The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2007-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 9. Old man, slave and baggage.

The costume is standard for Old and the earlier part of Middle Comedy, that is for Aristophanes and his immediate successors. All actors wear tights that contain padding on the belly and backside, carry a large phallos at the front, and cover the arms and legs to wrist and ankle. Over that they wear clothes appropriate to the part, whether male or female. In this case the figures both have short tunics. The older male wears a himation (cloak) over this and it conceals his left hand – this was regarded as fitting for a well-to-do citizen male and it indicated that he did not have to use his hands for work (much as our grandparents might have worn gloves). He also has a tall staff with curved top, again symbolic of his status by contrast with the shorter, more practical stick of the slave. They are on a journey. The slave has a yoke over his left shoulder, marked in white, to which is hooked a bed-roll at the back, and at the front a large (footed) basket of food for the trip.

An important piece of evidence from a slightly later date is the krater found a few years ago during the excavation of a cemetery in Messina (Fig. 10).12 It was made in Sicily, probably in Syracuse, about 330 BC. We have a four-figure composition. From left to right are a young woman, a young man, a portly figure in long dress and white slippers, and then, watching from the right, a white-haired older man leaning on his stick. Between the two central figures is a thumiatêrion (incense-burner). In seeking to understand the plot, the key figure is the one with long dress in the centre. The attire is apparently that of a girl and it is, perhaps deliberately, comparable with that of the girl on the left. Yet when we look more closely, ignoring the dress and the finger-gestures, the mask is that of a slave and so is the fatness of the figure. It is a slave dressed up as a girl, and most likely as a bride (thus the incense-burner for a sanctuary in the context of a wedding). The body-language of the young man, and his gesture with the left hand, makes clear his surprise as he looks round to what was presumably his real bride as she comes in from the left of the stage. At this point the older man has no active part in the events and it is hard to know whose father he is, the real bride’s or the young man’s. What is likely is that he is the target of the hoax and the ruse has been blown apart by the girl’s appearance.

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