“The Staff of Rome”: Dating Plautus’ Menaechmi

Jane Woodruff

William Jewell College

The comic devices used by Plautus, as any reader knows, are legion (e.g., mistaken identity, puns and other verbal humor, mythological mots and,  of course,  military metaphors).  In The Menaechmi too, although it is atypical of Plautine comedies in many other ways,  “battles” of all sorts rage: Menaechmus vs. Matrona, Peniculus vs. fames,  voluptas  vs. industria.   In one particular humorous conflict (lines 828-71), as Menaechmus II is attempting to evade his brother’s wife and father-in-law (who believe that he is their Menaechmus, and are intent on restraining their loved one,  now clearly in the grip of some sort of insanity), Plautus inserts a rare (for him) term: scipione.  This specific term—familiar to Romans of the late third and early second centuries B.C. both as the cognomen of one branch of the patrician Cornelian family and as one attribute of a triumphator—may assist us in assigning a firm(er) date to The Menaechmi  (previously posited as early as 215 and as late as 186 B.C.).