Asinaria: The One about the Asses

Prologue

xi Prologue 1–15 The Prologue tells all | there’s nothing to tell, so listen “I’m a person as much as you,” so the actor playing the slave playing the slave overseer tells the actor playing the straight-up role of free trader stranger-in-town.1 “P’raps, and yet—,” comes the rebuff, polite prudence to the end, “—A man’s a wolf, not a man, to a man who don’t know what he’s like” (= humanity estranged: homo, 490 ~ 493, homo homini, non homo, 495).2 The horseplay ends with wife-and-mother scolding naughty paterfamilias back home, for revenge with kisses (= bilge-water stench) and dinner on the table (= trouble, and so to bed: 893–940). The cast invite us to beg off the (castratory) husband-beating with a rousing score on the clapometer; and, curtains (= cut-off: 942–7). The stand-out moment of donkey business came a good deal earlier, in the cameo, one of Plautus’ greatest, which had young master-lover-son stop and pick up a piggy-back passenger: the ringmaster Cunning Slave wants a ride, and gets one (= one of Plautus’ daftest: 699–710).3 The businesslike Prologue gave spectators due notice, loud and clear, that today’s plot “takes no time at all,” it won’t take a moment, and in fact—it doesn’t (8, sane breuest)! Instead, in less time than it takes to say “plot,” attention fastens on the name of the play, backed with a promise of “wit-nfun —this one is a gas” (6–12; 13–14). Such preliminaries need kid us not. They generally put in play tasters of what’s to come, if only we knew it. On this occasion, as often, the tightly structured composition tips us the wink for the direction we should be looking—or rather, listening. A cruel gag (from the anarchic satirist Peter Cook) once ran: And now, for those who are hard of hearing—LISTEN! But Plautus’ prologue beams up ears to hear for one and all. First off, the hope is—“Do it, if you will”—that the production will “turn out well, for me and for all you.” Last up, farce does its will, telling that the writer “turned the play,” out of Greek, for “such is his will, if you allow it. . . . Give it up real good for me, so for you”—the hope is—“Mars [Roman god of war, and father of Romulus, founder of Rome] will give his backing, on a par with his past record” (12–15).4 Prologue’s “entrée, his will,” was to “say,” it is to “say” (and, as he says, he “says” he “said so,” too), that “the play’s changed its name from the Greek name of the play,” ∆ONAGOS, The Donkey-driver, to ASINARIA—The One about Donkey-driver or The One about Donkey[s] (6–12). Now this is fun. But is it fun and dandy because it’s fussy fuss about nothing? Of course it is. Minutiae are fun, especially when they take over the whole of this amplified programme and yet seem to make such infinitesimal difference, any which way you look at it (see n. and p. 211).5 But (I said) our ears are meant to be flapping. Prologue already made a crier do his thing, [SHHH! BRAY SILENCE!], before sitting him down, with a reminder to claim a double fee: for noise and for silence. In a flash, the human otophone’s rude proclamation made the whole of Rome into one acoustically amplified auditorium. From this moment on, who is there at the Asinaria that does not have ass’s ears? “Me and you,” Prologue began, “me so you,” he bowed out, “. . . backing . . . on a par” (2 ~ 14–15). Point is, the tale is well and truly pinned to the donkey before the start, and just as the entire “troupe” on this stage will take some beating, so we otosclerotic spectators must pin back our ears and take what we have coming, to a man. No troop of monkeys, but a herd (this should be a “pace”)—of donkeys (grex, 3).6 So much for the public address system. Brought to us in a neat, overneat , rhetorical ring that gives nothing away and enjoys itself telling us xii Prologue so. The presenter, uptightass Prologue, stuffs in the deictic “shifters” (herenow -this-I/we/you): hoc...