Asinaria: The One about the Asses

Preface

vii Preface She has her husband back, but he is no great prize. Niall Slater The tattered outlaw of the earth, | of ancient crooked will: Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, | I keep my secret still. G.K. Chesterton, “The Donkey” (1920) Res ridicula est. This play endured much comical misrepresentation and suffered farcical underappreciation in twentieth-century reception (p. 224 n.5). I should like to recommend its “wit and fun”; and proclaim to one and all: “it’s a gas” (13–14). The One about the Asses is full of Rome: slavery and sex slavery; money and family structure; masculinity and social standing ; senility and partying; jokes, lies, and idiocy. This is Latin behaving badly, and Plautus isn’t a pushover to read (pp. 105–16). But—especially if you have the sort of mind that will let you hear a donkey hee-haw as in Don Quixote—you’ll go a bundle on the nonstop silliness. So, as the prologue yells, LISTEN, as naughty Rome gets its kicks—and gives itself a kick in the Asinaria. We don’t know the date of first production, but it must have been shown, in a temporary auditorium, to the people of Rome at some state festival provided by elected magistrates of the Republic at its zenith in the late third or early second centuries BCE (p. 127). It then became classic theatre , revived and eventually edited for reading in and after school from the mid-first century BCE onwards. Like all Plautus’ surviving score of verse comedies, it is written in a colourful splash of colloquial mixed with parodic Latin, from a couple of centuries before the rest of the Roman verse we read today was first composed (pp. 117–20). A special language, then, and special play of language, but “Plautin” doesn’t have to be daunting, viii Preface particularly if you don’t mind me supplying a guide to rare vocabulary and unfamiliar language (pp. 105–16)—and “normalizing” the spelling. For the text, I list divergences from the long standard old stand-by, W.M. Lindsay’s Oxford Classical Text (1904), where more than orthography is involved: pp. 121–2. Of course I’m dissing the paradosis, but we could never come anywhere close to just what Plautus may have written, and in practice this play is virtually unaffected by which, by whose, edition. For all matters of transmission, including spelling, I am fortunate to be able to refer you to R.M. Danese’s Sarsina/Urbino Text (2004), which appeared after my work was completed. This amply conservative text is based on fresh, and definitive, collation of all the MSS, and will provide the bedrock for all future editions of the play (see the exact, and perfectly simultaneous, twin reviews, carefully noting all the misprints and slips, by Fontaine [2005] and Walker [2005], and the list of my divergences from Danese—again suppressing minimalia: p. 122). But here and now accessibility just has to take precedence. The metrical scheme is mostly regular, and easy to grasp: I give a brief run down, in the modern—“syllabic”—style (pp. 117–19), and key the text so that the notation provided will keep the verse rhythm running “for you” (p. 2). Plautus does write in a brash poetic/unpoetic (“poetic”) mode, which charges along noisily and heftily, taking charge of raw topics and risible relationships with a swagger in its step, and a lurching bravura all its own: well worth the rude ride. Let me finally confirm, this playtime is, it boasts at once, “on the short side,” as well (breue est, 8: under 1,000 lines). I.e., worth all the time you got. In fact, I’m convinced there is nothing at all to stop us playing Asinaria for all it’s worth: the “family plot” allows for every register of comedy, from crude farce to complex play within the leading roles (p. 221 n.20). The stand-out central scenes starring the pair of thinking and motoring slaves give us plenty to think about human relations in the intimacy of the classical household (chapters 3, 5, 9). Above all, they dish out humour. Cruel, brave, acute, stupid, basic, tantalizing, relentless, improvisational, knockabout, punning . . . humour. The verbal repartee supports a series of energetic bodily figures that lay bare the axioms of social status for all to beware. Sure, the play’s Father makes a complete mug of himself by getting far too involved with...