The Pot of Gold and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) by Plautus

The Pot of Gold and Other Plays (Penguin Classics) by Plautus

Author:Plautus [Plautus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics
ISBN: 9780140441499
Google: 5p6YuAEACAAJ
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Goodreads: 123916
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 1965-07-14T23:00:00+00:00


EXEUNT

THE SWAGGERING SOLDIER

(MILES GLORIOSUS)

INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE SWAGGERING SOLDIER

AN incidental allusion in this play (at line 211) to the imprisonment of a ‘foreign’, i. e. Roman, poet may plausibly be connected with the fate of the dramatist and poet Naevius, who suffered punishment for his political views, and who died about 200 BC. This clue, together with stylistic indications - the absence of metrical variety, for instance-places the play among the earliest of its author’s productions; and it is acknowledged (in the ‘delayed prologue’ spoken by Palaestrio) as a translation from a Greek original entitled Alazon (The Braggart). But, however early and however derivative it may be, it can be set beside Pseudolus, one of the latest plays, near the summit of Plautus’s achievement.

We cannot say how much the actual shape of the play owes to its model, but it has some unusual features. The main action is divided into two almost unrelated parts; the first consists of a plot to deceive the slave Sceledrus and enable the girl Philocomasium to masquerade as her own twin sister; the second is a campaign to prick the pomposity of the swaggering philanderer Pyrgopolynices. Left in this shape, the play would have given the soldier too little prominence and delayed its main theme for too long. The introduction of a preliminary scene, sketching the character of Pyrgopolynices as a braggart and as a woman-chaser, provides us with the expectation of the downfall prepared for him, and this introduction, together with the ‘prologue’ supplied by Palaestrio, ensures that during the first part of the play our attention is engaged not so much by the bamboozling of Sceledrus as by the situation which is being built up to facilitate the release of Philocomasium from Pyrgopolynices.

The bridge-passage between the two main stages of the action contains an unnecessary, but nevertheless entertaining digression in the discourse of Periplectomenus on his own virtues and the pleasures of bachelorhood; it also serves to establish the character of the young lover Pleusicles - a brother to many other Plautine youths, compliant and invertebrate.

It has been pointed out by many critics that the figure of the professional soldier, the careerist interested only in his own exploits in the service of any cause or employer, was common in Alexandrine Greece but could hardly have been a familiar phenomenon in the Rome of Plautus’s time. This would not necessarily prevent the Roman public from enjoying the caricature of a foreign type; nor need we suppose that they were unacquainted with the vices of boastfulness, self-conceit, and lechery, whether in soldiery or any other walk of life. In the main, it is not the military braggadocio of Pyrgopolynices but his amatory pretensions that are subjected to Plautus’s scathing attack. And it is this theme that gives the play a sharper satirical bite than can be found anywhere else in his work; nowhere else does the comedy of intrigue and light-hearted mischief work up to such a savage and damnatory finale.



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