Villains, Wives, and Slaves in the Comedies of Plautus

Roman comedy offers a fruitful field for the exploration of the hierarchies of Roman society because its characters behave in ways that reverse the norms of ordinary life. The Roman comic playwright Plautus (c. 254–180 Bce) freely adapted Greek plays written about a century earlier to suit the expectations of a Roman audience of the late third and early second centuries Bce. ¹ In this paper I shall be especially concerned with how social expectations inform the dramatic functions and characterizations of women and slaves. In particular, I shall examine two roles which Plautus greatly expanded with respect to his Greek models: the clever slave and the dowered wife. With the expansion of these two roles, the playwright addresses the social tensions of a period marked by the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean, the advent of large-scale slavery, and the emergence of new rules governing women's relation to property.