Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.04.17 Kathleen McCarthy, Slaves, Masters and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xi, 231. ISBN 0-691-04888-6. $45.00.
Reviewed by Ariana Traill, University of Colorado at Boulder
Word count: 4252 words
concessum est in palliata poetis comicis servos dominis sapentiores fingere, quod idem in togata non fere licet Donatus, ad Eun Readers since Donatus have puzzled over the cleverness of the comic slave. Next to an often dim-witted master, the clever slave appears to subvert a relationship of dominance. This has been explained in various ways, most famously by E. Segal, who popularized the idea that comedy offered a period of Saturnalian license, a temporary release for slaves and sons in potestate and a mechanism for the powerful to keep the lower orders in line. In a stimulating new study, Kathleen McCarthy uses detailed analyses of four plays, Menaechmi Casina Persa , and Captivi , to go beyond Segal's "safety-valve" theory and attempt to explain what stake the rich, powerful Romans who funded these plays had in actually watching them and why, more generally, the slave-owners who made up most of the audience enjoyed a form that presented them in an unflattering light. McCarthy offers an answer based on an insight into the psychology of slave-owning: Roman masters themselves felt a need for release, both from the labor of domination and from their own anxieties as "subordinates" in the larger hierarchies of Roman society. The first of these pressures may be universal to slave-owning societies (McCarthy draws on comparative evidence ranging from the East African plantation system to the New World), a consequence of the famous "contradiction of slavery", that is, the notion that the ideal slave should be both an "object", an absolutely obedient instrument of the master's will, and a thinking "subject", able to follow the intent and not just the letter of the command (McCarthy's discussion of the | |
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