Plautus' Persa, five papers, Sarsina 2010: M. Fontaine pleads for realising Saturio's daughter as an ingenious and coherent character. He refines and expands on his Funny Words in Plautine Comedy (2010, pp. 92–7) on vv. 549–672 (pp. 16–28). Seven helpful tables juxtapose the virgo's answers with what the audience (ought to) understand and the pimp's misunderstandings. Dordalus, for example, understands her (nata sum) in culina, in angulo ad laevam manum (v. 631) as ‘born as a stranger in a corner (of deepest Arabia) to the left’, whilst we hear – according to Fontaine – ‘born in a kitchen, in a corner, (destined) for an accursed power over me’. Bearing in mind that Fontaine's argument presupposes that an audience would grasp such ambiguities at once, I am sceptical whether all Fontaine's ingenious explanations are to be followed. For example, would ‘in a corner to the left’ not be the natural interpretation?
Enigmatic nullum Siculum acceperis (v. 396) is given a new and plausible interpretation (pp. 31–7). Siculus is to be understood as an anaptyptic form of siclus – ‘shekel’. Fontaine convincingly argues that this word must have been known in Rome in Plautus' time, making v. 396 the earliest instance of ‘shekel’ in the Latin language. Caveat lector: Mancipium is no ‘garanzia legale di proprietà’ (pp. 16, 18), but denotes either the transfer of ownership of res mancipi (= mancipatio) or the owner's ‘full-power’ over a slave.
R. Danese tackles the old question of originality. He identifies the well-known ‘anomalies’ of the play, the character-fusion of the servus callidus and the adulescens amans, the existence of Saturio's daughter, and the relationship between the freedwoman Lemniselenis and the slave Toxilus as the result of a combination of recurrent specific stock features of the Palliata (or even the Νέα). A free girl is needed for the intreccio; the parasite is the only free character who could be on Toxilus' side. Hence the virgo has to be his daughter. Lastly, Danese suggests differentiating between recurrent genre-defining and more specific stock features when reconstructing Greek originals (pp. 66–8). Unusually, book chapters are cited as separate publications (‘saggio’) passim; on p. 55 n. 28 read 1985 pro 1986.
Several questions related to the parasite are addressed by L. Pasetti: pp. 69–75 give a rather general account of ‘parasites and philosophy/ers’ in New Comedy; useful here is the collection of sources. Focusing on the play's fortuna, G. Arbizzoni discovers traces of the Persa not only in Della Porta's ‘La Trappola’, but also in ‘La Carbonaria’; on p. 93 read ‘Lustspiel’ pro ‘Lutspiel’. Finally, R. shows the symmetry of vv. 406–16 and 417–26, which include argentum twelve times.
Attenzione: C. Questa's authoritative Editio Plautina Sarsinatis of the Pseudolus, mentioned on p. 7 as ‘in via di completamento’, has not yet seen the light of day in 2015. In sum, Fontaine's paper is the most stimulating, Danese's methodologically interesting, and the entire volume one of the better in the series.
