Plautus' Mostellaria is one of ancient Rome's most breezy and amusing
comedies. The plot is ridiculously simple: when a father returns home
after three years abroad, a clever slave named Tranio devises deceptions
to conceal that the son has squandered a fortune partying with pals and
purchasing his prized prostitute's freedom. Tranio convinces the
gullible father that his house is haunted, that his son has purchased
the neighbor's house, and that he must repay a moneylender. Plautus
animates this skeletal plot with farcical scenes of Tranio's slapstick
abuse of a rustic slave, the young lover's maudlin song lamenting his
prodigality, a cross-gender dressing routine, a drunken party, a
flustered moneylender, spirited slaves rebuffing the father, and Tranio
hoodwinking father and neighbor simultaneously.
This is the first book-length study of Mostellaria in its literary and
historical contexts. It aims to help readers and theater practitioners
appreciate the script as both cultural document and performed comedy. As
a cultural document, the play portrays a range of Roman preoccupations,
including male ideologies of the acquisition, use and abuse of property,
relations between owners and enslaved persons, the traffic in women,
tensions between city and country, the appropriation and adaptation of
Greek culture, and the specters of ancestry and surveillance. As a
performed comedy, the play celebrates the power of creativity,
improvisation and metatheater. In *Mostellaria'*s farce, sleek
simplicity replaces complexity as Plautus aggrandizes his comic hero by
stripping plot to the minimum and leaving Tranio to operate alone with
no resources other than his quick wit. A chapter on Mostellaria's
reception considers modernity's continuing fascination with Plautine
farce and trickery.
