Comedy and the Rise of Rome (review)

Much of the considerable value of Leigh's book resides in its perceptive new readings of key scenes and comic themes; even more of it, however, resides in the book's overall effect, which is to reinvigorate the historicist method of reading Roman comedy.  New Comedy, with its domestic settings and its platitudinous resolutions, has long seemed an obvious source for learning about the lives of its audience.  Previous attempts at historicizing readings, however, have often come off in an unsatisfying way, usually because of either an excessively specific approach to "decoding" the play-scripts' topical references or an excessively vague approach to ancient mentalités. Leigh's title is a good index to the form of specificity he seeks and attains as a historicist: he interprets the period of the flowering of comedy in light of this same period's uniqueness as the moment when Rome was in the process of becoming the Rome of the classical period—imperialist, expansionist, economically sophisticated.  So, although much of the history he is interested in is cultural and social history, including the history of assumptions and attitudes, he grounds this investigation in the challenges facing Romans in this particular period, and in doing so not only opens up rich new perspectives on the commonplaces of comic plots and themes, but also gives us a very emphatic sense of the dynamism and upheaval of this period when everything was changing at once. 

In his introduction, Leigh meets head-on the challenge of how to read plays that were based on Greek originals (and maintained the Greekness of their represented world to varying degrees) as evidence for mid-Republican Rome. His argument constitutes as sophisticated an approach to the "problem" of the Greek originals as any we have seen in recent decades. He both offers evidence for Romans' own "against the grain" readings of comedy—seeing Romans on stage when presented with Athenians—and, in a New Historicist vein, argues for the mutual influence of literature and social practice (for example, when Cato's advice about farm managers "suggests strongly that he has begun to see his own society in the terms proposed by comedy" [19]). The four main thematic chapters focus, respectively, on comic trickery and the ethics of warfare ("Plautus and Hannibal"), on the tension between legal/political and familial resolutions to wartime captivity ("The Captivi and the Paradoxes of Postliminium"), on the moral and cultural resonances of trade and agriculture ("City, Land and Sea: New Comedy and the Discourse of Economies"), and, finally, on cultural analogues between the power exercised by fathers and generals ("Fatherhood and the Habit of Command: L. Aemilius Paullus and the Adelphoe").

What Leigh seems to be aiming for is a rapprochement between Old and New Historicism, between a conception of history in which texts "reflect" facts/objects in the world and one in which the text and the context participate in a mutual discursive construction of Romans' experiences. The center of gravity of his reading practice is definitely on the side of the New, but particularly in the chapters involving Hannibal and L. Aemilius Paullus he attempts to recuperate earlier attempts to tie in events on the comic stage with contemporary personages. (The latter of these two chapters offers his most explicit analysis of the practice of historicism.) Perhaps because he consistently reads like a New Historicist (and a very good one at that) these two chapters are less convincing than the other two, in which his ability to marshal a wide range of evidence and to perceive multiple layers of meaning produces perspectives that feel truly eye-opening.

But no matter what judgments a reader makes about Leigh's particular arguments, the conception of the book in itself constitutes a bracing new view of the plays of Plautus and Terence. In contrast to much recent scholarship, Leigh is not much interested in comedy as a genre, but in how these texts interact with a world of other texts, as...