SOURCE: "Hecyra: Ironic Comedy," in Roman Comedy, Cornell, 1983, pp. 130-41.

In the excerpt below, Konstan contends that The Mother-in-Law interrogates the traditional Roman values of amor and pietas (love and filial duty) and in the process "challenges and confounds their customary meanings. "

The tension between father and son in new comedy was available … as a vehicle for representing issues of caste and class in ancient society. At a certain level, to be sure, these issues manifest themselves as moral conflicts, which we may interpret according to the traditional Roman disjunction of virtue and passion: Modesty and obedience contend with amorous impulses which conventional wisdom regarded as selfish or antisocial. For this reason, moral or psychological interpretations of the plays inevitably come to mind. … [Many Roman plays] however, point beyond such abstract values to the matrix of social relations which endows them with content, and the social interest is...