The Brothers Menaechmus

Peniculus is a young man described as Menaechmus’s “parasite,” whose name literally denotes a sponge for wiping tables. The parasite, sponge or flatterer was a stock character of Greek and Roman comedy. He attached themselves like a leech to a man of higher status or wealth to get free food, drink and other benefits, in return for being at the beck and call of their patron. According to Peniculus himself, he is poor, not owning “a single thing to steal” (665).

Menaechmus addresses him as “my Lucky Charm, my Nick-of-Time” (137), indicating that their relationship is mutually beneficial. When Peniculus believes he has been betrayed by Menaechmus, he declares that he is “not myself,” showing how intimately his identity is bound up with that of his patron (471). This leads him to seek revenge.

Alongside vengeance, Peniculus’s major preoccupation is food. He is an epicure, who, like Menaechmus, prefers private pleasure to public duty. He accounts for his parasitic status by arguing that people will willingly remain subservient, provided they are well fed. They will then be bound by “chains of nourishment” (94).

Menaechmus’s wife is unnamed in the play, in keeping with the Roman attitude towards women as subservient to their male relatives (usually their fathers and then husbands). She was a rich woman before marriage, being described as a “big-dowry” wife (766). Prone to making rhetorical exclamations about her own suffering, such as “what a woeful wife I am” (620), she is described as “melodramatic” (559). On the other hand, she also tries to bring the confrontation between Peniculus and Menaechmus to a close, attempting to stop their physical fight through verbal explanation (643).

When he boasts about taking his wife’s dress and escaping from the house, Menaechmus compares himself to Heracles stealing the girdle of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons (201). As the Amazons were a mythological race of ferocious women who fought against the Greeks, this comparison enhances the characterization of the wife as a “shrew” (110), the archetypal difficult woman. Similarly, Menaechmus II compares her to Hecuba (715), the queen of Troy, who took revenge on her enemy by killing his children and blinding him. In return, the gods turned her into a dog, who, as Menaechmus puts it, “barked and cursed at everyone who came in sight” (717).

Menaechmus’s lover, Erotium, has a name literally meaning “pleasure.” She is another stock character of Greek and Roman comedy: the flirtatious, acquisitive prostitute, who speaks in the language of seductive innuendo. Peniculus argues that she is only attracted to Menaechmus’s money, claiming that “sluts can talk so sweet, while they see something they can snatch from you” (193). Messenio expresses the same belief, although Erotium attempts to prove him wrong by continuing to seduce Menaechmus II after he has given his money away. 

The stage is divided into two halves, with Menaechmus’s front door on one side and Erotium’s on the other. Erotium’s household therefore functions as a foil to Menaechmus’s, creating two magnetic poles that keep Menaechmus in tension throughout the play. When Erotium invites him to “come inside with…me […] As soon as suits you, come…recline” (367-68), she opens up a space of pleasure and luxury, in stark contrast to the tight ship run by his wife.

Another stock character, Cylindrus is a cook employed by Erotium, who, as he puts it, “owns me” as her slave (300). He is wordy and grandiose, using circumlocution and metonymy–the poetic substitution of one thing for another–wherever possible. He describes cooking food as applying “Vulcanic arts,” for example (330), substituting the Roman god of fire for fire itself. He is well-acquainted with the habits of the people he serves, pointing out that Peniculus “can eat for eight with greatest ease” (223). At the same time, he is proud of his skill, insisting that he will “serve a lovely dinner to the diners” (274).

As a slave, Cylindrus is used to the threat of violence, and interprets Menaechmus II’s angry behavior as a joke (317). He humors his master, turning the language of crucifixion into the language of hospitality and welcome: “take a cross yourself, cross over and come in” (329).

The play’s second protagonist, Sosicles is the twin brother of Menaechmus, renamed Menaechmus himself in memory of his kidnapped brother. He is on a quest to find his twin, determined to keep searching because of “how much he means to me” (246). Having wandered for six years through Italy and Greece, he is short on money, and therefore jumps at the chance of lavish feasting and expensive clothes and jewelery.

Menaechmus II has a quick wit and is skilled at adapting situations to his own advantage. He describes himself as “a temperamental man, extremely wild” (269), and is not afraid to blaspheme or transgress (pretending to be possessed by Bacchus and Apollo and threatening violence against an old man of high status). In his character, as well as in his physical appearance and costume, he is therefore the spitting image of his brother. The chief difference is that he is unmarried and unattached, “a free-born tourist,” as Messenio puts it (1005), allowing him to revel in the festivities from which Menaechmus is excluded, due to his wife and clients.

Messenio is Menaechmus II’s slave. He is cautious about the corrupting influence of Greek cities, and is concerned that a “pirate ship” is moored in the harbor and concocting trouble for his master (344). He is fed up with travelling and pessimistic about their long search for Menaechmus. Although Menaechmus II suspects Messenio will be lured into the trap of “Epidamnation” (267), Messenio is in fact the archetype of the honest slave. He guards Menaechmus II’s money, returns it to him even after he has been freed, and works hard to bring about the twins’ reconciliation.

However, he is also wary about expressing too much disapproval or misgiving, aware that this might overstep the boundaries of his slave status. He calls himself a “fool,” for example, when he tries to “argue down the man who owns me” (443). As he explains in his soliloquy on the nature of slavery, this reticence is partly due to fears of violent retribution. He tries to “follow Master’s orders” (980), in order to avoid “whips and chains, / And millstones, great starvation, freezing cold. / The price for […] misbehaviours” (972-4).

The old man is the father of Menaechmus’s wife. Many Greek and Roman comedies feature an elderly man as a stock character, who walks with a stick and complains about the troubles of old age. Menaechmus II describes him as a “white-beard, palsied wreck” (854) and an “old fogey” (858). He also draws a parallel with Tithonus, a mortal from myth who was granted eternal life but not eternal youth, and so continued to grow older and older forever (854).

In this play, however, the old man also appears as an authority figure who will sort out the plot’s confusion. The wife invokes him as her lawyer, and he is able to see both sides of the argument, explaining that rich wives have a tendency to be “fierce to their husbands” (767), but also that there are “limits to what a good wife can endure” (769). In the end, though, the old man is drawn into the confusion and becomes as mistaken as everyone else. When Menaechmus II threatens to attack this “goat who reeks of garlic” (838), he robs the old man of his remaining dignity, and the old man flees in terror, as “fast as possible” (875).