The Brothers Menaechmus

“Chief Actor: This town is Epidamnus, while the play is on.

But when we play another play, its name will change

Just like the actors living here, whose roles can range

From pimp to papa, or to lover pale and wan,

To pauper, parasite, to king or prophet, on and on.”

Stock characters are a staple of many dramatic forms, including Greek comedy, medieval mystery plays and Italian commedia dell’arte, and Plautus employs a number of them in this play, including the old man, the cook, the doctor and the prostitute. With its pacey roll-call of characters and its use of the vague “on and on,” the Prologue suggests that the audience were familiar with these roles. The pleasure of the performance was in watching how the playwright combined the different archetypes and set them to work.

“Peniculus: I’m heading for Menaechmus; he’s the man to whom

I’ve had myself condemned. I’m hoping that he’ll chain me.”

The reflexive verb, the word “hoping,” and the triple use of the first-person pronoun in these lines all express Peniculus’s active desire to be enslaved, a state usually associated with passivity and the loss of agency. This creates a surprising fusion of ideas of captivity with images of free will and desire.

“Peniculus: And yet we’ve had an intermission for some days

And tabled at my table, I’ve expended it.

I never eat or drink–except expensively.

But now my army of desserts has been deserting me.”

With its playful use of language, innovative puns and surprising personification, these lines display many of the hallmarks of Plautus’s style. They also make use of the nature of live performance, exploiting the ability of the actor to use dramatic pauses to comic effect.

“Menaechmus: Hidden from my wife we’ll live it up and burn this day to ashes.

Peniculus: Now you’re really talking sense. How soon do I ignite the pyre? Look–the day’s half dead already, right to near its belly button.”

Drawing on the Roman ritual of burning their dead on funeral pyres, these lines create a tension between images of productivity and images of destruction. At the same time as “living it up,” Menaechmus plans to burn the day down to ashes, while Peniculus conjures the image of the dying day through reference to a part of the body usually associated with birth. This paradoxical imagery creates the sense that the two men are poised at a crucial hinge: between deadening duty and life-giving feasting and mirth.

“Menaechmus: Wait wait wait, by Hercules. She’s coming out. Oh, see the sun! How the sun’s eclipsed by all the blazing beauty from her body.”

Menaechmus increases the suspense around Erotium’s entry onto the stage through the threefold instruction to wait and the real-time commentary on her arrival. When she finally emerges, he bursts into an exclamation of delight and draws an age-old comparison between his love interest and the sun. By using this classic romantic imagery, Plautus characterizes Menaechmus as an archetypal lover.

“Menaechmus: Darling, at your house today, prepare a little battleground. […]We’ll hold a little drinking duel, [indicating Peniculus] the two of us.

Then the one who proves the better fighter with the flowing bowl,

He’s the one who’ll get to join your company for night manoeuvres.”

Here, Menaechmus once again resorts to the tried-and-tested vocabulary of the lover, using military imagery to visualize love as war. By using the diminutives “little battleground” and “little drinking duel,” he tries to temper the warlike language and charm Erotium into agreement.

“Messenio: It’s six entire years since we began this job.

Through Istria, Iberia, Illyria,

The Adriatic, up and down, exotic Greece,

And all Italian towns. Wherever sea went, we went!

I frankly think if you were searching for a needle,

You would have found it long ago, if it existed.”

Just as the Chief Actor gave the backstory to the play as a whole, Messenio here gives an account of what he and Menaechmus II have been doing in the run-up to the play. The long list of place names is an evocative way of encompassing the great sweep of this journey, enhanced by the echoes of the most famous sea voyage of antiquity: Odysseus’s quest to find his home. The passage also exploits dramatic irony, with the audience knowing that Messenio’s fears about the object of their search are groundless.

“Messenio: By Hercules, unless you go home right away,

While you search on still finding no kin…you’ll be ‘bro-kin.’”

Plautus never misses an opportunity for a pun, no matter how far-fetched. The ellipsis here suggests that Messenio is acknowledging that he is taking comic liberties with his language, in a loaded pause which could be creatively brought out in performance.

“Erotium: Open my doors, let my welcome be wide,

Then hurry and scurry­–get ready inside.

See that the incense is burning, the couches have covers.

Alluring decor is exciting for lovers.

Lovers love loveliness, we don’t complain; their loss is our gain.”

With their lilting rhythm, these sung lines dissipate the confrontational atmosphere of the previous scene between Menaechmus II and Cylindrus, just as they literally expand the space of the stage through opening the doors. The last clause, however, brings the song back down to earth with a thud: the imagery of “welcome” and “loveliness” gives way to that of commerce and financial gain, showing how intricately sexual relationships were bound up with power and wealth in Roman society.

“Erotium: By Pollux, you’re the only one of all my lovers

Venus wants me to arouse to greatness. You deserve it, too.

For, by Castor, thanks to all your gifts, I’ve flourished like a flower.”

There are many points of connection between the myth of Castor and Pollux and the themes of the play. Twin sons of Leda and Zeus, and brothers of Helen, they are representative of brotherhood and romantic love. Erotium also invokes Venus, the goddess of love, and makes several innuendos (“arouse to greatness,” “flourished like a flower”) to ramp up the seductiveness of her speech to Menaechmus II.

“Erotium: Do you get some pleasure making fun of me, denying things,

Things completely true?”

By asking what “pleasure” Menaechmus II could get out of his behaviour towards her, Erotium brings up the question of why writers so often turn to the theme of mistaken identity for their subject. It is one of the most pervasive comic devices, appearing in works by Terence (Plautus’s fellow Roman comedian), Shakespeare, Dickens and Oliver Goldsmith, as well as films such as Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and The Parent Trap.

“Erotium: Don’t I know you well, Menaechmus, know your father’s name was Moschus?

You were born, or so they say, in Syracuse, in Sicily,

Where Agathocles was king, and then in turn, King Phintia,

Thirdly, King Liparo, after whom King Hiero got the crown.

Now it’s still King Hiero.”

Some commentators argue that Erotium’s references here are nonsensical, suggesting that her historical knowledge is not as solid as she and Menaechmus II make out (by this stage in the seduction, in other words, it does not matter whether she really knows Menaechmus II’s lineage by heart or not). Certainly, Plautus gives the genealogy a confused tone, with the ungrammatical phrase “Agathocles was king, and then in turn, King Phintia,” and the bathetic coda, “it’s still King Hiero”, suggesting that Erotium has run out of steam.

“Peniculus: Curse the man who was the first to manufacture public meetings,

All designed to busy men already busy with their business.

They should choose the men who have no occupation for these things,

Who, if absent when they’re called, would face fantastic fines–and fast.”

The transition from monarchy to republic was a foundational moment in the formation of Roman identity, and, although ostensibly set in Greece, the political trappings of the play are designed also to refer to contemporary Rome. Peniculus’s complaints about this system therefore undermine one of the key symbols of Roman distinction. As well as expressing an unpatriotic attitude towards public duty and personal pleasure, Peniculus intensifies his complaints by articulating them as a formal curse and by proposing a radical reform of the constitution.

“Menaechmus II: By all the gods, what man in just a single day

Received more pleasures, though expecting none at all:

I’ve wined, I’ve dined, I’ve concubined, and robbed her blind–No one but me will own this dress after today!”

As the play progresses, Menaechmus’s fall from grace is matched by Menaechmus II’s rise to good fortune. Here, Menaechmus II marvels at his luck. By stressing that this transformation has occurred in “a single day,” Plautus refers to the Aristotelian rule according to which plays take place over the course of one day only. He thus portrays Menaechmus II as a hero of classical tragedy, whose rise, ominously, is usually followed by a fall.

“Menaechmus II: What need of many words?

I’ve never had more fun at less expense to me.”

These lines contain a joke at the playwright’s own expense. The rhetorical question suggests that, if things really are as straightforward as this, then there is no need for all the elaborate “words” of Plautus’s play. At the same time, however, the audience is aware that there are many more complicated forces behind Menaechmus’s good fortune than he realizes.

“Menaechmus II: The gods have fully fostered me and favoured me unfailingly!”

The double adverb, together with the simplistic tone bestowed by the intense alliteration, suggest that Menaechmus II feels wholly able to interpret the gods’ will towards him. Given the emphasis in Greek and Roman philosophy on the impossibility of knowing the divine, Menaechmus II’s confidence in his own good luck may therefore border on the hubristic.

“Menaechmus: What Menaechmus could it be?

Wife: Yourself.

Menaechmus: Myself?

Wife: Yourself.

Menaechmus: Who says?

Wife: I do.

Peniculus: I do, too. And then you gave it to Erotium.

Menaechmus: I did?

Wife: You, you, you!

Peniculus: Say, would you like an owl for a pet–

Just to parrot “you you you”? The both of us are all worn out.”

The quick back-and-forth dynamic of this exchange intensifies the energy of the scene, enhancing its comic potential (particularly when performed on stage). The repeated use of pronouns also emphasises the importance of identity to the play, in which the plot hinges on the distinctions between individuals breaking down and losing their clarity. Furthermore, by capping the exchange with the ironic commentary of Peniculus, looking back at the parrot-like mimicry of the pronouns, Plautus adds a further, metatheatrical layer to the humour.

“Old man: I could mention them all but I won’t talk at length.

But deep in my heart is this worry:

My daughter has sent for me now in a hurry.

She won’t say what it is,

What it is I’ve not heard.

She just asked me to come, not explaining a word.”

In accordance with his stock character, the old man is long-winded and solipsistic. Here, after saying he will not “talk at length,” he immediately repeats himself, with the short lines and heavy rhythm contributing an additional monotony to the lines. Plautus makes this duplication more extreme by wholly replicating the meaning: “she won’t say what it is” is repeated in “what it is I’ve not heard,” and then again in “not explaining a word” (compare this to the Chief Actor’s promise that he will speak his lengthy Prologue with “the very fewest words” possible).

“Old man: What do you women want from husbands?

Servitude? Why, next you’ll want him to do chores around the house!

Next you’ll order him to sit down with the maids and card the wool!”

By presenting the idea of husbands helping around the house as a ludicrous impossibility (particularly through the rhetorical questions and exclamations), the old man expresses the fixed state of gender roles in Roman antiquity. Women were expected to run the household and look after domestic affairs, leaving the husband free for public and political duties.

“Menaechmus: Pollux, what a day for me: perverted and inverted too. Everything I plotted to be private’s now completely public.”

Alongside demonstrating Plautus’s alliterative style, these lines get to the heart of one of the central themes in the play: the tension between private pleasure and public duty. This inversion of private to public is key to the reversal of Menaechmus’s fortune, in stark contrast to Menaechmus II’s ability to enjoy the day untrammelled by public duty.

“Menaechmus: You, of course, have snatched the sacred crown of Jove, that’s what I know.

Afterwards, they tossed you into prison for this awful crime.

When they let you out, while you were manacled, they beat you up.

Then you killed your father. Then you sold your mother as a slave.

Have you heard enough to know I’m sane enough to curse you back?”

In response to what he sees as his father-in-law’s outlandish allegations, Menaechmus comes up with his own fanciful version of the old man’s behaviour and deeds. Plautus increases the drama of this imagined life through accumulating a number of short clauses and through repeating the word “then.” The use of “Jove” (the poetic name for Jupiter) and the inclusion of the Greek tragic trope of patricide (e.g. Sophocles’ Oedipus) enhance this melodramatic air.

“Menaechmus: My name is Menaechmus.

Menaechmus II: Oh, by Pollux, so is mine as well!

Menaechmus: Syracuse-Sicilian –

Menaechmus II: That’s my city, that’s my country too!

Menaechmus: What is this I hear?

Menaechmus II: Just what is true.

Messenio: I know you–you’re my master!”

The fast pace of these lines, created by the interruption and rhyme, gives a sense of mounting tension and excitement. It appears as if the moment of recognition has finally arrived. However, just when it seems like Messenio has cracked the puzzle–“I know you”–Plautus undercuts the audience’s expectations by presenting a different, less momentous epiphany–“you’re my master!”.

“Menaechmus: O by Pollux, I rejoice if you had fun because of me!”

Menaechmus’s attitude here stands in stark contrast to the rest of the play, in which characters are preoccupied with their own enjoyment and are aghast if someone else benefits from their plans (Peniculus, for example, is furious when he thinks Menaechmus has enjoyed the feast). By showing Menaechmus’s altruistic change of heart, Plautus suggests the closeness of the brothers’ relationship.