Giuseppe Rallo’s book is two things: an extensively documented study of the remains of the Roman dramatic genre called fabula togata, “comedy in Roman dress”, and a contribution to the far-flung debate on early Latin literature and the shaping of Roman identities during the Middle Republic. This debate has resulted in several book-length contributions since the early 1990s; one of the latest is Denis Feeney’s acclaimed monograph on the beginnings of Latin literature from 2016.[1] Rallo seeks to contribute to this scholarship by putting the long scholarly tradition of linguistic and philological study of the togata as a genre to the use of answering questions about how it depicted ‘Roman’ culture and society as opposed to ‘non-Roman’, and how this contributed to the development of a particular Roman identity expressed through social norms and a particular kind of language.
The book has only three main chapters: ‘I. Authors, terms, elements’, ‘II. Female and male characters’, and ‘III. Ancient reception and lexicon’. These, however, are each subdivided into several parts with sub-sections, many of which are not longer than one or two pages. While this fine-meshed structure may surprise in a book of less than two hundred pages, it is indeed helpful for quickly navigating Rallo’s careful documentation of the remains of the togata.
The first chapter serves as a kind of introduction to the genre and its authors. It is subdivided into three parts. The first is dedicated to the authors’ identity. Fragments survive from only three authors, Titinius, Afranius, and Atta, and none of their lives or works can be securely dated, although it is likely that they all wrote in the second century BCE (p. 41–49). This would make the togata a late contemporary and successor to the better known genre of the palliata, “Roman comedy in Greek dress”. In contrast to earlier dramatic authors, the three known authors of the togata stand out for being of Roman origin and, possibly, noble birth (p. 54).
In the second part of the first chapter, Rallo investigates the various meanings of togata, which ranged from ‘any play in Latin’ (a usage first attested in Varro), to ‘a type of comedy’ (as opposed to palliata), ‘a dramatic genre between comedy and tragedy’ (Seneca), and ‘unclear meaning’. Rallo concludes that the conventional definition as ‘comedy in Roman dress’ is ‘potentially misleading’ (p. 70), since the word did have various meanings. Yet, as Rallo admits, the dominant meaning was that of dramatic genre ‘with some sort of “Roman identity, usually by contrast with genres with a Greek identity’ (p. 71).
In the third part of the first chapter, Rallo identifies ‘Roman’, ‘Latin’, ‘Italian’, and ‘Greek elements’ in the plays. Out of altogether seventy remaining titles there are only four for which we can assume a setting in Rome (p. 72). But there are other indicators that the togata related to life in Rome: characters with Roman names (72–74), Roman calendars and religious traditions, titles with Roman themes, and various less certain allusions to Roman matters (72–78). There are fewer identifiable ‘Latin’ or ‘Italian’ elements, and it remains difficult to say, for example, how the difference between the toga as general dress code of respectable male Italians and as particular marker of Roman citizen status played out in the genre (79 f.). A bit more can be said about Greek elements. Slaves and prostitutes carry Greek names that possibly suggest a link, either in moral discourse or in contemporary social practice, between low status/disreputable genre and Greekness/foreignness (83 f.). This link appears even more likely in the appearance of the verb pergraecari, ‘to Greek it up’, to describe a kind of excessive revelling that is joyful yet reproachable (84). Like the palliata, then, the togata contributed to a discourse that ‘othered’ self-indulgent behaviour by calling it Greek, strengthening in turn a certain view of Roman identity as frugal and austere. Rallo concludes that the togata can be called a Roman genre only ‘in a broad sense, as denoting a fluid concept removed from strict geographical and cultural boundaries’. Like mid-republican Italy in general, the togata was marked by cultural hybridity.
Rallo takes up this line of thought in the second chapter on female and male characters. He calls the togata a ‘hybrid dramatic genre’ because it incorporated character types from Greek Middle and New Comedy as well as the palliata (88). Rallo notes that relatively many plays were named after female characters and offers an interesting explanation of this finding: because the plays of the togata were not ‘immunized’ by any Greek disguise, they could not give cunning slaves the room that the palliata gave them (91 f.). Analysis of the fragments reflecting on female characters does not suffice to reconstruct plots, but it does tell us how the togata contributed to discourse on Roman gender norms. Prostitutes are depicted as ‘Greek’ and contrasted with virtuous Roman matronae (98–100). At the same time, the uxor dotata, the ‘well-dowered wife’, figures prominently in the surviving fragments. The character of the wife who exerts power in the household and over her husband because of her personal wealth was both a motif adapted from the palliata and a stereotype of moral discourse in the second century, when upper-class women began to enjoy relatively more liberties (100–112).
Similarly, male characters appearing in the fragments are often old acquaintances from the palliata: the enslaved servant (servus), the parasite (parasitus), the pimp (leno), the old father (senex). Slave characters are represented in similar ways as in the palliata (and have Greek names), but they are less prominent (111–113). The palliata, however, was not the only dramatic tradition feeding into the togata. Like Athenian Middle Comedy, the togata depicted a broad spectrum of economic and occupational life and many of its titles resemble titles known from Middle and New Comedy (124–128).
The third chapter turns to ancient reception and lexicon. As we learn from testimonies, the togata was valued by later Latin authors for its elegance and purity and considered to be representative of these qualities in the Latin rhetoric of the mid-republican period (145 f., 149). Concerning lexicon, a defining characteristic of the togata is the frequency of words only attested once (hapax legomena) or used for the first time (primum dicta); since many fragments were preserved in later scholarly works interested in rare words, this impression may be produced in part by the conditions of transmission; Rallo, however, is able to show that the use of hapax legomena and primum dicta was a typical feature of early Roman drama, since the frequencies of such words relative to surviving words in total are similar to those in Plautus and Terence (167). In contrast to Plautus and Terence, however, Graecisms are rare; when used, they were employed to mark things as ‘foreign’ (176 f.).
Rallo concludes his study by comparing the “Romanness” of the togata with the palliata and Roman satire. Like the palliata, the togata is a hybrid genre in both content and style, but its hybridity ‘is more national (and even nationalistic’ (187). Like Roman satire, the togata ‘reflected and emphasized Roman indigeneity’ and it shared satire’s ‘strong sense of particular aristocratic identity’; like satire, the togata appropriated existing themes and traditions ‘in order to portray a particular type of self-congratulatory nationalism onstage’ (193).
At no point in the book did the reviewer feel compelled to reject Rallo’s findings and how he relates them to the broader theme of Roman republican identities. Yet, at no point as well did Rallo’s findings strike the reviewer as radically new or revisionist, when compared, for example, to the summary of the genre’s style and themes in Gesine Manuwald’s introduction to Roman republican theatre.[2] Rallo’s description of the togata as an element in the construction of Roman identity seems persuasive but at times also too general and vague. It would have been interesting, for example, if the author had engaged with Florence Dupont’s concept of ‘included otherness’ (alterité incluse)[3] in order to make a more pronounced judgement on whether he considers the Greek elements in the togata to be simple reflections of the presence of Greek persons or things in Italy (‘unroman’ in a descriptive sense) or rather, in line with Dupont’s view, as a device to ‘other’ desires and practices incommensurable with Roman public morals (‘unroman’ in a normative sense).
The greatest merit of Rallo’s study is the scrupulous and yet economical presentation of the evidence we have and what it adds up to in terms of cultural and social history. The fine-meshed structure of subheadings helps to navigate this presentation and the many tables on testimonies, titles, word usage etc. are very useful for following Rallo’s argument and using his results for one’s own research.
In dealing with a literary epoch whose remains are so few and also so unevenly distributed across time, space, and authors, it is immensely difficult to combine scholarly rigour with truly new interpretations. But even if Rallo may have not rewritten the history of the togata, he has pointed out ways to do so by looking at the genre in its wider historical context and by providing an invaluable resource to anyone willing to pursue this path of research further.
Notes
[1] Denis Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature, Cambridge, MA / London 2016; other important contributions to this debate include Erich S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome, Ithaca 1992, Thomas N. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome, Princeton 1998, Emma Dench, Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian, Oxford 2005, and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge 2008.
[2] Gesine Manuwald, Roman Republican Theatre, Cambridge, 2011, 156–169.
[3] Florence Dupont, ‘Rome ou l’altérité incluse’, Rue Descartes 37 (2002-2003), 41–54 and ‘L’altérité incluse: L’identité romaine dans sa relation à la Grèce’, in ead. and E. Vallette-Cagnac (edd.), Façons de parler grec à Rome, Paris 2005.