Plautus: Poenulus

Plautus’ Poenulus (The Little Carthaginian) is a work of staggering literary andhistorical significance. Performed in the long shadow of Rome’s struggle withHannibal’s Carthage, this play stages the restoration of a Carthaginian familydivided through enslavement. Set against the backdrop of a Greece marked bycomedic expectations and the geography of contemporary imperial conquest,Poenulus presents a tale of Carthaginian heartbreak and heartache to a postwarRoman audience. The comedy’s remarkable diversity prompts audienceinteraction with a wide range of socio-cultural topics relevant to Plautus’ time.Engaging weighty matters through song, slapstick, puns, and spectacle, Poenulusmay appear to defang, but its bite is deep.This book offers an innovative understanding of Poenulus’ place in Roman historyand literary culture, helping readers to appreciate the play itself, the complexnature of Plautine authorship, and the cultures of performance in RepublicanRome. Most of the book explores the play as a performance, from its unique andstrikingly 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 earlymodern period, including little-known revivals and adaptations in Ferrara, Rome,and Cambridge. Over the centuries, people have found in Poenulus a script wellsuited to active learning in the Latin classroom, a text capable of supportingnew political ideologies, and a dramatized vision of the world that accordedwith processes of racialization in Europe as reengagement with the classical pastcoincided with the expansion of the slave trade and the objectification of BlackAfricans. That one play has been seen to support and subvert the same outlooksand practices is a testament to its complexity and to the enduring power of all Plautine verse from the third century BCE to the present.