Plautus and the triumph of tragedy

Abstract

The presence of various tragic, epic and even lyric elements in the comedy of Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 a.C.) has been recognized by scholars like Christenson (2000), Oniga (1985) and Traill (2005), respectively. However, such miscellany of poetic genres in the Plautine corpus doesn’t depict them in a peaceful coexistence. On the contrary: many times the evocation of other poetic genres seems to suggest an atmosphere of emulation between those genres and the comic one. Our researches have been pointing to the preponderance of allusions to tragedy (or intermediated by it). As we would like to stress though, it is not a mere matter of amount of references: sometimes the dispute (and the tradicional hierarchy) is even thematized, as in Amphitruo, The captives, Truculentus. In this paper we sought to observe more closely, in certain Plautine passages, the supposed triumph that the tragedy would have over the comedy, in order to determine to what extent this is verifiable in some of the poet’s plays.