ABSTRACT
In a widely distributed folktale, the “clever wife” must outwit a husband who refuses to sleep with her until she has borne him a son. The usual solution is to seduce him while she is in disguise. (Recall Tamar in the Bible and Helena in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well). But Menander and Terence wrote extraordinary variations on this theme, in which the husband rapes the innocent woman who will later become his wife (in a darkness that keeps either from seeing or later recognising the other), producing newly complex and astonishing human dilemmas.
