SOURCE: "Aulularia: City-State and Individual," in Roman Comedy, Cornell, 1983, pp. 33-46.
In the essay below, Konstan discusses "the theme of avarice and the romantic theme" in the Aulularia.
In the characteristic story-type of new comedy, a young man's passionate infatuation with a girl who is ineligible for marriage is fulfilled in a respectable way through a turn in the plot—a recognition scene, for example—which reveals the maiden's citizen status. It is discovered, then, that the wayward passion had all along aspired to a permissible object, and the original tension turns out to be illusory. In plays of this type, the prohibited passion drives outward beyond the limits of the community. Love fastens in its willful way upon a stranger, and thereby threatens to violate the exclusiveness by which the community is defined. But a special class of stories, relatively rare in new comedy, looks not so much to urges that push across the boundary as to figures who withdraw into isolation from their fellow citizens. These are the tales of the misanthrope and the misogynist, the miser and the prude. Their challenge to the community manifests itself as a secession, rather than as the pursuit of a forbidden relationship. Characters of this sort bear a certain affinity to the stern fathers who are typically the obstacle to love. By his withdrawal from society the misanthrope or miser may for example block a romantic alliance involving his daughter. Nevertheless, the differences between the two types are essential. In the amatory plays the "blocking characters" prevent or oppose the romantic union, but they do so as representatives of the claims of marriage, that is, of legitimate social communion. The recognition scene is an essential part of a plot of this kind because it permits the fulfillment both of the erotic impulse and of the social requirement of marriage among citizens, which had seemed to be opposed in their demands. The misanthrope and the miser, on the contrary, have themselves severed their ties with society. It is they who will not marry or allow their
Vase painting of a scene used by Plautus in Aulularia: thieves pull a miser off his money chest. daughters to marry, they who will not engage in commerce with their fellows which is the right use of wealth. Consumed as they are by a private passion, they are more akin to the lover than they are to the conventional morality of the blocking character. Where the lover threatens to defy the boundaries of the community, the miser and the misanthrope dissolve its inner bonds and encyst themselves within society as internal exiles. They cannot be brought back into society by a dramatic coincidence or revelation. They must rather be made to realize the insufficiency of their isolation, so that they turn back of their own will to the community of men. Hence such plays depend essentially upon a change in character. The recusant foregoes his specious autarky, recognizes his insufficiency and the insufficiency of the ideal or symbol which he had made the sole object of his desire, whether it is the miser's gold or the misanthrope's virtue and sincerity. In a word, he gives up his fetish, which, from the point of view of community, consists in the worship of an abstract value at the expense of the social relationship that its function is to mediate. This paradigm defines the general form of Plautus's comedy, the
Aulularia.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Plautus c. 254 B.C-184 B. C.: David Konstan Access Pass.
