Asinaria: The One about the Asses

2 Drive a Hard Bargain

136 2 Drive a Hard Bargain 127–152 Loverboy’s lament 153–248 Loverboy spars with Madame: a deal is cut The comic stage yokes together society’s house of decency and society’s red house. As paterfamilias takes the part of his loving son, they bid for a stake in the turn-over of the one-girl “brothel” through the party wall. Uptown and downtown interpenetrate and threaten a merger. Assets for sharing. It will be left to matrona to reassert the difference. But it will be left to the audience to make a final assessment.1 Money rules both outfits. What of desire? Comedy tests the world that insists on coupling carnal pleasure with civic degradation, when it fills the reservoir of energy that drives the strategies of masking, repression , and sublimation on which the family is founded. When conjugality buckles, its need for desire, affection, and affirmation is (traditionally) exposed through alignment with the sex factory. So long as the product supplies disposable toys for absorbing adolescent testosterone at the city limits, it provides the community with its other system—the object lesson in othering , denial, and obliviation. Taking to heart the existence of sentiment, caring, and generosity in the exploitation economy of sexual ownership of expendable females will spell taking to task the home of propriety for failure to monopolize human values. Defamiliarize the domus, and there shows up the money-go-round of a sexless (de-pleasured) powerhouse.2 It will dawn on us. That’s why today’s cash-plot heist of “self-swindling” gets under way as morning comes up. Master fetched out slave for kickstart . Then it’s off(-stage) we go, to the mall (the forum: pp. 183–4): • to kill time (= master at the bank: argentarium |, 116, and, last word in the act, argentarium |, 126: in this redoubled echo, hear the “Starting- Drive a Hard Bargain 137 Point of the Plot” [= Archi-bulus, in Plautin, 115, consilia+exordiar] that images “Cash-as-Ass”: asinariam) • to magic up the embezzlement (= agent One, off to . . . snooze a while. We can relax, too—and let the playwright fool us: pp. 143–4) • to stumble into the miracle of a Courier, fresh in town, who fetches along, to mother’s agent, just the sum required (= agent Two, in earshot at the barber’s: to all appearances, slave stubble sat cheek by jowl beside free, and no fuss showing: p. 148) Mean time. Out on his ear, a youth is turfed in a heap onto the street, now last night is done and dusted, as per payment rendered; rooms are cleared, as ever, come each morning. We can only assume that this is the problem child whose confessions we just overheard at one remove. Before he is gone, some of us may have our doubts about this:3 we can have this salty specimen come across as less wet than “the average comic adulescens ”—more self-reliant, if the worse for wear.4 Later it will transpire that he was a sassy alter ego, a boy who is now sucked dry but has no oddball pal of a pater to turn to, and squeeze for a sub. I relegate documentation of this (formerly the chief) critical crux of Asinaria to a whopping footnote or two5 because I am sure that Plautus does fool with his audience here: it’s no great feat to trick spectators in this theatre, in fact it’s a built-in option, because (say it loud), in the absence of names, a mask for a part such as the adulescens amator specifies the role, not the individual.6 “Diabolus” will first be given his comic theatre name at 634, by when he is opposed to the Son, as his Rival (cf. 751, 913); Madame Cleäreta is only named at 751, in Diabolus’ still-drying contract.7 Thus the “[Diabolus]-[Cleareta]” scene is nameless, while its successor, the “[Cleareta]-Philaenium” scene, will name and shame the play’s “young lovers”: • “Argyrippus son of Demaenetus,” picked on and picked out formally as the john who is (not) special (522, cf. 542); first named at 74 (p. 161). • “Philaenium,” already flagged up as meretrix at 53. She will be named some more when the agents takes their chance to paw her (585, 623, 647, 680), when written into the contract so only Diabolus can paw her (753), 138 Commentary and Analysis...