31 pages • 1 hour read
PlautusThe Brothers Menaechmus
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“Prologue”-“Exit of Cylindrus”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary: “Prologue”-“Exit of Cylindrus”
The play opens with a Prologue, spoken by the Chief Actor of the company. Alongside establishing the tone for the comedy–fast-paced, playful and metatheatrical–the Prologue gives the backstory to the play. It explains that a merchant from Syracuse, named Moschus, went to market at Tarentum with one of his identical twin sons, Menaechmus. The young boy got lost in the crowd and was whisked away by a merchant from Epidamnus. Moschus was so distraught that he died, while the boys’ grandfather renamed the surviving twin Menaechmus (written, in the play, as Menaechmus II).
Having explained the background, the Prologue then reveals the time and place of the play itself. The setting is Epidamnus, in Greece, on a street which passes Menaechmus’s house on the way from the harbor to the forum. Several years have elapsed: Menaechmus is now very rich and married to a “dowried female” (61); Menaechmus II is just about to arrive in Epidamnus, as part of a long voyage in search of his brother.
After the Prologue, the first character to enter the stage is Peniculus, the parasite. With a name literally meaning “sponge,” Peniculus is a stock character from Roman comedy, a hanger-on or flatterer who attaches himself to a richer man in order to get free food and advantages, in return for running errands and fawning on his provider. Peniculus gives a philosophical discourse about the nature of captivity, arguing that the best way to bind someone to your will is to feed them: “Provide the guy with eatables and drinkables” (90), argues Peniculus, and he’ll be so satisfied that “he’ll never flee” (92).
Menaechmus then emerges from his house, backwards. He is having an argument with his wife. Fed up with her nagging, he tells her that he is going off to feast with his “wench” (124), the prostitute Erotium, who lives next door. Menaechmus escapes from the house, boasting to the audience that he has stolen his wife’s dress as a gift for his lover. He then notices Peniculus, his “good-luck charm” (138), and models the dress for him, convinced that he looks just like a famous pin-up from myth. The pair are about to knock on Erotium’s door when she steps outside, eclipsing the sun by “all the blazing beauty from her body” (181), according to the besotted Menaechmus.
Menaechmus gives her the dress and asks her to prepare a feast for the three of them. He and Peniculus then go off to drink in the forum, leaving Erotium to give orders to her cook, Cylindrus.
“Prologue”-“Exit of Cylindrus” Analysis
In the first two lines of the play, Plautus undercuts the audience’s expectations. The Prologue begins in a grand style, pronouncing an “apostrophe” (or address) and using alliteration to create an atmosphere of epic solemnity, before collapsing that lofty tone through the self-centered, petty attitude of the actor–“May fortune favour all of you–and all of me” (2). This combination of grandeur and mundanity, enhanced by the dramatic pause in the middle of the line, introduces a key theme of the play–that of the contrast between myth and everyday life–and plays with the audience’s powerlessness at the hands of this puckish, unpredictable actor.
Plautus also plays with his audience through the meta-theatricality of the Prologue. The actor issues direct instructions to the audience, demanding that they pay “friendly” attention (4). When he moves from explaining the backstory to introducing the play itself, he proclaims that he is literally moving from Syracuse towards Epidamnus, exploiting the double meaning of “metre by metre” (49) (referring both to the measure of travel and to the play’s rhythmic structure). He thus explores the power of theatrical illusion to capture an audience’s imagination and transport them to new worlds, alongside establishing the play’s distinctive verbal ingenuity.
The opening section of the play also engages with the Roman theatrical tradition of setting comedies in Athens in order to imitate the New Comedy of ancient Greece (plays written by Menander and others in the fourth century BC). By signaling that his play is “Greekish” (11) rather than Greek–that it has its roots in Sicily rather than Athens, for example–Plautus is therefore asserting his creative freedom from his Greek models. He is also suggesting that his contemporaries, by contrast, are enslaved by their ostentatious desire to make “everything […] seem more Greek” (9).
Central to Plautus’s innovatory style was his combination of speech and song, as can be seen in the fact that Menaechmus’s opening lines are sung, unlike those of the Chief Actor and Peniculus. Through this song, with its amalgamation of rhythms, its repeated alliteration and its anaphora (the repetition of the same word at the beginning of multiple clauses), Plautus creates a dexterous “word barrage” (127) and begins to explore another key theme of the play: the power of language to manipulate or confuse. Just as the audience was at the mercy of the punning speech of the Chief Actor, and just as Peniculus uses rhetoric to argue for the validity of his parasitic status, Menaechmus forces his wife into submission through the power of his language: “it’s victory!” (127).
