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  • Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini's Chrysis:Prurient Pastime—or Something More?
  • Emily O'Brien

"The Chrysis is above all a literary exercise, the learned pastime of a humanist. . . ."1

"In the comedy . . . [Aeneas] seems to relive a moment of relaxation and of escape from political and religious disputes. . . ."2

"The Chrysis is . . . the last of [Aeneas's] . . . morally unscrupulous works. . . ."3

"The spirit of the comedy was thoroughly libertine."4

So reads the scholarship on the Chrysis, the one-act Latin comedy penned by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405–1464). The text was the product of Aeneas's early years of service at the imperial court and, more specifically, of his brief sojourn in Nuremberg in the late summer [End Page 111] of 1444. Emperor Frederick III had convened a diet there to help resolve the schism between Pope Eugenius IV and the antipope Felix V—the "religious disputes" that are mentioned above. Aeneas's play, which has survived in a single manuscript and exists now in several modern editions, is one of the few examples of humanist comedy and, within this genre, the earliest with such a heavy classical imprint.5 Many in his cast of characters, including the prostitute who gives the play its title, are named after figures in the comedies of Plautus and Terence; and into its 812 lines, he packs more than sixty allusions to these works.6 If readers are surprised at how many classical references they find in Aeneas's play, they may be still more surprised at how much it makes them blush: without question, the Chrysis is one of the lewdest comedies of its age.

Aeneas's play centers on a day in the life of two prostitutes, Chrysis and Cassina, and the two pairs of lovers who seek their services. One pair consists of two clergymen, Theobolus and Dyophanes, who have paid the women to join them at the public baths and later for a night at the whorehouse. The other pair, two middle-aged men, Sedulius and Charinus, who have a longstanding relationship with these women, seek to take them away from their new lovers long enough to satisfy their own desires. When the play opens, the two clerics are on their way from the baths to the brothel, while Chrysis and Cassina, taking a different route, have stopped to enjoy the company of their other lovers. The clerics grow impatient waiting for their companions; and [End Page 112] when the prostitutes finally appear, the clergymen scheme to make themselves more desirable by resisting their shows of affection. Meanwhile, the two middle-aged lovers, who are themselves hoping for another meeting with the prostitutes, sneak into the brothel where, conveniently, they find the two women quite unoccupied. When Chrysis and Cassina at last take leave of their middle-aged lovers, they find themselves still pining for their clerical ones. With the madam and another of the whorehouse's visitors acting as peacemakers, the two prostitutes reunite happily with the very forgiving priests.

Given its lascivious nature and its classical modeling, it is no surprise that the Chrysis has earned a reputation as a work of sexual abandon and learned diversion. It has done so, moreover, by almost unanimous verdict. While recent scholarship has shed new light on the play's literary models and ambitions, its theatrical dynamics, and its relationship to "contemporary reality,"7 it has done little to change the traditional interpretations of the play's message first articulated more than six decades ago.8 Indeed, the most recent studies often simply repeat these familiar views.9

The only significant break with this pattern of interpretation comes in one scholar's short study of scene four of the play. Analyzing the philosophical underpinnings of the scene's monologue, Giuseppina Boccuto details Aeneas's familiarity with Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, and at the same time, the passage's distortion of Epicurean ideals.10 [End Page 113] While not the first to note the Epicurean inclinations of the play's characters, Boccuto is the only one to pay them serious attention.11 Her article contends that through these distortions, Aeneas was criticizing his contemporaries who incorrectly equated Epicureanism with hedonism and...

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