Ariana Traill’s Plautus: Cistellaria provides a clear and useful introduction to the incompletely preserved play. About half of Cistellaria has been lost or survives only through the badly damaged Ambrosian palimpsest, but through a combination of contextualization, attention to genre, and effective reconstruction, Traill enables readers to approach the play as a coherent dramatic work. In particular Traill emphasizes the pervasive element of female friendship, both among meretrices and across class boundaries between meretrices and freeborn women, which is arguably what makes this play most interesting for modern readers/audiences. The fact that Plautus’s plays are embedded in a society where social and economic injustice pervaded every aspect of life can make them problematic for modern readers to appreciate on a simply comedic level, though they can still be genuinely funny. In that context, Traill’s approach to the Cistellaria is successful because she highlights the ways in which the fictional characters show humanity within a system that treated some people as subhuman.
Chapter 1: “Cistellaria: A Roman Comedy” would function well as a stand-alone introduction to the play. It locates the play within the genre of Greek New Comedy and Roman palliatae, discusses the “Plautinopolis” setting, and includes a brief plot summary with discussion of the unusual focus on women. There is a section on the historical context of the play, including the ritual repetition of performances due to the religious nature of the festivals at which the plays were performed. This chapter discusses the dating of the first performance, and how the reference to velites at line 287 suggests a date of around 209 or shortly after. It discusses the somewhat disputed topic of original audience composition (see Richlin 2017 vs. Brown 2019), noting that, whoever actually formed part of the approximate 0.5% of Rome’s inhabitants that attended the plays of Plautus, the plays were at least notionally for citizen men. The status and reputation of the actors is briefly considered.
This first chapter also considers scholarly reconstructions of how the play would have sounded. There is a brief explanation of how the different meters signal character types as well as plot elements and subdivide the play. There is a section on music in the original performance of the play, with links (in the end notes) to traditional Middle Eastern singing performances that Traill considers to have some similarities to Plautine singing, and a summary of Moore’s work on Plautine music (Moore 2012).
The chapter includes several images of comic scenes (a marble bas-relief, a vase painting, and the Pompeian mosaic depicting Menander’s Synaristosae on which the Cistellaria is based), which Traill uses to explain the costumes and stock characters. This section would be clearer if the images had been in colour, though the book’s front cover is happily illustrated with a colour print of the mosaic labelled Figure 1.3. Traill’s discussion of the Apulian red-figured bell-krater (figure 1.2), with a “character with a raised arm” who is a “young man” type, and a male slave “on the far right.” Even in the full-colour photograph on the British Museum website (1849,0620.13) these identifications are not clear.
The chapter concludes with a discussion of the themes of amor, reconciliation and recognition, and friendship, and finally a useful pronunciation guide for the cast of characters.
Chapter 2: “The People of Cistellaria” gives a brief summary of the role of each character within the play, and within the palliata genre. Traill explains what might be missed by someone reading a translation, such as that fact that Selenium speaks with a formal and polite tone, while the speech of Gymnasium, involving witty banter and the normally male oath hercle, is more typical of a meretrix well trained in the arts of captivating men. Traill discusses the implications of the characters’ names and explains the joke of Gymnasium’s name by suggesting that she was essentially named “locker room” (35). Traill contextualizes her discussions of the young and old meretrices with the realities of sex work and of a social system with little or no provisions for elder care. She comments on the ways that the character of Malaenis (Selenium’s adoptive mother, whose name, derived from the Greek word for “black”, Traill argues, may imply that Plautus meant her to be dark-skinned) contradicts the generic expectations for an aging meretrix. Such a character would usually be expected to be simply selfish and greedy, but Melaenis, untrue to type, wants marriage for her adoptive daughter, and, unlike the freeborn character Alcesimarchus, keeps her promises.
Even the alcoholic Old Woman (called a lena, or female pimp, in a manuscript scene heading) does not completely fit the stereotype, Traill notes, despite having brought up her meretrix daughter Gymnasium to use her body to the best financial advantage. Traill points out the complexity of the Old Woman’s depiction, whereby her cynicism is paired with “kindness, sympathy, and even moral reasoning” (38), and notes that her behavior is meant to be seen as motivated by a profound fear of poverty rather than simple avarice.
Traill notes that the love-afflicted young man Alcesimarchus’s erratic and violent behaviour has often been described in terms of mental illness, but she goes beyond the colloquial use of terms like “depression”, “hallucinating” or “insane” to suggest that his behaviour resembles a modern diagnosis of bipolar disorder, with its highs, lows, and suicide attempt (42-44). She notes that the suicide attempt differs qualitatively from the suicidal ideation of similarly distraught men in Menander and Plautus, who only threaten suicide.
Traill’s discussion of the senex Demipho includes the topic of rape as a comic plot device, which she suggests ancient audiences would have taken as seriously as people do now: she notes that the “extenuating circumstances” of Demipho’s crime “do nothing to mitigate the crime for modern readers and probably did not convince most of an ancient audience either” (56). An explanation of rape as a plot device in a world that put a premium on women’s pudicitia (see Witzke 2020 and Rosivach 1998) would have given Traill’s discussion more nuance here. The reasons that Romans objected to rape (which were fundamentally about a man getting sexual access to a woman over whom he had no sexual rights) were so different from modern objections (which relate to the importance of consent and a person’s right to bodily autonomy) that the two cannot be straightforwardly compared.
Chapter 3: “Performance and Genre” is structured as a scene-by-scene analysis of the play, allowing Traill to offer genre-related context, discuss probable stage action and props, and to explain how the meters relate to the actors’ various speeches. She includes the name of the meter for each scene where it is relevant, points out how the requirements of performing a particularly complicated song would have limited the actor’s physical movements, and describes the likely physical actions that an actor would have used to accompany a song, such as Halisca’s searching for the dropped box at lines 671-94. Traill fleshes out missing and damaged lines with educated guesses, plausibly filling in gaps in the plot.
Traill’s discussions of the implications and effects of the different scenes should allow less experienced readers of Plautus to make sense of what might otherwise seem more chaotic than funny. For instance, she explains how the drunken and joke-filled prologue by the Old Woman complements the more explanatory one by the god Auxilium, interprets Alcesimarchus’s opening speech within the norms of Hellenistic poetry’s depiction of Amor/Cupid/Eros, and explains the mistakes Alcesimarchus makes in his oaths and why a Roman audience would have found the mistakes so funny. Traill points out the comic role reversals of an enslaved person abusing a slave owner, and of an upper-class client demeaning himself by pleading with the lower status leno/lena. She explains why the attempted suicide of Alcesimarchus would have seemed undignified and ridiculous within a historical context where suicide was sometimes seen as noble and gives an analysis of the trusting relationship between the freeborn woman Phanostrata and her servus dotalis (“dowry slave”) Lampadio (89-90).
Chapter 4: “The Afterlife of Cistellaria” concludes the book with the history of the script, noting how rare a written copy would have been even at the time of first performance due to the expense of copying, with actors probably having learned their lines aurally for this reason. Traill discusses the influence of Cistellaria and other plays of Plautus on later Roman and Greek writers. She notes the decreased popularity of Plautus’s plays that nearly resulted in their complete disappearance, and the lucky discovery, in 1815, of the Ambrosian palimpsest by Angelo Mai – who retrieved the Plautine manuscript using chemicals that ultimately damaged the text badly. She describes Stockert’s infrared photographic method, in the 2000s, to see the damaged script clearly enough to correct several misreadings. This chapter also discusses the play’s influence on later literature, describing in intriguing detail Gian Maria Cecchi’s 16th century The Enchantments, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Gelbart’s and Burt Shevelove’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, an “outstanding” translation of the play in 1996 (called Easy Virtue) by Sallie Goetsch, and a 2020 Spanish production La Comedia de la cestita.
Two appendices, one on the “State of Preservation” of the text (listing sections as complete, missing, or fragmentary), and the other listing the meters according to line numbers throughout the play conclude the book before the endnotes, works cited, and index.
Traill successfully pulls together a lot of Plautine scholarship as it relates to a fuller understanding of the Cistellaria, making this a useful companion to the play. Her many end notes lead to the most relevant scholarship and to fascinating websites (that will hopefully remain active). The book is informative and well written, with only the section in chapter 1 that discusses costumes via black and white images (mentioned above) showing the need for a more careful editing process. This book not only makes the play’s humour and stagecraft more comprehensible to those less familiar with context and genre but also makes more evident the social vulnerability underlying its stock characters. By pointing out the ways that Plautus depicted these characters as complex and largely sympathetic, Traill allows modern readers to look beyond the callous jokes about greedy sex workers and the beating of enslaved persons and to get an indirect peek into the world that the Roman audiences knew.
Works Cited
Brown, P. 2019. “Were There Slaves in the Audience of Plautus’ Comedies?”. The Classical Quarterly 69.2, 654-671.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0009838820000099
Richlin, Amy. 2017. Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosivach, Vincent J. 1998. When A Young Man Falls in Love: The Sexual Exploitation of Women in New Comedy. London: Routledge.
Stockert, Walter. 2012. T. Maccius Plautus: Cistellaria. Einleitung, Text und Kommentar. München: Verlag C. H. Beck.
Witzke, Serena S. 2020. “Gender and Sexuality in Plautus”, in Dorota Dutsch and George Fredric Franko (eds). A Companion to Plautus. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 331-346. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118958018.ch22