The Plautine corpus contains five letter-plays, comedies in which epistles are composed, delivered and/or read onstage and figure as a major element of the plot. These embedded missives, both stolen and forged ex nihilo, are variously employed by the personae to enact deception and engender duplicitous maneuvering of epistolary conventions, as well as sophisticated jokes about literacy and the dynamics of the medium. The Bacchides features the most elaborate manifestation of this motif. A servus called Chrysalus schemes to facilitate the love affair between his erus minor, Mnesilochus, and the young man's beloved Bacchis. Bacchis resides at Athens with her sister, another hetaera likewise called Bacchis, whose name and affair with the Bacchides’ second adulescens, Pistoclerus, precipitate a misapprehension that causes the play to reset. Under the mistaken impression that Pistoclerus is in love with his own Bacchis, Mnesilochus returns the money Chrysalus has successfully filched from his father, Nicobulus, informing on the tricky slave and undoing his progress. Once the mistake is clarified, Mnesilochus prevails upon Chrysalus to invent a new ruse for getting the girl. The schemer uses epistles to do it all over again. His second round of tricks consists of a two-pronged stratagem in which he forges and delivers a pair of letters to Nicobulus allegedly from Mnesilochus. The missives serve to pilfer not one but two sums of gold from the old man, permitting Chrysalus and his younger master to both purchase Bacchis’ freedom from her contract with the miles and have some fun.
The letters in Plautus are potent tools for making and thinking about Plautine comedy inside Plautine comedy. Emilia Barbiero demonstrates that Plautus' embedded letters reify the internal performance and evince its theatricality by means of the epistolary medium's script-like ability to precipitate presence in absence. These missives thus serve as emblems of the dramatic script, and in their onstage composition and recitation they cast a portrait of the plays' textual origins into the plays themselves. But by virtue of their inscription with a premise which is identical to that of the comedies they inhabit, the Plautine letters also reproduce the relationship between the playwright's Greek models and his Latin translations: the mirror effect created by a dramatic text inscribed, read and realized within a dramatic text whose plot it also duplicates generates a mise-en-abyme which ultimately serves to contemplate problems of novelty and literary ownership that beset Plautus' literary endeavor.
In this paper, I explore the extent of Plautus’ originality in the Bacchides by elucidating two of the comedy’s most vexed critical problems: the number of tricks in the Greek and Latin plays, and Chrysalus’ reference to a duplex facinus in vv. 640-641. Through a close, metatheatrical reading of the text, I propose a new explanation of these conundrums which, in turn, evinces the competitive stance Plautus’ comedy takes up towards its original. The Bacchides’ clever slave, I argue, vies with his Greek Doppelgänger in a metatextual agon of deception that self-referentially alludes to the dynamics of translation.
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