Plautus: Poenulus

Plautus' Poenulus (The Little Carthaginian) is a work of staggering literary and

historical significance. Performed in the long shadow of Rome's struggle with

Hannibal's Carthage, this play stages the restoration of a Carthaginian family

divided through enslavement. Set against the backdrop of a Greece marked by

comedic expectations and the geography of contemporary imperial conquest,

Poenulus presents a tale of Carthaginian heartbreak and heartache to a postwar

Roman audience. The comedy's remarkable diversity prompts audience

interaction with a wide range of socio-cultural topics relevant to Plautus' time.

Engaging weighty matters through song, slapstick, puns, and spectacle, Poenulus

may appear to defang, but its bite is deep.



This book offers an innovative understanding of Poenulus' place in Roman history

and literary culture, helping readers to appreciate the play itself, the complex

nature of Plautine authorship, and the cultures of performance in Republican

Rome. Most of the book explores the play as a performance, from its unique and

strikingly 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 early

modern period, including little-known revivals and adaptations in Ferrara, Rome,

and Cambridge. Over the centuries, people have found in Poenulus a script well

suited to active learning in the Latin classroom, a text capable of supporting

new political ideologies, and a dramatized vision of the world that accorded

with processes of racialization in Europe as reengagement with the classical past

coincided with the expansion of the slave trade and the objectification of Black

Africans. That one play has been seen to support and subvert the same outlooks

and practices is a testament to its complexity and to the enduring power of all Plautine verse from the third century BCE to the present.