Plautus’ and Seneca’s Ulysses: Some Questions of Influence and Intertextuality

Michael Fontaine (Cornell University)

In his commentary on Seneca’s Troades (Leeds 1994), A. J. Boyle remarks that Seneca’s sinister and cunning Ulysses in the deception-scene (523-c. 635) is oddly reminiscent of the clever slave of Roman Comedy. The point of my presentation is (1) to develop Boyle’s observation by showing that the resemblances are not merely thematic, but verbal as well; (2) to argue that Seneca’s model for Ulysses is specifically Plautine Comedy rather than the comedies of any of the other dozen or so comedians of Republican and later times, including Terence; and (3) finally to consider why Seneca looked to Plautus, rather than, say, a Roman tragedian for his depiction, and how this choice throws light on the relationship of comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy as the Romans saw it.

As to (1) and (2): E. Fraenkel demonstrated that Plautus, and no other, greatly expanded the role of the cunning slave in his comedies, and also that the Roman comedian favored the liberal use of hyperbolic and mythological comparisons and buffoonish identifications more than other comedians had (cf. now Plautine Elements in Plautus, Oxford 2007), judgments that may require some qualification but which have not been overturned. Fraenkel’s views as they relate to the Troades are encapsulated in a few passages from Plautus’ Bacchides. For instance, in the great monody of that play on the fall of Troy (925ff.), the crafty slave Chrysalus, singing of his victory, identifies himself as Ulysses (cf. 940 ego sum Vlixes, cuius consilio haec gerunt and 946 ego...Vlixes), an identification based on the shared traits of consilium, audacia, malitia, and doli at vv. 949-952.

But in developing Ulysses’ self-presentation, much of which is conveyed to us through ironic asides, Seneca may also have been thinking of Plautus’ innovative use of schizophrenic deliberation in monologue: in the Epidicus, for instance, the crafty slave checks himself in the second person at v. 160 (the whole metaphor is of sacking a town through superior cunning) Epidice, vide quid agas!; at Seneca Troades 608 Ulysses likewise checks himself by asking quid agis, Ulysse? These second person questions, marked with a vocative of the speaker’s name, are quite unusual; quid agam (or ago)? was normal. Other parallels will be pointed out, too.

As to (3): Why did Seneca look to comedy, not tragedy, for his depiction? Here recent discussions of intertextuality may offer an advance in interpretation. S. Hinds (Allusion and Intertext, Cambridge 1998) remarks on the odd intertextual circumstance in which one poet alludes to a famous event via a metaphor, and then a later poet, in narrating the original event, alludes to the prior poet’s description; Hinds’ example is Virgil’s allusion in the Aeneid to the decapitated Pompey via the decapitated Priam, a passage whose wording is borrowed by Lucan when he in turns narrates the decapitation of Pompey in the Pharsalia. It is in light of Hinds’ remarks that I would see Seneca’s valuation of those passages of Plautus’ Bacchides and Epidicus: Plautus had created the consummate trickster in Roman literature; Seneca wanted a consummate trickster for his Ulysses: why look elsewhere?

The only seeming problem, then, is the question of tone, which separates the farcical and funny Plautine tricksters from Seneca’s sinister Ulysses. But this was easily obviated. It is Plautus himself in the Amphitruo (54ff.) who coins the word and the doctrine of Roman

tragicomedia, a term defined as using omnibus isdem vorsibus, all the same verses, of a tragedy to create a comedy; all you need to do, he implies, is alter the tone of delivery. Such is, I will argue, what Seneca has done: for his Troades he has created from Plautine comedy a tragic Ulysses omnibus isdem vorsibus in more ways than one.