Excursus: Poet, Audience, and Slave in Plautus' Pseudolus

One of the earliest and most interesting interchanges between poet and audience is the possibly apocryphal story of Naevius and the Metelli. Naevius had written of the consulship of a member of this powerful family

Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules

Either: By destiny the Metelli are consuls at Rome. Or: To the ruin of Rome the Metelli are consuls.

The Metelli responded without ambiguity:

Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae

The Metelli will give the poet Naevius a beating.^[45]

The interchange recalls many scenes in Roman comedy in which the clever slave is reminded that he cannot get away with his impudence and trickery forever. Normal power relations, suspended by the license of art and the cunning of the textual, are eventually restored, and in the early days of Roman literature many of the writers (and most of the actors) were slaves, or otherwise of low social status. So the anecdote about Naevius and the Metelli points to some realities about the relation between poet and audience in the early Republic.

In Plautus' Pseudolus , the eponymous hero and slave bets his master Simo that he will be able trick the latter into providing the money to free his son's inamorata , a prostitute now in the hands of an unscrupulous pimp. Callipho, a friend of Simo who witnesses this scene, marvels at the slave's breathtaking audacity, commenting that he's a real "work of art" (graphicum, 519) if he can bring off this trick; he resolves to postpone his visit to the country so as to be able to watch Pseudolus' show (ludos, 552). Simo suspects that the self-confident Pseudolus is in league with the pimp to defraud him, but Pseudolus denies this:

aut si de istac re umquam inter nos convenimus,
quasi in libro quom scribuntur calamo litterae,
stilis me totum usque ulmeis conscribito. (544–45)

or if we have ever come to an agreement about this matter
you can write all over me up to the shoulders
just like you write letters in a book with a pen.

This is one of many elaborate references to the whipping of slaves in this play, but it takes on a particular significance in the light of Callipho's graphicum , a Greek loan-word meaning "worthy to be drawn" (or "written," graphikos ).^[46] In this scene, writing is used to figure both the fascination that Pseudolus' prospective "show" holds for his master's friend and the ultimate power that the master holds over his slave.

The persistent analogy in this play between the project of the slave and that of the playwright and/or actor relates this passage to the ambiguous position of the writer in relation to his audience that I have been describing in this chapter. Having promised both the audience and his master that he will dupe the latter, Pseudolus, who as yet has no plan, compares himself to a poet who has to conjure up what does not yet exist (401–5). Later, he reassures the audience that he is going to deliver on his promises, which he did not make just to keep them amused while the play was going on, and he compares himself to an actor who has to bring on some new device when he comes onstage (562–69). So the scheming slave who undertakes to concoct a plan by which to defraud his master, whom he has warned of his intentions, resembles both the playwright and the actor, who must similarly dazzle the expectant audience. The low status of both actor and playwright is itself reflected in the precarious position of the clever slave who controls the usual Plautine plot. Actors at Rome, as members of an "infamous" (famosus) profession, were subject to certain legal disabilities; even if they were citizens, they were liable to corporal punishment, from which other citizens were protected, and magistrates could summarily have them flogged.^[47] This may partially account for the assimilation of the Plautine slave to the actor/playwright.

At the end of the Plautus' play, Pseudolus bribes his master with half of the money he has won from his bet to join him for a drink. Simo suggests that Pseudolus invite the audience as well, but Pseudolus replies, in the last words of the play: "By Hercules, they're hardly in the habit of inviting me, nor I them. (To the audience) But if you want to applaud and show your approval of the cast and the play, I'll invite you for tomorrow" (1332–34). Of course, the audience and the actors belong to different orders of society, but then so do Pseudolus and Simo, and just as the slave and his master go off for a drink together through the manipulation of the slave, so the actor can "invite" the audience for

tomorrow's play on a basis of equality. Plautine drama engages the ambiguous relation of actor/playwright to audience through the theme of the clever slave and his improvisational plotting, which manages to defer the beating that the master threatens but must suspend as long as we, like Callipho, have suspended our own business out of curiosity for the "show" we have been promised.^[48]

Both the central role of the clever slave and the metatheatrical references to drama in the plays are thought to be Plautus' own contribution to the plays he has adapted from the Greek.^[49] It seems that the Romans were particularly conscious of the manipulative or seductive power of art and of its ability to destabilize hierarchical social relations. One might say that the suspicion and fear of art's effect on its audience itself becomes a source of dramatic structures that the Roman audience enjoys in the art it consumes.