WOMEN, METAPOETRY, AND COMIC RECEPTION IN TERENCE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Goran Vidović February 2016 © 2016 Goran Vidović WOMEN, METAPOETRY, AND COMIC RECEPTION IN TERENCE Goran Vidović, Ph.D. Cornell University 2016 The focus of this study is self-reflexivity as a key to understanding Terence’s dramaturgy and the poetics professed in his prologues. Building upon recent scholarship, I approach Terence’s prologues not as biographical accounts but as fictional compositions with programmatic function. I explore the parallels between the prologues and the plots of his plays, interpreting the plots as metapoetic commentaries on playwriting as described in the prologues. Specifically, I argue that female characters in Terence’s Eunuchus (Chapters 2-5) and Self-Tormentor (6-7) are metaphors for the plays and vice versa. Pursuing the analogy of women and poetry is rewarding for several reasons. The position of women and control over them are of fundamental importance in Menander and Roman comedy. Woman as a metapoetic trope, abundantly attested in ancient literature, especially comedy, highlights the commodification of texts and articulates the poets’ anxiety of ownership and availability of their work. The same concern emerges from Terence’s prologues, mapping onto the themes of sexual exclusivity and anxiety about emotional reciprocity in the plays. Central to Terence’s program is self-positioning vis-à-vis other poets. I first consider a possibly unique case of the woman-as-play trope in Plautus’ (most likely) last play, the Casina, proposing that he playfully commodified his “swan’s song” by imagining its revival (Chapter 1). In Chapter 2 I turn to Terence and interpret the Eunuchus prologue as “open-market” poetics, enacted in the play as sharing a meretrix (Ch. 3). An indication that the poetics are disingenuous is the emphasis on “privileged material:” the violation of a citizen virgin (Ch. 4), framed in temporal paradoxes of initiative and imitation (Ch. 5), which ultimately secures Terence’s poetic superiority by positioning the Eunuchus as a prehistory of the genre. The key to the Self-Tormentor poetics is performative (“ontological”) duplicity, between what is staged and what should be inferred (Ch. 6). This is manifested in the play through the character of Antiphila, designed to challenge the possibility of verifying a woman’s emotions by appearance (Ch. 7). The last chapter analyzes how Menander and Plautus encoded the anxiety about female sincerity as deceptiveness, and especially duplicity, of performance. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Goran Vidović was born in Belgrade, Serbia, where he completed an undergraduate program in Classics (University of Belgrade, 2006). He earned an MA degree in Medieval Studies at the Central European University in Budapest (2009). In 2010 he moved with his newly-wed wife Bojana to Ithaca, New York, where their two children, Milica and Maksim, were born. v Sve zajedno vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like Terence, I am indebted to many. Unlike Terence, I acknowledge my debts without a tongue in cheek. I am grateful to my parents and brother for a loving and supportive upbringing. From my father, a teacher-philosopher-poet-playwright, from my mother, a lawyer, and my brother, a philologist, I have learned—I now realize—to love language, drama, poetry, and meticulous argumentation. My enduring passion for all things Greco-Roman I owe to the Department of Classics at Belgrade University, especially my Latin teachers Marjanca Pakiž and Vojin Nedeljković. The rigorous training I received at the Department of Medieval Studies at CEU proved to be invaluable for my future scholarly endeavors. To the faculty, fellow-graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff of Cornell University’s Department of Classics I am forever grateful for providing me with a complete, unforgettable graduate experience. Two of my doctoral committee members, Jeff Rusten and Fred Ahl, have particularly influenced my scholarly interests and approaches in many different, indeed often opposite ways—and it is only for the best. For the ultimate success in my doctoral studies I can easily blame Mike Fontaine, who has been an exemplary advisor even since before I joined the program. Because most of the time this dissertation has been “in progress,” in the most risky meaning of the phrase, I have received less informal feedback than is perhaps desirable for a work of this level. Thus all of its shortcomings I proudly claim as my own. None of this would have happened—or mattered—without the unyielding love and support of my dear wife Bojana and the salutary distractions of our beloved daughter Milica and son Maksim. This work is dedicated to the three of them. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical sketch v Dedication vi Acknowledgments vii Table of contents viii List of abbreviations x Introduction 1 1. And now for something completely different: the prologues 3 2. Poetics of failure: dressed-up with nowhere to go 5 3. Fan factory 8 4. Metapoetic program 12 5. Poetry as a woman in antiquity: articulating ownership and access 16 Chapter 1: Posthumously humorous: revival and metapoetic afterlife of Plautus’ Casina 23 Chapter 2: The Eunuchus prologue: plagiarism and appropriation 38 2.1. Prologue problems 38 2.2. Dictum prius: poetics of response 40 2.2.1. Intentionality and specificity 43 2.2.2. Sequence: primacy and secondariness, simultaneously 45 Chapter 3: Romantic and metapoetic primacy in the Eunuchus 49 3.1. Phaedria unprompted: erotic and poetic invitation 50 3.2. Nil prius? 53 3.3. Prostitution and the poetics of secondariness 58 3.4. The ending: metapoetics of jealousy and inclusivity 60 3.5. Inclusivity and priority in the Asinaria and the Truculentus: retroactive metapoetic license 67 Chapter 4: Pamphila in the Eunuchus: A special girl and a privileged play 74 4.1. Virginity, citizenship, and plagiarism 74 4.2. Constructing Pamphila 77 4.2.1. Presumption of availability 79 4.2.2. Contradictory evidence 80 4.2.2.1. A new girl in town 81 4.2.2.2. Obviously obscured origin 85 4.3. Adoption and abduction 91 4.3.1. Literary offspring 91 4.3.2. Emancipation and appropriation 93 4.4. Rape and marriage 96 4.5. Brothers and the poet 100 viii Chapter 5: Echoes and thunders: metapoetics of initiative and imitation in the Eunuchus 103 5.1. Initiative and repetition: first encounter 103 5.2. Responding to Plautus 106 5.3. Phony antiphony: anticipating the protatic character 109 5.4. Poetic prelude or erotic prae-ludus 114 5.5. The Eunuchus and the Samia: Menander’s Jupiter and Terence’s Zeus 117 5.6. Time warp: Chaerea and temporal paradoxes 124 Chapter 6: Ars simplex, vita duplex: The Self-Tormentor prologue and the ontology of the script 129 6.1. Binary authorship 130 6.2. Two-tiered delivery 132 6.3. Authorial input: crowdsourcing and outsourcing 135 6.4. Measuring ontology 138 6.5. Duplicity of performance 140 Chapter 7: Donna e mobile: ontological duplicity of the Self-tormentor 146 7.1. Misrepresentations and misperceptions 147 7.2. Antiphila’s antecedents 150 7.3. Anticipating Antiphila 156 7.4. It’s (not) what it looks like 161 7.4.1. Mother matters 162 7.4.2. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition 165 7.4.3. The medium is the message 168 7.4.4. Fragmenting the script 172 7.5. Enter Antiphila 176 7.5.1. Tu sola 179 Chapter 8: Double-edged wall: Terentian half-wife in and before Terence 183 8.1. Sola Antiphila 184 8.2. Menander’s Samia: whorish wife and/or wifely whore 189 8.3. Some remarks on concubinage in Plautus 192 8.4. The concubina in the Miles gloriosus: monotony of monogamy 193 8.4.1. Mirror/mirror on the wall 195 8.4.2. Di-vision 198 8.4.3. Choreography of affection 200 8.4.3.1. Sealing the sail 202 8.4.3.2. Flush of fabrication: equal to Sappho, she seems 204 8.4.4. Birth and wedding certificates, reproduced 206 8.4.5. Invasions, incisions, incest 208 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 218 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS KA = Kassel, R., Austin, C. (1983-2001). Poetae comici Graeci (PCG). Berlin—New York: W. de Gruyter. LSJ = Liddell, H. G., Scott, R., Jones, H. S., McKenzie, R. (1996). A Greek-English Lexicon. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OLD = Glare, P. G. W. (1982). Oxford Latin dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. All abbreviations of Greek and Latin authors and works are according to LSJ and OLD, with the exception of Terence’s Heauton Timorumenos: I use HT, instead of the conventional Hau. Unless specified otherwise, all translations are my own, and the texts used are: Kauer, Lindsay, and Skutsch (1958) for Terence; Leo (1895-1896) for Plautus; Wessner (1902-1908) for Donatus; Arnott (1979-2000) for Menander. x Introduction One of the facts that might come to light in this process [of literary criticism] is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.