Plautus: Poenulus

Plautus’ Poenulus (or Little Carthaginian) is a staggering work. Performed in the years after Rome’s traumatic struggle with Hannibal’s Carthage, the comedy stages the restoration of a Carthaginian family divided through enslavement. This book explores the play's many themes such as slavery and war trauma, which resonate especially today, in a series of short thematic chapters followed by a continuous reading of the play.

By presenting to a post-war Roman audience a tale of heartbreak and heartache among Carthaginians, and by setting the action in a Greece marked by comedic expectations and the geography of contemporary imperial conquest, Plautus’ play stands as perhaps the most powerful surviving meditation on a Mediterranean world changed by Roman expansion. The play is populated by war veterans, enslaved peoples - including sex-workers, domestic slaves, and those who labour in the countryside - and an intersectional cast of Carthaginians and Greeks, a diversity that prompts audience interaction with a wide range of socio-cultural topics relevant to Plautus’ Rome. By engaging weighty matters through song, slapstick, puns, and orientalising spectacle, Poenulus appears to defang charged issues, but its bite is deep. The play also includes one of the most metatheatrical prologues of all surviving Roman dramatic works, which thematizes the act of writing comedy and the constitution of the Roman theatrical audience.