paper particularly interesting because I realized that I could do the same thing with Greek and Roman comedy about a number of aspects of slavery. First of all, I can count the number of manumissions. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it sounds, because while sometimes manumission occurs on stage, such as in the Epidicus, often it does not because while the master has promised to free the slave, the manumitting is only implied to happen in the future, such as in the Miles Gloriousus. Other times a slave is freed during the course of the play but nonetheless the manumission does not occur on stage, such as in the Persia. In yet other situations, a slave inquires about manumission but it seems unlikely that he or she will ever gain it. Or maybe one slave ponders whether another will ever be free, which also occurs in the Persia.
You may be surprised by the number of different ways that manumission comes up in comedy. After all, New Comedy is renown for being a very strict genre in terms of conventions: there is a little number of possible characters and all the plots are fairly similar. Indeed, most of the plays share the same setting of Athens, including those by the Romans Plautus and Terence.
However all of these authors were very much aware of these demands of genre. They wrote this way very consciously, not because they couldn’t think of other possibilities. A consequence of this awareness is that they were very free to build upon and then twist, subvert and sometimes entirely ignore particular demands of the genre. These authors no doubt recognized the possibility of manumission as a motive for their slave characters. Therefore they decided to deploy it in a multitude of different ways.
The Persia demonstrates how complex manumission could be. In this very unusual play, the main character Toxilus is a slave who is determined to help himself, not his master. What he wants is to marry a certain slave woman named Lemniselenis. In order to marry her, he has to buy her freedom from her owner Dordalus. Note that is goal is not his own freedom, but that of his fiancée. Rather interestingly, this rather important plot point occurs completely off stage. The play ends with a communal celebration of this scheme’s fruition and the beating of the pimp Dordalus.