Captive Captor Freed: The National Theater of Ancient Rome

Zusammenfassung

“Hey, there,” says an unknown character in the only remaining fragment of Plautus’ comedy Madam Usurer (Faeneratrix), “I’m telling you what in a barbarian country [in barbaria] they say the freedman told his former mistress: ‘Hello, Freedom! Papiria, go and be flogged!’”¹ This little bit of an otherwise lost play neatly demonstrates several features of the world’s first true national theater, the theater of Rome in the late third and early second century B.C. The sassy slave character, developed far beyond anything in their Greek “New Comedy” models by Plautus (and apparently by Roman Naevius before him), is one such feature. Another is the talk of brutal treatment. Reference to peculiarly Roman institutions (manumission and freedman status, which differed importantly from their counterparts in Greece) is a third; a fourth is the Roman name of the lady in the anecdote, who indeed bears a patrician nomen. Most important, however, is the self-conscious but at the same time self-assertive naming of what is obviously Rome as barbaria, “barbarian country.”