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O X F O R D S T U D I E S IN AN C I E N T C U L T U R E
A ND REPRESENTAT ION
General Editors
The late Simon Price R. R. R. Smith Oliver Taplin
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O X F O R D S T U D I E S IN AN C I E N T C U L T U R E
A ND REPRESENTAT ION
Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation publishes significant inter-

disciplinary research into the visual, social, political, and religious cultures of the
ancient Mediterranean world. The series includes work that combines different kinds
of representations that are usually treated separately. The overarching programme
is to integrate images, monuments, texts, performances, and rituals with the places,
participants, and broader historical environment that gave them meaning.
Mimetic Contagion
Art and Artifice in Terence’s Eunuch
ROBERT GERMANY
1
3
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Taïde è, la puttana che rispuose

al drudo suo quando disse “Ho io grazie
grandi apo te?”: “Anzi maravigliose!”
Inferno 18.133–5
Gratitude is often easy to express for things of short genesis, but this book has
been very long in coming to fruition. Its first glimmer of life was in September
2000, my second week of graduate school, as a delirious hallway conversation
between Shadi Bartsch, Phil Horky, and myself. It fashioned itself almost imme-
diately into a dissertation project, but was slower in arrival than its first flash
presaged, due to my own lumbering pace in connecting the grad school dots.
I owe a fine, high debt of thanks to the faculty of the Department of Classics at the
University of Chicago for the training and encouragement they gave me and the
patience they showed me throughout. But while gratitude is due to all, special
thanks must go to my thesis advisors, Shadi Bartsch, David Wray, and Jas Elsner,
who were unstinting in their support and their guidance with this project.
The last couple years of my tenure as a grad student were spent teaching at
Trinity University, where once again I found myself the recipient of material and
moral support well beyond my desert. The faculty and the students at Trinity were
truly remarkable in their willingness to think about mimesis and comedy with me
as I wrote the better part of this book, and the fact that many of them are still dear
friends at some years’ remove is hard to extricate from their love and intelligent
conversation as I worked through this material. Among many names that ought to
be mentioned, I can hardly fail to single out Erwin Cook, who first taught me to
read Homer when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas and once
again at Trinity was an irreplaceable interlocutor and a model of what a classicist
might be.
An animal is born once, a man perhaps twice, and such creatures are thus
limited in their reasonable claim of terroir, but a plant successfully moved from
one pot or earth to another gains a new native soil. This book has survived and
thrived in transplantation to Haverford College, and the thanks I owe to this
academic environment are immense. My colleagues at Bryn Mawr College and
other classicists throughout the greater Philadelphia area have been interested and
supportive and have taught me more than they know or than I can readily compass
here in words. But I must make special mention of my colleagues at Haverford,
Deborah Roberts and Bret Mulligan, whose friendship, feedback, and unfailing
encouragement have made my life these past seven years the envy of all who know me.
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I could not have asked for a more conducive environment for intellectual growth,
productive work, or happiness.
Without the generosity of Haverford College in funding my junior leave
(2011–12) and intermittent course releases throughout, I could never have com-
pleted this book, nor would it have the shape it has without the criticism
and encouragement I received when presenting pieces of it as papers, twice at
Chicago under the auspices of the Rhetoric and Poetics Workshop, in 2005
at CACW/CAPN, in 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2013 at the
University of Manchester. Terry Snyder and Margaret Schaus and Haverford
Libraries have been a great help with locating and purchasing image permissions.
At OUP Hilary O’Shea and Annie Rose have been a delight to work with, and the
anonymous readers have astounded me with the care they have taken and the
intelligence and sympathy of their response. I wish I knew their identities so
I could thank them by name for some of the most thoughtful criticism I have
ever received. I can only hope that they will read this and know that they have this
stranger’s gratitude and admiration. In case such a wide dispersion of thanks be
felt to mitigate my own responsibility for the mistakes and lapses in judgment in
this book, I should be clear that I claim those for my own, attributable to my own
oversight or obstinance and not to the hermeneutic and editorial help I have
received along the way. I sigh to think that after so many years in gestation such
errors must persist, but as Robert Burton said of his own slim tome, “I do easily
grant, if a rigid censurer should criticize on this which I have writ, he should not
find three sole faults, as Scaliger in Terence, but three hundred.”
It is a debt of a different kind that I owe to my mother, whose formative love,
thirst for life, and boundless inquisitiveness were always the beginning of every-
thing. Without the support of my closest friends and confidants these fifteen years
would have been too arid for this book’s growth, but they have also taught me
things that show up throughout the book and suffuse its perspective. I name, in
order of the date of our first love, Phil Horky, Dawn LaValle, Fr. Pat Reardon, and
Alex Petkas. In this same category, though no doubt with an intensity not to be
matched, are my four children: Grace, Ada, Elias, and Jack. From them much of
this book has been borrowed in the form of time and attention, but they have also
fed me all along the way. Above all else my wife, Dianna, without whom nothing.
It is to her I dedicate this book in affection, admiration, and thanks.
F R O N T I S P I EC E . Rembrandt’s Danaë (1636)

Photo courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xi
Introduction 1
1. Judging Chaerea: The Role of the Painting 28

2. Quickening Images: Mimetic Contagion in Cultic and Erotic Art 49
3. Lifelike Likeness: Mimetic Contagion in the Philosophical Tradition 72
4. Mimetic Contagion in Terence’s Rome 95

5. Mimic Rape: Genre Switching and Role Confusion 120
6. The Poetics of Contamination 157
Epilogue 178
Bibliography 183
Index 197
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece. Rembrandt’s Danaë (1636) viii

Photo courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
5.1. Santia vase, B.M. F233 144
Photo courtesy of the British Museum
Introduction
At the physical centre of every eunuch is a cut, an act of violence and irreversible
change, and Terence’s Eunuch is no exception. One line after the exact centre of
the play, Chaerea emerges from the house he had entered 56 lines before. Over the
next 57 lines he will narrate the events that transpired inside, creating a symmet-
rical diptych of backstage action and staged narration directly around a break at
the stichic centre of the comedy.1 Chaerea’s rape of Pamphila, at the very fulcrum
of the text, alters the lives of all the main characters and turns out to be central to
the plot. Its centrality, however, is not limited to its effects; we immediately
understand that the events of the first half of the play were engineered to get
Pamphila and Chaerea alone together backstage without the supervision of their
older siblings, one of whom is at a party and the other in the country.
A brief summary of the first half of the play will reveal this orchestration. Act 1
began with Phaedria, Chaerea’s older brother and Terentian double, complaining
to his slave Parmeno of his unrequited passion for his next-door neighbour, the
apparently mercenary meretrix, Thais, who has played him for gifts and affections
and now locks him out with haughty indifference. Now, after so many capricious
reversals, he is ready to forswear love and Thais forever. Parmeno agrees with his
master’s assessment of love, but is cynical about his ability to resist it, even
knowing its faults. Thais then joins them onstage and explains her recent cold
shoulder as part of a ruse to trick her old flame, Thraso, into giving her the
beautiful young lute girl, Pamphila. He had originally acquired the girl as a gift
for Thais, but since his arrival in Athens, he has learned of her affair with Phaedria
and is now hesitating to hand her over. Thais explains that, unbeknownst to
Thraso, Pamphila is actually her own adopted sister, an Athenian girl of uncertain
1
Thais takes Chaerea backstage immediately after line 493. He comes back onstage at line 549. His
narration lasts until line 606, at which point Antipho abruptly changes the subject and the boys depart. I do
not, of course, suggest that this symmetry would have been perceptible to the play’s original theatre
audience, but such careful structuring may indeed be further evidence that Terence wrote with the
expectation that his plays would enjoy private reading, whether sympotic or solitary. Peter Kruschwitz
(2001) has uncovered a similar effect in several of Terence’s plays, where individual scenes are paired by
consisting of the same number of lines. These scenes are sometimes far apart from each other, but upon
closer examination they reveal important thematic and dramaturgical similarities.
2 MIMETIC CONTAGION
parentage, who was given to her mother as a small child. Though raised in a
brothel, Pamphila is still a virgin, and Thais is eager to get her out of Thraso’s
clutches and into her own safekeeping, partly out of sisterly affection and partly
because she hopes to prove Pamphila’s Athenian citizen parentage. Reuniting an
Athenian family with their long-lost daughter, Thais would make her adopted
sister a marriageable Athenian girl and would procure patronage for herself in the
city where she has taken up residence but is as yet without protection. To
complete the deception she requires Phaedria’s absence for two days. This will
give her the chance to wait on Thraso unreservedly and convince him of her total
availability and devotion to him. Evidently unimpressed by this story and regard-
ing Pamphila as simply another expensive bauble that has caught Thais’ eye,
Phaedria complains that he too has made such gifts: she wanted an Ethiopian
slave girl, she wanted a eunuch—he got her one of each. Still, he grudgingly
agrees to go, provided that two days not turn into twenty, and begs her to be
faithful in spirit, if not in body (cum milite isto praesens absens ut sies, 192). He and
Parmeno go into his house to prepare for his journey, and Thais goes into her own
to wait for Pamphila’s long-lost Athenian brother.
In Act 2 Phaedria departs for the country, leaving instructions with Parmeno to
deliver the eunuch and the Ethiopian girl to Thais. Left alone, Parmeno barely has
time to bemoan his master’s love-smitten folly, when Thraso’s toady, Gnatho,
enters the stage bearing Pamphila to her new mistress. In the previous Act,
Parmeno’s sarcastic interjections had served to comment on Thais’ speech, and
here, too, Gnatho’s self-satisfied monologue is punctuated by Parmeno’s dis-
gusted asides. His contempt for the parasite sets Parmeno up for a painful reversal,
when Gnatho, who knows where things stand with Phaedria, notices Parmeno
and cannot resist the opportunity to poke fun at him for being locked out of Thais’
house. Gnatho goes inside, deposits Pamphila, and departs, and Parmeno only has
one line to fume before spotting Chaerea, who stumbles onstage breathless with
frustration (occidi!), having no sooner seen than lost the girl of his dreams. He
describes her to Parmeno and relates how he was fortuitously hindered from
getting near her or seeing where she went, except that it would surely have been
somewhere onstage (huc advorterat | in hanc nostram plateam, 343–4). Parmeno
realizes he means Pamphila, and tells him that she is Thraso’s gift to Thais,
considerably outbidding poor Phaedria’s gift of a broken-down old eunuch.
Even with the eunuch’s unspeakable deficits, Chaerea still finds him enviable
because of his impending proximity to Pamphila. Parmeno suggests that Chaerea
impersonate the eunuch and be delivered into the house in his stead, and they
depart to make the necessary wardrobe changes.
Act 3 opens with one of the funniest and most ethopoetic scenes in Terence.
Here the focus is not on getting into Thais’ house, but getting her out of it and
keeping control of her. Thraso flounders from one embarrassingly idiotic story to
INTRODUCTION 3
another, while Gnatho leads him on with shameless flattery, and Parmeno’s
revulsion grows by the moment along with his eagerness to trick all of them.
Thraso is unsure of Thais’ affections, and worries how he can keep her attention
once he has her at the party. They have evidently noted how keen Thais was to
receive Pamphila and get her away from Thraso, and Gnatho explains that she is
jealous and therefore vulnerable. If, during their revelry, Thais wants to invite
Phaedria, all Thraso must do is return fire by sending for Pamphila, if she praises
Phaedria’s handsomeness, Thraso should praise Pamphila’s beauty, and so on,
pitting par against pari until she learns how it feels to be a rival (440–5). We know
that Thais is unlikely to mention Phaedria at all, since she has made such a point of
insuring his absence, but Gnatho’s hypothetical scenario, by casting Phaedria and
Pamphila as functional pares, suggests the real similarity between them: Phaedria’s
absence in the country and the emphatic seclusion Terence is setting up around
Pamphila. Thais’ plans will keep Phaedria off stage right, in the direction of the
country, and Thraso’s party off stage left, in the direction of town, leaving her
house rather isolated. She comes out when she hears Thraso’s voice and is ready to
leave with him immediately, but Parmeno chooses this moment to make trouble
for everyone by showing up with Phaedria’s gifts, the Ethiopian slave girl and the
‘eunuch’, played by Chaerea. This untimely presentation is successful in putting
Thais in an awkward position with Thraso. She has been waiting for Pamphila’s
brother, Chremes, but now Thraso is eager that they be on their way, so Thais
tucks the new slaves into the house as quickly as possible and gives Pythias
instructions that if Chremes should show up, he must if possible be kept in the
house until her return. Only if he will not wait should he be escorted to the party.
As soon as everyone leaves, of course, Chremes arrives from the country, grum-
bling his suspicions about Thais, who has summoned him now for a second time.
He is eager to assure anyone who wants to know (roget quis, 511) that he is
innocent of Thais and her wiles, whatever they may be. From her line of ques-
tioning at their previous interview, he supposes she is trying to seduce him or snag
his family’s estate at Sunium or maybe even pretend that she is his long-lost sister,
which he says is preposterous given her age. He learns that Thais is out and he is
ready to head home immediately, so Pythias tries to entice him into the house.
When it becomes clear that this will not work, she offers to have him escorted
directly to Thais at Thraso’s party, and he agrees.
In every one of these scenes from the first half of the play, there is some tension
around the issue of access to Thais’ house. Both Phaedria and Thais would like to
be in her house, whether for love or to wait for Chremes, but circumstances force
them off the stage in different directions. Parmeno was made to feel like a fool for
being temporarily locked out of her house, and Chremes refused to cooperate
with the plan and stay there. This convergence of tensions between people who
wish to be or are supposed to be there but are emphatically not there creates a
4 MIMETIC CONTAGION
dramatic vacuum about the house. To be sure, there are slaves at home, but
Chaerea and Pamphila are left unsupervised by older siblings and by anyone else
who has been introduced as a major character so far. Moreover it is clear that
everything that has happened up to this point in the play has conspired to produce
this configuration. Does this transparence of dramaturgical intentionality provide
some mitigation of Chaerea’s crime? If the rape was not a random act but the telos
towards which the first half of the play was driving, then the scheming is clearly,
even spectacularly, on Terence’s side, and Chaerea comes to seem more like a
hapless puppet. In case we miss this orchestration in the flurry of scenes, the
characters themselves point it out in hindsight. In Act 5, when Chaerea and Thais
are reaching an agreement, he looks back at the day’s events with wonder at how
everything has mysteriously played advantageously. ‘What if some god has
ordained all this?’ he asks (quid si hoc quispiam voluit deus? 875). Thais agrees:
‘That’s exactly the way I’d like to interpret it!’ (equidem pol in eam partem
accipioque et volo).
Fortune or the controlling god in New Comedy may always be understood
metatheatrically, as the invisible hand of the comic poet ex machina. The vague-
ness of Chaerea’s quispiam deus may encourage such a reading, but we should not
miss his two-fold invocation of Jupiter, once when he first emerges from the house
after the rape (550) and then again at the end of the play, in a prayer that Jupiter
will continue to maintain the day’s blessings (1048).2 This possible doubling of
Jupiter as presiding god and figure for the playwright is reminiscent of the
prologue of the Amphitruo, where Mercury repeatedly explains that he has been
sent on stage by his ‘father’ with explicit orders to deliver this speech pleading for
the audience’s attention. He is sure the audience will comply out of fear of the
king of gods, but he goes on to say that Jupiter, who was paradoxically born to a
human mother and father (28), has instructed him to ask nicely, since they are all
dependent on the success of the comedy. This play with paternity is metatheatrical
in two distinct senses: Mercury may be understood as a self-aware character
speaking about his ‘creator’ or he may be understood as an actor referring to his
‘patron’. Of course, these two senses may well overlap with each other, and both
ontological and performative dependence become aspects of Mercury’s relation-
ship to Jupiter throughout the Amphitruo.
The Eunuch’s metatheatrical play with the authority of Jupiter is, as we might
expect, much more restrained, but when Chaerea modifies his diffuse claim of
providence at work to a prayer for Jupiter’s continued beneficence, it is hard to
miss the pattern. Of course, we might be tempted to dismiss his earlier Pro
2
Note also Phaedria’s exclamation the moment he learns that his brother was the eunuch/rapist:
Iuppiter magne, o scelestum atque audacem hominem! (709).
INTRODUCTION 5
Iuppiter (550) as a standard oath in Roman comedy, but as he is about to explain

he has just experienced an epiphany of Jupiter in art (583–91):
dum adparatur, virgo in conclavi sedet
suspectans tabulam quandam pictam: ibi inerat pictura haec, Iovem
quo pacto Danaae misisse aiunt quondam in gremium imbrem aureum.
egomet quoque id spectare coepi, et quia consimilem luserat
iam olim ille ludum, inpendio magis animu’ gaudebat mihi,
deum sese in hominem convortisse atque in alienas tegulas
venisse clanculum per inpluvium fucum factum mulieri.
at quem deum! ‘qui templa caeli summa sonitu concutit.’
ego homuncio hoc non facerem? ego illud vero ita feci – ac lubens.
While [the bath] is prepared the girl is sitting in a chamber
Looking at a certain painted panel: on it was this picture,
How they say Jupiter once sent a golden shower into the lap of Danaë.
I too started looking and because he played a very similar game
Once upon a time, all the more my heart rejoiced,
That a god should turn himself into a man and creep
Onto someone else’s roof tiles to trick a woman through a skylight.
And what a god! ‘Who shakes the quadrants of the sky with his clap.’
And I, mere mortal, shouldn’t do it? You bet I did it, and I loved it!
Rape is a frequent enough feature in the backstories of Greek New and Roman
comedy, but this act of violence in the Eunuch is unique in the genre. It occurs not
in the backstory, but backstage during the action of the play, and many have felt its
literally obscene (unstageable) brutality to be a provocation to condemn the
character and perhaps the poet as a monster. Chaerea’s narration of the rape
seems, however, to displace significant responsibility on to the painting, and
Chapter 1 attempts to discern how seriously we are meant to take this excuse. At
one time many readers apparently adopted a relatively positive view of Chaerea,
but more recently disapproval of his crime and dislike of his character have become
so intense that scholars have generally either ignored his description of the
painting or dismissed it as a disgusting prevarication. Rather than simply pointing
out the lack of positive evidence that Chaerea was planning to rape Pamphila
before he saw the painting, I argue that the comedy is carefully structured to
reinforce the unexpectedness of the rape. Terence plays against the Roman
taxonomic discourse of erotic success (the quinque lineae amoris) and the formu-
laic code for the context of rape in New Comedy (wine and religious festival), in
ways that have been either underappreciated or missed entirely, in order to
emphasize the centrality of the painting’s intervention in the plot. One of the
reasons critics have been likely to miss the mitigating force of the painting, I argue,
is that they are generally blinded by revulsion at the attack. Rape was certainly a
crime in antiquity, arguably more severely punished then than now, and yet we
6 MIMETIC CONTAGION
evidently respond to this literary scenario with greater consternation than the
Greeks and Romans seem to have done. One of the things I attempt in this
chapter is a cursory archaeology of reading rape in the twentieth century, as a
tentative explanation for the lens with which we all approach the Eunuch. This
survey of modern responses to this scene and the painting is balanced against two
ancient responses: Donatus’ and Augustine’s, both of which, in very different
ways, support a more expansive reading of the role of the painting.
Where Chapter 1’s principal function is to investigate what the painting does,
Chapters 2 and 3 attempt to explain how a painting could be thought to have such
an imposing effect. This investigation takes us some distance away from the text of
the Eunuch, as this expanded perspective is necessary to demonstrate that such
coercive influence was broadly attributed to works of art in antiquity. Indeed, this
book is not in the first instance intended as a study of Terence’s Eunuch, but
rather of the phenomenon I call mimetic contagion as an organizing motif of that
play. The conceit that life may be drawn into imitation of art is less interesting in
universalized abstraction than in application within a specific cultural moment, as
an historically inflected mode of thinking about artifice and response, but before
historical and textual specificity is intelligible, the wider context of mimetic
contagion is necessary.3 I begin with cultic practices involving artworks designed
to implicate the viewer in imitation. Next, I consider the effect of erotic art on the
viewer as a closely related form of persuasive analogy. This dynamic is apparent in
straightforward ‘pornography’, but it is even more significant within the discourse
of didactic erotic art, a tradition I explore at some length here because of its
relevance to the painting in the Eunuch. Along the way I am taken more deeply
into several such examples, especially underinterpreted passages in Ovid and
Propertius, a pair of Pompeian paintings, and a Flavian mirror. Finally, Xenophon
of Ephesus’ novel, the Ephesiaca, will provide a useful comparison for the Eunuch,
not only due to the inspirational role of an erotic image hanging above a bed, but
because this image, once imitated superficially, will prove itself to have an
emblematic quality, recurring through the rest of the story in less obvious ways.
The focal viewers of this image in the Ephesiaca, as in the Eunuch, are young
people, and perhaps they should be assumed to stand in need of the kind of erotic
instruction discussed in Chapter 2. In any case, as young people, they would
almost certainly be understood as peculiarly vulnerable to mimetic suggestion
more generally, whether for good or for ill, and Chapter 3 explores the role of
3
Of course, not all contagion is mimetic, nor is all imitation based in visual art. For the most part such
extensions lie beyond the narrow scope of this book. One of the most suggestive of such stories not told here
is the development (and eventual suppression) of medical theories of contagion (metadosis) as distinct from
miasma. On this topic see Leven 1993 and Nutton 2000. On the likely confusion between the concepts of
contagion and miasma, see Holmes 2010, 133.
INTRODUCTION 7
mimetic contagion in the philosophizing discourses of pedagogy. Any represen-

tation, however crude, might in the right circumstances be thought to inspire
imitation, and the cultic and erotic images surveyed in Chapter 2 may well rely
more on context and use for their effect than on any artistic quality intrinsic to the
object. But when the artwork seemed to excel at verisimilitude, the mimetically
contagious quality of the image could appear a necessary corollary of the artist’s
success at capturing life. Several ancient testimonies report or postulate artistic
images wrought with such exacting verisimilitude that they inspire direct imitation
in the viewer, and Xenophon’s Socrates regards this persuasive lifelikeness as
essential to an artwork’s ability to become an ethical model, whether for good
or ill. This philosophical interest in morally infectious images is taken up by
Aristotle, and though his focus is not on the role of lifelikeness, he does express
concern for the contagious quality of deleterious artworks, particularly for the
young. From Aristotle’s tightly circumscribed treatment of this topic, I turn to the
more expansive issue of mimesis in the philosophical tradition, specifically focus-
ing on the aspects of Platonic mimesis that relate directly to mimetic contagion. As
has been amply demonstrated elsewhere, the word mime ̄sis is used by Plato and
Aristotle to cover a variety of interrelated but still distinguishable phenomena, so
I try to be as careful as possible in delimiting the range of where this conceptual
field intersects with mimetic contagion. In the Republic, famously, Plato takes a
suspicious view of mimesis, but some scholars have doubted that this suspicion has
anything to do with what I call mimetic contagion. I argue that in Republic 3 Plato
does, in fact, regard the morally contagious effect of visual art, particularly on the
young, as a paradigm for thinking about one of the dangers of mimesis more
generally. Some two decades later, in the Timaeus, Plato will return to the ethical
implications of mimesis in a different light, and here too the aspect of mimesis he
has in view will be closely connected with mimetic contagion. My reading of
mimetic contagion in the Timaeus shows how the ongoing propagation of images
from artefact to viewer contributes to a partial recuperation of the concept of
mimesis in Plato’s thought, and it also reveals an important connection between
Timaeus’ description of the structure of the universe and Critias’ account of the
generational propagation of the Atlantis story.
Chapter 2 examines cultic practices and popular uses of art across Greco-Roman
antiquity, and Chapter 3 considers the reflex of these phenomena in philosophical
texts influential on Hellenistic constructions of the pedagogical power of images.
Though the problem of the Eunuch explored in Chapter 1 is never totally absent
from view in this survey, it is in Chapter 4 that the historical focus for mimetic
contagion is narrowed to Terence’s cultural context and to the Eunuch itself.
I consider the role of images in mid-second-century BCE Roman funerary practice
as a local analogue of some of the broader ancient Mediterranean ritual patterns
and pedagogical discourses of the previous two chapters. More importantly,
8 MIMETIC CONTAGION
I approach the later testimony on the sack of Syracuse in 211 BCE and the effects of
Marcellus’ ovatio on the character of the Roman people not in order to speculate
on what really happened in 211, but rather to determine how these events were
understood and the effects of Greek art formulated, at least in some circles, half a
century later when the Eunuch was produced. Having moved from mimetic
contagion in ancient Mediterranean culture at large to Terence’s Roman context
more narrowly, I turn next to the Eunuch’s most immediate generic neighbour-
hood. An investigation of the role of plastic art in Plautus’ comedies reveals
attitudes that are importantly related to themes developed in Chapters 2 and 3
more generally, and in a few cases Plautus deploys works of art in ways that
prefigure the direction Terence will take in the Eunuch. Paintings are introduced,
if only in the imagination, as a comparison for a character in the comedy, but the
analogy somehow escapes its container and informs the character more broadly.
After extensive exploration of the background of this moment in the Eunuch,
both cultural and generic, we are prepared, at last, to return to the Eunuch itself
for a fuller reading of the role of the painting. In the Plautine examples there is
always a clearly metatheatrical dimension to this play with art, and this feature is
also present in the Eunuch. I examine the overtly theatricalized elements of the
eunuch intrigue, which is clearly handled as a play-within-the-play. This work of
dramatic art is derailed by contact with the painting and then seems to adopt the
painting’s aggressive quality, as the role of the eunuch threatens to step outside its
theatrical frame and become reality. Chaerea is faced with emasculation, first
figurative (when he casts himself on Thais’ mercy and begs her to become his
patrona) and then fictional (when Pythias announces that he is about to be
castrated). Chaerea’s castration is, of course, only symbolic or narrated as part of
a trick—he is never in any real danger of getting literally stuck in the role of the
eunuch. But Thais is not so lucky. She proposes in Act 1 to play the greedy
meretrix, a caricature of her stock character grotesquely out of step with her
‘real’ personality. Her only fear is that Thraso, the miles, will not be the only
one to fall for her act and that her true love, Phaedria, will come to think ill of her.
This is precisely what happens. Phaedria, the arch-lover of Act 1 and model for the
future elegiac tradition, has by the end of the play been disabused of his ideals of
love and agrees to pimp Thais out to Thraso for money. This disgusting resolution
has confused and disappointed readers for the last century, but I argue here that
when Thais’ assumed role transcends its intended boundary and becomes indis-
tinguishable from her real life, it is only following the pattern introduced by the
painting at the centre of the play.
Chapter 5 examines the rape scene from a slightly different perspective and
explores another aspect of mimetic contagion, namely its ready connection with
the theatrical genre of mime. I see no reason to assume, as is often done, that pre-
literary Italian folk theatre was all essentially alike. The evidence indicates a range
INTRODUCTION 9
of theatrical styles and types of entertainment (Fescennine, satura, Atellan,

Phlyax, etc.) as different from each other as the diversity of their provenance
would suggest. However, the Romans themselves seem to insist on dichotomiz-
ing theatre into highbrow fabula and lowbrow mime, a category capacious
enough eventually to subsume all other types of entertainment and function as a
relatively stable generic Other. From Cicero on we find explicit testimony of this
binary dissection of Roman theatrical entertainment into scripted, cultivated
fabula and crude, improvisational ‘mime’, and though such external testimony
is lacking for the mid-second century, the prologues of Terence’s plays furnish
important evidence that this dichotomy is already alive. The prologues repeatedly
return to the theme of the fragility of the production and the destructive invasion
of some alien type of entertainment into the performance of Terence’s quiet
comedy. I survey the prologues from this perspective, including the much studied
prologue(s) of the Hecyra, not to determine how much historical truth they tell,
but rather to elucidate the self-consciousness of the comedies’ formulation of
their own genre, as permanently vulnerable to subversion by some rougher
theatrical Other.
After thus delimiting the generic space that Terence constructs for his comedy
and examining one of the ways in which he thematizes the irruption of lowbrow
shenanigans, I explore the connection between mime and the rape scene in the
Eunuch. Ancient definitions of mime emphasize the centrality of imitation in
mimic acting. Mimes would sometimes copy their audience, but this copying
could also prove contagious, and the audience would find themselves imitating
the mime. To elucidate this hall-of-mirrors effect in mimic imitation I look more
closely at the Latin Anthology’s Vitalis epitaph (Riese 487a) and the end of
Xenophon’s Symposium; the significance of this dynamic for the Eunuch will be
obvious to anyone who has read Chapter 4. Alternatively the mimic actor might
copy another character in the mime, as in the well-attested mimus secundus or
stupidus role, or the imitation might even be drawn from a work of art, as on the
Santia vase. Another feature of mime that connects it to the rape scene in the
Eunuch is its sexual ‘realism’. Female parts were played by mimae, who might be
presented naked onstage (e.g. at the Floralia, only a few weeks after the Eunuch),
and perhaps in this period they even went so far as to have or feign intercourse
onstage. If the skene were inverted and backstage became the stage, the audience
would recognize this scene as a transplant from mime, out of place in New
Comedy. But the audience is not alone in this regard: Antipho, Chaerea’s friend
to whom he is narrating the backstage events, makes only one real interruption in
the story, and I believe we can best understand his comment as a recognition that
for the rape scene Chaerea must have sported the costuming typical of mime,
rather than that of a character in fabula palliata. I close the chapter by looking at
Chaerea’s description of the painting itself, where there seems to be a confused
10 MIMETIC CONTAGION
slippage of roles, with Jupiter as prurient viewer and paradoxically in the same
frame as metamorphic sexual actor. This is the very same confusion Chaerea
experiences in his own role under the influence of the painting, but it also suggests
the labile plasticity of roles typical of mime and may therefore be the trigger for the
mimic element in this scene.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on themes pertaining to the infiltration of a play by an
alien work of art, whether plastic or dramatic, and Chapter 6 extends the inquiry
of mimetic contagion to the related question of contaminatio in Terence. Konta-
minationsforschung was one of the priorities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century scholarship on Roman comedy, but these issues have long been dismissed,
at least in the English-speaking world, as both insoluble and irrelevant to our
understanding of Plautus and Terence as creative playwrights. There is much
wisdom and sobriety in this resolve to read Roman comedy in its own right,
especially for Plautus where the practice of combining two Greek plays into one
has never been securely proven. However, at least for the three Terence plays
where the practice is explicitly admitted (Andria, Eunuchus, and Adelphoe), our
suppression of the earlier scholarly tradition has been unfortunately influenced by
twentieth-century political history and predicated on an ever narrower interpret-
ation of the word contaminare in the Terentian prologues. I argue that this trend
has left us with a definition inadequate to explain the full evidence of the word’s
use, both in the prologues and elsewhere. By returning to a less extreme version of
the early twentieth-century technical use of the term as equivalent to ‘corrupt by
mixing’, we can better satisfy the ancient testimony and begin to explain Terence’s
evident interest in the poetics of contamination. For instance, in the scene where
Chaerea narrates the rape to Antipho, Terence makes an explicit wink (Eun. 552)
at his earlier contamination of the Andria with a sentence from Menander’s
Eunouchos (cf. Don. ad An. 959). Perhaps because recent scholarship has been
blinkered by such a restricted definition of contaminare, we have failed to catch
Terence’s sophisticated play with his own comedies’ vaunted hybridity. Most
significantly for this study, the two ‘contaminating’ characters in the Eunuch
may be seen to operate as a contagion in the play, infiltrating its dramatic structure
and making a permanent home for themselves in this play’s world. More particu-
larly, Gnatho, the parasite, who describes his flattery as a form of imitative
response, becomes, in turn, a model for the other characters’ imitation and
draws them into his own ethical paradigm.
The structure of this study, as I have outlined it here, is one of spiralling
recurrence. We begin with a single scene of a single play and return to it repeatedly
from different angles, following the promptings of our culturally and historically
wider and narrower perspectives on mimetic contagion. To the extent that various
theories of mimesis and representation, ancient and modern, become relevant
along the way, they are introduced and discussed as needed, but as mimetic
INTRODUCTION 11
contagion itself has not, at least to my knowledge, been the subject of sustained
theorization, there is little in the way of inherited jargon to be explained or
defended in this introduction. There are, however, two concepts with some
measure of fashionable currency in classical studies that should be addressed at
the outset, namely metatheatricality and ekphrasis. Both these concepts have been
widely applied and, arguably, abused in our discipline, so it will be worth clarifying
how they intersect with our topic and mode of reading the Eunuch.
TERENTIAN METATHEATRICALITY
The term ‘metatheatricality’ had no currency in the study of Roman comedy until
about thirty years ago, when there was a significant shift in the distribution of
scholarly interest between Plautus and Terence. Since the Renaissance there have
been oscillations in each poet’s ‘stock’ relative to the other, and most periods have
been content to treat them as opposite points on an aesthetic compass, so that the
favour of one implies distaste for the other.4 Some degree of balance was always
retained in this zero-sum game by asserting that the two playwrights were good in
different ways: Plautus was the poet of exuberant bad taste, outrageously inventive
language, and the kind of comedy that pitches us into belly laughs, while Terence
was a playwright of sophisticated manners, charmingly sedate poetry, and a subtle,
ironic form of humour more apt to arouse a smile than a guffaw. The event that
threw this aesthetic economy off-centre, at least for the English-speaking world,
was the publication of Niall Slater’s Plautus in Performance: The Theater of the
Mind in 1985.5 The originality of Slater’s book was not so much a ‘discovery’ that
Plautus’ characters often seem to know that they are make-believe people on a
stage. Indeed, anyone who has read the plays will have noticed the references to
theatrical trappings and the jokes about dramatic conventions.6 His decisive
contribution lay rather in a general reappraisal of the artistic value of these
moments as more than lowbrow silliness. Informed by the theory and the cultural
clout of post-World War II Absurdist theatre, Slater effectively inverted the
standard of urbanity and disrupted the older distribution of prestige. Instead of
calling Plautus the funnier and Terence the more sophisticated playwright, critics
following Slater have generally come to give Plautus the double crown, even
attributing Terence’s alleged lack of popular success to his excessive reliance on
4
For a concise account of the history of these oscillations, see Duckworth 1952, 396–433.
5
Given the unique history of Italian theatre and its relative circumvention of naturalism (or at least the
persistence of non-naturalistic traditions), it is not surprising that Slater’s work was anticipated in some
respects by Barchiesi 1969, Petrone 1977 and 1983, and Chiarini 1979.
6
For proof that this observation requires no elaborated theory of metatheatricality, see Knapp 1919.
boring Greek models and inflexible theatrical naturalism.7 This book attempts,
among other things, to redress this critical imbalance by showing that Terence
did not completely reject the metatheatrical aesthetics of earlier palliata, but
rather subsumed it in a modified form into his own grammar of illusion and
performance.8
One could distinguish between forms of self-referentiality that cause a complete
if only momentary rupture in theatrical verisimilitude, such as explicitly mention-
ing the audience or the length of the play, and subtler forms that suggest theatrical
self-consciousness through double entendre, without necessarily excluding the
possibility of a ‘straight’ reading. Such a distinction is artificial, of course, and
impossible to maintain in any rigorous sense, but Plautine examples of both types
are easy to find, while Terence never unambiguously breaks through the ‘fourth
wall’ and fully jettisons theatrical illusion.9 Indeed, the uniformly greater subtlety
of these moments in Terence, combined with a general absence of overt lexical
reference to stage trappings, is probably responsible for their near invisibility to
scholars used to Plautine metatheatricality. For example, in Act 1 of the Eunuch,
when Chaerea’s brother, Phaedria, is planning to leave for the country for two
days, his slave Parmeno doubts he can carry it through. ‘I don’t think so’, he says.
‘Either you’ll come right back or insomnia will drive you back tonight’ (non hercle
arbitror; | nam aut iam revortere aut mox noctu te adiget horsum insomnia,
218–19). Critics have generally read this as a prudent evaluation of his master’s
weakness in the face of love, and of course it is that too.10 But the double entendre
rests in another kind of prudence. Parmeno is mindful of the conventional Unity
of Time: the total length of time that passes in the make-believe world of the play
7
‘Gentle Terence wrote beautiful Latin verse that captured the spirit of New Comedy—and failed
repeatedly the crucial dramatic test of a theatre and an audience’ (Slater 1985, 6). Apart from the prologues
and the Suetonian Vita Terenti, all the ancient evidence we have points to Terence’s solid and lasting
popularity, and there is no suggestion that he was ever anything but a stage success in his own time and in
repeated revivals. In this context, as in several others, the Vita has been shown to be almost completely
reliant on inference from the prologues themselves, so it cannot be considered independent evidence (cf.
Gruen 1992, 210–15; Parker 1996). In other words, there are many reasons to think Terence was very popular
in antiquity, and the only self-standing reason to think otherwise is what Terence himself tells us in the
prologues. Scholars have only recently come to appreciate the degree to which the prologues are to be read
as playfully ironic dramatic poetry, rather than as historically accurate records (cf. Gilula 1989).
8
The exception to the rule of Terence’s exclusion from scholarship on metatheatricality in Roman
comedy is the work of Stavros Frangoulidis. In studies of the Eunuch (Frangoulidis 1993, 1994a, 1994b) and
more recently the Phormio (1997), he has detected play with theatrical language and situations. See also now,
Knorr 2007.
9
Except for the prologues, of course, which are not only innovative, but arguably a form of metathea-
tricality more radical than anything else in extant ancient comedy. The audience is also addressed at the end
of the plays but only very briefly, to be solicited for applause and dismissed. The Andria’s uniquely
expansive two line clausula ends with the standard plaudite!, which by itself (Hec., Ad.) or preceded by
valete et (Hau., Eu., Ph.) is sufficient closure for all the other plays.
10
See, for example, Büchner 1974, 245.
INTRODUCTION 13
cannot be more than one day.11 If Phaedria does stay in the country for two days
he will have fallen off the edge of the world, as far as the play is concerned. He is
not as clever as his slave nor as close to understanding the real constraints on his
action, so he is offended by what he takes to be Parmeno’s lack of faith. ‘Why,
I could manage just fine out there for three days’, he says. ‘Three whole days!’
exclaims Parmeno, ‘vide quid agas’ (224). This is usually translated as ‘mind what
you are doing’ or ‘be careful’, but that would seem to leave a slight gap in sense.12
After all, why would Phaedria be in any danger? The comment only makes full
sense if we remember that three days in the country is a virtual death sentence for
a character in a play. Banished from the stage for the duration, he will act no
more in this comedy. We note that the verb agere also means ‘to act in a play’, so
that vide quid agas could have the distinctly ambiguous feel of ‘consider your
role in all this’.
This is a subtle form of self-consciousness, one not marked by unmistakably
theatrical language, but its more important difference from Plautine metatheatri-
cality is its ethopoetic and structural significance. It is not merely an entertaining
moment, quickly forgotten in a series of funny scenes, but a revelation of Parme-
no’s character and a preparation for his later bid for the position of playwright,
when he authors the eunuch intrigue.13 Parmeno’s awareness of the generically
constituted boundaries of the play world fits him for this coup, but the scene in
Act 1 is neatly balanced by a scene in Act 5 where Parmeno has met his match and
then some. He comes on strutting and cooing his own praises, saying his handi-
work deserves the Palme d’Or (palmarium, 930), and Thais’ slave, Pythias, sees
her chance to get even. She feigns hysteria over the rough treatment of Chaerea in
the house, expressing sympathy for ‘the poor boy’ (adulescentulum, 943, 949) and
cursing Parmeno for setting him up for such a fall. Parmeno thinks he is eaves-
dropping rather than witnessing a performance, but eventually he can hang back
no longer and he asks Pythias what is going on. She tells him about the rape and
Pamphila’s citizen status, and she alludes to the horrific punishments Chaerea is
now suffering. She also makes it clear that they are blaming Parmeno as the source
of all this mischief, and when Chaerea’s father comes on, she encourages Parmeno
to make a full confession.
Pythias’ reference to Chaerea’s punishment may sound elliptical to us, but as
I argue later (pp. 111–16), she must mean castration. The obvious irony here is
that Chaerea has played the eunuch and is now allegedly about to become one
11
On the Unity of Time in Roman comedy see Duckworth 1952, 130–1. More recently, and anticipating
some of my own arguments for self-conscious engagement with this convention, see Dunsch 2005.
12
Ruhnkenius 1825 ad loc.: hac formula aliquem monemus ne rem difficilem et periculosam suscipiat.
13
See pp. 35; 108.
for real. What is perhaps not so obvious in this situation is the close functional
homology between the intrigue and the painting that Chaerea encountered in the
house. Parmeno has crafted the role of the eunuch as a work of dramatic art, and
he expects his master will be able to step into it and out of it at will, but, as Pythias
tells it, this role has turned out to have the same aggressive quality as the painting,
threatening to break outside its frame and become reality. Chaerea has taken up
the part Parmeno sketched for him, donned the mask of the eunuch, as it were,
and now the mask seems likely to stick. We must not forget that this is all a lie. If
Thais had not been so generous or so eager to find a win-win solution, Chaerea
might really have faced such dire consequences, but in fact he is never in any
genuine danger of castration; this is just a trick Pythias is playing on Parmeno. In
doing so, she is giving him a taste of his own medicine, and like some of her
namesake’s most infamous oracles, what Pythias says may in one sense be untrue,
but it is the kind of pretence that has the power to create reality. She makes
Parmeno believe that he has betrayed Chaerea, so when the father arrives at last
Parmeno is in the excruciating position of having to confess everything he and
Chaerea have done, and also everything Phaedria has done, and scaring the old
man out of his wits. In effect, he does betray both boys by telling on them to their
otherwise unsuspecting father.
However, there is another sense in which Pythias’ announcement of the
impending castration is more than just a lie. By suggesting the nightmare of
Chaerea’s pretence becoming real, she points back to the painting at the centre
of the play and tells a disturbing truth about the effects artifice can have. The
fact that the castration itself is her pretence adds another layer of irony to this
revelation. We recall that Parmeno is the arch-trickster, a self-aware character
who knows about the Unity of Time and thinks he can co-opt the authority
and the kudos of the comic poet. By beating him at his own game, Pythias
shows herself supreme in this world of deception. The father rushes into Thais’
house sputtering in fear and finds that he is too late—his son’s eunuch outfit
speaks for itself! Nobody but Pythias knows why the old man is so scared, but
Chaerea is just as mortified to be found as his father is to find him, and the
whole mess is Parmeno’s fault. When Pythias comes back out onstage she
cannot contain her laughter: in five lines (1004–8) there are three occurrences
of some form or derivative of ridere. Parmeno is still puzzled so she explains
(1009–11):
numquam pol hominem stultiorem vidi nec videbo. ah
non possum sati’ narrare quos ludos praebueris intus
at etiam primo callidum et disertum credidi hominem.
I’ve never seen and never will see a stupider person.
Oh, I cannot relay what a show you have given us inside.
And at first I thought you such a clever and capable person.
INTRODUCTION 15
She never will see a stupider person because, as she seems to realize, the play is
almost over and her brief life at an end. For today, Parmeno has taken the cake for
stupidity. Her reference to the backstage show (ludos) repeats the theatrical
language used earlier for the eunuch intrigue and explains her laughter: she has
been witness to a comedy and she knows it. Her use of the word callidum is also
pointed, as the stock epithet of the servus callidus role that Parmeno has played so
well up to this point. She thought he was that character primo, at the beginning of
the comedy, and so did we, but now she can gloat over the revelation of his
ineptitude. She explains how he really did betray the poor boy to his father, and
Parmeno can scarcely believe how he has been duped (1017–20):
PA. ehem quid dixti, pessuma? an mentita es? etiam rides?

itan lepidum tibi visumst, scelus, nos inridere? PY. nimium.
PA. siquidem istuc inpune habueris . . . ! PY. verum?
PA. reddam hercle. PY. credo:
sed in diem istuc, Parmeno, est fortasse quod minare.
PA. What do you mean, you bitch? You lied? Are you still laughing?
Do you really think it’s smart to make fun of me, you snake? PY. Totally.
PA. Even if you get away with this . . . PY. Yes?
PA. I’ll get even. PY. Sure—
But perhaps, Parmeno, what you’re threatening will be another day.
She understands what he evidently knew in Act 1 but seems to have forgotten:
they are all creatures of a day, and any consequences that matter will have to
matter in the next 74 lines.
We have moved from the beginning of the play to the end very quickly here in
an attempt to elucidate the dynamics of this single aspect of metatheatricality in
the Eunuch, so our reading of these few scenes is one-sided and simple almost
to the point of caricature, but even at this limited scale some of the consequences
of the novelty of our approach are evident. We noted the use of theatrically
resonant vocabulary (ludus, agere, callidus, etc.), but the heart of our reading,
concerning the self-conscious play with the Unity of Time, was not keyed by a
lexical tick, but rather by observation of a feature implicitly connecting these
scenes to one of the empirically evident ‘rules’ of fabula palliata. The Eunuch’s
play with and against the code system of Roman comedy is more subtle than the
kinds of metatheatricality normally detected in Plautus, but it is also richer, in that
this motif is not deployed merely as an isolated drollery, but as a framing device for
the whole comedy and a barometer of Parmeno’s discomfiture.
In the chapters that follow, several other modes of metatheatricality will
emerge in our reading of the Eunuch, forms of engagement with theatrical self-
referentiality almost as different from each other as they are from anything in
current Terence scholarship. What unifies them is that they all somehow turn on
the rape scene at the centre of the play and, more specifically, on the dynamic of
the painting in that scene and its broader implications for the Eunuch. The
phenomenon of mimetic contagion need not have anything to do with metathea-
tricality, for it rests on a very broad base of Greek and Roman experience with art,
extending far beyond theatre. Conversely, as our brief look at Terence’s play with
the Unity of Time in the Eunuch should illustrate, not all theatrical self-
referentiality, even the more sophisticated sort that interests me here, need have
anything directly to do with artworks that project themselves into reality.
However, when mimetic contagion is thematized within a play, especially when
it is given the centrality it has in the Eunuch, its metatheatrical deployment
is probably inevitable. By focusing on mimetic contagion, first by itself and then
in its instrumentalization as a metatheatrical device, I believe my project escapes
one of the more treacherous shortcomings common to studies of ancient
metatheatricality.
The term ‘metatheatre’ is plagued by a number of difficulties, beginning with its
inapposite prefix and the unfortunate circumstances of its birth in a now justly
neglected work.14 By explicit clarification we may escape most of these associ-
ations, and the term does have valuable conceptual utility and undeniable cur-
rency, but there is often, perhaps unavoidably, a tendency to essentialize
metatheatricality as a universally self-identical dramatic phenomenon. Aristoph-
anes and Anouilh may both stage characters who seem to be aware of their own
theatrical fictiveness, but we must be careful of the assumption that such aware-
ness accomplishes the same work in both plays or that it is even, necessarily, the
same phenomenon at all. Rather than beginning from the premise that all me-
tatheatricality can be read with the same formalist lens, I propose to begin with the
painting, first by investigating the painting’s role in the Eunuch and by elucidating
a broad cultural context for artworks that inspire imitation. Only when this
forensic and anthropological work has been set forth and only with the warrant
that it gives me do I plan to back into a metatheatrical reading of the play, showing
14
The word was coined by Lionel Abel (1963) in his bantam testament on all theatre. His argument is
that tragedy and comedy came to an end in the Renaissance with a new birth of self-consciousness. From
Shakespeare and Calderon down to the Absurdists, modern theatre is all of a type unknown in antiquity,
specifically a new genre he calls ‘metatheatre’. Beginning with Barchiesi 1969, classicists have found it easy
enough simply to appropriate Abel’s term for theatrical self-consciousness, ignoring his naïve claims about
ancient theatre and the whole historical dimension of his argument. Rosenmeyer 2002 offers a vigorous
critique of this appropriation, because even without the historical aspect, the term makes a special category
out of a feature common to almost all theatre. The meta-, then, is redundant. This is a sound point and a
good reason for preferring, as many scholars now do, the adjective ‘metatheatrical’ and the abstract noun
‘metatheatricality’ to denote these aspects of any theatre. I agree wholeheartedly with every one of
Rosenmeyer’s criticisms of Abel, but he may be confusing origin and essence, underestimating his col-
leagues’ ability to ignore Abel’s ghost.
INTRODUCTION 17
how various types of ‘role-playing’ cluster around the painting and share its basic
dynamic of mimetic contagion.
MIMETIC CONTAGION AND EKPHRASIS
Another term of art from the critical vocabulary of modern scholarship that may
be relevant to the study of mimetic contagion is ekphrasis. Unlike metatheatri-
cality, ekphrasis is a designation with an ancient pedigree; though it languished in
obscurity from late antiquity until a few decades ago, it has enjoyed an enormous
ascendancy of late.15 This inheritance presents problems of its own, however,
principally because of an important difference in ancient and modern usage of the
term. The ancient sources that talk directly about ekphrasis are consistent in
applying the term to descriptions of any kind of visible object or event (artworks,
crocodiles, women, seasons, harbours, etc.). They do not explicitly limit ekphrasis
to contexts of public speaking, but they clearly see it, in the first instance, as a
mode of rhetorical discourse, and they emphasize its usefulness in rendering
absent objects present for the audience because of its clarity and vividness. In
modern critical parlance, however, ekphrasis refers more specifically to the
description of works of art. Art may, of course, be described in almost any
genre, but the notional generic ‘home’ of ekphrasis in modern scholarship is
poetry, not public speaking, and there is usually no presumption that vividness is
definitive of the ekphrastic mode, still less that this vividness naturally results in an
audience swept away with sympathetic imagination. Thus modern ekphrasis is
topically narrower and contextually broader than ancient ekphrasis. Our discus-
sion of mimetic contagion and ekphrasis will intersect with both the modern and
the ancient definitions in different places; with the moderns I share a specific
interest in the description of art, and with the ancients an interest in the vividness
thought to be peculiar to ekphrasis and its role in directing the audience’s
experience.
From the standpoint of the modern definition, the archetypal ekphrasis that set
the standard for the subsequent development of the trope was Homer’s descrip-
tion of the shield of Achilles (Il. 18.478–608), and throughout antiquity the
description of works of art was a touchstone of the poetic craft. But our oldest
extant theoretical discussions of ekphrasis are in the Progymnasmata, schematic
handbooks for elementary education in the Roman Empire. It is difficult to
15
The explosion of modern critical interest in ekphrasis may be traced to Leo Spitzer’s famous essay on
Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1955). The flood of scholarship on ekphrasis is now so vast that citing a few
examples would be pointlessly arbitrary. For a recent bibliographical survey, see Denham 2010, 213–87.
Notable recent collections in classics include the special issues of Ramus 31 (2002) and CP 102.1 (2007).
determine how representative the Progymnasmata are of earlier educational prac-

tices, but in some cases the uniformity of their language may indicate that they
are operating within received conventions that go back to Hellenistic educational
and rhetorical discourses.16 The nearly identical wording of the definition of
ekphrasis across the Progymnasmata is a perfect example of this kind of collective
witness of a clearly elaborated long-standing tradition. ‘Ekphrasis is a descriptive
(περιηγηματικός) speech, which vividly (ἐναργῶς) brings the subject shown
(δηλούμενον) before the eyes (ὑπ᾽ ὄψιν).’17
The first feature of this definition to note is that it rests on a paradox: how can
speech bring anything before the eyes? As in mimetic contagion, where the
artwork surprises by transcending its presumed frame as a mere fiction and
propagating itself in the world of the viewer, ekphrasis refuses to be bound by
the normal constraints on language to remain a solely auditory phenomenon and
becomes an occasion for seeing. As strange as such a conception of ekphrasis may
sound to modern readers, it fits within a recognizable ancient pattern for describ-
ing speech acts in terms drawn from visual experience. The most famous literary
instance is surely the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis (AP 361), but there are
many other examples of the Greco-Roman instinct for synaesthetic visualization
of language.18 In fact, the stock definition of ekphrasis as a logos that puts
something ‘under the eyes’ (ὑπ᾽ ὄψιν) echoes Aristotle’s very similar formulation
of a certain type of metaphor—the type that ‘signifies activity’ (energeia)—as
placing the subject ‘before the eyes’ (πρὸ ὀμμάτων).19
If we ask what it is about energeia that enables it to render metaphor a
functional equivalent of ekphrasis, we must turn to its near homonym, another
element we noted above in the stock definition of ekphrasis in the Progymnas-
mata, namely enargeia (‘vividness’).20 Nicolaus says that enargeia is what separ-
ates ekphrasis from narration (die ̄ge ̄sis) and that where narration is just a bald
exposition of facts, ekphrasis ‘tries to make hearers (ἀκούοντας) into spectators
(θεατάς)’.21 Similarly Theon says that enargeia is one of the features (aretai) of
ekphrasis and that its function is to make the audience ‘almost see the subject’.22
Another Imperial Greek rhetorical treatise, attributed to ‘Anonymous Segueria-
nus’, defines enargeia in the same terms used by the Progymnasmata for ekphrasis:
16
Webb 2009, 40.
17
Theon Prog. 118.6, ed. Patillon; but see also, with only the slightest variation of diction and syntax,
Hermog. Prog. 22; Aphth. Prog. 36; Nicol. Prog. 68. Hermogenes even inserts a ὥς φασιν (‘as they say’), thus
indicating the formulaic force of this definition with the tag of an ‘Alexandrian footnote’.
18
See p. 107. 19
Rhet. 1411b24–5.
20
On the richly interesting conceptual bleed between energeia and enargeia, see Calboli Montefusco
2005.
21
Nicol. Prog. 68. 22
Theon Prog. 119.
INTRODUCTION 19
‘a speech that brings the subject shown (δηλούμενον) before the eyes (ὑπ᾽ ὄψιν)’.23
The circularity of these definitions is frustrating but not surprising, given the
strangeness of the phenomenon described. Invisible language is wrought visible
or, to be more precise, it becomes a visual experience for the hearer—this is the
paradox that defines ekphrastic discourse. But it works this miracle because of its
enargeia, which can in turn only be defined or described by its capacity to render
the unseen visible. Perhaps we can come closest to unravelling this puzzle by
regarding enargeia as the quality (rather than a type of speech, pace Anonymous
Seguerianus) that most essentially defines ekphrasis by enabling it to accomplish
the seemingly impossible task of turning hearers into spectators.
The visibility generated by enargeia survives in its Latin calques. In his Institutio
oratoria (roughly contemporary with the oldest of the extant Progymnasmata)
Quintilian uses the Greek word freely, but he also glosses it with the Latin word
evidentia, the term used, he says, by Cicero and Celsus.24 He mentions that
Cicero also calls it illustratio and sub oculos subiectio.25 All these expressions are
based in vision, and this last especially echoes the definition of ekphrasis and
enargeia in the Progymnasmata. No less than the writers of the Progymnasmata,
Quintilian wonders at the power (magna virtus) of enargeia to make the objects
of its description ‘appear to be seen’ (ut cerni videantur, 8.3.62). Enargeia does
not stop at the ears, but makes a presentation to ‘the eyes of the mind’ (oculis
mentis ostendi, 8.3.62). ‘Somehow the whole scene is painted with words’ (tota
rerum imago quodam modo verbis depingitur), so that the very witnesses of the
event would not have a better view (non clarior . . . spectantibus, 8.3.63).
This talk of visibility in speech may ultimately be no more than a metaphor, but
it is worth considering how literally we ought to take it, especially since it is so
frequently encountered in our sources. Some scholars have postulated that ancient
audiences actually experienced oratory radically differently than we do, condi-
tioned as they were by their oral culture to a more actively participatory visual
imagination.26 Not that the Greeks and Romans routinely saw hallucinations
when they heard vivid speech, of course, but it may indeed be true that predom-
inantly non-literate cultures inculcate a more biddable mind’s eye for memory
training and that this mental/visual faculty so honed would be peculiarly suscep-
tible to vivid descriptions. This would certainly explain a great deal about why our
sources speak about enargeia the way they do and with such perfect consistency.
But even if we reject this thesis as unverifiable speculation and assume that the
23
Anonymous Seguerianus, Art of Rhetoric 96.
24
For Cicero, see Quint. Inst. 6.2.32; for Celsus, see 9.2.40.
25
illustratio (6.2.32); sub oculos subiectio (9.2.40). He says ‘others’ prefer repraesentatio (8.3.61) and
ὑποτύπωσις (9.2.41), but he does not identify them.
26
See Vasaly 1993, 99.
oft-repeated notion of ekphrasis as speech making vision through vividness is only

a façon de parler in rhetorical writers, it is still a striking formulation, not only
because it is so different from how modern critics use the term ekphrasis, but also
because it seems to rest on a conception of language as a physical force capable of
acting on the hearer. Even if the audience’s ‘vision’ is only figurative, this notion
of speech as a thing objectively working in the world and compelling human
response could hardly be more typical of ancient ideas about language, both
popular and philosophical.27 In this sense, then, ekphrasis does what all language
does, only at a heightened level. The force of the prefix ek- is not, as some modern
critics have thought, that the ekphrasis stands ‘out’ from the surrounding text, but
rather intensive.28 Ekphrasis is just a full (ek-) telling (phrasis) of what could also
be told less fully. We recall Nicolaus’ assertion that ekphrasis does the same thing
that narration does, only with enargeia. Similarly, Quintilian classes enargeia as an
ornamentum, an additive dress-up for a narration that would be clear and accept-
able without it (8.3.61). If one knows all the horrors that attend the sack of a city,
the phrase ‘the city was taken’ ought to convey everything, but in fact such a bare
announcement ‘insinuates less deeply into the emotions’ (in adfectus minus
penetrat, 8.3.67) than a fuller description with all the lurid detail of enargeia.
Indeed the mere word eversio says it all, ‘but saying it all is less than saying
everything’ (minus est tamen totum dicere quam omnia, 8.3.70).
Quintilian’s suggestion that enargeia ‘penetrates’ to the inner recesses of the
hearer reveals something important about the mechanics of its effect. The con-
ception of language as a physical force seems to be in play here; enargeia gives
speech a heightened power to pierce our defensive boundaries. Where a plain
narration of facts makes it only as far as the ears (usque ad aures valet, 8.3.62),
speech with enargeia gets all the way to the mind’s eye. But what is the faculty that
enables us to generate enargeia in the first place, and what exactly happens once
this charged speech reaches the soul of the hearer? The answer to these questions
requires recourse to another Greek technical term: phantasia. We may be tempted
to translate phantasia as ‘mental picture’ (Quintilian proposes the Latin visio), but
Quintilian’s use of the Greek word suggests that phantasia is a rhetorical term of
art. Ps.-Longinus explains that phantasia can popularly (κοινῶς) denote ‘any idea
(ἐννόημα), wherever it comes from, that generates speech’, but the word has taken
on a more technical sense for situations ‘where you seem to see what you describe
and place it before the eyes (ὑπ᾽ ὄψιν) of those listening’.29 This obviously echoes
the definitions of ekphrasis and enargeia we have already seen, but here the visual
27
Ong 1988 is perhaps still the best place to begin exploring the consequences of orality for cultural
studies at large. For the ‘psychodynamics’ of the experience of language in pre-literate cultures, see esp.
pp. 31–2. For the physical force of ancient speech and its relevance to enargeia, see Webb 2009, 98–100.
28
See Webb 2009, 74. 29
Longin. Rh. 15.1.
INTRODUCTION 21
experience is not only for the audience, but also for the speaker. Ps.-Longinus likes
the term phantasia, but others, he says, call it eidolōpoiia (‘image making’, 15.1).
Indeed, there is an objective production of images, visible not only to the passive
recipients of the speech, but also to the agent of its production. The practical
purpose of phantasia in poetry is ekple ̄xis (‘astonishment’), and in speeches
enargeia (15.2), however phantasia is not in itself a feature of language, but an
imaginative faculty, a physical process, experienced by the speaker first and then
passed on to those listening as if by contagion. Quoting two Euripidean passages
portraying the madness of Orestes in vivid terms, ps.-Longinus remarks that the
poet himself saw the Furies, and that what he had thus conceived with phantasia
he compelled (ἠνάγκασεν, 15.2) the audience virtually to see as well. So one
important difference between phantasia and the comparatively inert modern
notion of a ‘mental picture’ is its reliance on compulsion. Indeed, as the text
goes on to say, in prose speeches no less than in poetry phantasia does not just
persuade the listener, it ‘enslaves’ him (δουλοῦται, 15.9).
This treatment of phantasia in On the Sublime is extremely similar to Quinti-
lian’s fuller explanation of the process behind enargeia. ‘When it comes to
arousing emotions, the key is being aroused ourselves’ (circa movendos adfectus
in hoc posita est, ut moveamur ipsi, 6.2.26). The reason imitation of grief, anger, or
indignation is sometimes ridiculous is that ‘we only adapt our words and face
without adapting our interior state’ (verba vultumque tantum, non etiam animum
accommodarimus, 6.2.26).
quare, in iis quae esse veri similia volemus, simus ipsi similes eorum qui vere patiuntur
adfectibus, et a tali animo proficiscatur oratio qualem facere iudici volet. an ille dolebit qui
audiet me, qui in hoc dicam, non dolentem? irascetur, si nihil ipse qui in iram concitat ei
quod exigit simile patietur? siccis agentis oculis lacrimas dabit? fieri non potest: nec incendit
nisi ignis nec madescimus nisi umore nec res ulla dat alteri colorem quem non ipsa habet.
primum est igitur ut apud nos valeant ea quae valere apud iudicem volumus, adficiamurque
antequam adficere conemur. (6.2.27–8)
Therefore in situations where we wish to be lifelike, we should assimilate ourselves to the
emotions of those who are truly in the grip of passion. Our speech should proceed from the
kind of spirit it wishes to produce in the judge. Or will anyone be brought to pain listening
to me, if I am in no pain myself when this is my object in speaking? Will he get angry, if the
one summoning him to anger feels nothing like the emotion he is trying to stir up? Will he
weep, if the speaker’s eyes are dry? Impossible. Nothing starts a fire but flame, we do not
get wet unless there is moisture, there is no thing that passes on to another a colour it does
not itself have. So those feelings should first be strong in us that we wish to be strong in the
judge, and we should be affected before we try to create affect.
But how should we go about generating such feelings in ourselves? This is where
phantasia enters his account, the faculty by which ‘images of absent things are so
presented to the mind that we seem to have them present and see them with our
eyes’ (imagines rerum absentium ita repraesentantur animo ut eas cernere oculis ac
praesentes habere videamur, 6.2.29). With frequent practice and attention this
faculty grows strong, and the adept imaginer, the euphantasiot̄ os, as he calls him,
‘will be most powerful in affects’ (is erit in adfectibus potentissimus, 6.2.30). The
mental activity usually squandered in daydreaming can be harnessed to the
production of phantasiai, and Quintilian gives a vivid example himself of an
imagined murder scene complete with dramatic and gory details and then asks,
‘Will not the blood, the pallor, the groans, the very last gasp of the dying victim be
imprinted on the mind? The result is enargeia’ (non animo . . . insidet? insequetur
enargeia, 6.2.31–2). Whose animus does Quintilian mean here? English translators
(Watson 1856, Butler 1920, Russell 2001) seem to assume he means the speaker,
but the Latin will allow either the speaker or the listener, and of course Quintilian
means both, in that order. Enargeia can more accurately be said to show (osten-
dere) than tell (dicere), and it generates the same emotions in the audience as if
they were present at the events live (6.2.32). He quotes several phantasia-inspired
passages from the Aeneid and notes that the poet had deeply conceived an image
of death (poeta penitus ultimi fati cepit imaginem, 6.2.33). Thus the audience’s
visual experience is immediately caused by and in turn proves the same visual
experience deep in the poet’s soul. Lest we imagine this vision sharing is peculiar
to poetry, Quintilian transitions directly from poetic illustrations to precepts for
rhetorical practice, just as ps.-Longinus did, stressing that these techniques are as
necessary for an advocate or other public speaker as for a tragic or comic actor
(6.2.34–6).
Phantasia is at least as different from ‘mental picture’ as enargeia is from
‘vividness’, and for roughly the same reasons.30 Both ancient concepts are rooted
in a strongly physicalist notion of language and of the mind’s eye, and both
concepts presume that ekphrastic speech can exert a surprising degree of control
over the audience’s thoughts and feelings. Ps.-Longinus, as we have seen, goes so
far as to say that phantasia ‘enslaves’ the hearer (δουλοῦται, 15.9), and Quintilian
implies that a speech with enargeia ‘completely dominates’ him (plene dominatur,
8.3.61). Even if these expressions of compulsion are taken to be hyperbolic, they
indicate something important about how ekphrasis limits diversity of audience
response by imposing a unified pattern of thought, feelings, and visual experience
on anyone listening. But what is the relationship between this shared vision and
the subject of the description itself? In the examples mentioned here, both poetic
and rhetorical, ps.-Longinus and Quintilian seem to assume that the characters of
the speaker’s narration form a third point on the affective triangle established by
30
For an account of phantasia distinguishing it sharply from ‘creative imagination’ and assigning it
‘more properly to the object which engenders an impression than to the mind which is impressed’, see
Tanner 2006, 259.
INTRODUCTION 23
ekphrasis.31 The speaker thinks himself into the emotional and visual world of the
characters and then foists that imagined reality on to the audience, so that both he
and they are pulled into conformity with the pattern of thought and vision of the
narrated characters. But in these cases the speaker has access to this pattern only
through his own imagination, since the characters are either literary fictions or
parties to a legal dispute whose hearts and minds are no more visible than the
heroes of myth and thus open for fictionalization in the same ways. Is the situation
not somewhat different when the object of description is not an imaginary scene
but a visible work of art? In some sense no, for hardly any ancient ekphrasis of a
work of art confines itself entirely to what can be seen, and if there is some
mythical or other narrative context the speaker routinely uses the image as a
springboard into the larger story.32 Furthermore, the speakers in the examples
cited by ps.-Longinus and Quintilian are not entirely free to imagine whatever
they want, since they are constrained by the datum of the mythological tradition
or the indisputable facts of the case. But however much this givenness may limit
their imaginative freedom, it is not visual in nature, so it operates on different field
from the phantasia itself. By contrast, when the object of description is a visible
work of art, it supplies the fundamental visual datum, which the speaker may
indeed supplement with collateral vividness, but which can hardly fail to be the
basis for the visual pattern experienced by speaker and audience.
Because this work of art is itself the product of creative visualization, it too relies
on the mechanics of phantasia for its very existence. The image which came to be
in the mind of the artist, whether from witnessing live events or other works of art
or from the unprompted resources of his own imagination, is given objective form
and transmitted to the mind of the viewer, who in this case is the composer of an
ekphrasis mediating the same phantasia to his audience or readers. If the phanta-
sia experienced by all these creators, viewers, and readers is really the same, then
phantasia creates a hall of mirrors effect down through untold layers of artistic and
literary creation, so that the reader of an ekphrastic description of a work of art can
peer into the mind of the ekphrast, back to the artwork itself, into the mind of the
artist, back to his sources, etc. Where we moderns might be inclined to emphasize
the loss, distortion, amplification, or originality that occurs at each of these stages,
the ancients were much more interested in the continuity of imaginative visual
experience, and their formulation of phantasia provided the conceptual frame-
work to explain how such continuity is possible.
In this sense, too, phantasia provides reliable access to reality outside oneself.
Rhetorical theorists were not the only ones to use phantasia as a technical term to
describe a peculiarly objective form of imagining. The Stoics relied on phantasia
31
Aygon 2004, 118–19. 32
Nicol. Prog. 69.
to denote the perception of sensory objects or the mental presentation of rational

but non-sensory cogitations, in contrast to phantasmata, by which they mean
mere figments of the imagination, illusions, dreams, and the like.33 The dichot-
omy for the Stoics is not between visible and invisible content or vivid and sparsely
detailed, but between true and false. Obviously there are important differences
between rhetorical and Stoic phantasia. For example, a rational conclusion,
however correct it may be, would presumably not fit the rhetoricians’ understand-
ing of phantasia if it did not have a visual component, and conversely a highly
visual daydream would not satisfy the Stoic definition. But these two conceptions
of phantasia do overlap in their remarkable assumptions about the uniformity of
mental picturing; the rhetoricians and the philosophers would agree that all who
correctly and clearly perceive a visible object have the same phantasia. As we have
seen, the ekphrastic description of a work of art opens up a special case of
rhetorical phantasia in that it implies a vista of successively identical visions, and
our sources emphasize that such visions must somehow originate in an experience
of immediate co-presence with the described object.34 Rhetorical phantasia
comes very close to philosophical phantasia here, for if the content of the
transmitted image is not just universally identical among participants, but also
originates with a clear and direct perception of the object, then the phantasia is
not only objective, but also, in some sense, true.35
I would not wish to push this possible connection between rhetorical and Stoic
phantasia too far. Rhetoric is not philosophy, and though the implicit role of truth
may be drawn out as a hidden and probably unrecognized consequence of their
formulation of phantasia, the rhetoricians claim to be interested only in likeness to
the truth (veri similia, 6.2.27). However, as different as these two versions of
phantasia are from each other, it is interesting that they come closest to agreement
33
A good selection of Stoic texts on phantasia is collected in Long and Sedley 1987, vol. 1, }} 39–40
(pp. 236–53). The editors focus particularly on passages relevant to kataleptic phantasia, the controversial
notion of a ‘cognitive impression’, an infallible register of sensory data, to which all normal human beings
have immediate access, but which only the sage is able to discern perfectly.
34
After a particularly vivid passage from Euripides, ps.-Longinus apostrophizes the reader: ἆρ᾽ οὐκ ἂν
εἴποις, ὅτι ἡ ψυχὴ τοῦ γράφοντος συνεπιβαίνει τοῦ ἅρματος καὶ συγκινδυνεύουσα τοῖς ἵπποις συνεπτέρωται; οὐ γὰρ
ἄν, εἰ μὴ τοῖς οὐρανίοις ἐκείνοις ἔργοις ἰσοδραμοῦσα ἐφέρετο, τοιαῦτ᾽ ἄν ποτε ἐφαντάσθη (‘Would you not say that
the writer’s soul is mounting the chariot together with [Phaethon] and has risked it all flying off with the
horses? If he were not running alongside those celestial bodies, his phantasia would never have conceived
such things’, 15.4).
35
Webb (2009, 117 n.35) criticizes Jaś Elsner for failing to distinguish between philosophical and
rhetorical phantasia and thus being led to the erroneous conclusion that ‘ekphrasis . . . tells the truth’,
(1995, 27). She is right in principle to insist on the distinction between these two versions of phantasia,
but it may be precisely in this sense that the two versions blur together: if we take seriously the claim that
rhetorical phantasia establishes a link of shared visual experience between speaker and hearer and if the
speaker is describing a visible object, then the validity of the hearer’s apprehension of the object will be in
direct proportion to the successful enargeia of the ekphrasis.
INTRODUCTION 25
when the object of perception and description is a visible work of art. It is also
interesting to note that Stoic phantasia, most clearly exemplified in the immediate
perception of the truth, is not a fundamentally different faculty than the one that
enables us all to see the objects around us.36 Infallible insight is only a developed
form of this universal ability. Similarly, as we have seen, Quintilian regarded
phantasia as a more disciplined application of the same faculty used in daydream-
ing, and the Progymnasmata saw enargeia as a supercharged form of narration,
doing the same thing as all descriptive language does but with more force.
Ekphrasis is defined by its paradoxical ability to make an absent object visible
with words, and it accomplishes this by relying on phantasia and enargeia, which
at first seem just as miraculous, but turn out only to be a heightened or clarified
form of very usual activities.
In this study I argue that any act of mimesis, as an imitation of some model, may
suggest the possibility of further copying of itself. This suggestion is in most cases
entirely implicit and it may even be suppressed because of its unruly potential, but
when it is actualized the result is mimetic contagion. Ekphrasis is neatly analogous
to mimetic contagion in that it first seems to be an anomalous form of language,
but on closer inspection it turns out to be only an unusually focused form of
speech, thus revealing the potential force of all language. More specifically,
though, the ekphrastic description of a work of art intersects with the topic of
mimetic contagion because it is a recapitulative response to an artwork. Not all
ekphrasis is mimetic contagion, any more than all mimetic contagion is ekphrasis,
but the description of an artwork entails the creation of a new work, in a different
medium but in imitation of the original. Among the Progymnasmata writers,
Hermogenes says that the style of ekphrasis should ‘match (συνεξομοιοῦσθαι) the
subject matter’, using flowery language to describe a meadow, for instance, and
Aphthonios says it should ‘completely imitate (ἀπομιμεῖσθαι) the thing being
described’.37 More generally enargeia creates a visual experience, so it may
naturally be described as a visual medium. John of Sardis, the Byzantine com-
mentator on Aphthonios, says that enargeia works by ‘imitating (μιμούμενος) the
painters’ art’.38 It is the contagious quality of phantasia, however, that establishes
the relationship between ekphrasis and mimetic contagion at the deepest level.
The ekphrast trains himself into imaginative conformity with the character and
emotional life of the object of his description and thus impresses its image deep in
his soul. By speaking from his own visual experience in this inspired state he
impresses the same image on the soul of his audience and draws them with him
into parallel conformity.
36
See Long and Sedley 1987, vol. 1, 249.
37
Hermog. Prog. 23; Aphth. Prog. 38; see Webb 2009, 57.
38
Sardianos Commentarium 217.
I shall demonstrate in Chapters 2–4 that mimetic contagion is a recurrent topic

of interest and a familiar way of thinking about image and reality across all periods
of Greco-Roman antiquity and in a great variety of genres and social practices. By
contrast, our sources for this elaborated discourse of ekphrasis, enargeia, and
phantasia are all rhetorical theorists from the first and second century CE and
their Byzantine commentators. Because of the tight uniformity of definitions
across these sources and the echoes of both vocabulary and concepts in Aristotle
and Hellenistic thought more broadly, it seems likely that these Imperial testi-
monies reflect older traditions of talking about ekphrasis, at least in rhetorical and
educational discourses. Their reliance on a strongly physicalist conception of
language certainly makes their theory of ekphrasis seem like a natural extension
of a very old and widespread view in antiquity. If nothing else, Quintilian’s
repeated references to Cicero’s word choices for translating these Greek terms
would seem to imply that, as in other areas, there was an established Hellenistic
technical tradition for which Cicero was an influential figure in shaping the Latin
technical vocabulary, but for which he was generally far from the first Roman
enthusiast. However, all this must remain speculation. The relevance of this
discourse of ekphrasis for our investigation of mimetic contagion is that it repre-
sents a tantalizingly similar development in ancient thinking about art and
response. Unfortunately, without evidence from before the first century CE, we
cannot know whether this elaborated theory of ekphrasis may be too historically
and generically limited to be trusted as a hermeneutic key for the rest of ancient
literature. So it would probably be hazardous to apply this understanding of
ekphrasis directly to Terence’s Eunuch or to rely on it as a straightforward
explanation for the contagious force of the painting in the play. What we do,
however, indisputably see in the Eunuch is a continuation of a very old tradition of
ekphrastic description of a work of art, which had by the second century BCE
developed into a self-consciously elaborate art form in its own right. How much of
the later theory of ekphrasis was already in place we can only guess, but in the
Hellenistic period ekphrasis was obviously taken very seriously as an object of
focused literary attention. It will be worth remembering in the study that follows
that the painting in the Eunuch is backstage, i.e. totally fictional. Whatever role the
painting ultimately plays in the comedy, it only exists in ekphrasis.
INTRODUCTORY EPILOGUE
The frontispiece of this book reproduces Rembrandt’s Danaë of 1636, a renowned

icon of sexual vulnerability, now hanging in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Her
legs are simultaneously covered and uncovered, pressed together and exposed; her
right hand is raised in a gesture of fear or awestruck expectation, and her body is
INTRODUCTION 27
either turning towards or away from the strange golden light that suffuses her bed.
Jupiter is not portrayed, except as a radiance focused on Danaë’s hesitant but
unprotected body, and in this regard he seems to be a figure for the viewer’s
gaze.39 If the viewer’s perspective is therefore written into the painting in sym-
pathy with the role of the god, at least one viewer has been drawn into an
excessively literal and horrific recapitulation of Jupiter’s act. In the summer of
1985 a man, variously described as a deviant, a lunatic, or a political dissident,
entered the Hermitage and vandalized the painting with a knife and sulphuric
acid.40 In an understandable attempt to thwart ill-gotten fame, the man’s identity
and purpose have been kept largely secret, but some sense of his motivation may
be gleaned from the details of the assault: ‘the knife attack began at the subject’s
genitals. Then the attacker put down the blade and turned to a pressurized bottle
filled with acid, with which he made four ejaculatory squirts in quite separate areas:
her genitals, belly, breasts, and finally her face.’41 The sexual character of the
attack, so often latent in vandalism, is here explicit, but more interesting is the
man’s assimilation to the role of Jupiter in the painting. The Hermitage is
refashioned into another Acrisius’ tower for the rape of the painted Danaë, just
as Thais’ cubiculum becomes a ‘stage’ for the rape of the mimic Danaë, with both
rapes in imitative response to the same painted image. This observation does
nothing to absolve the attacker of guilt for his crime, still less does it imply
blame for Rembrandt’s painting, as if it somehow invited the assault. However,
when we understand the logic of response as embedded in the work of art itself,
violent imitation must not be confused with random brutality. As we have said,
the phenomenon of mimetic contagion may be traced across the ancient Medi-
terranean world and well beyond. A more striking illustration of this continuity
could hardly be found than this uncanny parallelism of response between Chaerea
and the unnamed vandal of Rembrandt’s Danaë.
39
The classic feminist treatise on the scripting of eroticized (male) scopic desire in art is Kappeler 1986.
She problematizes the distinction not only between pornography and the female nude, but in principle that
between pornography and representation tout court, an objection to mimesis (though Kappeler never uses
this term) that makes her critique relevant to the philosophical scruples explored in Chapter 3. But where
Plato is concerned about the potential effect of the image on the viewing subject, Kappeler draws attention
to the violence of representation as experienced by the represented (female) object and the complicit role of
the viewer as consumer. See especially her ‘Problem 6: Why Look at Women?’ (1986, 63–81).
40
Russell 1997. 41
McKim-Smith 2002, 29.
ONE
Judging Chaerea
The Role of the Painting
It must be confessed openly that here for once Terence presents us with
pictures which are or may be deleterious.
Gilbert Norwood (1923, 61)
The genesis of crime, whether it be in the human heart itself or in the promptings
of some external inducement, is one of the great mysteries of our common
experience. The only safe presumption may be that no two cases are exactly
alike and that no two cultures approach this question with exactly the same
framework of ethical and psychological premises. Within a work of literature
words have an especially great significance in shaping our conception of what
happens and why, but the slave Pythias, who later comes on and describes
Pamphila’s physical and emotional state soon after the attack, relates that Pam-
phila is in no condition to talk about what happened (659), and she herself was not
an eyewitness to the outrage. Chaerea’s narration of the rape is thus our only
window on to the backstage event at the centre of the play, and though we may
regard his perspective as hopelessly partial, it also occupies a uniquely focal place in
any interpretation of this pivotal juncture. It is worth quoting again the text of
Chaerea’s ekphrastic confession:1
dum adparatur, virgo in conclavi sedet

suspectans tabulam quandam pictam: ibi inerat pictura haec, Iovem
egomet quoque id spectare coepi, et quia consimilem luserat
iam olim ille ludum, inpendio magis animu’ gaudebat mihi,
at quem deum! ‘qui templa caeli summa sonitu concutit.’
ego homuncio hoc non facerem? ego illud vero ita feci – ac lubens.
1
For a fuller recapitulation of the events of the first half of the play leading up to this scene, see pp. 1–4.
THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 29
While [the bath] is prepared the girl is sitting in a chamber

Looking at a certain painted panel: on it was this picture,
How they say Jupiter once sent a golden shower into the lap of Danaë.
I too started looking and because he played a very similar game
Once upon a time, all the more my heart rejoiced,
That a god should turn himself into a man and creep
Onto someone else’s roof tiles to trick a woman through a skylight.
And what a god! ‘Who shakes the quadrants of the sky with his clap.’
And I, mere mortal, shouldn’t do it? You bet I did it, and I loved it!
The progression in Chaerea’s narration from painting to mythological subject to

consummated crime is quick and clear, leaving little room for doubt as to the
painting’s relevance, and his affective response highlights the revelatory quality of
the painting’s suggestion. It sounds, from this description, as if the painting marks
a turning point in the events backstage, and Donatus provides strong confirm-
ation of such a reading:
RESPECTENS TABVLAM QVANDAM PICTAM: bene accedit repente pic-
tura ad hortamenta aggrediendae virginis, ideo quia non ad hoc venerat
Chaerea, ut continuo vitiaret puellam, sed ut ‘videret, audiret essetque una’,
cum nihil amplius cogitare ausus fuerit, usque dum picturam cerneret.
LOOKING AT A CERTAIN PAINTED PANEL: it is fitting that the painting
comes up suddenly to encourage Chaerea to assault the maiden, since he had
not come for the purpose of immediately raping the girl, but to ‘see her, hear
her, and be together with her’, for he would not have dared to think of more
until the moment when he saw the painting.
Several modern critics have quoted this passage in Donatus with tentative
approval or have made the related point that there is no clear mention of rape
before this moment in the play.2 But these scholars have made no attempt to
answer the arguments of the majority of critics, who ignore Donatus’ testimony or
seek to refute it. Perhaps it is not so surprising that many twentieth-century critics
have refused to take Chaerea’s narrative of the painting’s intervention at face
value, or that they have been generally ill-disposed to Chaerea and inclined to
2
Barsby (1999a, 198) says Donatus’ interpretation is ‘probably . . . correct’, but he maintains that ‘it
would be in character for Chaerea to seize upon a plausible excuse for his behaviour’. Saylor 1975 emphasizes
the theme of planlessness throughout, so he makes use of Donatus here (305). Philippides 1995 also gives
unusual weight to Donatus’ comment on the painting (281). Hers is the most intense engagement with
Donatus’ interpretation of this scene. Donatus sees the bath and laying-out of Pamphila in 593 as a reference
to the ritual preparation of the bride by her pronubae. Philippides takes up this argument and sees it as a clear
mitigation of Chaerea’s crime. Donatus’ observation is quite shrewd and I am inclined to take his word on
such cultural associations, but I am not sure I agree with Philippides that by itself the suggestion of wedding
ritual does much to extenuate the crime.
sympathy with Pamphila. She appears on stage only briefly as a mute character and
is quickly ushered into Thais’ house where she will be assaulted and kept hidden
for the rest of the play. As the Eunuch’s ‘madwoman in the attic’, Pamphila’s total
silence and near invisibility have made her presumed point of view all the more
persuasive for many of us, and the concomitant reaction against her assailant has
been severe.
It is hard to imagine how earlier ages could have been so friendly to this
character.3 When Francesco de’ Nobili, one of the bright lights of early
sixteenth-century Venetian public life, took the name Cherea, presumably he
did not mean to characterize himself as a brutal rapist.4 Chaerea’s influence
shows itself clearly in the warm adaptations of his character in Renaissance and
Restoration comedy.5 In the nineteenth century the great Terence editor Philippe
Fabia summed up his age’s response to Chaerea, calling him ‘une des figures les
plus originales, les plus vivantes et les plus attrayantes de la comédie antique’ and
comparing him to the passionate, impulsive Chérubin in Beaumarchais’ Le
Mariage de Figaro.6 Chaerea still had fans in the early twentieth century. Casper
Kraemer calls him ‘a young, likable boy, with an impetuous, passionate, rather
self-centered disposition’.7 But his focus is less on the lovability of the character
than on his verisimilitude. ‘Chaerea might well find his present-day counterpart
on any college campus or, with some little additional vulgarity, on any street
corner in a modern city. He certainly is not unnatural in his enthusiastic attention
to female beauty. His own claim to connoissieurship [sic] in matters of this sort is
amply supported by the “raffish succulence of phrase,” which may be reprehen-
sible, but is still a familiar characteristic of boys at his age.’8 Edward Kennard
Rand finds him ‘impulsive, passionate, tender, resourceful, manly, pious, true, a
Catullus in action, scandalously indecorous, irresistibly lovable’.9 Given that
3
And indeed they were not equally friendly to him in all contexts, especially those involving young actors
and audiences. For a very helpful survey of the bowdlerization of Roman comedy, particularly of this scene
of the Eunuch, when it was regularly performed by boys as the Westminster Latin Play from the sixteenth
century to the twentieth, see Brown 2008.
4
On Cherea de’ Nobili’s remarkable career, not just as an actor and a figure in early Commedia dell’ arte,
but also as a sometime diplomat, chancellor, and spy, see Szakolczai 2013, 181–6.
5
One thinks most readily of Viola in Twelfth Night (‘Thou shall present me as an eunuch to him’, 1.2.56).
The Eunuch has been called Shakespeare’s favourite play, perhaps because of the quotation in The Taming of
the Shrew (1.1.158): ‘If love have touched you, nought remains but so; | redime te captum quam queas
minimo’. If nothing else, Viola’s reference to her singing ability should make the allusion to Chaerea clear,
but of course she is a eunuch of a very different sort. See Elam 1996. Closer English avatars are Erostrato in
Gascoigne’s The Supposes (1566), Lionel in Sir Charles Sedley’s Bellamira, or The Mistress (1687), and
Courtly, Jr in Thomas Cooke’s The Eunuch, or the Darby Captain (1736). Sedley’s Lionel is arguably fairly
dastardly, but certainly no more than any other lover in Restoration comedy.
6
Fabia 1895, 17 n.1; ‘one of the most original, lively, and attractive figures of ancient comedy’.
7
Kraemer 1927, 667. 8
Kraemer 1927, 665. 9
Rand 1932, 58–9.
characterization, it is not too hard to understand how Rand can refer to the rape as
a ‘mad prank’.10
However, by the time of Kraemer and Rand another critical reaction was
already afoot. In fact, they were both writing in response to the strong condem-
nation expressed in Gilbert Norwood’s book-length study of Terence’s oeuvre, a
condemnation that would become typical of scholarship from the second half of
the century. Norwood found fault with a tradition that preferred Plautus, ‘who
wrote plays like a blacksmith mending a watch’, and was concerned at every turn
to show Terence’s brilliant craftsmanship, truth to life, and good taste.11 He
provides a canonical narrative of the young poet’s progress from the Andria,
fine in its language but faulty in its construction, to that masterpiece of comedy
and humanity, the Adelphoe. Along the way, he must admit, the Eunuch ‘marks a
faltering in our poet’s progress’. (57) The language is as elegant as ever, but certain
‘abjectly Plautine’ elements mar the plot, most clearly the rape of Pamphila.12
Where older critics had tended to ignore the rape and love the character, Nor-
wood sets the tone for newer critics, who have generally started by condemning
the rape and moved out from there to a more holistic ethical proscription, finding
vices in all the virtues earlier readers had loved. The text itself provides no clear
evidence that the rape was maliciously planned, so any absolute judgment of
Chaerea has to be based on a composite sketch of his personality drawn from
his behaviour in other scenes. For example, Norwood pursues his case by attempt-
ing to expose Chaerea’s character through his ‘raffish succulence of phrase’ (the
tag mocked by Kraemer, as noted earlier). Examples drawn from various other
scenes in the play prove that Chaerea is an oversexed young man, and we are left to
draw our own conclusions. The focus is less on the act itself than on Chaerea’s
attitude, ‘frankly, casually, and callously using fellow-creatures as mere material.
Kant has bidden us always to treat a human being as an end, never as a means only’
(61). Norwood dismisses the well-worn comparison to Chérubin, for Chaerea
lacks such charming vulnerability. Far from acting on a sudden impulse, Chaerea
‘deliberately and skillfully gratifies a physical appetite’ (62). Half a century later, in
the introduction to his translation of the Eunuch, Douglass Parker registered a
similar disapproval of Chaerea’s character, noting his ‘compulsive gregariousness’
and ‘smarmy disingenuousness’.13 Once again, the basis of condemnation is not
found in the description of the rape, but rather in Chaerea’s behaviour in other
scenes. Instead of Norwood’s explicitly Kantian ethical lens, Parker’s language
reveals a focus on the diagnosis of Chaerea’s pathology of character. The debt to a
10
Rand 1932, 62. 11
Norwood 1923, 1.
12
Norwood 1923, 61. He also disapproves of the end, with its gross mistreatment of Thais, but singles out
the rape as ‘perhaps the most objectionable feature of the whole’.
13
Parker 1974, 151.
broadly psychoanalytic ethical and descriptive system is clear: sociability is auto-

matically under suspicion of being compulsive, and few things are more contempt-
ible than insincerity. In fact, this vaguely Freudian compass plays the same role in
his reading as that played in Norwood’s by Kant’s version of the golden rule.14
Writing today, at some remove from both Kantian and psychoanalytic ethical
models, it is deceptively easy to historicize Norwood’s and Parker’s reading and to
imagine that we see just the point at which an anachronistic moral system intrudes
upon their reaction to the character. And yet their condemnation is so immedi-
ately intelligible that we are not surprised to see it repeated with ever greater
vehemence as the twentieth century draws to a close. Several scholars have
followed W. S. Anderson in finding the happy ending an insufficient absolution
for a character so ‘utterly sober and deliberately underhanded in his attack’.15 The
strongest statement of this position is from L. P. Smith, who takes issue not only
with Chaerea’s defenders, but also with his comparatively indulgent earlier critics:
‘All these evaluations seem too cautious, lenient, and deferential; Chaerea is, after
all, a soldier absent without leave who, on his way to a party, enters a private house
under false pretences and rapes a young girl.’16 She argues that the Roman
audience would be predisposed to a negative view of Chaerea first because of his
dereliction of his post and second because of the shamefulness of his disguise. The
legal consequences of rape were more serious in Rome than Athens, and Smith
seems to be the first scholar to point out the very harsh punishments the Roman
audience would be likely to anticipate for Chaerea (22–3). Rather than ignoring
the role of the painting, as most scholars have done, Smith insists that we
disbelieve Chaerea’s narration on this point as a lame excuse and not the least
despicable aspect of his character:
Chaerea justifies what he did by arguing that he imitated what he saw represented in a
picture in Pamphila’s room. This is transparently as disingenuous and dishonest as his
earlier specious justification of his entry into Thais’ house (382–87) as vengeance upon one
meretrix on behalf of the sufferings of all men at the hands of any and all meretrices. That
statement, justifying violence against meretrices as an appropriate response to their
behavior, by a character who then commits rape, can be recognized as specious rhetoric
by the audience, who have already heard Chaerea announce his real motive: he is in pursuit
of the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. (293–97)17
K. F. Pierce sees it similarly: ‘Chaerea aligns himself with the king of the Roman
gods—Jupiter—so as to provide himself with an excuse for raping a girl.’18
14
On the subject of Freud’s intellectual genealogy in Kant, see Fell 1976. More recently and for the more
general psychoanalytic debt to Kantian ethics, see Gondek and Widmer 1994.
15
Anderson 1984, 131. For similar arguments see Hunter 1985, 94 and Forehand 1985, 75. Goldberg (1986,
121) does not go so far, but he does emphasize Chaerea’s ‘deceit’.
16
Smith 1994, 21. 17
Smith 1994, 27. 18
Pierce 1997, 175.
V. J. Rosivach, in his survey of rape in New Comedy, focuses on the uniqueness of

this violation: ‘The rape here is deliberately planned, not, as elsewhere, a spur-
of-the-moment affair.’19 Once again the painting enters the account only to
provide further evidence of the rapist’s depravity: ‘Chaerea’s language here
shows clearly that in his mind what he and Jupiter have done, sneaking
into a house and raping a young woman within, is nothing but a “game”
(ludus), a lark’.20 Most recently A. Sharrock: ‘Chaerea is encouraged in his plan
of rape by a picture on the wall’.21
Given this weight of critical opinion, perhaps it is not enough to argue ex
negativo, merely insisting that there is no positive evidence the rape was planned.
But we can go further. The text seems to hint very subtly at sexual contingencies
and then emphatically exclude the possibility. When Chaerea learns that Parmeno
is on his way to deliver Phaedria’s gifts, he breaks out in envious raptures (365–8):
CH. o fortunatum istum eunuchum quiquidem in hanc detur domum!

PA. quid ita? CH. rogitas? summa forma semper conservam domi
videbit colloquetur aderit una in unis aedibus,
cibum nonnumquam capiet cum ea, interdum propter dormiet.
CH. O happy eunuch, to be handed over into this house!
PH. Why? CH. You have to ask? His fellow slave at home,
Beauty’s summit—he’ll always see her, chat with her, be together with her
In the same house, sometimes he’ll take a meal with her,
Occasionally sleep nearby.
Love’s power to debase, a theme already given explicit treatment by Phaedria and
Parmeno in Act 1, is here again brought to the fore, this time with a comic turn: a
virile, young Athenian citizen is reduced to envying a decrepit, castrated slave for the
sole sake of his access to Pamphila. Only a few lines before, Chaerea had described
the eunuch as ‘a vile person, fresh off the auction block, an old woman’ (inhonestum
hominem, quem mercatus est heri, senem mulierem, 357). The five activities the lucky
eunuch will share with Pamphila may seem to be taken at random from his day, but
on closer inspection they turn out to make an ascending series, each term implying
greater familiarity than the last. Any ascending polycolon of intimacy will probably
generate an expectation of the ultimate closeness: actual sex. Of course, in the
eunuch’s case this is an expectation that will have to be disappointed. He may make
it through third base, but home plate will be anatomically off-limits. Even in his
absurdly idealized portrait of a eunuch slave’s life, Chaerea veers at the end to
19
Rosivach 1998, 46. 20
Rosivach 1998, 47.
21
Sharrock 2009, 222.
‘sleeping nearby’. Donatus’ comment confirms this reading and even indicates that
the ancients had a fixed programme of ‘bases’: the five lines of love.
VIDEBIT COLLOQUETUR ADERIT UNA: amatorie nimis quinque lineas
amoris exsecutus est, adeo diligenter, ut etiam ordinem custodiret. [ . . . ] istae
enim sunt amoris lineae, etsi non omnes est persecutus.
HE WILL SEE HER, CHAT WITH HER, BE TOGETHER WITH HER:
just like a lover, he has followed the five lines of love, and so carefully that he has
even kept the order straight. [ . . . ] For these are the lines of love, even if he has
not gone through all of them.
Donatus assumes the system of five lines is not an anachronistic construction, but
rather that Terence is alluding to them, both by keeping to them (custodiret) and
by diverging from them (non omnes est persecutus). In Act 4 there is striking
confirmation that he is right—Terence also knows the lines of love. Phaedria
returns from the country ahead of schedule, and explains that if he cannot get to
second base, he may as well be content with first (638–41):
nil est. quid ‘nil’? si non tangendi copiast,
eho ne videndi quidem erit? si illud non licet,
saltem hoc licebit. certe extrema linea
amare haud nil est.
It’s nothing. Nothing? If he can’t cop a feel,
Can’t a guy even look? If the one thing is out of reach,
At least the other will be ok. Hey, to love from
The outmost line is hardly nothing.
Donatus’ note is more explicit this time, and he spells out the five lines:
CERTE EXTREMA LINEA: et hoc recte, quia quinque lineae perfectae sunt
ad amorem: prima visus, secunda alloquii, tertia tactus, quarta osculi, quinta
coitus.
TO LOVE FROM THE OUTMOST LINE: just so, because five lines are
traversed to love: first, seeing; second, talking; third, touching; fourth, kissing;
fifth, sex.
Returning to Chaerea’s fantasy with the quinque lineae in place, we note several
things about the eunuch’s progress. The first two lines, looking and talking, are
kept exactly and establish the paradigm. The third line, touching, will not quite do
for the eunuch, who will have neither desire nor pretext to fondle Pamphila, so the
contact of bodies has been weakened to proximity (aderit una in unis aedibus).
The fourth line, kissing, would be even more out of bounds for the eunuch, but
the analogy of kissing and eating is very widespread in Greek and Roman erotic
languages, and so the emphasis on shared oral activity is kept (cibum nonnum-
quam capiet cum ea).22 Finally, and perhaps most transparently, the fifth line has
been bleached to what we might think was a euphemism for sex, if we did not
know this to be impossible: ‘he will sleep hard by her’ (propter dormiet). The
modification of the five lines of love is as significant as their invocation. In a
pregnant ellipsis, the text adumbrates sex, only then to cut it out. It would be
absurd to insist that Chaerea alludes to sex here to suggest the sinister things he
would do in the eunuch’s place. Rather, the point is surely that love has reduced
him to envying a truly unenviable character, and his desire merely to see Pamphila
again and to be in her presence is so great that he can imagine full satisfaction in
the limited pleasures the ‘fortunate’ eunuch will soon enjoy.
Only now does Parmeno suggest impersonation and substitution, and Chaer-
ea’s slowness on the uptake confirms that his thoughts have not been running to
such things and emphasizes that Parmeno is the planner here. Indeed, this
emphasis is another serious argument against taking Chaerea as a shrewd master-
mind of anything.
PA. quid si nunc tute fortunatu’ fias? CH. qua re, Parmeno?
responde. PA. capias tu illi(u)s vestem. CH. vestem? quid tum postea?
PA. pro illo te ducam. CH. audio. PA. te esse illum dicam. CH. intellego.
PA. tu illis fruare commodis quibu’ tu illum dicebas modo:
cibum una capias, adsis tangas ludas propter dormias;
quandoquidem illarum neque te quisquam novit neque scit qui sies.
PA. What if you were now to be ‘happy’? CH. How, Parmeno?
Tell me. PA. You could take his outfit. CH. His outfit? What then?
PA. Instead of him I’d deliver you. CH. I’m listening.
PA. I’d say you’re him. CH. I see.
PA. You’d be the one to enjoy those very pleasures
You were just saying were his:
You’d eat together, be with her, touch her, play with her, sleep nearby,
All the while none of those women knows you or knows who you are.
From the first line it is clear that Parmeno is not proposing rape. His question looks
back to the fortunatus of Chaerea’s exclamatory apostrophe four lines before, and
implicit in the suggestion that Chaerea can be ‘happy’ (like the eunuch) is that he
will enjoy just those pleasures he has said would be sufficient for envy. In case we
miss the point, Chaerea’s confusion gives Parmeno the chance to make the refer-
ence to the eunuch’s pleasures explicit (illis . . . commodis), and to recapitulate the list
of five stages, though he makes some substitutions and changes the order and the
diction on all the terms except the last (propter dormias).
22
For the erotic uses of ‘eating’, see Adams 1982, 138–41.
Chaerea takes up the suggestion with characteristic enthusiasm, in spite of

Parmeno’s second thoughts. When Parmeno warns that what they are doing is a
crime, Chaerea protests that it is payback against Thais and prostitutes in general.
Has the plan now changed from being modelled on the figure of the lucky eunuch
to one of retribution, and if so, is rape part of what Chaerea means to justify?
Smith says that Chaerea ‘makes a speech of specious justification for what he is
doing as vengeance upon one meretrix for the sufferings of all young men at the
hands of all meretrices (382–7), thus justifying the violent rape of one woman as
revenge on others’.23 Let us look at this passage more closely.
PA. at enim istaec in me cudetur faba. CH. ah.
PA. flagitium facimus. CH. an id flagitiumst si in domum meretriciam
deducar et illis crucibu’, quae nos nostramque adulescentiam
habent despicatam et quae nos semper omnibus cruciant modis,
nunc referam gratiam atque eas itidem fallam, ut ab is fallimur?
an potius haec patri aequomst fieri ut a me ludatur dolis?
quod qui rescierint, culpent; illud merito factum omnes putent.
PA. Well, your bean will be threshed on me. CH. Ha!
PA. We’re doing wrong. CH. Is it wrong if I am led into a cathouse
And pay back now those racks that despise us and our youth
And that always torment us in every way,
And if I deceive them like they deceive us?
Or is it more just for this to happen to my father that he be tricked by me?
Anyone who saw the latter would blame it,
But they would all think the former was justified.
Smith herself has noted that the impersonation of the eunuch and entry into
Thais’ house on a false pretext would already be enough to qualify as a flagitium.
Is it possible that this is all they mean and rape is still not part of the plan?
Parmeno’s concern is for his own culpability in what they are about to do (istaec
in me cudetur faba). Given that he is the author of the plan to substitute Chaerea
for the eunuch, he may well be worried about his direct responsibility for the
travesty. If things go badly inside, as they do, he could also be considered
responsible, as he will, but since they are both about to commit a flagitium
together it is unnecessary to construe his concern at this point as focusing on a
second as-yet unmentioned crime Chaerea may or may not commit once inside.
This reading is confirmed in the plural that follows (flagitium facimus) and in
Chaerea’s explicit question whether it can be a flagitium for him to be led into her
house, as thanks for what adolescentes suffer at the hands of meretrices. Prostitutes
pretend to be in love, and the young men who frequent them are duped into
23
Smith 1994, 23.
believing false appearances. When Chaerea says he wants to ‘deceive them as we

are deceived’ surely he means simply to turn the tables on trickery. Indeed, even if
fallere could be used as a euphemism for rape (and such a colourful usage is totally
unattested), Chaerea’s point of returning like for like would be lost. The next line
makes this even clearer: an potius haec patri aequomst fieri ut a me ludatur dolis? If
there were any hint of rape in the ‘deceptions’ of the previous lines, the anaphoric
haec applied to his own father would be more monstrous than even Chaerea’s
most hostile critics would suggest. Why does Parmeno not tell Chaerea what he
has heard from Thais about Pamphila being an Athenian citizen? Even if he doubts
its truth one might think he would pass on such important information. If we
understood the plan, at the end of Act 2, still to be free of rape, we will gain
important insight into Parmeno’s ineptitude as a servus callidus, a role that
requires an active awareness of all possible contingencies. It is precisely this sudden
and surprising failure of Parmeno’s callidity that Pythias makes explicit in Act 5
(1011). But if we believe that the plan now includes rape, Parmeno’s failure to
mention to Chaerea what he has heard about Pamphila’s parentage becomes a slip
so stupid as to strain credulity.
Chaerea will return to the stage 83 lines later in his eunuch disguise, but like the
Ethiopian slave girl and like Pamphila before, he will be introduced into Thais’
house without speaking a word. So after the end of Act 2 we have no glimpse of
Chaerea’s intentions until he emerges from the house in 549, the rape committed
and the play half over. Once again, in his narration to Antipho, he gives strong
confirmation of the plan’s innocence (568–74):
amare coepi. forte fortuna domi

erat quidam eunuchu’ quem mercatu’ fuerat frater Thaidi,
neque is deductus etiamdum ad eam. submonuit me Parmeno
ibi servo’ quod ego arripui. AN. quid id est? CH. tacitu’ citius audies:
ut vestem cum illo mutem et pro illo iubeam me illoc ducier.
AN. pro eunuchon? CH. sic est. AN. quid ex ea re tandem ut caperes
commodi?
CH. rogas? viderem audirem essem una quacum cupiebam, Antipho.
I fell in love. By great good luck there was
A certain eunuch at home whom my brother had bought for Thais,
And he hadn’t yet been given over to her. Our slave Parmeno gave me
Some advice that I took up. AN. What was it? CH. Hush and I’ll tell you:
That I trade clothes with him and order myself delivered in his place.
AN. The eunuch? CH. Yeah. AN. What advantage could you hope to get
From that? CH. You have to ask? I would see her, hear her, be together
With the girl I wanted to be with, Antipho.
Antipho’s question picks up the earlier interchange about the eunuch’s ‘advan-
tages’ (commodi), and Chaerea’s rogas? echoes his earlier rogitas? in response to
Parmeno’s confusion about why the eunuch was so lucky. Rogitas? had served to
introduce his modified five lines of love; now rogas? has the same function, but the
last two lines have been stripped away and colloquetur has been replaced by
audirem. Earlier he emphasized the innocence of the eunuch’s pleasure by making
the last three lines increasingly divergent from the normative five. Here, with
himself explicitly in the eunuch’s place, he has made the plan sound even more
emasculated by cutting off the two boldest lines and weakening ‘conversation’ to
the entirely passive ‘listening’. Now all that remains of the ‘real’ quinque lineae is
vision, and as it turns out this is the sense that will get him into trouble.
One recent scholar does advance a text-based argument that the rape was
planned. Three times Chaerea uses the verb potior to talk about ‘getting’
Pamphila:
mea nil refert, dum potiar modo. 320

I don’t care, so long as I get her.
obsecro hercle, Parmeno, fac ut potiar. 362
I’m begging you, Parmeno, help me get to her.
eamus; et de istac simul, quo pacto porro possim 613
potiri, consilium volo capere una tecum.
Let’s go; and meanwhile I want to get your advice
On how I can have her for good.
Line 614 is, of course, after the rape, but if we focus on the first two occurrences of
potior it may sound as though Chaerea is already planning something physical and
violent. It is on this basis that Rosivach rejects Donatus’ reading. ‘“To win
sexually, gain the submission of,” OLD s.v. potior 2.c. As Chaerea’s use of this
verb makes clear, from the outset it was his intention to have sex with Pamphila
(if not necessarily to rape her), and Donatus (ad Eun. 584) is wrong in saying that
he had not entered Thais’ house with this intention but was only moved to assault
when he saw a picture of Jupiter and Danaë in the house.’24 However, we may cite
any of the other OLD entries for potior, especially 3 and 4, far less violent kinds
of ‘getting’. The word certainly can connote ‘obtaining mastery’, but early Latin
also provides plentiful examples of potior meaning ‘to reach’ (a destination) or
‘to come by’ (anything good or bad). Note, for example, the line in the younger
Naevius: penetrat penitus thalamoque potitur (Cyp. Il. 2) ‘He goes within and
gets to the bedchamber.’ Or the Ennian ille meae . . . potis pacis potiri (462 Vahlen)
‘He could have peace with me.’
Plautus provides numerous other examples, but the more important evidence is
from Terence himself. Apart from Chaerea’s references to ‘getting to’ Pamphila,
the verb potior appears seven times in the Terentian corpus. Four of these (Haut
24
Rosivach 1998, 169.
322, 323; Ph 159, 830) have an amica as the implicit object, but in each case the
context makes it clear that the issue is ‘getting the girl’ in an extended relationship
with all the family and practical problems that arise from long-standing affairs,
rather than anything specific to sex. Of course, as in English, ‘getting the girl’ may
also euphemistically cover sexual intercourse, but that is not the focus in these
cases. Surely this is also true of Chaerea’s use of potior in line 614. He can hardly be
thinking of marriage, since he does not yet know that she is an Athenian citizen,
but the use of porro (instead of, say, iterum) shows that Chaerea is imagining a
long-term love affair, rather than another chance to rape her. The other three
occurrences of potior in Terence (Ph 469; Ad 871, 876) are not directed to love
objects at all, but to other good or bad things one can ‘obtain’. In summary, it is
not clear that Terence ever uses potior in the specifically violent sense of OLD 2.c,
‘to gain the sexual submission of ’. Chaerea will ‘get the girl’ in the end, and in the
middle of the play he will ‘get’ her in bed, and looking back on lines 320 and 362
from that perspective gives them rich dramatic irony. This may well be the point of
the ambiguity that has led Rosivach astray. We are meant to hear obsecro hercle,
Parmeno, fac ut potiar as the plea of a typically harmless comic lover who wants to
‘get to’ his girl, and the irony rests precisely on the gap between what Chaerea
now intends and the more sinister fulfilment his prayer will take.
Yet perhaps in offering a philological answer to Rosivach’s claim about potior we
are not really going to the heart of the matter. After all, Rosivach comes at the end
of the twentieth-century response to the play, and all the other scholars we have
surveyed, who reached the same judgment about Chaerea’s malicious intentions,
did so without the aid of any explicit text-based argument at all. If that makes their
reaction to Chaerea less than scientific, the imperative to explain their universally
shared revulsion becomes all the more pressing. It would be unforgivably arrogant
to assume that we could sweep away such a strong hunch, common to so many
learned and sensitive readers, simply by pointing out that there is no positive
evidence for their view, and if we do not attempt somehow to account for their
reaction, we will have compounded arrogance with short-sightedness.
Over the second half of the twentieth century, Western democracies underwent
an historically unparalleled shift in the public consciousness of rape. A crude but
objective index of this development may be seen in statutory changes, which have
resulted in broader definitions of sexual assault, a proliferation of recognized types
of rape (date, spousal, acquaintance, statutory, etc.), and perhaps most signifi-
cantly, at least in the English-speaking world, a universal reclassification of rape as
presumptively criminal.25 Parallel to these legal changes and sometimes in
25
The debate on the legal definition of rape has produced a vast literature. For a sample of some of the
more influential work, see Estrich 1987, LaFree 1989, Bourque 1989, Schulhofer 1992, Berger, Searles, and
Neuman 1995.
dialogue with them, the feminist debate on the nature and significance of rape has
become more articulate with each successive decade.26 The revolutions of basic
assumptions and goals within feminism have never taken attention away from the
pressing necessity of formulating a way of thinking about rape, as a locus for the
combination of problematic sex and power and as the most blatant form of
gendered oppression. Changes in popular attitudes are, of course, much harder
to track than legislative reforms and scholarly debates, but these discursive shifts
have not transpired in a social vacuum, and for many of us there is perhaps no
word in the English language so like fingernails on chalkboard as ‘rape’. By telling
contrast with this lexical freighting, neither Greek nor Latin had a word to denote
non-consensual sex. The crime was conveyed by more general words for ‘assault’
without sexual specificity, words that emphasize not the act but the resultative
polluted state of the victim, and words for ‘adultery’ that completely ignore the
issue of consent.27 This perceived paupertas linguarum antiquarum has provided
a starting point for scholars interested in tracing out Greek and Roman construc-
tions of sexual assault and the proper limitations on our retrojection of legal and
moral categories.28
If there is any truth in Foucault’s claim of a modern self emergent in the
discourses of sexual (self-)control, then the horror of rape, for a modern victim,
rests not only in its disruption of autonomy, but in the fact that it operates within
the very field of autonomy’s grounding.29 Since late antiquity, according to this
26
The beginning of the contemporary conversation and in many ways still the most prominent work is
Brownmiller 1975. Brownmiller argued that rape is not sex, most fundamentally, but violence: ‘a deliberate,
hostile, violent act of degradation and possession on the part of a would-be conqueror, designed to
intimidate and inspire fear’ (391). The radical feminist thought on rape, best represented by MacKinnon
1989 and Dworkin 1989, essentially sought to invert Brownmiller’s formulation. Rape is different from
‘normal’ heterosexual sex only in the degree to which it unmasks the violence inherent in all intercourse,
whether sexual or social, between men and women. ‘Considering rape as violence not sex evades, at the
moment it seems most to confront, the issue of who controls women’s sexuality and the dominance/
submission dynamic that has defined it’ (MacKinnon 1989, 178). Of the more recent work on rape, I have
found Cahill 2001 to be the most helpful.
27
The words for ‘assault’ in Greek are generally formed from bia; Latin uses the verb comprimere with or
without the ablative compliment vi. The ‘shaming’ or ‘outrage’ words are mostly taken from hubris in
Greek; Latin uses the verbs stuprare and vitiare. Adultery is, of course, moicheia, a classification of rape that
makes spousal rape notionally impossible. For the Greek vocabulary of sexual assault, see Cole 1984, 98 and
Cohen 1991. More recently and following this same tripartite division, see the comprehensive study in
Omitowoju 2002.
28
Lape 2001, 84–5: ‘What the lack of a Greek lexical equivalent for rape does suggest is that “coerced
sexual intercourse” in the Athenian context is not necessarily problematized in the same way or for the same
reasons that we find today. For this reason, even to speak of rape in the Athenian context is, in some sense, to
beg the question, importing an ideology and locus of legal and moral problematization that requires
demonstration rather than mere assertion.’
29
I am thinking primarily of Le Souci de soi, of course, but the basic idea is fundamental to much of what
Foucault wrote. Rape is never an explicit subject in Foucault’s treatises, but in a roundtable discussion on
model, our cultural and institutional forms have constructed subjectivity out of
sexuality, as the individualized agency for marshalling the deployment of sex.
When sexual autonomy is instrumentalized for the articulation of selfhood, its
brutal subversion can only be understood as a total dislocation of identity. It
should be emphasized, since I have used his idiom, that this interpretation of the
modern experience of rape is not strictly Foucauldian. Writing from an intellectual
tradition often explicitly hostile to Foucault, Ann J. Cahill offers one of the most
insightful and informed contemporary theorizations of rape. She says, ‘Rape cannot
be defined or understood as theft, mere assault, or virtually identical to other forms
of heterosexual intercourse. Rather, it is a sexually specific act that destroys (if only
temporarily) the intersubjective, embodied agency and therefore personhood of a
woman.’30 By making the physical and social trauma of rape secondary to a more
fundamental dislocation of identity, Cahill provides a trenchant formulation of the
atrocity of rape as it is experienced today, but she relies on a localization of agency
which is itself arguably historicizable. If we posited a moment anterior to such
localization, we would still expect the experience of sexual assault to be attended by
the enormities of force and degradation, but without the cardinal shattering of self
Cahill describes. Indeed, this would explain why ‘violence’ and ‘disgrace’ are the
very semantic fields used in antiquity to denote sexual assault.
This historical trajectory would also go some way towards explaining the
difficulty modern critics have had reading the rape in the Eunuch. Their ethical
abreaction is not superficially anachronistic, but tied to very deep, important
allegiances. Even when they realize there is something distinctly modern in their
response, this admission is usually made in a tone of despondency.31 Of course,
this interpretive crux is not confined to the Eunuch. As strange as the ancients may
seem in their forensic discourses of rape, more baffling still is its presence in New
Comedy. First there is the overwhelming frequency of rape as a plot motif.32
penal reform in 1977 (published in Foucault 1988, 200–2), he advocated radical desexualization of the crime:
‘[T]here is no difference, in principle, between sticking one’s fist in someone’s face or one’s penis into their
sex’. This suggestion seems to have won him few friends. As Teresa de Lauretis notes (1987, 37), misguided
though it may be, Foucault’s proposal must be understood as a move of resistance against modernity’s
‘technoligization’ of sex.
30
Cahill 2001, 13.
31
Rosivach 1998, 169: ‘My own feeling is that he is still despicable, but that is not what the play, overall,
seems to be saying.’ See also Hunter 1985, 94.
32
It is difficult to assess numbers for the badly fragmentary poets, but we are sure that at least eight plays
by Menander (Georgos, Epitrepontes, Heros [two rapes!], Kitharistes, Plokion, Samia, Phasma, and the
unidentified fragment on P. Cariensis 43227) and at least three plays by Plautus’ younger contemporary,
Caecilius Statius (Davos, Plocium, and Titthe), involved rape. Plautus is rather restrained here, including rape
in only three of the surviving twenty-one plays (Aulularia, Cistellaria, and Truculentus), but Terence, who
apparently stays closer to Menander in this regard, employs rape in the plots of no fewer than four of his six
comedies (Eunuchus, Phormio, Hecyra, and Adelphoe).
But just as striking as its ubiquity is the formulaic regularity of its inclusion, where
as Pat Easterling has noted, it seems to function as ‘a courtship practice’.33 In
every play that relies on rape, except for the Eunuch, the crime occurs as part of the
backstory, and is thus neatly sequestered from the action of the play itself. In most
cases the rape was committed nine months before, and because of the victim’s
untimely pregnancy, she has been abandoned by her new husband or dropped by
her fiancé.34 After a series of miscommunications and revelations, and to the
surprise of both parties, the assailant turns out to have been the lead, who
unwittingly raped his own fiancée. If they had married before the separation, he
may now return to his bride, and if they had not, the wedding is back on. Either
way, a happy ending is made even happier by the birth of a son. In other cases, the
rape occurred a generation before and resulted in the birth of a girl, who happens
to be the ingénue.35 Here again the rape is essential to the happy ending: because
of the surprising revelation of the girl’s citizen parentage, she is allowed to marry
the lead, who loves her but has until now taken her for an unmarriageable
prostitute. In either case, but especially in the latter, the audience is effectively
shielded from the unpleasantness of the crime itself by its more or less remote
occurrence.
Another highly regularized feature of these rapes is the cluster of circumstances
surrounding the crime. The rape almost always occurs in the context of a night-
time festival. As scholars have often noted, this provides an ‘excuse’ for the victim
by explaining why a good citizen girl was away from home and vulnerable to
attack.36 The dramatic interests of New Comedy simply do not revolve around
undermining the ingénue’s chastity or impugning her eventual suitability to marry
the lead and become a matrona. In addition to saving face for the girl, the night-
time festival context situates the event in an atmosphere of carnivalesque license
and inversion of norms, and the cover of dark explains how rapist and victim could
fail to recognize each other later, even after marriage. So this single contextual
element provided a handy solution to several thorny technical problems involving
ethical depiction of the victim and dramatic verisimilitude and it quickly became
conventional. It is here, I would argue, in its conventionality, that the night-time
festival context has an equally important narrative function, for the more formu-
laic the rape becomes, the more thoroughly it is denatured as a brutal crime and
refashioned as a semiotic token, part of the sign system of New Comedy. The lack
of ‘naturalism’ in this convention is therefore essential to its full utility, but such an
33
Easterling 1995.
34
I am conflating two of the categories in Rosivach’s survey: ‘rapes which lead to marriage of rapist and
victim’ (Rosivach 1998, 14–23) and ‘premarital rapes’ (27–35).
35
For ‘rapes whose revelation allows marriage of victim’s daughter’, see Rosivach 1998, 23–7.
36
Lape 2001, 93; Rosivach 1998, 36; Zagagi 1994, 115.
obvious departure from reality is also an irresistible incitement to self-conscious

play. So, for example, Onesimos in the Epitrepontes says (451–3): ‘a night-time
festival and women. It stands to reason (κατὰ λόγον), a girl was raped. She bore this
child and exposed it—obviously! (δηλαδή).’
Parallel to the festival context, and clearly connected with it, is the equally
universal motif of drunkenness. Here the function is plainly to mitigate the
rapist’s guilt and shift the blame to the explosive compound of youthful passion
and alcohol. As Susan Lape says, ‘[T]he rapist’s diminished capacity supplies a
crucial exculpatory factor leading to the conventional wisdom that New Comic
rapists cannot be held accountable for their actions because they act without
thinking. They are always overcome by a potent combination of youth, passion
and alcohol.’37 So in the Adelphoe, Aeschinus’ crime is rationalized by reference
to the formula: ‘Night, love, wine, youth persuaded him—it’s only human’
(persuasit nox amor vinum adulescentia:/humanum est, 470–1). Most striking is
that this excuse is made not by the rapist himself, but by Hegio, the victim’s
representative. In the Aulularia, Lyconides, who was earlier said to be drunk
when he raped Euclio’s daughter (vinolentum, 689), makes a claim similar to
Chaerea’s, that it was a god that led him on (deus mihi impulsor fuit, is me ad
illam inlexit, 737). He goes on to explain: ‘It was the fault of wine and love that
I did it’ (vini vitio atque amoris feci, 745). Later he will pick up this reference to a
divine impulsor and repeat his justification: ‘I admit I wronged your daughter
at the night-time festival of Ceres because of wine and the impulse of youth’
(ego me iniuriam fecisse filiae fateor tuae | Cereris vigiliis per vinum atque
impulsu adulescentiae, 794–5).
This combination of night-time festival, wine, and youthful passion recurs with
a regularity that can only be called formulaic. In fact, there are only three
comedies involving rape where any of these elements seem to be missing: the
Samia, the Hecyra, and the Eunuch. In the Samia, Moskhion has impregnated
the girl next door, Plangon, during a celebration of the Adonia, and his modesty
prevents him from giving details about what happened. Perhaps we are meant to
assume, for her chastity’s sake, that it was rape and not seduction, but his
narration is exceptional in not making that explicit. Nowhere in the text we
possess does he say that he was drunk, but the play is badly fragmentary and he
may have made this excuse elsewhere. Furthermore, it may go without saying
that since the Adonia was being celebrated in his own house, Moskhion will have
been drinking too. The theme of Moskhion’s drunkenness and illicit sex does
come up later in the play. Plangon gives birth, and the baby is given into the
safekeeping of Khrysis, the concubine of Moskhion’s father. When the father
37
Lape 2001, 94.
returns home and finds Khrysis with a new baby, he does the maths and realizes
it cannot be his, and he assumes that she got Moskhion drunk and seduced
him (339–42):
παρέλαβον αὐτόν που μεθύοντα δηλαδή,
οὐκ ὄντ᾽ ἐν ἑαυτοῦ· πολλὰ δ᾽ ἐξεργάζεται
ἀνόητ᾽ ἄκρατος καὶ νεότης, ὅταν λάβῃ
τὸν συνεπιβουλεύσαντα τούτοις πλησίον.
Well, she got hold of him when he was drunk, obviously,
Not in control of himself. Unmixed wine
Does lots of stupid things and also youth,
When it comes into contact with someone scheming.
In the Hecyra the situation is reversed: there is no explicit mention of a holiday

context for the rape, but the perpetrator is certainly drunk. Pamphilus raped an
unknown woman in the street at night and in the struggle tore a ring from her
hand. He went straight to his girlfriend Bacchis, confessed the crime, and made
her a present of the ring. The victim will turn out to be none other than his
estranged wife Philumena, and the ring will prove her faithfulness to her husband
and save the day. Perhaps we are meant to understand that there was a festival,
for there is no other obvious reason for Philumena to be on the street alone at
night, but it is unusual that this is not made more explicit. In any case, Pamphilus
was drunk (vini plenum, 823). So the Samia and the Hecyra do not spell out that
the rape was attended by both religious festival and alcohol, but they certainly
draw attention to one of the two and make it seem probable that the other factor
was present as well. Aside from these partial exceptions, every other comedy
involving rape makes fully explicit both the festival context of the crime and the
drunkenness of the perpetrator—except for the Eunuch, of course, which has
neither of these features.
The twentieth-century reaction to Chaerea cannot be understood without refer-
ence to the apparent uniqueness of his crime. Instead of being neatly sequestered in
the past, the rape is committed backstage in the middle of Act 3. This fact alone
makes it seem less like a semiotic convenience of plot construction and more like a
real part of the play. Indeed, as this book will show, that perception is well
grounded—the painting and Chaerea’s reaction to it are far from incidental to the
whole of the Eunuch. But for the judgment of Chaerea as a cool-headed, calculating
rapist nothing has been more damning than his sobriety.38 Adele Scafuro and Susan
Lape have argued (with respect to other rapists) that the Athenian legal discourse
surrounding hubris made the combination of youthful passion and inebriation
38
Anderson 1984, 131: ‘utterly sober’; Smith 1994, 23: ‘completely sober, not drunk’; Rosivach 1998, 46:
‘not drunk but cold sober’.
exculpatory, but this defence will not apply to Chaerea.39 However, if the rape is
approached not as a real crime requiring evaluation of mens rea, whether by ancient
standards or our own, but as an eccentric instantiation of a literary topos, the shift in
our perspective has important consequences. Chaerea’s exuberant youthfulness and
passion were immediately clear from his first entrance, and Parmeno made the
comparison to Phaedria explicit: ‘You’ll say that other one was just fun and
games, compared to what this one’s madness will do’ (ludum iocumque dices fuisse
illum alterum, | praeut huiu’ rabies quae dabit, 300–1). Chaerea’s energy and his lust
for Pamphila fit him perfectly for the first part of the rape formula, but when the
crime occurs, the clear absence of both festival context and inebriation works as a
kind of dramaturgical anacoluthon. The stylization of the formula is so iron-clad
and this situation so unique that the audience listens to Chaerea’s narration in rapt
expectation that it will disclose the missing elements.
It is just here, I would argue, that Donatus’ reading of the painting’s role is
most perspicacious, for the painting is not only the catalyst of the crime, but the
site of the rape’s partial generic normalization. The missing element of religious
context is, in fact, supplied by Chaerea’s unexpected encounter with the painting,
which functions as an epiphany of Jupiter, henceforth to be invoked as tutelary
god or dramatic genius (see p. 4). Drunkenness may be understood metaphoric-
ally elsewhere in Latin literature, for good fortune or love or other intangibles
(Hor. C. 1.37.12; Cat. 45.11; etc.), but here the intoxicating agent is quite material.
The sudden exposure to the painting sends Chaerea reeling from his senses, and
his exultant Rausch leads straight to the rape. The ethical work accomplished by
the night-time festival motif is twofold: it protects the victim’s reputation by
giving her an excuse for being out and it helps account for the young man’s loss
of control. Similarly drunkenness has two functions: facilitating the subsequent
lack of recognition and, again, explaining the young man’s loss of control. The
Eunuch, however, does not need to defend Pamphila’s chastity, since she is raped
at home, neither does it need to make room for future misrecognitions. But taking
out these two inducements, the formulaic pattern offers a clarification still quite
necessary in the Eunuch, namely that the perpetrator’s state of mind was jumbled
to the edge of unaccountability by something physically real and external. The
painting fits into this niche exactly, accomplishing neither more nor less drama-
turgical work than the situation requires. Unlike their modern counterparts, as
I will argue in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, an ancient audience would have come to the
theatre already alive to art’s potential for direct agency in inspiring imitation.
39
See Scafuro 1997, 246; Lape 2001, 94 and passim. These scholars’ attempts to situate the mitigating
factors of Menandrian rape in an Athenian legal context are very convincing and helpful, but perhaps they
are less relevant for Terence as a Roman poet. In any case, the Eunuch is only cited as an exception.
So Donatus’ ready assignment of efficacy to the painting seems prima facie much
more likely for Terence’s audience than it has been for most modern readers, but
the role of the painting becomes even clearer when we see how neatly it slips into
the billet left empty by the absence of ‘religious event’ and ‘alcohol’. New
Comedy’s tightly organized Erwartungshorizont for rape shunts the painting
into a role that should be significantly exculpatory.
As helpful as Donatus has been for this recovery of an ancient Roman response
to the painting, there is another fourth-century reading of the same scene, where
the confirmation of the painting’s role may be less explicit, but is essential to the
way the passage is deployed. In chapter 13 of the first book of the Confessions,
Augustine repents of his foolish childhood love of false tales from Homer and
Virgil, and in chapter 17 he laments precious time lost in declamatory exercises
translating the wrath of Juno into prose. For a modern reader Augustine’s regrets
may seem ill-placed, but between these diatribes on educational frivolity, we
encounter a judgment to which our response is likely to be more sympathetic.
In chapter 16, he apostrophizes the ‘hellish river of human custom’, in which the
sons of Eve read about Jupiter’s dalliances, but Augustine passes lightly over the
already time-worn censures of the Homeric gods and their indiscretions and
chooses a far more offensive text for his obloquy. The river of text calls out to
the boys and their tuition-paying parents, advertising itself as the source of the
rhetorical art, not only on a synthetic level (hinc adquiritur eloquentia), but on a
lexical level (hinc verba discuntur). Perhaps ironically, Augustine answers the
river’s advertisement with an erotema, a ‘rhetorical question’:
ita vero non cognosceremus verba haec, ‘imbrem aureum’ et ‘gremium’ et ‘fucum’ et
‘templa caeli’ et alia verba quae in eo loco scripta sunt, nisi Terentius induceret nequam
adulescentem proponentem sibi Iovem ad exemplum stupri, dum spectat ‘tabulam quan-
dam pictam’ in pariete ‘ubi inerat pictura haec, Iovem quo pacto Danaë misisse aiunt in
gremium quondam imbrem aureum, fucum factum mulieri?’ et vide quemadmodum se
concitat ad libidinem quasi caelesti magisterio: ‘at quem deum!’ inquit, ‘qui templa caeli
summo sonitu concutit. ego homuncio id non facerem? ego vero illud feci ac libens.’ non
omnino per hanc turpitudinem verba ista commodius discuntur, sed per haec verba
turpitudo ista confidentius perpetratur. non accuso verba quasi vasa electa atque pretiosa,
sed vinum erroris quod in eis nobis propinabatur ab ebriis doctoribus, et nisi biberemus
caedebamur, nec appellare ad aliquem iudicem sobrium licebat. et tamen ego, deus meus,
in cuius conspectu iam secura est recordatio mea, libenter haec didici, et eis delectabar
miser, et ob hoc bonae spei puer appellabar.
Would we really not learn the words ‘golden shower’ and ‘lap’ and ‘trick’ and ‘quadrants of
the sky’ and all the other words without Terence portraying a worthless youth who claims
Jupiter as his model of vice, when he’s looking at a ‘certain painted panel’ on a wall ‘where
there was this picture, how Jove they say sent into the lap of Danaë a certain shower of gold
to play a trick on a woman?’ And look how he whips himself up to concupiscence as if by a
heavenly teacher: ‘But what a god!’ he says, ‘Who shakes the quadrants of the sky with his
lofty clap. And I, mere mortal, shouldn’t do it? You bet I did it, and I loved it! Those words
are learned no more readily through this depravity, but through these words that depravity
is committed more assuredly. I’m not blaming the words, which are like select, precious
vessels, but the wine of error dispensed to us in them from drunken masters, and if we
didn’t drink up, we were beaten, and there was no summoning a sober judge. But I, o
Lord, in whose sight my memory is now sound, I learned these things gladly, and wretch
that I was I took delight in them, and for this I was called a boy of good hope.
The reader coming to this passage for the first time will probably be somewhat
disoriented, as she encounters a dissociated list of words from Chaerea’s
speech, without any preparatory indication of provenance. This is, of course,
the point. The reader understands the words without knowing their literary
context and thus enacts a proof of Augustine’s argument that the depravity of
the scene has no pedagogical necessity. Indeed, by themselves the words are
‘precious vessels’, but because of their opprobrious deployment in this text
they become the decanters of the ‘wine of error’. Augustine understands
however that the words are not just a false pretext for our seduction, nor are
they simply a medium of delivery for our destruction. They are, in their
compromised state, a large part of the problem: per haec verba turpitudo ista
confidentius perpetratur.
Invoked merely as an example, out of what was obviously a very broad literary
and rhetorical education, this scene from the Eunuch is taken as a kind of moral
synecdoche for classical pagan literature. In our curriculum Terence has been
comparatively marginalized, so Augustine’s choice may seem tendentiously
quirky, like judging all English literature indecent on the basis of a scene from
Wycherley. But we should remember that Terence was one of the most popular
school authors from antiquity down to the nineteenth century, so Augustine’s
representation of the Eunuch as foundational may well be true to his own
educational experience and that of countless others. But the choice of this scene
from this play is also clearly motivated by Chaerea’s combination of bad theology
with outrageous behaviour. Indeed, there are probably few places in the classical
canon that so neatly jumble the themes of the Confessions: human frailty, sex,
divinity, the plunge into error.
More suggestive still, Chaerea is the impressionable young man led astray by a
work of art, just as the young Augustine is led astray by the dramatic work of art in
which Chaerea appears. Augustine could have focused on the crime itself or even
on Chaerea’s invocation of the myth of Jupiter and Danaë without the emphasis
on the painting, but then his cameo of the hazards of pagan culture would have
lost its inlaid mise en abîme, its programmatic inculpation of deleterious art.
Corollary to this analogy is the partial displacement of blame from Chaerea’s
character to the painting. Terence portrays a nequam adulescentem, but it is not
clear whether Chaerea’s nequitia is ethically fundamental or the result of the
painting’s bad influence.40 If this were a free-standing vignette we might unre-

servedly opt for the former, but considering its imbeddedness in the Confessions,
specifically the Eunuch’s role in Augustine’s downward slide to perdition, the
second, more sympathetic reading of Chaerea’s character seems more appropriate.
When the same scene comes up in the City of God the language is very similar and
the focus is even more explicitly on the play’s ruinous effect on the character of the
young who consume it and are drawn into imitation of it. Of the crimes (flagitia)
of the gods depicted on the comic stage Augustine laments: utinam solo risu, ac
non etiam imitatione digna viderentur (‘Would that they had seemed worthy only
of laughter, and not of imitation’, DCD 2.9). A bit later he asks: dignum fuit, ut
Terentius vester flagitio Iovis optimi maximi adulescentium nequitiam concitaret?
(‘Was it right for your Terence to stir up the mischief of young men by the crime
of Jupiter Most High?’ 2.12). What was subtly suggested in the Confessions—that
Terence’s introduction of a nequam adulescentem was corrupting for the young
Augustine—is here made plain by Terence’s incitement of the (plural) adulescen-
tium nequitiam.41 Not that we should imagine Chaerea before he saw the
painting as morally spotless, any more than Augustine himself before he read
the Eunuch. The point is rather that for a soul already enfeebled by sin, a well-
placed work of art can provide a strong or even irresistible incitement to imitation.
40
In the phrase induceret nequam adulescentem the adjective is probably to be understood as attributive,
but inducere, in the sense of ‘portray as’, can also take a predicative compliment (OLD inducere 3.b). It is
also tempting to read this nequam within the tradition of heroic ‘badness’ typical of the loveable scapegraces
of Roman comedy. On this theme, see Anderson 1993, 88–106.
41
The danger of moral infection posed by the theatre is not, of course, limited to the Eunuch. The
history of this pathogen goes all the way back to its institutional origins at Rome. In the following book’s
catalogue of the failure of the gods to defend the city in her hour of need, Augustine mentions the plague
that bore off M. Furius Camillus in 365 BCE as the occasion of the introduction of a far worse plague: in hac
pestilentia scaenicos ludos aliam novam pestem non corporibus Romanorum, sed, quod est multo perniciosius,
moribus intulerunt (‘In the midst of this pestilence they brought in theatrical shows, one more novel disease
not for the bodies of the Romans, but, far more perilous, for their character’, DCD 3.17).
TWO
Quickening Images
Mimetic Contagion in Cultic and Erotic Art
ὦ Μένανδρε καὶ βίε—

πότερος ἄρ᾽ ὑμῶν πότερον ἀπεμιμήσατο;
Aristophanes of Byzantium
The previous chapter has argued, from evidence internal to the play and from the
recorded responses of its ancient readers, that modern critics have tended to
underestimate the effectual power of the painting in the Eunuch. This discrepancy
between ancient and modern distributions of fault may be partially explained by the
differences in our conception of rape, but there is another difference that separates
us even more sharply from Terence’s audience and has surely done much to occlude
the painting’s role. Modern readers, to the extent that we are accustomed to
thinking of artefacts as inert objects perceived by rational agents, are likely to be
less alive to the possibility that the stream of agency may be reversed, that life may
be induced to imitate art. My goal now is to explain what Chapter 1 merely noticed.
By exploring some of the cultural background and discursive practices that feed into
the conceit of artefacts shaping the world in their own image, I hope to account for
the influence of the painting in the Eunuch, locating its apparent effects first within a
broad Greco-Roman context, then more specifically in mid-second-century BCE
Rome, and finally within the genre of Roman comedy.
I designate as ‘mimetic contagion’ the effectual power of images that replicate
themselves in their viewers, not only because they conflate Frazer’s Law of
Sympathy and Law of Contact or Jakobson’s metaphor and metonymy, but
because they implicitly suggest their own transmissibility. Whenever an image,
notionally patterned on some real subject, inverts the presumed ontological order
of similarity and becomes, itself, a subject for imitation, it proves it has the means
of its own further propagation through its new ‘host’. More particularly, when the
image is a representational artefact embedded in another work of art, whether
plastic or theatrical, and it projects itself on to some figure in the larger work of art,
the door is open for a vertiginous expansion of the image and of mimesis itself, as
the mise en abîme becomes an emblem for the porous boundary between art and
life. In our survey of the various forms of mimetic contagion prominent in

Hellenistic culture, we shall meet several artefacts that show just this expansion
and suggest a reading of the painting in the Eunuch as a figure of adhesive role-
playing within the play.
It is Frazer’s fundamental confidence in the gulf between his own cognitive
processes and ‘primitive thinking’ that authorizes his projection of the category
‘sympathetic magic’ on to the superstitious men of distant times and cultures and
even, with some regret, the rural poor of his native Scotland.1 Subsequent
anthropological scholarship has, of course, demolished the notion that there
could ever have been a culture in which people routinely live in participatory
psychic sympathy with the world around them, or in which adults are incapable of
understanding causality except by matching similia similibus.2 But if Frazer’s
‘cunning and malignant savages’ (55) have been shown to be more like us than
he assumed, another branch of twentieth-century critical theory was concerned to
demonstrate that we are also more like them. Benjamin’s essay ‘Über das mime-
tische Vermögen’ (1933), advanced the view that even, or perhaps especially, our
higher cognitive functions are shot through with the same mimetic impulse
everywhere evident not only in primitive man, but in all of nature.3 Similarly for
Adorno, the project of the Enlightenment is decried as a domination of the Other
by objective ‘identification’. The antidote, he believes, is to be sought in a cultural
poetics of self-modulation, of ‘identification with’ the Other.4
Without further demonstration, the vatic insights of Benjamin and Adorno
might be dismissed as a blind calumny of the Enlightenment or at least an
underestimation of the intellectual suppleness of modernity, but subsequent art-
historical investigation has provided striking confirmation of the basic validity of
their views. For instance, David Freedberg has given an impressive catalogue of
1
‘From the azure sky, the stately fanes, and the solemn ritual of ancient Egypt we have to travel far in
space and time to the misty mountains of the humble cottages of the Scottish Highlands of to-day; but at
our journey’s end we shall find our ignorant countrymen seeking to attain the same end by the same means
and, unhappily, with the same malignity as the Egyptian of old’ (Frazer 1935, 68).
2
If this description of the primitive mentality sounds closer to Lévy-Bruhl, that is because I take Lévy-
Bruhl’s formulation to be an apt expression of an assumption implicit in Frazer. An adequate refutation of
such prejudices may be found already in Durkheim (1912, 342), and by mid-century, as Lienhardt observes
(1954, 95), no working ethnographers still believed in radically different modes of thought employed
exclusively by primitive peoples. If anyone was still left, a decade later, labouring under Frazer’s influence
on this point, surely he will have been set right by Lévi-Strauss 1962.
3
‘Vielleicht besitzt [der Mensch] keine höhere Funktion, die nicht entscheidend durch mimetisches
Vermögen mitbedingt ist’ (Benjamin 1977, 210).
4
‘In den Kunstwerken ist der Geist nicht länger der alte Feind der Natur. Er sänftigt sich zum
Versöhnenden. Nicht bedeutet sie nach klassizistischem Rezept Versöhnung: diese ist ihre eigene Verhal-
tensweise, die des Nichtidentischen innewird. Der Geist identifiziert es nicht: er identifiziert sich damit.
Dadurch daß Kunst ihrer eigenen Identität mit sich folgt, macht sie dem Nichtidentischen sich gleich: das ist
die gegenwärtige Stufe ihres mimetischen Wesens’ (Adorno 1997, 202).
MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 51
evidence that modern, Western, institutional ‘high art’ is indeed the exception to
the rule that images are everywhere thought to have the power to shape reality.5
Even in our culture, the range of responses to art, from sexual arousal to rage at
the prototype, gives the lie to aestheticist assumptions about images as passive
objects. Most recently, Alfred Gell has articulated an anthropological theory of art
grounded in a general taxonomy of agency associated with images and artefacts.6
Gell effectively invents a language for describing the nested complexities of social
agency mediated by objects. Rather than assuming that the image must be passive
and the viewer active or vice versa, Gell shows how artist, index, prototype, and
recipient negotiate and renegotiate a tangled web of active and passive roles, partly
prescribed by the broader culture and partly ad-libbed according to the particu-
larities of each interaction.
If the power of images, more specifically the capacity of certain artefacts to
summon the viewer or participant into a mimetic role, has been recuperated to
some extent in the twentieth century, the ancient Mediterranean world never
needed to be reminded of this phenomenon for the simple reason that it had never
forgotten such modes of thinking about images or tried to pretend them away.
Among the Greek and Roman cultural practices of plastic representation that were
organized around this principle of life imitating art, one fairly clear example is the
‘voodoo doll’.7 Because the doll is somehow like the victim, if only notionally and
schematically, the victim is then supposed to suffer, if only metaphorically, the
tortures and bindings inflicted on the doll. A relationship of similarity between
figurine and subject is ritually reversed, and mimesis becomes a two-way street.
Such practices were apparently ubiquitous in antiquity, but scholars are only now
coming to appreciate how often allusions to these techniques lurk beneath the
literary surface in Latin poetry.8 This process was not necessarily dependent on
vision, since the dolls were often secreted away, but there were also practices in
which the victim’s cognizance and vision of the image seem to have been import-
ant, such as representations of emphatically healthy people used by the infirm to
effect a homoeopathic cure.9 There are also instances of the same formulation of
5
Freedberg 1989.
6
Gell 1998. Gell’s work has been especially influential in the study of non-Western material, but recently
classical art historians have begun to explore his approach and adapt it to their subject; see now, Stewart
2007 and Osborne 2007.
7
See Faraone 1992 and now Collins 2003, 37–44.
8
Laurel Fulkerson (2002) argues convincingly that the erotic manikin of Protesilaus in Heroides 13
functions as a voodoo doll and that its burning coincides with his death. For sympathetic magic in Proper-
tius, see O’Neill 1998.
9
The ritual deployment of votive body parts is well attested in the cult of Asclepius and beyond. For
Minoan evidence, see Dickinson 1994, 271; for the classical period, see Forsén 1996 passim; for fourth-
century Etruscan examples, see Turfa 2006, 96. The continuity of this practice in both Eastern and Western
Christianity is well known, but other devotional Überlebsel of this ancient attitude to images are less likely to
art and subject deployed on a public and even civic scale, where those implicated
in imitation were clearly intended to see their models.10
In most defixiones, whether public or private, the emphasis is on the passions of
the image, and the viewer or prototype is supposed to suffer changes somehow
analogous to the changes visible in the index, but alongside such practices we may
situate the very frequent ancient topos of an image that fascinates viewers into
imitation of its inanimate fixity by freezing them in wonder, fear, or desire.11 To
take only the clearest, most widely attested, and best studied of these phenomena,
we may look to the mythological and representational traditions surrounding
Medusa.12 The apotropaic gorgoneia affixed ubiquitously in antiquity, on temple
façades, shields, ships, workshops, and common household ware, seem intended,
in principle, to confront the victim head-on and induce panic and paralysis. They
are truly ‘terror masks’, in both active and passive senses, in that their bugged-out
eyes and distended rictus give them a terrified look but also, presumably, cause the
same countenance in the hostile viewer.13 The victim who looks straight at that
face, as it looks straight at him, finds himself frozen it its thrall, mirroring the
image’s lifelessness as he mirrors its expression.14 But the monster herself was
be recognized, especially when the image is more obviously embedded in a narrative context. For an
example of such an artefact, see Jacquelyn Tuerk’s essay (1999) on an early Byzantine amulet depicting
the woman with the issue of blood from Mark, which would have been used by a woman suffering from the
same ailment. By contemplating the two sides of the amulet, one showing the woman prostrating at Christ’s
feet and the other showing her standing orant and evidently whole, the viewer would have attempted to
analogize herself to the woman in the gospel and make the passage from sickness to health after the narrative
model prescribed by the sequential sides of the amulet.
10
The clearest example may be from the founding of Libyan Cyrene in the seventh century BCE. The
colonists and those staying behind in Thera bound themselves to the conditions of their agreement by
burning wax effigies, accompanied with the conditional self-imprecation that they themselves would ‘melt
away and dissolve like the images’ should they violate the terms of their charter. See Faraone 1993.
11
Steiner 2001 has an excellent survey of this range of phenomena; for the ‘terrifying look’ theme, see
especially 172–81, for hypnotized agalmatophilia, see especially 198–204, but the topic of thauma, as both
object and response, is richly explored everywhere in her work.
12
For recent treatments of this aspect of the Medusa tradition, see Steiner 2001, 170, 173, 296–7; Faraone
1992, 38; and most thoroughly, Vernant 1991, 111–50.
13
By indicating a potential distinction between different types of viewers, welcome and hostile, I mean to
offer a partial answer to Rainer Mack’s observation (2002) that the Gorgon’s very ubiquity is an indication
that she was not necessarily so dangerous to look upon. He argues that the full mythological context for the
disembodied Gorgon’s head implies that her representation in this form is emblematic not of her terror but
of her defeat at the hands of Perseus. I would insist, however, that even after decapitation and death,
Medusa’s head is terrible and proves lethal for some. Mack points to an interesting problem, but a simpler
solution would be to say that, for any given social interaction mediated by such an image, there may have
been some potential viewers who were indeed supposed to be warded off or terrified.
14
Already in the Iliad, the emphasis is on the icy fear produced in the enemy who views Medusa’s image.
In the aegis (8.740–2), along with ‘chilling Rout’ (κρυόεσσα Ἰωκή), appears the ‘dreadful and terrible’ (δεινή
τε σμερδνή τε) Gorgon’s head, and crowning Agamemnon’s shield (11.36–7), along with Fear and Dread
(Δεῖμός τε Φόβος τε), the Gorgon appears ‘horrid of aspect’ (βλοσυρῶπις) and ‘fearsomely glaring’ (δεινὸν
already a kind of living statue, with hands of bronze and wings of gold (Apollod.
2.4.3), so in this case the prototype is already a work of art, spawning copies both
in her replicas and in the terrified faces of her victims. ‘When you stare at Gorgo,
she turns you into a mirror where, by transforming you into stone, she gazes at her
own terrible face and recognizes herself in the double, the phantom you become
the moment you meet her eye.’15
If Medusa herself is already halfway to being an artefact, perhaps that explains
why she works so well as an icon of this kind of power in images, but there are
similar, if less insistent, stories associated with Dionysus and with the other gods
and their images.16 Nor was this type of art confined to the Greeks. The Romans
seem to have had a close equivalent: the apotropaic masks called oscilla.17 One
might presume that the oscilla were a Roman adaptation of Greek terror masks,
since any Roman with even a passing acquaintance with Greek culture would have
noticed the gorgoneia, not so much because of their frequency on buildings and
public art, which do not usually travel, as on inexpensive ware, which does.
However, like voodoo and other forms of homoeopathic magic, apotropaic
techniques were evidently constant across the historical and cultural continuum
of the ancient Mediterranean world, and the essential similarity between gorgoneia
and oscilla is more likely due to spontaneous polygenesis. In any case, the mes-
merizing painting of Jupiter in Terence’s Eunuch would have been interpreted by
an audience already operating under the assumption that images of the gods may
be uncannily arresting.
The widespread prevalence of such discourses in antiquity should never be lost
from view as we attempt to understand how the painting is taken to affect
Chaerea, but ultimately, of course, the painting in the Eunuch is not a volt sorcery
talisman or a terror mask. Though the boundary between magic and art was
porous in antiquity, or rather no boundary at all, perhaps there are other practices
with images that can be considered more apposite contextual comparanda. Vari-
ous sources testify to the Roman taste for architectural decoration on the principle
of matching image to space.18 Vitruvius (7.5.1–2) describes the usual practice of
δερκομένη). These descriptions based on implicit response are typical of the Medusa tradition, and the
viewer’s petrifaction is usually, as here, metaphorical, but in a particularly literal version, relayed by Pausanias
(9.34.2), a Boeotian priestess of Athena went into the sanctuary at night and, upon seeing Medusa’s head on
the goddess’ tunic, became stone.
15
Vernant 1991, 138.
16
For Dionysus, see Frontisi-Ducroux 1991, 189–92; for a generalization to facial images of all divinities,
see Steiner 2001, 174. For the eye cups as a form of ‘involved spectatorship’ in which the participant is made
to look through the eyes of a satyr, see Hedreen 2007.
17
The standard work on the oscilla, as on all early Roman mask culture, is still Meuli 1955; see especially
214–18. For a more recent treatment, with comparative references to the Hellenistic crossovers in Magna
Graecia, see Faraone 1992, 38.
18
For a recent survey of some aspects of this issue, see Perry 2005, 50–65.
decorating interiors with painted construction materials and decorating walks

with landscapes, and Pliny relates that the matching of painted representation to
intended use could be more exact, for example, wrestling and anointing rooms
adorned with portraits of athletes (HN 35.5). Of all such correspondences between
art and space, surely none is so well attested in antiquity as the use of erotic images
in cubicula, both in homes and in brothels.19 This phenomenon spanned all strata
of Roman society, from the humblest Pompeian lupanaria to Tiberius’ infamous
residence on Capri, where he kept in his bedroom (in cubiculo dedicavit, Suet.
Tib. 44) a spectacularly valuable portrait, painted by none other than the old
master Parrhasius, of Atalanta fellating Meleager. Such images might, of course,
have many intended functions, from simple amusement to advertising the owner’s
refinement or opulence, but their most obvious purpose, especially given their
location, is to arouse the viewer and encourage the enactment of a scene like the
one portrayed. If we are inclined to think of such an effect on the viewer as merely
psychological and wholly separate from homoeopathic magic, perhaps this is, in
part, because we do not generally ascribe a divine aetiology to sexual arousal. In
antiquity, the image does not operate on the viewer with the meagre instruments
of rational persuasion, and his (or her) involuntary reaction is met by a cultural
tradition dictating imitation as an appropriate form of response.
Alongside the raw power of erotic images to arouse viewers and thus indirectly
replicate themselves, there is a more intentional form of imitation sometimes
associated with sexually explicit art. The encyclopaedic fancy to catalogue and
describe the various sexual positions was well known to the Greeks and Romans,
an impulse that had found its fullest expression in the Hellenistic erotic handbooks
traditionally ascribed to the courtesans Astyanassa, Philaenis, and Elephantis.20
These books may not have been illustrated guides to the art of sex, but corres-
ponding pictures could always be supplied in an appropriate context.21 Ovid’s Ars
amatoria is obviously much more than a poetic version of this tradition, since its
didactics of love range well beyond a mere how-to of sexual positions, but the
poem does end on just this note, surveying the various modi and figurae, explain-
ing to the female reader why she might opt for each of the positions, and
describing how to do each one (3.771–88). Here, at the end of the Ars, the
praeceptor amoris is putting himself in the role of the older, experienced woman,
not only because of the straightforward parallelism with the didactic tradition of
19
The bibliography on figurae veneris and the significance of their placement is now quite vast.
Myerowitz 1992, Jacobelli 1995, Clarke 1998, and McGinn 2002 have proved most germane to this
project.
20
Parker 1992 has a clear survey of the evidence of these sex manuals, along with a perceptive attempt to
situate them within larger cultural preoccupations.
21
Though Brendel (1970, 63–4) does believe there would have been both illustrations and a numbering
system for the positions. See also Clarke 1998, 247.
books by female experts on sexual positions, but because of his own claim towards
the end of the previous book that old women make good lovers due to their
incomparable savoir-faire.22 ‘However you like it, they make love in a thousand
positions; no painting has found more ways’ (utque velis, Venerem iungunt per
mille figuras: | invenit plures nulla tabella modos, 2.679–80). Clearly the tabella he
has in mind is not a single-frame erotic painting, such as we generally have from
Pompeii, but rather a visible index of positions.
This kind of painting comes up again in Tristia 2, Ovid’s extended apologia
for Ars amatoria. His strategy is to defend his erotic vademecum by pointing to
all the other forms of didactic poetry on light themes (swimming, pottery, etc.)
or on potentially pernicious themes (gambling), none of which are branded
with censure like the Ars. Even Ennius and Lucretius allude to the adulteries of
the gods, and from Tibullus one can be instructed in the high arts of erotic
deception. Surely nothing Ovid has written could be as bad as the mimes.
Chapter 5 will explore the full significance of mime for the rape scene in the
Eunuch, but I will quote Tristia 2.497–524 here for its collocation of theatrical
performance, which may or may not be supposed morally contagious, and
didactic erotic painting:
quid, si scripsissem mimos obscena iocantes,

qui semper vetiti crimen amoris habent:
in quibus assidue cultus procedit adulter,
verbaque dat stulto callida nupta viro? 500
nubilis hos virgo matronaque virque puerque
spectat, et ex magna parte senatus adest.
nec satis incestis temerari vocibus aures,
adsuescunt oculi multa pudenda pati;
cumque fefellit amans aliqua novitate maritum
plauditur et magno palma favore datur;
quoque minus prodest, scaena est lucrosa poetae,
tantaque non parvo crimina praetor emit.
inspice ludorum sumptus, Auguste, tuorum:
empta tibi magno talia multa leges. 510
haec tu spectasti spectandaque saepe dedisti
(maiestas adeo comis ubique tua est)
luminibusque tuis, totus quibus utitur orbis,
22
Ovid’s persona is often either explicitly female or implicitly feminized (see Sharrock 2002). There have
been a number of recent studies on this aspect of the Heroides (see, for example, Spentzou 2003 and
Fulkerson 2005), but to my knowledge no one has examined this gender slippage in the Ars amatoria. The
praeceptor amoris has based his authority in experience (usus opus movet hoc, Ars 1.29), but book 3 will turn to
the instruction of women, and it is the anus at the end of book 2 whose veteran status makes her relevant to
this task. I am not, of course, arguing that the praeceptor is really a praeceptrix, but rather that the gender of
erotic authority is destabilized by this move.
scaenica vidisti lentus adulteria.

scribere si fas est imitantes turpia mimos,
materiae minor est debita poena meae.
an genus hoc scripti faciunt sua pulpita tutum,
quodque licet, mimis scaena licere dedit?
et mea sunt populo saltata poemata saepe,
saepe oculos etiam detinuere tuos. 520
scilicet in domibus nostris ut prisca virorum
artificis fulgent corpora picta manu,
sic quae concubitus varios Venerisque figuras
exprimat, est aliquo parva tabella loco.
What if I had written dirty jesting mimes,

Which always contain the sin of forbidden love,
In which a slick seducer is constantly strutting out
And a clever bride tricking her stupid husband?
Marriageable maiden, wife, husband, child—all watch these mimes,
And a big part of the senate is there too.
It’s not enough their ears are polluted with impure words;
Their eyes get used to suffering many shameful sights,
And when the lover has tricked the husband by some new contrivance,
They cheer and bestow the palm with great praise.
The less beneficial the stage is, the more profitable it is for the poet,
And the praetor buys such outrages dear.
Examine the books for your own games, Augustus,
You’ll find many such things bought at great price in your name.
You’ve watched them yourself and presented them often for others,
So great is your generosity in all things,
And with your eyes, twin lights to all the world,
You’ve calmly watched theatrical adulteries.
If it is permitted to write mimes that imitate shameful things,
My stuff deserves a lighter penalty.
Is it the stage that makes this type of writing safe?
Does the theatre bestow all license to the mimes?
My poems too have often been choreographed for the people,
Often they have captured even your eyes.
Of course in our houses, just as the venerable bodies of heroes
Shine, painted by the hand of an artist,
There is also a small painting in a certain place
Representing diverse couplings and positions of love.
Ovid’s overt point is that mime is not normally considered liable for censure as
indecent, and so a fortiori neither should the Ars amatoria. But throughout
Tristia 2, Ovid’s defence of Ars amatoria is consistently undermined by
playful misreadings that implicate himself and Augustus equally as corruptors of
morals.23 The more mischievous reading of this passage is suggested by Ovid’s

indignant description of theatrical indecency: mime probably is a corrupting
influence on its audience, and Ovid’s poetry too should be handled with care,
but it is all likely to be misread by Augustus, who is a careless reader and as corrupt
himself as the poems he pretends to judge. Mime is treated as morally contagious,
not just because of its obscenity (497), but because it is a theatrical performance,
which therefore aurally (503) and visually (504) assaults its spectators, including
the young and impressionable (501). However, if mime is deleterious then Augus-
tus is to blame for having presented so much of it (511). The eyes of the people
(oculi, 504) may have become inured to the indecency of mime, but that is because
the whole world uses Augustus’ eyes, which have themselves grown complacent at
theatrical immorality (luminibusque tuis, totus quibus utitur orbis, | scaenica vidisti
lentus adulteria, 513–14). If only Augustus would tear his eyes away from such
depravity and look into (inspice, 509) his accounts, he would be a better reader
(leges, 510) of the realities of literary entertainment at Rome.24 But whatever
damage may be done by the strictly theatrical aspect of mime is shared by
Ovid’s poetry, which has often been presented with accompanying dance (519).
Once again Augustus’ eyes (oculos, 520) are at issue, but this time their captive
gaze is trained on Ovid’s poetry in performance.
None of this works as a straightforward defence of Ars amatoria or flattery of
Augustus. It sets out to make mime seem more dangerous, but by describing the
Roman people and Augustus as corrupted by mime, it makes Augustus both
perpetrator and victim of mimetic contagion. Furthermore, by pointing to the
exact parallel between mime and his own poetry, in thematic content, in perform-
ance context, and in its effect on the hapless emperor, Ovid makes Ars amatoria
sound just as bad as the most pernicious mime. For the purposes of our study,
however, the most interesting thing about this passage is the abrupt shift from
Augustus’ eyes held captive by a dramatic rendering of Ovid’s admittedly salacious
poetry to a painting in a domestic setting presenting a panoply of sexual positions.25
Perhaps an array of erotic symplegmata collected together in one panel could be
intended simply to arouse all the more, as if by visual polyptoton, but the emphasis
on schematic variety makes this parva tabella sound more like a didactic illustration
23
See Williams 1994, 201–9.
24
Williams (1994, 179–93) argues that throughout Tristia 2 Ovid consistently hints that Augustus is too
busy as emperor to have the otium required to be an adequately careful reader.
25
The text of line 521 is unclear; the painting is either in our (nostris) houses or in your (vestris) house.
Myerowitz (1992, 155–6) has a full survey of the muddle of manuscript evidence and editorial indecision on
this question. I have followed Owen 1924 and the majority of recent editions (pace Luck 1967 and
Myerowitz) in reading nostris, but I consider neither reading implicitly better than the other. If we read
nostris then Ovid is situating Augustus’ and the Romans’ viewing of sexually explicit theatre within typical
Roman visual practice. If we read vestris then he is continuing the motif of Augustus’ docile gaze specifically
into the imperial bedroom.
of the various possible postures. The Ars amatoria is here defended by analogy to
(or affirmed to be as inspirational as) a type of painting that it had mentioned itself at
the end of book 2 and ekphrastically rendered at the end of book 3.
There is a distinctly Ovidian irony in the use of the particle scilicet as the first
word of line 521 to introduce the painting. In Metamorphoses 15 Ovid admits that
one might think all Caesar’s conquests and other achievements greater than
simply fathering Augustus, but that assessment—so runs the logic of his
panegyric—would obviously be wrong. The barb is the devilishly equivocal word
scilicet, which begins line 752 and introduces Caesar’s res gestae. As Steven Hinds
has argued for this passage, Ovid mobilizes the ambiguity of scilicet to connote
‘evident absurdity; or evident truth’ and to frustrate a narrowly pro- or anti-
Augustan reading.26 The word scilicet appears four times in Tristia 2, always in
the same metrical sedes, the first foot of a hexameter line, and every time, arguably,
with this same delicately ambiguous force.27 It is pointedly impossible to deter-
mine, then, whether the erotic painting is introduced as a ubiquitous example of a
visual practice parallel to and just as harmless as theatre, or whether it is ironically
submitted as a form of art obviously intended to inspire direct imitation, making it
an emblem for the admitted danger of theatre but also an illustration of Rome’s
current depravity, so that singling out the Ars amatoria is clearly unjust.
Let me emphasize that there is no reason to think that the domestic use of erotic
images was ever a novelty at Rome, any more than the use of figurative art more
generally, but as we shall see, the myth of a fall from early Roman artistic restraint
or even aniconism is recurrent and has cultural and political force at various times
in Roman history. Propertius gives a contemporary and more explicitly nostalgic
response to the same issue (2.6.25–36):
templa Pudicitiae quid opus statuisse puellis,

si cuivis nuptae quidlibet esse licet?
quae manus obscenas depinxit prima tabellas
et posuit casta turpia visa domo,
illa puellarum ingenuos corrupit ocellos
nequitiaeque suae noluit esse rudis. 30
ah gemat in tenebris, ista qui protulit arte
orgia sub tacita condita laetitia!
non istis olim variabant tecta figuris:
tum paries nullo crimine pictus erat.
sed nunc immeritum velavit aranea fanum
et mala desertos occupat herba deos.
26
Hinds 1987, 25.
27
The other three instances are in lines 17, 107, and 219. Williams (1994, 176–7) has already suggested this
reading of the scilicet in line 107.
What’s the point of founding a temple to Chastity for the girls,

If anything goes for any bride?
The hand that first painted wanton pictures
And put shameful things on display in a decent home—
That hand corrupted the innocent eyes of girls,
Not wanting them to be ignorant of its own naughtiness.
Oh, let him groan in darkness, who brought forth by his art
Mysteries hidden beneath silent bliss!
Once houses were not decorated with those filthy illustrations,
Back then no wall was painted with disgrace.
But now spider webs enshroud the neglected temples
And vile weeds overrun our forgotten gods.
Once again the didactic significance of erotic painting is clear.28 Its effect on
society has been apocalyptic, revealing to tender eyes things hidden since the
foundation of the world, but veiling from view (velavit, 25) things that should have
been open, and meriting wretched obscurity (tenebris, 31) for its progenitor. Amid
this play of visibility and invisibility, the joke is that none of this is strictly relevant
to Cynthia, who is not the poet’s nupta and whose house was never a casta domus.
As the opening lines of the poem reveal, Cynthia has more gentleman callers than
any of the great Hellenistic hetaerae, including Menander’s Thais, ‘in whom all
Athens took its pleasure’ (in qua populus lusit Ericthonius, 4). The irony here is
just the opposite of that in Tristia 2. Ovid invokes the erotodidactic painting
overtly to excuse himself, Augustus, and the Romans, but there was a criticism
latent in his deployment of the picture. Propertius, on the other hand, mentions
the erotic painting ostensibly for a stern reflection on moral decline, but his tirade
on how dirty pictures corrupt good girls by teaching them things they should not
know is totally irrelevant to his affair with Cynthia. In fact, Propertius’ amata is
less like a virginal bride than she is like Menander’s Thais, for not only is she not
innocent, she is also not real.29 Menander’s Thais is described as thronged by a
crowd (turba, 3), but as the next line reveals, this crowd was none other than
the Athenian people at play (populus lusit, 4). Not a mob of suitors, then, but a city
at the theatre. Propertius invokes what was, as we shall see, a traditional moralistic
28
Francis Cairns has argued that there may be an allusion to Gallus’ erotodidaxis in many places in the
Monobiblos, see especially Cairns 2006, 116–18. For this passage alone, Cairns detects a Gallan flavour both
for the vocabulary and the metrical sedes of nequitiae (line 30) and laetitia (line 32), see Cairns 2006, 95 and
205 respectively.
29
It is tempting to conjecture that Propertius may mean Menander’s Thais specifically as she appears in
Terence’s Eunuch. Barsby 1999b argues that the post-comic exclusus amator tradition, as it emerges in
Catullus and elegy, is due directly to Phaedria’s dialogue with Parmeno in Act 1, a scene adapted by Horace
(Serm. 2.3.259–71) and Persius (5.161–75) and quoted several times by Cicero and Quintilian. Propertius
certainly sounds like Phaedria here, but more particularly he accuses Cynthia of inventing false relations (7),
and he suspects that she has among her entourage a man in drag (14).
topos about the novelty of certain types of images and about the danger of mimetic
contagion, but he does so to make fun of this attitude towards art or to make
fun of his persona as elegiac amator or both. In any case, the irony of his treatment
does not diminish his value as evidence of the didactic use of erotic painting
or of the currency of Roman concern about the imitative responsiveness of
young viewers.
Roman brothels certainly had sexually explicit paintings and there may be
material evidence of brothels decorated on a similar principle to Ovid’s parva
tabella, presenting a catalogue of positions to inspire unimaginative clients or to
enable communication between people who may not have spoken the same
language, but this evidence is unclear and the interpretation of these images as
didactic is highly conjectural.30 A closer comparandum for Ovid’s thumbnail
sketch catalogue may be found by returning to Tiberius’ pleasure dome on
Capri. According to Suetonius, Tiberius ‘decorated bedrooms variously arrayed
with pictures and statuettes of the most provocative paintings and figures and
stocked them with the books of Elephantis, so that his sex partners would never be
stuck without a model of whatever position he had ordered’ (cubicula plurifariam
disposita tabellis ac sigillis lascivissimarum picturarum et figurarum adornavit
librisque Elephantidis instruxit, ne cui in opera edenda exemplar impe[t]ratae
schemae deesset, Suet. Tib. 43). Where Ovid’s parva tabella was implicitly in a
bedroom and intended for direct imitation, Tiberius’ images are explicitly so, and
the connection to didactic written erotica is also made plain.
The relevance of this material for the Eunuch may not be immediately apparent.
The painting in the Eunuch, after all, is not part of a serial catalogue of sexual
positions. It is, however, a sex scene painted above a bed in a brothel. By its
placement if not by its nature alone it is clearly intended to arouse, and once
aroused, the bedmates in such a cubiculum may be presumed to enact their own
love scene. Yet Chaerea’s response is not simply one of arousal and incidental
30
Perhaps the best contender for erotodidactic painting in a brothel-like context is room 7 of the
Suburban Baths in Pompeii. Discovered in 1986 and excavated by Luciana Jacobelli, the Suburban Baths
are unusual in not having separate men’s and women’s sections. Most remarkably, the apodyterium contains
a numbered series of sixteen boxes with a different sexual position represented above each box. Jacobelli
(1995, 70) connected these images with the so called spinitriae, small bronze tokens of completely
indeterminate purpose, with a number from one to sixteen on one side and on the other side a different
sexual position for each number. Clarke (1998, 247) has suggested that these taxonomic numbering systems
point to a shared source in the Hellenistic sex manuals, but that the boxes in the Suburban Baths are just a
place to store clothes and the spinitriae are just game pieces, so the system is functioning here not to teach,
but only to amuse viewers. I am inclined to agree with Clarke’s assessment, but even if patrons of the
Suburban Baths could not be expected to order sexual positions by number and enact them there in the
apodyterium (contra Guzzo and Scarano Ussani 2000, 17–25), it is quite possible that venal sex was available
somewhere in the baths, especially if, as Jacobelli (1995, 94–7) argues, the Suburban Baths were used by men
and women simultaneously. For baths doubling as brothels, see McGinn 2002, 12.
recapitulation, but one of avowed imitation. There is no way to know how far
back in Roman culture the didactic use of erotic art may have gone or how
widespread it was at any time. Suetonius’ condemnation of Tiberius seems to be
directed not to the practice itself but to the outrageous scale at which it was
executed, and Ovid’s reference to the modestly erotic painting does not seem to
be intended as an indictment at all, nor is there any suggestion that it is a novelty.
In fact, Ovid sets the parva tabella among a highbrow entourage of other
Hellenistic types, predominantly images of heroes and gods (Tr. 2.521–8), and
Tiberius’ inclusion of the books of Elephantis situates his porn collection as the
composite visual aid to the specialist knowledge of the appropriate Hellenistic
expert. Terence’s audience may well have known the didactic use of erotica from
their own experiences in Roman brothels, but even if they did not, if this later
testimony is any indication, they probably recognized it as especially appropriate
to the house of a Greek hetaera.
Our evidence of how and where paintings of any kind were used in the second
century BCE is frustratingly sparse, but at least for later periods the use of erotic
paintings in Roman bedrooms was evidently widespread enough to enable sophis-
ticated play with the conceit of nested artistic response, reminiscent of some of the
dynamics we will be tracing out from the painting in Terence’s Eunuch. For
example, on the south wall of room 43 in the House of the Centenary (IX.8.6)
in Pompeii there is a painting of a couple in the mulier equitans position with the
woman facing her lover, who is propped up slightly on his left elbow.31 On the
wall behind the couple, above them and to their right, is a dark rectangular patch
of underpainting—all that remains of what was clearly a pinax on the fictional back
wall of the lovers’ room. Removal from its original site for hasty storage in the
locked Gabinetto degli Oggetti Osceni probably did more damage than time or
volcanoes to the delicately applied secco that would have been used for this tiny
picture-within-the-picture, so there is no way to be sure what was represented
there, but scholars have generally concluded, from analogous images in other
media, that it would have been an erotic painting, probably not too different from
the scene within which it appears.32
The couple’s attention seems occupied at the moment, but if they were to look
out of their painting and across the room, they would see an image strikingly
similar to their own, for on the north wall of the same room there is another
painting of a couple, also mulier equitans with the man leaning on his left elbow,
though now the woman is turned around with her back towards her lover
(adversa).33 Again there is a dark rectangle on their back wall, this time to the
31
Marcadé 1965, 79.
32
See Myerowitz 1992, 145–6 and, more forcefully, Clarke 1998, 166–7.
33
Marcadé 1965, 126.
left of them. Scholars have, of course, noted the similarity of these paintings, and
some have supposed that two such pictures in one room are enough to designate it
a camera d’amore.34 But such assignments of use are conjectural; there is no way
to know whether room 43 was especially intended for sex. If it was a room in
which people might legitimately be expected to copulate, then the mise en abîme
in the paintings was literally projected into reality. If, on the other hand, the room
was not apt for sex, then the paintings would seem to tease the viewer by showing
enactment as a fitting response to the presence of painted sex and then playfully
doubling this presence, flanking the viewer from north and south.
However the response of real viewers in room 43 is meant to be constellated,
there is a significant emphasis on the painted lovers, especially the women, as
potential viewers of art. We do not fully understand the cultural valence of the
mulier equitans position in antiquity, and there has been some recent disagree-
ment about the attitude to women it conveys.35 But whether the position implies
the woman’s subjugation or her liberation, it certainly requires a greater level of
activity on her part than almost any other position. The two erotic paintings in
room 43 illustrate the two possibilities for the woman straddling her partner: she
may either face him or she may face away from him. Either way, the sex consists of
her doing something, so it may be significant that in both images the painting-
within-the-painting is situated in front of her. To be sure, in neither picture is she
portrayed studying the painting in her room, but the shift in placement of the mise
en abîme is one of the few differences between the two paintings, creating, I would
argue, an emphasis on the visibility of these tiny paintings for the women who are
perhaps in a position of needing instruction, inspiration, or encouragement.
There are several other examples from Roman antiquity of tabellae nested in
larger erotic images, but the most striking parallel to the paintings from the
House of the Centenary is on the back of a first-century CE mirror found on
34
Dexter 1975, 150. Clarke (1998, 161–4) is critical of Dexter’s label, since there are many other, non-
erotic paintings surrounding these panels and the layout of the rooms does not particularly suggest an
exclusively erotic use.
35
Paul Veyne (1978, 53–4) sees it as the position for lazy, chauvinistic men and deferential women, since
the woman must do all the work and service her passive partner, who is left idle and free of the responsi-
bilities of erotic labour. Catherine Johns (1982, 136–7), on the other hand, sees the prevalence of this position
in Roman art as an indicator of the sexual emancipation of women, for it puts them metaphorically as well as
literally on top. The woman who ‘rides’ her partner implicitly occupies the equestrian status, and she has
unparalleled freedom of movement and control, since the position itself necessitates ‘her very active
cooperation’. Clarke (1998, 217–19) criticizes both these readings for their anachronistic assumptions
about this position. He notes that painting would be more likely to portray the woman on top, since this
position more fully exposes the parts of the woman’s body he presumes most interesting to the viewer. If
Clarke is right that the mulier equitans position naturally lends itself to representation because it lays open
the most arousing aspects of the act for the viewer’s gaze, then we have all the more to account for the
apparent absence of this position from erotic images of some eras (see Dover 1978, 107).
the Palatine.36 A man and woman are having sex and she twists around to kiss him,
while on the wall behind them a shuttered panel portrays another erotic image.
The sexual positions of the two couples are not identical, though they are both
rear-entry. The woman’s hairstyle is the same, and in both images the woman
looks back at her lover. What is most interesting is that the woman’s line of sight, if
not obstructed by her lover’s head, runs straight to the painting on her wall. There
is, of course, a difference in medium between wall painting and engraving, so the
mise en abîme effect is not quite as seamless as in the paintings from the House of
the Centenary, which may function for the people in room 43 just as the paintings
within them do for the lovers. However, the mirror must be understood as an
essential trapping of its owner’s toilette and can easily be imagined scattered
somewhere within her room, just as on the mirror the woman’s intimate posses-
sions (her slippers, footstool, puppy, bowl, pitcher, etc.) are shown occupying the
same space as her lovemaking.37 In other words there may be within this image a
hint that mirrors are just the sort of thing one might find lying around in a
woman’s cubiculum, especially when she has been expecting her lover, in which
case the mirror stands in the same relation to its owner as the painting does to the
woman on the mirror.38
The shift in medium is also more suggestive than it may seem at first. The
painting, by virtue of being included in an engraving, is only notionally a painting. By
being brought into the engraving it has been upgraded from the two-dimensionality
of a painted image to the semi-three-dimensionality of an engraving. If the mirror’s
owner falls within its spell and enacts in her own cubiculum a scene somewhat like
the one in the mirror, the projection to full three-dimensionality will be complete.
This same possibility of the woman’s self-recognition, including the play with
dimensional shift, informs the dynamic of the other side of the mirror, where the
owner, who has been encouraged to identify with the woman on the mirror
now becomes the woman in the mirror, this time in an image of depth rendered
as surface.
The mirror’s dimensional play may also explain the significance of the positions
of the two pairs of lovers. As we noted earlier they are not identical, but they are
quite similar (both rear-entry with the woman craning her neck around to look
back at her lover), and there is an emphasis on the woman in the room looking
back at the tabella, where her gaze would be met by that of her painted counter-
part, looking back past her lover and out of the painting. One consequence of
combining the similarity of their positions with the visual line between the two
36
A photograph of this mirror-back may be found at Clarke 1998, 44. For such images in ceramic media,
see Marcadé 1965, 83 and 85C.
37
On the mirror’s associations with the feminine world, see Bartsch 2006, 29–30.
38
Goldhill (2001, 174) makes a similar point, as does Myerowitz (1992, 145–7).
women is that they are near inversions of each other on the right/left axis or, as we
say, ‘mirror images’. The two women seem to be looking back at each other, but
the one is looking over her right shoulder and the other is looking over her left
shoulder. The mirror’s capacity to distort by reversal of right and left was infamous
in antiquity, and given the representational context of these lovers on a mirror, it is
hard to ignore the reversal of polarity in their positions.39 Note, however, that if
the woman is looking up at her lover and along the line of her body she cannot,
within the fiction of the three-dimensional room, also be looking back at the
tabella. The fact that she is in reality also facing the tabella is due to the flattening
of her room into two dimensions for the engraving. If the tabella were actually
conceived as a mirror on the back wall of her room, not only would there be no
variation in their postures, but for the viewer standing in our notional position in
front of the bed, the only reversal would be a Z-axis inversion. In other words, we
would see the back of her in the tabella-mirror, but there would be no inversion of
right and left. In order to see the tabella as a kind of mirror image we have to
imagine that her room is (as it actually is) flat. The woman in the tabella is a mirror
image of her only to the extent that we see it not from ‘our perspective’ in the
reconstructed three-dimensional room, but from her perspective within the two-
dimensional space. The other side of the mirror renders us as flatlanders, whose
three-dimensionality is an illusion, but on this side of the mirror we are induced to
see mirroring from the perspective of a flatlander and simultaneously to allow the
illusion of three-dimensionality to continue. The fact that we have no trouble
intuitively seeing the tabella’s right/left inversion as a mirror image indicates how
well the mirror succeeds in putting us in the woman’s place.40 The tiny painting at
the top centre of this bronze mirror back, once noticed, alters the meaning of
image and gaze, first for the lovers and then for the owner and her partner and
finally for anyone who looks into the other side of the mirror. In this way, it is an
excellent comparison for the painting at the centre of the Eunuch, for as we shall
see, the painting is first replicated within Chaerea’s intrigue, then it becomes a
model for how artifice will work throughout the play, and finally, teasingly, it
threatens projection on to the audience.
39
On inversion in mirrors, see Pl. Tht. 193c–d and Ti. 46a–b, Lucr. 4.292–301, Ptol. Optica 3.96, Apul.
Apol. 16.3; see also Bartsch 2006, 38.
40
In the Villa of the Mysteries there is a similar representation of a mirror image that bends the rules of
optics to implicate the viewer. One of the last frames of the narrative series shows the now initiated woman
at toilette with her hairdresser, while a cupid, standing ‘further back’ in the painting, holds a mirror up for
her, and her mirror image, as one would expect, gazes out of the mirror back towards her. However,
impossibly, the woman herself is not looking at the mirror. Instead, she gazes out into the room, apparently
at the viewer (Herbig 1958, 37). So the viewer is transposed into the role of the mirror or perhaps of the
initiated woman looking into the mirror. On the embedding of this dynamic in the narrative of the rest of
the room, see John Henderson 1996, 260.

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN THE EPHESIACA
This chapter has surveyed a wide range of cultic and erotic objects of art that in
one way or another work by recreating themselves in the behaviour of the notional
viewer. Some of these have been real artworks that have survived to us or are
widely attested types and others are singular literary creations, conjured with text
and existing only in the imagination of author and reader. This latter category, the
instances of mimetic contagion in Ovid and Propertius for example, we have
considered primarily as isolated events, collateral evidence for the phenomenon,
rather than asking what role mimetic contagion, thematized in these moments,
plays in the Tristia or the Monobiblos more generally. Since this is precisely the
approach I wish to take with the Eunuch, it will be worth considering another,
remarkably similar literary moment to show how the logic of mimetic contagion
may propagate out from an embedded artwork and suggest itself as a thematic
principle in a work of literature.
A boy and a girl gaze up together at an erotic mythical representation hanging
above the bed in which they will soon consummate their union. This scene sketch
could describe backstage events midway through Terence’s Eunuch, the unseen
scene that provides the focus of this book, but it also fits a moment in the first book
of the Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus.41 The lovers are the newly wedded
Habrocomes and Anthia, and portrayed in embroidery on the canopy above their
marriage bed are Ares and Aphrodite being brought together by Eros for their tryst.
ἦν δὲ αὐτοῖς ὁ θάλαμος πεποιημένος· κλίνη χρυσῆ στρώμασιν ἔστρωτο πορφυροῖς καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς
κλίνης Βαβυλωνία ἐπεποίκιλτο σκηνή· παίζοντες Ἔρωτες, οἱ μὲν Ἀφροδίτην θεραπεύοντες (ἦν δὲ
καὶ Ἀφροδίτης εἰκών), οἱ δὲ ἱππεύοντες Ναβαταίαις στρουθοῖς, οἱ δὲ στεφάνους πλέκοντες, οἱ δὲ
ἄνθη φέροντες· ταῦτα ἐν τῷ ἑτέρῳ μέρει τῆς σκηνῆς· ἐν δὲ τῷ ἑτέρῳ Ἄρης ἦν οὐχ ὡπλισμένος,
ἀλλ᾽ ὡς πρὸς ἐρωμένην τὴν Ἀφροδίτην κεκοσμημένος, ἐστεφανωμένος, χλαμύδα ἔχων· Ἔρως
αὐτὸν ὡδήγει, λαμπάδα ἔχων ἡμμένην. ὑπ᾽ αὐτῇ τῇ σκηνῇ κατέκλιναν τὴν Ἀνθίαν, ἀγαγόντες
πρὸς τὸν Ἀβροκόμην, ἐπέκλεισάν τε τὰς θύρας. (1.8.2–3)
The chamber had been prepared for them. A golden bed was spread with purple sheets and
above the bed a Babylonian canopy had been embroidered. There were Erotes at play,
some serving Aphrodite (there was also an image of Aphrodite), others riding Nabataean
ostriches, others plaiting garlands, others bringing flowers. This was on one part of the
canopy. On the other was Ares, not dressed for battle, but adorned to make love to
Aphrodite, garlanded, wearing a cloak. Eros led him on the way holding a burning
torch. It was beneath this canopy that they brought Anthia to Habrocomes and laid her
out, and then they closed the doors.
41
The world of New Comedy is one of the most important sources for the ancient novel (for a compact
survey of formal affinities and the recent scholarship, see Ruiz-Montero 2003, 52–4), but the similarities
between this moment in the Ephesiaca and the Eunuch, along with these texts’ shared interest in mimetic
contagion, need not be due to direct generic influence.
At the simplest level the image is suggestive of the sex the gods and the newlyweds
are about to enjoy. Thus the canopy establishes a parity between the two couples,
though it is not immediately clear whether we should understand its function vis-
à-vis the human lovers as predictive or persuasive.
As a specimen of anticipatory ekphrasis, this description of the canopy is hardly
unique in the novels. Indeed, Bildeinsätze are both frequent and focal in almost all
the surviving ancient novels, and they are usually somehow related to the plot. In
some cases these works of art merely warn the characters of their impending future
and thus are functionally akin to dreams and oracles, but in others they intervene
more directly in the ‘real’ world by recreating themselves in the lives of their
viewers.42 A particularly obvious example of this second type is the painting of
Andromeda in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica 4.8. The Ethiopian queen was gazing at
this painting as she and the king made love, so the image of the naked Androm-
eda, white skin and all, was impressed on the child they conceived.43 The queen’s
response to the painting is not merely aesthetic or discursive. The image propa-
gates itself in her body, and hints at a much broader pattern in the novel, which
Tim Whitmarsh has called ‘ekphrastic “contagion”: the power of the visual icon to
infect its surrounding discourse with ontological and perceptual uncertainty’.44
Descriptions of works of art that ‘seep’ into the story may be traced throughout the
Aethiopica, so the queen’s interaction with the painting comes to seem programmatic
for the more general dependence of life on art within the novel. This is especially clear
since, as Shadi Bartsch has noted, this unusual conception is related in book 4, but it
is actually the earliest event in the story and the cause of all future circumstances,
making it directly parallel to the novelistic convention of the introductory painting
ekphrasis, though in typical Heliodoran fashion it is playfully denatured by its
transposition to the middle of the novel.45 Furthermore, the metapoetic aspect of
this remarkable tale of art and response is made clear when we remember that the
story is embroidered on a ribbon in the hard-to-read Ethiopian hieratic script and is
being read, or rather recounted as read, by the arch-deceiver Calasiris. Artifactuality,
narration, and interpretation converge here, so that the reader is no safer from
ekphrastic contagion than any other character in the novel.46
42
Foundational for the study of ekphrasis in the novels as more than an ornament (or, as some would have
it, a blemish!) is Bartsch 1989. More recently in this vein, but only for the Aethiopica, see Whitmarsh 2002.
43
The impression of an image on a foetus at conception has widespread ancient and modern attestation,
but this example is vivid enough that Michael Reeve had dubbed the phenomenon more generally ‘the
Andromeda Effect’ (Reeve 1989). This may indeed be one of the most frequently claimed forms of mimetic
contagion, and the collocation of mythological painting, sex, and imitation is immediately suggestive for our
reading of the Eunuch.
44
Whitmarsh 2002, 111. 45
Bartsch 1989, 48.
46
The capacity of an image viewed by a woman to impress itself on the child she conceives need not always
suggest less visual forms of imitation or become generally programmatic, but the Aethiopica was not the only
time it did. See for example Dion. Hal. On Imitation fr. VI, pp. 203–4 U.-R. (Hunter 2009, 111–20).
The Aethiopica is a highpoint of the ancient genre, and Heliodorus deploys art
and its effects with great subtlety and sophistication. By contrast it is not surprising
that the canopy ekphrasis in the Ephesiaca has been neglected, but even in this
undeniably humble specimen similar dynamics may be recognized.47 The por-
trayal of the assignation of Ares and Aphrodite within an inset work of art has an
obvious precedent in the second song of Demodocus (Od. 8.266–332). As the
blind bard who sings of gods and men, Demodocus seems a fairly clear figure of
the Homeric poet himself, so too in the Greek romance, where ekphrasis is
marked as a touchstone of the novelist’s art, the description of the introductory
erotic artwork functions as a heraldic miniature of what novelists do. Thus the
canopy ekphrasis in the Ephesiaca is similar to Demodocus’ song both in mytho-
logical subject and in metapoetic function. This generically self-referential
dynamic is even recognized within the novel by Habrocomes, who, lying beneath
the canopy, exclaims that Anthia is ‘more fortunate than any woman ever nar-
rated’ (τῶν πώποτε λαλουμένων εὐτυχεστέρα, 1.9.3).
The novels are notoriously fond of ‘graphic analogue from myth’, as Grundy
Steiner calls it, whereby a character in the story, particularly the ingénue, is
assimilated to a figure from traditional mythology.48 However, the Ephesiaca is
unusually restrained in this regard, with only one explicit comparison: at the
beginning of the novel, before she meets Habrocomes, Anthia is compared to
Artemis (1.2).49 Yet after tonight the maiden goddess of the hunt will no longer
be an appropriate paradigm for Anthia. Even as the marriage bed itself despoils
her of her old station in life, the image on the canopy above has the function of
providing her with a new divine model. Anthia is brought in and presented to
Habrocomes, and, as they lie together in hesitation, on the canopy above them
Erotes prepare Aphrodite for her union with Ares. Some of them ride strouthoi,
47
The exception to this general neglect is Shea 1998, which takes the canopy ekphrasis as a starting point
for understanding the novel, but goes in a very different direction than I do here. Her suggestion is that the
Ephesiaca has been misfiled as a novel, when it is really a serial ekphrasis. She imagines a sympotic
performance context in which the speaker goes from one artwork to another in the patron’s dining room,
stitching together a narrative to unify the images into a single love story, a kind of Stations of the Romance.
This explanation would provide an alternative to the epitome theory to account for the vertiginous
inconsistency in narrative pace and the intensely episodic character of the plot, since the text that has
come down to us would be simply the script of one such performance. I find this suggestion of generic
misidentification intriguing, and it is an attractive way of avoiding the conclusion that Xenophon is a bad
novelist or that we only have an epitome of his novel, but without any further evidence that such a form of
entertainment existed and some way of connecting the Ephesiaca to it, her theory must remain a speculation.
48
Steiner 1969.
49
Perhaps it is unwise to assume this was intended to be the only graphic analogue in the novel, since, as
has sometimes been argued, the novel we now have may be an epitome or partially epitomated form of the
original. The ‘epitome theory’ was introduced in Bürger 1892 and became dominant for a while, but since
Hägg 1966, many scholars have been less convinced, and most now implicitly treat the work as a unity. For
the complex arguments on both sides of this issue and a full bibliography, see O’Sullivan 1995.
the phallic bird par excellence, and some of them bring in flowers (anthe) in
etymological anticipation of Anthia and her defloration.50 Anthia’s assimilation to
Aphrodite goes beyond her loss of virginity. There is also a shift in her character,
evident in the immediately following scene (1.9) when she becomes sexually
aggressive and upbraids Habrocomes for his unmanly delay in making love to
her. The replacement of Artemis with Aphrodite corresponds not just to Anthia’s
objective change of station, but to an ethical makeover which began when she first
saw Habrocomes and is enforced to its conclusion under the canopy.51
The novel has done much in the first half of book 1 to prepare us for the critical
role this image plays. The story opens with an enthusiastic description of Habro-
comes, whose beauty rivals the gods’ and emboldens him to spurn the power
of Eros:
Ἔρωτά γε μὴν οὐδὲ ἐνόμιζεν εἶναι θεόν, ἀλλὰ πάντη ἐξέβαλεν ὡς οὐδὲν ἡγούμενος, λέγων ὡς οὐκ
ἄν ποτε οὐ<δὲ> εἷς ἐρασθείη οὐδὲ ὑποταγείη τῷ θεῷ μὴ θέλων· εἰ δέ που ἱερὸν ἢ ἄγαλμα Ἔρωτος
εἶδε, κατεγέλα, ἀπέφαινέ τε ἑαυτὸν Ἔρωτος παντὸς καλλίονα καὶ κάλλει σώματος καὶ δυνάμει.
καὶ εἶχεν οὕτως· ὅπου γὰρ Ἀβροκόμης ὀφθείη, οὔτε ἄγαλμα <καλὸν> κατεφαίνετο οὔτε εἰκὼν
ἐπῃνεῖτο. (1.1.5–6)
Eros he considered no god at all, but completely discounted him and reckoned him of no
importance, saying no one would ever fall in love or be subordinated to the god unless he
wanted to. Whenever he saw a temple or statue of Eros he would make fun of it and
proclaim himself more handsome than any Eros, both in the loveliness of his body and in
power. And it was true, for wherever Habrocomes was seen, no statue appeared lovely and
no image was praised.
Even in statuary proxy Eros takes umbrage at being upstaged and, swearing
vengeance on Habrocomes, finds his most irresistible weapon in Anthia. Imme-
diately after the ekphrasis of Anthia in Artemisian form, we learn that some
thought she actually was Artemis and others held her to be ‘someone else
fashioned by the goddess’ (ἄλλην τινὰ ὑπὸ τῆς θεοῦ πεποιημένην, 1.2.7). Habro-
comes, likewise, is proclaimed a ‘matchless representation of a handsome god’
(οἷος οὐδὲ εἷς καλοῦ μίμημα θεοῦ, 1.2.8). Hearing each other described as works of
art, it is no wonder that each longed to see (ἐπεθύμει ἰδεῖν, 1.2.9) the other.
When at last they do set eyes on each other, the optical infection is mutual and
immediate:
ἐνταῦθα ὁρῶσιν ἀλλήλους, καὶ ἁλίσκεται Ἀνθία ὑπὸ τοῦ Ἀβροκόμου, ἡττᾶται δὲ ὑπὸ Ἔρωτος
Ἀβροκόμης καὶ ἐνεώρα τε συνεχέστερον τῇ κόρῃ καὶ ἀπαλλαγῆναι τῆς ὄψεως ἐθέλων οὐκ
50
On the strouthos as Aphrodite’s bird, see Pollard 1977, 29 and 147. On these anthe as figura etymologica,
see Cueva 2004, 42.
51
Note that in her Artemis phase, Anthia’s eyes were timid or austere (φοβεροί ) as befits a woman in
control of her desires (ὡς σώφρονος, 1.2.6). By the time she chides Habrocomes for his cowardly hesitation in
bed she has a new tutelary deity now and her bearing has changed accordingly.
ἐδύνατο· κατεῖχε δὲ αὐτὸν ἐγκείμενος ὁ θεός. διέκειτο δὲ καὶ Ἀνθία πονήρως, ὅλοις μὲν καὶ
ἀναπεπταμένοις τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς τὸ Ἀβροκόμου κάλλος εἰσρέον δεχομένη. (1.3.1–2)
Then they see each other: Anthia is captivated by Habrocomes and Habrocomes is bested
by Eros. He kept looking at the girl and, though he wanted to, was unable to tear himself
away from the sight; the god lay heavy on him and held him in possession. It was bad for
Anthia, too, as Habrocomes’ beauty flowed in at her enrapt, wide-open eyes and she
received it.
They just want to keep looking at each other and they only leave off doing so with
difficulty, but even then ‘reflection on the sight of each other infiltrates them’
(ἔννοια ἐκείνους ὑπῄει τῆς ὄψεως θατέρου, 1.3.4). Habrocomes recognizes that he is
being punished for ridiculing Eros, and he tries, briefly, to separate himself from
his passion by distinguishing between his eyes and himself: ‘To your eyes, Hab-
rocomes, is Anthia beautiful, but not to yourself, if you wish it so’ (τοῖς σοῖς
ὀφθαλμοῖς, Ἀβροκόμη, εὔμορφος Ἀνθία, ἀλλ᾽, ἐὰν θέλῃς, οὐχὶ σοί, 1.4.3). Such resist-
ance only makes Eros redouble his efforts and Habrocomes is soon forced to
admit defeat. They both pass the night in this misery, suffering the lingering
effects of the stamp they had inflicted on each other at first sight: ‘They had
before their eyes the sight of each other, moulding their images on each other’s
souls’ (εἶχον δὲ πρὸ ὀφθαλμῶν τὰς ὄψεις τὰς ἑαυτῶν, τὰς εἰκόνας ἐπὶ τῆς ψυχῆς
ἀλλήλων ἀναπλάττοντες, 1.5.1).
The description of characters, particularly beautiful women, in terms reminis-
cent of artworks, and the fascination with the mechanics of optical impression, are
both typical of the ancient novel.52 In the Ephesiaca these topoi lead directly into
the canopy ekphrasis and prepare the reader to expect both a high degree of
alignment between art and life and a danger of infection through vision. Though
this infection is explained in psychological terms, it is a strongly physicalist
psychology, with constant reference to the organs and mechanical processes of
perception, and when Habrocomes once tries to make a distinction between his
eyes and himself, he is immediately proven wrong.53 The attentive reader will
expect, therefore, that the image on the canopy is more than a pretty ornament
for the wedding chamber and will not be surprised when it turns out to be
broadly determinative of the roles Habrocomes and Anthia will play for the rest
of the novel.
52
See, for example, the ekphrasis of Charicleia in Aethiopica 1.2, a description in many ways similar to the
description of Anthia in Ephesiaca 1.2. For issues relating to vision in Achilles Tatius, see now Morales 2004.
53
The novels stand out for the consistency of their interest in vision, but the physicality of their account
of visual perception is hardly unique, and the consequences of such models of vision are common to many
ancient texts; see Goldhill 1996 and 2001. Both in its final form and in various stages of preparation, Bartsch
2006 has been particularly important for my understanding of this issue.
An innocent reading of the canopy—surely the lovers’ reading as they gaze up at

it—would only suggest an erotic context appropriate for the night of love they are
about to enjoy (1.9.9), but this straightforward interpretation is frustrated by the
prominence of Eros in the image, both in plural form thronging Aphrodite and in
singular form conducting Ares. From the beginning of the novel, as we have seen,
Eros sets the plot in motion as retribution for Habrocomes’ pride, and when
Habrocomes finally capitulates and confesses his subjection, the god is not
appeased: ‘This is what he said, but Eros was still angry and plotted to inflict a
great punishment on Habrocomes for his arrogance’ (ταῦτα ἔλεγεν, ὁ δὲ Ἔρως ἔτι
ὠργίζετο καὶ μεγάλην τῆς ὑπεροψίας ἐνενοεῖτο τιμωρίαν εἰσπράξασθαι τὸν Ἀβροκόμην,
1.4.5). The punishment is never explicitly stated, but as they are already in love, the
god’s scheming must point to something beyond that. When their parents consult
the oracle they are told that Habrocomes and Anthia are suffering from the same
disease, which will also be the source of their cure, and that terrible suffering and
endless toils await them afterwards, but eventually they will offer gifts to Isis as
saviour and have a better lot in the end (1.6.2). Eros is not named here but it seems
clear that the divine source of their suffering now and later is the same, as opposed
to the goddess who will preside over their final salvation. Eros is the deity driving
the plot of the novel onwards, and Isis is the deity who will allow the novel to end.
The dominant role Eros plays in the canopy is therefore quite ominous. In the
beginning Habrocomes was said to scoff at representations of Eros, but this is the
only time in the narration that the lovers are confronted with their divine oppon-
ent in visible form. The canopy may have been intended only to set an aphrodisiac
mood, but it reveals the truth about the force driving them together and deter-
mining the course of their life. Throughout the novel the image on the canopy
threatens to come true in ways they could never have guessed on their wedding
night. For instance, in the next book (2.13), Anthia has been taken prisoner by a
band of robbers and comes dangerously close to being sacrificed to Ares. Rather
than playing the role of Aphrodite opposite Habrocomes in the role of Ares,
Anthia is to be given directly to Ares, a horrifically literal misinterpretation of
Aphrodite’s role on the canopy. There is another sense in which a straightforward
identification of Habrocomes and Anthia as Ares and Aphrodite is problematic.
The scene on the canopy is not conjugal love, but rather adultery, and as Gareth
Schmeling has noted, this image is inappropriate for a marriage bed.54 However,
we may readily compare the coverlet in Catullus 64, where the sad story of
Theseus and Ariadne is superficially inconsonant, yet in hindsight profoundly
fitting, for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis.55 The resonance between
54
‘Why put such a scene over the marriage bed of especially chaste lovers? Does Xenophon know what
he is doing? do dirty scenes produce fertility? passion? or is a little humor intended?’ (Schmeling 1980, 28).
55
On the significance of the myth on the coverlet for the framing myth, see Townend 1983.
Habrocomes and Anthia’s fate and the image of Ares and Aphrodite is deep, but
not as they could have known or wished. Shortly after their wedding night the
newlyweds will be separated, and they will not come together again until the end
of the story, after being tossed from one end of the Mediterranean to the other,
but throughout the novel because of their exceptional beauty they will attract the
attention of a seemingly unending series of lustful brigands, bandits, brothel
owners, maharajas, military men, and infatuated women in the tradition of Poti-
phar’s wife. They will both, repeatedly, come within inches of being compelled to
break their marriage vows. The threat of forced infidelity is common enough
in the Greek novels, but only in the Ephesiaca and in Chariton’s Callirhoe could it
be framed as adultery, for only in these two novels are the lovers married at the
beginning, rather than at the end of their trials. So the theme of adultery on
the canopy is not only apposite to Habrocomes and Anthia’s story, it is peculiarly
right for them in a way it would not be for the hero and heroine of most of the
other novels that have survived to us.
In Demodocus’ song the bed in which Ares and Aphrodite couple has been
fashioned into a trap, for hanging above their heads is a finely wrought web,
indiscernible to them, which will fall upon them and constrain them with ineluct-
able bonds (Od. 8.274–5). In the same position, hanging above the lovers, the
canopy in the Ephesiaca reveals the victory Eros can already celebrate over Hab-
rocomes and Anthia, but it also hints, in ways still opaque to his hapless victims, at
the future torments the god has in store for them. If we remember what the novel
has already said about how vision, specifically vision of a beautiful work of art, can
infect the soul with a lasting pattern, as well as the identical placement of the
canopy and Hephaestus’ net in the story told on the canopy, we will recognize
that the canopy both represents and enforces the god’s triumph, as it locks
Habrocomes and Anthia into their future roles.
THREE
Lifelike Likeness
Mimetic Contagion in the Philosophical Tradition
Psychologie ist die Beschreibung der Spiegelung der irdischen Welt in der
himmlischen Fläche oder richtiger: Die Beschreibung einer Spiegelung, wie
wir, Vollgesogene der Erde, sie uns denken, denn eine Spiegelung erfolgt gar
nicht, nur wir sehen Erde, wohin wir uns auch wenden.
Franz Kafka, Oktavhefte (18 October 1917)
Some of the images surveyed in the previous chapter function persuasively on the
viewer by virtue of their ritually correct deployment or aptness of contextual
placement, and their power is not explicitly linked to any particular artistic skill
with which they are wrought. In other cases, though, there seems to be an interest
in developing the analogy between the image’s apparently miraculous likeness to
its model and its ability to generate likeness in the viewer by mimetic contagion.
This fascination with the power and danger of verisimilitude may be more preva-
lent in elite cultural discourses surrounding images, and where Chapter 2 looked
at humble cultic talismans and brothel décor, this chapter will be more closely
concerned with famous masterworks of lifelikeness and the Socratic response to
the problem or potential of mimetic contagion. Xenophon’s Socrates comes to the
topic of mimetic contagion through veristic elite painting, whereas Plato’s Socra-
tes is less focused on the effect of this kind of artistic skill and more interested in
the problem of representation itself, but Plato’s treatment of mimesis is at least
partly framed in terms of the power of images to replicate themselves in viewers, so
this chapter will move from mimetic contagion in ancient discourses of lifelikeness
to explore the significance of mimetic contagion for Platonic mimesis.
Unlike the wide range of examples surveyed in Chapter 2, this chapter’s focus
on culturally elite art and philosophical thinking about images may seem less
immediately relevant to the situation in the Eunuch, for neither Terence nor his
audience may be assumed to be philosophers. The charge of philosophical influ-
ence may with greater plausibility be levelled at Terence’s model, for Menander
was a student of Theophrastus, himself a student of Aristotle, but Greek philosophy
had made considerable inroads in Terence’s Rome as well. The Epicureans were
MIMETIC CONTAGION IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION 73
expelled from the city in 173 BCE and in 161, the year of the Eunuch’s staging, there
was a general expulsion of philosophers and rhetoricians. Furthermore, there is
explicit mention of the philosophers and their schools in the Eunuch itself, in a
context immediately relevant to the theme of mimetic contagion (see Chapter 6).
It is not my contention, however, that Plato’s formulation of mimesis as explored
in this chapter had influence, direct or indirect, on Terence’s play, any more than
the scene in the Ephesiaca that closed Chapter 2 need be understood as an
imitation of the Eunuch. Rather, the texts and objects of Chapter 2 and the
thinking about verisimilitude and mimesis in this chapter may all be viewed as
parallel cultural phenomena, potentially independent responses to mimetic con-
tagion, which may help to elucidate each other and the Eunuch.
Lifelikeness may be mostly in the eye of the beholder. It is hard for a late
modern, Western viewer to know how most of the images surveyed in Chapter 2
would appear to someone bred in a radically different visual culture, and absent
ancient testimony for any given object, speculation on this score is probably
unsound. Tiberius’ prized erotic painting by Parrhasius, however, (see p. 54)
may point to an intersection of the aesthetic discourse of persuasive verisimilitude
and mimetic contagion. In the famous contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, as
Pliny relates it (HN 35.65), Zeuxis’ painted grapes are accurate enough (tanto
successu) that birds are fooled into trying to eat them, whereas Parrhasius’ painting
of a curtain is so very true to life (ita veritate repraesentata) that Zeuxis himself is
tricked into trying to draw it aside. Both performances frame artistic success as
verisimilitude so extreme that the viewer treats the image as reality.1 In this story,
birds and artist take roles complementary to the object represented—grapes call
for eating, curtain calls for lifting—but when Parrhasius paints a human being in
the throes of some affect, his quasi-mythical ability to pull viewers into participa-
tion results in their literal sympathy with the painted subject. Another story about
Parrhasius has him buying an Olynthian slave specifically to torture so as to
provide himself a model for his painting of Prometheus.2 The slippery boundary
between extremely lifelike art and life itself is here again at play, but knowing that
there was a live model for the anguish of Prometheus somehow permits the
suffering behind the painting to become real again in the viewers. So Seneca
the Elder’s rhetorical exercises on the theme of Parrhasius’ terror art argue that
the painter has harmed the public weal (accusatur rei publicae laesae, Con. 10.5).
1
Parrhasius is notoriously supreme in this game, not just over Zeuxis, but over all other artists.
Athenaeus attributes an epigram to Parrhasius in which he claims to have ‘discovered the clear limits of
art’ and ‘fixed a boundary which may not be passed’ (Ath. 12.543e). Pliny also says that Parrhasius called
himself ‘prince of artists’ (HN 35.71), but he testifies that other artists concur in giving the palm to Parrhasius
for the extreme skill (summa subtilitas) of his graphic line drawing (HN 35.67).
2
Morales 1996 is still the most perceptive treatment of this tale and of the responses to it in the
Controversiae.
Several of the orators quoted by Seneca point to the threat that the horrific realism
of Parrhasius’ painting must spill over into reality, but the orator Argentarius is
most explicit: ‘An Olynthian was welcomed at Athens with such good cheer? Was
it only the Olynthian that Parrhasius tortured? Does he not torture our eyes as
well?’ (hoc hospitio Olynthius Athenis exceptus est? tantum porro Olynthium torsit
Parrhasius? quid? non et oculos nostros torquet?, Con. 10.5.3).
Given Parrhasius’ associations with mimetic contagion through exquisite veri-
similitude, perhaps we are meant to understand that Tiberius’ painting was so
charming precisely because of how effectively it communicated Meleager’s arousal
to the viewer. However, naturalistic technique ‘convincing’ enough to entrance
viewers into sympathetic response was not unique to Parrhasius or painting. For
example, Pliny tells (HN 34.59) of Pythagoras of Rhegium’s sculpture of a lame
man, which was so affecting that viewers experienced the subject’s sore feet.
Pliny’s interest in Pythagoras of Rhegium is focused on his role in the develop-
ment of verisimilitude, beginning with his ‘victory’ over Myron, the innovator of
expanded realism (primus hic multiplicasse veritatem, HN 34.58), and ending with
his distinction as the first artist to render sinews, veins, and elaborate hair. This
focus on Pythagoras of Rhegium’s contest with other artists and innovative
struggle to capture the visible world is consonant with Pliny’s broader fascination
with the agon between nature and artistic skill.3 An adequate and coherent
theorization of verisimilitude has proved totally elusive for modern visual theory,
but if, as seems most probable, the perception of representational ‘lifelikeness’ is
more cultural than natural, we can expect a permanent gulf between our own
fractured discourses of verisimilitude and the ancient practices and experiences
associated with the attempt to copy reality in art.4 Despite these difficulties,
however, one of the few discernible points of consistency is that such forms of
mimesis are so often framed as a summoning, a replication of the absent model.5
Pliny’s story about Pythagoras of Rhegium fits this much larger pattern, then, but
it does so in an interesting way that amplifies the rhetorical effect of the topos, for
the prototype, the model lame man, is not only evoked in the bronze of the statue,
but in the living flesh of the viewer. Because of the successful realism of the artist’s
technique, the claudicans is not merely represented to the viewers, nor indeed just
‘re-presented’, made present again before their eyes—rather they become him, if
only temporarily, and perceive his pain as their own.
3
For Pliny’s investment in the ‘artifice of nature’, see Carey 2003, 102–37.
4
The bibliography on the theoretical problem of verisimilitude is vast and beyond the scope of our study.
Most recent formulations (see for example Mitchell 1995) are in some way a response to Gombrich 1960. For
a nuanced discussion of how these issues apply to ancient painting, see Neer 1995.
5
For the place of verisimilitude in the larger discourse of ‘replacement and replication’, see Steiner 2001,
27–32.
Precisely because such sympathetic response to naturalistic representation

was generally held to be possible, or even inevitable, the philosophical tradition
tended to approach these mimetic techniques with a certain suspicion, on the
one hand, and, on the other, with a qualified interest in their educational value.
So Xenophon’s Socrates, in his conversations with the three artists in Memorabilia
3.10, observes that it is the ‘quality of lifelikeness’ (τὸ ζωτικὸν φαίνεσθαι) that
‘principally manipulates men through the faculty of vision’ (ὃ δὲ μάλιστα
ψυχαγωγεῖ διὰ τῆς ὄψεως τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, 3.10.6). The point of this ‘manipulation’
becomes clear in the larger context; the ‘character of the soul’ (τῆς ψυχῆς ἦθος) is
argued to be imitable (μιμητόν, 3.10.3) because ‘friendly and hostile looking’ (τό τε
φιλοφρόνως καὶ τὸ ἐχθρῶς βλέπειν) can be artistically copied in the eyes (μιμητὸν ἐν
τοῖς ὄμμασι, 3.10.4). In a sympathetic exchange similar to that notionally expected
with the Gorgon (see pp. 52–3), the ‘look’ in the image’s eyes determines the aspect
of the viewer. Our expressions modulate to become ‘radiant’ (φαιδροί) at the joys of
our friends and ‘gloomy’ (σκυθρωποί) at their misfortunes, so Socrates concludes by
asking whether it is not ‘sweeter’ (ἥδιον, 3.10.5) to see exemplars of good character
than bad. If feelings (τὰ πάθη) are not only artistically expressible, but visually
contagious, then, as Socrates implies, art has a profoundly civic role to play.6
In a similar vein and even more explicitly, Aristotle discusses the ethical effect of
art on its viewers in book 8 of the Politics (1340a). The broader investigation is
on the infectious qualities of certain kinds of music, such as the melodies of
the Phrygian composer Olympus, which ‘make souls inspired’ (ποιεῖ τὰς ψυχὰς
ἐνθουσιαστικάς). ‘And moreover just listening to representations everyone comes
to have the same feelings [as the representations], even apart from their rhythms
and melodies’ (ἔτι δὲ ἀκροώμενοι τῶν μιμήσεων γίγνονται πάντες συμπαθεῖς, καὶ
χωρὶς τῶν ῥυθμῶν καὶ τῶν μελῶν αὐτῶν, 1340a 12–14).7 More broadly, Aristotle tells
us, certain types of music contain likenesses (ὁμοιώματα) of particular states of the
soul, and these states, whether good or bad, are immediately transmitted to
anyone hearing the music. The objects of touch and taste do not have this ethically
communicative property, but the objects of sight do, to some extent, because they
are figures (σχήματα). To be sure, not everyone is susceptible to the ethical
content of images, nor is it strictly likenesses of character that are transmitted in
this case, but rather the figures and colours are signs (σημεῖα) of character, the
6
‘Socrates’ conclusion is designed to introduce the ethical—the qualities of a good citizen—into the
process of visual representation’ (Goldhill 1998, 111). Goldhill argues (109 and passim) that this civic eye for
the deployment of art explains Xenophon’s claim that Socrates was ‘useful’ (ὠφέλιμος, 3.10.1) to artists.
7
For the reading of this μιμήσεων as ‘representations’, in the same broad sense as in Poet. 1, rather than
the more common translation as ‘imitations’, see Kraut 1998, 194. Kraut’s whole discussion of this passage is
invaluable for its careful exposition of the likely cathartic overtones of Lydian enthusiasm, what it means that
the representations can have feelings, and how they can be conceived as essentially distinct from their
melody and rhythm.
external stamp of the body in an emotional state (1340a 32–5). After this elaborate
circumscription of the ethical power of images compared to music, Aristotle
admits that pictorial art is a potent-enough influence on character to make some
works dangerous for the young: ‘But no, since the contemplation of these things
makes such a difference, the young should not contemplate the works of Pauson,
but those of Polygnotus and any other painter or sculptor interested in character’
(οὐ μὴν ἀλλ᾽ ὅσον διαφέρει καὶ περὶ τὴν τούτων θεωρίαν, δεῖ μὴ τὰ Παύσωνος θεωρεῖν
τοὺς νέους, ἀλλὰ τὰ Πολυγνώτου κἂν εἴ τις ἄλλος τῶν γραφέων ἢ τῶν ἀγαλματοποιῶν
ἐστιν ἠθικός, 1340a 35–8).
We know little of Pauson and Polygnotus, apart from what Aristotle himself
tells us in Poet. 2: that the former painted men worse than we are, where the latter
painted men better than we are. It does not seem, then, that Pauson’s fault was
with his execution, but rather with his choice of subjects. It is perhaps not obvious
how one could have known that the characters depicted were so vicious, unless, as
Kraut has argued, Pauson’s subjects were drawn from mythology.8 In which case,
there would already be an interesting point of comparison with the scenario in the
Eunuch, in that a painted scene from one of the more unseemly myths has an
immediately deleterious effect on the disposition of the viewer, but the more
significant connection between the Politics and the Eunuch is that Aristotle’s
concern is specifically for the young, whom he believes to be more vulnerable to
this kind of suggestion. But perhaps ‘suggestion’ is the wrong word, at least if it is
understood in a purely psychological sense, for one of the most striking things
about Aristotle’s discussion of mimetic contagion in music and art is the insistent
physicality of his language. He dismisses the relevance of touch and taste to this
issue since he believes they have no ethical content, but he brings them up in the
first place because this discussion of the implantation of auditory and visual stimuli
in the body of the observer is obviously linked to his interest in the general
mechanics of perception. Throughout the De anima Aristotle implies that per-
ception somehow involves a physical change in the observer into conformity with
the sensed object, as for instance the famous passage 424a 17–24, which compares
sensation (αἴσθησις) to a wax seal receiving an impression from a ring. The material
of the wax is not changed to gold or bronze, but its form is now a copy of the ring
(σημεῖον). If by its material recalcitrance the wax is thus saved from becoming itself
a signet, the boundary between matter and form is often quite different for Aristotle
than it would probably be for us. For instance, he repeatedly insists that the jelly of
the eye actually changes colour to match the colour of the object of vision.9 Seeing
8
Kraut 1998, 197.
9
For chameleon eye jelly and its relevance to the hylomorphic and functionalist reading of Aristotle’s
philosophy of perception, see Sorabji 1978, 49.
is thus becoming and the very act of perception is a partial corruption of the
boundary between subject and object.
MIMETIC CONTAGION AND (PLATONIC) MIMESIS
The word mimēsis is central to Platonic and Aristotelian discussions of art and
thence to all subsequent Greek (Hellenistic, Imperial, Byzantine) aesthetic dis-
courses. Under its Latin calque, imitatio, the concept of mimesis, or rather the
complex of concepts covered by this term, continued to play a pivotal role in
Renaissance and Neoclassical thinking about what art can and should aspire to do.
Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetic regimes have often understood themselves
to be anti-mimeticist, and the words ‘mimesis’ and ‘imitation’ have not generally
enjoyed currency in recent critical language, but the version of mimesis rejected by
the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century revolution was only one
aspect—and a particularly jejune one at that—of the conceptual field subtended
by the term mimēsis in antiquity.10 Indeed even the most avowedly anti-mimetic
theorizations of art in the twentieth century have often only succeeded in reani-
mating one of the less well-known corners of ancient mimesis under a different
name. Thus mimeticism, in the broadest sense, has been the conceptual spine that
runs through the history of Western aesthetics, and it is implicitly worth consid-
ering what its significance may be for our topic of mimetic contagion.11
If the word ‘imitation’ has been rendered irretrievably pejorative in modern
English, connoting inauthenticity at best and at worst an outright counterfeit, this
demotion of a once esteemed artistic ideal speaks volumes about the infiltration of
Romantic aesthetic theory into our habits of speech and thought. The formulation
of art as an ‘imitation of nature’ or ‘imitation of life’ was as commonplace from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century as any unquestionably true Aristotelian
maxim.12 But the subsequent rise of industrialized mass production, among other
late modern experiences of mechanized homogenization, has made this older
understanding of art as an imitation of life aesthetically untenable for many of
us. It may even be regarded as morally offensive, when the true vocation of art is
10
Auerbach 2003 is still essential for understanding the role of mimesis in critical discourse since World
War II. Potolsky 2006 is a good recent survey of positions and issues, but it does not replace Gebauer and
Wulf 1992 as an historical survey. For an excellent analysis of modern versions of mimesis as responses to
serially isolated aspects of the ancient tradition, see Halliwell 2002, 344–81.
11
And not only aesthetics, but sometimes also anthropology. See, for example, Taussig 1993 for an
eloquent exploration of ‘the mimetic faculty, the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty
to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other’ (xiii).
12
For the reign of art as imitation of life/nature in this period, see Hathaway 1962, 3–125; Halliwell 1992,
412–18.
taken to be expressive originality, the only legitimate resistance to a world of

soulless reproductions.13 Thus for many of us sympathetic engagement with the
older language of mimesis/imitation requires a leap of aesthetic imagination, but
it also needs patient attention to the breadth of meaning these words enjoyed in a
time less immediately suspicious of them.
This philological task, however, has proved surprisingly difficult and productive
of controversy. The Greek word mimēsis is plainly connected to the word mimos,
which denotes both a particular type of generally lowbrow theatrical entertain-
ment and the actor who plays in such a show, a polysemy that lives on in the Latin
mimus and the English ‘mime’.14 The problems of mimesis, including mimetic
contagion, are never too far from the associative field of mime, and I shall explore
this connection further in Chapter 5. But from as far back as we have evidence the
noun mimēsis and the related verb mimeisthai are employed in contexts much
wider than the performance of theatrical mime, and it would be a mistake to
assume that mime is universally determinative of the meaning of this Wortfeld,
even in the earliest pre-Platonic uses.15 If anything, the unifying theme to these
early attestations is not theatre, but a diffuse sense of ‘similarity’ or ‘likeness’, and
perhaps it was the very breadth and abstractness of this concept that recom-
mended mimēsis to Plato for such a central role in his thought. But to say that
Plato, or for that matter Aristotle, has a unified doctrine of mimesis would be
altogether wrong. Plato uses the word in various ways at different points in his
career, sometimes apparently in revision of his own earlier ideas. Aristotle per-
petuates this instability of meaning, both because he is pointedly responding to
Plato by using the word differently and because, for him no less than for his
teacher, mimesis is in itself a richly polyvalent concept. Still, as Halliwell has
demonstrated, it is possible to class the various usages of the word, especially as
it emerges from Plato and Aristotle, under two broad headings: mimesis as world-
reflecting and mimesis as world-creating.16 For the sake of economy and clarity,
and at risk of imposing an overly technical distinction where for the ancients
there was ambiguous unity, I shall call these mimesis1 and mimesis2, respectively.17
13
The most eloquent exploration of these issues is still Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im
Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (1936).
14
The etymology of the mim- root is totally opaque. Schulze (1934, 53) once proposed a connection to
the Skt. ma ˉya
ˉ, ‘illusion’—a delightful suggestion which, if true, would amount to a genetic connection
between mimesis and one of the central motifs in Hinduism and other eastern religions. But, alas, all recent
Indo-Europeanists are agreed in dismissing this etymology and declaring a linguistic dead end. See, for
example, Beekes 2010, 954–5.
15
For a careful examination of the limited textual evidence and the copious earlier scholarship, see
Halliwell 1998, 109–16.
16
Halliwell 2002, 23 and passim.
17
I intend no reference to Paul Ricœur’s similarly subscripted enumeration of different mimeses. His
interest is in the mimetic events that occur prior to the act of aesthetic creation and subsequently in the
Most of the pre-Platonic and Platonic attestations of the word are some version
of mimesis1, references to the copying of a model, either in performative action
or as an artistic product fashioned in matter. But alongside these instances of
mimesis1 sometimes (and with increasing frequency in Aristotle and later writers)
the emphasis on copying or mirroring seems to be absent, and the word refers to
the production of an autonomous artistic creation, so that in some cases mimesis2
might virtually be rendered as ‘fiction’.
It is mimesis1 that is most obviously relevant to our investigation of mimetic
contagion, since the dynamic that interests us here is the imitation of a visible
model. But if in most cases the model is assumed to be natural (i.e. not a product
of art) and the copy a work of representation, then mimetic contagion effectively
inverts this pattern by casting the artwork as the model and the viewing subject as
the copy. To be clear, this is still a matter of mimesis1, only the causal directionality
has been switched and the looking glass reversed, with the viewer now acting as
the image of the artwork. There is, however, also a sense in which mimesis2 is
relevant to mimetic contagion. When the world is refashioned in accordance with
an artwork it can no longer be clear what the boundaries of the artwork are, since
by drawing the viewer into recapitulation of its own ethos or action, it effectively
exceeds its frame. Its fiction now includes the viewer, who is properly part of the
fashioned world of the artwork in the sense that mimesis2 generally implies.
However, this mimetically produced world is not safely autonomous from the
‘real’ world, but rather a replacement for it. Thus by inverting the usual sense of
mimesis1, mimetic contagion offers an ironic twist on mimesis2. This inversion-
cum-irony points to a departure from the typical order of mimesis, but it also
indicates where the two facets of mimesis, world-reflecting and world-creating,
are fundamentally linked.
If mimetic contagion represents a perversion of mimesis as normally understood,
the threat posed by this perversion is always latent in the Greek understanding of
mimesis, and Plato’s infamous reservations about the role of mimetic arts in the
well-run city may be largely explained by the perception of just this danger. Plato’s
critique of mimesis in the Republic is complex, but it emerges in ways that may be
grouped under two broad headings, one concerned with the falsehood of mimesis
and the other with its capacity for ethical corruption.18 The treatment of the bed
in Republic 10 (596b–99a), for example, would be in the first category. The god
reader. For him these ‘upstream’ (mimesis1) and ‘downstream’ (mimesis3) events are no less mimesis than
the creative act itself (mimesis2). His enumeration establishes a temporal order within what he considers a
single process; mine is meant to distinguish between different types of mimesis. See Ricœur 1984.
18
These two complaints about mimesis may, of course, be linked to each other, especially by seeing the
latter as a natural consequence of the former. Attempts to do so almost always focus on book 10 to the near
exclusion of book 3. See, for example, Moss 2007.
cogitates an ideal bed, which is fully real; from this pattern the craftsman makes a
phenomenal bed, removed from reality by one degree; and the painter imitates the
mere appearance of this phenomenal bed, a type of creation which is now two
degrees removed from truth and reality. For all the cogency this ontological
critique has, both within Plato’s system and in the philosophical tradition more
broadly, it is not immediately relevant to mimetic contagion. However, some of
the Republic’s earlier attempts to associate mimesis with illusion and falsehood
may be more germane to our topic.
At the end of book 2 and the beginning of book 3, for instance, there is an
extended critique of the presentation of the gods and heroes in traditional Greek
poetry, where presumably they could have been accurately rendered as virtuous,
but in fact they are often misrepresented as weak-kneed scoundrels.19 Adeimantus
assumes that these stories have a bad effect on the young (365a), and Socrates
agrees that since young people see the gods and heroes giving way to grief, for
example, they will be influenced to do the same when they meet with adversity in
their own lives (388d). More generally, such stories offer an excuse for bad
behaviour and persuade us of the universality of turpitude, and so they ‘engender
a proclivity (εὐχέρειαν ἐντίκτωσι) to wickedness in the young’ (392a). The danger
that Adeimantus and Socrates expound here is certainly a version of mimetic
contagion, but Plato’s agenda is manifold and his concern is not simply that
impressionable people will take the representation as a model for imitation, but
that the representation is in itself false and that the young will learn bad theology
from it. If their bad behaviour is then the consequence of their erroneous ideas
about what is desirable or even possible in a human life, rather than due to their
direct imitation of the traditional stories, we may not wish to label this a straight-
forward instance of mimetic contagion.
After expounding on the danger of the content (logoi) of these traditional
stories, Socrates turns to address the issue of the style (lexis) in which they are
mediated (392c). Here at last the word mimēsis enters the argument, in contrast to
diēgēsis (‘narration’). We may imagine a type of poetry, for example dithyramb,
consisting almost entirely of diēgēsis, while tragedy is obviously all mimēsis, and
epic blends the two styles. This distinction between telling and showing—one of
the most resilient elements of Plato’s thought in modern literary criticism—is as
readily intelligible for us as for Adeimantus, and on the surface it seems to offer
a neatly value-free spectrum for describing various types of storytelling.20 No
19
The criticism of the gods of Greek myth as overly anthropomorphic is, of course, a well-established
tradition by the time of Plato, and it is tempting to see his hostility to mimesis more generally in this context
as an extension and intensification of the pre-Socratic revision of received poetic wisdom. See Papadopoulou
2006.
20
For a thoughtful appraisal of this dichotomy and its critical Nachleben in Aristotle and in modern
narratology, see Kirby 1991.
sooner is the distinction explained, however, than Socrates clarifies that the
pressing question is now what kinds of mimēsis will be allowed in the city, if
indeed it will be allowed at all (394d). Apparently diēgēsis will not be subjected to
the same passport scrutiny, though based on the preceding discussion of the
danger of traditional poetry it is not immediately obvious why mimēsis should
be singled out for interrogation, since theological errors may be conveyed by
diēgēsis just as well. It bears remarking that this is mimesis1, imitation rather than
imaginative representation in general, since the latter would certainly include
narration and could not serve as its opposite.
Socrates’ first concern is with the effect of mimesis on the integrity of the
performer. Twice already in book 2 (370a–b; 374a–c) he had spoken of the need
for specialization in the ideal city and he returns to this theme here. It is impossible
to imitate many things as well as one, so we do not expect the same actor to
perform comedy and tragedy with equal skill (395a). Likewise, it may be impos-
sible both to imitate an action and to do that same action well, so if we want the
guardians to be ‘craftsmen of the city’s freedom’ (395c), we must not wish them to
pursue other crafts or imitations. This is a glancing preview of the kind of
argument he will advance in book 10 in his ontological critique of mimesis, but
here he immediately reverts to the moral argument and, without explanation,
concedes that the young guardians may engage in some kinds of mimesis, but it
must always be imitation of virtue and strength and never of vice or weakness.
Whatever is imitated will eventually be naturalized and settle into character and
second nature (εἰς ἔθη τε καὶ φύσιν, 395d). Fundamentally mimesis is likening
oneself to another (ἀφομοιοῦν αὑτούς, 396a), but if we liken ourselves to madmen
ultimately the madness will be our own, and we shall find ourselves actors no
more. As we saw in the previous section, the danger of immoral representations of
the gods and heroes might be construed as based in mimetic contagion, since the
young would in fact behave like the characters, or their behaviour might have
been understood as a ramification of bad theology, but now the danger is
explicitly a matter of imitation. The mimesis of wickedness in any form, divine
or human, false or true, is perilous because it tends to become unruly and outlast
the performance by becoming the real character and nature of the performer.
If we have defined mimetic contagion, however, as the viewer’s tendency to
imitate or absorb behaviours or ethical qualities from an artwork, we may still note
a possible discontinuity between the danger Socrates describes here and mimetic
contagion. The mimetic poetry he has in mind is principally tragedy, which would
of course have a visible public performance context. Drama in action is a visual art,
and throughout antiquity the association between theatre and painting is close
(see p. 107). It is primarily for the audience, however, that the drama is an object of
spectation, whereas the actors can only be understood as ‘viewers’ of their roles in
a metaphorical or reflexive sense. It may cause us to hesitate, therefore, in labelling
the danger Socrates perceives as a form of mimetic contagion when we recognize

that the concern he expresses in this section is entirely on behalf of the performers;
the audience is not in view here. It will soon become clear, though, that this
discussion has relevance for the visual arts as well as poetry and for the audience as
well as the actors. Socrates shifts from dramatic performance to other poetic and
musical styles, discussing the metres, modes, and instrumentation proper to each,
and discovers that it is generally possible in all these cases to discern what ought to
be allowed in the ideal city on the basis of whether it accords with harmony, grace,
and intelligent order (398c–400e). However, such virtues and their opposites are
not the exclusive province of poetry:
Ἔστιν δέ γέ που πλήρης μὲν γραφικὴ αὐτῶν καὶ πᾶσα ἡ τοιαύτη δημιουργία, πλήρης δὲ ὑφαντικὴ
καὶ ποικιλία καὶ οἰκοδομία καὶ πᾶσα αὖ ἡ τῶν ἄλλων σκευῶν ἐργασία, ἔτι δὲ ἡ τῶν σωμάτων
φύσις καὶ ἡ τῶν ἄλλων φυτῶν· ἐν πᾶσι γὰρ τούτοις ἔνεστιν εὐσχημοσύνη ἢ ἀσχημοσύνη. καὶ ἡ
μὲν ἀσχημοσύνη καὶ ἀρρυθμία καὶ ἀναρμοστία κακολογίας καὶ κακοηθείας ἀδελφά, τὰ δ᾽ ἐναντία
τοῦ ἐναντίου, σώφρονός τε καὶ ἀγαθοῦ ἤθους, ἀδελφά τε καὶ μιμήματα.
Παντελῶς μὲν οὖν, ἔφη.
Ἆρ᾽ οὖν τοῖς ποιηταῖς ἡμῖν μόνον ἐπιστατητέον καὶ προσαναγκαστέον τὴν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ εἰκόνα
ἤθους ἐμποιεῖν τοῖς ποιήμασιν ἢ μὴ παρ᾽ ἡμῖν ποιεῖν, ἢ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις δημιουργοῖς ἐπιστατητέον
καὶ διακωλυτέον τὸ κακόηθες τοῦτο καὶ ἀκόλαστον καὶ ἀνελεύθερον καὶ ἄσχημον μήτε ἐν εἰκόσι
ζῴων μήτε ἐν οἰκοδομήμασι μήτε ἐν ἄλλῳ μηδενὶ δημιουργουμένῳ ἐμποιεῖν, ἢ ὁ μὴ οἷός τε ὢν
οὐκ ἐατέος παρ᾽ ἡμῖν δημιουργεῖν, ἵνα μὴ ἐν κακίας εἰκόσι τρεφόμενοι ἡμῖν οἱ φύλακες ὥσπερ ἐν
κακῇ βοτάνῃ, πολλὰ ἑκάστης ἡμέρας κατὰ σμικρὸν ἀπὸ πολλῶν δρεπόμενοί τε καὶ νεμόμενοι, ἕν
τι συνιστάντες λανθάνωσιν κακὸν μέγα ἐν τῇ αὑτῶν ψυχῇ, ἀλλ᾽ ἐκείνους ζητητέον τοὺς
δημιουργοὺς τοὺς εὐφυῶς δυναμένους ἰχνεύειν τὴν τοῦ καλοῦ τε καὶ εὐσχήμονος φύσιν, ἵνα ὥσπερ
ἐν ὑγιεινῷ τόπῳ οἰκοῦντες οἱ νέοι ἀπὸ παντὸς ὠφελῶνται ὁπόθεν ἂν αὐτοῖς ἀπὸ τῶν καλῶν ἔργων ἢ
πρὸς ὄψιν ἢ πρὸς ἀκοήν τι προσβάλῃ, ὥσπερ αὔρα φέρουσα ἀπὸ χρηστῶν τόπων ὑγίειαν, καὶ εὐθὺς
ἐκ παίδων λανθάνῃ εἰς ὁμοιότητά τε καὶ φιλίαν καὶ συμφωνίαν τῷ καλῷ λόγῳ ἄγουσα;
(401a–d3)
But painting is full of these qualities, as is every craft of that sort, full too weaving,
embroidery, architecture, and the production of other furnishings, and also the nature of
our bodies and of other living things. In all of these there is gracefulness or gracelessness.
And gracelessness, being out of step, and disharmony are kin to bad language and bad
character, and the opposite of these things are kin to a prudent and noble character and are
imitations (mimēmata) of it.
[Glaucon:] Absolutely.
So then is it only the poets we must regulate, compelling them to fashion an image of good
character in their poems or else not to compose poetry in our midst? Or mustn’t we also
regulate other craftsmen, forbidding them from fashioning a vicious character, unbridled,
servile, or graceless, either in portraiture or in architecture or any other product of
craftsmanship? Or, if someone is unable to comply, shouldn’t we bar him from practicing
his craft around us, lest the guardians be raised among images of evil, as in an evil pasture,
plucking and grazing much—a little every day from many such—and so without realizing
it accumulate a great evil mass in their souls? Shouldn’t we look rather for those craftsmen
cleverly capable of tracking down the nature of the beautiful and graceful, so that the
young would abide, so to speak, in a healthy environment and be benefitted by everything
around them, from which ever direction any of the beautiful works strikes their vision or
hearing, like a wind wafting health from pleasant climes, and thus from their earliest youth
it would subtly draw them to likeness to, affection for, and harmony with beautiful reason?
Now at last it becomes clear that Socrates’ earlier focus on the effect of dramatic
poetry on the performer was an illustrative metonymy of what he sees as a more
general problem implicating the visual arts and the effect of images (eikones), not
only on those who produce them, but on all impressionable people who come into
contact with them. The destructive influence of these images is not fundamentally
due to bad theology or erroneous propositions of any kind, but rather an ingestive
accumulation of wickedness transmitted directly from image to viewer/auditor.21
The soul’s rational assent in this process is as unnecessary as in the assimilation
of food.
Plato will return to the theme of the corrupting effect of dramatic mimesis on
the audience in book 10. There he sees the danger looming not just for the young
and unusually impressionable, but even for the respectable (τοὺς ἐπιεικεῖς) and the
best among us (οἱ . . . βέλτιστοι ἡμῶν, 605c). We all harbour an irrational part in our
souls, and though we know it would be shameful to yield to grief in adversity, for
example, this irrational part of us would like to do just that. When we see
a mimetic performance of unrestrained grief, ‘we enjoy it and, surrendering
ourselves, follow it in sympathy’ (χαίρομέν τε καὶ ἐνδόντες ἡμᾶς αὐτοὺς ἑπόμεθα
συμπάσχοντες, 605d). The combination of pleasure and pity we feel for those
exhibiting behaviour we would, in principle, scorn nourishes the same irrational
impulses in us, and ‘what we enjoy must pass from others to ourselves’ (ἀπολαύειν
ἀνάγκη ἀπὸ τῶν ἀλλοτρίων εἰς τὰ οἰκεῖα, 606b). Older scholarship on mimesis in the
Republic did not generally distinguish the performer’s identification in book 3
from the audience’s sympathy in book 10, regarding them as two facets of
essentially the same mode of response to a dramatic character, but more recent
work has usually tended to see these two passages as having different purposes and
describing distinct phenomena.22 Plato is interested in the actor’s experience
in book 3 and that of the audience in book 10, and the performer’s habituated
self-likening to the role is clearly distinguishable from the theatregoer’s lack of
self-control resulting from a habit of emotionalism and confusion about what is, in
fact, praiseworthy.
21
Plato’s environmental materialism in this passage may be situated within a larger cultural context and
within his project more generally; see Ford 2002, 221.
22
Examples of the uncritical conflation of actor’s and audience’s response: Adam 1963 (vol. 1), 150; Cross
and Woozley 1966, 272; Halliwell 1988, 4. Arguments against the application of ‘mimesis’ to the audience:
Sörbom 1966, 122–4; Dyson 1988, 44–5; Halliwell 2002, 80–1 (in revision of his earlier position).
While I would agree with the more recent line of scholarship that identification
and sympathy are notionally distinguishable, Socrates’ claim in book 10 that what
we enjoy in others necessarily becomes our own (oikeia) substantially conflates the
effects of audience sympathy with those of the actor’s self-likening. Whether
we encounter the morally questionable dramatic role as performers or spectators,
we shall find ourselves not only weakened and worsened by the experience, but
also ethically assimilated to the character. More importantly, though, the signifi-
cance of the passage I quoted earlier at length (401a–d3) for the connection of
mimesis in books 3 and 10 seems usually to have been missed, perhaps because it is
not strictly about dramatic mimesis but artistic mimesis in the most general
sense.23 Indeed the focus there was, if anything, more on visual art than drama,
so scholars keen to understand Plato’s view of poetry may understandably have
skipped over a passage that seemed less directly relevant.24 But of course drama is a
visual art, and, as we saw earlier, Socrates describes his shift in focus in 401a–d3 as
a summary generalization of the topic he had been treating before, so the actor/
audience distinction can hardly be as central to Plato’s understanding of this issue as
we might make it, and we may well see the assimilating sympathy described in book
10 as another application of the general phenomenon described in 401a–d3.
Plato’s purpose in the Republic is not to elaborate a grand unified theory of
mimesis, still less is it to isolate and explain the dynamic we have dubbed mimetic
contagion, but these passages of books 3 and 10 reveal that among other criticisms
of artistic representation (as ontologically fallen, as traditionally erroneous, etc.),
one of Plato’s primary concerns about art is its tendency to exceed its apparent
boundaries and infect those who come into contact with it, even without their
23
Without this passage clearly in view, one is likely to conclude that book 3 is only about performers and
book 10 is only about the audience. See, for instance, Leszl 2006, 258: ‘The situations envisaged are then
profoundly different’. Belfiore, by contrast, defends the unity of mimesis in books 3 and 10, but she excludes
visual art from her definition of mimesis, even in the face of 401a–d3: ‘Thus, it is doubtful that Plato is
discussing imitation at all at 3.401Aff . . . . no theoretical account of imitation in the visual arts, good or bad,
is given in Republic 3’ (1984, 134).
24
Plato is more absolute in his dismissal of poetic mimesis from the ideal state in book 10 than he was in
book 3, and scholars have often defended him from the charge of inconsistency by arguing that he only
means to banish bad, i.e. morally deleterious, mimesis. See, for example, Verdenius 1949, 21–3. Nehamas
1982, by contrast, takes Socrates at his word in book 10 and understands him to be banishing all poetic
mimesis; the earlier more liberal expressions ultimately only apply to the visual arts. Nehamas notices that
Plato’s most general model of mimesis seems to be painting, and he argues that pre-Platonic attestations of
mimesis all concern aural phenomena, so this grounding of mimesis in painting must be a Platonic
innovation, designed to make poetry (and all other art forms) share in painting’s inability to tell any deeper
truth about things than their surface appearance. By itself, though, this limitation only makes painting trivial
and harmless, whereas poetry is so compelling in its deceptiveness that it must be forbidden. Nehamas’
observations about the centrality of painting for Plato’s view of mimesis have interesting consequences for
my thesis as well. However 401a–d3 shows that Plato does not think painting and other visual arts to be quite
as harmless as Nehamas thinks they are.
knowledge or assent. In these passages Socrates and his interlocutors draw the
logical conclusion that mimesis should be banned from the ideal state or else
regulated to an unrecognizably hygienic form. It would be rash, however, to take
these passages in isolation from the rest of the Platonic corpus and label him, in
any straightforward sense, a puritanical enemy of the arts. There are several other
places where Plato speaks approvingly of mimesis, especially in his later works, so
perhaps his views became less stringently hostile over time.25 Moreover, the
dialogues themselves are essentially dramatic in form and often present characters
we should not wish to emulate, so it is tempting to conclude that the same Plato
who wrote tragedies in his youth lived on in the mature thinker and that he
adapted these literary genres into his work as a way of situating his philosophy as a
comparable social practice.26 Indeed, perhaps we were never meant to read the
harsh judgments of mimesis in Republic 3 and 10 as literal proscriptions, but rather
as logical conclusions in a thought experiment or agonistic bids in Plato’s ironic
contest with a nexus of institutions that is, at least in its effects and its claim on our
attention, surprisingly similar to philosophy.27 However literally we take these
public policy recommendations and however permanent a view we believe them
to represent in Plato’s thought, they are unsettling for most of us, not least
because they are so difficult, even after two and a half millennia, to dismiss.28
Aristotle stands as the first inheritor of this critique, and his formulation of
mimesis in the Poetics may be understood as an attempt to rehabilitate art from the
vexed position in which the Republic had left it. He concedes that the mimetic
artwork, at its most successful, does have a violent effect upon the emotions of the
viewer, but rather than inspiring direct imitation, the twin forces of pity and fear
are supposed to result in an experience of purgation (katharsis, 1449b27–8). Pity
and fear are, in the first instance, feelings that arise in the presence of real
calamities and dangers, so the audience’s response to mimesis mimics what their
emotional response would be to a real encounter with the represented events. In
admitting that mimesis can call forth a passionate response in the audience and
in implying that this response is predicated on their willingness to credit a kind of
‘as if ’ reality to the representation, Aristotle seems to come within reach of some
of the issues that had interested Plato in Republic 3 and 10. But this similarity in
topic is ultimately only apparent. Aristotle provides a positive account for the
beneficial role of the audience’s response to mimesis, as conducive to their
25
Halliwell 2002, 65–71. 26
Nightingale 2000.
27
‘Next to philosophy, only art and specifically mimetic poetry have the power to create happenings,
cultural and psychological, that subvert political, social, and ethical laws’ (Naddaff 2002, 4).
28
Few indeed would follow Plato all the way to the bitter end of his proscriptive conclusions, but one
need not be a puritanical enemy of the open society to admit that art can do harm, sometimes by remaking
us in its pernicious image. For a refreshingly candid attempt to apply the Republic’s critique of mimesis to
television (with apparent sympathy both to Plato and to the mass media), see Nehamas 1988.
health and knowledge, and he is not obliged to confront and explain away the
dangers Plato saw as inherent in mimesis, in large part because he means
something subtly different by the word. As I said earlier, mimēsis covers a
complex cluster of concepts, which may be broadly divided between versions of
world-reflecting (mimesis1) and world-creating (mimesis2). In the passages
of the Republic we have examined, Plato is using the word in the sense of
mimesis1, but in the Poetics Aristotle has shifted almost entirely to mimesis2.29
Aristotle does not need to deny the power of mimesis to inspire imitation in
the viewer, because he is ignoring the imitative aspect of mimesis altogether,
or rather refocusing on the alternate sense of the word, as the creation of an
autonomous fictional world.
However far from view they may be in the Poetics, the possible benefits and risks
of mimetic contagion are not lost on Aristotle more generally. As we have seen
(pp. 75–6) in the Politics he explicitly addresses the ethically contagious effects of
painting and sculpture on young viewers. In this passage he might virtually be
channelling the Socrates of Republic 3, but in the Poetics he never envisions the
audience imitating the mimesis or even describes mimesis as having an imitative
relationship to a model. The problem of mimetic contagion is not so much
dispelled as side-stepped. Though the Poetics cannot be said to answer the
Republic’s accusations against mimesis, Aristotle does succeed in reclaiming a
positive space for (some version of) mimesis and thus justifying the ways of art
to philosophy. Posterity has been grateful. But these passages in the Republic also
mark a nadir in Plato’s assessment of mimesis, and whether explicitly or implicitly
almost any other Platonic text using words from the mim- group is more affirm-
ing. Most of these do not bear in any direct way on the issue of mimetic contagion,
but there is one worth examining for its relevance to our topic.30
The Timaeus is one of Plato’s last dialogues, probably written some twenty
years after the Republic, but it immediately positions itself as a continuation of
‘yesterday’s speech’ about the ideal state (17c). Readers from Proclus to the
twentieth century have often assumed that the dramatic date of the Timaeus
was meant to be the day after that of the Republic, but of course Socrates, in
fiction as in life, may have had many such conversations, and though the topics are
similar, the Timaeus has different interlocutors than the Republic, so perhaps
another occasion is meant.31 It has also been suggested that Plato intentionally
made the dramatic date for these conversations ambiguous, so the dialogues’
29
This shift allows Aristotle to treat mimesis as a cognitive process and thus, in the first instance, a means
of knowing, rather than an adaptation in conformity with some external model. See Golden 1992, 63–103;
Halliwell 2002, 151–233.
30
Conversely the Ion is plainly interested in mimetic contagion, but it avoids the word mimesis, so I do
not treat it in this section. See p. 179.
31
Cornford 1937, 4–5.
setting is as timeless as their philosophy.32 As various recent scholars have noted,

however, even if the dramatic dates of these dialogues are not successive days, it
seems clear that the reader of the Timaeus is meant to have the Republic
in mind.33 Socrates would like to extend the discussion of the ideal state to a
narrative depiction of its conflict with some competing state, thus revealing the
merits of the ideal at their full advantage by showing them in action, but he doubts
his own ability to render the ideal dynamic, since the world he grew up in is so far
from political perfection. Not that the poets would fare any better: ‘the mimetic
clan (μιμητικόν ἔθνος, 19d) will most readily and best imitate (μιμήσεται) the things
among which they were raised, but things outside their upbringing are hard for
anyone to imitate (μιμεῖσθαι) in actions and even harder in words’. In this three-
fold invocation of the mim- root in one sentence, mimesis1 and mimesis2 are neatly
blended, and Socrates hints that the poets are as useless to the rendering of the
good city as they are to rendering the city good.
Fortunately, Critias comes to the rescue with the remarkable story of the lost
city of Atlantis and her contest with the ideal city, which turns out to be none
other than Athens in the once-upon-a-time past. This story set in the distant
antiquity of the human race requires its own cosmogony, so Critias soon inter-
rupts himself and invites Timaeus to describe the constitution of the physical
universe beginning with its origin and ending with the generation of mankind
(27a–b). This is no small task, obviously, and Timaeus’ discourse runs to 65
Stephanus pages, but Critias has promised that he will continue with the Atlantis
story once Timaeus has given the cosmic backdrop, and he does so in the
immediately following dialogue, Critias. Thus the Timaeus-Critias consists prin-
cipally of Timaeus’ long description of the universe and Critias’ shorter-frame
narrative about ancient Athens and Atlantis, but Timaeus’ speech is not only set
within Critias’ story, it is told at Critias’ request and follows the programme he
gives it, so the whole complex may be characterized as Critias’ response to
Socrates’ complaint about the inability of the ‘mimetic clan’ to represent the
ideal polis in action. It is therefore no wonder that one of the things this response
must do is give a new contour to mimesis and the phenomenon of mimetic
contagion.
The central conceit of Timaeus’ account is that the world of our experience, the
world of becoming and change, is a mimesis of the eternal, changeless world of
the Forms. It is not a case of incidental likeness, where the phenomenal world
merely happens to be similar to the ideal world, neither is the phenomenal
world unconsciously propagated out of the ideal, rather the sensible world is an
artistic copy, intentionally created by the Demiurge as he gazed on the eternal
32
Moors 1987. 33
Zeyl 2000, xxvii; Johansen 2004, 178.
(πρὸς τὸ ἀΐδιον ἔβλεπεν, 29a). The model (paradeigma) is not only eternal and real,
but intelligible, uniform, and alive, so the Demiurge fashioned the sensible world
into its likeness, a rational, spherical animal, an artwork/object of joy (ἄγαλμα,
37c). Thus he sent the stars endlessly wheeling around their celestial courses ‘in
order that they might be as similar as possible to that perfect and rational animal
after the imitation (μίμησιν, 39e) of its eternal nature’. Mimesis has a different
colour here than Socrates had given it in the Republic and in Timaeus 19d, not
because it means something fundamentally different, but because the results are so
much happier. The ideal world, for all its notional invisibility, is described as the
object of the Demiurge’s gaze, and his response is to imitate what he sees. But
because what he contemplates is good and he is a good imitator, the mimesis is not
destructive for him or for other viewers of the eikon (29b) he fashions. The
universe of our experience is a ‘copy of the model’ (μίμημα . . . παραδείγματος,
48e), but if the heavens are therefore ‘secondary’ we can hardly complain about
their ontological derivativeness. After all, as Timaeus says in the last sentence of
the dialogue, this eikon of the intelligible is itself a perceptible god, greatest, best,
fairest, most perfect, and only begotten (92c).
Implicit in these descriptions of the created world as an image lies the possibility
that the Demiurge’s mimesis of the ideal is not a dead end, but will itself inspire
further imitation as a visible model, that mimetic contagion, in other words, will
prove to be contagious. This is precisely the direction in which Timaeus develops
mimesis as he continues his cosmogony. After fashioning the heavenly bodies and
the other created but immortal gods familiar from Hesiod, the Demiurge enjoins
these deities to follow his creative example. ‘Yourselves, according to nature, turn to the
fashioning (δημιουργίαν, 41c) of animals, imitating (μιμούμενοι) my power in creating
you.’ The children of the Demiurge respond with due obedience and fashion
terrestrial life, ‘imitating their author’ (μιμούμενοι τὸν σφέτερον δημιουργόν, 42e).34
But they imitate not only his power or himself, but also the perfect celestial world
he created. For example, they make man’s head a sphere ‘in imitation of the shape
of the universe’ (τὸ τοῦ παντὸς σχῆμα ἀπομιμησάμενοι, 44d) and they ensconce this
seat of higher faculties literally above the rest of the body. The structure of the
human body thus mirrors the structure of the cosmos, even imitating its direc-
tionality in the fall from the spherical beauty of the head, with its organs of speech
and sensation, to the upper torso, with its motions in breath and appended
arms and hands, speechless but still capable of signification and reasoned control,
to the lower torso and its grosser functions beyond the reach of rational volition.
Even here, though, images from the intellect can penetrate, and the liver is
designed specifically to mirror the mind’s state and pass on to the bowels a limited
34
See also 69c.
kind of participation in the higher life of the soul (71b–c). Our bodies are a
mimesis of the cosmos, which means that we can resonate with its design even
apart from the operation of the intellect. For example, sensation can, by definition,
only give access to the sensible, but when low and high sounds combine according
to geometrical principles of motion they generate delight ‘because of the imitation
(μίμησιν, 80b) of the divine harmony’. So too the coursing of blood in the body
recapitulates a more general structure, and the blood ‘is compelled to imitate
(μιμεῖσθαι, 81b) the circulation of the universe’.
All is not compulsion, however, and inasmuch as our thoughts and our behav-
iour may affect the degree to which our bodies and souls are mimetic of the cosmic
order, we are under a corresponding moral duty to maximize that conformity.
Precisely because we have a choice in how much attention we devote to the grand
structure of the universe we should be as alert as we can to such matters, using our
eyes to study the heavens and our minds to understand their order, so that
‘imitating (μιμούμενοι, 47c) the unvarying [cycles in heaven] we may stabilize
the varying ones in ourselves’. We must take care of our diverse parts in imitation
(ἀπομιμούμενον, 88d) of the form of the universe, where wet and dry, motion and
stasis, are never allowed to get out of balance. The Demiurge gazed on the ideal
world and made this world in imitation, and he enjoined the deathless created
gods to imitate him in making us. They did so, copying not only his creative
pattern but the pattern he created. Finally we are enjoined to take note of the
order in our bodies and the cosmos and to live our lives in imitation of that order.
Timaeus has described a descending chain of imitative order, each level looking up
to the previous level for a paradigm of its own activity. It is mimetic contagion all
the way down.
One of the great interpretive problems for the Timaeus-Critias is understand-
ing exactly how Timaeus’ speech is related to the Atlantis story.35 This is a difficult
issue, significantly complicated by the fact that the Critias breaks off part way
through the narration, so a comprehensive answer to this question is beyond our
35
A favourite interpretation of the story sees Atlantis as a figure for the Persian empire, which would
make the victorious Athens in the fable a type for the Athens that won at Marathon. The tragic irony, of
course, is the double signification: the aggressive imperialist regime would all too soon be Athens, which
then must play the role of Atlantis in the Peloponnesian War. On this reading the story becomes a parable
about the inevitable consequences of ill-organized, vice-ridden polities confronting chaste, disciplined
neighbours. Vidal-Naquet 1986 is a standard formulation of this interpretation, and it has been refined
and extended by others; see, for example, Morgan 1998. However, it is never exactly clear how this reading is
supposed to connect to the cosmology of the Timaeus, if at all. Johansen 2004, 7–23 argues that both the
cosmos of the Timaeus and the political history of the Critias are structured according to narratives in which
there is a profound order in the world and all pleonexia is unnatural and must eventually be frustrated. This
sounds right, but perhaps it does not get us very far. One would hardly expect Plato to tell a story or
elaborate a cosmology in which the world turned out to be radically disordered or to reward vice. See also
Pradeau 1997; Broadie 2012, 115–72.
scope. However, in tracing out the role of mimesis in Timaeus’ account we may
have stumbled on a clue. As we have seen, Timaeus’ speech is an extended
interruption of the Atlantis story, told at Critias’ prompting and following his
specifications. Its relationship to its surrounding frame is thus oddly similar to the
terrestrial world’s relationship to the surrounding celestial cause/model. Critias
begins his account with an intriguing archaeology of the story itself: the Egyptians
told it to Solon, who told it to Critias’ grandfather (also called Critias), who in
turn passed it on to him. The quasi-mythical status of the Egyptians as timelessly
ancient wizards is clear from his description, as is Solon’s role as wandering wise
man, who must travel far from home but returns with an enriched understanding
of the world and, particularly, of his home. The Atlantis story thus descends
through time but also in a chain of narrators that carries it from the legendary
dispassionate sages of Egypt to the semi-legendary lawgiver of Athens to the
Athenian world of our acquaintance. It may be overly schematic to insist on a
rigid corresponsion of levels (Egyptians = Demiurge; Solon = created gods; Critias =
mankind), and it would probably be going too far to read the shared name of Critias
as a marker of intergenerational mimesis, but it can hardly be missed that the
Atlantis story follows an arc not at all unlike the paradigm’s descent from ideal to
celestial to terrestrial, stamping itself on each stage successively.
More striking still is Critias’ description of the story’s place in himself:
Truly marvellous, as they say, how the things we learn as children hold our memory. I’m
not sure I could call back to mind the things I heard yesterday, but of this story, which
I heard so long ago, I’d be shocked if any part escaped me. I heard it with such pleasure and
amusement, and the old man was eager to teach it to me, since I asked for it repeatedly,
so that the story became fixed in me like the encaustic designs of an indelible painting
(ὥστε οἷον ἐγκαύματα ἀνεκπλύτου γραφῆς ἔμμονά μοι γέγονε, 26c).
Timaeus’ speech seamlessly extends this motif of self-propagating mimesis from

Critias’ introductory description of the Atlantis story to a theme undergirding the
cosmos. When Critias takes up the sceptre again to continue the Atlantis story, he
characterizes both Timaeus’ account and his own as a necessary ‘imitation and
copy’ (μίμησιν . . . καὶ ἀπεικασίαν, 107b), which, like paintings, must be evaluated
for their faithfulness to the truth.36 Critias recognizes that mimesis may indeed fail
to render the contour of reality, but he nevertheless lays claim to the word in
reference to these speeches, a sanguine turn that seems fully justified after all
Timaeus has said about the cosmic role of mimesis. Socrates’ dismissive attitude
towards mimesis in Timaeus 19d and his anxiety about mimetic contagion in the
Republic are thus answered by Critias and Timaeus together. Mimesis is not only
36
On the Atlantis story as an experiment in fiction (as pointedly distinct from falsehood), see Gill 1977
and 1979.
central to the operation of the world as we know it, it is so precisely because of

mimetic contagion.
Plato’s critique of mimesis in the Republic posed a serious question about how
art affects us, a question the subsequent philosophical tradition has laboured to
answer with complete satisfaction. Aristotle’s answer in the Poetics has doubtless
been the most successful among readers and critics of practically all periods, but it
works by taking advantage of the ambiguity in the word mimēsis. By focusing on
mimesis2 Aristotle manages to highlight some of art’s very real psychological
benefits, while quietly ignoring the problem of mimetic contagion, which only
seems apparent when considering mimesis1. Plato’s own late return to this topic in
the Timaeus-Critias is, in a sense, a more effective response to the Republic’s view
of mimesis, because it squarely addresses the issue of mimetic contagion, but it
presumes an entire cosmological system to do so, and if we cannot subscribe to his
doctrine of the structure of the physical world, we may find the corresponding
rehabilitation of mimesis somewhat precarious. The Timaeus has commanded its
share of sympathetic readers, especially in late antiquity and the Middle Ages when
its influence far overshadowed that of the Republic, and its view of the phenom-
enal world as a mimesis of the ideal world is never entirely lost from view in the
later history of aesthetics.37 But wherever the Republic has been read it has
disturbed complacent assumptions about the benign passivity of art, and it has
often provided the conceptual tools for writers interested in exploring the unrulier
side of mimesis.
For example, Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ is written in the
form of a Platonic dialogue and it makes repeated reference to Plato, and to the
Republic more specifically, as a venerable corroboration of its thesis. Wilde’s
Vivian presents an extended encomium of mendacity in art, partly on the grounds
that creative lying provides relief from the grim monotony of reality, and partly
because the basic principle that art and life should be similar will never ultimately
be violated, for mimesis is a two-way street: ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art
imitates Life.’38 He gives many examples of human behaviour brought into
conformity with compelling artworks, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, and
even posits that our natural environment, or at least our experience of it, is
radically conditioned by its prior construction in art. Though Wilde’s valuation
of mimesis is obviously a playfully ironic inversion of Plato’s, his basic understand-
ing of the dynamics of mimetic contagion is similar.39 Vivian takes the Republic as
a principal source for mendacity’s connection to art and for its educational utility,
37
For all aspects of the reception of the Timaeus in this period, see Reydams-Schils 2003.
38
Wilde 1968, 186.
39
On Wilde’s reuse and abuse of Plato in this essay, see Danson 1997, 58–9; Comfort 2008, 57–62.
and he even affects to regard Plato as a kind of personal alternative to truth.40

Most interestingly, in a passage without overt reference to Plato, the image of the
cave from Republic 7 becomes a figure for art’s capacity to transcend and trans-
form the world:
Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave, Art
reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the
marvellous, many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it, its
own spirit that is finding expression in a new form. But it is not so. The highest art rejects
the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material
than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great
awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not
symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols. (189)
Wilde inverts the cave’s metaphysical orientation. ‘Reality’ is now located not in
the world outside, but in ‘the shadows of the cave’, and the role of the lone
escapee is now played by Art herself. There is a ‘wondering crowd’ of spectators, as
in Plato’s version, and they are just as confused as ever about the ontological status
of what they see, but the object of their gaze is now Art’s perfect unfolding, a kind
of striptease that lulls them into thinking that they are witnessing an imitation of
their lives, when in fact their lives are only an imitation of Art’s performance.41
Plato never uses the word mimesis (or any words from the mim- group) in his
Allegory of the Cave (514a–20a), but his description of the subterranean shadow
theatre is as full of artistic image-making and theatrical performance as any part of
the Republic. The images carried by the puppet masters are themselves wrought
(εἰργασμένα, 515a) copies of other forms, even human forms (ἀνδριάντας, 514c), and
their function is precisely to generate copies of themselves, shadow images on the
back wall of the cave. Again, the language of mimesis is not used in this passage,
but the connection to the problems of mimesis in Republic 3 and 10 is clear
enough, and the philosophical valuation of this imitative image-making is as
40
‘Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the
most careful study, the most disinterested devotion’ (Wilde 1968, 168–9). ‘Lying for the sake of improve-
ment of the young . . . still lingers amongst us, and its advantages are so admirably set forth in the early books
of Plato’s Republic that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them here’ (193). ‘Just as those who do not love Plato
more than Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love Beauty more
than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art’ (194).
41
Wilde’s allusion to the Republic’s cave has not, to my knowledge, been noted in the scholarship on this
text. No doubt this is mostly due to the fact that he does not mention Plato in this passage, but it may also
stem from readers’ assumption that the Allegory of the Cave would not have been particularly interesting to
Wilde, because it is about epistemology and metaphysics, rather than art and the problem of mimesis. But
this may not have been how Wilde read Plato’s cave. As he said in De Profundis, his famous letter written to
Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897 while he himself was a prisoner in the cave of Reading Gaol, everything Plato
ever said about metaphysics could ‘be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art, and there find its
complete fulfillment’ (Wilde 2000, 741).
negative as elsewhere in the Republic. Oscar Wilde was neither the first nor the last
reader to mine Plato’s cave for an image apposite to the philosophical problems
of mimesis, only to invert its value and use it to rehabilitate artistic imitation.
Luce Irigaray has also found Plato’s cave a fertile symbol for the possibilities of
strategic essentialism represented by mimesis. In her long essay ‘Plato’s Hystera’
(1974) she draws attention to the morphological similarity between Plato’s cave
and the womb, both of which function as a matrix of mimetic production from
which one must struggle to escape into the real world. But the cave is not only
womb-like in its inscription of the copying faculty in a world of darkness and
mystery, it is also ‘latter’ (hysteron), ontologically secondary to the real world of
the Forms and truth.42 Like the womb (hystera) the cave generates imitations
logically dependent on some masculinized originating agency of prior and super-
ior reality. Each human life, however, begins with the womb (hystera) which is
thus temporally if not ontologically prior (proteron). Similarly, for the denizens of
the cave facing the back wall all their lives it is the real world that is behind
(hysteron) and the shadowy images of images that are in front (proteron).43 This
instability of hysteron and proteron in the space and time of the womb/cave
expands into an instability of copy and original as the escapee moves from inside
to outside and sees topographical features that can only remind him of the familiar
furniture of the cave.44 Not only do the puppet masters turn out to have produced
copies of individual items from the outside world, the whole architecture of the
cave is designed to mimic the shape of that world, where vision, for example, is
only possible because of a great light (fire inside the cave, sun outside).45 In both
places masculine desire seems designed to induce a turning back towards what is
physically behind, whether it be the yearning of the foetus or the philosopher
to make his escape from the feminine cave and be born, or the nostalgic yearning
of the philosopher to return to the entombed state of illusion or the lover’s desire to
return to the womb in the oblivion of sex.46 Thus in the vertiginous spinning along
the axis of hysteron and proteron there is a final confounding of the categories of
original and copy, and the cave’s mimetic property turns out to have effected a kind
of performative resistance to the tyranny of the masculine ideal, ever-reinscribing its
features on a reality that ironically may already have been radically mimetic.47
Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s cave is perhaps the boldest reappropriation of
this parable in the long philosophical and critical tradition, and if it is, in some
sense necessarily, a hijacking of Plato’s myth for anti-Platonic purposes, it is also
one that resonates deeply with elements genuinely latent in Plato’s account. Her
foregrounding of mimesis as the unstated but peculiar activity of the cave and her
alertness to the unruly instability of mimetic contagion are profoundly Platonic.
42
Irigaray 1985, 244. 43
Irigaray 1985, 247. 44
Irigaray 1985, 286.
45
Irigaray 1985, 294. 46
Irigaray 1985, 341. 47
Irigaray 1985, 363.
The aspect of mimesis that she elucidates more effectively than anyone else in this
tradition is its radical unrepresentability and the aptness of the cave for symboliz-
ing something that cannot in itself be shown.48 Indeed, an actor may copy a drunk
and a painter may copy a flower, but how do either of them represent mimesis
itself? The content of any given instance of mimesis is the representation of some
object, but the form of that mimesis is representation itself, and how can repre-
sentation itself be represented? The cave, on Irigaray’s reading, does just this, by
figuring the hidden, blind matrix where likenesses are born and spawn new
likenesses, only to serve as the origin of every possible vision of reality. Irigaray’s
interest in Plato’s cave is thus neatly parallel to the philosophical side of our
interest in mimetic contagion. As Aristotle said, man is mimetic by nature
(1448b5–6), so it is not surprising when people imitate what they see in the
world. But when what they see and imitate is itself a work of mimetic art, their
behaviour serves as an icon not only of the object they see, but of the unrepre-
sentable mode of existence of that object. Mimesis, if it can be represented at all,
can only be represented transitively, in the contagious passage from one imitation
to the next.
48
‘The hystera, faceless, unseen, will never be presented, represented as such. But the representational
scheme and sketch for the hystera—which can never be fulfilled—sub-tends, englobes, encircles, connotes,
overdetermines every sight, every sighting, face, feature, figure, form, presentification, presence. Blindly’
(Irigaray 1985, 245).
FOUR
Mimetic Contagion in Terence’s Rome
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes

intulit agresti Latio.
Horace, Ep. 2.1.156–7
The arc of Chapters 2 and 3 has spanned ritual and other popular uses of images
and the development of a philosophical discourse of the mimetically persuasive
effect of art, particularly on the young. Some of this material will have been
more directly familiar to Terence and his audience than other material, but even
the more abstract philosophical reaction to mimetic contagion is rooted in a
concrete concern with practical and universally pressing questions of pedagogy.
At Rome, the educational role of images and their power as ethical exempla for the
young took an institutional form more explicit than anything we know from
Greek culture. Polybius, who was brought to Rome as a hostage in 168 BCE and
might well have been present at the original production of the Eunuch, describes
the singular role played by the imagines in Roman funerals of that time (6.53–54).1
After the burial, an image (εἰκών) of the deceased, a mask fashioned to meticulous
likeness (εἰς ὁμοιότητα διαφερόντως ἐξειργασμένον), is displayed in the most conspicu-
ous place in his house. Polybius indicates the ambiguous role of these likenesses
as both artistic images and masks, noting that they are carefully displayed at
public sacrifices, but that in subsequent family funerals they are actually worn by
men who are as like the originals as possible (ὡς ὁμοιοτάτοις) in body type and who
will enhance their performance by dressing the parts their subjects played in life.2
Throughout his description of the funeral, Polybius repeatedly emphasizes
the importance of seeing. Twice he says that this kind of production is only
undertaken for the distinguished or, more literally, ‘visible’ (ἐπιφανής, 6.53.1 and
6), whose noticeability in life only continues after death, and we can hardly miss
the connection between the body’s conspicuous placement (ἐναργής) on the
1
Flower 1996, 91–127 has the best treatment of this passage and its context within the broader evidence of
Roman ancestor masks.
2
For the relationship between this semi-dramatic, masked performance practice and Roman theater, see
Flower 1996, 114–15.
Rostra and the mask’s prominent location (ἐπιφανέστατον) in the house. Not only
does this ritual create a continuity of passive visibility from life to death and corpse
to artefact, it also establishes a continuity of active spectation from one generation
to the next. For the funeral eulogy is delivered ‘under the gaze’ (ὑπὸ τὴν ὄψιν) of all
in attendance, and this will necessarily include, as the following description makes
clear, the gaze from the hollow eyes of the ancestors’ masks.
The old dead may be spectators of the new dead, but, according to Polybius,
the parade of the old dead before the young is the most important part of the
ceremony. The whole next chapter of book 6 is devoted to advertising the famous
bravery of the Roman people and showing the relevance of their funeral rite for
the Romans’ national character. Polybius understands the chief point of this
manifestly theatrical spectacle (θέαμα) of dead men walking to the funerals of
their descendants to be the effect of these images on the young. Young men hear
the famous exploits of the men whose likenesses they are looking at, and word and
image come together to inspire them to become ethical likenesses of their fore-
bears. Polybius hints at the many examples he could cite of Roman piety stirred up
by such means, stories of battles decided by single combat, heroic self-sacrifice,
and fathers condemning their own sons to death for the good of the Republic, and
we will of course recognize these types from the early books of Livy and other
accounts of Rome’s legendary history. The example Polybius finally singles out as
representative is the story of Horatius Cocles, an especially appropriate instance for
several reasons. His deed is introduced as an example of the young being inspired to
imitate their ancestors, so presumably we are to understand that such rituals as the
Roman funeral have impelled Horatius to this act of bravery, but, within the story,
he is explicitly inspired by the expectation of his own future renown (τὴν ἐσομένην
μετὰ ταῦτα περὶ αὐτὸν εὔκλειαν, 6.55.3).3 In a way similar to the Roman funeral, then,
where young men are spectators but are therefore expected to become ‘prominent’
(ἐπιφανής), and the recently deceased is the spectated but will subsequently be one
of the old dead and play both roles at once, Horatius too finds himself in an essential
continuity of inspirational watching and being watched.
After taking up Horatius, Polybius does not return to the topic of the family
imagines, but Horatius’ relevance for these inspirational modes of figuration
becomes clear if we bear in mind Livy’s testimony (2.10.12) that there was an
honorary statue of Horatius in the comitium, just as Cloelia, whom he constructs
as an explicit imitator of Horatius (2.13.6–8), was honoured with a statue on
the Sacred Way. If the statue of Horatius Cocles is supposed to be a civic-scale
version of a family imago, inspiring the Roman people to imitative virtue, the
reason for focusing on him in connection with the funeral rite becomes all
3
The richest treatment of Horatius Cocles and the role of vision in Roman exemplarity is Roller 2004.
MIMETIC CONTAGION IN TERENCE’S ROME 97
the more clear. As usual, it is probably impossible to determine whether Polybius’

analysis of exemplarity in Roman culture is his own or adapted from his native
sources, but it seems extremely likely that in this case Polybius is handing on his
informants’ understanding of their funeral ritual.4 This would account for his
immediate turn to Rome’s early legends for exempla, as opposed to more recent
history with which he was personally familiar, and it may also explain his failure to
mention the public statue of Horatius, if this connection with the funeral imagines
was obvious to his informants but not to him. As to Horatius Cocles’ role as paradigm
of exemplarity, Matthew Roller has counted over thirty references to him in extant
ancient literature.5 Sometimes the story is told afresh, but in other cases the name
seems to be enough, and often he is invoked explicitly as an ethical standard against
which contemporary figures are judged. Given this frequency and focus of deploy-
ment, it seems improbable that Polybius could be the single-handed author of this
whole tradition, and it is much more likely that he is simply transmitting his inform-
ants’ commonplace understanding of the cultural centrality of these images.
The significance of this conjecture is the implication that at least some portion
of the original audience of the Eunuch would already have considered represen-
tational art to have an ethically contagious effect, particularly on the young, and
that its operation on them was already being described in theatrical terms. This
formulation of the popular Roman discourse of exemplarity is emphatically posi-
tive, as the focus here has been only on the effect of good images on the young,
but just as Aristotle and Xenophon’s Socrates could point to both beneficial and
destructive forms of mimetic contagion, the Romans had available cultural models
for the detrimental effect of images, particularly in their understanding of the
history of their own use of representations of the gods. Plutarch relates that
Numa, as a good Pythagorean, forbade the use of painted or sculptural images
of the gods and that for 170 years the Romans flourished in religious architecture
but never compromised their piety by ‘likening the higher to the lower’ with
statuary (Numa 8.7–8).6 The notion that Roman religion was ever aniconic is as
fanciful as Numa’s very existence, but this story is traceable as far back as Varro.7
When the representational austerity of early Roman religion is invoked in these
texts, it is always immediately coordinated to an indictment of subsequent
corruption of piety after the introduction of images, so that the historicity of
Roman religious aniconism is clearly subordinated to its rhetorical importance as a
4
The methodological problems inherent in trying to ascertain Polybius’ sources become even more
intense for book 6. For the source issues, along with other problems unique to book 6, see Walbank 1972,
130–56. There is certainly no evidence for an earlier literary version of the Horatius Cocles tale, see Walbank
1957, 740–1.
5
Roller 2004, 2.
6
For the cultural background to the tradition of Numa’s Pythagoreanism, see Humm 2005, 541–54.
7
For Varro, see Aug. De civ. 4.31; see also Tert. Apol. 25.12–13.
moralistic topos. This myth has two inevitable corollaries: first, whenever it is
expedient to do so, artistic representations, especially of the gods, can be con-
strued as culturally imported and alien to ancestral Roman practice, and second,
however pious the votary’s intentions, these images may be mysteriously harmful
to public character.
Closely related to this moralistic tradition is the conventional assertion that
Rome’s expanding empire eventually brought in significant quantities of technic-
ally refined Greek art, which effected the corruption of the Roman people by
spoiling their rugged simplicity and introducing Hellenic luxury. Here Marcellus’
sack of Syracuse in 211 BCE, followed by his elaborate ovatio, is often treated as the
cardinal event. ‘For before that time’, says Plutarch, ‘Rome neither had nor knew
anything of refinement or elegance’, but bristling with her barbaric arms and
bloody trophies of war, she was ‘no sight for cowardly and luxurious spectators’
(οὐδὲ δειλῶν ἦν θέαμα καὶ τρυφώντων θεατῶν, Marc. 21.2). There is a nice irony here;
every city gets the ‘spectators’ she deserves. Early Rome was not worth looking at
(θέαμα), but then there was no one inclined to the idleness of looking at her
(τρυφώντων θεατῶν), since this was before she became famous as the home of
spectacles and mother of spectators! She was austere and sober and so were her
citizens, until ‘Marcellus adorned the city with spectacles that had pleasure and
Greek charm and persuasiveness’ (Μάρκελλος ἡδονὴν ἐχούσαις καὶ χάριν Ἑλληνικὴν
καὶ πιθανότητα διαποικίλας ὄψεσι τὴν πόλιν, Marc. 21.3). The artworks’ first two
subversions, their ‘pleasure’ and their ‘Greek charm’, will be familiar to anyone
with a broader acquaintance with Roman moralizing on luxuria, but the third
affliction, their ‘persuasiveness’, will be harder to understand apart from the
discourse of mimetic contagion.8 Like the sculpture of Pythagoras of Rhegium,
these artworks from Sicily are persuasive in two senses at once; they are deceptively
lifelike, and precisely because they are convincing in this sense, they are also
persuasive in that they somehow remake the Romans in their own image, as
luxurious, idle Greeks. ‘He filled the people with idleness and chatter
about art and artists, talking cleverly and fiddling with this a great part of
the day’ (σχολῆς ἐνέπλησε καὶ λαλιᾶς περὶ τεχνῶν καὶ τεχνιτῶν, ἀστεϊζόμενον καὶ
διατρίβοντα πρὸς τούτῳ πολὺ μέρος τῆς ἡμέρας, Marc. 21.5).
In Livy the problem is presented somewhat differently: ‘This was the first
beginning of admiring works of the Greek arts and of this general license for
despoiling everything sacred and profane, a freedom which eventually turned
on the Roman gods, first of all on that very temple which was so lavishly adorned
by Marcellus’ (inde primum initium mirandi Graecarum artium opera licentiae-
que huius sacra profanaque omnia vulgo spoliandi factum est, quae postremo in
8
The best general treatment of Roman luxuria, seen through the lens of sumptuary legislation, is still
Sauerwein 1970.
Romanos deos, templum id ipsum primum quod a Marcello eximie ornatum est,
vertit. 25.40.2). The model that the Roman people are seduced into imitating this
time is not associated with the images themselves, but with the whole context of
their impious procurement. This shift in attention from the artworks to the
conquering general is unique to this text, and it seems plain that Livy’s point in
this turn is to set up the irony of the sack of Marcellus’ temple. The Romans have
proven to be good students, imitating not only their teacher’s love of art, but his
total disregard for provenance. Livy yokes the art’s captivating wondrousness
(initium mirandi) to the public slide into Marcellus’ licentia without specifying
the images’ direct dynamism, but the art’s implicit role in the Romans’ degrad-
ation is probably already clear. Later, however, when Cato refers to Marcellus’
haul, the images’ aggression is more explicit (34.4.3–5):
haec ego, quo melior laetiorque in dies fortuna rei publicae est, quo magis imperium
crescit—et iam in Graeciam Asiamque transcendimus omnibus libidinum inlecebris reple-
tas et regias etiam adtrectamus gazas—, eo plus horreo, ne illae magis res nos ceperint
quam nos illas. infesta, mihi credite, signa ab Syracusis inlata sunt huic urbi. iam nimis
multos audio Corinthi et Athenarum ornamenta laudantes mirantesque et antefixa fictilia
deorum Romanorum ridentes. ego hos malo propitios deos et ita spero futuros, si in suis
manere sedibus patiemur.
The better and brighter the fortune of the state becomes every day, the more the empire
grows—and now we are crossing Greece and Asia, which are full of all the enticements of
desires, and we are even laying our hands on royal treasures—, well, I shudder all the more,
for fear those things will gain more control over us than we over them. Believe you me,
those statues brought in from Syracuse were poison for this city. These days I hear too
many people extolling and venerating the baubles of Corinth and Athens and laughing at
the clay tiles of the Roman gods. For my part, these are the gods I’d rather see happy, and
I hope they may remain so, if we let them stay in their own abodes.
Horace had subverted the roles of conquest at a national level—Greece captures

her fierce captor (Ep. 2, 1, 156)—but Livy’s Cato locates the agency in the spoils
themselves. The fear that Rome would be possessed by her possessions points
directly back to the black day when the destructive (infesta) Syracusan artworks
were brought into Rome, corrupting the Romans’ relationship with their old
gods by giving them a taste for the wondrous (mirantes) imported images and
making the old-fashioned representations seem laughable. ‘Cato’s’ view of the art
from Syracuse and of the power of images is clearly of a piece with Livy’s; how
much of this attitude can be reliably attributed to the real Cato is, of course,
anyone’s guess.9 Livy does, however, give strong confirmation that this view of
9
Letta (1984, 21 n.110) argues that this particular speech is either based on a real speech by Cato or
assembled from genuinely Catonian material. Gruen (1992, 70) is more sceptical. For Livy’s access to actual
speeches by Cato and his reliance on them, especially for his Cato’s speeches, see Astin 1978, 296–7.
Marcellus’ ovatio and of Greek art in Rome more broadly goes back long before
Plutarch, and by putting this sentiment in a speech made by Cato, thirty-four years
before the Eunuch, he suggests that it is consistent with the culturally ‘tradition-
alist’ rhetoric of the mid-second century.
Once again, though, Polybius provides the most direct evidence for views
contemporary with the Eunuch, and he is as apprehensive of the art from Syracuse
as Plutarch, Livy, and Livy’s Cato. If the Romans had always relied on the capture
and display of such spoils, he says, that would be one thing, ‘but they were used to
lives of simplicity, far from such luxury and magnificence, and yet they generally
prevailed over those who had the greatest number and most beautiful of such
works’ (ἁπλουστάτοις χρώμενοι βίοις καὶ πορρωτάτω τῆς ἐν τούτοις περιττότητος καὶ
πολυτελείας ἀφεστῶτες ὅμως ἐπεκράτουν τούτων αἰεὶ παρ᾽ οἷς ὑπῆρχε πλεῖστα καὶ
κάλλιστα τὰ τοιαῦτα, 9, 10, 5). How, he asks, can anyone doubt that the Romans’
change in practice after the sack of Syracuse was a mistake? For they abandoned
the habits (ἔθη) of victors and took up emulation (ζῆλον) of the conquered. Along
with the art itself came the envy (φθόνος) inevitably attending such objects and
eventually an ardent hatred (ὀργή) of those successful enough to have taken it.
Between Polybius, Livy, and Plutarch there are substantial differences in
emphasis and in the account of the precise way in which the art was so destructive
for the Romans, but there is also clear agreement on the essential point: the Greek
art introduced into Rome after the sack of Syracuse had a debilitating effect on the
character of the Romans by teaching them to stare at art and, more subtly, by
pulling them into ethical affinity with the art’s original owners and with the art
itself. The older scholarship, even if it rejected the censorious judgment of
Hellenism at Rome, tended to follow this moralistic tradition in its appraisal
of the early Romans’ lack of sophistication and in seeing the sack of Syracuse as
a turning point in Rome’s aesthetic history.10 But during the 1990s many scholars
began to question the simple cultural boundaries implied by such terms as
‘Hellenization’ and even the very notion that Rome was ever meaningfully
detachable from the greater Greek world.11 Regarding Marcellus’ ovatio and its
effect on the Roman people, this more recent scholarly trend is best exemplified
in the work of Erich Gruen, who has pointed out that already in the fourth century
Rome was being decorated with imported statuary and paintings, including
images of the gods brought in as spoils of war.12 Given this long-standing history
of Greek art in Rome, Gruen argues, nothing about Marcellus’ ovatio would
have seemed especially novel or problematic in 211 BCE, and the later tradition’s
10
See, for example, Becatti 1951, 9–12; Pape 1975, 58–65; MacMullen 1991, 425–6.
11
For example, Torelli 1990, 303–5. Along these lines, Gruen 1990 and 1992 together provide a thorough
rethinking of Greek and Roman cultural interaction for this period.
12
Gruen 1992, 84–130.
moralizing hindsight is anachronistic. Most recently, Myles McDonnell has argued,

contra Gruen, that the Syracusan haul was indeed unprecedented, perhaps in its
quality and more certainly in its quantity, and that a somewhat less sceptical
reappraisal of the later tradition is in order.13
Happily, for the purposes of our investigation, the historicity of the traditional
reading of Marcellus’ ovatio and the novelty of Greek art in Rome in 211 BCE may
be left undecided. The only significant question for us is how Terence’s audience
in the mid-second century understood the effect of Greek art on their own
character. And it is precisely here, once again, that the testimony of Polybius is
so valuable, for it confirms that the moralistic suspicion concerning Greek art and
its influence on Romans can be traced back at least that far. As Gruen points out,
similar claims (moral pollution, turning point in the history of Roman character)
were also made for the triumphs of L. Cornelius Scipio Asiagenus in 189 and Cn.
Manlius Vulso in 187, but where this may weaken the evidentiary value of the
tradition for discerning what really happened in 211, it shows the continuing
relevance of the moralistic trope in the first half of the second century.14 Consid-
ering the increasing frequency and splendour of triumphs in this period, Polybius’
claims about the spoils from Syracuse could hardly have a merely antiquarian
point. The audience of the Eunuch needed look back no further than six years at
the unprecedented haul of art and artists after the battle of Pydna.15
ART IN ROMAN COMEDY
These hopes and anxieties concerning imitative response are, of course, only one
of the available ways of talking about the plastic arts in Middle Republican Rome.
Accordingly, there is no reason to expect that the theme of art and mimetic
contagion was a consistent interest of all Roman comedy, but before turning to
the Eunuch, it is worth considering Plautus’ attitudes towards art, in order
to establish a generic context for the dynamic evident in the Eunuch.16 Maurizio
Bettini has convincingly argued that when images or the figurative arts are
mentioned in Plautus’ plays, it is generally to indicate some perfected state of
being. A striking illustration of this point is the adjective graphicus, which never
has any of the meanings of the Greek γραφικός, all directly related to painting,
but rather denotes perfection or unqualified success, especially at some form of
13
McDonnell 2006. 14
Gruen 1992, 105–7.
15
Livy 45.33.5–6; 45.39.5; Pliny HN 35.135; Plut. Aem. Paull. 6.5.
16
The most complete collection of evidence for painting in Roman comedy is Knapp 1917. More
recently, Bettini 1999, 170–5 has a very compelling discussion of these issues (even touching on the Eunuch),
the influence of which on my readings of Plautus will be apparent.
trickery. For example, in Trinummus, Charmides calls one man a graphicus

fur (1024) and another a graphicus nugator (936) and pergraphicus sycophanta
(1139). A textbook tricky slave is a servus graphicus (Epid. 410), but even without
explicit reference to a notionally crafty role, a character who fits his part to a
T can be called a mortalis graphicus (Pseud. 519, 700; Stich. 570). The adverbial
form, graphice, is used in the same way, to indicate some kind of picture-perfect
rightness (Pers. 306, 464, 843; Trin. 767).
The adjective graphicus holds up the painted image, if only in a recurring
metaphor, as the standard of perfection against which ‘real life’ may be judged,
but the comparison to painting is not limited to this metaphoric level. As Bettini
says, ‘Plautus, in marked contrast with Plato’s rejection of the figurative arts, was
convinced that images could be more true and perfect than truth itself.’17 For
example, in Epidicus, the girl Telestis is as pretty as a picture: aspecta et contempla,
Epidice: | usque ab ungiculo ad capillum summumst festivissuma. | estne consimilis
quasi quom signum pictum pulchrum aspexeris? (‘Look her over, Epidicus; she’s a
delight from tip to toe. Isn’t it like looking at a pretty painting?’ 622–4).18 There is
no gap between her picture-perfect outward appearance and the idealized por-
trayal of feminine beauty one expects from a painting. But the qualities of a scene
that make it worth comparing to a painting do not have to be strictly limited to the
visible, nor must the painting be a recognizable type. In the Poenulus there is a
scene so ‘picturesque’ that it suggests a non-existent archetype. The recognition is
past and the play nearly over; Hanno has gained his long-lost daughters and
everyone embraces in a group hug. At the sight, the young man Agorastocles
breaks out: o Apelle, o Zeuxis pictor, | qur numero estis mortui, hoc exemplo ut
pingeretis? | nam alios pictores nil moror huiusmodi tractare exempla (‘O Apelles,
o Zeuxis the painter, why are you dead too soon to paint this subject? For
I wouldn’t want other painters handling subjects of this sort’, 1271–3). Agorasto-
cles can see the reunited family with his own eyes, but he yearns to see the scene
painted: ‘The picture is not a bad imitation of reality: quite the opposite. It is
manifest perfection, rendering the truth even more worthy of being true.’19
In Mercator, Lysimachus exclaims to the audience that his friend Demipho,
despite his advanced age, is the very portrait of a lover: si umquam vidistis pictum
amatorem, em illic est. | nam meo quidem animo vetulus, decrepitus senex | tanti-
demst quasi sit signum pictum in pariete (‘If you’ve ever seen a painted lover,
behold the man. Anyway to my mind this broke down little oldster is just the same
as a painted picture on the wall’, 313–15). The comparison here is a little more
17
Bettini 1999, 173.
18
For signum in Plautus as generalized ‘representation’, rather than specifically ‘statue’, see Knapp 1917,
150.
19
Bettini 1999, 174.
complicated than that in Epidicus, because the essential identity asserted between
life and art is not based in outward appearance, but rather on a hidden similarity of
character. Demipho’s inside and outside do not match, and the irony is that he is
likened, in spite of his appearance, to a painted image, which is, of course, all
surface. The joke here is also metatheatrical, in that both senex and adulescens
amator are stock character types, as visibly identifiable as the painted lover. We
know that Demipho is a senex because he looks like one, as prescribed by the
conventions of mask and costume. Lysimachus insists that Demipho’s character
does not fit his appearance, but he does so by comparing his friend’s hidden heart
to the two-dimensional painted lover, a conventional type just as ethically flat as
the comic senex. He confronts the spectators as viewers (vidistis), hypothetically
of a painted lover and then more immediately of ‘this man’ (em illic).20 When
the fourth wall is so patently ignored and the audience, directly addressed as
spectators, is asked to regard ‘this guy’, the referent of the deictic illic begins to
slip between character and actor, especially in the context of this playful oppos-
ition of visible appearance and unexposed personality. The only secret self, hidden
beneath the theatrical signifiers of character, is the actor, who probably is quite
different from the senex he plays.
The only other reference to painting in Roman comedy comparable in extent to
the one in the Eunuch is in the Mostellaria. The slave Tranio has already proven his
mettle as a servus callidus by pulling off several grand schemes to save his young
master, and now, in his victory lap, he is simultaneously tricking the two old men
Theopropides and Simo. Tranio has convinced Simo to let Theopropides tour his
house, because Theopropides (he says) must make some home improvements and
wants to use Simo’s house as a model. Theopropides, however, has been fooled
into thinking that his son has bought Simo’s house, so the tour is an inspection of
his own property. During the inspection, Tranio shamelessly plays to both old
men at once, stroking the vanity of each by extolling the house each thinks he
owns, while artfully ensuring that neither reveals his understanding of the situ-
ation to the other. As he goes on he gets bolder and more playful and cannot
help pointing out a pair of posts, how amazingly stiff they are and how dense
(quanta firmitate facti et quanta crassitudine, 819). Such loaded observations
20
The connection between the two acts of viewing in this sentence is subtler than it may at first seem.
There is no logical dependence of the apodosis on the protasis; his being the quintessence of the lover is in
no way affected by whether or not the audience has seen a painting. This is an example of a ‘speech-act
conditional’ (for this category, see Sweetser 1990, 118–21). The full sense is something like: ‘If you’ve seen a
painted lover before [then you’ll know what I mean]: look, that’s him’. The seeing implicit in the apodosis is
due to the illocutionary force of em illic, which, like ecce, is essentially imperative. The discourse particle em
was probably originally an imperative of emo, and in comedy generally expresses consternation or surprise at
some visible person or thing, which the addressee is invited to consider. The deictic illic makes the bid for
the spectators’ visual attention even stronger. See Hand 1969, vol. 3, 49.
accumulate and become more pointed, until they reach their climax in an ek-
phrasis of a painting (832–40):
TR. viden pictum, ubi ludificat una cornix volturios duos?
TH. non edepol video. TR. at ego video. nam inter volturios duos
cornix astat, ea volturios duo vicissim vellicat.
quaeso huc ad me specta, cornicem ut conspicere possies.
iam vides? TH. profecto nullam equidem illic cornicem intuor.
TR. at tu isto ad vos optuere, quoniam cornicem nequis
conspicari, si volturios forte possis contui.
TH. omnino, ut te apsolvam, nullam pictam conspicio hic avem.
TR. age, iam mitto, ignosco: aetate non quis optuerier.
TR. Do you see that painting of a crow tricking two vultures?
TH. No, I don’t see that. TR. Well, I do. There’s a crow standing
Between two vultures pecking at them one after the other.
Look over here towards me and you’ll see the crow.
Now do you see it? TH. Gosh, I don’t see any crow over there.
TR. OK, look over towards each other, since you can’t catch the crow,
Maybe you’ll be able to see the vultures.
TH. You know, I’m just not seeing any painted bird at all.
TR. Well, forget about it; it’s OK. You’re probably just too old.
Scholars are divided on the question of whether this painting is meant to be real or
merely dreamed up by Tranio for his fantastic lie.21 I incline strongly to the latter
view, but either way, the broad similarity between this situation and that in the
Eunuch is clear: the characters take after the figures in a painting. Tranio, like the
crow, makes a spectacle of the old men (ludificat), and they are helpless to stop
him. Once again, the painting tells the truth about what is really going on, but the
old men cannot see the painting, and this, paradoxically, proves the painting’s
accuracy. For they are just as stupid as the vultures and as blind as Tranio says they
are, otherwise they would surely catch him in his lie and reveal the painting to be
simultaneously unreal and false.
Apart from the Eunuch, there are two other references to mythological painting
in Roman comedy, and unlike the painting in the Eunuch they are not ‘real’ in the
play, but merely recollections of general types. One is from the Captivi, where
Tyndarus returns from the quarries at the end of the play: Vidi ego multa saepe
picta, quae Accherunti fierent | cruciamenta, verum enim vero nulla adaeque est
Accheruns | atque ubi ego fui, in lapicidinis (‘I have seen the many tortures often
painted, which happen in hell, but there’s no hell like where I was, in the quarries’,
998–1000). Here the painted scene is brought in as a comparandum for Tyndarus’
real sufferings and found inadequately horrific. As we have seen, this criticism of
21
See Leach 1969, 327–8.
painting’s failure to render the truth with sufficient vividness is atypical; in fact, it
seems to be unique in all Roman comedy. The other reference to mythological
painting has proven very difficult to interpret. When Menaechmus I emerges from
his house, having filched his wife’s dress to give to his mistress, he crows happily to
Peniculus (141–6):
ME. vin tu facinus luculentum inspicere? PE. quis id coxit coquos?

iam sciam si quid titubatumst, ubi reliquias videro.
ME. dic mi, enumquam tu vidisti tabulam pictam in pariete
ubi aquila Catameitum raperet aut ubi Venus Adoneum?
PE. saepe. sed quid istae picturae ad me attinent? ME. age me aspice.
ecquid adsimulo similiter? PE. qui istic est ornatus tuos?
ME. You want to lay eyes on a brilliant accomplishment? PE. Who was the
cook?
I can tell if there was a slip-up just by looking at the leftovers.
ME. Tell me, have you ever seen a wall painting
Where the eagle carries off Ganymede or where Venus snatches Adonis?
PE. Sure, but what do your pictures have to do with me? ME. Look at me.
Am I the spitting image of anything? PE. What’s that you’re wearing?
Menaechmus has smuggled his wife’s palla out of the house by wearing it under
his cloak, which he presumably parts or doffs in line 145 to reveal his unusual
underwear and prompt the parasite’s reaction. He seems to think he is ‘just like’
something in an abduction painting.22 But what does he mean? It is unclear just
what or whom he is supposed to resemble, and scholars have been divided on this
question, without apparent acknowledgement of the diversity of likely interpret-
ations. One possibility is that he is the wily abductor and the palla is the ravished
beloved.23 Alternatively, there is no ‘abductor’ in this scenario, but dressed in
drag, he is a champion pretty boy (luculentum), like one of the all-star effeminates
of Greek myth.24 Or perhaps the figure he cuts recalls the painted ensemble, both
aggressor and victim at once. If we imagine him holding his cloak out to reveal the
dress, then his outspread pallium may recollect the eagle’s wings or Venus’ robes,
while the dress underneath puts him in the role of erotic prey.25
22
For the colloquial use of figura etymologica for intensity in adsimulo similiter, see Hofmann 1951, 94–5.
23
Knapp 1917, 152: ‘Menaechmus’ allusion is, to be sure, rather far-fetched; we have to suppose that he
thinks of himself as the eagle or as Venus, of the cloak as Ganymede or Adonis.’
24
Gratwick 1993, 151–2: ‘Men. is facetiously comparing himself with Ganymede and Adonis as types of
champion “pretty boy” whom Zeus and Venus respectively as types of the superhuman found irresistibly
attractive.’
25
Moseley and Hammond 1962, 62: ‘Presumably he thinks that his outspread cloak represents the
eagle’s wings or the robes of Venus, and he, in the woman’s mantle, one of the effeminate boys of Greek
mythology (in 197 he is compared to a female impersonator). There is also implied the idea of a successful
abduction.’
Whichever of these interpretations is adopted, none of them can easily be

denied, so there is a prima facie ambiguity in the comparison to the painting,
or perhaps better, an instability in the assignment of roles, akin to what we will
be tracing out in the Eunuch in Chapter 5. I would suggest a progression, then, as
follows. Given his manifest pride throughout this scene at successfully making off
with his wife’s palla, Menaechmus casts himself predominantly in the role of
divine plunderer and the dress as the worthy booty, but already ecquid adsimulo
similiter? suggests a sardonic reply, which Peniculus does not quite make. As
Gratwick says, ‘The suppressed answer to the question is “yes, a cinaedus.”’26 But
this turns out to have been the right answer. The day’s events will soon come
swooping down out of the blue on poor Menaechmus I, when his long-lost twin
brother, Menaechmus II, shows up and creates all havoc. In the ensuing confu-
sion the distribution of benefits is one-sided: Menaechmus II gets to enjoy manly
delights and freedoms his brother can only dream of (sex with his brother’s
mistress, followed by robbing her, then telling off his brother’s feared wife and
father-in-law), while Menaechmus I suffers the consequences of his brother’s
behaviour as a passive victim. Menaechmus I really is Fortune’s cinaedus, and
his claim to be ‘just like’ the painting proves to true in ways he could not have
predicted or wished.
EUNUCH
Where Chapter 1 provided substantial evidence of the painting’s persuasive role in

the Eunuch, this chapter has endeavoured to show how it was ever possible for
an image to be thought to have such power. We have attempted to situate this
instance of mimetic contagion within a larger body of Greek and Roman dis-
courses and practices involving works of art that impress themselves upon their
viewers as models. More specifically, we have tried to indicate some of the ways in
which this preoccupation with ethically persuasive art seems to have had a place in
mid-second-century BCE Roman culture. More specifically still, we have examined
earlier Roman comedy for evidence of attitudes to painting and found a range of
suggestive precursors to the scenario in the Eunuch. In several of these Plautine
examples the character’s averred similarity to a painting proved to be slipperier
than has usually been noticed, perhaps due to the metatheatrical instability
inherent in the enclosure, however brief, of a painting within a play. The remain-
der of this chapter will examine the Eunuch somewhat along the lines indicated by
these Plautus plays, on the assumption that Terence’s audience would have been
as ready to think with the painting as they were to notice its effect.
26
Gratwick 1993, 152.
If an artistic representation of a rape can incite a viewer to imitation, what about

a play that contains a rape? This is the question implicit in Augustine’s metaphor-
ical deployment of the painting.27 At this level of abstraction the painting is more
than just a picture; it has already become a figure for the work of art that contains
it, and its relationship to its dramatic setting is essentially emblematic.28 It is, of
course, by no means surprising that a painting should be made to stand for a
poem, least of all a dramatic poem. Horace’s famous dictum, ut pictura poesis (AP
361), is only the handiest example of an extremely widespread ancient tendency to
locate the metaphorical ground of literary art in visual art.29 Rather than compar-
ing the plastic to the poetic or rather than simply ignoring the possibility of
transmedial analogy between the ‘mimetic’ arts, the Greeks and Romans, going
back at least to Pindar and Simonides, usually explained verbal art by reference to
pictorial art.30
The analogy to figurative representation is all the more irresistible with drama,
for theatre is a visual art form in its own right and is, among literary forms,
uniquely ‘made of ’ plastic art, from the masks, costumes, and other properties
to the stage set, which may have been one of the most public displays of large-scale
painting in the ancient city. As Alison Sharrock says, ‘Drama seems to stand on the
boundary between verbal and visual art.’31 This approach to the narrated painting
in the Eunuch as mise en abîme at the heraldic centre of the play suggests a type of
self-awareness of theatre-as-art that is rather unlike any of the kinds of metathea-
tricality scholars have detected in Roman comedy. It is not simply a matter
of a joking reference to the audience or a lexical wink at the language of the
theatre, but rather a form of recursive autosimilarity. The painting is ‘fictional’,
from the perspective of Chaerea and Pamphila, in that it tells someone else’s
story for spectacular consumption and is obviously artificial, and yet the painting
proves able spontaneously to overstep its frame and become ‘real’ in the lives of
its viewers.
If the painting’s relationship to the internal audience has implications for
the play’s relationship to the external audience, there is another type of theatrical
27
See pp. 46–8.
28
By ‘emblem’ I mean to invoke, rather specifically, the Renaissance tradition of printing images with
affixed captions. These pictures were often used in allegorical illustration of the accompanying text, but the
inevitable gap between the two media could result in a relationship ranging from supplementary homology
to irreconcilable divergence. My thinking about the painting in the Eunuch has been influenced by some of
the scholarship on this aspect of early modern book culture. Especially helpful for the philosophical and
historical background of emblems is Russell 1995; for a broader range of recent perspectives, see Saunders
and Davidson 2005.
29
A recent survey of this theme across antiquity, with thorough references to earlier scholarship, is
Benediktson 2000.
30
For Pindar see, e.g., N. 5; for Simonides, see Plu. Mor. 3.346F–347A.
31
Sharrock 1996, 104.
self-consciousness at play in the same scene. The eunuch intrigue is quite

clearly handled as a play-within-the-play, and scholars have long noted the
prominence of theatrical vocabulary surrounding Chaerea’s ‘role’ as the
eunuch.32 The most irrefutable example may be Parmeno’s boast, in Act 5,
that his handiwork in scripting the day’s events deserves the Palme d’Or
(palmarium, 930). Critics since Ashmore have read palmarium as a witty
reference to the palma, the dramatic prize that would shortly be given to
the Eunuch.33 But Parmeno is not the only character to use explicitly theat-
rical language in connection with this deception. Chaerea’s comparison of his
own exploit with Jupiter’s emphasizes the spectacular and ludic aspect of both:
egomet quoque id spectare coepi, et quia consimilem luserat | iam olim ille
ludum (‘I began watching it too, and because he had long ago played such a
similar game’, 586–7).
Later, when the indignant Pythias insists that the shrivelled old weasel whom
Phaedria is calling the eunuch bears no resemblance to the attractive adulescentu-
lus Parmeno delivered in Act 3, Phaedria responds ambiguously, hem quae haec est
fabula? (‘Ah, what is this farce?’, 689). He may well doubt the veracity of her
‘story’, but he also begins to recognize the signs of comic subterfuge behind the
mounting evidence of mistaken identity, for the word fabula, even more than
ludus, is linked to the technical language of theatrical entertainment.34 Soon
enough, by interrogating the real eunuch, he will learn of Chaerea’s involvement,
and he must undertake damage control by getting himself and the eunuch offstage
as quickly as possible. As he drives the poor creature off he pretends to threaten
him: actumst, siquidem tu me hic etiam, nebulo, ludificabere (‘It’s all over if you’re
going to make fun of me here too, you nebbish’, 717). But Pythias is not fooled by
this attempt to shift the play-making (ludificabere) to the eunuch, and her recog-
nition of Parmeno’s hand comes out in the next line: Parmenoni’ tam scio esse hanc
tech<i>nam quam me vivere (‘This is Parmeno’s artistry, sure as I’m alive’). Pythias
recognizes Parmeno’s dramatic techina in the intrigue and knows him for the
auctor (1013). Identity deception is a common-enough plot motif in comedy, but
when coupled with dress-up, it takes on an unmistakably theatrical dimension.35
32
Earlier scholars (Saylor 1975, 304–5; Gilula 1989, 95) remarked on the general confluence of dramatic
language and its appropriateness with respect to the intrigue, but Frangoulidis 1994a presents a coordinated
argument for theatrical self-consciousness.
33
See Ashmore 1910, ad loc.; Duckworth 1952, 78; Fantham 1972, 33; Tromaras 1994, ad loc.; Frangoulidis
1994a, 125 n.11. We have no direct evidence that the Eunuch was awarded the palma, but Suetonius’
testimony (Vita Terenti 2) that it was performed twice in one day and was the highest remunerated comedy
to date would seem to point in that direction. On the palm frond as a dramatic prize from at least the time of
Plautus, see Manuwald 2011, 88.
34
See OLD, fabula 6. 35
In Terence no less than in Plautus, pace Muecke 1986, 221.
This intrigue does involve a change of vestment, and the text repeatedly draws
attention to Chaerea’s eunuch costume as such.36
Given such clear justification for a theatricalized reading of the intrigue, Stavros
Frangoulidis argues that Chaerea’s successful performance in his play-within-the-play
ensures a happy ending for the Eunuch: ‘Chaerea’s acting brings about his
personal happiness as well as a positive outcome of Phaedria’s troublesome
relationship with Thais.’37 He recognizes, however, that the rape does not figure
in Parmeno’s plan: ‘In the context of the performance, this act must be considered
as an ad hoc improvisation.’38 This approach to the rape as a kind of improvisa-
tional theatre is quite astute, and, as I shall explain in Chapter 5, I believe it points
in the right direction, but there are difficulties with the straightforward ascription
of the improvisational mode to this scene. The motif of unscripted improvisation
ironically written into the texts of Plautine comedy is well documented, but there
are some important differences from the Plautine specimens of this type.39 In Plautus,
characters may contrive to dress up and affect new identities in order to accomplish a
deception, and once under way in their new and overtly prescribed ‘roles’ they may
spontaneously diverge from plan, either by necessity or just for fun. In the first case,
something unexpected comes up and the trickster must adapt to the new contin-
gency in order to keep the deception going; in the second, the frivolous departures
from plan may come close to wrecking the deception, but they never actually do so.
In both cases, the comedy comes both from the very visual pleasure of watching a
character show off his virtuoso plasticity and also from the witty evocation of the truly
unscripted forms of popular entertainment, the degree-zero of Italian folk theatre
from Atellan farce down to the Commedia dell’arte. It is precisely this visual dimen-
sion, so essential to the comedy of the ad hoc, that is lost by placing Chaerea’s
‘improvisation’ backstage. An easy equation of this rape with improvisation becomes
impossible once we recognize the fundamental denaturing of the improvisational
mode when the antics happen not before our very eyes with the giddy delirium of
the unplanned and indeterminate, but merely in our minds and after the fact.
Another problem with reading the rape as an unscripted improvisational inter-
lude is that the inspiration for the rape does not come from Chaerea’s masterful
control of his performance or his genius for thespian invention, but directly
from the painting.40 Indeed, as this chapter has prepared us to see, the painting
36
capias tu illi(u)s vestem. vestem? (370); qui hic ornatust? (546); quid sibi hic vestitu’ quaerit? (558)—
note here the echo of the last line of the Prologue: quid sibi Eunuchus velit (45); vestem cum illo mutem (572);
is dedit mi hanc (701); meam ipse induit (702); Chaerea tuam vestem detraxit tibi? (707); et east indutu’?
(708).
37
Frangoulidis 1994a, 125. 38
Frangoulidis 1994a, 123.
39
For a fuller treatment of the scholarship on improvisation in Plautus, see p. 121.
40
Though elsewhere Frangoulidis recognizes that the rape was not planned, his portrayal of the
painting’s role demotes it to mere confirmation of Chaerea’s already formed intention: ‘Chaerea, as a
functions precisely as a script. It would be giving Chaerea far too much credit to
see him as the author of anything; he is an actor, who reads his new part written on
the wall and then agrees to enact it. If we understand the rape to be theatricalized
simply as an ad hoc improvised performance, not only must we totally elide the
fixity and materiality of the painting as text, but more fundamentally we ignore
the simple fact that there are two actors in this performance and that they come to
their new script with the same essential passivity. No one would call Pamphila
the authoress of anything, but it is her attention to the painting that conducts
Chaerea’s eyes to it in the first place, and her passivity as reader and actress is
ultimately parallel to Chaerea’s response to the painting. If it were simply a matter
of Chaerea getting the idea from the painting, it would have been easy enough for
him simply to describe what he saw and thought, without the dramaturgically
unmotivated attention to Pamphila as viewer. Instead, his fixation travels along
the line of her gaze to a new object and a new goal. During his ekphrasis we are
invited to imagine a quiet scene of art appreciation in which rapist and victim
contemplate the roles they are about to play.
In what sense is Chaerea’s performance as the eunuch successful? Unlike a good
improvisation, which complements and augments its framing performance, the
theatricalized rape completely derails and vitiates all the careful verisimilitude of
the performance in which it is embedded. The crime effectively blows his cover
and renders him a lousy ‘eunuch’. Frangoulidis’ contention that the rape brings
about a happy resolution for Phaedria and Thais would receive little support from
a critical tradition that finds the end of the play sour for both of them, but his claim
that the rape makes Chaerea’s marriage possible seems less controversial.41
Notice, however, that Chaerea too gains nothing from the rape. If he had kept
to the plan he would have spent part of the day captivated with Pamphila and left
quietly, more in love than ever, to host the potluck with his friends. He would
have returned to find that the girl he loves is actually a marriageable Athenian
citizen and that her guardian Chremes is conveniently accessible and in a mood to
dower his long-lost sister. As it is, his happy ending is not the result of his own
performance, but of Thais’ goodwill and his father’s permissiveness in allowing
him to marry without a dowry.
Far from giving him control of his destiny, the rape puts Chaerea in the
extremely degraded position of subjugation to a meretrix. When he returns to
the stage in Act 5, mortified with shame at the eunuch outfit he still has been
unable to doff and terrified that he will be recognized, he finds Thais there
waiting, and he is stuck in his deception (ipsast. haereo | quid faciam, 848–9).
viewer of the painting, discovers that the god, who secretly comes into Danaë’s bosom in the form of golden
rain, plays the role he intends to play’ (1994a, 123).
41
On the problem of the play’s ‘happy ending’, see pp. 175–6.
He must meekly submit to his mistress’ (era, 851) indignation. By this point, of
course, she knows his real identity, but she is now in a position to reveal Pamphi-
la’s citizen status, so she has him at a great disadvantage. For fourteen lines
(850–63) he must endure being treated like runaway chattel, and when he learns
that Pamphila is a citizen he can only mutter that he thought she was a fellow slave
(conservam esse credidi, 858). He realizes that he has committed a serious crime,
but for the moment he is trapped in his part. Thais is in control here, and it is only
when she sees fit to call off the teasing pretence, naming him as Chaerea and his
crime as something unworthy of his real self, that he is finally let out of the eunuch
role (missa haec faciamu’. non te dignum, Chaerea, | fecisti, 864–5). This does not
mean, however, that he is free to resume the contemptuous attitude towards
Thais he had expressed with such vehemence earlier (382–7). Rather, his gratitude
to her is eternal (872), his love for her is profound (882), and when he comes to
supplicate her help in securing Pamphila’s hand, he makes her his patroness: nunc
ego te in hac re mi oro ut adiutrix sies, | ego me tuae commendo et committo fide, | te
mihi patronam capio, Thai’, te opsecro (‘I hereby implore you to give me your
support in this matter, I consign and entrust myself to your protection, I take you
as my patroness, Thais, I beg you’, 885–7).42
It is here, in Chaerea’s indignity, that the adhesive quality of role-playing in the
Eunuch is first revealed. He has played the eunuch, presumably with the under-
standing that he could return to himself at will, but now, with nothing left to gain
from the deception, he is inexplicably stuck in his part, until Thais decides she has
punished him enough and releases him from the role. In taking the initiative to
manumit him, she exhibits decisive magnanimity and effectively emasculates him.
He responds by immediately suing to become her client and eternal protégé.
Chaerea may have escaped the role of the eunuch at last, but he appears to be
openly humiliated and unmanned.43 Since his emergence from the house the
costume has been a persistent inconvenience for him, one he has tried in vain to
escape, and now the part seems to have set in on an ethical level.
Chaerea’s loss of virility is only symbolic, of course, and there is doubtless a
playful quality in his grovelling. However, a few lines later we find an even more
42
The verb commendare has already been used once in this play, when Chaerea is narrating the rape
scene and he comes to the moment when the housekeeper hands Pamphila over to his care (commendat
virginem, 577).
43
Dessen 1995 sees several characters in the play as sexually ambivalent extensions of the figure of the
eunuch, including Phaedria, Thais, Thraso, Gnatho, and above all Chaerea. She even reads Chaerea’s role in
the rape as suggestive of the sexual monstrosity of this ‘controlling metaphor’. Though she recognizes the
problem in Chaerea’s submission to Thais as patron, Dessen also sees it as a positive revaluation of the
eunuch theme, since Thais’ forgiveness is ‘a better way of handling aggression’ (133). She goes on: ‘It is
significant, I think, that the audience sees Chaerea acceding still dressed as a eunuch; he thus makes the
eunuch a positive symbol for social change’ (134). Though I agree with her that symbolic castration is an
important theme in the play, I strongly doubt there is anything positive about it.
striking, because more literal, reference to his castration. Pythias has been watch-
ing Parmeno from hiding, and she decides to take her vengeance by making him
think things have gone even worse than they have. She exchanges the iambic
senarii they have both been using for more agitated trochaic septenarii and
launches into a bogus entrance monologue (943–58):
PY. pro deum fidem, facinu’ foedum! o infelicem adulescentulum!

o scelestum Parmenonem, qui istum huc adduxit! PA. quid est?
PY. miseret me: itaque ut ne viderem, misera huc ecfugi foras.
quae futura exempla dicunt in illum indigna! PA. o Iuppiter,
quae illaec turbast? numnam ego perii? adibo. quid istuc, Pythias?
quid ais? in quem exempla fient? PY. rogitas, audacissime?
perdidisti istum quem adduxti pro eunucho adulescentulum,
dum studes dare verba nobis. PA. quid ita? aut quid factumst? cedo.
PY. dicam: virginem istam, Thaidi hodie quae dono datast,
scis eam hinc civem esse? et fratrem ei(u)s adprime nobilem?
PA. nescio. PY. atqui sic inventast: eam istic vitiavit miser.
ille ubi id rescivit factum frater violentissimus
PA. quidnam fecit? PY. conligavit primum eum miseris modis. PA. hem
conligavit? PY. atque quidem orante ut ne id faceret Thaide.
PA. quid ais? PY. nunc minatur porro sese id quod moechis solet:
quod ego numquam vidi fieri neque velim.
PY. With gods as my witness, what a foul deed! O you poor lad!
O vile Parmeno, who brought him here! PA. What’s she on about?
PY. It just kills me; I ran out here so I wouldn’t have to watch.
What shocking punishment they say he’s in for! PA. O god,
What’s this mess? Am I done for? Here goes. What’s up, Pythias?
What are you saying? Punishments for whom? PY. You! You have to ask?
You’ve destroyed that poor boy you delivered in place of the eunuch,
Trying to trick us. PA. What? What’s happened? Tell me.
PY. OK. The girl, the one given to Thais today as a gift,
You know she’s a citizen? And her brother from one of the best families?
PA. No. PY. Well, it’s been proven. That poor boy of yours raped her.
When her brother found out about it, well, he’s a hot-tempered sort and . . .
PA. What did he do? PY. First tied him up, rough like. PA. What?
Tied him up? PY. Yes, and Thais all the time begging him not to.
PA. What are you saying? PY. Now he’s threatening, you know,
What happens to adulterers.
Which I’ve never seen done and would just as soon not see.
Twice, in 945 and in 958, she indicates that she has fled outside to avoid witnessing
his punishment. What it is exactly she does not say, but she feels sorry enough for
him to use the pathetic diminutive (943, 949) and call him infelix (943) and miser
(953). Her euphemistic reference to id quod moechis solet (‘the usual treatment for
adulterers’, 957) seems frustratingly elliptical, but it is clear from Parmeno’s

reaction that he understands what she means, so our confusion must be due to
our own ignorance of second-century Roman punitive practice. In Athens, an
adulterer could be killed on the spot if caught in the act by his partner’s husband,
father, or brother (Dem. 23.55; Lys. 1.25–6), and under Augustan legal reforms
Roman men apparently gained the same prerogative in some circumstances, but
this provision is not securely attested for the pre-Augustan period.44 In any case,
the situation described in Pythias’ narration is different. For one thing, she never
says he was caught in the act, but more importantly, he has been bound and
detained; the threatened punishment, the thing she has never seen done before,
is clearly not simple killing in the heat of the moment. There were several
inventive punishments for adulterers in antiquity, including depilation of pubic
hair with hot ash and, infamously, anal penetration with radishes and/or mul-
lets. Such discomforts are attested by Aristophanes (Nu. 1083; Pl. 168) and by
later Roman poets (Catul. 15.19; Juv. 10.314–17), but there is no evidence from
legal, historical, or even rhetorical writers that these torments were ever normal
at Rome. Valerius Maximus cites flogging, castration, and rape by servants as
typical punishments, but it is the second of these, castration, that is known to
Roman comedy.45
‘What are you doing?’ asks Milphio in the Poenulus. ‘Something red-handed
adulterers hardly ever do’, answers Syncerastus (facio quod manufesti moechi
hau ferme solent, 862). ‘What’s that?’ ‘I’m going home with my equipment
intact’ (refero vasa salva, 863). At the beginning of Curculio Palinurus offers
the young Phaedromus a circumspect warning about the consequences of illicit
love (23–32):
PA. numquid tu quod te aut genere indignum sit tuo

facis aut inceptas facinus facere, Phaedrome?
num tu pudicae cuipiam insidias locas
aut quam pudicam esse oportet? PH. nemini;
nec me ille sirit Iuppiter. PA. ego item volo.
44
See Treggiari 1991, 270–5.
45
VM 6.1.13. The Bacchides may be an outlier to this rule. In 860–9 Cleomachus threatens to kill his wife
and her lover if he catches them together, so as to teach her a lesson, but there is an obvious joke here at the
expense of the miles, as the quintessentially slow-witted character type. ‘What the soldier threatens in
Bacchides is not evidence of what a Roman husband could legally do. He speaks of killing wife and lover, to
make her admit that he is not contemptible. This seems to be the only passage in comedy which even
mentions killing both. Plautus wants to make a joke, not to illustrate law’ (Treggiari 1991, 271). At first,
Nicobulus, the lover’s father, seems ready to take Cleomachus at his word (867), but once he thinks his son
safe, he rephrases the danger the boy has eluded: obtruncaret moechum manifestarium (‘he would have
mutilated him as a red-handed adulterer’, 918). To be sure, obtruncare could be no more than a synonym of
the earlier necare, but it also suggests the apparently more normal punishment: reduction to a trunk, i.e., the
paring off of his son’s relevant extremity.
ita tuom conferto amare semper, si sapis,

ne id quod ames populus si sciat, tibi sit probro.
semper curato ne sis intestabilis.
PH. quid istuc est verbi? PA. caute ut incedas via:
quod amas amato testibus praesentibus.
PA. You aren’t doing anything unworthy of yourself or your family
Or setting out to commit some crime, are you, Phaedromus?
Laying a trap for an honest woman
Or one that ought to be? PH. No,
God forbid. PA. Good, that’s what I like to hear.
If you’re smart, you’ll always check your love affairs,
So if people find out who it is, it won’t be a mess.
Just be careful you can always bear witness like a man.
PH. Huh? PA. Walk the straight and narrow, you know.
Love your love, but make sure you keep your witnesses.
The pun here is too straightforward to need much elaboration. If caught in

adultery Phaedromus will not only be shunned as morally ‘detestable’ (OLD
intestabilis 2), he will also be branded with infamia and therefore ineligible to
participate in the legal process (OLD intestabilis 1). More immediately, though, he
will be despoiled of the twin attestants of his manhood.
This joke also comes into play in Plautus’ most extended treatment of the
punishment of an adulterer, the entire final act of Miles Gloriosus. Periplectomenus
has the stripped Pyrgopolynices thrown into the street, and then he calls to his
cook to ready the instruments (1397–9):
vide ut istic tibi sit acutus, Cario, culter probe.
CA. quin iamdudum gestit moecho hoc abdomen adimere,
ut faciam quasi puero in collo pendeant crepundia.
Cario, make sure your knife is good and sharp.
CA. Oh, it’s long been hopping to lop off this adulterer’s bag of appetites,
So I can make him a nice toy to hang around his neck, like a little kid.
The lorarii rough him up for a few lines, and when he cries that he has been
beaten enough, Cario is eager for the punishment to begin in earnest (1406–8):
CA. quam mox seco?

PE. ubi lubet: dispennite hominem divorsum et distendite.
PY. opsecro hercle te ut mea verba audias priu’ quam secat.
CA. How soon do I cut?
PE. Whenever you like. Get the guy in position, spread eagle.
PY. Oh god! I’m begging you, hear what I have to say before he cuts me.
Pyrgopolynices tries to explain that he was tricked and that he thought she was
unmarried. They make him promise that if they do let him go in one piece (salvom,
1413) he will never to try to take revenge for the beating he has received. He swears
that he will never seek revenge and agrees that his beating has been just. He would
consider it a privilege to be given witness protection, but he will also accept a life
unencumbered: et si intestatus non abeo hinc, bene agitur pro noxia. | PE. quid si id
non faxis? PY. ut vivam semper intestabilis (‘And if I don’t walk away from here
unwitnessed, I’ll be getting off easy. PE. What if you don’t. PY. Let me live on,
forever free of witness’, 1416–17). Cario says he should get another beating and
then be set free, and Pyrgopolynices blesses the cook for this advocacy; then Cario
demands a mina of gold, and Pyrgopolynices asks what for. ‘Well, lover boy, that’s
the price of you getting out of here today with your testicles’ (salvis testibus, 1420).
He agrees immediately, and they send him away stripped and beaten. ‘If I ever
catch you around here again’, warns Periplectomenus, ‘you will lose your testicles’
(carebis testibus, 1426).
Given these three passages from Poenulus, Curculio, and Miles Gloriosus, it
seems incontestable that Pythias means castration. There is no evidence of any
other standard punishment for the period, so when she says id quod moechis
solet, the audience would probably identify castration as the customary default
for this situation. But apart from the real world, considering the uniformity of
the Plautine testimony, her solet probably also has a metatheatrical application. As
we have already argued, Pythias is the consummately self-aware character in this
play, the only one who consistently knows the conventions of the comic genre.46
Her reference here to what ‘typically’ is done to adulterers points to the punitive
norm both on and off the Roman stage. Of course, it would be a vast departure
from the comic genre for an adulescens actually to be castrated, and this I think is
part of the humour of Parmeno’s send-up. If Parmeno were not so forgetful of his
place in a fabula, and if he were paying closer attention to Pythias’ language, he
might have noticed that she is not saying the castration has happened yet—nunc
minatur porro sese id quod moechis solet: so far Chremes is only ‘threatening’ the
usual for adulterers. Indeed, id quod moechis solet, in generic terms, is being threatened
with castration, not actually suffering it.47
Surprisingly, the scholarship on this play has never pointed out the simple irony of
Pythias’ suggestion: a character who has played a eunuch in a play called Eunuchus
is threatened with castration.48 As apposite as Chaerea’s imagined punishment is,
46
See pp. 14–15.
47
In line 946 Pythias had described the castration as indigna. This word bothered Donatus enough to
get the gloss per ‘indigna’ foeda crudeliaque significat (‘by indigna he means foul and cruel’). To be sure it is
easy to find support for this reading of indignus = ‘shocking’, ‘horrible’, vel sim. (cf. OLD indignus 6), but
given the earlier argument, we may point out that castration is also indignus in the more proper sense of
‘unsuitable’ for a comic adulescens.
48
In some cases this seems to have been due to confusion about what punishment is intended. Surely the
unforgettable radishes and mullets of Catullus 15 have played a role in blinding most readers to the more
however, its real significance lies in its complementarity to the immediately preceding
scene, in which Thais effectively unmanned Chaerea, first by teasing him as a runaway
slave, and then by generously releasing him from his role as eunuch only to take him
on as her client. Pythias observed all this and protested that he was getting off too
easy, because in spite of his loss of social virility, he is still a sexual threat (883–4,
898–904). Now she effects his literal castration in Parmeno’s mind, the same mind
that scripted the eunuch intrigue, as she herself realizes (Parmenoni’ tam scio esse
hanc tech<i>nam quam me vivere, 718). First symbolically at Thais’ hands and then
fictionally at Pythias’ hands, the role of the eunuch transcends its boundary as play
and is projected as reality.49 It is here that the painting’s role in the play as emblem is
most clear. The repeated emphasis on the theatrical artifice of the eunuch intrigue,
clustered around a ‘real’ work of art at the centre of the play, already suggests a
connection between the travesty and the painting. Parmeno had crafted the role of
the eunuch as a work of dramatic art, and he expected Chaerea would be able to step
into it and out of it at will, but precisely because of the intervention of the painting in
the plot, the role has turned out to have the same aggressive quality as the image.
Chaerea’s performance as the eunuch, like the painting, wants to step outside its
intended frame and become reality, and it is in this aspect of the role of the eunuch
that the logic of the painting is most clearly discernible, but the painting is not only
at the heart of the eunuch intrigue, it is also at the heart, indeed as we have said, at
the very stichic centre of the whole play.50 If the painting is the key to understand-
ing the dynamic of the intrigue, it is probably also pivotal to what the play has to say
about art, including especially the dramatic art of role-playing. It is not surprising
that we should be expected to think out from the eunuch intrigue to the rest of the
Eunuch, both because of its implicitly metatheatrical status as play-within-the-play
and since, as the title indicates, the role of the eunuch is somehow meant to be the
play’s focus.51 As the ninth-century commentator Pseudo-Servius acutely observes:
contextually appropriate possibility. For example, Tromaras (1994, ad loc.) reads id quod moechis solet as a
‘gelungene Anspielung auf die ῥαφανίδωσις’. Barsby (1999a, ad loc.) acknowledges that ‘the reference here is
probably to castration’, and Brothers (2000, ad loc.) likewise says ‘generally in comedy the punishment was
castration’, but neither relate this observation to the character or the title of the play.
49
Note that the rape itself was framed, in part, as an act of separation from the eunuch role. If he had not
raped her, he says, tum pol ego is essem vero qui simulabar, (‘then I would have been in truth the person I was
pretending to be’, 606). The irony, according to my reading, is that he foreshadows the danger of the eunuch
role becoming real, but this possibility only encourages him to do the very thing that will get him into trouble.
50
See p. 1.
51
There is also a real eunuch, Dorus, who could, at least in principle, be the play’s eponymous hero, but
no one has been eager to attribute the play’s name to him. So Donatus’ commentary on the play begins:
Haec masculini generis nomine nuncupata est Eunuchus fabula et est palliata Menandri vetus, quam ille
auctor de facto adulescentis, qui se pro eunucho deduci ad meretricem passus est, nominavit (‘This play is called
Eunuchus (noun, masculine) and is an old New Comedy by Menander, who named it after the deed of a
young man, who suffered himself to be led to a prostitute in a eunuch’s place’).
Eunuchus dicta est fabula a quodam falso eunucho dicto Chaerea qui ductus in domum
Thaidis meretricis pro eunucho vitiavit quandam virginem Atticam civem; iste talis eu-
nuchus qui vitiavit illam virginem est principalis materia in hac comoedia; si aliae personae
inducantur eunucho suserviuntur, et omnes partes fabulae aliquo modo ad eunuchum
tendunt.52
The play is called Eunuchus from a certain false eunuch named Chaerea who was led into
the house of the prostitute Thais as a eunuch and raped a certain girl, an Athenian citizen.
This ‘eunuch’ (so to speak) is the chief subject of the comedy. If other characters are
brought on, they are auxiliary to the eunuch, and all the parts of the play in some way point
back to the eunuch.
The theme of mimetic contagion around the painting is most manifest in

Chaerea’s performance, but it is ultimately only realized here in a temporary
way, first symbolically, in his inability to terminate the role without Thais’ per-
mission, and then imaginatively, in Pythias’ lie. To find a more permanent
embodiment of the theme of a performance taking on life of its own and becom-
ing reality, we must look to Thais, the only other character around whom role-
playing is framed in such clearly metatheatrical terms. At the end of Act 1 she
swears that she really loves Phaedria alone, and that her apparent affection for the
soldier, Thraso, is all an act for the purpose of saving Pamphila from his clutches.
She only needs one small favour from Phaedria: that he make himself scarce for a
couple days and let Thraso take top billing. sine illum priores partis hosce aliquot
dies | apud me habere (‘Let him have the leading role around here for a few days’,
151–2). This use of theatrical language to describe the lover’s role (priores partis)
has long been noted by commentators.53 Later, when Chaerea asks who is so
powerful as to give Pamphila to Thais as a gift, Parmeno identifies Thraso by stock
comic labels: miles Thraso | Phaedriae rivali’ (‘The soldier Thraso, Phaedria’s
rival’, 353–4). Chaerea picks up the theatrical metaphor and responds in kind:
duras fratri’ partes praedicas (‘You’re talking about a hard role for my brother’).
The theatrical dimension of this second reference to the lover’s partes has been
noted by commentators since Donatus.54
Presented with Thais’ appeal, Phaedria is hardly inspired with confidence, but
he grudgingly promises the two days’ absence she requests and departs with
52
Unfortunately there is no recent edition of Pseudo-Servius. His commentary was often printed in the
sixteenth century and, along with Donatus’, had an incalculable influence on early modern readings of
Terence, but once he was no longer confused with the fourth-century Servius his commentary generally lost
its authority or at least its claim on modern attention. The passage I have quoted is from 53R in the 1511
Venetian edition of Terentius cum quinque commentis.
53
See Ashmore 1910, Tromaras 1994, ad loc., Barsby 1999a, ad loc., and Frangoulidis 1994a, 127.
54
Donatus (ad 354): ‘partes duras’ μεταφορικῶς ab actoribus scaenicis. See also Tromaras 1994, ad loc.,
Barsby 1999a, ad loc., and Frangoulidis 1994a, 128.
Parmeno. Left onstage alone, Thais expresses her concern about her relationship
with Phaedria in an intensely metatheatrical soliloquy (197–201):
me miseram, fors[it]an hic mihi parvam habeat fidem
atque ex aliarum ingeniis nunc me iudicet.
ego pol, quae mihi sum conscia, hoc certo scio
neque me finxisse falsi quicquam neque meo
cordi esse quemquam cariorem hoc Phaedria.
Oh dear, I’m afraid he doesn’t trust me
And is judging me now based on other women’s characters.
Listen, I know myself and I also know this for a fact:
Neither have I fabricated any falsity,
Nor is anyone dearer to my heart than Phaedria.
Her asseveration that she has not pretended anything false (neque me finxisse falsi
quicquam) may be true with respect to what she has just said to Phaedria, but it is
not literally true, for by her own admission she has been dissembling with Thraso.55
Moreover her trickery has taken the form of assuming the character traits of a comic
meretrix. Thraso knows about her relationship with Phaedria (cf. 137–8), but she has
pretended that her love is totally venal, so that he may hope to regain her affections
with an expensive gift. She is, in effect, playing her own stock character.
Thais recognizes that this is a dangerous game. Her very name gives her away as
a meretrix in a Roman comedy, for it is as formulaic as her costume and other
features of her stage identity.56 To these external characteristics she has added the
55
Frangoulidis (1994a, 127) also notes the metatheatrical significance of this line, but his reading is
somewhat different from mine: ‘Thais tries to assure Phaedria of the sincerity of her feelings for him and of
the truth of her story with regard to Pamphila: neque me finxisse falsi (200). In a performance context, such
an assertion is important, for it highlights Thais’ insincere feelings for the soldier and thus, underscores the
fictional and, therefore, theatrical dimension of her intrigue.’ Thais cannot be trying to assure Phaedria of
anything, since he is not present and this line is spoken to the audience alone. I agree that her protest of total
honesty points back to her intrigue with the soldier and highlights its theatricality, but I do not think it
points back only by contrast, but is itself performative and, strictly speaking, untrue (falsi quicquam).
56
Terence has pointedly changed her name to Thais. Menander’s original called the analogous character Chrysis
(schol. on Pers. 5.161–75). The name Thais seems to connote more than just a hetaera; she is the archetypically
devious, greedy man-trap of Greek New Comedy. Such at any rate is her function when she is invoked by Propertius,
Ovid, and Juvenal. See Traill 2001. Menander’s play Thais was one of his most famous, apparently because of the
unforgettable title character. In the prologue he gives a summary of her wiles, preserved for us by Plutarch (Mor. 19a):
ἐμοὶ μὲν οὖν ἄειδε τοιαύτην, θεά,
θρασεῖαν, ὡραίαν δὲ καὶ πιθανὴν ἅμα,
ἀδικοῦσαν, ἀποκλείουσαν, αἰτοῦσαν πυκνά,
μηδενὸς ἐρῶσαν, προσποιουμένην δ᾽ ἀεί.
Sing to me, goddess, of such a woman:
Brazen, young and charming too,
Breaking the rules, locking men out, always making requests,
Loving no one, but ever pretending to.
pretence of being a woman of easier virtue than she really is, so she may well fear
that her deception will prove more global than she intends. When she worries
that Phaedria will judge her ‘from the characters of other women’ (ex aliarum
ingeniis) she once again shows her keen awareness of the stock theatricality of her
role, even as she insists that there is an ethical gap between her persona and
herself.57 As Donatus notes here, the fascination of her character for the audience
rests on her both being and not being representative of the standard meretrix.58
From Phaedria’s perspective (as clearly also from Parmeno’s), it is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that she is simply a typical mercenary prostitute from Roman
comedy, playing one man against another to get maximal lucre from both.
By the end of the play, her fears have been realized. Phaedria has given up on
true love and reached the conclusion that he cannot afford to keep her himself. He
is essentially persuaded to pimp her out part-time to Thraso to help feed her
appetite for gifts, which he has come to believe is insatiable. We shall explore how
this happened in greater detail in Chapter 6. For now we only note the similarity
between the hardening of her role into reality and the dynamic of the painting.
She thought she could flirt with her own stock character, pretend, for a while, to
have the venal disposition one would expect from a prostitute in a Roman
comedy, and then step out of her pretence as soon as she got Pamphila safely
away from Thraso. But by the end of the play the other characters have all agreed
that she really is that mercenary meretrix, and they have made arrangements on
her behalf to insure that she will be stuck in this role for good. What is merely
suggested in the case of Chaerea, actually happens for her; she becomes the thing
she has pretended to be. The artifice of her deception passes outside its intended
boundary and stops being make-believe, like the painted rape that steps out of its
own frame to become real in the lives of the boy and girl who gaze up at it.
Note that our Thais is (or seems to be) guilty of every one of these things, indeed this last line is just what is
at issue here.
57
I confess that this turn in Thais’ self-presentation always reminds me of Jessica Rabbit’s sultry protest
to Valiant: ‘I’m not bad . . . I’m just drawn that way.’ Cartoon characters may not lay claim to the three-
dimensionality of ethical depth; there can be no real self, hidden beneath the flat surface of how they look
and sound. Even trying to distance herself from her own appearance, Jessica is constrained to speak in
Kathleen Turner’s voluptuous contralto, so that her protestation of innocence sounds as naughty as she
inevitably looks. Similarly, despite Thais’ claim that she is not the stereotypical comic meretrix she appears to
be, her language even in this scene with Phaedria and Parmeno, is notably in keeping with the conventions
of her stock role (see Barsby 1999a, ad 87, 128, 130).
58
hic Terentius ostendit virtutis suae hoc esse, ut pervulgatas personas nove inducat et tamen a consuetudine
non recedat, ut puta meretricem bonam cum facit, capiat tamen et delectet animum spectatoris (‘Here
Terence shows it is within his capability to stage hackneyed characters in a novel way and yet not depart
from the usual pattern, like making a “hooker with a heart of gold,” while capturing and delighting the mind
of the spectator’).
FIVE
Mimic Rape
Genre Switching and Role Confusion
CHAEREA ALIQVID INVENI induxit μίμησιν. dramatice more suo, non contentus
dicere quod pollicitus sit tantum, sed quomodo etiam et quibus verbis.
Donatus (ad Eun. 308)
Eduard Fraenkel’s Plautinisches im Plautus was, as any candid reckoning of the

field today would probably admit, ‘the most influential treatment of Plautus in the
twentieth century, and is still the most important single book devoted to him’.1
Like most Plautus scholars coming out of the ninetenth-century German trad-
ition, and more particularly as a student of Friedrich Leo, Fraenkel was funda-
mentally occupied with the question of the relationship between the Roman plays
and their Greek originals. What most distinguishes Fraenkel’s project from the
work of his teacher and colleagues is a simple difference in focus. As the title of his
study suggests, Fraenkel was less interested in the elaborate reconstruction of
Greek New Comedy for its own sake than in the appreciation of the peculiarly
Plautine elements in Plautus’ plays. Of course, this line of inquiry still cast him back
on the often hopeless task of divining details about lost comedies, and arguably
Fraenkel’s most lasting contribution is to be found in his brilliant local readings and
insights about individual plays, rather than in any grand scheme, but his reorienta-
tion of focus on to Plautus as a poet still continues to reverberate in the field.2
One aspect of how Fraenkel accounted for Plautus’ departure from his Greek
models was by reference to the largely forgotten world of pre-literary, improvisa-
tional Italian folk theatre. Fraenkel’s invocation of native Italian theatrical forms is
global rather than specific; he uses broad notions of what these traditions were like
in order to explain some of the recurrent features of Plautus’ comic landscape,
tone, and style of invention.3 This somewhat vague suggestion of the probable
influence of Italian folk theatre stood fallow for many years, but recently,
1
This quote is from the preface (xi) of Drevikovsy and Muecke’s new English translation (2007).
2
For a fuller appraisal of the permanent significance of this shift, see Chapter 6.
3
See, for example, Fraenkel 2007, 264.
GENRE SWITCHING AND ROLE CONFUSION 121
following the orality turn of the 1990s, exponents of the ‘Freiburg school’ have
begun to take up the challenge of reading individual passages through this lens,
looking for scenes in Plautus’ plays where the influence of earlier performance
traditions may be discernible.4
These various forms of non-literary Italian theatre all seem to have been based
on unscripted improvisational entertainment. Plautus, too, loves to stage scenes
where the characters are in confusion and we watch them respond on the fly to
rapidly changing contingencies. Of course, Plautus’ plays are fully scripted literary
comedies and can therefore be only pseudo-improvisational theatre, but the
Roman audience’s taste for such scenes may well have been conditioned by their
familiarity with pre-literary native traditions.5 It is generally assumed that Greek
New Comedy was uninterested in drawing on the energies of improvisational
theatre, so these moments in the Plautine corpus are readily taken to be his
contribution. However valid this assumption may be for Plautus, it has erected a
barrier against the importation of the same type of reading into Terence, who is
understood to be far closer to his Menandrian model than to the native comic
spirit.6 I will argue that the description of the rape in the Eunuch evokes a scene
from mime, not for the audience’s visual entertainment, since indeed it only
‘happens’ backstage, but in order to comment on the generic boundary of
Terence’s art.
COMEDY’S OTHER
The scholarship on Plautus’ debt to native Italian theatre generally draws indis-
criminately on evidence of Fescennine, satura, Atellan farce, Phlyax, and the genre
known properly as mime. An implicit assumption underlying this practice is that
these theatrical types were all essentially regional variations of a single performance
genre, but there is little reason to suppose that such diverse traditions constituted
4
Much of this scholarship has been published in the ScriptOralia series of the Gunter Narr Verlag in
Tübingen. Most volumes in this series have been devoted to individual plays, for example, Menaechmi
(ScriptOralia, 11), Captivi (ScriptOralia, 74), Pseudolus (ScriptOralia, 101), Amphitruo (ScriptOralia, 116),
Persa (ScriptOralia, 121), Aulularia (ScriptOralia, 122), Epidicus (ScriptOralia, 125), Poenulus (ScriptOralia,
127), and Cistellaria (ScriptOralia, 128). But a few of them have had a more generally Plautine scope, for
example, ScriptOralia, 25 (=Lefèvre, Stärk, and Vogt-Spira 1991), ScriptOralia, 73 (=Lefèvre 1995), ScriptOr-
alia, 75 (=Benz, Stärk, and Vogt-Spira 1995). Outside the ScriptOralia series, see Vogt-Spira 1995.
5
‘Hält man sich also vor Augen, daß diese Stegreifspiele keineswegs schlagartig verschwinden, wird die
konkrete Rezeptionssituation klar, auf die die Palliatendichter treffen’ (Vogt-Spira 1995, 72).
6
Hunter 2002 is a notable exception. He argues for the presence of ‘mimic elements’ in Menander’s
Dyscolus and Terence’s Adelphoe, and on some points there is clear similarity between our approaches.
Eckard Lefèvre has also been consistently interested in the influence of Stegreiftheater on Terence, a theme
that runs through his Zetemata series, now at last (as of 2013) covering all six plays.
a monolithic substrate of theatrical experience or that they formed a genuinely

undeviating cultural backdrop for fabula palliata and togata. The barest survey of
evidence demonstrates that these theatrical forms were as variegated as their
provenance within Italy.7 Several factors do, however, justify allowing these
various traditions to bleed into one conceptual category when attempting to
estimate their impact on Roman comedy. First, despite the differences between
these types of theatrical entertainment, there are undeniable similarities. They are
all rough, bawdy, and apparently improvisational, and their humour consists
largely of ridicule, either of specific people or of generalized rustic types. Second,
they were not necessarily stable genres, immune from each other’s influence,
especially in the south, where troupes of travelling performers could easily have
cross-pollinated the Atellan farce of the Oscans and the Phlyax plays and Greek
mime of Magna Graecia.8
This is just the kind of dissemination and confluence implied in Livy’s account
of the beginning of ludi scaenici at Rome. Formalized theatrical entertainment
was, according to Livy, introduced in 363 BCE by a troupe of Etruscan dancers
summoned to Rome, ‘a novelty for a warlike people’ (nova res bellicoso populo,
7.2.3). The exchange between foreign invention (peregrina res, 7.2.4) and domes-
tic adaptation begins with the modified imitation of Etruscan dumb-show by the
Roman youth (7.2.5–7):
imitari deinde eos iuventus, simul inconditis inter se iocularia fundentes versibus, coepere;
nec absoni a voce motus erant. accepta itaque res saepiusque usurpando excitata. vernaculis
artificibus, quia ister Tusco verbo ludio vocabatur, nomen histrionibus inditum; qui non,
sicut ante, Fescennino versu similem incompositum temere ac rudem alternis iaciebant sed
impletas modis saturas descripto iam ad tibicinem cantu motuque congruenti peragebant.
Then the youth began to imitate them, showering each other with wit in crude verses, and
their movements were suited to their words. Thus was the custom adopted and kept up by
frequent practice. The Etruscan word for player was ister, so the name histriones was given
to native artists, who did not, as before, take turns tossing off something clumsy, random,
and rough, like a Fescennine verse, instead they performed saturae full of metres, with
singing now accompanied by flute and movements to match.
However accurate the particulars of Livy’s account, he gives a clear sense of the
fluidity of the early Italian theatrical traditions, in which genres could move from
one culture to another and absorb or replace existing forms of entertainment,
while undergoing significant modification themselves.
7
For a successful recent attempt to assemble a coherent picture of preliterary Italian theatrical enter-
tainment, see Beacham 1992, 1–26. For a totally different view of the same material, Beare 1950, 10–23 is still
worth considering.
8
Physical humour travels well and is not stopped by language barriers. Note the international popularity
of ‘Charlot’, the export version of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp.
Thus was satura conceived in Rome under the influence of an Etruscan style of
theatre, very likely itself an adaptation of the Greek satyr play.9 However, satura
was not born into a vacuum, rather it seems to have absorbed the social and
performative functions of the Fescennine verses, a bawdy, rustic, and sometimes
aggressive form of semi-theatrical festive poetry, easily compared with Greek
phallica and iambic aischrologia.10 In taking over these functions, satura altered
the economy of Roman poetic genres and helped render Fescennine obsolete, but
it was not immune to alteration or replacement in its own turn. Livy’s narration
goes on to explain that Livius Andronicus was ‘the first to dare depart from the
saturae and compose a play with a plot’ (ab saturis ausus est primus argumento
fabulam serere, 7.2.8). For some 120 years, then, saturae had been the theatrical
standard, until 240 BCE, when Livius Andronicus first staged Greek tragedy and
comedy in Latin translation (fabulae). To save his voice, Livius is supposed to have
given the songs (cantica) to a singer, who stood in front of the flute player,
keeping only the dialogues (diverbia) for himself. This left him free to dance
and gesticulate more vigorously during the songs, but it could only have been
done because fabula, highbrow theatre as he was inventing it for the Romans, was
an entirely scripted form of entertainment.11 This literary transformation and
professionalization of acting resulted in the withdrawal of the Roman youth
from staged show business and a revival of aristocratic song (7.2.11–12):12
postquam lege hac fabularum ab risu ac soluto ioco res avocabatur et ludus in artem
paulatim verterat, iuventus histrionibus fabellarum actu relicto ipsa inter se more antiquo
ridicula intexta versibus iactitare coepit; unde exorta quae exodia postea appellata con-
sertaque fabellis potissimum Atellanis sunt; quod genus ludorum ab Oscis acceptum tenuit
iuventus nec ab histrionibus pollui passa est; eo institutum manet, ut actores Atellanarum
nec tribu moveantur et stipendia, tamquam expertes artis ludicrae, faciant.
When, by this ordinance of the plays, show business came to be distinguished from
clowning and broad humour, and drama had gradually turned into an art form, the
9
Wiseman 1988 presents a convincing case that the Etruscan form was a direct development from satyr
plays.
10
On the general character of the Fescennines, see Horace Epist. 2.1.139–50.
11
Livy seems to be the only source for the claim that the jobs of actor/speaker and singer were ever split
between two performers (unless Isid. Etym. 18.44 is to be taken as independent testimony, which it probably
should not be), and most scholars have rejected the idea as unlikely. Beare (1950, 219) postulated that Livy
was ‘thinking of some form of theatrical performance of his own day’, which may be right, or he may be
faithfully passing on a tradition about Livius Andronicus that he learned from Varro. Whatever the historical
veracity of this account of Livius Andronicus, the salient point for our investigation is that Livy imagines the
introduction of fabula as the moment when it became impossible for performance to be fully improvisa-
tional, if for no other reason than because the division of labour between two performers for the same part
would now require the lines to be set.
12
For the broader context of this shift and its place in Republican constructions of writing and song, see
Habinek 1998, 34–68.
youth abandoned the acting of playlets to professionals and returned to their old custom of
bantering among themselves in unscripted poetic jests. From this arose the pieces later
called exodia and generally worked up into Atellan farces, a type of drama derived from the
Oscans, which the youth kept for themselves and did not allow to be polluted by
professional actors. And so it remains an established rule that actors in Atellan farces are
not kicked out of their tribe and they do military service as if innocent of the dramatic art.
Livy’s testimony here is fascinating, for it locates a bifurcation of Rome’s theatrical

culture in the wake of the introduction of scripted plays. The new fabulae drive
the older saturae offstage and presumably into productive retirement, as they will
undergo an evolutionary course resulting in the later Roman genre of satire. The
aristocratic Roman youth are presented as the guardians of an ancient tradition of
unscripted blame poetry, which they preserve, paradoxically, by transforming it
first into satura and then into ‘after pieces’, stitched together as Atellan farce.
Once again the fluidity of these traditions, at least in their Roman reception, is
impressive, for there is no reason to suppose that the Etruscan entertainment that
inspired satura had much in common with the Oscan Atellan, but these diverse
forms are framed as the successive vessels of an essentially uniform type of Roman
poetic performance. Indeed, the only strong dichotomy in Livy’s account is
between fabula and everything else; fabulae are scripted, refined, and profession-
ally acted, whereas Fescennine, satura, and Atellan are unscripted, crude, and
amateur.
Where exactly mime fits in this mix of Italian theatrical forms is difficult to
determine, partly because of the obscurity of its early history and partly because it
seems always to have been the most flexible style of entertainment. The genre
known properly as mime came to Magna Graecia with the Dorians, where it not
only flourished but proliferated in types.13 We do not know when or in what form
mime first came to Rome. It may have been there long before the introduction of
scripted plays in 240 BCE or it may have arrived later, but the earliest known
Roman actor, who may be dated to the period just before the Eunuch (c.210–160
14
BCE), was a mime. Across its history, mime seems to have been generally
improvisational but could lend itself to scripted performance.15 There were
13
For the early history of mime the fullest survey (more compact and less speculative than Reich) is Wüst
1932, cols. 1729–33. A good recent treatment may be found in Panayotakis 2010, 1–32.
14
Protogenes, slave of Cloulius; for inscription and analysis, see Rawson 1985, 111.
15
One of the early types of mime actors are called autokabdaloi, a name that emphasizes the improvisa-
tional nature of their performance (see Pickard-Cambridge 1962, 137–8), but they were by no means
uniquely unrehearsed. Alongside this dominant practice of ad hoc performance, however, mimographoi
or mimi scriptores are attested from an early date. Some important early names from this tradition are
Epicharmus, Herodas, and Sophron. For a survey of the evidence on later mime writers, see Nicoll 1963,
110–15.
probably both amateur and professional forms.16 It included mythological bur-

lesque but also portrayed everyday people.17 There are certain recurring character
types (prostitutes, runaway slaves, adulterous couples, cuckolded husbands), but
though names may sometimes have been repeated, mime was not limited to a
fixed set of four named stock characters, as Atellan farce was.18 Also unlike
Atellan, mime did not generally use masks, although Phlyax, which did use
masks, was regarded by ancient writers as an Italian species of mime, and there
is evidence of later mime occasionally using masks.19 Unlike any other form of
ancient theatre the female parts could be played by actresses, but they could also
be played by male actors.20 In short, mime was as anarchically free in its absorption
of other styles of theatre as it was in its presentation of human folly, making it so
capacious a category that it would eventually assimilate and supplant all other
forms of theatrical entertainment.21
This displacement was far from immediate. Atellan farce dwindles but it is still
attested as late as the second century CE, though given the evident plasticity of
Atellan and the overwhelming popularity of mime in the Imperial period, it may
be doubted whether by this time ‘Atellan’ was anything more than an exotic or
archaic sounding name for mime.22 Cicero could still make a distinction between
Atellan farce and mime, but only to point out that where once Atellan was
performed, the norm was now mime (Epist. ad fam. 9.16.7). Just as in Livy’s
account of theatre in the third century BCE the important dichotomy was between
scripted fabula and everything else, for Cicero the salient distinction is between
fabula and mime. So, famously, in the Pro Caelio he summarizes Clodia’s crazy
story about a plot to murder her, tricky slaves who agree to help Caelius poison
their mistress and then double-cross him, a counter-plot to entrap Licinius, and a
melodramatic scene at the baths with Licinius fumbling for the poison box and
then mysteriously escaping: mimi ergo iam exitus, non fabulae; in quo cum
clausula non invenitur, fugit aliquis e manibus, dein scabilla concrepant, aulaeum
tollitur (‘So the denouement is not like in a proper play but in a mime, where
when they can’t figure out how to end it, someone just slips away, then it’s cue the
applause and . . . curtain!’, Pro Cael. 65). Clodia’s story is not only obvious fiction,
16
As with other species of theatre, the professionalization of mime is obscure and probably political, in
the sense we have seen, that aristocratic privilege may insist on retaining amateurism for some forms. For
example, Athenaeus (14.621f) testifies that there was a Theban type of mimic performers called ethelontai.
17
On the ‘literary realism’ of mime, see Reich 1903, 19–38. On burlesque, see pp. 145–6.
18
The four characters of Atellan were Pappus, Maccus, Bucco, and Dossennus (or Manducus).
19
On Phlyax as ‘Italian mime’, see Athenaeus (14.621f) and Nicoll 1963, 50.
20
The most compact collection of the testimony on mimae is Nicoll 1963, 92–9.
21
On mime in late antiquity (and its relationship to pantomime), see Webb 2008, 95–138.
22
Tacitus notes that under Tiberius Atellan farce had become so degraded and influential (eo flagitiorum
et virium venisse, Ann. 4.14) that it had to be suppressed.
but tawdry pulp fiction as well, more like lowbrow mime than highbrow fabula.23
The two types of stage entertainment are implicitly opposed and mutually exclu-
sive; there is apparently no significant tertium quid of theatrical genres.
The standard practice, since Fraenkel, of treating the various native Italian
theatrical traditions as a uniform backdrop for scripted comedy is, therefore, still
broadly defensible, in part because there was a degree of homogeneity across these
traditions, especially as they coalesced into mime, but more importantly because
the Romans themselves evidently regarded the (perhaps artificially) consolidated
category of mime as a stable Other for the polished world of scripted comedy and
tragedy. In Bakhtinian terms, this dichotomization of generic space into a rela-
tively simple highbrow/lowbrow binary would permit a rich dialogism to flourish
within either mime or comedy, since a dramaturgically small gesture would be
enough to suggest the excluded generic Other. Whether rightly or wrongly, the
scholars who have investigated the sub-literary elements in Plautus’ plays have not
generally allowed for the possibility of such a self-consciously bright line between
these two modes of theatre. The analysis of Plautus’ plays into two strata, reserved
Greek New Comedy and unscripted Italian screwball, may privilege either stra-
tum, but it has invariably assumed that this analysis itself is a modern scholar’s
game, rather than being part of the fun for the original audience. In Plautus’ case
this assumption may be right, for he includes stock lazzi, heroic improvisation,
and other routines from mime so frequently that they may not be perceptible as a
break in the generic texture of his plays. Terence, however, precisely because he
stays so much closer to the tone of his comparatively reserved Greek models, can
count on the unexpected inclusion of an alien element from the world of mime to
be felt as an irruption into his play.
UN-TERENCE IN THE PROLOGUES
Readers of Terence, from Cicero and Caesar to modern scholars, have always
noted that he is more staid than other Roman comic poets.24 However, this
23
Cicero may be relying on recognizable associations appropriate to mime, such as the use of real
meretrices to play female roles and the poisoning-scene as a standard motif. See Austin 1960, 128.
24
Because Plautus and Terence are so different, scholars sometimes tend to think of Roman comedy
consisting of two broad types, but Wright 1974 shows convincingly that the fragmentary comic poets shared
Plautus’ theatrical aesthetics. Considering the genre as a whole, Terence was the odd man. Suetonius’ Vita
Terenti (7) reports both Cicero’s and Caesar’s epigrams. Cicero’s high praise of Terence does not seem to be
undercut by his emphasis on the comic poet’s restraint (sedatis motibus) and his general ‘niceness’ (quiddam
come loquens atque omnia dulcia dicens), but in Caesar’s epigram the same features significantly attenuate the
commendation. In the first line, Terence is addressed as ‘half-pint Menander’ (o dimidiate Menander), and
Caesar goes on to wish that greater ‘energy’ (vis) had been joined to Terence’s mild verse (lenibus . . . scriptis).
‘Then,’ says Caesar, ‘your comic vigor might have equal potency with the Greeks and you would not be
universally held judgment is not, in the first instance, a product of disinterested

literary history, but of poetic self-presentation, for it can be traced back to Terence
himself. In the prologue of the Heautontimorumenos, Ambivius Turpio makes a
distinction between Terence’s sedate play and a recent play by Luscius Lanuvinus
that features a servus currens scene (31). He asks the audience to pay attention and
keep quiet so he can perform this demure piece (statariam agere, 36).25 Ambivius
is getting to be an old man, and if this one flops he will have to go back to playing
running slaves, angry old men, hungry parasites, brazen tricksters, and greedy
pimps, roles that require clamore summo and labore maxumo, as opposed to this
Terence stuff which is ‘all about the script’ (in hac est pura oratio, 46). In this
passage Terence evokes, in some detail, a type of theatre notionally different from
his own. The prologus does not refer to this alternative style of theatre as ‘mime’,
but he does insist on a typological difference between Terentian comedy and
other Roman comedy, exactly parallel to the difference we have seen other Roman
writers drawing between fabula and mime.
Mime’s place within the insistently dichotomous economy of Roman theatrical
genres was such that anything identifiably other than New Comedy could be
antithetically characterized as ‘mime’ or at least ‘mimic’. For example, when Aulus
Gellius complains that Caecilius replaced the quiet subtlety of his Menandrian
model with an alien farcical buffoonery (quae Menander praeclare et apposite et
facete scripsit, ea Caecilius . . . quasi minime probanda praetermisit et alia nescio
quae mimica inculcavit, NA 2.23.12), it is mime that provides Gellius his reference
point for theatrical high jinks. As in the passage from Pro Caelio above, mime and
scorned as a failure in this department! This is the one quality, Terence, I’m distressed and grieved that you
lack’ (comica ut aequato virtus polleret honore | cum Graecis neve hac despectus parte iaceres! | unum hoc
maceror ac doleo tibi deesse, Terenti).
25
In Brut. 116 Cicero uses the adjective statarius as a theatrical technical term for an actor in such a play,
explicitly contrasted with the more agitated type of performance: ‘As on stage so also in the forum I don’t
want to see only those men praised who display quick and taxing bustle, but also the ones they call statarii,
whose acting has that straightforward and unaffected genuineness’ (volo enim ut in scaena sic etiam in foro
non eos modo laudari, qui celeri motu et difficili utantur, sed eos etiam, quos statarios appellant, quorum sit
illa simplex in agendo veritas, non molesta). Again in 239 he applies statarius to C. Piso, an orator not given
to extreme gesture. Horace does not use this term, but the contrast is clear in Ep. 2.1.58–9, where Plautus
scurries (properare) like Epicharmus, but Caecilius and Terence top their models in gravitas and ars,
respectively. Evanthius explains that there are three types of comedies: motoria, stataria, and mixta.
motoriae turbulentae, statariae quietiores, mixtae ex utroque actu consistentes (De com. 4.4 p. 22). Donatus
uses the same terms constantly; see, ad Andr. praef. 1.2; ad Eun. praef. 1.2; ad Ad. praef. 1.2, 24.2, 299; ad
Hec. praef. 1.2. Terence never uses the word motoria, and it seems unlikely that this juxtaposition of
technical terms would go back as far as the second century BCE, but of course there is no way to know. It
is more readily conceivable that this use of the word stataria in the Heautontimorumenos inspired the later
terminological development of motoria for the other half of the dialogism. Even if stataria does not have a
technical valence for Terence, it is striking that the later grammatical tradition would utilize his language,
and the opposition implied in it, as the basis for its typology.
fabula constitute a binary generic space, but here it is not a question of classifying
a whole story as fabula or mime, rather a drop in tone within a translated Greek
New Comedy is described as an intrusion of ‘mimic elements’ (nescio quae
mimica), though of course Caecilius’ play as a whole will remain a perfectly
normal specimen of fabula. So the servus currens scenes and related stock physical
elements of Plautine and other Roman comedy, which Ambivius contrasts with
Terence’s type of theatre, may not be mime in the full sense, but they are alien to
Terence’s aesthetic precisely as these mimic elements are alien to Menander.
Terence is generally spare in his inclusion of such elements in his plays, except
that he has, if only in praeteritio, injected them in narrative form (pura oratio)
here in the prologue of the Heautontimorumenos. It would have been easy
enough not to mention this other theatrical world; instead, it is made to seem
perilously close. These same actors have acted in such plays and will do so again, if
and when this production fails.
The fragility of the production is probably the most consistent single theme
across the prologues, and in every case it may be wondered what practical purpose
was served by drawing attention to the possibility of the show being overwhelmed
by disruptive events outside the play. As eager as we are for evidence of the
performance conditions of these comedies, there is little reason to trust Terence’s
prologues as a reliable record, for if these productions were really as vulnerable to
interruption as he indicates, he would surely have little incentive to advertise the
fact. The most spectacular example, of course, is the prologue(s) of the Hecyra,
which apprise us of two earlier aborted performances. The first prologue claims
that an earlier showing fell apart when a tightrope walker bedevilled the attention
of the dumbfounded audience (populu’ studio stupidus in funambulo | animum
occuparat, 4–5). The second prologue returns to this event and renders its chaos in
fuller colours (comitum conventu’, strepitu’, clamor mulierum, 35), and it goes on
to tell that the second performance came off no better than the first. The play
seemed to be going well (primo actu placeo, 39), when a rumour of gladiators
resulted in general mayhem (populu’ convolat, | tumultuantur clamant, pugnant
de loco, 40–1). Centuries of readers have pitied Terence having to work under such
conditions and with such an unappreciative audience, but Erich Gruen has
advanced a forceful argument that the prologues are a fiction; there were no
aborted earlier performances.26 The joke here, for if Gruen is right the prologues
26
Gruen 1992, 210–15. Even if Gruen’s explanation is rejected and Terence’s narration of events is taken
at face value, we need not imagine (with Beare 1950, 161 or Duckworth 1952, 81) that the original audience
simply lost interest and wandered off after something flashier. Rather, the prologus seems to suggest that a
second group of entertainers and spectators showed up to crowd out the show in progress, perhaps implying
that the disappointed original audience was thwarted from seeing the Hecyra; see Gilula 1978; Sandbach
1982; Parker 1996, 592–601. On the other hand, the description may suggest that the original audience
joined in the tumult; see Lada-Richards 2004, 58–9.
must be a kind of joke, draws on the same sense of humour as motivated

L. Anicius Gallus’ outrageous production in 167 BCE, in which offstage Roman
boorishness is carefully juxtaposed to, and allowed to trample on, highbrow Greek
divertissement.27 Gallus entertains his audience, both by thumbing his nose at the
cultivated artistry of the Greek musicians and by poking fun at a caricature of
Roman crudeness so extreme as to assure the audience that it is on the right side of
the laughter.
To be sure, not all scholars have concurred with Gruen’s expansive reading of
Roman ironic self-consciousness, either in the Hecyra or in Gallus’ follies.28
However, Gruen’s approach to the prologue of the Hecyra does conform to a
recent trend towards reading Terence’s prologues as playfully ironic dramatic
poetry, not totally divorced from the fictionality of the comedies they introduce.29
The prologue of the Phormio closes with an admonition to the audience to attend
in silence, otherwise it may be like the time the company got swept offstage by an
upheaval (quom per tumultum noster grex motus locost, 33). This has generally been
read as a reference to the failed first performance of the Hecyra in 165 BCE, but
there is no explicit mention of the Hecyra here. If Gruen is right and there was no
failed first performance of the Hecyra, then the prologue of the Phormio may
simply be engaging in the same kind of humour, on a smaller scale, as the Hecyra
prologues. Terence’s first transmitted play, from 166 BCE, is sufficient proof that
27
Our source for these events is Polybius (30.22), who sounds no less bewildered than dismayed at what
he has to report. Not to be entirely outdone by Aemilius Paullus, who that same year celebrated a triumph of
unprecedented magnificence, even staging elaborate Greek-style games at Amphipolis, Anicius reversed his
rival’s strategy of cultural negotiation by bringing to Rome the finest musical performers Greece had to offer
(τοὺς ἐκ τῆς Ἑλλάδος ἐπιφανεστάτους τεχνίτας, 30.22.2). He constructed a stage in the Circus and put all the
flute players onstage playing together. Things seemed to be proceeding normally enough, the players
moving sedately with their music, when Anicius demanded that they show more competitive spirit
(ἀγονίζεσθαι μᾶλλον, 30.22.5). They were at a loss to understand, until one of the lictors explained to them
that they should run at each other and make as if to fight. They did their best to comply, the chorus joined in
and formed two armies, and before long the music had devolved into discord, as opposing sides advanced
against each other and retreated across the stage. When one of the dancers took a boxer’s stance against an
advancing flute player, the crowd went wild, and the whole production sank into general melee. Just then
the prize fighters and buglers came in, along with more musicians and dancers, and Polybius’ powers of
description desert him (ἄλεκτον ἦν τὸ συμβαῖον); he refuses even to tell us about the tragic actors, because he
swears we would think he was joking (διαχλευάζειν, 30.22.12). Scholars have generally taken their cue for
disgust from Polybius and have often assumed that this public brawl was a spontaneous departure from the
musical program, perhaps due to the bored vulgarity of the Roman audience (see, for example, Crowther
1983, 270), but the boxers and buglers waiting conveniently in the wings are enough to suggest that this
apparently riotous event was fairly well planned and remained under Anicius’ control. Gruen (1992, 215–18)
has pointed out the production’s canny inversion of Aemilius’ Greek games in Greece earlier that same year.
28
Unconvinced about Gruen’s Hecyra: Parker 1996, 600; Moore 1998, 204–5; unconvinced about his
Gallus: Forsythe 1994. These scholars express incredulity or assert that Gruen goes too far, but do not offer a
specific explanation of their reservations.
29
Gilula 1989 is foundational, but see most recently Gowers 2004.
his interest in the theme of his own failure and expulsion from the stage predated
any putative first flop of the Hecyra, for the prologue of the Andria ends with the
open question for the audience, whether Terence’s future plays will have a hearing
or be driven offstage before they are performed (spectandae an exigendae sint vobis
prius, 27). The Eunuch comes closest to the Hecyra in actually narrating an earlier
performance of the play that was begun and then interrupted. According to the
prologue, Luscius Lanuvinus arranged for a preview performance of the Eunuch
after it had already been bought by the aediles (perfecit sibi ut inspiciundi esset
copia, 21). The official audience had arrived and the private showing had just got
underway (magistratu’ quom ibi adesset occeptast agi, 22), when Luscius Lanuvi-
nus broke in with theatrics of his own, crying (exclamat, 23) that it was a thief, not
a poet, behind the boards.
If Gruen’s claim that the Hecyra prologue is fictional rather than historical has
left most critics unconvinced, perhaps it is imprudent to ignore their sense of the
fundamental improbability of his thesis. Even if we dismiss the didascalic evidence
as no more reliable (or independent of the prologues) than the Suetonian Vita,
perhaps it does strain belief that a scenario as elaborate as this double-flop could be
made up out of whole cloth and then delivered totally deadpan to the amusement
of its original audience and the universal perplexity of future ages.30 It may be,
however, that the chief problem with Gruen’s thesis is his reliance on a fictional/
historical dichotomy, as opposed to asking whether the inclusion of this narrative
in the prologue of the Hecyra is rhetorically mobilized as part of Terence’s self-
characterization vis-à-vis other forms of Roman entertainment, or whether, on the
other hand, it is nothing more than an explanation for the play’s reappearance
after a failed earlier production and a straightforward plea for attention at last.
Reformatted in these terms, the question becomes both more readily answerable
and more immediately significant, for even if there were earlier failed perform-
ances of the Hecyra, we may still ask why these events are given such focal
prominence for the final performance.
It is my contention that even if the story is completely true, it would not receive
the emphasis it does unless its inclusion served Terence’s purpose of constructing
30
The Hecyra is unique in Terence’s plays in that it has two preserved didascaliae, one from the codex
Bembinus (A) and a shorter version in the other manuscripts (Σ). Both versions report three performances,
but they say slightly different things about them. The codex Bembinus does not mention any problems with
the first performance but says the second performance was a failure (NON EST PLACITA, 8), whereas the
Σ version says the first performance fell through completely (NON EST PERACTA, 3) but mentions no
problems with the second performance. The two prologues purport to be from the second and third
performances, and the A didascalia says the Hecyra was performed the first time without a prologue (5–6).
This sounds suspiciously like an explanation for the missing prologue; in any case, we have no other mention
of any Terence play being performed without a prologue. The same didascalia also tells us the Greek original
was by Menander, where Donatus makes it clear that it was by Apollodorus. On the place of the Plautine and
Terentian didascaliae in ancient scholarship on the plays, see Deufert 2002, 88–96.
a particular generic space for his plays, as pointedly vulnerable to displacement by

rougher, more physical forms of entertainment from offstage.31 Still less would
this theme recur without motivation in the Phormio, nor, as I have argued, would
it be gratuitously adumbrated beforehand in the Andria, refashioned in a different
narrative guise in the Eunuch, or framed as a fundamental opposition between two
types of theatre in the Heautontimorumenos. In every one of these instances, of
course, narration is its own form of inclusion. Terence’s claim of pura oratio does
not mean monkey business has no place in his plays, rather it means that the
rowdiness has all been reformatted as language. The prologus in the Heautonti-
morumenos, as ultimately also in the other plays, gives us a staid, discursive
description of an alternative type of theatre not based on staid, discursive descrip-
tions. This quarantined presence of the indecorous within the decorum of
Terence’s theatre, as a scene conjured only with words and carefully located either
temporally or spatially just offstage, is central to Terence’s aesthetic in the broad-
est sense.32 To be sure, these prologues never refer to the non-Terentian style of
entertainment as ‘mime’, and I do not wish to claim that every instance of
theatrical competition or interruption they describe should be understood as
pointing to mime. I would rather situate the mimic elements of the rape scene
within a larger Terentian pattern of play against a discretely framed lowbrow
theatrical Other, which may at any moment overwhelm and displace the genteel
comedy before our eyes.
IMITATIO VITAE AND VITALIS
Perhaps the feature of mime that relates most clearly to the rape scene in the
Eunuch is obvious from the thesis of Chapter 4, that the painting’s effect on
Chaerea is best understood as a form of mimetic contagion. The rape is framed
as an imitation of an artwork embedded in a theatricalized play-within-the-play,
and, as the word itself implies, imitation as play is the heart of ancient mime. The
fourth-century CE grammarian Diomedes gives the fullest recorded definition of
mime (Art. Gramm. Lib. III, p. 491 Kiel):
31
For a similar approach to the Hecyra prologues, see Lada-Richards 2004.
32
The contrast to the opening lines of Aristophanes’ Frogs is instructive. Xanthias wants to crack the
vulgar old jokes that always get a laugh, a routine Dionysus is willing to permit to an extent, but he draws
the line at the truly tired quips of Ameipsias, Lycis, and Phrynichus. The humour of this scene consists in the
partial inclusion of these jokes, through ironic praeteritio. In any case, these poets are Aristophanes’ rivals
with whom he was in direct and formal competition. In fact, in this very contest (the Lenaia in 405) the Frogs
would take first place over Phrynichus’ Muses. This situation is obviously quite different from the challenges
Terence describes facing from offstage physical entertainment that is totally different in kind from his
theatre, not in formal competition with him, and, unlike a joke, impossible to incorporate partially in his play
as Aristophanes does.
Mimus est sermonis cuius libet imitatio et motus sine reverentia, vel factorum et dictorum
turpium cum lascivia imitatio; a Graecis ita definitus, μῖμός ἐστιν μίμησις βίου τά τε
συγκεχωρημένα καὶ ἀσυγχώρητα περιέχων. mimus dictus παρὰ τὸ μιμεῖσθαι, quasi solus
imitetur, cum et alia poemata idem faciant; sed solus quasi privilegio quodam quod fuit
commune possedit: similiter atque is qui versum facit dictus ποιητής, cum et artifices, cum
aeque quid faciant, non dicantur poetae.
Mime is an imitation of any kind of speech and irreverent movement or imitation with
wantonness of shameful deeds and words. It is thus defined by the Greeks: ‘Mime is an
imitation of life containing things both licit and illicit.’ The word mime is from the Greek
word ‘imitate’, as if it alone were engaged in imitation, even though other genres do the
same thing. Mime alone, however, has claimed as its special prerogative what was common
to all. Likewise the man who makes verse is called ‘poet’, while other artists, though they
are just as much makers, are not called poets.
Diomedes’ definition has been criticized for its failure to mention dance, songs,
and music as important constituents of mime and its silence on other topics that
interest us, such as mime’s origins in religious ritual.33 These omissions, however,
can easily be explained by the fact that any kind of ancient theatre might have
musical accompaniment and certainly had beginnings shrouded in early cult. In
other words, these elements in mime were not constitutive of its distinctive code.
The peculiar place of mime in the generic system of ancient theatre was deter-
mined by its name. Mime calls itself imitation, and though all poetry is in some
way imitative, mime has a corner on the claim of preeminent imitation. As such it
cannot be selective about the range of what it imitates, but must admit all life as its
subject. The embedded Greek definition, the source of which Diomedes unfor-
tunately does not identify, makes mime’s imitation universal, accommodating
both licit and illicit themes, but the Latin part of the definition makes it clear
which type of material made a bigger impression (sine reverentia; turpium;
lascivia).34
As we saw in Chapter 3, the Greek word mimēsis is notoriously difficult to pin
down, and some of these ambiguities pass on to mime.35 One sense of mimēsis is
as ‘representation’ (see p. 78), and it is clear from Diomedes’ definition that one of
the ways in which mime is representative of life is in its range of registers, a span
from high to low no less diverse than the real world. However, mimēsis can also be
closer to ‘mimicry’, and there are other ancient references to mime’s prodigious
capacity for imitation. So Cicero, in De oratore, notes that there have been cases in
33
Panayotakis 1995, xiii.
34
An attractive possibility that has been put forward is that the Greek definition comes from Theo-
phrastus, but there is no way to prove this and other suggestions have been made. See Giancotti 1967, 26–8.
35
The literature on the meaning of the word mimesis, as on everything else to do with the topic, is vast.
Halliwell 2002 provides a good starting point and goes a long way towards bringing out the full complexity
of the word in Plato and beyond.
which vultus et vocis imitatio has been effective, but he advises the ideal orator to
avoid visible imitation (De orat. 2.242):
mimorum est enim et ethologorum, si nimia est imitatio, sicut obscenitas. orator surripiat
oportet imitationem, ut is, qui audiet cogitet plura quam videat; praestet idem ingenuita-
tem et ruborem suum verborum turpitudine et rerum obscenitate vitanda.
For excessive imitation, like obscenity, belongs to the mimes and character players. The
orator should sneak imitation, so the audience imagines more than it actually sees. He
should display his nobility and decency by avoiding shamefulness of speech and obscenity
of gestures.
The ‘mimes’ and character players’ capacity for likeness’ (mimorum et ethologorum
similitudo, 2.244) certainly has its place, he insists elsewhere, but there is a
difference between laughable (ridiculum) and witty (facetum):
quid enim potest esse tam ridiculum quam sannio est? sed ore, vultu, [imitandis moribus,]
voce, denique corpore ridetur ipso; salsum hunc possum dicere atque ita, non ut eius modi
oratorem esse velim, sed ut mimum. (2.251)
For what can be as laughable as a buffoon? But he is ridiculed for his face, his expression,
his imitation of character, his voice, in short for his very body. I can call him funny and he
is, not of the sort as I would have an orator be, but as a mime.
Combining mime’s imitative quality with its improvisational freedom naturally

means that mime could be responsive to its audience in ways scripted theatre
could not. Many instances of this phenomenon could be cited; I single out here
the often neglected epitaph of the mime Vitalis from the Latin Anthology (Riese
487a), which presents its subject as the mirror and vessel of his spectators (15–22):
fingebam vultus, habitus ac verba loquentum,

ut plures uno crederes ore loqui.
ipse etiam, quem nostra oculis geminabat imago,
horruit in vultus se magis isse meos.
o quotiens imitata meos per femina gestus
vidit et errubuit totaque muta fuit!
ergo quot in nostro vivebant corpore formae,
tot mecum raptas abstulit atra dies.36
I copied the faces, postures, and words of those talking,
So you would think many were speaking from one mouth.
36
Shackleton Bailey (1982, 116) has suggested emending crederes in 16 to crederer, thus preserving the
metre and giving basically the same sense. However, the poem is presumably late enough that the length of
this e is not important. Note, for example, the short i in the very same metrical position in line 2 (nescis
amare iocos). Emending to the first person also diminishes the epitaph’s play with the shifting second person
referent throughout. In lines 1–2 tu is death, in line 16 tu is the spectator, in lines 24–5 vos is the readers, and
in lines 25–6 tu is Vitalis, thus balanced addresses to death and Vitalis at beginning and end of the poem
frame invocations of his spectators while he was alive and then of his readers now that he is dead.
The very man being twinned in his eyes by our image

Shuddered at having passed more fully into my face.
Often a woman, echoed by my body language,
Saw and blushed and was struck dumb.
So all the shapes who lived in our body
Have been borne off with me by the black day.
Vitalis replicated his spectators onstage and in their own eyes (oculis geminabat
imago), and when they realized they had been absorbed into his body (in vultus se
magis isse meos), they fell into cold rigidity (horruit) and silence (muta), a foretaste
of his death and the death they would die with him. His death is then an imitative
response to their response to his imitations of them, and finally their death with
him as formae is their ultimate imitation of his final performance. The dynamic of
mimetic contagion is here mapped on to the hall of mirrors of an audience’s
response to a mime. In Chapters 2–4, we examined the discursive habits of the
Greeks and Romans surrounding the frequently recurring phenomenon of the
inversion of mimesis, the reversal of ‘flow’ of imitation. The focus there was on
works of art that inspire imitation, rather than meekly portraying objects, but if, as
Diomedes’ definition implies, theatrical mime is mimesis’ true home, we may
expect to find mimetic contagion here as well. Unfortunately we have so little
evidence on ancient mime, beyond superficial descriptions; a thorough picture of
contemporary constructions of sympathetic audience response to mime is beyond
our present grasp. However, the Vitalis epitaph is not alone in suggesting that the
audience could be drawn into mimesis of the mimic performance.
CONTAGIOUS MIME IN XENOPHON’S SYMPOSIUM
In chapter 2 of Xenophon’s Symposium an unnamed Syracusan entertainer arrives

at Callias’ party with his mime troupe and has them perform a musical piece to
the delight of the symposiasts. Socrates praises Callias for offering such pleasing
sights and sounds to accompany the tastes of dinner, and Callias jokingly suggests
that perfume be brought in to add one more sensory faculty, but Socrates replies
that perfume drowns out the more attractive odours that distinguish free men
from slaves. Far finer, he insists, is the residual smell of olive oil from the
gymnasium (2.4). ‘Sure, on young men,’ responds Lycon, ‘but what should be
the smell of a man too old for the gymnasia?’ ‘Nobility, surely’ (Καλοκἀγαθίας νὴ
Δί’) replies Socrates succinctly. Lycon slyly asks where a man might come by this
ointment, and Socrates agrees that it is not on sale in the perfumeries. In earnest
answer to Lycon’s question, Socrates quotes a couplet from Theognis (35–6)
indicating the ethically contagious quality of either good or bad associations:
Ἐσθλῶν μὲν γὰρ ἀπ᾽ ἐσθλὰ διδάξεαι· ἢν δὲ κακοῖσι|συμμίσγῃς, ἀπολεῖς καὶ τὸν ἐόντα
νόον (‘You will learn good things from good men, but if you mingle with the bad,
you will destroy what good mind you have’).37
Socrates turns this line to praise Lycon’s son, Autolycus, who is also Callias’
eromenos, for his choice of friends, but not everyone present agrees that virtue can
be learned. They are about to discuss the matter further, but Socrates notes that
the dancing girl from the mime troupe is ready to perform a juggling feat, so they
should delay this conversation. The girl’s performance is very impressive and
Socrates uses it as proof that woman’s nature is not inferior to man’s and that a
husband should confidently teach (διδασκέτω, 2.9) his wife whatever he would
have her know. After a brief exchange about the challenges Socrates faces edu-
cating his own wife, the girl performs another dance, this time a dangerous one
involving swords, and Socrates offers her performance as proof that even courage
can be taught (καὶ ἡ ἀνδρεία διδακτόν, 2.12), for though she is female she was bold
enough to jump into the swords. Antisthenes suggests that the Syracusan should
exhibit the girl to the city and ask for money to teach the men of Athens to face
combat. Amid such jokes, the boy in the mime troupe performs a graceful dance,
and Socrates points out that as handsome as he is at rest, he appears even
handsomer in his figures (σχήμασιν, 2.15).
In all Socrates’ praise of the dancers it is not their natures or bodies that are
emphasized, rather these are consistently subordinated to the skills or virtues they
have been taught. Charmides notes this pattern and suggests that Socrates is really
singing the praises of the dancing master (ὀρχηστοδιδάσκαλον). Socrates readily
agrees and insists that anyone who wants his body to be more agile (εὐφορώτερον,
2.16) must dance this way. At this point, Socrates surprises everyone by turning
to the impresario and applying to become his dancing student: ‘I too would
be delighted, o Syracusan, to learn the figures from you’ (μάθοιμι τὰ σχήματα
παρὰ σοῦ). The symposiasts laugh at Socrates’ suggestion that he learn to dance,
so he goes on to defend the virtues of dancing for exercise and confesses that
just the other day Charmides had caught him dancing early in the morning.
Charmides plays along and Philip jokes about the absurdity of Socrates’ body.
Then Philip orders flute music and renders a burlesque mimicry (μιμούμενος, 2.21)
of the dances the troupe had just performed, exaggerating and misrepresenting
every gesture.
Ancient readers and modern scholars alike have generally taken this passage as
testimony that Socrates enjoyed dancing, but Bernhard Huss has argued that it is
37
Xenophon quotes these lines again, in his own voice, at Memorabilia 1.2.20. There too the theme is
association with Socrates as a training in virtue (ἄσκησις τῆς ἀρετῆς). As long as Critias and Alcibiades were
companions of Socrates his influence kept them good, but when they began spending their time with worse
men, they deteriorated. For a reading of the Xenophon’s Symposium as a picture of the contagious influence
of Socratic kalokagathia, see Huss 1999a, 405.
all a joke: ‘Socrates never danced’.38 Huss is surely right that we are meant to read
the encomium of dancing’s salubrious benefits and the banter with Charmides as a
jest, perfectly in keeping with the tone of the evening’s conversation, but as Wohl
(2004) convincingly argues there is a serious kernel in Socrates’ proposal. He has
been arguing throughout chapter 2 that virtue can be learned, specifically by
associating with those who are virtuous and imitating them. He recognizes that
for all the performers’ physical beauty, what is most impressive in them are the
ethical qualities and the ‘figures’ they have been taught. The implication is that
they have absorbed these qualities and forms of knowledge by ascetical exposure
to and imitation of the impresario, and Socrates wishes to submit himself, as he
wishes others to submit themselves, to the same kind of training in virtue. The
notion of Socrates training in imitation of the mimes sounds funny to his com-
panions, of course, and he plays to their laughter, but when Philip performs his
coarse rendition (μιμούμενος) of the dances they have just seen, and exhausts
himself in the process (ἀπειρήκει, 2.23), he is doing, if only at a superficial level,
what Socrates had proposed. To find the imitation of the mimes enacted in full, we
must look to the end of the Symposium.
In chapter 7 a potter’s wheel is brought in as a prop for the dancing girl, who is
about to use it in her juggling act, but Socrates suggests to the impresario that all
the possible acrobatic feats the mimes could perform would not really be suitable
for the occasion. Like scientific questions, such spectacles ‘are not conducive to
the same goal as wine’ (οὐκ εἰς ταὐτὸν τῷ οἴνῳ ἐπισπεύδει, 7.5). He proposes that
they leave and come back with a dance, perhaps portraying (γράφονται) the Graces,
Horae, and Nymphs, as befits the charm of the symposium. The Syracusan agrees
wholeheartedly and takes his troupe out. Socrates follows with his long Erotikos
Logos (8.7–41) praising Callias’ love for Autolycus. Throughout, he frames their
chaste, spiritual affection as not just beautiful and ennobling, but as a heavenly
blessing from the gods.39 The man suffering under the vulgar love, by compari-
son, follows his beloved around like a beggar ‘pleading for a kiss or some other
fondling’ (ἄλλου τινὸς ψηλαφήματος, 8.23). The course word ψηλάφημα and the
rather abject image of the lover entreating for a grope are at odds with the polite
urbanity of the party, so Socrates immediately offers an excuse for his bluntness: εἰ
δὲ λαμυρώτερον λέγω, μὴ θαυμάζετε· ὅ τε γὰρ οἶνος συνεπαίρει καὶ ὁ ἀεὶ σύνοικος ἐμοὶ
ἔρως κεντρίζει εἰς τὸν ἀντίπαλον ἔρωτα αὐτῷ παρρησιάζεσθαι (‘If I speak rather
indecently, don’t be surprised, for the wine carries me along, and the love which
38
Huss 1999a, 387 (italics in original).
39
Hindley points out (1999, 76–7) that we may be meant to understand that Callias and Autolycus’
relationship does have a physical dimension and that Socrates’ encomium is essentially protreptic. Such an
assumption would explain Hermogenes’ observation in 8.12 that Socrates is admonishing Callias as he
praises him.
ever abides in me goads me into frankness against its adversary love’, 8.24). Shortly
before, Socrates claimed that a mimetic skit would be more in keeping with the
trajectory of the sympotic wine than non-representational juggling and tricks
would be. Now he reveals that the wine is also lifting him on its swell, and that
its agency is shared by the heavenly love that comes from the gods and dwells
inside him always. The heavenly love and the vulgar love may go under the same
name and may sometimes look confusingly similar, but it must always be remem-
bered that they are really opposites. So too, if the wine and Socrates’ divine love
have impelled him into some dictional indecency, it is only the candour born of
sympotic friendship and must not be confused with real obscenity.
Socrates’ speech ends and the Syracusan returns with his troupe and explains
the scenario. The young woman will be playing Ariadne, waiting in her bridal
chamber for Dionysus, who will arrive shortly, ‘having tippled a bit with the gods’
(ὑποπεπωκὼς παρὰ θεοῖς, 9.2). The Syracusan has succeeded better than Socrates
could have hoped at matching the trajectory of the sympotic wine. Dionysus will
be fresh from a symposium himself and in the same condition of mild inebriation
as his audience. But more profoundly than merely matching his audience on this
level, he will also portray the intersection of sympotic drinking with the epiphany
of divine love coming to humanity. This was the experience of wine and love that
Socrates was describing, but more importantly, if what Socrates says is true and
there is a heavenly love dwelling in himself, then the symposiasts have, like
Dionysus in the mime, been drinking in the presence of divinity.40 The characters
in this mime are to mirror not only the superficial condition of the symposiasts,
but their deeper story as well.
Xenophon’s description of the mime closes the Symposium (9.3–7) and is worth
quoting in its entirety, for its constant play on the slippage between reality and
representation and its exemplification of mimetic contagion:
To begin with, Ariadne, adorned as a bride, came in and took her seat on the chair.
Dionysus was still nowhere to be seen, but there was Bacchic flute music. At this point
everyone was amazed at the dancing master, for as soon as Ariadne heard it, she behaved in
such a way that everyone would know she was delighted at what she heard (ἀκούσασα
τοιοῦτόν τι ἐποίησεν ὡς πᾶς ἂν ἔγνω ὅτι ἀσμένη ἤκουσε). She didn’t go to meet him or even
rise, but she was obviously struggling to keep calm. Finally, when Dionysus caught sight of
her, he came dancing toward her as lovingly as could be, knelt down, put his arms around
her, and gave her a kiss. She seemed like the picture of a modest woman (αἰδομένῃ μὲν
ἐῴκει), but she lovingly returned his embraces nonetheless. As the symposiasts watched,
they were clapping and shouting, ‘Encore!’ But when Dionysus stood up and helped
40
This seems to be what Autolycus’ father, Lycon, had intimated, when he closed the conversation with
an interpretive last word: Νὴ τὴν Ἥραν, ὦ Σώκρατες, καλός γε κἀγαθὸς δοκεῖς μοι ἄνθρωπος εἶναι (‘By Hera,
Socrates, I think you really are a noble human being’, 8.43).
Ariadne to her feet, that was when one could see just what it looks like when people kiss
and hug each other (ἐκ τούτου δὴ φιλούντων τε καὶ ἀσπαζομένων ἀλλήλους σχήματα παρῆν
θεάσασθαι). This truly handsome (ὄντως καλὸν) Dionysus and beautiful Ariadne were not
messing around but actually French kissing (οὐ σκώπτοντας δὲ ἀλλ᾽ ἀληθινῶς τοῖς στόμασι
φιλοῦντας), and the spectators all got excited watching (οἱ ὁρῶντες . . . πάντες ἀνεπτερωμένοι
ἐθεῶντο). For indeed they could hear Dionysus asking her if she loved him and her
promising she did in such a way that not only Dionysus but all present would have taken
an oath together that the boy and girl really were in love with each other. For they did
not seem like people who had learned routines, but like those now permitted to do things
long desired (ἐῴκεσαν γὰρ οὐ δεδιδαγμένοις τὰ σχήματα ἀλλ᾽ ἐφειμένοις πράττειν ἃ πάλαι
ἐπεθύμουν). Finally, when the symposiasts saw them embracing and going off together,
evidently to bed (ὡς εἰς εὐνὴν ἀπιόντας), the bachelors swore they would get married and
the married men mounted their horses and rode home to their wives so they could enjoy
them. But Socrates and those who remained went off to join Lycon and his son on their
walk. Thus was the dissolution of the symposium that night.
There is nothing surprising (except, of course, to the extent that all theatre is
surprising) about Xenophon’s reference to the actor and actress as Dionysus and
Ariadne. However, this fundamental principle of all theatrical mimesis, Coler-
idge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’, becomes problematic when Xenophon
causally connects the actress’ trained skill as a performer with the audience’s
recognition that she was happy when she heard the music announcing her
approaching bridegroom. Diderot’s famous ‘Paradox of the Actor’ is relevant
here: the more powerfully an actor feels an emotion onstage the less successful
he will be at conveying it. If the actor playing Ajax gives himself over to a genuine
abyss of grief and embarrassment, he will be incapacitated as a performer and
unable to project the signals appropriate to his character’s emotion. Xenophon
points much the same direction by emphasizing the action of Ariadne (τοιοῦτόν τι
ἐποίησεν) when she heard the music, its intended effect on the minds of the
spectators, and above all their wonder at the expert skill of her coach. However,
this objective focus on performance is undermined by the fact that the content of
the spectators’ ‘knowledge’ is that, when Ariadne heard the music, she was happy.
There is, of course, only one act of hearing, but it is stated twice, as a participle and
then as a verb; the subject of ἀκούσασα is the expertly trained actress ‘Ariadne’,
whereas the subject of ἀσμένη ἤκουσε, the woman who rejoices at Dionysus’
arrival, must be the character Ariadne.
A similar problem arises when he contrasts her ‘looking like’ a modest woman,
though she enthusiastically reciprocates her lover’s advances. Does he mean to
refer to an ethically internal ambiguity, the disparity between how she seems and
what she actually does? Or does he mean to suggest the disparity between the
character and the actress, since the actress only simulates (ἐῴκει) the real modest
woman, namely the mythological figure, while her profession itself is enough to
disqualify her for real modesty? They are actors, providing the figures (σχήματα) of
intimacy for a spectacle, but these are not empty appearances, as he hastens to
explain. They were truly (ὄντως) a handsome pair and they were really (ἀληθινῶς)
kissing, and the audience responds to all this reality on the stage by imitating it
offstage: Dionysus arises (ἀνιστάμενος) and raises Ariadne up (συνανέστησε), and
their kiss causes the spectators in turn to become ‘aroused’ (ἀνεπτερωμένοι).
Dionysus asks Ariadne if she loves him and her oath (ἐπομνυούσης) of love is so
believable that the spectators in turn would take an oath (συνομόσαι) that this is
real romance, not between ‘Dionysus’ and ‘Ariadne’, but between the actors (τὸν
παῖδα καὶ τὴν παῖδα). The distinction between represented passion and real passion
has collapsed, as the realism of the performance reveals that the actors are not
acting at all. But more interesting still is the inclusion of ‘Dionysus’ as the first of
the potential oath-takers. Even if the audience is wrong and the boy has no
feelings for the girl, he would of course, as ‘Dionysus’, still swear to the
sincerity of his love.41 The audience’s earlier admiration for the dancing coach
(ὀρχηστοδιδάσκαλον) may be tempered now that it has become apparent that these
are not actors who have learned their poses (δεδιδαγμένοις τὰ σχήματα) but simply
lovers who have been given free rein, but here too, by using the verb ἐῴκεσαν,
Xenophon subtly reminds us that the audience only reacted as it did because of
how the actors seemed; their love may be apparent, but it is also therefore
appearance.
The spectators have now been drawn into fully sympathetic conformity with the
mime, and when Dionysus and Ariadne leave together, presumably (ὡς) for
the marriage couch, the married men take their cue and rush home to recapitulate
the backstage denouement with their own wives. Socrates, Callias, and the rest
also leave to join Autolycus and his father on their walk and to enjoy a more
spiritual interpretation of the mime’s hieros gamos: the exporting of noble sympo-
tic friendship into the civic space, organized around the figure of divinely chaste
homosexual love. Huss has noted the general parallelism of the erotic theme of
Socrates’ speech in chapter 8 and the ‘highly risqué performance’ in chapter 9 and
that this alternation of σπουδή and παιδιά informs the Symposium at a compos-
itional level.42 However, the parallelism we have established here runs much
deeper than the shared erotic theme. As we have argued, the Syracusan impresario
41
Various critics and scholars, beginning with Schenkl 1876, have noted the logical problem of Dionysus’
inclusion in the oath and sought to propose a lacuna after Διόνυσον or otherwise to emend the text; see most
recently Bowen 1999, 125. Huss (1999b, 445) is more conservative: ‘Der Text is hier jedoch trotz leichter
logischer Inkonzinnität tadellos’. I agree wholeheartedly with Huss, but I believe we can now offer an
explanation for this ‘logical inconcinnity’, as one among many features of this ekphrasis that blur the
distinction between mimesis and reality and point to this very blurring as still, paradoxically, an aspect of
the mimesis.
42
Huss 1999a, 393 n.36. For a fuller presentation of the alternation of serious and light elements in the
Symposium and in Xenophon more generally, see Huss 1999b, passim and especially 30–7.
succeeds in matching the tone of the party and in representing, both at a super-
ficial level and at a more profound level, the coordinated dynamics of sympotic
drinking and divine love, which the symposiasts have just been hearing about from
Socrates and experiencing through him. But the likeness of mime to symposium is
no sooner established than its ontological order is reversed. The spectators are
drawn first into affective imitation and then into full recapitulation of a perform-
ance which they no longer believe is a performance, and the boundary between
representation and reality collapses, if not in the actors’ genuine arousal then
certainly in the spectators’.
In his Erotikos Logos, Socrates excused his slip into lexical indecency by
displacing his agency on to the legitimating forces of wine and divine love; so
also the symposiasts’ arousal in response to the mime may seem crude, but it is
inspired by the presence of the very same forces within the mime, and its propriety
is evident in its two resolutions, both of them civically productive: conjugal love
and the public projection of sympotic friendship.43 For some literally, then, and
for others metaphorically, the evening has ended with imitation of the mime.
Socrates’ proposal of learning the ‘figures’ from the impresario in chapter 2, which
quickly became a joke at the time, has turned out to have a more serious
application, one which all the symposiasts would eventually follow to their own
benefit, though at differing levels of abstraction.44 Socrates postponed discussion
of the question whether virtue could be learned, suggesting instead that they
watch the mime troupe perform. His answer to the question would seem to be
implicit in his redirect: virtue, like vice, can indeed be learned—in fact, it is
contagious.
43
Wohl 2004 generally casts these two reactions (somatic, literal, and heterosexual vs spiritual, meta-
phoric, and homosocial) as incompatible, to the extent that she reads the impresario as being in implicit
contest with Socrates throughout, but on pp. 356–7 she does consider the effective overlap in the two
resolutions.
44
Scholarship on Xenophon’s Symposium has largely been devoted to comparing it (unfavourably) to
Plato’s Symposium and to the relative dating of these two texts. Most scholars have come to the conclusion
that Xenophon’s Symposium is later, but recently Danzig 2005 has provided fresh ammunition to the
argument in Thesleff 1978, that Xenophon wrote the first seven chapters of his Symposium, presumably
with a different ending, before Plato wrote his Symposium, and then later tacked on chapters 8 and 9, as a
response to Plato’s text. Happily, for our purposes, the question who wrote first is as immaterial as it is
inconclusive, and even if it could be demonstrated that Xenophon returned to his Symposium and added the
last two chapters, it would not therefore follow that there must be a lack of unity in the text as he finally left
it. The tendency to depreciate the unity of Xenophon’s ending as inferior to Plato’s is still very strong; see,
for example, Bowen 1999, 126: ‘The clash between the heterosexual mime and Socrates’ words in VIII is left
unresolved, and there are other loose ends. Plato wrote more tidily (Smp. 223b6-end).’ For Danzig,
Xenophon’s relative artlessness is only the necessary cost of his greater ‘realism’. He points to Socrates’
speech at the end of Plato’s text, which subtly incorporates and answers the previous speeches: ‘This feature
gives Plato’s Symposium a powerful literary unity that is, frankly, lacking in Xenophon’s’ (2005, 341). At the
risk of diminishing Xenophon’s realism, I believe my reading shows the unity between chapters 8 and 9 and
also between these last two chapters and the rest of the text.

CHAEREA STUPIDUS
In both the Vitalis epitaph and Xenophon’s Symposium, mime’s imitative faculty is
directed outwards to the audience, but there is an easier way to accomplish
impromptu modulation of performance, namely between two characters within
the mime. By keeping the game of reflective imitation within the skit, the actors
can create a similar sense of improvisatory contingency, while maintaining some-
what more control of how the performance will develop. Because it does not
involve the incalculabilities of audience interaction and can be practiced ahead of
time by the actors, this effect can also be simulated in Plautine comedy. On the
most basic level, this principle of competitive matching underlies one of Plautus’
favourite forms of pseudo-improvised emulative performance: the tit-for-tat duet,
in which tight verbal echoes intensify the impression of an unscripted responsorial
contest.45 The technical term for this theatrical motif, not only in modern schol-
arship but evidently also for Plautus, is par pari respondere.46 Alongside the
general frequency of responsive copying in mime, the imitative function can also
be consolidated on to one of the characters, who then becomes the generically
constituted focus of mimicry. The mimic grex is often attested as having a leading
actor, the archimimus, the head of the troupe and perhaps something like the
vaudevillian ‘top banana’, but in addition to this figure the company would also
need at least one other actor, a mimic fool variously called μῖμος δεύτερος, actor
secundarum, μωρὸς φαλακρός, or simply stupidus.47 While the first mime pursued
his heroic (or mock heroic) exploits, the second mime would follow along, aping
his superior, picking up words and gestures for repetition in the wrong contexts,
and generally finding himself in parallel, if ludicrously warped, situations. Horace,
advising Lollius to steer clear of being an abject parasite, gives some idea how the
part of the mimus secundus worked (Epist. 1.18.10–14):
alter in obsequium plus aequo pronus, et imi

derisor lecti, sic nutum divitis horret,
sic iterat voces et verba cadentia tollit,
ut puerum saevo credas dictata magistro
reddere vel partes mimum tractare secundas;
One man, flat on his back in flattery,
A joker in the dunce chair, so trembles at the rich man’s nod,
Parrots his phrases and picks up words as they tumble from his lips,
You’d think he was a child repeating after his stern teacher
Or a mime playing the second role.
45
There is an excellent example in Act 2, scene 2 of Persa, appropriately called midway through by
Paegnium (par pari respondes dicto, 223).
46
The fullest exploration of par pari respondere in Plautus is Wallochny 1992, 65f.
47
Nicoll 1963, 87–8.
The character of the stupidus was one of mime’s most lovable and enduring
inventions, from Sannio in antiquity to Harlequin in Commedia dell’arte to
Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, whose love affair works as a parody of Tamino’s.
Perhaps Papageno is a good illustration of another point about the second mime:
he is ‘second’ in the sense that his is not the principal role and his performance is
derivative of the one he is imitating, but that does not mean that he is less
interesting as a character or that his part is technically easier. In fact, it is usually
just the opposite on both counts. The archimimus is certainly a mime, but because
the mimus secundus lives by direct and apparently improvised imitation, he is a
mime’s mime. To quote (in a slightly different context) Diomedes’ definition of
mime, solus quasi privilegio quodam quod fuit commune possedit (‘He alone has
claimed as his special prerogative what was common to all’). The Eunuch, like
most of Terence’s plays, is a duplex comoedia, and as usual one of the couples is
better developed.48 Phaedria and Thais are both major characters in the play, and
because of their prominence in Act 1, they emerge early on as the dominant love
story. Unlike Thais, Pamphila is mostly talked about, comes onstage briefly in Act 3,
says nothing, and is quickly ushered backstage never to appear again. So Chaerea’s
love affair is fundamentally an auxiliary double of his brother’s, and when Chaerea
first comes onstage in Act 2, Parmeno immediately subordinates his character to
Phaedria’s by describing him as being like his brother, only more so (297–301):
ecce autem alterum!

nescioquid de amore loquitur: o infortunatum senem!
hic vero est qui si occeperit,
ludum iocumque dices fuisse illum alterum,
praeut huiu’ rabies quae dabit.
Great, the other one!
Talking about love . . . Poor master!
And this one is the type that, once he gets going,
You’ll think that other one was fun and games,
Compared to the mess this one’s madness will unleash.
Parmeno’s predictions are right, of course; Chaerea follows his brother in love by
falling for Phaedria’s mistress’ adopted sister, and the effects of his rabies will soon
48
The only Terentian comedy with a single lover is Hecyra, one of the many ways this play is exceptional.
In the other comedies the two love stories are never equally developed in interest, so that in most cases the
apparent complexity of the plots is, as Sander Goldberg says, ‘a bit deceptive’ (1986, 144). In fact, the
double-plot structure in Andria is so rudimentary that it is not always recognized as such (Levin 1967, 301),
but the relative insignificance of Charinus and Philumena’s love story (and happy ending) for the story of the
Andria is not fundamentally different from the disparity in other plays. It is only an extreme case of the usual
asymmetry of the two lobes of the amatory double plot. On the Andria as barely (but still importantly!)
duplex, see Gilula 1991; Germany 2013, 239.
outstrip any problems his brother’s affair has caused. Phaedria is not the only one
Chaerea copies, however. As I have argued extensively in Chapters 1 and 4, the
eunuch intrigue originates with Parmeno, and until the intervention of the
painting Chaerea is following Parmeno’s script. This complaisant reproduction
of the role sketched by Parmeno is not the same thing as direct mimicry, but as we
have seen, the play insistently points to the ethical consistency in Chaerea’s
mindless conformity when faced with a model. For that matter Chaerea does
mimic Parmeno, not in the eunuch intrigue but at the very beginning of their
exchange. Parmeno has often rewarded Chaerea’s gifts by pledging to help if he is
ever in love, and Chaerea calls in the favour now, but rather than simply reminding
Parmeno of his promise, he parrots his actual words: Chaerea, aliquid inveni |
modo quod ames: in ea re utilitatem ego faciam ut cognoscas meam (‘Chaerea, just
find something to love; I’ll show you my usefulness’, 308–9). Donatus’ comment,
which provides the epigraph for this chapter, draws attention to the mimetic
excess of these lines. Chaerea’s performance of ‘Parmeno’ accomplishes nothing
for the plot; its function is purely ethical. He reveals upon his first entrance that the
tendency to mimesis is fundamental to his character (more suo).49
Chaerea fully adopts the qualities of mimus secundus only in his direct mimicry
of the painting, or rather of Jupiter in the painting as archimimus. The later
evidence for the second mime part, as regrettably thin as it is, does seem to fit
Chaerea’s performance here perfectly, but was it normal to have the model,
effectively the archimimus role, played by a work of art rather than a human
actor? Because of the overall paucity of evidence for mime especially in this period,
there is no way to know what connections this mimetic response to a work of
plastic art might have had with improvisational routines specific to the stupidus
type in second-century Italian folk theatre. There is, however, a tantalizing
resemblance to the so-called Santia vase (Figure 5.1).
A Campanian wine jug from the second half of the fourth century BCE, the
Santia vase is usually classed as a ‘Phlyax vase’. Its form is unexceptional (oenochoe
shape 3), and the overall manner of its secondary decoration is also typical of
southern Italian Greek vases. It presents a figure standing next to a small, icono-
graphically normal statue of Herakles. The figure’s mask is typical for a Greek
comic slave, but his chlamys and chiton are different from those on other comic
vases from Apulia and Paestum, and most notably he lacks the phallus.50 Above his
49
Donatus has Chaerea in the ‘second part’ in another sense as well, following Parmeno as supporting
actor: in hac comoedia qui personam Parmenonis actor sustinet primas habet partes, secundae sunt Chaereae,
tertiae ad Phaedriam spectant (‘The actor who plays the role of Parmeno in this play has the first part, the
second is Chaerea’s, the third goes to Phaedria’, Don. Eun. praef. 1.4).
50
Taplin 1993, 40–1. Green 1995 argues that the costume is badly confused and that this is not a slave at
all, but an old man misidentified as a comic slave, perhaps even by the purchaser of the pot rather than the
painter: ‘[I]t seems clear that the painter has based his figure on other representations rather than direct
F I G . 5.1. Santia
vase, B.M. F233
Photo courtesy of the
British Museum
head, in retrograde Oscan lettering appears the name SANTIA. Santia is easily
explained as the Oscan form of Xanthias, which is cited by Aeschines as a typical
name for a comic slave, and which is attested in labels for slaves on other southern
Italian pots.51 In other words, the Santia vase is in itself strong confirmation of the
adoption and modification of elements from older Greek comedy into similar, yet
recognizably novel, Italian theatrical forms.
observation . . . In any event, the vase does not deserve the place it has been given in modern scholarship as
evidence for comic theatre. It is, rather, excellent evidence for what can happen on the margins of Greek
culture’ (114–15). But precisely here, at the margins of Greek culture, hybridity of character types and
costume conventions is more likely to be due to locally adapted forms of performance than to the painter’s
confusion or ineptitude.
51
Aeschines 2.157. Other Xanthias pots: Museo Civico Archeologico, Milan, AO.9.284 and British
Museum, London, F151.
Among its unique features, however, the most interesting thing about this vase
for our inquiry is that Santia is engaged in direct mimicry of Herakles.52 He holds
a staff with knots like those on Herakles’ club, and his left hand is raised in the
same enigmatic gesture. Herakles’ left leg is dropped back in an attractive classical
contrapost, a stance which is clearly meant to be echoed by Santia’s awkwardly
crossed legs. Poor Santia, in short, is trying (and ludicrously failing) to copy the
statue. There is, of course, no way to prove any kind of continuity between this
isolated vase and Terence’s Eunuch a century and a half later, but specific lazzi can
be remarkably persistent in folk theatre, and if Santia’s mimicry of the statue is part
of a larger Italian expansion of the stupidus role to include the overt aping of
artistic representations, Chaerea’s description of his own imitation of the painting
may be reminiscent of a type of entertainment the audience would associate with
native mimic traditions.
Another similarity between the Santia vase and the rape scene in the Eunuch is
that the figure being mimicked is a character from Greek myth. In both cases the
dramatic re-enactment of an artwork takes the form of mythological burlesque.
From its earliest beginnings, mime delighted in representing gods and heroes in
humorously compromised circumstances.53 In fact, two Phlyax vases show situ-
ations very similar to the scenario Chaerea describes, in which an actor playing
Zeus is creeping in at the window of a woman who may be Danaë.54 Mime here
reveals one of its many affinities with Attic Old Comedy, as opposed to New
Comedy, in which the gods appear rarely and only in prologues.55 In Roman
comedy mythological burlesque is totally unknown, apart from the Amphitruo,
which is probably not based on a Greek New Comic model.56 This pronounced
difference between, on the one hand, Menandrian New Comedy, as adapted on
the Roman stage, and, on the other hand, all the various older Greek, native
Italian, and broadly ‘mimic’ traditions would make the rape scene in the Eunuch
52
In this regard Santia may be compared with Dionysus in Aristophanes’ Frogs (who is himself
accompanied by a Xanthias).
53
Wüst 1932, 1752, cols. 9–22.
54
One vase is in the Vatican and the other is in the British Museum (F. 150). For images, see Nicoll 1963,
56–7. The woman is usually taken to be Alcmena, but in that case Zeus would presumably use the front
door. For the argument that she is Danaë, see Stewart 1958, 369–70.
55
Pan delivers the prologue of Menander’s Dyscolus, the Aspis has Tyche, and the Perikeiromene has
Agnoia. Five Plautus plays have prologues delivered by a god (Amphitruo, Aulularia, Casina, Cistellaria,
and Rudens), but as Duckworth points out (1952, 296), these prologues differ little in content or function
from those delivered by an impersonal prologus. In the Samia Demeas asks Nikeratos if he has not heard the
tragic poets telling (λεγόντων, 589) how Zeus transformed himself to gold and paid a call on a girl, but this
scene in Menander is itself far from mythological burlesque; it is not a comical re-enactment of Zeus and
Danaë, but a reference to a telling.
56
The source may be a Middle Comedy (see Webster 1953, Hunter 1987) or perhaps from one of the
native Italian traditions (see Chiarini 1980, 106–15).
stand out as alien to its own generic context. Chaerea’s act is explicitly in imitation
of Jupiter’s ‘play’ (ludus, 587), and he casts himself in the god’s role, not just for a
momentary comparison, as in the Plautine examples we saw in Chapter 4, but for a
recapitulative performance conscripting Pamphila in the role of Danaë. The clear
thematic relevance of mythological burlesque to this narrated scene would,
I believe, be felt as a generic rupture. The painted scaena is the only thing
preserving the play’s smooth surface of Terentian decency from the mimic bur-
lesque supposedly playing backstage.
MIME AND BODY
All drama can be located somewhere on a spectrum between pure declamation

and mute action. The English word ‘mime’ generally implies a solely gestural
performance, but mime in antiquity was by no means confined to dumb-show.
There was, however, a striking preponderance of non-verbal entertainment in
mime, especially compared with the overwhelmingly verbal aesthetic (pura oratio)
of Terentian comedy.57 Although mimes with carefully scripted libretti were not
unheard of, in most cases the language seems to have been simple and less
important than the action.58 Dance and physical comedy were always part of the
show, and from its earliest beginnings down through late antiquity, mime was
capacious enough to contain acrobats, jugglers, and other thaumatopoioi.59 If
only for its non-verbal physicality the rape in the Eunuch would look more like a
routine from mime than a scene from New Comedy, but not only is it physical, it is
explicitly sexual.
Perhaps no feature of ancient mime is so consistently testified as its obscenity,
and despite its frequent overlap in themes and scenarios with New Comedy and
the Greek romance, mime is set apart from both these genres by the frankness
with which it portrays sexual situations.60 Ancient descriptions of mime emphasize
the prominence of adultery in the plots, the bawdiness of the language, and the
sleazy movements and unbridled performance style.61 In the few mimic fragments
57
On the centrality of slapstick in mime, focusing on the apparently mimic associations of the word
alapa, see Rawson 1993, 259. On sexual violence in mime more generally, see Fantham 1986.
58
‘Die Sprache des Mimos ist die Umgangssprache des niederen Volkes’ (Wüst 1932, col. 1736).
59
Most of the scholarship on mime focuses exclusively on literary dramatic mime. For non-dramatic
mime, see most recently W. J. Slater 2002.
60
As a genre only the Latin novel seems in any way comparable, though the Pseudo-Lucianic Ass and the
Iolaus may also be adduced in this regard as Greek matches for the two Latin novels.
61
On the relative preponderance of primary obscenities and sexual metaphors in mime, compared to
comedy, see Adams 1982, 219. In his list of the various types of mimic performers, Athenaeus mentions one
called the kinaidologos, who apparently lived up to his name (14.620e–21b). Sotades, the champion of this
particular style, ran afoul of Ptolemy Philadelphus by goading him for his incestuous marriage to his sister,
that have come down to us, for example from Herodas (third century BCE),
women coach each other on adultery (Mim. 1) and where to get a good dildo
(Mim. 6). In another of Herodas’ mimes (Mim. 5), a mistress, Bitinna, who forces
her slave, Gastron, to have sex with her has become jealous of his wandering
attentions. Herodas, like Theocritus, is writing pseudo-mime for an educated
elite, so the language is uncharacteristically artificial, literary, and clean.62 Even
so, the first three lines show enough differences from the world of New Comedy
to be worth quoting:
λέγε μοι, σύ, Γάστρων, ἤδ᾽ ὐπερκορὴς οὔτω
ὤστ᾽ οὐκέτ᾽ ἀρκεῖ τἀμά σοι σκέλεα κινεῖν
ἀλλ᾽ Ἀμφυταίῃ τῇ Μένωνος ἔγκεισαι;
Tell me, Gastron, is this so stuffed
That jiggling my legs doesn’t cut it anymore
But you’re wrapped up in Menon’s Amphytaea?
No one in Menander talks about sex this boldly, of course, least of all a woman,
but just as striking, from the perspective of New Comedy, is the demonstrative
pronoun in the first line. Bitinna would not fit in a Terence play because she is the
kind of woman who will point to a man’s penis and ask rude questions about it,
and Gastron would not fit because he has something to point at. One of the most
conspicuous changes in the costume of comic actors across the history of the
genre is the gradual lengthening of the jerkin and shortening of the phallus.63 The
male characters in mime, as in Aristophanes, would have sported visible members,
whereas their New Comic and Roman cousins had discreetly hidden (which is
surely to say, for purposes of costuming, non-existent) genitalia.64 Not only did
Roman comic actors not wear a false phallus, they were meticulous about avoiding
wardrobe mishaps that would give an unscheduled glimpse of their real privates.
Cicero (Off. 1.129) explains, ‘Such is the modesty of stage actors (scaenicorum) by
longstanding discipline (vetere disciplina) that none of them would set foot on
stage without a subligaculum on, lest some accident befall and they make an
Arsinoë. The line that got Sotades killed was: ‘You’re sticking your prick into an unholy hole’ (εἰς οὐχ ὁσίην
τρυμαλιὴν τὸ κέντρον ὠθεῖς). Athenaeus also describes the magodos who: ‘has tambourines and cymbals and
all his clothes are effeminate; he bumps and grinds (σχινίζεται) and does everything that’s over the top (τὰ
ἔξω κόσμου), playing now adulteresses and pimps, now a drunkard in a revel going to meet his lady’
(14.621c).
62
Compare, for example, the ‘popular mime’ fragment 7 (Cunningham), where the scenario is the same:
mistress demanding sex from her slave, who has grown wayward since he fell in love with another woman.
Her language is not just prosaic, but extremely coarse, her descriptions of the torments she will exact on her
slave are brutal, and her sexual vocabulary would make Herodas’ Alexandrian heroine blush.
63
See Green 2002, 104–6.
64
For the phallus in mime, see Reich 1903, 258n. The scholiast for Juvenal (6.276) refers to phallum ut
habent in mimo.
improper spectacle by revealing certain parts of the body.’65 Given the sexual
effusiveness of the males of Old Comedy and mime, compared to the relatively
restrained gentlemen of New Comedy, it is not hard to see phallic size as a fairly
obvious index of libido, especially for Hellenistic and Roman mime, since the
persistence of the traditional large phallus is here inevitably in generic dialogue
with the costuming conventions of New Comedy.
If the males of the mimic stage were usually macrophallic, the females were
often sexualized in another way. As we have already said (p. 125), the women’s
roles in mime were generally played by actresses, while in highbrow theatre,
whether tragedy or comedy, the cast was all male. In most cases the gender gap
between male actor and female character may have been ‘invisible’ to an audience
accustomed to this practice, but the gap was nonetheless always there, whenever
playwrights or performers wanted to draw attention to it.66 Ancient theatrical
cross-dressing probably did not indicate, as ‘drag’ does so readily for us, gender
performativity at its most conspicuous, but along with masks, metrical language,
and numerous other theatrical conventions, it contributed to the broadly non-
illusionistic character of most ancient theatre. Conversely, the absence of any of
these protocols in mime may have tended to push performance towards illusion-
ism and audience response towards a sympathetic immediacy unlikely under the
literary code systems of performed gender in tragedy and comedy.
In Xenophon’s account of the Dionysus and Ariadne mime, for instance, the
unfeigned kisses and apparently genuine expressions of love blur the boundary
between representation and reality. Does the audience become aroused because
they see a convincing performance of Dionysus and Ariadne and come to a deeper
understanding of divine love or because they watch an explicit make-out scene
between an uncommonly attractive boy and girl, whose true love makes ‘Dio-
nysus’ and ‘Ariadne’ irrelevant referents? I have argued above that Xenophon
subtly avoids authorizing either interpretation to the full exclusion of the other,
65
For the subligaculum, see Olson 2003, 206 and Marshall 2006, 65–6. Marshall speculates that the
comic actor may have worn some kind of token penis, over the subligaculum but under the tunic, and that
this might explain the three attested Naevius plays with names pertaining to male genitalia. But if the actors
in fabula palliata did wear a phallus, it was evidently so subtle as to be negligible compared to that of mime.
Surely plays with titles like Triphallus, Testicularia, and Appella would be entertaining even without a
costume phallus.
66
Jeffrey Henderson (1996) takes a strong position on the normativity, and therefore semiotic insignifi-
cance, of cross-dressing in Greek and Roman theatrical cultures: ‘male and female characters are at all times
understood to be respectively men and women’ (17). Henderson’s reserve here may be prudent, as it is
surely easy for us to overinterpret this feature of ancient theatre, but Greek tragedy and comedy (Bacchae
and Thesmophoriazusae are perhaps the most obvious examples) do sometimes highlight the gender gap
between male actor and female character as part of their exploration of sex and its relationship to
performance, most explicitly by including cross-dressing as a plot element. The clearest example of this
kind of play in Roman comedy is in the Casina; see Gold 1998.
but the collapse of performance into either illusion indistinguishable from reality
or into reality itself would clearly be impossible without the gender parity between
these performers and their roles.67
Given this tendency towards sexualized deployment of the female body, per-
haps it is not surprising that ancient mimes sometimes maximized this form of
realism by staging nude mimae. In fact, a bed might be placed onstage and sex
consummated before the very eyes of the spectators.68 The direct testimony of sex
acts in mime is considerably later than Terence, but there is no evidence that mime
became more sexually explicit over time, nor is there any good reason to posit such
a trajectory in its development. Indeed, mime’s very formlessness seems to frus-
trate all attempts to delineate a clear history of the genre. Whether or not
Terence’s audience would have known live sex shows as a form of entertainment
proper to mime, they certainly would have recognized the naked mima as a
feature of the Floralia. The Eunuch was performed at the Ludi Megalenses
(4–10 April) in 161 BCE, and the Floralia (28 April–10 May) was the next festival
in the Roman calendar. The Floralia may have had a long prehistory in Roman
religious life, but the Ludi Florales were officially incorporated into the calendar
just twelve years before, in 173 BCE, and the theatrical centrepiece was evidently a
mime performance with naked mimae (or naked meretrices functioning as
mimae).69
For Pamphila’s brief, non-speaking appearance onstage in Act 2, she is, of
course, played by a male actor, but if the audience were watching the backstage
events, Pamphila could no longer be played by a man. She is summoned to her
bath, leaves the room, comes back, and is placed on a bed, where Chaerea is
instructed to fan her freshly bathed and presumably naked body. The other slaves
leave the room to take their bath and Chaerea bolts the door behind them, so
there will be no spectators for the subsequent dumb-show. The rape does not
occur in some vague interior space, but in a room as discretely bounded as a stage,
which Chaerea does not leave throughout the scene.70 Thais leaves the room with
a pronouncement typical of characters leaving the stage (ego . . . ad cenam hinc eo,
580), and the bath is as hidden from Chearea as if it were securely ‘offstage’. The
stage-like unity of this interior space fits the theatrical language Chaerea uses to
67
Plutarch says the mimes stage things not even slaves should be allowed to look at, and ‘they throw
one’s soul into greater confusion than any amount of drink’ (Mor. 712E-F).
68
The bed: Ps.-John Chrysostom Patr. Graec. 56.543; real sex: SHA Elag. 25.4; Minuc. Felix 37.12; Val.
Max. 2.6.7.
69
See Val. Max. 2.10.8 and Sen. Ep. 97.8. On the general character of the Floralia, see Ov. Fast. 5.329–68
(especially 347–8 for the scaena levis).
70
All Roman comedies with the exception of Rudens are set in the street in front of a house or pair of
houses; see Duckworth 1952, 83. Mime’s setting is much more flexible, even including, as often in the case of
adultery mime, interior spaces.
describe his performance, but the presence of a naked woman ‘onstage’, to say
nothing of the rape itself, is enough to make the scene look more like a transplant
from mime than a scene from Terentian comedy.
CODE SWITCH: MIME
We have surveyed the general features of the rape scene in the Eunuch that make it
reminiscent of mime. It contains violent physicality, extreme sexuality, and female
nudity, all of which are usual for mime and none of which would fit in the
restrained world of New Comedy, and it is framed as an imitation either of
another performance (a burlesque of Jupiter’s ludus) or of a work of art, making
Chaerea’s response a type of the mimus secundus role. But perhaps it remains to
show where Terence has more specifically intervened to draw attention to this
generic rupture in his play. Because of the essential conservatism and continuity of
mime throughout the Hellenistic period, much of what we have said here may be
equally valid for Menander’s Eunouchos, but since we have lost that text, reflection
on Terence’s relationship to his source must remain speculative. In one particular,
however, we are on firmer ground: Donatus tells us (ad, 539) that in the Greek
original for this scene the narration of backstage events was a soliloquy, and
Terence has invented the character Antipho to break it up (ne unus diu loquatur,
ut apud Menandrum).71
Antipho’s name essentially means ‘protatic character’, and Donatus’ claim that
he was introduced by Terence for the sake of interruption seems credible enough.
But of his dozen remarks most are very short and essentially phatic (ain tu?, 567;
quid id est?, 571; miser!, 580). In fact, Antipho slips in only one real interruption of
any substance. His comment is extremely interesting, however, for in it he
conceives of the backstage events as a spectacle he would like to have seen.
Chaerea had just been handed a fan and given instructions to aerate the freshly
bathed Pamphila, with whom he would now finally be alone, and Antipho breaks
in (597–8):
AN. tum equidem istuc os tuom inpudens videre nimium vellem,

qui esset status, flabellulum tenere te asinum tantum.
AN. That’s when I would really have wanted to see your shameless face,
and what your stance was, holding your little fan, you giant ass!
Antipho’s vellem introduces a past continuous unfulfilled condition, three things

he would like to have seen. My translation can scarcely capture the force of his
71
I follow most scholars in taking Donatus at his word here, but Fraenkel (1968, 235–42) argues against
doing so.
asyndetic tricolon, but of the three grammatically different objects of vision, it is

the middle element, the indirect question, that seems hardest to render in English.
Barsby (1999a, ad loc.) suggests ‘what posture you adopted’, where I have used an
English cognate of status, the precise sense of which here is somewhat difficult to
locate. Why should Antipho wish to see how his friend was standing?
The answer becomes clear, I believe, if we consider the situation and pay close
attention to the third element of the tricolon. Until the other slaves leave the
room Chaerea must continue to play his part, but he is about to be left alone with
Pamphila and his excitement is at its peak. Antipho understands that by this point
his friend was struggling to hide an erection. Chaerea’s ‘stance’ would have been
such as to conceal, as best he could, the evidence of his arousal. The ‘little fan’ is
funny anyway, of course, as a ludicrous stage property for this virile adulescens to
be ordered to hold, but it becomes even funnier when we realize, as Antipho does,
that he must hold it in such a way as to make it an instrument of concealment.72
Animal insults are rare in Terence, so it is striking to hear Chaerea called a ‘huge
ass’, but donkeys were notoriously oversexed and well-endowed, and Antipho’s
point is not lost.73 If Chaerea’s erection were detected by the internal audience of
his intrigue, it would vitiate his performance as the eunuch and blow his cover. But
his visible phallus is also an indication that this scene is ‘costumed’ like a mime,
rather than like a palliata, for as we have seen the archaically protruding male
member is virtually a signature of mime in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Chaerea’s erection is essentially a masculine analogue of Pamphila’s nudity.
Another immediately visible difference in costuming between these two genres
would probably have been the masks. Unfortunately, we can reconstruct very little
about the masks of Roman comedy with any certainty, but it is at least fairly clear
72
As we have seen (p. 146), ancient mime was capacious enough to include performers we would call
jugglers. These artists could be called simply mimi or they could be referred to by a more specialized term
often based on the object they typically juggled. In a recent article W. J. Slater (2002) analyses the evidence
pertaining to the ventilator, a type of juggler who danced with a toy shield, specifically arguing that although
the term is not used, this is the type of mime Martial has in mind in 9.38, where nimble Agathinus is praised
for balancing his little shield on various parts of his body without ever letting it fall. When Antipho broke in
Chaerea was mimicking the slave who showed him how to ventilate Pamphila with the fan (ventulum huic
sic facito, 595). If the toy shield juggler was a type Terence’s audience would have recognized, perhaps even
under the name ventilator, part of the humour in this situation may rest in Chaerea’s deployment of the fan
precisely as a shield to hide his erection. Chaerea’s pseudo-martial use of the fan is especially funny because
he is a young man of military age; in fact, he is currently serving the ephebeia (miror quid ex Piraeo abierit;
nam ibi custos publice est nunc, 290). If we can trust Livy’s account of the capture of Heracleum in 169 BCE,
just eight years before the Eunuch, the use of mimic shield play by young soldiers would already be familiar
to Terence’s audience. Livy describes (44.9) how the wall was breached by a group of Roman youth (iuvenes
etiam quidam Romani) who held their shields above their heads at an angle to form a slanted testudo, which
could then be used by other soldiers as a ramp to the top of the wall. Livy says specifically that the young
men had adapted this technique from a circus performance (ludicro circensi ad usum belli verso).
73
For an exhaustive bibliography on ancient prejudices about aroused donkeys, see Griffith 2006, 224.
that the actors in Greek New and Roman comedy did wear masks, almost certainly
regularized into tightly defined character types.74 Most mime, on the other hand,
did not use masks, and though there may have been forms of mime throughout
antiquity that did, it seems unlikely they were ever confined to the fixed masks of
New Comedy’s schematic stock roles.75 In a theatrical culture that uses masks,
references to a character’s facial expression can be used to convey information
otherwise difficult to signify, or they may be used metatheatrically to point up the
artificiality of the convention. Even if there were no play against the mimic genre
here, Antipho’s reference to Chaerea’s face would still remind the audience that
Chaerea is wearing a mask. But given Antipho’s evident recognition of the
backstage generic shift, his wish that he could have seen his friend’s os inpudens
signals the fact that this mime scene would have required a different face than the
one Chaerea is wearing now on stage.
EKPHRASTIC ROLE CONFUSION
Mimus halucinatur, comoedus sermocinatur (‘the mime meanders, the comic actor
converses’)—thus, at any rate, does Apuleius (Flor. 18) characterize the perform-
ance styles of the two genres we have been trying to distinguish in this chapter.76
If delirious lack of focus is typical of mime, perhaps it will not surprise that
Chaerea’s description of the painting itself is so unclear. Indeed, there does
seem to be an almost hallucinatory confusion in his interpretation of what exactly
he saw depicted. He says Pamphila was looking up at a painted panel and (584–5):
ibi inerat pictura haec, Iovem

on it was this picture, How they say Jupiter
once sent a gold shower into the lap of Danaë.
Ekphrasis always replaces showing with telling, but here Chaerea has gone further,
substituting mythological narrative (aiunt) for description.77 The version of the
74
Most scholars today agree that the actors in Roman comedy wore masks, but this has not always been
the majority opinion. The tide seems to have turned in favour of masks after Beare’s masterful argument
(1950, 303–9). See also Duckworth 1952, 92–4; Gratwick 1982, 83–4; Wiles 1991, 132–3. For a dissenting view,
see Dupont 1985, 80–1.
75
For masks and no masks in mime, see p. 125.
76
If Apuleius’ implicit contrast between halucinatio and sermo is meant only to imply the difference
between the fantastic and the ordinary, halucinari is a strange verb to choose. The examples OLD offers for
(h)alucinor generally seem to imply delusional wandering of the mind.
77
It is possible that this invocation of what ‘they say’ should be read as an allusion to a specific text, an
‘Alexandrian footnote’. The Danaë story had provided the material for tragedies by Livius Andronicus and
Naevius, so it is quite possible that Terence’s audience would think of a specific version. But, of course, such
myth that Chaerea seems to mean is well known: Jupiter transforms himself into
golden rain and directs himself to Danaë’s privy parts. But a few lines later he says
something very strange. He rejoices (588–9):
that a god should turn himself into a man and creep onto
someone else’s roof tiles to trick a woman through a skylight.
Just what is it then that the painting shows? Does Jupiter transform himself into a
rain cloud or a man? In earlier ages, when editors were poets, several suggestions
were offered to fix in hominem, but emendation is unnecessary here.78 There was
another version of the myth, where Jupiter enters Danaë’s chamber through the
roof as a shower, but once inside, rather than raining on her, he assumes human
form for his epiphany.79 Donatus, who evidently has the same text we do here,
finds several possible solutions.
ATQVE IN ALIENAS TEGULAS hic apparet separatim Iovem, separatim auri
fuisse picturam.
DEUM SE IN HOMINEM CONVERTISSE utrum quia Iuppiter humana forma
aurum infundens pictus erat in tabula, non pro Iove aurum? an ‘in hominem’, id est
in hominis audaciam atque flagitia?
AND ONTO SOMEONE ELSE’S ROOF TILES—It appears here that Jupiter and
the painting of the gold were rendered separately.
THATA GOD SHOULD TURN HIMSELF INTO A MAN—Is this because Jupiter in
human form pouring gold was painted on the panel, rather than gold representing
Jupiter? Or does ‘into a man’ mean into the impudence and vulgarity of a man?
In the first comment Donatus considers the possibility that various moments in
the myth may be discretely rendered, like a cartoon strip, in which case Jupiter can
appear in human form here and in precipitate form there without logical incon-
sistency. Donatus’ deeper uncertainty about the passage becomes clearer in the
second comment, where he entertains both the possibility that Jupiter really does
send (misisse) the rain down, while himself staying anthropomorphic, and the
alternative possibility that he appears transfigured as rain, in which case the irony is
specificity would be hard for us to prove, since the Danaë myth had also been the subject of plays by each of
the three Attic tragedians and was popular in other media as well.
78
Bentley liked in aurum or in pretium and Fabia suggested in imbrem. For excellent arguments against
either of these emendations, see Tromaras 1985.
79
Pherecydes of Athens (FGrH 1.3.10) is our principal source: ἐρασθεὶς δὲ Ζεὺς τῆς παιδὸς ἐκ τοῦ ὀρόφου
χρυσῷ παραπλήσιος ῥεῖ. ἡ δὲ ὑποδέχεται τῷ κόλπῳ, καὶ ἐκφήνας αὑτὸν ὁ Ζεὺς τῇ παιδὶ μίγνυται.
that what Chaerea describes is not Jupiter’s physical transformation, but his ethical
transformation, his diminution to the all-too-human, in the same sense that the
rape in the Adelphoe was called humanum (471).
The conception of Perseus was a common motif for vase painters from the early
fifth century on, as well as showing up on gems and other media. There are also
several wall paintings of this scene that survive from Pompeii, enough to lend
support to the inference that this was a particularly well-loved theme in Roman
domestic art. One is hesitant to draw strong conclusions based on frequency, since
the Pompeian material is two centuries later than the Eunuch, but Pliny indicates
that this scene was already painted on a tabula by Nicias in the fourth century.80 In
the majority of these images Danaë languidly holds her himation aside, exposing her
pudenda to the tiny, localized dribble of rain, but there are two paintings, one from
the House of Regina Margherita (V.2.1) and the other from the so-called house of
Gavius Rufus (VII.2.16), that show Jupiter, identifiable by his sceptre, in the form of
a young man seated next to the typical Danaë-cum-drizzle configuration.81 Perhaps
these images are intended to represent the alternative version of the myth, in which
the transformation was only a means to get into her prison and Jupiter returned to
his more usual anthropomorphic form to have sex, but without the iconographically
standard golden shower it may have been difficult to indicate Danaë’s identity. In
any case, these paintings show her being impregnated by rain (the more usual
version of the myth), so Jupiter’s presence as a iuvenis is hard to explain. Indeed,
he would seem not only to be in two places at once, but in two versions of the myth
at once. I emphasize that these are not two discrete frames representing different
points in time, like a cartoon strip, nor yet a jumbling of two moments in a single
frame, neither of which would be unexampled in the mythological paintings from
Pompeii, but rather a mythological catachresis, where the dominant version plays
out as usual and the alternative version sits idly by and spectates.82
80
Pliny’s testimony (H.N. 35.131) is not explicit as to what kind of Danaë scene Nicias painted, but it was
most likely some version of the conception of Perseus. Images of Danaë with the shower of gold are so much
more frequent in all media than any other type of Danaë scene that when Pliny calls Nicias’ tabula simply a
painting of Danaë, it is hard to imagine such an unmarked description fitting any other scene from the
Danaë myth. Furthermore, Tiberius dedicated this panel, alongside another by Nicias portraying Hyacin-
thus, in the Temple of Augustus. Jean-Jacques Maffre (LIMC s.v. Danae, 330) notes the likely reason for this
collocation: ‘Ce rapprochement donne à penser que les deux œuvres étaient consacrées à des mortels aimés
par les dieux, et peut-être D. était-elle donc peinte en train de recevoir la pluie d’or.’
81
For the painting from the House of Regina Margherita, see Schefold 1957, 69; for the one from the
house of Gavius Rufus, see Schefold 1957, 170. The paintings are quite different from each other: in the
Regina Margherita painting the setting is inside and Danaë is portrayed sitting; the Gavius Rufus painting is
set outside with Danaë standing and receiving the golden shower poured from the horn of a Cupid. Corso
(2004, 306–7) connects this Danaë with the Praxitelean tradition, by way of Nicias.
82
Elsner (2007, see esp. 32–3) explores a similar play in Pompeian paintings of Ariadne, where the
internal gaze is refracted along the jagged fault lines of contradictory mythological traditions.
Working back from Pompeii to Hellenistic painting is, of course, always dan-
gerously speculative, but when two paintings of the same myth, from different
houses and apparently from different hands, show such significant differences yet
replicate the same essential form by duplicating Zeus in defiance of narrative logic,
it seems reasonable to assume that there may be a standard Hellenistic type serving
as model.83 Some of the members of Terence’s audience could then very well have
recognized Chaerea’s convoluted description of the painting as a fairly accurate
rendering of this catachrestic type, which creates a narrative paradox by showing
two contradictory versions of the myth in the same frame. In an iconographically
standard pose Danaë looks meekly up at the imber streaming down on her, and
she does not seem to notice the logically extraneous iuvenis who is gazing at her
intently. Chaerea is obviously in just the same position as this iuvenis, watching his
beloved as she watches something else. In the painting the imber and the iuvenis
are somehow both Jupiter, but this essential identity with the painted object of
Pamphila’s gaze is just what Chaerea claims and then enacts: consimilem luserat |
iam olim ille ludum (586–7). His ekphrasis sounds unclear because it makes a
strange muddle of the roles of Jupiter/homo and Jupiter/imber, but if the audi-
ence recognizes this iconographic type in his description, they will also readily
understand his claim of similarity to Jupiter, who is shown here as both scopo-
philic spectator and metamorphic sexual actor.84 Given the focal agency of the
painting, the similarity of Pamphila’s role to Danaë’s is also clear: Danaë’s atten-
tion, like Pamphila’s, is directed not at the iuvenis, who is inexplicably in her
room, but at an object which is normally inanimate, but is now exceeding its usual
boundary, invading her body, and changing her life.
The mime’s imitative faculty, as we have seen so many times, may be pointed
either within or without the fictional world of play. If without, then he becomes
like Vitalis, a mirror of life, drawing in his spectators and captivating them by
rendering them as himself. But if the mime’s capacity for imitation is directed at
some other character in his fictional world, perhaps even at a work of plastic art,
then he takes on the mantle of the stupidus, who apes his superior in all gestures
and actions, even (or especially) when he has no clear understanding of what he is
doing. As a performance style, or rather as a way of approaching performance,
mime instils an extreme flexibility of role. The model changes with the vagaries of
the audience or the unpredictable grandeur of the troupe leader, and the per-
former has to remake himself with hypermobile and apparently thoughtless
immediacy. When roles are felt to be labile and plastic to the degree mime
83
On the relationship of Roman panel-pictures to old masters, see Ling 1991, 128–35.
84
Selene and Endymion are depicted on a comparable pair of Pompeian wall paintings, which likewise
figure the deity as agent and primary viewer of the epiphany, though of course Selene is not presented in two
forms simultaneously. On these paintings, see now Platt 2011, 372–6.
inculcates, and the stupidus bumps into a painting where the roles are illegible
because they are so ambiguous, he can only project this two-places-at-once quality
in his description of the painting and in his dramatic response. Thus our reading of
the generic rupture to mime in this scene is complementary to a full appreciation
of Chaerea’s confusion both in his ekphrasis and in his imitative performance.
If Chaerea and Pamphila were the only characters touched by mime, it would be a
grim presence in the play. Happily, there is another character in the Eunuch who
more perfectly submits to the logic of mimetic contagion and more successfully
exemplifies its comic possibilities. We will explore his philosophy of performance
in Chapter 6.
SIX
The Poetics of Contamination
Verschiedene Weine zu mischen, mag falsch sein, aber alte und neue Weisheit
mischen sich ausgezeichnet.
Bertolt Brecht, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis
An etymology, as told by even the best lexicon, is a monologic trajectory, a one-

track evolution, and the meanderings subtended by a calque are fundamentally
outside its scope. The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for ‘contamination’
distinguishes between the general meaning as pollution or corruption (1.a and
b), and the technical usage as a philological term of art for the blending of stories
(c), lexical forms (d), or manuscripts (e). These technical meanings are obviously
related; they are drawn from the same scholarly field, and they have in common
with each other, and in contrast to the non-specialized uses, an ethically neutral
focus on mixture, as opposed to ruining. The dates of first attestation (and hence
the ordering in the entry) reveal that d and e are developments from c, and both
the exempla offered for c are from texts discussing Roman comedy. What the
OED does not tell us is that this technical usage is not a development from
contamination’s general meaning, but rather an importation of the German
Kontamination, which had steadily gained currency since Grauert’s magisterial
treatment (1833) of contamination in Roman comedy.1 The scholars who intro-
duced this homonymous double into English, eventually for circulation in con-
texts totally unconnected to classics, thought they were recovering the original
meaning of the Latin word contaminare. If the more recent scholarship on the
question is correct, they were in error, but I think it is likely that they were at least
partly right.
1
I am not sure that Grauert coins the German word. He is the first scholar I can find using it, but that
may only be because, unlike Westerhov, Drakenborch, and other early scholars who address the issue, he is
not writing about contaminare in Latin. He uses the word as an established term, not a neologism. I note,
too, in passing that since World War II and the cultural advent of radioactive contamination, German has
imported the primary English sense as a secondary meaning of Kontamination—we have swapped calques!
The 1960 Duden knows only the philological sense, but the 1997 Duden lists general and nuclear Ver-
unreinigung as second and third definitions, respectively.
It is the joy and frustration of studying the vocabulary of Roman comedy that so
many words are recorded here for the first time. The three earliest surviving
attestations of the verb contaminare are from Terence.2 The first of them comes
in the prologue of his first play, the Andria (16):
quae convenere in Andriam ex Perinthia

fatetur transtulisse atque usum pro suis.
id isti vituperant factum atque in eo disputant
contaminari non decere fabulas.
The bits from the Perinthia that fit into the Andria
He admits he lifted and used as his own.
His enemies find fault with this practice,
Namely they contend plays ought not be contaminated.
The prologus goes on to say that when they make this accusation, they are really
accusing Naevius, Plautus, and Ennius, who did the same thing, but Terence
would rather imitate the neglegentia of these poets than the ‘obscure diligence’ of
his critics. The next occurrence of contaminare is in the prologue of the Heau-
tontimorumenos (17):
nam quod rumores distulerunt malevoli

multas contaminasse Graecas dum facit
paucas Latinas, factum id esse hic non negat
neque se pigere et deinde facturum autumat.
habet bonorum exemplum, quo exemplo sibi
licere facere quod illi fecerunt putat.
His enemies have spread rumors
That he has contaminated many Greek plays
Making few in Latin, which he doesn’t deny
Nor is he sorry, and he says he’ll do it again.
He has the model of good poets, by which model
He supposes he can do what they did.
One certainly sees why Mme Dacier would be a little scandalized at how boldly
Terence owns the charge of contamination. In her 1706 edition she wrote,
‘contaminare ne peut signifier ici gâter, et ceux qui l’ont traduit de même font
dire à Térence une chose de fort mauvais sens; car qui doute que ce ne soit fort mal
de gâter les comedies . . . ? Il faut donc que contaminare soit pris en bonne part’.
But Mme Dacier is not sanitizing contamination in a vacuum—she will, of course,
have known Donatus. In fact, most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of
Terence printed the commentary alongside the plays. His scholion for Andria 16
2
The nominal form, contaminatio, is not attested before the third century CE, and when it does occur it
certainly is not in the literary technical sense.
THE POETICS OF CONTAMINATION 159
(contaminari non decere) reads: id est: ex multis unam non decere facere. So an
unambiguous definition of contamination as ‘making one from many’ can be
traced from the fourth century.3 It might seem strange that contaminare would be
so divorced from its ethically negative meaning elsewhere in Latin, but then these
are the earliest attestations of the word. If this fact casts us back on the etymology,
we note its relation to contagio and contingere.4 An important bit of evidence that
seems to have dropped out of more recent treatments of the topic is the passage in
Gellius (12.9) that gives periculum, venenum, and contagium as examples of words
that now are only used pro malis, but were once vocabula ancipitia. Perhaps it is
not surprising, then, if in the second century BCE the word had more to do with
contact than spoiling.
The philological term of art rests on this ethically neutral sense, but often the
word shades over almost imperceptibly to a more pejorative usage, implying hasty
or clumsy workmanship.5 If blame is already implicit in the word contaminare, as a
specification of the kind of mixing, that would explain its censorious use by
Terence’s critics, and it would also fit well with the negative sense of the word
elsewhere in Latin. We can answer the qualms of Mme Dacier (and the many
others who have insisted that contamination must not be a bad thing if Terence
admits the practice) by calling his statement ironic; he throws back in his enemies’
teeth the same word they have used in their accusation as a blatant transvaluation
of their literary code.6 Contaminare gets its rhetorical force here precisely by
keeping its strongly negative connotation.
Whether by contaminatio is meant merely ‘mixing’ or ‘mixing to bad effect’
(miscendo depravare, as the TLL has it) some notion of blending is fundamental to
the academic study of contamination in Roman comedy as it developed in the
nineteenth century. It was no less a titan than Friedrich Leo who first proposed
taking Terence’s excuse at face value.7 If Terence is imitating Plautine practice,
that ought to mean that some of Plautus’ plays are amalgamations of more than
one Greek model. Perhaps if we press on just the right places in the Plautine text,
the sutures will show themselves, and we can discern the botched cobbling of the
3
We will give less evidentiary weight to the later scholiast, who does not appear in the Terence MSS
before the eleventh century, but his comment here is also apposite: NON DECERE id est non fas esse
CONTAMINARI id est commisceri fabulas (Schlee 1893, 170).
4
In this etymology I follow Walde-Hofmann and the larger scholarly consensus, but there are those
(Hartmann 1919, Pisani 1935) who take contaminare back to tabes.
5
Richter (1914, 40) surveys various nineteenth-century translations of contaminare before settling on
Hauler’s translation as zusammanpatzen, which he then turns back into Latin as consarcire. Jachmann (1931,
147) translates the substantive as ein vermischendes Durcheinanderwerfen, Thierfelder (1935) likes rem
corrumpere aliquid admiscendo and Tredennick (1952) uses ‘spoil by combining’.
6
Cf. Fabia 1888, 179 n.2: ‘Térence défend la légitimité de procédé sans se préoccuper du mot dont ses
ennemis le flétrissent; il avoue le fait et, sans lui chercher un autre nom, il l’apprécie tout autrement.’
7
Leo 1912, 170.
Roman poet from the pristine artistry of the Greek original. With stunning
rapidity, the science of Kontaminationsforschung emerges as a new sub-discipline
of Plautus studies, complete with methodological orthodoxy, true believers, and
hacks. Of course, this overnight development was predicated on the whole
intellectual framework of classics in Germany and to a lesser extent England and
elsewhere. From its institutional beginnings in Germany in the late eighteenth
century, the modern science of classical philology had claimed the Homeric
Higher Criticism not only as its crowning achievement, but as its foundational
principle. A single text is refracted with an analytic sieve designed to separate the
original from the epigonic. Reading, at its best, consists in the accurate delimita-
tion of strata, invisible to the uninitiated eye. After the high-profile cases, like
Homer and Moses, it was relatively easy to apply this technique to any other
ancient author.8 What makes the study of contaminatio in Roman comedy
interesting is that the text is not thought to be an aggregate product of a single
cultural tradition, but rather a violent displacement from one language, culture,
and artistic sensibility to another. In this way, the scholarly project resembles the
source criticism for, say, an Augustan poet, but here too there are important
differences. For Plautus and Terence are not supposed merely to draw on various
dispersed literary sources for an obviously distinct artistic product, but rather to
bastardize their otherwise maximally faithful translation of one play with a max-
imally faithful translation of a scene from another play.
In such an intellectual culture, the distinction I have indicated between an
understanding of contaminare as miscere vs male miscere is finally moot. When
purity is a self-evident virtue, all mixing is bad. After Wagner there is a pervasive
assumption that it is the peculiar calling of drama in any culture to supply the
Gesamtkunstwerk. By being visual as well as auditory, by being kinetic as well as
poetic, and ultimately by being communal, the theatre can bring us together and
make us whole by being itself a unity. Menander’s plays (as far as anyone could
tell) were sensitive and fine-drawn, bringing together the best of tragedy and
comedy, tradition and novelty. Since the eighteenth century, Germans had been
writing poems about how Menander must have been the original genius of his
age. If the hallmark of genius is self-contained totality, how could anyone, above
all a Roman, touch those plays without doing serious damage?
The problems, both methodological and ideological, with this approach to
classical texts are so obvious now that I think I can forgo rehearsing them.
Apart from the general circularity and speculativeness that always plagues source
criticism, the study of Plautine contaminatio rests on especially brittle ground. For
8
For an illustration of how F. A. Wolf ’s analytic reading of Homer was immediately extended not only
to other ancient authors, but also welcomed, at least in some circles, as a guiding principle for contemporary
poetics, see Germany 2007.
one thing, as Beare never tired of pointing out, Terence may have lied.9 Plautus
was certainly free with his models, and it may be that Terence wants us to associate
his own practice of combining Greek plays with a more diffuse notion of Plautine
neglegentia, even though Plautus himself only added scenes or deleted scenes for
comic effect, but never actually combined two models. Apart from these two
passages in Terence, there is no evidence that Plautus did anything of the kind; no
single Plautine play can conclusively be shown to be ‘contaminated’.
Around the same time as the search for Plautine contaminatio was called off, we
encounter a more general suspicion of this scholarly category, even with respect to
Terence. Already as early as Schwering (1916) most of the argument had been
formulated, but it did not win widespread acceptance until much later. It has now
often been claimed that there is no attestation of contaminare that absolutely
cannot be translated with ‘spoil’ or ‘ruin’.10 The con- prefix may be intensive
(OLD, con- 5), rather than collective (OLD, con- 1). Both prologues do in fact use
the word contaminare with reference to combining plays, but that may be just a
coincidence. Donatus’ comment may be taken as an explanation of the accusation,
rather than as a definition of contaminare, or for that matter Donatus may be
ignored altogether. But once the focus on textual interweaving is taken totally
out of our definition, a new question presents itself: what exactly gets ‘ruined’
and in what sense? There is always a triangle of texts. First, there is the principal
Greek model, such as Menander’s Andria; then there is the secondary Greek
model, such as Menander’s Perinthia, which is mined for a small amount of
material; finally, there is the Latin text produced by this combination, in this
case Terence’s Andria. If contaminate means only spoil, which of these texts is
contaminated and why? According to Duckworth (1952, 204), ‘A Greek play was
defiled (in the eyes of literal translators) if alien matter was added to it from
another source; perhaps also the second original was spoiled for later adaptation
if a part of it was inserted into another play. It should be noted that to speak of a
Latin comedy as being “contaminated” is highly inaccurate; it was always the
Greek play that suffered injury.’
The exclusion of the third term, the Latin play, from consideration as ‘contam-
inated’ is really nothing but a corollary of the elimination of any essential notion of
mixture from the definition of contaminare. Spoiling is a thing that can only
happen to something that already exists, whereas mixture can be a useful desig-
nation both for the process and the result of mixing. The slippage of the perfect
passive participle in some semantic fields between predicative and attributive uses
is an ambiguity both English and Latin enjoy. We say, ‘Several single malt
beverages are blended to produce this fine blended whisky’—the word ‘blended’
9
Beare 1937, 108ff.; 1940, 33ff.; 1948, 70ff.; 1950, 90ff.
10
Beare 1950, 90; Duckworth 1952, 204; Chalmers 1957, 12; Marti 1963, 25.
is verbal in ‘are blended’ and adjectival in ‘blended whisky’. So the resulting drink
can be called ‘blended’ without itself having to suffer anything. If the contamin-
ation of Menander’s Andria consists only in the admixture of something from his
Perinthia, then surely the blended product can be called ‘contaminated’. Indeed,
there is no contamination of these two plays in any sense, apart from the existence
of Terence’s Andria. The prologue says that the bits of the Perinthia that fit into
the Andria Terence brought over (transtulisse). To be more precise, of course, he
brought them over into his own Andria rather than Menander’s, but since the
title is the same, he does not need to belabour that distinction. The three plays for
which Terence avows combination of models, Andria, Eunuchus, and Adelphoe,
all keep the title of their principal model, and there is a resultant blurring between
the first and third points, as it were, on the contamination triangle. The prologue
to the Eunuch even calls the following play quam nunc acturi sumus | Menandri
Eunuchum (19–20). Ultimately this means that whatever is ‘suffered’ by Menan-
der’s play is both inflicted and suffered by Terence’s play.
As I say, this exclusion is only a necessary consequence of Duckworth’s axio-
matic rejection of mixture from his definition of contaminare, but there is a more
fundamental flaw in his argument. If Menander’s Andria and his Perinthia are
both spoiled, it is, by Duckworth’s definition, in two very different senses. The
first is cluttered by heterogeneous content, where the second is recklessly plucked,
for the sake of a relatively small amount of material, from the roster of Greek plays
still available for translation. This neat demarcation of a different kind of spoiling
for the secondary model only highlights the reliance on hybridity as the sole
explanation for the defacement of the principal model. He has effectively said
that contaminatio is not ‘mixture’, but just ‘ruining’, except that for the primary
model the ruining consists of nothing but mixture!
The only way to fix this problem, without admitting a definition focused on
blending, is to locate the defilement only on the side of the excerpted model and
deny that the principal model is corrupted at all. Such a refinement would deliver
the most radically minimalist definition yet. This is exactly the strategy adopted by
Goldberg 1986. The excerpted text, according to Goldberg, is spoiled for trans-
lation by any future Latin poet. He argues that contaminatio can only be under-
stood with reference to the related charge of furtum. Terence is called a ‘thief ’ for
mixing two characters from Menander’s Colax into the Eunuch, not because he
somehow violated the artistic sanctity of the Eunuch, but because the Colax had
already been translated by Naevius and Plautus. The prologus swears that Terence
was ignorant of these earlier adaptations, but he points out that by strict applica-
tion of this criterion you would have comedy without running slaves, good wives,
bad mistresses, munchy parasites, braggart captains, long-lost children, old men
tricked by slaves, love, hate, suspicion—in short, no comedy at all (Eun. 35–40).
For the Adelphoe he mixed in a scene from the Synapothnescontes, a play by
Diphilus which had already been translated by Plautus under the title Commor-
ientes. Here his excuse is not ignorance, but the fact that this particular scene was
left out of Plautus’ adaptation (Ad. 9–11). Goldberg argues that this intense focus
on copyright explains the worry over contamination, since such a practice unfairly
reduces the number of Greek plays available for translation. He says, ‘Terence is
accused of violating operational, not aesthetic, rules. Only among modern critics
has the charge of contamination become an aesthetic issue.’11
This has been tried before. Beare argued in 1937 for such a focus on copyright,
but he changed his mind after Waltz (1938), and throughout the next two decades
his argument becomes more and more clearly focused on the defacement of the
principal original. His strongest statement appears in a 1959 article in CR. He says,
‘On the copyright theory, the most effective way of “spoiling” a Greek play for
rival Latin dramatists would be to translate it outright, as Terence apparently did
the Heautontimorumenos. This would mean that all translation was contamina-
tio.’12 Once again, Beare is quite right. In fact, by this definition, all of Terence is
contaminatio, except for the Colax scenes in the Eunuch, which had already been
sullied by translation and would presumably, therefore, be unharmed by being
used again. Goldberg’s definition of contaminatio turns out to be effectively
equivalent to ‘translation’ and almost exactly the opposite of what it needs to be.
There are other reasons for doubting this exclusion of aesthetic concern from
the definition of contaminatio. Goldberg’s quotation of the Andria prologue, like
my quotation earlier (p. 158), begins with line 13. But the four lines previous are
essential:
Menander fecit Andriam et Perinthiam.

qui utramvis recte norit ambas noverit:
non ita dissimili sunt argumento et tamen
dissimili oratione sunt facta ac stilo.
Menander wrote the Andria and the Perinthia
If you know one, you know both;
That’s how close the plots are—
Well, the diction and style are different.
The oratio and stilus will be changed in translation to Latin anyway, but with
respect to plot, the part not lost in translation, the plays can be fitted together
homogeneously. Given the charge of contaminatio immediately following, the
point would seem to be that Terence may have violated a generally accepted
aesthetic principle in combining these plays, but that there was no harm done in
this case, since the plays were so similar. Another instance of disagreement over
11
Goldberg 1986, 95. 12
Beare 1959, 8.
translational practice expressed as aesthetic concern for the Greek model may be
found in the prologue of the Eunuch. Here the tables are turned and it is Terence
accusing Luscius Lanuvinus of spoiling Greek plays, not by contaminatio, but
apparently by overliteral translation (7–10):
qui bene vortendo et easdem scribendo male
ex Graecis bonis fecit Latinas non bonas.
idem Menandri Phasma nuper perdidit,
atque in Thesauro . . .
Who translating well but at the same time writing poorly
Made bad Latin plays from good Greek ones.
He recently ruined Menander’s Phasma,
And in his Treasure . . .
And he goes on to explain how Luscius muddled the Treasure. Again the charge is
not contaminatio, but the exalted Greek model can be ruined (perdidit) by clumsy
handling in Latin, enough to suggest that aesthetic integrity is a vital concern for
these translators.13
My suggestion would not be to return to an understanding of contaminare in
the prologues as a purely neutral synonym of miscere, but to follow the TLL’s
rendering as miscendo depravare or male miscere. Such a definition acknowledges
that the word is always used in castigation, but also that there are times when the
notion of mixture is essential to the reproach. As Hugh Tredennick remarked in
his rather hostile review of Beare (1950), ‘Professor Beare’s view is that contam-
inatio in the traditional sense is a pure fiction due to Terence’s lack of candour and
Donatus’ stupidity.’14 If we are willing to dismiss the evidence from Donatus on
the grounds of his lateness and stupidity, perhaps it will not be difficult to extend
our dismissal to his student Jerome, who wrote that he had been accused of
merging together different works by Origen: dicunt Originis me volumina com-
pilare et contaminari non decere veterum scripta.15 If Donatus is simply wrong
about the meaning of the word, then we must convict Jerome of remarkable
acquiescence in repeating his master’s mistake. Turning to earlier authors, we find
many attestations of contaminare where it is difficult to decide between a render-
ing as ‘mix to bad effect’ and ‘ruin’. So, for example, in Pro Sulla 45 Cicero asks:
per me ego veritatem patefactam contaminarem aliquo mendacio? (‘Would
13
The MSS for 9 have nunc nuper dedit, but I follow Bothe’s conjecture of nuper perdidit. As Barsby
(1999a, ad loc.) says, ‘we seem to need an accusation that Luscius has ruined the play’. Even if the MSS
reading is correct and Terence is not saying anything explicitly critical about Luscius’ version of the Phasma,
the larger point still stands, since the bungled Treasure is obviously also a wreck.
14
Tredennick 1952, 28. 15
Hier. comm. in Mich. 2 p. 480 Vall.
I willingly contaminate the obvious truth with some deception?’). One could
certainly take the verb here as equivalent to miscendo depravare, but as in so many
places, it is not clear that a reading as corrumpere would be wrong, so this text
cannot be considered conclusive. We come much closer with a fragment of
Accius’ Atreus (206–8 R.), the earliest attestation after Terence:
quod re in summa summum esse arbitror

periclum, matres coinquinari regias,
contaminari stirpem ac misceri genus.
What in the greatest house I hold to be
The greatest threat: royal matrons corrupted,
A contaminated stock, and a family alloyed.
If we take the two expressions in the last line as synonymous, then this is strong
evidence of contamination as mixture, but perhaps the previous line’s coinquinari
makes this synonymy less conclusive. Similarly, in Livy 4.1.1, the tribune of the
people, C. Canuleius, brings a bill on the marriage of patricians and plebes, which
is regarded by the patricians as being deleterious of the orders: qua contaminari
sanguinem suum patres confundique iura gentium rebantur (‘by which the patri-
cians thought their blood was being contaminated and the laws pertaining to
families jumbled’). Jachmann (1931, 152) may be right that there is nothing morally
despicable about plebeian blood as such (‘nicht um moralische, sondern um
genetische Reinheit handelt es sich’), but separate is never equal—it is the patri-
cians who object to the bill. This is still important testimony, since the contam-
ination consists of the mixing of blood, but if we are looking for a case of
contaminare where the mixture itself is clearly at fault and not the quality of the
admixed material, this passage will not do.
In fact, we do have one such attestation. Here, too, the context is miscegen-
ation, but the perspective is reversed, since it is a patrician transitio ad plebem.
Cicero criticizes Clodius for his sham adoption by P. Fonteius (De domo 35):
non aetas eius qui adoptabat est quaesita, ut <in> Cn. Aufidio M. Pupio, quorum uterque
nostra memoria summa senectute alter Oresten alter Pisonem adoptavit, quas adoptiones
sicut alias innumerabiles hereditates nominis pecuniae sacrorum secutae sunt. tu neque
Fonteius es qui esse debebas, neque patris heres, neque amissis sacris paternis in haec
adoptiva venisti. ita perturbatis sacris, contaminatis gentibus, et quam deseruisti et quam
polluisti, iure Quiritium legitimo tutelarum et hereditatium relicto factus es eius filius
contra fas cuius per aetatem pater esse potuisti.
He doesn’t have the requisite age, like Cn. Aufidius or M. Pupius, who, we remember, as
old men adopted Orestes and Piso, respectively. And after those adoptions, as after
countless others, there was an inheritance of name, estate, and cult. But you’re not
‘Fonteius’, as you ought to be, nor are you your father’s heir, nor have you taken up
your adoptive family’s cult, though you’ve sure left your own. So the cults are a mess, the
families are a jumble (the one you’ve dropped and the one you’ve polluted), and our
established ancestral law regarding guardianship and inheritance lies forsaken—it’s uncon-
stitutional, but you’ve become his son and you’re old enough to be his father!
It was just possible to read the Accius and Livy passages as describing miscegen-
ation only from the dominant perspective, as pollution, but here the admixed
agent is socially higher than his adoptive family. Cicero is not bothered by the
change of gens as such, as the respectfully cited cases of Cn. Aufidius Orestes
Aurelianus and M. Pupius Piso Calpurnianus show. A legitimately undertaken
adoption should show three types of heredity: name, estate, and cult (hereditates
nominis pecuniae sacrorum). The next sentence shows that Clodius’ adoption is
bogus on all three counts. He has not taken Fonteius’ name, he is not his inheritor,
and he is in a limbo of family cults. Finally, the ablative absolute of the last sentence
repeats these three items, only changing the order to cult (perturbatis sacris), name
(contaminatis gentibus), and estate (iure . . . hereditatium relicto). The thrice
repeated tripartite structure reveals that by ‘jumbled families’ Cicero means Clo-
dius’ problematic name. By being in the Fonteian gens without taking the nomen
gentile, Clodius effects in his own person an unlawful blending of two families
and becomes a monster of the clan system. For how can clan be divorced from
name? As Cicero says elsewhere (Top. 29), gentiles sunt inter se qui eodem nomine
sunt (‘clansmen are people who share the same name’).
This passage from the De domo is, I believe, by itself sufficient proof that
contaminare could be used to cover cases of unhappy mixture, where neither of
the two ingredients is bad but the manner of their combination violates etiquette.
Taken together with the many other cases that suggest this reading without
necessarily requiring it, and adding in the evidence of etymology, Gellius’ testi-
mony on the early meaning of contagium, the direct witness of Donatus and
Jerome, and, above all, the sense logically required by Terence’s prologues, it
seems to me that recent scholarship has gone too far in taking mixture totally out
of the definition of contaminare. Certainly the reductive understanding of con-
taminatio, that sees ‘ruining’ only in the prodigal consumption of Greek models,
is insufficient and cannot be sustained. It is evident that the Latin poets are at least
also concerned with damage to the principal original in the resulting dramatic
product. On the other hand, the insistence of scholars like Duckworth that
contaminare means ‘pollute’ or ‘spoil’ without any implicit notion of mixture is
ultimately nonsensical, if the only thing the principal model suffers is hybridiza-
tion. It would seem that Goldberg’s position is the logical, if extreme, conclusion
of a line of argumentation that began as the salubrious corrective to the excesses of
early twentieth-century German Altphilologie. We laugh now at their absurdly
positivistic quest for Plautine contaminatio, and we stop laughing when we note
their patently racist philhellenism and their eagerness to shred the texts we do still
have, but our reaction to their abuses has left us with a definition of contaminare
unable to account for its use in the Terentian texts where the practice actually
is attested.
CONTAMINATED EUNUCH
I wish to suggest that because of our ever more restricted and now inappropriately
narrow understanding of contamination, we have failed to catch the Eunuch’s
playful awareness of its own hybridity. We have examined the two attestations of
contaminare in the prologues, but Terence uses the word one other time, in the
scene that has been the focus of this book. Chaerea emerges from the house where
he has just raped Pamphila, and though he is spied by his friend Antipho, he
believes he is alone (549–62):
CH. numquis hic est? nemost. numquis hinc me sequitur? nemo homost.
iamne erumpere hoc licet mi gaudium? pro Iuppiter,
nunc est profecto interfici quom perpeti me possum,
ne hoc gaudium contaminet vita aegritudine aliqua.
sed neminemne curiosum intervenire nunc mihi
qui me sequatur quoquo eam, rogitando obtundat enicet
quid gestiam aut quid laetu’ sum, quo pergam, unde emergam, ubi siem
vestitum hunc nanctu’, quid mi quaeram, sanu’ sim anne insaniam!
AN. adibo atque ab eo gratiam hanc, quam video velle, inibo.
Chaerea, quid est quod sic gestis? quid sibi hic vestitu’ quaerit?
quid est quod laetus es? quid tibi vis? satine sanu’s? quid me aspectas?
quid taces? CH. o festu’ dies hominis! amice, salve:
nemost hominum quem ego nunc magis cuperem videre quam te.
AN. narra istuc quaeso quid sit. CH. immo ego te obsecro hercle ut audias.
CH. Anyone here? Nope. No one following me? Not a soul.
Can I let my joy out now? By god,
I could stand to die at this moment before
Life contaminates this joy with some distress.
Amazing that there’s no busybody coming my way right now,
Following me wherever I go, plaguing me, wearing me out with questions:
Why I’m so ecstatic and happy, where I’m going, whose house this is,
Where I got this get up, what I’m up to, am I sane or nuts!
AN. I’ll go up and do him the favour I see he wants.
Chaerea, why so ecstatic? What’s with the outfit?
Why are you so happy? What are you up to? Are you OK?
What are you looking at me for? Why the silence?
CH. Oh, you human fiesta! Hello, friend!
There’s no one in the world I’d rather see right now than you.
AN. Tell me what it is, won’t you? CH. Oh no, I’m begging you to listen!
Does Chaerea want an interlocutor or not? The exclamatory infinitive does not tell
us whether he is relieved or disappointed at being alone, and scholars have
disagreed on this point.16 Büchner, with his usual sensitivity to dramatic ambigu-
ity, argues that Chaerea’s wishes are complex and not totally fixed.17 His surprise
at being left alone certainly sounds grateful: curiosus is always a negative word and
of course obtundere and enicare are also things to be avoided. But Büchner may be
right to read a certain longing into this longwinded exclamation. As Donatus says
(ad loc.): id cupit gaudens, quod aliis tristibus molestum est (‘He is happy and he
wants something that is irritating for people when they are sad’). Antipho obvi-
ously understands the exclamation the same way, and, as far as we can tell from his
welcome, he knows his friend’s mind. At first, though, Chaerea is only eager to
confirm that he is alone so he can vent his joy.
This is the summit of his life, the moment of perfect attainment, when, like
Cleobis and Biton, he could die and be called happy, for no future changes could
then alter his state. It is here that Terence uses contaminare for the last time. The
second half of the play will, in fact, furnish Chaerea with plenty of opportunity for
distress, but ‘life’ has already added something to surprise him: throughout his
encomium of solitude he is not alone. Antipho was not in Menander’s Eunuch, as
Donatus tells us (ad 539); Terence wove him in to break up Chaerea’s monologue
(ne unus diu loquatur, ut apud Menandrum). Antipho’s name essentially just
means ‘protatic character’ and his function is simply to motivate the exposition of
the rape by asking all the questions Chaerea has just said would be so obnoxious.
On the subject of redende Namen, Chaerea’s name suggests the gaudium he is
afraid life will contaminate with some trouble. Terence has tinkered with Menan-
der’s play and mixed in a new character to a scene that was ‘supposed’ to be all
Chaerea. Of course, in order to catch the contamination joke the audience will
have to know that Menander’s scene was a monologue. In general, Terence seems
to assume that part of his audience has familiarity with Menander (cf. Haut. 7–9),
but it would be unwise to suppose that many people in the audience of the Eunuch
knew Menander’s text well enough to follow the irony here. That is unless their
attention had already been drawn to this passage. As it turns out, this line about
contamination had already been contaminated. At line 959 of the Andria, the
ecstatic adulescens Pamphilus thinks he is alone and so he lets out:
16
For the ‘relieved’ reading, see Pasquali 1936, 119 and more recently Barsby 1999a, ad loc.: ‘the
immediate point of these questions is to establish that Chaerea has got away with his trick; there is no
one to raise the alarm and he is free to give vent to his joy’. For the ‘disappointed’ reading, see Fabia 1895, ad
loc. and more recently Tromaras 1994, 195: ‘sofort verspürt er das Bedürfnis, einer vertrauten Person sein
Abenteuer mitzuteilen’.
17
Büchner 1974, 268.
ego deorum vitam propterea sempiternam esse arbitror

quod voluptates eorum propriae sunt; nam mi immortalitas
partast, si nulla aegritudo huic gaudio intercesserit.
I hold the life of the gods to be eternal, inasmuch
As their joys are abiding; for unto me immortality
Is born, if no distress breaks into this joy.
This is just the sort of thing Terence got in trouble for with the Andria, as
Donatus says (ad An. 959): hanc sententiam totam Menandri de Eunucho trans-
tulit et hoc est quod dicitur contaminari non decere fabulas (‘He lifted this whole
sentence from Menander’s Eunouchos; this is what they mean about, “plays ought
not be contaminated”’). So you would not have to be a Menander expert or have
an encyclopaedic knowledge of Terence’s earlier plays to understand the contam-
ination allusion at Eunuch 552. He had taken this sentence out of a soliloquy in
Menander’s Eunouchos spoken by a character who was happy to be alone and
mixed it into his Andria for a character who was looking for someone else to tell
his story (Davus), while being overheard by a third person (Charinus). Indeed, the
next line (962) is: sed quem ego mihi potissumum optem, nunc quoi haec narrem,
dari? (‘But who would be the ideal person to pop up right now for me to tell
this stuff to?’). If this inconcinnity disconcerted overscrupulous critics, it will
offend them even more when it is mixed back into the Eunuch with situational
traces of the Andria still on it! All the while flouting their cavils by replacing
intercesserit with the very word they had used in their accusations: contaminet. As
the prologus had said in the Heautontimorumenos, he was not sorry he did it and he
would do it again.
The primary contamination in the Eunuch needs no discovery; there has never
been any doubt about what does not belong. As the prologue says, Terence does
not deny that he brought over the soldier and the parasite from Menander’s Colax
(eas se non negat | personas transtulisse in Eunuchum suam, 31–2). But these
characters are strangers in this play in more ways than one. The scenes in which
they feature have a markedly different feel than other scenes in the play, with
considerably more rowdiness and vulgarity, so they are alien not only to the text,
but to the ethos of the Eunuch.18 They are also strangers in a more obvious sense.
They are not Athenians or even resident aliens, and they are not lodging in either
of the two onstage houses. They have apparently blown in from out of town and
were supposed to be passing through, but they end up wanting to stick around. By
the end of the play, they have successfully moved in and implicated themselves in
the lives of the other characters.
18
This ethical discrepancy may go back to differences in tone between Menander’s Colax and Eunouchos.
For the significance of these differences, as indicated by the fragments, see Büchner 1974, 287.
Perhaps the most important passage, for our understanding of Thraso and
Gnatho and their relation to the play’s themes, is the scene in Act 2 where we
meet Gnatho for the first time. His monologue narrates an offstage encounter,
like Chaerea’s narration of the backstage rape, and also like Chaerea’s report, it
touches the theme of improvisational imitative role-playing, specifically the
mime’s role of extempore mirroring that will be so important in Chaerea’s
response to the painting (232–64):
GN. Di inmortales, homini homo quid praestat? stulto intellegens

quid inter est? hoc adeo ex hac re venit in mentem mihi:
conveni hodie adveniens quendam mei loci hinc atque ordinis,
hominem haud inpurum, itidem patria qui abligurrierat bona:
video sentum squalidum aegrum, pannis annisque obsitum. ‘oh
quid istuc’ inquam ‘ornatist?’ ‘quoniam miser quod habui perdidi, em
quo redactu’ sum. omnes noti me atque amici deserunt.’
hic ego illum contempsi prae me: ‘quid homo’ inquam ‘ignavissime?
itan parasti te ut spes nulla relicua in te siet tibi?
simul consilium cum re amisti? viden me ex eodem ortum loco?
qui color nitor vestitu’, quae habitudost corporis!
omnia habeo neque quicquam habeo; nil quom est, nil defit tamen.’
‘at ego infelix neque ridiculus esse neque plagas pati
possum.’ ‘quid? tu his rebu’ credi’ fieri? tota erras via.
olim isti fuit generi quondam quaestus apud saeclum prius:
hoc novomst aucupium; ego adeo hanc primus inveni viam.
est genus hominum qui esse primos se omnium rerum volunt
nec sunt: hos consector; hisce ego non paro me ut rideant,
sed eis ultro adrideo et eorum ingenia admiror simul.
quidquid dicunt laudo; id rursum si negant, laudo id quoque;
negat quis: nego; ait: aio; postremo imperavi egomet mihi
omnia adsentari. is quaestu’ nunc est multo uberrimus.’
PA. scitum hercle hominem! hic homines prorsum ex stultis insanos facit.
GN. dum haec loquimur, interealoci ad macellum ubi advenimus,
concurrunt laeti mi obviam cuppedenarii omnes,
cetarii lanii coqui fartores piscatores,
quibus et re salva et perdita profueram et prosum saepe:
salutant, ad cenam vocant, adventum gratulantur.
ille ubi miser famelicus videt mi esse tantum honorem et
tam facile victum quaerere, ibi homo coepit me obsecrare
ut sibi liceret discere id de me: sectari iussi,
si potis est, tamquam philosophorum habent disciplinae ex ipsis
vocabula, parasiti ita ut Gnathonici vocentur.
GN. Gods above, how doth one man surpass another! The difference
Between a wise guy and a chump! Here’s what’s got me thinking:
Coming here today I met a man of my rank and station from hereabouts,
A basically decent guy who, like me, had guzzled away his inheritance.
What I see is a shabby, filthy, rickety mess overgrown with rags and age.
‘Ugh,’ I say, ‘What’s up with the get up?’ ‘Well, I’ve lost all I had, so
It’s come to this. Everyone I know, all my friends—they ditched me.’
At this point the contrast with myself was enough to make me detest him.
‘You sucker!’ I said, ‘Have you managed to lose every shred of hope?
Have you misplaced your mind along with your money?
Look at me; I hail from the same class. Note my complexion,
My glossy sheen, my apparel, my physical condition!
I have everything, yet I have nothing.
There’s nothing there, but there’s nothing wanting.’
‘Well, sap that I am, I can’t be a clown and take a beating.’
‘What? You think that’s how it goes down? You’ve got it all wrong.
Once upon a time, in another age, maybe that’s how they survived.
It’s a whole new game these days; in fact, it’s a trail I blazed.
There is a type of men who wish to be number one in everything,
But they’re not. These are the ones I pursue, and I don’t make myself
A butt for their jokes; no, I laugh at them,
All the while wondering at their wit.
Whatever they say I praise, and if they deny it I praise that too.
He nays, I nay; he ayes, I aye. In short, I have imposed a rule on myself:
Conformity in all things. This is by far the most profitable line.’
PA. The guy’s amazing! He makes nuts out of chumps.
GN. While we’re talking like this we get to the market,
And all the vendors run up, happy to see me—
Fishmongers, butchers, cooks, sausage stuffers, sprat sellers,
For whom, bull market or bear, I’ve been and always will be a windfall.
They greet me, invite me to dinner, welcome me to town.
When that poor starveling sees the esteem in which I am held and
The ease with which I procure my living, then and there he starts pleading
To be allowed to learn from me. I advise him to enrol as my pupil,
So, just as philosophical schools take their names from their masters,
Perhaps parasites will be called Gnathonists.
The philosophical overtones are obvious even to us, but they will have been even
more glaring to Terence’s audience in 161 BCE, the very year in which all Greek
philosophers and rhetoricians were expelled from Rome.19 Twelve years before,
only the Epicureans had been banished, but in the year of the Eunuch’s staging
there was, at least as a legal fiction, a total purge of these deleterious educators.20
19
Suet. Rhet. 1.2; Gell. NA 15.11.1. For an analysis of the sources, see Garbarino 1973, 370.
20
Gruen (1990, 171–2) argues that the expulsion could not have been successful or even taken too
seriously, but then he argues the same for sumptuary laws (170–3), the repressions of the Bacchanalia
(34–78), and most other domestic legislation. But even if these actions only had symbolic value, that is
enough for our purposes.
This is not the only bit of legislation from 161 relevant to Gnatho’s monologue.
The first half of the second century had seen occasional sumptuary laws, but the
lex Fannia of 161 beats its predecessors, not only in terms of strictness, but also of
specificity.21 It was directed to banquets given during the Ludi Megalenses, not
only the year but the very occasion of the Eunuch’s production, and set very
explicit limits on just how much money could be spent on the kind of sweetmeats
and dainties Gnatho describes. We have fragments of a speech in support of the
law, saying that the purpose of these restrictions is to protect the Roman youth
from their own prodigality, again a clear focus on the educational aspect of the
issue.22
It is as a teacher that Gnatho emerges from this monologue. He mirrors the
words and attitudes of his sugar daddy, but he also makes other men like himself,
most obviously of course his new friend who will convert to professional boot-
licking, but note also how the small tradesmen fawn on him and captate for his
favour. The irony here is rich: his success at toadying puts him in a position where
the vendors want to kiss up to him, and it is only upon seeing this adulation that
his interlocutor wishes to emulate him. Their imitation of him is unconscious, his
disciple’s imitation will be studied, but one way or the other, all the world is drawn
into his ethical paradigm. More specifically, it is not Gnatho’s rhetoric that turns
his friend’s mind, but rather witnessing his reception with the merchants. Dona-
tus’ comment (ad 260) is essential:
hic ostendit, quae res coegerit ad discendum . . . vide ut sententiose demonstret malos ex
bonis contagione fieri, exemplis in pravum praevalentibus: ‘videt’ mihi hoc prodesse et
discere optat, quod negabat se posse.
Here he reveals what impels us to discipleship . . . Note how vividly he shows good men
being made bad by contagion, since models for the worse are overwhelming: he sees that it
is profitable for me and he longs to learn what he has said he could not do.
It is precisely in spectating (videt) the triumph of bad behaviour over good that
men are corrupted, as Donatus says, ‘by contagion’. The relevance of all this to the
themes of vision, role-playing, and mimetic contagion is too obvious to need
stress. I point out here only that Gnatho is the element of contamination, a
character alien to Menander’s Eunuch who has been, literally, ‘mixed in to bad
effect’. From his first appearance in the play we see him as a spreading infection,
and this is just the semantic field Donatus uses to describe him.
21
See Gell. NA 2.24.2–6 for the broadest survey of the restrictions. Athenaeus (6.274c) details some of
the spending caps on food, both daily and annual, going into special detail for such delicacies as smoked
meats and the finer vegetables. Pliny (NH 10.139) reports that there was a limit of one hen per meal and an
outright ban on artificially fattened poultry.
22
Macrob. Sat. 3.
Altogether there are four scenes that feature the parasite with or without the
soldier.23 It is striking how little they interact with other characters and how
generally superfluous they are to the action of the play. Apart from delivering
Pamphila to Thais’ house and causing Thais’ absence from her house at a key
moment, they have no structural necessity to the plot, and both these effects could
easily have been accomplished by other means. The hilarious scene where Thraso
leads an assault on Thais’ house is oddly stuck on at the end of Act 4, and indeed
the whole point of it is that the siege is easily aborted and comes to nothing.24
Critics who have prized Terence for his structural finesse and dramaturgical
economy have tended to puzzle over this lapse and complain about the strangely
prosthetic feeling of these scenes.25 One interesting consequence of this fact,
however, is that back in the day of serious Kontaminationsforschung, critics
could mentally delete these scenes and imagine with relative confidence that
they were coming close to recovering Menander’s Eunouchos.26 But the scholars
who attempted this surgery discovered that the operation founders on the last of
the four scenes, which is also the last scene of the play. The resolution of the
comedy is totally dependent on the two interpolated characters, and no efforts to
remove them from the last scene have proved satisfactory in the least. In fact,
Walther Ludwig goes so far as to say that the end of the play cannot, in any
meaningful sense, have come from either of the Greek plays and must be Ter-
ence’s own invention.27 I certainly agree with this assessment, but I point out that
it means a radical departure from the way he has combined the plays up to this
point and also from what we were given to expect in the prologue, where he spoke
only of the addition of fungible stock characters in modular generic scenes.
23
Gnatho is onstage, with or without Thraso, for lines 232–87; 391–506; 771–816; 1025–94.
24
Ludwig (1959, 22–7) argues that there must have been something like this scene in the original. Thais
has been hoping that Chremes would become her patron in gratitude for the restoration of his sister, but by
the end of the play she looks towards Chaerea’s father for patronage. Ludwig sees a neat preparation for this
shift in line 770: perii, huic ipsist opu’ patrono, quem defensorem paro (‘Drat, the man I’m snagging for a
protector needs a patron himself!’). If this line does indeed go back to Menander then (according to
Ludwig) there must have been some scene where ‘Chremes’ (the model for Terence’s Chremes) needs
propping up, probably because he is afraid of ‘Thraso’, who must have been threatening legal action or
physical assault, and the latter is more dramatically appealing, so Ludwig guesses that ‘Thraso’ was a soldier
too. This is, to say the least, a tenuous thread of speculation. I agree that there is a nice irony in line 770, but
hardly enough to provide sole motivation for this whole scene. If Menander (or Terence) just wanted the
conceit behind this line, Chremes is marked throughout as a rusticus, and it is easy to imagine other possible
situations that might have led Thais to lose confidence in his initiative or savvy. In any case, when Thais and
Chremes depart the stage in line 810 they are ignoring Thraso (quaere qui respondeat) and going about the
business they would be doing if he and his warrior band were not there at all.
25
See, for example, the spirited censure of Norwood 1923, 64–9, who attempts to show how these two
characters are at every level a pointless blight on the construction of the play and not hard to remove.
26
The fullest synthesis of this type of work on the Eunuch was Meyerhöfer 1927.
27
Ludwig 1959, 36–8.
Not only are the interpolated characters impossible to extricate from the
dramatic structure of the denouement, but also, within the fiction, the end of
the play implicates them in the lives of the other characters. Before this happens,
there is a moment when the action of the play seems to have passed Thraso and
Gnatho by and made them irrelevant. Phaedria, Chaerea, and Parmeno are all
onstage and exultant because everything has played out to their advantage.
‘There’s another thing we can be happy about,’ says Parmeno in line 1041, ‘the
soldier will be pushed out (miles pelletur foras).’ This comment is the first of
several in this scene with theatrical double entendres. When Thraso approaches
them, a few lines later, cap in hand, Phaedria thinks maybe he has missed Act 5
(1061–5):
PH. tu fortasse quae facta hic sient
nescis. TH. scio. PH. quor te ergo in his ego conspicor regionibus?
TH. vobis fretu’. PH. scin quam fretu’? miles, edico tibi,
si te in platea offendero hac post umquam, quod dicas mihi
‘alium quaerebam, iter hac habui’: periisti.
PH. Maybe you don’t know what’s been happening.
TH. I do. PH. So why am I still seeing you around here?
TH. At your charity, sir. PH. Don’t you know it, soldier!
Let me tell you something: if I ever run into you again on this street,
I don’t care if you say, ‘I’m looking for someone else down this way’—you’re
done for!
Phaedria repeats Thraso’s stock character name (miles), and ‘this street’ is, of
course, the stage; the deictic references (his . . . regionibus; platea . . . hac; iter hac)
indicate just what you see. This is the moment where Gnatho gets involved and
begins brokering the deal that will close the play. He urges the boys, or perhaps
specifically Phaedria, to accept the soldier as a rival (militem rivalem ego recipiun-
dum censeo, 1072). This repetition of miles in apposition now with the role of the
comic standing contender, rivalis, suggests that what Gnatho is imagining is not a
resolution at all, but virtually a set-up for a new comedy. Phaedria is incensed,
naturally; he has been trying all day to get rid of this creep, why would he willingly
submit to such an arrangement? Gnatho reminds him how much he enjoys
victitating with Thais, how expensive she is, and how little he has to give. If
Thraso is kept on and given his share, he can be fleeced for all expenses, since he is
rich, liberal, and stupid, and they can always get rid of him, if they want, because
there is no chance Thais would fall in love with him.
Indecent proposal or not, as Chaerea says, it sounds like Thraso is necessary
anyway (quoquo pacto opust, 1083), and Phaedria agrees. ‘Right, then,’ says
Gnatho, ‘but there’s one more thing I have to ask of you: that you accept me
into your company (ut me in vostrum gregem | recipiati ’, 1084–5). I’ve been
rolling this stone long enough.’ The word grex almost always has a contemptuous
tone, in Latin more generally and certainly in Terence.28 However, in this case
contempt is clearly precluded by the context, so we are virtually forced to under-
stand the word metatheatrically, since it is also the term for an acting troupe.29
Note the repetition of the verb recipere from his first suggestion, a few lines before
(1072), that Thraso be admitted as a rival. The reception he is trying to win for
Thraso and for himself is essentially the same: admission to the cast of the Eunuch.
The comment about the rolling stone sounds cryptic enough to be proverbial,
and Donatus (ad 1085) confirms that it is an idiom, drawn from the myth of
Sisyphus, and used as he says for those ‘afflicted with inextricable work’ (prover-
bium in eos, qui inextricabili labore afflicti sunt). But the labour of Sisyphus is not
only unending, it is also repetitive. The prologue, as we have seen above, insisted
that Terence did not know the Colax had already been translated by Plautus and
Naevius. Whatever we want to make of this protestation of innocence, one thing it
certainly accomplishes is to inform the audience, if they did not already know it,
that these two characters are now seeing the boards for at least the fourth time. By
this point, one may well forgive the parasite for wanting a change of company.
He gets his wish, naturally (recipimus, 1085), and all’s well that ends well.
Thraso, too, is pleased things have worked out, but he cannot exactly be surprised;
after all, the braggart soldier is always a hit. ‘I’ve never yet been anywhere,’ he says,
‘where everyone didn’t absolutely love me.’ ‘What did I tell you?’ says the parasite
to his new hosts, ‘Attic charm.’ ‘Just what you promised,’ says Phaedria, ‘Come
this way.’ And with this ite hac (1094) the interpolated characters are finally
welcomed into Thais’ house and into the world of the Eunuch, and the play
ends. The comment about Thraso’s Attica elegantia is a joke, of course; he will
always be a boor. But he has now become indispensable to these Athenians and
will have a home here, just as he and his toady have become structurally necessary
to the end of the play. All this happens because the brothers agree to take the
parasite’s advice, advice which consists in nothing other than becoming sponges
like himself. ‘I give you this man,’ he says, ‘to feast on and ridicule’ (hunc
comedendum vobis propino et deridendum, 1087).
Among modern readers, Thais is one of the best-liked prostitutes in Roman
comedy.30 We find her principled, loyal, humane, and strong. In scene after scene
her remarkable qualities stand out, especially against the backdrop of all the weak-
willed, egotistical men in the play. For this reason the final arrangement between
Thraso and Phaedria has generally offended critics and seemed unjustly demeaning
28
The two other places Terence uses grex are Haut. 245 and Ad. 362, both plainly derisive. For
comparison to Ciceronian and Horatian usage, see Fantham 1972, 56.
29
OLD s.v. grex 3b. See Frangoulidis 1994a, 130.
30
Norwood 1923, 60: ‘She is a splendid creation. To class her with the boisterous harlots of Plautus’
Bacchides and similar plays, merely because of the manner in which she happens perforce to earn her living,
would be an outrage.’
of this rara avis.31 But Thais is not the only one degraded by the ending. The play
had opened with Phaedria’s profession of helpless love, a scene so striking for its
language and its ethical intensity that it turns up in Cicero, Horace, and Persius,
but here he is at close of day, effectively pimping her out.32 As Karl Büchner says,
the only way this ending can be appreciated is if we forget everything that has
come before.33 On the other hand, I would argue, this formulation is precisely
wrong, for we can only appreciate the ironic artistry of the ending to the extent
that we are conscious of this radical discontinuity of character. From the prologue
on there is never a moment when we are allowed to forget the foreignness of the
interpolated characters, and the end of the play can only integrate them by
ethically denaturing everyone else. If this tale of moral infection is disturbing to
us, perhaps it should be, and if it casts a shadow over the generically prescribed
happy ending, then it only makes the Eunuch, like every other Terence play,
something of a black comedy.
One never sees the two-sidedness of contamination in this play, until one
attempts, succeeds at first, and then finally fails to recover Menander’s Eunouchos
from this text. The scholars from the early twentieth century who did just that and
erected such an edifice of confusion have generally been disregarded for the last
twenty if not fifty years as a prime example of bad methodology, bad aesthetics,
and bad politics. But the thing that distinguishes this work on the Eunuch from
Plautine Kontaminationsforschung, is that it is explicitly authorized by the text
itself. Whatever misguided conclusions these scholars may have come to because
of other convictions, in this regard they were only following the bouncing ball that
Terence himself set in motion. Presumably the audience of 161 BCE may have
included people who knew the Menandrian originals well, but I think we can be
fairly sure that the vast majority of viewers did not. Perhaps they knew other plays
or perhaps they had some vague awareness of the themes and style of Greek New
Comedy, if only through its reworking as fabulae palliatae. That is to say, the
average Roman viewer probably knew roughly as much about the sources of the
Eunuch as we do. But when the text itself seems to suggest so loudly that we think
about the Greek originals that lie just behind what we are seeing, one may well
suppose that many viewers have walked similar hermeneutic paths to the ones trod
31
Pasquali 1936, 128: ‘quest’ ultima scena, cosi indegna di quella creatura gentile, non avrà forse offeso la
maggior parte degli spettatori, ma avrà offeso i più fini anche dei lettori contemporanei di Terenzio; a noi
moderni è insopportabile’. Sandbach (1977, 144–5) suggests that perhaps Terence did not fully understand
the dignity with which a hetaira (as opposed to a porne ) should be treated, since Latin did not readily
comprehend the distinction. Konstan (1986, 384–5) reads the moral ambiguity of the ending as a successful
meditation on the complexities of commercial love. Not all readers have been so disturbed by the
conclusion; see, for example, Brown 1990, 49–61; Goldberg 1986, 116–22.
32
Cicero: Tusc. 4.76, Nat. deor. 3.72; Horace: Serm. 2.3.259–71; Persius: 5.161–75.
33
Büchner 1974, 303–5.
by early twentieth-century scholarship. Our almost total ignorance of Menander

before the 1960s would have made us close to what Wolfgang Iser calls ‘intended
readers’. The irony is that these scholars thought of the text almost as an object
under a microscope and their own project as one of scientific detachment, when it
now seems conceivable that their attempt and failure to decontaminate the
Eunuch was an extension of their own implication in the text.
Epilogue
Die guten Abderiten waren so voll von dem, was sie gehört und gesehen
hatten, daß sie sich genötigt fanden, ihrer Überfüllung noch auf andere Weise
Luft zu machen.
C. M. Wieland, Geschichte der Abderiten
On a hot summer’s day in Abdera, so the story goes, a production of Euripides’

Andromeda infected its audience with tragedy. Lucian tells this strange anecdote
at the beginning of How to Write History (59) as a comparison to the epidemic of
historiography that had spread since the inception of the Parthian War. The
disease (νόσημα, 1.2) included seven days of fever, followed by either nosebleeds
or sweats, but after the fever broke the Abderites were left in a ridiculous
condition (1.6–21):
ἐς γελοῖον δέ τι πάθος περιίστη τὰς γνώμας αὐτῶν· ἅπαντες γὰρ ἐς τραγῳδίαν παρεκίνουν καὶ
ἰαμβεῖα ἐφθέγγοντο καὶ μέγα ἐβόων· μάλιστα δὲ τὴν Εὐριπίδου Ἀνδρομέδαν ἐμονῴδουν καὶ τὴν
τοῦ Περσέως ῥῆσιν ἐν μέλει διεξῄεσαν, καὶ μεστὴ ἦν ἡ πόλις ὠχρῶν ἁπάντων καὶ λεπτῶν τῶν
ἑβδομαίων ἐκείνων τραγῳδῶν, ‘σὺ δ᾽ ὦ θεῶν τύραννε κἀνθρώπων Ἔρως’, καὶ τὰ ἄλλα μεγάλῃ τῇ
φωνῇ ἀναβοώντων καὶ τοῦτο ἐπὶ πολύ, ἄχρι δὴ χειμὼν καὶ κρύος δὲ μέγα γενόμενον ἔπαυσε
ληροῦντας αὐτούς. αἰτίαν δέ μοι δοκεῖ τοῦ τοιούτου παρασχεῖν Ἀρχέλαος ὁ τραγῳδός, εὐδοκιμῶν
τότε, μεσοῦντος θέρους ἐν πολλῷ τῷ φλογμῷ τραγῳδήσας αὐτοῖς τὴν Ἀνδρομέδαν, ὡς πυρέξαι τε
ἀπὸ τοῦ θεάτρου τοὺς πολλοὺς καὶ ἀναστάντας ὕστερον ἐς τὴν τραγῳδίαν παρολισθαίνειν, ἐπὶ
πολὺ ἐμφιλοχωρούσης τῆς Ἀνδρομέδας τῇ μνήμῃ αὐτῶν καὶ τοῦ Περσέως ἔτι σὺν τῇ Μεδούσῃ
τὴν ἑκάστου γνώμην περιπετομένου.
The funny thing was that some affliction befell their minds, for everyone went crazy with
tragedy and they were squawking iambics and bellowing fortissimo. Most of all they sang
solos from Euripides’ Andromeda and recited Perseus’ lines in metre, and the city was full
of all these pale, thin, one-week tragedians braying, ‘O thou tyrant of gods and men, Eros,’
etc. in a loud voice. And so it was for a long time until winter, and there was a cold snap,
which stopped their nonsense. The cause of all this, it seems to me, was furnished by the
actor Archelaus, who was popular at that time. In the middle of summer, at the height of
the heat, he performed the Andromeda, so that most people caught fever from the theatre
and later, when they had arisen from their sickbeds, they slipped back into the tragedy. The
Andromeda kept haunting their memory, and Perseus with his Medusa was flitting around
each person’s mind.
EPILOGUE 179
Lucian relates the story as traditional (φασί, 1.1), and perhaps the specificity of its
placement in Abdera during the reign of Lysimachus and other particular details
indicate a received legend, but given the vividness of his imagination, we cannot
be sure he did not invent the story for this occasion.1 It matters little for our
purposes whether the anecdote goes back to the fourth century BCE or comes
straight from Lucian’s pen; what is significant for us is the story’s combination of
theatrical performance and contagious imitation that spreads beyond the usual
boundary of dramatic art.
Recent scholarship on this anecdote has focused, quite rightly, on its relevance
to the broader themes of How to Write History, specifically Lucian’s critique of
rhetorical enthusiasm.2 Though such approaches have been very successful and
are clearly necessary for a full appreciation of the significance of the anecdote
within the treatise at large, our interest here is more narrowly circumscribed. The
Abderite audience’s imitative response will remind the reader of many other
sympathetic reactions to art and performance we have seen in this study. The
Abderites were proverbially stupid, and perhaps we are to understand that greater
sophistication would have made them immune to this extremity of mimetic
contagion, but though the play may not have excited the same response from
every audience, its effect here is obviously not a matter of merely rational persua-
sion.3 The heat of the day and the ardour of the performance combined to draw
the impressionable Abderites into a sympathetic fever. As an explanation for being
stuck in the Andromeda, this νόσημα is no more elective than the magnetism
operating on the iron rings in Plato’s famous analogy for poetic inspiration in the
Ion (533d1–536d3).4 Like a loadstone for an iron ring, the Muse draws the poet to
herself, but along with the poetry, she bestows enough ‘divine power’ (θεία
δύναμις, 533d3) on the poet that he can now transmit the same enthusiasm on to
others. Ion admits to having affective reactions consonant with the poetic scenario
he is singing and says he can look out from the stage and see that the audience is
experiencing the same passions, and Socrates explains that they are simply the last
ring of the magnetized chain. Similarly, the Andromeda appears in Abdera as a
communicable disease, which assimilates the audience willy-nilly, first to its heat
and then to its language.
1
Another version of the same story has been transmitted in the fragments of the Historika hypomnemata,
compiled by Eunapius of Sardis (345–c.420 CE). Eunapius’ account is closely similar to, but apparently
independent of, the version in How to Write History, so it seems most likely the story does not originate with
Lucian. For the text, see Blockley 1983, fr. 48. There are many other broadly similar stories in the
paradoxographic literature; see Anderson 1976, 61.
2
See especially Fox 2001 and Möllendorff 2001.
3
For a full survey of ancient prejudice on the stupidity of the Abderites, see Tschiedel 1986.
4
On Platonic enthusiasm, see Büttner 2000, 255–365.
The loss of Euripides’ Andromeda is surely one of the greatest misfortunes of

the transmission history of Greek tragedy. First performed in 412 BCE and fre-
quently revived thereafter, it was evidently among Euripides’ most moving
works.5 Perhaps because of our ignorance of the specifics of this play, scholars
who have worked on How to Write History generally seem to assume that the
Andromeda is intended here simply as an icon for extreme Euripidean pathos and
popularity. The exception is Peter von Möllendorff, who notes that among the
extant fragments of the play, we happen to have the three lines immediately
following the one line Lucian quotes (fr 136):
σὺ δ᾽ ὦ θεῶν τύραννε κἀνθρώπων Ἔρως,
ἢ μὴ δίδασκε τὰ καλὰ φαίνεσθαι καλά,
ἢ τοῖς ἐρῶσιν εὐτυχῶς συνεκπόνει
μοχθοῦσι μόχθοις ὧν σὺ δημιουργὸς εἶ.
O thou tyrant of gods and men, Eros,
Teach not the fair to seem fair,
Or else propitiously suffer together with those in love,
Who struggle with struggles of which thou art the source.
Möllendorff argues that the broader context of the one quoted line is relevant to a
fuller understanding of Lucian’s game:
When the Abderites rend the air in the streets with this particular verse, then they do so not
simply because it is good, stirring stuff. Seen in its proper context, it is rather a sort of coded
cry for help: as they are unable to talk any other ‘language’ than tragic verse, this is the one
way the Abderites can beg to be cured of their ecstatic ailment (συνεκπόνει . . . ). Only the
reader who knows how Euripides’ text continues will recognize this shift into the implicit
mode, a move characteristic of Lucian’s method of allusion.6
Möllendorff ’s observation concerning this fragment is very suggestive and does,

I believe, point in the right direction, but there is another connection we may
draw between the available evidence on the Andromeda and the scenario in How
to Write History. The Andromeda apparently opened with a scene in which the
forlorn title character, chained in a desolate cave, engages in a dialogue with her
only available interlocutor, the nymph Echo.7 After every line of Andromeda’s
lament Echo would croon back her last word or two as a response. This technique
of monologic dialogue could easily heighten the dramatic pathos beyond that
attainable by a soliloquy: Echo is the only consort whose company signifies
solitude. However, it is also possible to imagine this same element turned to
other purposes; if Echo were not in sympathy with her interlocutor’s plight, her
parroting would be intensely obnoxious. This comedic potential was not lost on
5
The scholiast on Frogs 53 is emphatic: τῶν καλλίστων Εὐριπίδου δρᾶμα ἡ Ἀνδρομέδα.
6
Möllendorff 2001, 128–9. 7
The fullest treatment of the evidence is Bubel 1991.
EPILOGUE 181
Aristophanes, whose Thesmophoriazusae, produced the year after the Andromeda,

parodies Euripides’ ‘realism’ by introducing the tragedian himself in a hopeless
ruse to free his kinsman from the renegade women.8 Aristophanes’ Euripides
can think of no more effective means of salvation than to create a pastiche of
rescue scenes from his own plays. He excerpts the Palamedes and the Helen
before coming to the most ridiculous rehearsal of all, a re-enactment of useless
re-enactment, so to speak. The kinsman sees Perseus in the distance and under-
stands that he is now to play Andromeda, so he recalls the princess’ address to the
vocal nymph of the cave, but when Echo takes the stage, the kinsman finds that he
has summoned a slapstick gadfly: ‘Echo, cheeky repeater of words’ (Ἠχώ, λόγων
ἀντῳδὸς ἐπικοκκάστρια, 1059). She explains how she served Euripides the previous
year and how she will serve him again, and together they launch into the pseudo-
dialogue from the beginning of the Andromeda. The irony is even richer if, as the
scholia suggest, the actor who plays Echo is the actor who plays Euripides
elsewhere in the play.9 Aristophanes’ parody indicates something of the popularity
of Euripides’ Andromeda and the ease with which the conceit of its prominent
Echo scene could be turned to comic effect. I would suggest that the opening of
How to Write History is another form of play on the same dynamic. The Abderites’
obsessive repetition of lines from the Andromeda indicates that they are trapped in
the play and dependent on its language, but within the play this behaviour is not
unique: they are echoing Echo.10
Lucian’s story of the Abderites provides a convenient résumé for many of the
issues that have concerned us in this book. The pattern of mimetic contagion that
informs this anecdote is focused on a play, rather than a work of plastic art, except
that, as we argued in Chapter 4, theatrical performance is itself a form of visual art
and a prominent venue for painting. However, one of the things Lucian says is
stuck in the spectators’ brains is Medusa’s head (1.21), presumably an artistic
replica they would have seen as a property Perseus brought onstage with him in
the Andromeda, and we recall from Chapter 2 (pp. 52–3) that the Gorgon’s head
was one of the most widespread and consistent instances of mimetic contagion
across Greco-Roman antiquity. Our inquiry in Chapter 5 also seems relevant here.
The Andromeda is a tragedy, not a mime, but Aristophanes immediately realized
the paratragic potential of the Echo scene, and the straightforward entertainment
of watching one actor mindlessly ape another is strongly reminiscent of
the stupidus role in mime. Similarly in Lucian’s anecdote, the Andromeda plays
8
N. Slater 2002, 175–7; Sommerstein 1994, 226–7. 9
Rutherford 1896, 502.
10
Returning to fr. 136, I note that there are a striking number of close verbal echoes (Ἔρως . . . ἐρῶσιν;
καλὰ . . . καλά; μοχθοῦσι μόχθοις). The Abderites are choosing lines that will only intensify their repetitiveness.
This kind of play with Echo as a figure of repetition, simultaneously intra- and intertextual, has a long
tradition in Greek literature; see Germany 2005.
once in Abdera as a tragedy, but then it gets replayed ad nauseam as a farce. The
foolish Abderites, like Chaerea, make a spectacle of themselves by clumsily imi-
tating the roles in a work of art they do not fully understand. Finally, at the end of
Chapter 2 (p. 66) we cast a glance at the scene in Aethiopica 4.8 where a painting
of Perseus and Andromeda infects its viewer and causes her to replicate its image in
the foetus she is conceiving. If it is not a coincidence that the Perseus myth
provides the subject for both these stories, perhaps it is also significant that in
the Eunuch it was a painting of Perseus’ conception that exceeded its frame to
propagate itself in its viewers and reformat the play according to its own logic of
art and life.11
11
For the widespread evidence of violent affect associated with the Andromeda myth, see Hilton 1998,
84–9.
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INDEX
Accius 165 Horace 18, 107, 141

Adelphoe 10, 31, 43, 162 Horatius Cocles 96–7
Adorno 50
Andria 10, 130, 158, 161–3, 168–9 Irigaray, Luce 93–4
Anonymous Seguerianus 18–19
Antipho 9, 150–2, 168–9 Jerome 164
Aristotle 7, 18, 75–7, 85–6 Jupiter 4–5, 10, 45, 153–5
Augustine 6, 46–8
Livy 96, 98–100, 122–4, 165
Benjamin 50 Lucian 178–82
Caecilius 127–8 Marcellus’ ovatio 8, 98–101

castration 1, 8, 13–14, 111–16 Medusa 52–3
Celsus 19 Menander 10, 41, 59, 72, 118, 127, 145, 160–4,
Chaerea 1–4, 8, 28–48, 109, 142–3 168–9, 173, 177
Chérubin (from Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage de metadosis/miasma 6
Figaro) 30–1 metatheatricality 4, 8, 11–17, 108–10
Cloelia 96 mime 8, 55–7, 78, 109, 120–56 (passim)
Cicero 9, 19, 125, 132–3, 147, 164–6 mirror 6, 52–3, 62–4
contaminatio 10, 157–77 (passim)
Numa 97
Danaë 5, 154–5
defixiones, see similia similibus in cultic images oscilla 53
de’ Nobili, Francesco “Cherea” 30 Ovid 6, 54–8
Diomedes 131–2, 142
Donatus 6, 29, 34, 45–6, 150 Pamphila 1–4, 28, 30, 110, 149
par pari respondere 3, 141–5
enargeia 18–25 Parmeno 1–3, 12–13, 33–6, 108, 142
ekphrasis 17–26, 66–7 Parrhasius 54, 73–4
emblem 6, 49–50, 107, 116 Phaedria 1–3, 8, 13
Euripides 178–81 phantasia 20–5
exemplarity 95–101 Plato 7, 77–94
Ion 179
Frazer 49–50 Republic 79–85
funeral ritual 95–6 Timaeus-Critias 86–91
Plautus 8, 10, 11, 101–6, 120–1, 160–1
Gellius 127, 159 Amphitruo 4, 145
Gnatho 2–3, 10, 169–75 Captivi 104
Gorgon, see Medusa Curculio 113
Epidicus 102
Heautontimorumenos 127, 131, 158, 169 Menaechmi 105–6
Hecyra 9, 128–31 Mercator 102–3
Heliodorus 66 Miles Gloriosus 114–15
Herodas 147 Mostellaria 103–4
198 INDEX
Plautus (Continued) Santia vase 9, 143–5

Persa 102 Seneca the Elder 73–4
Poenulus 102, 113 sexually explicit painting as
Pseudolus 102 erotodidaxis 54–64
Stichus 102 Shakespeare 30
Trinummus 102 similia similibus in cultic
Pliny 74 images 51–3
Plutarch 97–8 Solon 90
Polybius 95–7, 100 sympathetic magic, see similia similibus in
Pompeian paintings 6 cultic images
House of Gavius Rufus (VII.2.16) 154–5
House of Regina Margherita (V.2.1) 154–5 Thais 1–4, 8, 110–11, 117–19, 175–6
House of the Centenary (IX.8.6) 61–2 Thraso 1–3, 8, 169–75
potior 38–9 Tiberius 54, 60, 61, 73–4
Progymnasmata 17–18, 25
Propertius 6, 58–60 Unity of Time 12–15
ps.-Longinus 20–1
ps.-Servius 116–17 Varro 97
Pythagoras of Rhegium 74 verisimilitude 7, 12, 24, 30,
Pythias 3, 8, 13–15, 108, 112 42, 72–5
Vitalis epitaph (Latin Anthology, Riese 487a)
quinque lineae amoris (five lines of love) 5, 9, 133–4
34–5 voodoo dolls, see similia similibus in cultic
Quintilian 19–22 images
rape 1, 4–6, 28–46 Wilde, Oscar 91–2

modern formulations 39–41
as plot motif in New Comedy 41–4 Xenophon of Athens 7, 9, 75, 134–40
Rembrandt’s Danaë 26–7 Xenophon of Ephesus 6, 65–71

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/9/2016, SPi

Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation publishes signiﬁcant inter-

Taïde è, la puttana che rispuose

F R O N T I S P I EC E . Rembrandt’s Danaë (1636)

1. Judging Chaerea: The Role of the Painting 28

4. Mimetic Contagion in Terence’s Rome 95

6. The Poetics of Contamination 157

Frontispiece. Rembrandt’s Danaë (1636) viii

Iuppiter (550) as a standard oath in Roman comedy, but as he is about to explain

mimetic contagion in the philosophizing discourses of pedagogy. Any represen-

of theatrical styles and types of entertainment (Fescennine, satura, Atellan,

PA. ehem quid dixti, pessuma? an mentita es? etiam rides?

MIMETIC CONTAGION AND EKPHRASIS

determine how representative the Progymnasmata are of earlier educational prac-

oft-repeated notion of ekphrasis as speech making vision through vividness is only

to denote the perception of sensory objects or the mental presentation of rational

I shall demonstrate in Chapters 2–4 that mimetic contagion is a recurrent topic

The frontispiece of this book reproduces Rembrandt’s Danaë of 1636, a renowned

dum adparatur, virgo in conclavi sedet

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 29

While [the bath] is prepared the girl is sitting in a chamber

The progression in Chaerea’s narration from painting to mythological subject to

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 31

broadly psychoanalytic ethical and descriptive system is clear: sociability is auto-

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 33

V. J. Rosivach, in his survey of rape in New Comedy, focuses on the uniqueness of

CH. o fortunatum istum eunuchum quiquidem in hanc detur domum!

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 35

Chaerea takes up the suggestion with characteristic enthusiasm, in spite of

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 37

believing false appearances. When Chaerea says he wants to ‘deceive them as we

amare coepi. forte fortuna domi

mea nil refert, dum potiar modo. 320

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 39

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 41

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 43

obvious departure from reality is also an irresistible incitement to self-conscious

In the Hecyra the situation is reversed: there is no explicit mention of a holiday

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 45

THE ROLE OF THE PAINTING 47

painting’s bad inﬂuence.40 If this were a free-standing vignette we might unre-

ὦ Μένανδρε καὶ βίε—

life. In our survey of the various forms of mimetic contagion prominent in

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 51

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 53

decorating interiors with painted construction materials and decorating walks

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 55

quid, si scripsissem mimos obscena iocantes,

scaenica vidisti lentus adulteria.

What if I had written dirty jesting mimes,

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 57

morals.23 The more mischievous reading of this passage is suggested by Ovid’s

templa Pudicitiae quid opus statuisse puellis,

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 59

What’s the point of founding a temple to Chastity for the girls,

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 61

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 63

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 65

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 67

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 69

An innocent reading of the canopy—surely the lovers’ reading as they gaze up at

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN CULTIC AND EROTIC ART 71

MIMETIC CONTAGION IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION 73