Plautus

Összefoglaló

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