Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

LIGHT DRAMA
fore cannot logically ask about her. Thirdly, Milphio's brief explanation of the
dramatic situation (10906*".) is unsatisfactory: he ought to mention that Lycus
had at least been put on the defensive. In fact, the relationships, situation, and
language which he uses are calqued straight from the prologue and earlier lines
of the play; Plautus is thus guilty of a dramatic anachronism: Milphio's description
is out of date. Lastly, by describing the girls to Hanno as meretrices
seruolae (1094) 'working girls', rather than as Carthaginienses ingenuae,
'freeborn Carthaginians', as would now be natural, Milphio makes it seem to
Hanno that not only is he to pretend to be their father, but also that it is a
fiction that the girls are Carthaginian at all.
The dramatic objection to any second trick in the play, its particular legal
absurdity, Agorastocles' abrupt disappearance, and the other technical faults
mentioned are characteristic of Plautus' neglect of realism. His intentions were
to make his Milphio another Epidicus or Pseudolus, and to present Hanno in
his readiness to participate (io86ff.) as a 'crafty Carthaginian'. It is significant
that he does not balk at seriously distorting the plot of his original in the
attempt, and that' craftiness' is essentially incompatible with what in the original
was undoubtedly a wholly serious and high-minded presentation of the
alien.
In the opinion of the present writer, the source of Plautus' insertion was a
passage of Menander's Sikyonioi 'The Sicyonians' known to us from papyrus
fragments first published in 1964. Plautus certainly knew this famous play:
he borrowed its hero's name Stratophanes and used it for the soldier in his
Truculentus, a play produced about the same time as Poenulns (189—187 B.C.).
It is therefore unreasonable to suppose that the episode in question occurred
in other plays and that one of these, and not the Sikyonioi, provided the model.
In any case, we are not dealing with a simple locus communis, like the entrance
motif of the soldier who sees his beloved embraced by a brother or father and
mistakes the situation (e.g. Menander, Perikeiromene init., Misoumenos 2o8ff.,
Poen. i28off.) but with a very specific dramatic situation which (as Plautus
shows) cannot easily be transplanted — daughter and faithful retainer taken
long ago by pirates; ignoble but well-meant proposal of a legal deception to
establish the girl's identity; 1 misinterpretation, praise, tears. Here, then, we have
the first documentary example of the kind of ' contaminatio' which Terence
practised and which he attributed to Plautus (see above, p. 95):
KIX. OUK eis T6V oAsdpov - GHP. X