Liverpool UP/Aris & Phillips (2016) p/b 256pp £19.99 (ISBN 9781107132252)
This welcome book, the first commentary in English for just over a century, is the result of a meeting in Italy at the Giornate Plautine, and subsequent collaboration, between S., whose own commentary in German had appeared in 1983, and M., who retired from Rugby School in 2000. One consequence is that the notes and bibliography have, as the editors tell us, rather more references to work in German and Italian ‘than is perhaps customary in this series’.
The Introduction contains in its nine sections, besides what one would expect by way of background information, detailed speculation on the play’s lost ending (perhaps we lack 150-250 lines) and ‘the Greek Aulularia’. We can have some idea of the play’s ending from the two Argumenta, but much is uncertain, especially given Plautus’s willingness to vary from a Greek original, as the editors admit (p.33). As for the ‘Greek Aulularia’, there is agreement that the orginal was, more likely than not, written by Menander (so Plautus had 100 or more plays to choose from, an interesting thought in itself—where did he get the copies?), but whether the editors are right to emphasise the ‘structural parallels’ with Dyscolos, who knows? (They admit that the differences are ‘conspicuous’, and it would be a remarkable coincidence if Plautus had used as his model the only almost complete play of Menander that we have.) Rather bravely, S./M. give a detailed account of the reconstruction of the original by A. Primmer ‘even if much must be regarded as hypothetical’. The reviewer is unconvinced, so slender is the evidence, but readers and scholars must decide for themselves how plausible the various speculations are. The reviewer welcomed the section on the transmission of the text, fuller than is sometimes the case nowadays.
While the Introduction has a long section on the play’s ‘rich’ reception (the adjective is the publishers’), where, however, the lack of an ending presents a real problem if a theatrical representation is to be attempted, the comment on Plautine language (‘ebullient and extravagant’) is disappointingly scanty: it is, after all, that which, together with the enhanced roles given to slaves, so strongly distinguishes Plautus from Terence. To be sure, the editors will not have had the benefit of the truly chalcenteric work of Giuseppe Pezzini in Adams and Vincent’s Early and Late Latin (2016), from which we learn, inter multa alia, that there are no fewer than ca.370 hapax Plautina (your reviewer spotted an additional one in Aulularia seemingly not listed by Pezzini—tervenefica), but it seems a pity that more was not said: the editors are, it is clear, well acquainted with Eduard Fraenkel’s Plautine Elements in Plautus, at last translated into English in 2007.
Since the book has two highly unusual features, comment here will precede that on other matters. First, although the text (with brief apparatus criticus) is accompanied by a translation, the book includes a second translation, which ‘aspires to offer just a hint of the metrical variety and excitement which Plautus provides’ (‘transgender queen’ at 402 is modish, but a somewhat free version of the Latin). Secondly, say S./M., ‘we have added the sign ‘ on the principal syllables of the verse’, to make ‘the text easy to read even for beginners’. What is more, they do the same for the (second) translation: thus (line 587) Ho’c est se’rvi fa’cinus fru’gi, fa’cere quo’d ego pe’rsequor and ‘ Thi’s is what an ho’nest slave does: doe’s what I am do’ing now’. Are today’s students so cloth-eared that the rhythm even of a trochaic tetrameter catalectic escapes them? But since M. was Head of Classics at Rugby for many years, he presumably knows his constituency, and it will be interesting to see whether this innovation is found welcome, and is copied in the future.
On a related subject, the editors offer a (mainly elementary) Metrical Appendix, which includes a helpful synopsis of the prosody of the verses of the Aulularia. It includes a note on ‘iambic shortening’ (lex brevis brevians) which is necessarily, if understandably, incomplete. While the editors do give some references to other sources, they should not have omitted the authoritative accounts given in W.M. Lindsay’s edition (1900, but reprinted) of Captivi (pp. 30-40) and his Early Latin Verse (1922).
The commentary, not unduly long, but always to the point, is good both on the staging of the play and in its introductory comments on each scene; the editors put to good use what Fraenkel has to offer (less on Aulularia than on some other plays). The reviewer (but not the editorial duo) was struck by the similarity of the phrase germanam sororem at line 121 to κοινον αὐταδελφον at Antigone, line 1; and is stuprare (rape) at line 36 the translation of ὑβριζειν in the Greek original? Perhaps understandably, S./M. refrain from going into any attempt to discuss or define rape in the classical world: on which see Susan Deacy and Karen Pierce (edd.), Rape in Antiquity (1997), which might usefully have found a place in the Bibliography here. A good point is made at 232ff., where S./M. point out the difficulty of finding a Greek equivalent for class, ordo, though the ‘social divisions are universal’. The hapax (vide supra) tervenefica at 86 compares with trifurcifer at 326 and trifur (52), both also hapax—clearly a Plautine way of intensifying an insult (cf. ‘triple-dyed scoundrel’)—and other usages limited to Plautus are commented on as they appear. It would be all too easy to multiply such incidental comments: suffice it that your reviewer found answers where they were needed, and indeed enjoyed reading and using the commentary: references to scholarly work in languages other than English, though, are likely to remain unconsulted by most. Happily, the text has little in the way of cruces (Wilamowitz effortlessly corrected the irrelevant phylacistae to thylacistae at 518) and the commentary will unquestionably be found useful at both school and university levels.
On the quality of the play itself, the reviewer takes issue with its description by the editors as ‘brilliant’, perhaps influenced by the lively characterisation of the old man Euclio (and after all, the fact is, that the play is unfinished). For, as Fraenkel trenchantly observed (op. cit., p.218), ‘We have no right to see Plautus as a dramatist. We must not imagine he was capable of taking from different plays parts of dialogue which actually carried the stage action forward … and weaving these together into new unified dialogues, or thinking up elements of a main plot by himself’. Doubtless the editors will think that Fraenkel went too far, yet the paucity of recent commentaries on Plautus’s plays—the Bibliography lists only four Anglophone ones since 1950—perhaps speaks for itself.
Colin Leach