Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy

by Amy Richlin

Roman comedy evolved early in the war-torn 200s BCE. Troupes of lower-class and slave actors traveled through a militarized landscape full of displaced persons and the newly enslaved; together, the actors made comedy to address mixed-class, hybrid, multilingual audiences. Surveying the whole of the Plautine corpus, where slaves are central figures, and the extant fragments of early comedy, this book is grounded in the history of slavery and integrates theories of resistant speech, humor, and performance. Part I shows how actors joked about what people feared - natal alienation, beatings, sexual abuse, hard labor, hunger, poverty - and how street-theater forms confronted debt, violence, and war loss. Part II catalogues the onstage expression of what people revenge, honor, free will, legal personhood, family, marriage, sex, food, free speech; a way home, through memory; and manumission, or escape - all complicated by the actors' maleness. Comedy starts with anger.

Genres: Nonfiction, Classics

578 pages, Hardcover

Published February 23, 2018

Reviews

[Drianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I could praise this book enough, clearly Richlin's magnum opus. Her basic contention is that the audience of Plautus' plays (in their original, 3rd c. performance context in central Italy/Latium/not just Rome) was in fact largely enslaved people and freed people, and that the plays speak mainly to that audience. She divides her book into two sections: "What was given" (i.e., the conditions of slavery in that specific time/place and what enslaved people experienced, as demonstrated in the plays); and "What was desired" (the ways in which the plays show enslaved people speaking back to their conditions in various ways and speaking of what they would like). I find her reading, ultimately, convincing, as much as it goes against the received way of interpreting Plautus as fairly literary/highbrow and aimed at elites in the audience, no matter who else was there (and there have been lots of disagreements about that). Definitely a book to return to, and one that demonstrates without question why Richlin is almost sans pareil in reading the voices of the marginalized back into our Roman texts. Completely and totally recommended.

[reread 4/2020: This book is just so brilliant. And it has *completely* altered by approach to teaching Plautus, for the better. I feel like I can finally make it appeal to my students, because we can talk about Plautus as 'slave literature', as recovering lost voices, as a non-hegemonic text.]

[Tallulah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amy Richlin's magnum opus really sets the standard for what good scholarship- and good scholarly discussions of ancient slavery- should look like. This book is fantastically argued and researched and absolutely seminal for a conference paper I am currently writing on the servus callidus in Terence and Plautus. A love letter to the palliata!!

[Kevin Nobel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic analysis of available evidence on the lives of enslaved people in second century Rome. But don't read if you know almost nothing about Roman comedies already 😆