Plautus: Poenulus

Plautus’ Poenulus (The Little Carthaginian) is a work of staggering literary and historical significance. Performed in the long shadow of Rome’s struggle with Hannibal’s Carthage, this play stages the restoration of a Carthaginian family divided through enslavement. Set against the backdrop of a Greece marked by comedic expectations and the geography of contemporary imperial conquest, Poenulus presents a tale of Carthaginian heartbreak and heartache to a postwar Roman audience. The comedy’s remarkable diversity prompts audience interaction with a wide range of socio-cultural topics relevant to Plautus’ time. Engaging weighty matters through song, slapstick, puns, and spectacle, Poenulus may appear to defang, but its bite is deep. This book offers an innovative understanding of Poenulus’ place in Roman history and literary culture, helping readers to appreciate the play itself, the complex nature of Plautine authorship, and the cultures of performance in Republican Rome. Most of the book explores the play as a performance, from its unique and strikingly self-aware prologue to the actors’ call for applause in the final line. The longest chapter examines the play’s afterlives in the Renaissance and early modern period, including little-known revivals and adaptations in Ferrara, Rome, and Cambridge. Over the centuries, people have found in Poenulus a script well suited to active learning in the Latin classroom, a text capable of supporting new political ideologies, and a dramatized vision of the world that accorded with processes of racialization in Europe as reengagement with the classical past coincided with the expansion of the slave trade and the objectification of Black Africans. That one play has been seen to support and subvert the same outlooks and practices is a testament to its complexity and to the enduring power of all Plautine verse from the third century BCE to the present.