ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a new reading of Plautus’ Pseudolus by examining a series of allusions to and reminiscences of Plato’s Phaedrus. Through reference to Platonic ideas, and through the incessant redirection of our attention to the written word, philosophy, and rhetoric throughout the play, Plautus dramatizes and also partly challenges Plato’s disparagement of rhetoric and writing as vehicles of persuasion and self-knowledge. Plautus reworks Platonic ideas into a staged exploration of Roman identity, using a network of references to Plato in order to offer a thought-provoking display of the crafting of Roman identity. This chapter examines a wide-ranging group of statements and dramatic scenarios in the play which bear directly on the work’s adaptation of Plato’s ideas. Writing is a central theme of the Pseudolus and the Phaedrus (the myth of Theuth and Thamus). The Pseudolus begins with a series of puns about the mind’s arousal from wax tablets (31–7). Calidorus claims that his animum is found in the tabellae that he has Pseudolus read (a pun on animum as “darling” and as “mental faculties”). Various instruments of writing appear throughout the play (litterae, tabellae, stilus, epistula). Pseudolus is likewise referred to twice with the laudatory term graphicus (519, 700). Pseudolus notes at length the deceptive potential contained in the letter he has tricked Harpax into giving him (669–86). And nowhere else in Latin literature are the puns on salus/salvere/salutare so prevalent and productive, offering a sustained set of jokes that center on the use of epistolary greeting (salutem dicere) and the physical greeting of individuals salutare/salutatio (40–50, 71, 707–10, 968, 982, 1003–14), indirectly calling attention to one of Plato’s main criticisms of writing, namely that an individual cannot be present in writing to bear examination. The second criticism, that writing makes us forgetful because it frees us from the skill of remembering, is suggested by Simia’s humorous remark: memorem immemorem facit qui monet quod memor meminit, 940–1). Plautus throughout takes a Platonic motif and reworks it within comedic conventions in order to consider different aspects of identity. This emphasis on identity and knowledge is twice connected to the famous Socratic adage: know thyself. First, at 262 (nunc qui sit ipsus sciat) then at greater length nam in foro vix decumus quisque est qui ipsus sese noverit (973), where it’s called philosophizing (philosophatum, 974). At 480–1 Pseudolus jokes siquid scibo Delphis tibi responsum dicito, before he begins to answer Simo’s questions in Greek and in a style that seems to mock Socratic elenchus (482–8). Simo even claims that Pseudolus will talk like Socrates (Socratem tecum loqui, 465), and Pseudolous claims to conduct himself like a philosopher (philosophatum, 687). Central aspects of Roman comedy – wordplay, identity, persuasion, and deception are connected to the most important meditation in Greek philosophy on the nature of language and the dangers inherent in representing the world through the written word. The Pseudolus playfully engages in a serious consideration of how Roman acculturation through Greek texts is itself a challenge and ultimately a confirmation of individual no less than Roman identity. This can help to explain why the young master Calidorus is the only example of a iuvenis in the Plautine corpus to engage in the code-switching otherwise associated with slaves (cf. J. N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language [Cambridge 2003, 351–3]): nimium est mortalis graphicus, ∊?ρητής mihist. This is a telling moment in which Calidorus both “identifies” Pseudolus and imitates his Greek manner of speech, just as Pseudolus later on will reciprocate by adapting his Greek vocabulary to Latin syntax (712). In the Pseudolus, Platonic ideas about knowledge and self-knowledge are transformed into concrete Roman questions of self-knowledge as cultural identity. The play exemplifies how Roman comedy can be a marvelous vehicle to promote Greek culture to a Roman audience, suggesting along the way that Romanitas is itself inherently connected to the Greek world.
