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PlautusThe Brothers Menaechmus
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Themes
The Gap Between Myth and Everyday Life: Menaechmus as Hercules
The Brothers Menaechmus belongs to the sub-genre of Roman comedy known as fabula palliata, or “plays in a Greek cloak.” Set in Greece and modelled on New Comedy, their relationship to the Greek world therefore illuminates their meaning in crucial ways. In the play, this Hellenic presence is partly explored through the parallels between Greek myth and the characters’ lives.
As is recorded in the preserved city of Pompeii, many ancient houses were decorated with wall paintings of Greek myths, in a display of learning that exemplifies the Roman fascination with Greek culture. When Menaechmus enters the stage, modelling the dress he has stolen from his wife, he refers to “frescoes painted on the wall,” that show Ganymede, a beautiful young man whom Zeus carried to heaven disguised as an eagle, and Adonis, a hero beloved by Venus (143-44). The method by which Menaechmus imagines his own attractiveness, therefore, is through comparing himself to figures from Greek myth. However, Plautus suggests a bathetic contrast between these mythic figures and the contemporary Menaechmus, by showing how difficult it is for Peniculus to answer Menaechmus’s question about the resemblance. Menaechmus asks, “notice something similar?”, to which Peniculus responds, “what kind of crazy dress is that?” (146).
Similarly, when Menaechmus II pretends to be mad, he portrays himself as a mythic hero, ordered by the gods to drive a chariot: “up up up, ye steeds […] Quickly curve your course with splendid speed and swifty swoop of steps” (866-67). The archaic vocabulary and form of address, the lofty circumlocution, and the ballad-like alliteration introduce a mythic atmosphere into the scene which, as the audience knows, is a comic conceit created by Menaechmus II as a way to get out of trouble.
Perhaps the most crucial mythic parallel for Menaechmus, however, is Hercules. The characters’ frequent tendency to exclaim “by Hercules” is a formulaic oath (comparable to the modern “oh God,” and matched by the exclamations “by Pollux,” “by Castor,” “by Jove,” etc.), but it gains extra meaning, given the other references to this hero throughout the play. “Hercules in labour number nine was not as brave as I”, exclaims Menaechmus, when he recounts his theft of the dress to Erotium (200). Similarly, when he characterizes his wife as a “bloody mountain lion” (159), he alludes to Hercules’ first labor of battling the lion of Nemea. When Menaechmus II jokes that he knows the old man (i.e. Menaechmus’s father-in-law) as well as he knows Hercules’s father-in-law, he unwittingly strengthens the association between Menaechmus and the hero.
As with the paradigm of Ganymede and Adonis, however, there is a stark contrast between these mythic feats and the actual events of the play (between, for example, Menaechmus’s escape from his wife and Hercules’s slaying of the Nemean monster). By setting up the mythic parallel and then suggesting how his characters fall short of that heroic exemplum, Plautus suggests the gap between myth and everyday life. Through his summoning of a Greek mythic presence, he emphasizes the actual, down-to-earth reality of his characters and contemporary Rome, both of which are trying to live up to a Greek model that is receding into myth.
The Varieties of Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom
After the Prologue, the play’s opening speech explores the different ways in which people can be enslaved. Peniculus advocates a form of what contemporary sociologists might call “soft power,” arguing that the most efficient way to enslave someone is to treat them lavishly and give them what they think they desire (in Peniculus’s case, plentiful food and drink). According to Peniculus, invisible restraints are therefore the most powerful, and those who “bind their prisoners with chains, / Or clap the shackles on a slave […] / Are acting very foolishly” (79-81).
Plautus then puts forward a different theory of slavery in Messenio’s speech starting at line 966, one which we could identify as a model of “hard power.” While Peniculus argued that people remain loyal because of a willing, self-serving satisfaction, Messenio argues that it is the fear of violence that keeps an individual subservient. Whereas Peniculus argued that a good slave is a happy one, Messenio claims that the most dependable slave will be the one who is the most afraid; he personally is “determined to be good–so I won’t turn out badly” (977).
As if to probe which theory of slavery is the most valid, Plautus portrays a variety of different kinds of captivity in the play, exploring several methods of power. Both Menaechmus and the old man argue that Menaechmus’s wife should be satisfied because she has “maids and aides, a pantry full, / Purple clothing, gold and wool” (120) or because she is “well dressed, well jeweled and well supplied with food and maids” (801). In other words, according to the logic of Peniculus, she should have nothing to complain about. The wife herself, however, feels that she is trapped by her marriage and that no amount of food or wealth will make up for that entrapment: “I simply can’t endure all this disgracefulness” (719). On the other side of the coin, both Menaechmus and the old man accuse her of enslaving her husband in return. The wife’s father asks, “What do you women want from husbands? Servitude?” (795-96).
Many other chains appear in the play. Individuals are bound together by bonds of family and of citizenship, such as when Peniculus is waylaid in the assembly, and there are the bonds of patron and client, such as when Menaechmus claims his client “bound me and tied ropes around me” (589) before he was finally “freed” (599). A particularly crucial and overarching form of captive relationship, however, is that between the audience and the play itself. Through his slippery language, whirlwind plot, and direct instructions to pay attention, Plautus entraps his audience, reminding us of the inherent powerlessness involved in watching a play.
Perhaps there is one character, however, who is truly free. As he is a foreigner in the city, Menaechmus II is exempt from the bonds of civic duty; he has no wife or family, and no clients. As his slave is bound by hard power, he demands nothing in return for his service. In stark contrast to his brother, who tries and fails to escape his obligations throughout the play, Menaechmus II therefore appears unconstrained. He makes the most of that liberty, living an ideal that Menaechmus can only dream of. Reading the play from a psychoanalytical perspective, we might say that Menaechmus II is Menaechmus’s alter-ego, who enacts his innermost fantasies. However, by the end of the play, Menaechmus II does become bound to another, through ties of kinship with his twin, and does so willingly, at the same time as freeing his slave. Plautus structures the play as a whole, therefore, through a double journey from freedom to slavery, in the context of Menaechmus II, and of slavery to freedom, in the context of Messenio.
The Boundaries Between Madness and Sanity
As a result of its fundamental premise of mistaken identity, characters in the play are repeatedly convinced that they are talking to someone they are not, leading to misunderstanding and miscommunication. Although characters produce a variety of explanations for the seemingly nonsensical reactions of their interlocutor—Erotium, for example, thinks that Menaechmus II is “making jokes” with her (381), while the wife believes her supposed husband is simply lying–one significant interpretation is that a character has gone mad. Enhanced by the inherent ability of theatre to explore issues of reality and illusion, these doubts over sanity are a crucial theme of the play.
Menaechmus II and Messenio, for example, believe that Cylindrus is a madman when he invites them into the feast. Thinking that he must be “absolutely raving mad / To bother me, an unknown man who doesn’t know you” (292-93), Menaechmus II orders the cook to buy a pig, which he can “sacrifice to purify your mind at my expense” (291). According to Greek and Roman medicine, madness was an affliction sent by the gods, which could therefore only be cured by appeasement like sacrifice and prayers. Therefore, Menaechmus II’s feigned madness is also religious in tone: he experiences an ecstatic state induced by Bacchus, god of theatre, wine and ritual madness, and is possessed by Apollo, the god of prophecy.
However, these confident diagnoses of insanity are more complicated than they first appear. When Menaechmus II feigns madness, he does so believing that the old man and the wife have themselves lost their wits. “They both say I’m crazy,” he declares, but “I know they’re the really crazy ones!” (842-43). However, since Menaechmus II thinks that he “knows” something which the audience can see is not really the case (given the old man and the wife’s valid questions and beliefs), there is a sense in which he really has lost his grip on reality. Is he insane, then, and who is in a position to confirm either way? The same difficulties apply to the original Menaechmus, who thinks that the old man and the doctor are insane because they ask him questions which are, in fact, grounded in reality: “those who wrongly say I’m mad,” he proclaims, “are really mad themselves” (962).
As with the issue of Menaechmus’s guilt or innocence when cross-examined by his wife and parasite, Plautus therefore makes us question a binary attitude towards sanity. Through confusing our ability to pin down such distinctions, he emphasizes that such claims depend on the knowledge and position of the one making them. Throughout the play, seemingly distinct categories shift and swap at lightning speed. Crucially, however, none of the characters doubt their own sanity, portraying a world of self-confidence and assurance at odds with the reality of the audience.
