Week 5: Terence’s Eunuch: joking (seriously) about castration and rape Roman Laughter Week 5: Terence’s Eunuch: joking (seriously) about castration and rape

‘No sooner does anxiety about the body manifest itself than the intrusion of a comic element is to be feared.’ (p32)

Chaerea’s transformations Beautiful citizen replaces slave; off-duty (manly) soldier becomes man- woman; potent, lust-fuelled young man replaces unfertile, and ?undesiring?, if not impotent ugly old man; impenetrable citizen body steps into the shoes, or costume, of cut, compromised body.

The eunuch lover? Eun.666ff. Pythias (talking to Phaedria): Well, I’ve always been told that their sort were tremendous lovers of women, but were powerless.. God, it certainly never crossed my mind, or I’d have shut him up somewhere and never trusted him with the girl.

The Magna Mater, Cybele: made state goddess in Rome in 204BCE o festus dies! (“O festival day!” Eun. 560).

Acting the (incongruous) part: costume and gesture Eun.597-8: Antipho: What an ass you must have looked like standing there with a fan in your hand! (qui esset status, flabellulum tenere te asinum tantum) Eun.601-2: Chaerea: Then the girl fell asleep. I took a peep at her, peeping through the fansticks like this…(ego limis specto / sic per flabellum clanculum)

(not) the whole story 472-3: Parmeno: Where are you, Dorus? Come along. (Enter Chaerea). There’s a eunuch for you! Face of a gentleman, life in its prime! (ubi tu es, Dore? accede huc. Em eunuchum tibi, / quam liberali facie, quam aetate integra!) 479 Thraso: I know what I should do with him, drunk or not. (ego illum eunuchum, si opus sit, vel sobrius.)

Acting and infamia Chaerea: a soldier gone AWOL Eun. 290, Parmeno: I wonder why he left the Piraeus: for he is a guard on public duty now. ‘Acting was seen as the inversion of fighting, its antithesis. Actors accomplished nothing … Actors were dissemblers, people who pretended to be what they were not. They were praised precisely for their ability to deceive. These were not the qualities desirable in a Roman soldier … Actors were neither soldiers nor full citizens. Acting was essentially “unRoman,” essentially “other” ‘ (C. Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome, 1993: 102)

The brutal (director’s) cut ‘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 symmetrical diptych of backstage action and staged narration directly around a break at the stichic centre of the comedy. 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.’ R.Germany, Mimetic Contagion: Art and Artifice in Terence’s Eunuch, 2016, 1

Playing rape differently in Terence’s Eunuch Violence not resolved by marriage Rape is not part of the backstory but happens ‘backstage’ within the play itself The rape is premeditated and brutal; the rapist is sober The internal audience is enraged; the victim’s suffering is recounted The victim does not claim a token: as in Hecyra, it is the rapist who steals something, or is suspected of doing so (Eun.661) No religious or festival setting for the rape. The rape is inspired by a work of art, the painting depicting Jupiter’s rape of Danae.

infandum facinus, Eun.665 644ff. Pythias: Where is he? Brute, monster where can he be? Oh to think that he could dare to do such a wicked thing! Phaedria: Good lord, I don’t like the sound of this. Pythias: To add insult to injury, after he’s wronged the girl tore her dress and even tore out her hair! Phaedria: Just let me get my hands on him – I’d scratch his eyes out, the poisonous snake!  

Chaerea, Pamphila; Zeus, Danae (Bell-krater 450-425BCE; Titian 1544) Danae story: see Homer Iliad 14.319-20, Hesiod fr.129 M-W, cf. Pindar Pyth.12.17-18

G.Klimdt, Danae, 1907 Sharrock, Reading Roman Comedy 223ff: Nb. Sophocles, Euripides, Livius Andronicus and Naevius all wrote a Danae tragedy. The story appears in Menander, Sam.589-600. Sharrock, Reading Roman Comedy 223ff: ‘Disguised entry into the house leads in the direction of tragedy’ (cf. Aeschylus Oresteia, Euripides’ Bacchae); Chaerea’s report of the rape is also reminiscent of a tragic messenger scene. In comedy, think of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (entry of old relative into all-female festival).