Plautus Menaechmi 210-211: Greek or Roman Meats?

Lora L. Holland (University of North Carolina, Asheville)

The consumption of meat is a small but significant signifier of social tensions in the Plautine corpus. The abundance of references to pork in particular reflects a lengthy Roman love affair with the pig, as Fraenkel (Elementi Plautini 1960: 239 n. 2) argued long ago; but since the references are generally made by those who did not have ready access to such expensive fare, they also remind the audience of that very fact. The meat theme is an additional aspect of the negotiation between what McCarthy calls “the degradation of slavery and the wearying labor of mastery” (Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy, Princeton, 2000: 29). Recognizing how the playwright manipulates the comic effect of status foods requires a close examination of how he names them. When the parasite Peniculus requests meat for lunch at Menaechmi scene I.3 (182-218), his lust for pork is exceeded only by the peculiarity of his words: glandionidam suillam laridum pernonidam aut sincipitamenta porcina (210-211). Are these Greek or Roman meats? I will argue that they are Latin versions of cuts also consumed at Greek public festival feasts as detailed in Hellenistic Greek sacrificial regulations, especially in an inscription from southern Attica (SEG XXXV 113, published in 1970, dated to the first half of the third century BCE). I conclude that Plautus does not use the normative Greek terms for these and similar meats. This affords new insight into the Menaechmi scene.

As Ussing noted, the terms glandionida and pernonida are patronymicae comicae (Commentarius in Plauti comoedias 1875, reprinted Hildesheim, 1972: ad loc.). Gratwick argued for Ur-forms glandion and pernon in the Greek original (Menachmi, Cambridge, 1993: 161). Glandion, however, is not an attested Greek word, and pernon is commonly believed to be a borrowing from Latin. Sinciput is also of Latin origin, and has a comic secondary meaning in Menaechmi (506, 633, both instances apply to Peniculus, set up for the joke by the initial reference at 211) to be rendered something like “having half a brain.” Sinciput is parallel linguistically to hêmikraira, a word that appears frequently in the Greek inscriptions mentioned above, and is also a term of abuse in Attic comedy. Peniculus’ carnal desiderata, therefore, are couched in Latin terms, two of them patronymic hybrids (cf. Persa 702-705). The Greek original (assuming the scene in question is not entirely Plautine invention) would have used the normative terms that we can now extrapolate from the epigraphic evidence. Plautus’ uniquely rendered pork offers a further illustration of the complex relationship between audience and stage, and lends a very Roman vis comica to the lunch proceedings.