The conclusion of Chrysalus' famous canticum comparing the successful duping of his master Nicobulus to the sack of Troy has often been suspected by critics (Plaut. Bacch. 976–7):

The lines are condemned by Leo, Gaiser, and Jocelyn, but defended by Lefèvre and printed by Lindsay, Barsby, Questa (in his first and third editions, but not his second), and most recently De Melo.Footnote ¹ In addition to qualms about the inconsistency of casting Nicobulus as Priam here when he was Ilium little over thirty lines earlier – an inconsistency which can surely be attributed to the ebullience of Chrysalus rather than the incompetence of an interpolatorFootnote ² – the main objection to these lines is their divergence from the mythological tradition about Priam's fate at the sack of Troy. As Jocelyn puts it, ‘The threat senem uendam … would have been ludicrous to any audience acquainted with the heroic story.’Footnote ³

Barsby's attempt to make a comic virtue out of Jocelyn's flaw, even appropriating his language (‘This proposed fate for Nicobulus creates a ludicrous contrast with the epic tradition of Priam's death’),Footnote ⁴ is not entirely convincing, not because Chrysalus should be as scholarly and decorous as Jocelyn would wish, but because the new Priam's para prosdokian fate is simply not ludicrous enough. Or perhaps it might be more precise to say that it is not sufficiently pointed. In contrast to the gloriously garbled mishmash which, two and a half centuries later, Trimalchio makes of the Trojan War and its protagonists, with Agamemnon kidnapping Helen and substituting a deer for her (Petron. 59.4–5), to have Priam enslaved like Hecuba, Cassandra, and so many other Trojan royals is not absurd in itself, and at most is only made so by the entirely contingent tradition of his death at the hands of Neoptolemus. Whereas there is an obvious comic incongruity in the Petronian joke of Ajax's killing himself because Achilles married Iphigenia, selling Priam into slavery smacks less of deliberate comic reversal than of minor and not particularly amusing mythological error. Of course, as Lefèvre and others observe, there is a pointed reversal in having a slave sell his master into slavery, but this joke has already been made at 814–15 and some justification must be made for its repetition and for its linkage with the figure of Priam. The conceit, perhaps especially standing as it does at the climax of the canticum, must carry some point other than divergence from mythological tradition, and that point is a bilingual wordplay.Footnote ⁵

Chrysalus over-determines the notion that he is going to sell Nicobulus by using four words relating to the proposed transaction, two etymologically linked to emo (emptor … comptionalis [=coemptionalis]), two to uendo (uendam … uenalem). Such verbal exuberance is, of course, characteristically Plautine, but it does hammer the notion of buying and selling into the audience's minds and thus helps to alert them to a related word in the vicinity. That word is Priamus (Πρίαμος), which bears a striking similarity to the Greek word for ‘buy’, πρίαμαι. Such a bilingual wordplay could be made ad hoc, but the etymology of Πρίαμος from πρίαμαι was an established one. Various sources, both Greek and Roman, mythographers such as Apollodorus and Hyginus, and scholiasts such as Tzetzes and Servius, as well as grammarians and lexicographers, attest versions of a story whereby Heracles enslaved Laomedon's son Podarces and permitted Hesione to ‘buy’ him out of servitude with her veil, as a result of which he was renamed Priam, ‘from being bought’ (ἀπὸ τοῦ πρίασθαι).Footnote ⁶ Perhaps more tellingly, Lycophron has Cassandra allude to this story with characteristic obscurity, simultaneously calquing and concealing the name of Πρίαμος, ‘the bought one’, behind the periphrasis ‘the wretch bought by his sister's veil’ (ὁ πρὸς καλύπτρης τῆς ὁμαίμονος τάλας | ὠνητός).Footnote ⁷ Of course, Plautus on the Palatine would hardly expect of the groundlings in the cauea the same ability to decode abstruse allusions as Lycophron demanded of his scholarly Alexandrian readers, but this does constitute a parallel for the creative use of this etymological wordplay, and the steps from Priamus to πρίαμαι to emptor are much smaller than the leaps required in the Alexandra.

Since it is by no means necessary to assume that Plautus knew the tradition about Hesione and her veil, we might consider more significant a parallel for the wordplay which seems, like Chrysalus', ad hoc and based on verbal wit rather than mythico-etymological doctrina. Moreover, it is found in the work of a playwright whose comedies Plautus demonstrably knew and knew well, since he based three of his own on them: Diphilus.Footnote ⁸ In Diphilus' Emporos, a character complaining about the price of fish claims to have overpaid for a conger eel: ‘I bought it, just as Priam did Hector, paying out as much as it weighed’ (ὥσπερ ὁ Πρίαμος τὸν Ἕκτορα, | ὅσον εἵλκυσεν, τοσοῦτο καταθεὶς ἐπριάμην, fr. 32.7–8 K.–A.). Of course, the humour here lies primarily in the extreme incongruity of comparing Hector's body to that of a conger eel and the tragic tableau of Priam's ransom (perhaps literally tragic, since this post-Homeric version where Hector's corpse is weighed against the gold is first attested in Aeschylus' Phrygians) to a comic transaction with a fishmonger.Footnote ⁹ However, this very incongruity is reinforced by the way in which the depiction of the eel-lover as a culinary king of Troy extends, through wordplay, to his not simply ‘buying’ but ‘doing a Priam’ (πρίαμαι) on the conger.Footnote ¹⁰ It is quite possible, if unknowable, that Plautus may have come across this pun in Emporos and adapted it for an entirely different context, though we need not assume that, just because he adapted three of Diphilus' comedies, he had read all one hundred of them. Diphilus' pun is probably more significant as a definite parallel than as a possible source. It shows that such a wordplay could be made, and that by a writer of New Comedy, who probably occupied a position, like Plautus, at the verbally and physically exuberant end of that genre's spectrum.

Even without accepting Fraenkel's argument that Chrysalus' canticum was an entirely Plautine invention – though it is very tempting to do so – there is little reason to believe that the pun on Πρίαμος/πρίαμαι would have been imported from Menander's Dis Exapaton and none to believe that it must have been. Footnote ¹¹ Puns are infinitely more Plautine than Menandrean, and in many cases even bilingual puns on Greek words and names seem to have been introduced by the Latin playwright.Footnote ¹² To give a well-known example from Bacchides itself, the multiple puns on the name Chrysalus and χρυσός cannot possibly have been present in Dis Exapaton, since the slave's name there was Syrus, and indeed it seems at least possible that Plautus chose the name of his seruus callidus precisely in order to facilitate these puns.Footnote ¹³ It is true that, at 240, Plautus employs the Greek loanword chrysus in opus est chryso Chrysalo (‘Goldman has need of gold’), which makes it easier to recognize for a spectator with little Greek than Priamus/Πρίαμος/πρίαμαι/emptor. Yet it may well be that Plautus' motivation is less to make the audience's job easy, than to produce an emphatic and amusing jingle, since at 703–4 the play is on aurum and Chrysalus. Even there, as often, the etymological wordplay is more or less explicitly signalled: quid mi refert Chrysalo esse nomen, nisi factis probo? (‘What point is there in my having the name Chrysalus, if I don't prove it by my actions?’, 704). This sort of wordplay, which still requires the spectator to cross the linguistic boundary but which clearly signals the need to do so, can be paralleled in Stichus when Gelasimus derives his name from ridiculus (γελάσιμος).Footnote ¹⁴ Yet there are also puns which are less clearly signalled, as in the recurrent association of the fisherman Griphus in Rudens with his net (rete/γρίϕος).Footnote ¹⁵ That some, and perhaps a large proportion, of Plautus' audience would have had enough Greek to pick up such wordplays is very likely.Footnote ¹⁶ For such a spectator, Chrysalus' fourfold repetition of the basic idea that he intends to have Nicobulus ‘bought’ would surely be sufficient for him to make the connection between Priamus and πρίαμαι.