40 pages • 1 hour read
PlautusThe Braggart Soldier
Fiction | Play | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I Summary
Act One begins as Pyrgopolynices, the braggart soldier, enters with his “parasite,” Artotrogus, and minions who carry his enormous, overblown shield. Pyrgopolynices bombasts about his shield and blade, which he claims are longing for a fight. As the soldier’s parasite, Artotrogus flatters Pyrgopolynices and regales him with romanticized and exaggerated tales of the braggart soldier in battle, and in return, Pyrgopolynices supports Artotrogus financially— – as Artotrogus quips, “It’s only for my stomach that I stomach him” (4). Artotrogus responds to the soldier’s request for a recounting of Pyrgopolynices’s tales of bravery, and informs the audience in an aside that the tales he tells to feed the soldier’s ego are lies.
Artotrogus praises the soldier, spinning impossible stories to feed the braggart’s ego and claiming that by his calculations, Pyrgopolynices has slain seven thousand enemy soldiers. The parasite tells the Pyrgopolynices that ladies are constantly calling for him and falling all over themselves when they see the braggart soldier, and that just yesterday two women mistook him for the great Greek war hero Achilles. Pyrgopolynices informs Artotrogus that he must go and pay the mercenaries he hired when the king asked him to enlist men into the army. The soldier leaves with his parasite and minions.
Act I Analysis
Although soldiers have certainly appeared in both Greek and Roman dramas and comedies, Plautus’s configuration of Pyrgopolynices stands out as perhaps the most famous incarnation of the Miles Gloriosus trope. Miles Gloriosus, the Latin title of the play, translates as “The Braggart Soldier.” Although Plautus did not invent the character type of the braggart soldier, he used it in seven of his twenty surviving plays. A famous example of an early Greek braggart soldier trope appears in Aristophanes’s The Acharnians, but the works of Aristophanes were a part of Greek Old Comedy, the first period in which Greek comic theatre emerged (c. 5th century BCE) and plays tended to focus on jokes with contemporary relevance, parodies of public figures, and song and dance.
Plautus adapted works from Greek New Comedy, the latter era of Greek theatre (approximately 320 BCE until the mid-third century BCE), which is understood primarily through the works of Greek comic playwright Menander. Greek New Comedy satirized Athenian society and domestic life. In the works of Menander, the soldier is typically an honorable figure rather than a comic one, and is an appropriate match for the young ingenue. Plautus’s construction of the braggart soldier shows how he placed his own spin on the Greek comedies he adapted rather than simply translating them into Latin. The braggart soldier as a stock character continues in subsequent eras and theatrical styles, including the Capitano figure in commedia dell’arte, a popular form of theatre that occurred during the 16th to 18th centuries CE in Italy. The stock characters from commedia continue to reverberate in popular comedies in the 21st century.
