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Persa ("The Persian") is a comedic Latin play by the early Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. Unusually in this play, the lover is not a wealthy young man helped by a cunning slave, but the cunning slave himself. In order to repay the money he has borrowed to buy his girlfriend from the pimp Dordalus who owns her, Toxilus persuades his friend Sagaristio to dress up as a Persian, in order to trick the pimp Dordalus into paying a large sum to buy a girl who is dressed as an Arabian captive, but who is in fact free. The girl's father Saturio then appears and reclaims his daughter.
Persa | |
---|---|
Written by | Plautus |
Characters | Toxilus, a slave Sagaristio, a slave Saturio, a parasite Sophoclidisca, a slave Lemniselenis, an enslaved prostitute Paegnium, a slave boy Unnamed daughter of Saturio Dordalus, a pimp |
Setting | Athens |
The play is set in a street in Athens. Facing the audience are two houses, one belonging to Toxilus's absent master, and the other to the pimp Dordalus.
Persa is believed to be one of Plautus's later plays. Among other indications is a reference in lines 99–100 to the epulum Iovis "banquet of Jupiter", a custom instituted in 196 BC; another indication is the large number of polymetric cantica.[1] Unlike some other Plautus plays, it has been rarely if ever imitated in later literature, perhaps because of the somewhat coarse elements in its plot.[2]
The slave Toxilus is taking care of his master's house while he is away. Toxilus is in love with a girl, Lemniselenis, who is owned by the procurer (pimp) Dordalus. He asks his friend Sagaristio to lend him the money required to buy her freedom. Sagaristio does not have the required sum, but promises to try to obtain some from elsewhere. Toxilus intends to get the money back from Dordalus after it is paid.
First Toxilus persuades Saturio, a parasitus, who has a pretty and clever daughter, to allow Sagaristio sell this girl to Dordalus, even though she is not a slave. Saturio, who will do anything for a meal, agrees. Meanwhile Toxilus sends a cheeky young slave boy, Paegnium, with a letter to Lemniselenis. Paegnium meets Lemniselenis's messenger, the maid Sophoclidisca, coming the other way and they exchange insults and banter.
Then Toxilus receives Sagaristio's money (money which was entrusted to Sagaristio by his owner to make a purchase) and takes it to Dordalus to buy Lemniselenis's freedom.
While Dordalus is having the money tested in the forum, Sagaristio dresses up as a Persian. Aided by Toxilus, he sells Saturio's daughter, pretending that she was captured in Arabia, to Dordalus for a huge sum. Immediately afterwards Saturio enters and reclaims his daughter, on the grounds that she is an Athenian citizen, and drags Dordalus off to court. The play concludes with Toxilus and Sagaristio feasting to celebrate Dordalus' misfortune.[3]
Plautus's plays are traditionally divided into five acts; these are referred to below for convenience, since many editions make use of them. However, it is not thought that they go back to Plautus's time. One way in which Plautus himself articulated the different parts of the play is by changes in the metre.
In Plautus's plays a common pattern is to begin each section with iambic senarii (which were spoken without music), then a scene of music in various metres, and finally a scene in trochaic septenarii, which were apparently recited to the accompaniment of tibiae (a pair of reed pipes). Moore calls this the "ABC succession", where A = iambic senarii, B = other metres, C = trochaic septenarii.[4] However, the ABC order is sometimes varied.
The Persa only partly follows the ABC scheme. The play begins with music, rather than the usual unaccompanied iambic senarii.[5] The following two sections also have music preceding the iambic senarii. The final scene, instead of being in pure trochaic septenarii, consists of trochaic septenarii mixed with anapaestic and other metres, perhaps reflecting the carnivalesque nature of the scene. If a metrical section is considered as ending with trochaic septenarii, the overall scheme may be seen as follows:
C. W. Marshall (2006), however, sees the metrical sections (or "arcs") as always starting with iambic senarii (excepting the two paragraphs where the forged letter is being read aloud).[6] He therefore divides the play as follows:
As Timothy Moore points out in an analysis of the music of the play, the more emotional scenes tend to be accompanied by music, whereas more serious or "matter-of-fact" passages, such as the letter which Dordalus reads out (501–512, 520–527), are unaccompanied. Another point is that the slave characters have most or all of their words accompanied by music, whereas Saturio speaks all of his.[7]
The character of the cunning slave who rescues a girl from the clutches of a slave-dealer by means of a trick is found in several other Plautus plays. In Asinaria, Libanus rescues Philenium with the help of his fellow-slave Leonida who dresses up as a donkey dealer; in Miles Gloriosus Palaestrio rescues Philocomasium, with the help of two courtesans, who dress up as a rich divorcée and her maid, and Philocomasium herself, who pretends to be her own twin sister; in Poenulus, the slave Milphio rescues two girls from a pimp by dressing up his master's farm-manager Collybiscus as a rich customer; and in Pseudolus, the slave Pseudolus rescues his master's beloved Phoenicium by dressing up another cunning slave, Simio, as the servant of the soldier who wants to buy her. What is unusual about Toxilus is that he himself is the character who is in love with the rescued girl rather than acting on behalf of his young master. This is unprecedented in Plautus, although Menander's comedy Heros opened in a similar way with a slave called Daos complaining of being in love.[11]
Sagaristio is another cunning slave of the same kind as Toxilus. The similarity of the two is emphasised by the music of the opening scene, when the metres and words used by Sagaristio mirror those used by Toxilus.[7] Sagaristio's cunning is shown by his quick-witted acting the part of the Persian stranger; his slyness is shown by his willingness to risk punishment by "borrowing" his owner's money to lend to Toxilus. He helps Toxilus perform his con trick by dressing up in costume, just as Leonida helps Libanus in Asinaria, and Simio helps Pseudolus in the play Pseudolus.
Dordalus the pimp is another stock character of Plautus's plays, similar to Ballio in Pseudolus or Lycus in Poenulus. His trade is to buy under-age girls and rent them out for sex with rich clients. His meanness is shown by his deducting 2 didrachmas for the purse when he pays over the money to the Persian stranger. Unlike the pimp Labrax in Rudens, however, he keeps his word, and frees and delivers Toxilus's girlfriend Lemniselenis after being paid the agreed price.
Paegnium is a boy-slave. He is described by Sophoclidisca as young and good-looking but boyish "not yet weighing 80 pounds" (line 231). His main characteristic is his waspish tongue and his insolence and cheek; he is never short of an insult. It is hinted (lines 229, 284, 804) that he has sex with men, and he is quite brazen about it, replying to Sagaristio's taunt, "So what if do? At least I don't do it for free, like you do!" It has been argued for various reasons that the scenes with Paegnium were added by Plautus for humorous effect and were not in the original Greek play. One indication of this is that in Greek comedy it seems probable that no scene had more than three speaking actors; and yet the last scene of Persa requires five. Moreover, the carrying of two messages in Acts 2.2 and 2.4 seems superfluous to the plot; it is more likely that in the original play only Sophoclidisca delivered a letter and then returned without meeting Paegnium.[11] The name "Paegnium" means "little plaything" and is also given in Plautus's Captivi 984 to a boy slave.[12]
The unnamed daughter of Saturio combines the roles of the quick-witted courtesan and the highly moral unmarried girl. The costume she is dressed in, including crepidulae "sandals", appears to associated with tragedy rather than comedy; moreover, several of her lines seem to be quotations from Sophocles and Euripides, and the conversation with Saturio seems to be a parody of the scene in Euripides' play Iphigenia in Aulis where Agamemnon is about to sacrifice his daughter. So part of the humour of her role may be that she is acting a parody of tragedy while Saturio and Sagaristio are playing an obviously comic role. Another humorous element is that she repeatedly refuses to follow the script which Toxilus has told her to say, causing him to become frantic that his trick may fall through.[13]
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