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 EPIDICUS BY PLAUTUS
An Annotated Latin Text,
with a Prose Translation

CATHERINE TRACY
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 EPIDICUS BY PLAUTUS
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Epidicus by Plautus

An Annotated Latin Text,

with a Prose Translation

by Catherine Tracy
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2021 Catherine Tracy

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0

International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and
transmit the work for non-commercial purposes, providing attribution is made to the author (but
not in any way that suggests that she endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should
include the following information:

Catherine Tracy, Epidicus by Plautus: An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation. Cambridge, UK:
Open Book Publishers, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0269

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Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will
be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.

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Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/
OBP.0269#resources

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-284-3

Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80064-285-0

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-286-7
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-80064-287-4
ISBN Digital ebook (azw3): 978-1-80064-288-1
ISBN Digital ebook (xml): 978-1-80064-289-8
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0269

Cover image: Marble figure of a comic actor. Roman, 1st–2nd century. Photo by Joanbanjo, Wikimedia,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Actor_borratxo,_exposici%C3%B3_la_Bellesa_
del_Cos,_MARQ.JPG.

Cover design by Anna Gatti.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
The Plot of Epidicus 12
Loose Ends 14
The Roman Theatre 16

Latin Text of Epidicus with Language Notes 19

Helpful Information for Reading the Latin Text 21
The Rhythm of Plautus 27
Trochaic Septenarii 27
Iambic Senarii 28

The Play in Latin 31

PERSONAE 33
ACTVS I 35
1.1 EPIDICVS, THESPRIO 35
1.2 STRATIPPOCLES, CHAERIBVLVS, EPIDICVS 46
ACTVS II 53
2.1 APOECIDES, PERIPHANES 53
2.2 EPIDICVS, APOECIDES, PERIPHANES 55
2.3 EPIDICVS 68
ACTVS III 71
3.1 STRATIPPOCLES, CHAERIBVLVS 71
3.2 EPIDICVS, STRATIPPOCLES, CHAERIBVLVS 73
3.3 PERIPHANES, APOECIDES, SERVOS 78
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

3.4 MILES, PERIPHANES 83

3.4a PERIPHANES, MILES, FIDICINA 86
ACTVS IV 91
4.1 PHILIPPA, PERIPHANES 91
4.2 ACROPOLISTIS, PERIPHANES, PHILIPPA 96
ACTVS V 101
5.1 STRATIPPOCLES, EPIDICVS, DANISTA, TELESTIS 101
5.2 PERIPHANES, APOECIDES, EPIDICVS 108

Translation of Plautus’s Epidicus 117

About the Translation 119

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 6 Epidicus by Plautus

The Play in English 123

Cast of Characters 125
Setting 127
ACT 1 129
1.1 Scene with Epidicus and Thesprio 129
1.2 Scene with Stratippocles, Chaeribulus, and Epidicus 135
ACT 2 139
2.1 Scene with Apoecides and Periphanes 139
2.2 Scene with Epidicus, Periphanes, and Apoecides 140
2.3 Scene with Epidicus 147
ACT 3 149
3.1 Scene with Stratippocles and Chaeribulus 149
3.2 Scene with Epidicus, Stratippocles, and Chaeribulus 150
3.3 Scene with Periphanes, Apoecides, a Slave, and 153
the [Hired] Lyre-Player (Who Doesn’t Speak in
this Scene)
3.4 Scene with the Soldier and Periphanes (and an Unnamed, 155
Non-Speaking Slave)
3.4a Scene with Periphanes, the Soldier, and 156
the [Hired] Lyre-Player
ACT 4 159
4.1 Scene with Philippa and Periphanes 159
4.2 Scene with Acropolistis, Periphanes, and Philippa 162
ACT 5 165
5.1 Scene with Stratippocles, Epidicus, the Moneylender, 165
and Telestis
5.2 Scene with Periphanes, Apoecides, and Epidicus 168
Argumentum (Plot Summary) 173
Acrostic Translation of the Argumentum 175
Literal Translation of the Argumentum 177

Works Cited 179

Index 183
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Acknowledgments

This project was inspired by my wonderful students at Bishop’s University

in Sherbrooke, Quebec (Canada), who often don’t have any background in
Classics but who show such enthusiasm for what is fascinating, horrifying, or
just plain weird about ancient Rome. I wrote the book to encourage them to
learn Latin, and to help them appreciate Plautus even if they don’t know any
Latin. I wish to thank the plucky students of my third-year Latin class of Fall
2020 who, pandemic notwithstanding, made their way through the Latin play
with me and helped me to improve the vocabulary and grammar annotations.
When they had trouble with the Latin, I knew I needed to add another footnote.
I am also exceedingly grateful to the kind and meticulous comments of Dr
John Henderson, series adviser at Open Book Publishers. It was a privilege to
have an expert of such high caliber to help me root out mistakes and clarify my
writing.
The supportive and friendly atmosphere at Bishop’s University, located on
the traditional and unceded territory of the Abenaki people and the Wabenaki
confederacy, gave me the time and space to work on this project, and that too
was invaluable. Our small library is more than compensated for by our excellent
librarians and library staff, and the inter-library loan system. My colleague and
friend, Dr Rebecca Harries of the BU Drama department, has taught me a great
deal over the years about the theatre. While I’ve always loved Plautus, I have
a much better understanding of Roman drama thanks to our many delightful
conversations on the practice and history of the theatre.
Thank you also to my husband, Oisín Feeley, who has always been supportive
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

and encouraging. Finally, my love and gratitude to my daughter, Sorcha Feeley,

who diligently did her remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic without
interrupting me more than a few times in any day despite how boring she found
it to be learning online by herself.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction

“I love the play Epidicus as much as I love myself,” claims the wily slave Chrysalus
in another of Plautus’s plays (Bacchides 214), implying, we’d like to think, that
the playwright was particularly proud of it.1 Epidicus is a play that translates
well and manages to be very funny despite the millennia that have passed since
its original production. What makes it so appealing is the star character: the
slave Epidicus. While Romans accepted the inhumanity of slavery as a fact of
life (there was no ancient abolitionist movement), the plays of Plautus, and
Epidicus in particular, show us that Roman spectators loved to see a slave outwit
a stupid master, at least in the ritualized context of the fabula palliata (comedy
set in the Greek world).2
The fabulae palliatae used stock characters that the spectators would recognize
and expect to act in characteristic ways. Apuleius (second century CE) gives us
a list of some of these stock characters:

the lying pimp, the ardent lover, the wily slave, the teasing girlfriend, the wife
that gets in the way, the permissive mother, the stern uncle, the helpful pal,
the belligerent soldier, […] gluttonous parasites, stingy fathers, and sassy sex
workers. (Apuleius, Florida 16)

In other ancient lists of comic stock characters, the “father” is defined as

“harsh” or “angry” or by his tendency to be tricked by his slave, the “soldier” is
“boastful”, and additional characters are listed as the “running slave” (usually
a different character from the “wily slave”), the “dishonest procuress”, the
“virtuous wife”, and the “shameless flatterer”.3
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Stock characters might behave according to recognizable patterns and within

a limited set of plot lines, but such constraints did not hinder Plautus from
creating memorable and innovative comic romps.

1 The line from Bacchides cannot be taken uncritically as Plautus’s enthusiastic endorsement of
Epidicus, however, as it was at least partly a joke (see Gunderson 2015: 228).
2 The adjective palliata comes from the Latin word pallium, referring to a cloak commonly
associated with Greek male attire in which most of the actors in a fabula palliata were dressed.
By contrast, comedy with a Roman setting, of which unfortunately only fragments survive,
was called fabula togata (plural: fabulae togatae), in which at least some of the actors wore togas.
3 Plaut.us, Captiui 57–58; Terence, Eunuchus 35–40 and Heauton Timorumenos 37–39; Horace
Epistulae 2.1.170–173; Ovid, Amores 1.15.17–18.

© 2021 Catherine Tracy, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0269.03

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 2 Epidicus by Plautus

Reading the play today is entertaining, but it also gives us some insight into
the world of mid-republican Rome (Plautus lived from about 254 BCE till 184
BCE). Epidicus, like all Roman comedy of the palliata genre, was inspired by
the Greek New Comedies circulated from Athens a hundred years before. The
characters have Greek names, and the action is usually supposed to take place
in Athens, which does, it is true, pose a minor problem when we want to use
Plautus to illustrate the world of Rome. The plays, however, were not direct
translations of Greek originals. As Siobhán McElduff explains when discussing
Plautus’s art: “translating drama is not simply a matter of linguistic replacement
(itself a complicated endeavor), but of adapting a play so that it appeals to a
new audience, often one with a different set of demands and expectations”
(McElduff 2013: 62). Plautus’s Roman audiences enjoyed other forms of comic
drama, including Atellan farces (short improvised comic skits originating in
Atella, an Oscan town in Italy) and mime performances (short, low-brow comic
dramas), and the exuberance of these theatrical forms doubtless influenced
the spirit of the fabulae palliatae. It is important to understand that the fabulae
palliatae, though strongly influenced by Greek literature, were composed
for Latin-speaking Italy. The versions of the palliata genre that we have were
adapted specifically for Roman audiences, with topical references to the city
of Rome, and jokes about contemporary Roman fashions (see lines 222–235 of
Epidicus, for example) and historical events. The Greek costumes allowed the
playwrights to make jokes about Roman life that would not have been permitted
by the sponsoring magistrates if the characters had been dressed in togas (Kocur
2018: 207).
Epidicus, probably one of Plautus’s later plays, is a great example of Plautus
adapting a basic Greek romantic plot line into an irreverent situation comedy
that depicts characters (mis)behaving within a fantasy “Athens” that mixed
stereotypes of Greek culture with day-to-day Roman life. Where we have
evidence of the Greek source for any of Plautus’s plays we see that Plautus’s
approach was fundamentally different to that of his Greek models, with the
triumph of the underdog predominating over the Greek focus on traditional
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

family values (Anderson 1993: 29; see also Stürner 2020).

The Greek original for Epidicus, if there was one, has not survived. Some
scholars believe that it was based on a Greek play that made much more of the
young master’s love affair, and ended with his marriage to his half-sister, which
would have been legal in Athens had she been a citizen, though such a marriage
would not have been legal in Rome.4 However it may have played out in the

4 There are two lost Greek comedies, known only by title, called Homopatrioi (Ὁμοπάτριοι), one
by Antiphanes and the other by Menander, which may have been the model for Epidicus
(Katsouris 1977: 321). True, Goldberg 1978 argued that we lack evidence to assume that Epidicus
was based on a Greek script, and he found some evidence to suggest that — exceptionally — it
was an original plot by Plautus. But more recent scholarship has tended to be less interested

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction  3

Greek play that inspired Plautus, Epidicus gives us no charming love scenes, and
in fact makes the young man surprisingly unappealing, so that we enjoy, rather
than sympathize with, his final discomfiture when he learns that the woman
he’d hoped to make into his slave- or freed-girlfriend is now out of his reach.
Plautus always puts comic effect ahead of sentimentality, and in Epidicus, the
romantic plight of the young man Stratippocles serves only to place the wily
slave Epidicus in a series of situations where he must use his wits to get out of
impossible situations.
What can we learn about Rome from the play Epidicus then? While the
play gives us a ludicrously sanitized view of what it was like to be a slave,
it nevertheless conveys to us the ubiquity of slavery in Rome, and it can be
a useful jumping-off point for an informed reader to consider how Plautus’s
ancient audiences thought about slavery. The cheerful ingenuity of Epidicus
can’t completely hide the brutal reality of slavery: we know that the impossible
situations he finds himself in are due to his abusive masters. Stratippocles,
the freeborn son of the household, has the power to cause Epidicus real
harm (a severe beating at the very least), so when he demands that Epidicus
solve his problems for him, Epidicus has little choice but to obey. Solving
the son’s problems, however, means cheating his legal master Periphanes
(Stratippocles’s father), and if he gets found out Epidicus will suffer worse
harm from him. Slave owners often kept torturers whose job was to punish
slaves who angered their masters (see line 147 of this play), and we know
from joking references in Plautus’s comedies that slaves lived under constant
threat of corporal punishment and torture.
Rome’s overseas expansion during the 3rd century BCE had begun the
process of turning Roman Italy from a society that owned slaves into, by the mid
2nd century BCE, what is called a “slave society”, in which slavery becomes a
significant element of the society’s economy, and in which enslaved people have
come to form a large proportion (at least 20%) of the population (Hunt 2018:
20). Men who fought in Roman wars risked enslavement if they were defeated,
and if their army was victorious they helped to bring about the enslavement of
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

the defeated soldiers as well as of the women, children, and other civilians of
the captured towns and states.
Slaves in republican Rome had no right to fair treatment by their owners and
no recourse when their owners abused them. There were no legal restrictions
on a slave owner’s right to destroy his or her slave (Dowling 2006: 12). While
a small number of slaves were treated comparatively well because of their
invaluable skill-sets and/or the decency of their particular owner, most lived
under the very real threat of cruel punishments, such as “spikes, red-hot irons,

in this hypothetical source for the play, though Arnott 2001 shows how closely some elements
of the play correspond to various examples of Greek New Comedy.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 4 Epidicus by Plautus

crosses, leg shackles, ropes, chains, prisons, restraints, leg traps, neck irons” (so
listed by a slave character in another play by Plautus: Asinaria 548–52).
Slaves had no right to bodily autonomy, and indeed the physical and sexual
abuse of slaves (male and female) was a deliberate means of subjugating them.
Slaves were not only separated from their families upon enslavement but were
considered no longer to have parents or ancestors (see line 340 of this play,
and note 53 on page 150); they lost the right to their own names, and even if
they were eventually freed, their legal name became that of their former owner.
Those born into slavery likewise were deemed not to have parents in a legal
sense; they might be identified as the offspring of a particular slave woman, but
she had no parental rights over her children and could be sold away from them,
or they could be sold away from her. When a male slave owner fathered a child
by one of his female slaves, the child was automatically a slave and had no filial
claim on her or his father.
In the opening scene of this play, Epidicus jokes to his fellow slave Thesprio
about thieving slaves getting a hand cut off as a punishment (11–11a). Epidicus’s
young master (Stratippocles) threatens to have Epidicus severely beaten by
the slaves his father keeps for the purpose (147) and then sent to the mill to
push the treadmill if Epidicus doesn’t find a way to settle Stratippocles’s debt,
a seemingly impossible situation for a slave, though not for the clever Epidicus
(lines 121 and 145). At lines 610–626 Epidicus, who thinks that he’s about to
be found out and punished for his lies, expresses his fear of crucifixion, and a
strong desire to run away.
The agonizing and slow form of execution known as crucifixion was reserved,
in the Roman world, mainly for slaves and convicted criminals. Crucifixion
involved suspending the victim on a post with or without a cross-piece, with
flogging and/or disemboweling and/or impaling potentially forming part of
the execution (Harley 2019: 305). Such a form of execution, even if rarely carried
out, is so horrifying that we must wonder how it could be such a common
subject for jokes in Roman comedy.
It is true that crucifixion never occurs within the plays, on or off stage, nor
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

do the plays mention crucifixion as something that had been done prior to the
action of the play. But crucifixion did exist as one of the methods that a real-life
slave-owner had for terrorizing his or her slaves. A little over one hundred years
after Plautus’s time, Cicero mentions a slave owner having her slave crucified
(Cicero Pro Cluentio 187). Cicero calls such an act “dangerous and inhuman
wickedness” (infestum scelus et immane), but Cicero’s outrage was due to the
fact that the poor slave was thus prevented from bearing witness against his
murderous owner, rather than due to any sympathy for the slave (the slave’s
testimony, had he not been crucified, would have been extracted under torture,
as Roman law required). An inscription from Puteoli (a town about 200 km

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction  5

south of Rome) reflects the right of slave owners to have their slaves crucified,
listing four sesterces as the pay for each of the labourers who were needed to
carry the cross-piece (patibulum), for each of the floggers (uerberatores), and for
the executioner (carnifex) (AE 1971, no. 88, II.8–10).
When, at line 78, the slave Thesprio tells Epidicus to “go get crucified”, and
at 513 Periphanes expresses the same wish to the hired freedwoman lyre-player,
we are not meant to take the threats at face value (especially in the latter case,
since the lyre-player was not a slave). No doubt these jokes found favour with the
slave-owning members of the audience who probably viewed the punishment
of slaves simply as a solution to the difficulties of managing their own slaves.
It has been suggested, furthermore, that the joking references to crucifixion in
the fabulae palliatae “confirm[ed] the Roman audience in its sense of superiority
and power”, but that the “cunning slave” is never actually crucified because his
bad behaviour has all been for the benefit of the young man’s love affair that
the audience naturally wants to see succeed (Parker 1989: 240; 246). Another
possibility is that the slave avoids the threatened punishment because his role in
the comedy is to celebrate “pure anarchic fun” and to represent, for the audience,
“an alternative humanity, parodic of the free citizen and released from the
obligations that the demands of dignity impose on the free” (Fitzgerald 2019:
188–199). The high stakes (painful and disfiguring punishment) emphasize the
slave’s heroism, too.
These approaches interpret the references to slave punishment through the
lens of the free spectators, but how did the slaves and former slaves in Plautus’s
audience respond to these jokes when crucifixion was a terrifying reality for
some unfortunate slaves? Modern readers should not be deluded into thinking
that the light-hearted references to such cruelty in Plautus’s plays meant that
no one in the ancient audiences found the idea of these punishments upsetting.
Were their feelings unimportant to Plautus, or did they have a more complicated
response? Applause, even from enslaved spectators, was still applause, making
it unlikely that Plautus didn’t care about entertaining the slaves in the audience.
Jokes about abuse may have helped the slaves in the audience endure it in
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

their own lives. It is also probable that individual slaves were able to persuade
themselves that only bad slaves got punished, and that good slaves like
themselves could safely laugh at the bad ones on stage (while perhaps secretly
admiring the bad behaviour). Everyone could, at least, recognize how this
ideology was supposed to work.
It is also likely that the torture references loomed less large for the slaves
in the audience than the fact that, on stage, the wily slave magnificently
dominates his master. Richlin has argued that the triumph of the wily slave
on the palliata stage may have given voice to those who had been enslaved,
and created a safe, though temporary, way for slaves and former slaves to

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 6 Epidicus by Plautus

experience the undermining of slave owners (Richlin 2020: 354–355; Richlin

2017: 26 and throughout). The slaves in Plautus’s audience could thus be
expected to enjoy Epidicus’s triumph over his master Periphanes as a delightful
though unrealistic alternative to their own less successful relationships with
their masters.
Epidicus’s behaviour would not, of course, have been plausible for real
Roman slaves. Furthermore, since the plays produced in Rome were sponsored
by magistrates from a slave-owning elite, we know the plays could not have
been fundamentally subversive of slavery as an institution, however much the
slaves in the audience may have enjoyed them. It is intriguing to speculate about
how the slave owners in Plautus’s audience reacted to the wily slave outwitting
his master. Did it serve to justify their brutal control of their own slaves, or did
they laugh at the helpless dupes on stage who couldn’t dominate their slaves as
well as they fancied they themselves did? Fitzgerald’s suggestion, mentioned
above, that they identified with the stage slave’s ability to live without worrying
about the dignity required of free citizens is certainly possible.
Epidicus references the brutality and inhumanity of slavery within a madcap
and cheerful comic setting that ultimately rejoices in one (male) slave’s
fundamental (and fictional) power over his hapless owner, which creates a
cognitive dissonance with which modern readers should attempt to engage.
The plays of Plautus were, above all, fantasies. We are told that another form of
comic drama in Rome (the comic fabulae togatae, or comedies in Roman dress)
rarely included wily slaves that were cleverer than their masters (Donatus, On
the Eunuch 57), which makes it clear that slaves outwitting their masters was a
pleasure enjoyed by Roman audiences only in specific and ritualized settings.
The fantastical schemes of a clever male slave on stage, and his relationship
to the lived experiences of enslaved men in the real world, give us one way
to look at mid-Republican Rome. Another is to look at how Plautus depicted
women, both slave and free/freed.
Epidicus shows us how vulnerable women were to mistreatment in the world
of the ancient Mediterranean: the old man Periphanes had impregnated and
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then abandoned Philippa; years later their daughter Telestis was captured and
sold as a slave; and we ought to sympathize with Acropolistis and the other sex
workers who have to make their living by pleasing wealthy men, though the
Roman audience generally saw them simply as desirable and rapacious (see
lines 213–235 of this play).
In the plays of Plautus, women who have become sex workers greedily
deplete the fortunes of the hapless men who want to buy access to their bodies,
and then become clownish alcoholics when they’re too old to attract customers
anymore. Only women who have not yet started sex work are ever discovered
to be freeborn daughters of citizens and thus worthy of marriage. Marriage in

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 Introduction  7

Rome, especially among the wealthy, was about linking two families and was
arranged by, or had at least to be approved by, the male head of the household
(pater familias). The bride’s chastity was an important aspect of her value as a
wife, hence the unmarriageability of practicing sex workers. The misfortunes
that the female characters suffer through no fault of their own may inspire a
modern reader’s sympathy, but in the plays self-pity is simply what women do
(Dutsch 2008: 49, citing Donatus Ad Ad. 291.4).
The female stock characters in Plautus are divided between middle-aged
(who are usually depicted as no longer desirable) and young (and thus
desirable). These groups are further subdivided into the categories of freeborn
citizens, free or freed non-citizens, and slaves. Epidicus includes examples of
most of these types. Interestingly, the middle-aged freeborn woman (Philippa)
is depicted as still desirable, since the old man Periphanes hopes to marry her.
Philippa, in the Epidicus, follows the self-pitying-woman script (mentioned
above), as evidenced by her opening speech and Periphanes’s response:

Philippa: [weeping and wringing her hands] If a person suffers so much that she
even pities herself, then she’s really pitiable. I should know: so many things are
coming at me at once, breaking my heart. Trouble on top of trouble keeps me in a
state of worry: poverty and fear are terrorizing me, and there’s no safe place where
I can pin my hopes. [sobbing] My daughter has been captured by the enemy, and
I don’t know where she may be now.

Periphanes: [Catching sight of Philippa] Who is that foreign woman, coming along
looking so fearful, who’s moaning and pitying herself? (526–534)

It is perhaps Philippa’s relative passivity and powerlessness that makes her

worthy of marriage, since other middle-aged women in the plays of Plautus
who exercise or attempt to exercise power over men are not depicted as desirable
(see Plautus’s Casina, for example). Passivity is a characteristic of most of the
marriageable women in Plautus; in Epidicus the marriageable Telestis is even
more passive than her mother Philippa. Passivity is not sufficient on its own
to make them marriageable, however; to be worthy of marriage in Plautus a
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woman must be a citizen, and either a virgin (as we are to assume with Telestis),
or to have had sex only with the man who eventually marries her (as we are to
assume with Philippa).
The play shows us the Roman reality that freeborn young women like Telestis
needed family support to protect them from capture and sexual exploitation. If
her father Periphanes had not interested himself in her welfare she would have
been forced into sexual slavery (by Periphanes’s son Stratippocles, despite his
boast at line 110 that he had not so far used force on her). Sexual abuse of slaves
was both common and also an established part of the enslavement process of
women and girls after the sacking of a town. As Kathy Gaca has shown, women
and girls captured in war were routinely brutalized as part of the domination

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 8 Epidicus by Plautus

of the defeated people, a process known as andrapodization (from the Greek

andrapodisis or andrapodismos) (Gaca 2011: 80).
This vulnerability works as an uncomplicated plot device in the plays of
Plautus. Freeborn and virginal women are rescued from the sex trade just in time,
while those who had already entered the sex trade before the play’s action are
cheerfully accepting of their permanently unmarriageable status. Acropolistis,
in Epidicus, is viewed as primarily a sex worker, and indeed Epidicus assumes
that she will be available to compensate Stratippocles by becoming his concubine
after his disappointment in finding out that Telestis is his half sister (line 653).
Acropolistis’s lyre-playing skills do not hint at an alternate career to sex work,
since professional women in the Roman world were generally assumed to
be sex workers as well. Women and men who performed on the stage were
deemed infames, which meant that they had lost fama, or reputation, and they
held reduced civic rights. The bodies of free/freed professional women were
assumed to be for sale, and if the women were slaves their bodies belonged to
their masters.
Life for a sex worker in mid-republican Rome would have been precarious,
but though Plautus’s audience might be prompted to feel sorry for the recently
enslaved Telestis and be glad when she regains her free-born status, the same
cannot be said of women like Acropolistis who have already entered the sex
trade. Acropolistis is depicted as relatively self-reliant, and capable of looking
after herself. When Periphanes realizes she is not his daughter and is furious
with her for tricking him, she responds with humorous logic, claiming that she
can’t be blamed for obediently doing what was asked of her (by Epidicus), and
for calling Periphanes “father” in response to him calling her “daughter” (lines
584–592).
Her obedience somewhat undermines Periphanes’s right to be angry with
her, since it is a womanly virtue in the world of Plautus to obey. The passive
obedience of Telestis is what nearly condemns her to a life of sex slavery, but it is
also what makes her worthy of being rescued. Philippa’s prior relationship with
the young Periphanes is also marked by her passivity and compliance (see note
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5 on page 12 on the question of whether or not Periphanes had in fact raped her).
In Roman comedy it is not a woman’s choices that fit her to a life of respectable
marriage on the one hand, or infamous sex work on the other; instead it is what
is allowed to happen to her that changes her status and her future prospects. It
is therefore her protectors, or lack thereof, who define her status.
How might Plautus have thought about the real women in his audiences,
and how would they have interpreted his plays? We know that enslaved, freed,
and free women watched the plays. The prologue of Plautus’s Poenulus includes
a direct address to the audience, and refers to various different groups including
“nannies / nursemaids” (nutrices 28) and “married women” (matronae 32). The

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 Introduction  9

nutrices would have been slaves or else free/freed lower-class women, while
the matronae would have been freeborn, and probably citizens, coming from all
classes.
How much did Plautus and his actors care about keeping these women
entertained? Marshall has argued that “Plautus sought to take the diverse
individuals in the audience and treat them as a corporate whole, perhaps at
the expense of a scapegoat or two”, and lists as these potential scapegoats a
“reluctant spectator”, a “Greek slave or tourist”, or “the praeco” — that is, the
crier or announcer whose job was to announce the play and make the audience
pay attention (Marshall 2006: 77). It is evident that the female members of the
audience ought to be added to Marshall’s list of scapegoats, especially given
that the “nannies” and “married women” mentioned above from the prologue
of the Poenulus are told, respectively, to stay at home with the children they are
in charge of, and to be sure to laugh quietly so as not to annoy their husbands.
Regardless of the women’s class, it seems, Roman men were always ready to
laugh at jokes that told women to shut up.
Plautus’s depiction of female characters on the stage is not by any means
wholly misogynistic, but most of the women in Plautus are not given as full a
range of human emotions as the male characters are (bearing in mind that the
male characters are by no means fully fleshed out as characters themselves). This
must partly have been due to the fact that the Roman comedies were meant to
be set in the Greek world (usually Athens), where, as the fifth-century Athenian
general Perikles had reportedly said, women achieved glory by not being talked
about by men, no matter whether that talk was about their virtues or their flaws
(Thucydides 2.45). Women in Rome were far freer in their movements than their
Athenian counterparts, but they were not the target audience for the plays of
Plautus. The female characters in Plautus were played by male actors in masks,
unlike mime dramas where female actors could play starring roles, and this
would have further diminished the likelihood of the actors and the playwright
viewing women as their target audience.
The limited behaviours and outcomes for the female characters in Plautus
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must have fit within the Roman audience’s ideas about women’s roles, even if
the reality for Roman women would have been significantly more varied. We
can’t know if the Roman women watching Plautus’s plays viewed the stage
women as relating in any way to their own real lives, but it is likely that the
plays’ emphasis on the fates deserved by each of the stage women had the effect
of teaching them their place in Roman society.
Reading Epidicus also allows us to see some of the more casual aspects of
life on the lower end of the Roman social scale. Students of Roman history are
usually familiar with the praetorship as a step on the cursus honorum, that is, as
one of the coveted political offices for which ambitious men of the senatorial class

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 10 Epidicus by Plautus

campaigned energetically, and they have probably learned about the retinue of
lictors who accompanied the higher magistrates and symbolized their authority
by carrying the fasces (bundles of rods with or without axe heads attached). We
see in Plautus that, to the ordinary Roman public, the praetor was primarily
seen as the judge who dealt with bankruptcies, fraud cases, and the like. At the
beginning of the Epidicus, the title character uses formal legal language for comic
effect (line 24), in response to which the other slave, Thesprio, makes a joke
about Epidicus playing praetor and deserving a beating with his own lictors’
fasces. This probably inspired shocked and delighted laughter amongst the
lower-class members of Plautus’s audience, who had reason to fear the praetor’s
power. If a real praetor was present in the audience (a likely possibility), his
reaction to the joke would have enhanced its comic effect.
Students will also know about Rome’s nearly constant warfare; in the plays
of Plautus we get to see how frequently warfare and its consequences appear as
background to the plots. Greek warfare, especially after Alexander the Great,
tended to involve soldiers hiring themselves out as mercenaries, while Roman
soldiers of Plautus’s time were drafted to serve the republic. The plays juggle with
both of these military practices, and soldiers in the audience would have been
able to mock the Greek mercenaries while appreciating the military metaphors.
In Epidicus the slaves deplore and joke about the cowardliness of Stratippocles’s
conduct in battle (lines 29–38 tell us that he threw away his weapons and ran
away), and military metaphors are casually used at lines 343 and 381 to illustrate
the strategic efforts of Epidicus and Stratippocles to outsmart Periphanes and
win the praeda (“war prize”, that is, the enslaved woman Stratippocles is in love
with). When the unnamed soldier in the play (who is characteristically boastful
and belligerent as his stock character requires him to be) meets Periphanes
(whom we find out was himself a boastful soldier in his youth) we get to laugh
at their self-aggrandizement and sense of entitlement in much the same way that
Plautus’s ancient audience must have done (lines 442–455). More importantly
we see that successful soldiers, at least in the fantasies of the Roman audiences,
were able to enrich themselves from their campaigns, and that the economic
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power of wealthy soldiers was at odds with the way the Roman audiences felt
power ought to be distributed. Wealthy soldiers in Plautus usually end up being
very properly outwitted by the less wealthy characters. Burton 2020 discusses
the multifaceted ways in which the plays of Plautus were intended to appeal to
spectators who had personal experience in Rome’s wars.
At least two characters in the play show us sanitized examples of some of
the direct victims of warfare: Telestis, whose capture would have condemned
her to a life of sex slavery had she not been rescued, and Thesprio, whose name
(meaning “man from Thesprotis”), tells us that he was probably also a war
captive, since captured slaves were usually given new names, with the new

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 Introduction  11

slave name often being a reference to their place of origin (Strabo 7. 3.12). Lines
210–211 of the play mention the boys and young women that Stratippocles
and his fellow soldiers have brought back as slaves from the war in Thebes:
enslaving the conquered was a consequence of war that was uncontroversial to
the Roman audiences.
The religious references in the play illustrate the pervasiveness of religion
in everyday life in the ancient Mediterranean. It is, however, far from clear
how Roman these references are, rather than (fictionalized) Greek. Since the
play is set in Athens, or rather “Athens”, we have to accept the likelihood that
some of the religious references were meant to be a comic version of what
the average Roman could believe was normal in the Greek world (on this see
Jocelyn 2001). Characters swear by the demigods Hercules and Pollux (both
naturalized Greek imports — Herakles and Polydeukes — to Roman religion)
and make repeated references to personal religious rituals. When Apoecides
jokes about Periphanes’s ritual offerings to his dead wife’s tomb (lines 173–177),
does this suggest that the Roman audiences laughed at the insincerity of those
carrying out personal religious rituals in Rome, or did they only find it funny
because they thought they were laughing at Greek religious insincerity? The
unnamed freelance lyre-player (who appears in act 4, scene 1, and who has a
short speaking role in lines 496–516) has, she tells us, been hired to play her
lyre for a religious ritual Periphanes was to have performed, and this points to
the regular domestic rituals conducted by the male head of a Roman household
(pater familias), though we do not know if hiring a lyre-player for the ritual
would have seemed normal to the Roman audience, or if it was meant to be a
comic example of an alien Greek ritual (Jocelyn 2001: 280). The Greek setting,
of course, would have made jokes about religious rituals safer, since it could be
plausibly denied that they were attacks on Roman ritual.
The repeated ritual imagery throughout the play, where the slave Epidicus
is likened to a “sacrificial victim, sacrificer, embalmer, auspex, Agamemnon, and
son of Vulcan” has been discussed by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, who argues that
the Epidicus “uses ritual imagery and religious associations to reflect power
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relationships between characters” (Gellar-Goad 2012: 149). The play thus

shows us the ubiquity of religion in Roman life and the ways in which religious
imagery could be used in popular performances as shorthand for social themes.
Finally, the play conjures up exaggerated versions of the ways that Romans
might get into debt, and depicts the rascally nature of moneylenders. We see that
husbands resented their wealthy wives (lines 173–180), and that the famous
paternal power (patria potestas) — which we know from legal sources gave, at
least in theory, near absolute power to a man over his sons — was something
that Roman audiences liked to see flouted, at least on stage, if not in real-life
Rome. It is likely that the now lost fabulae togatae (comedies set in Rome) forbore

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 12 Epidicus by Plautus

to depict this sort of undermining of Roman paternal power; the togatae seem to
have had a less frivolous approach to family life (Manuwald 2010: 5). The fabulae
palliatae, however, show us that Plautus’s Roman audience enjoyed seeing the
perennially outwitted father on stage in fantasy-“Athens”.

The Plot of Epidicus

The complicated tricks the slave Epidicus uses to outwit his master are what
makes the play so funny, but sorting out the various young women around
whom the plot hinges requires some concentration.
The first woman is Acropolistis, who is a slave trained as a courtesan and
as a lyre-player (fidicina). We are told in the opening dialogue of the play that
Stratippocles, the son of Periphanes, fell madly in love (actually, “lust” is the
more appropriate word) with Acropolistis before he left to fight with the army
in the nearby state of Thebes (remember that the play is supposedly set in the
Greek state of Athens, and its characters are supposed to be Greeks). He left
instructions for Epidicus, a slave of his household, to somehow get hold of
enough money to buy her for him. Like most young men in Roman comedy,
Stratippocles is financially dependent on his father who could not approve of
wasting large sums of money buying courtesans, so Stratippocles’s repeated
insistence that Epidicus buy Acropolistis might seem an impossible task.
Nothing, however, is impossible for such a wily slave as Epidicus, the star of
the show. Epidicus convinces Stratippocles’s father Periphanes that Acropolistis
is the latter’s illegitimate daughter. Years before, Periphanes had raped or had
a fling with5 a woman called Philippa whom he had not married (presumably

5 
An unfortunate result of Greek and Roman predatory attitudes around sex and possessive
attitudes around women means that the question of whether or not Philippa had consented
to the sexual encounter with Periphanes was not considered important enough to be made
clear in the Latin text. In a virgin-bride culture, any sex with a young woman of marriageable
status was considered a sexual crime because it ruined her value as a family asset unless she
then married the man. Wolfgang de Melo’s 2011 translation of Epidicus uses the term “rape”
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(to translate compressae in line 5 of the Argumentum) and later has Periphanes say that he
“forc[ed Philippa] to lie with [him]” (to translate comprimere at line 540b). Henry Thomas
Riley, in his 1852 translation of Epidicus, used the rather quaint Victorian terms “seduction”
and “intrigue”. While the verb perpulit (or possibly pepulit, according to one of the manuscript
traditions) at line 541a of the play seems to suggest force was used, it is not unambiguous in
meaning. The play simply emphasizes Periphanes’s selfishness in having thus compromised
Philippa’s marriage prospects. Rape as a plot point in a culture that valued a woman’s pudicitia
(sexual modesty and chastity) allowed the play to “increase the dramatic impact of citizen
girls” without the raped woman losing her claim to pudicitia (Witzke 2020: 337). Philippa’s
potential willingness to marry Periphanes years after their sexual encounter would have
seemed, to the Roman audience, like a satisfactory conclusion for her regardless of whether
or not he had used force. On rape as a plot point in New Comedy see Rosivach 1998 (chapter
2); see also Omitowoju 2009 on the relative unimportance of the woman’s consent in Athenian
attitudes around extra-marital sex (chapter 2; see also Part 2 of her book for discussion of
illicit sex in New Comedy).

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 Introduction  13

he was already married to Stratippocles’s mother at the time), and Philippa

had borne him a daughter named Telestis. The widowed Periphanes has been
planning on marrying Philippa and is now delighted to rescue his long-lost
daughter (as he thinks) and to welcome her into his home. Periphanes therefore
has provided the money to buy the pretend Telestis (who is really his son’s
girlfriend Acropolistis).
So far so good: Epidicus has got the young master what he wants, and
presumably hopes that Periphanes will never discover the trick. How
Stratippocles would have been able to carry on an affair with a woman living
in his household as his half-sister is not addressed, but the silliness of such an
arrangement is part of the fun.
As we learn in the opening dialogue of the play, however, Epidicus’s efforts
to get Stratippocles access to Acropolistis turn out to have been wasted, since the
shallow Stratippocles has already transferred his interest to a different woman.
This second woman is a recent war captive, and Stratippocles has borrowed
money at an extortionate rate of interest in order to buy her and bring her back
from Thebes. She’s from a “good family” as we’re told, and Stratippocles boasts
to his friend Chaeribulus that he has so far not forced himself on her6 (which
Sharon James calls “perhaps the play’s most implausible feature”, given the
expected behaviour of young men in Roman comedy, see James 2020: 114). His
self-restraint is important for the plot, because we eventually find out that she is
the real Telestis, and thus Stratippocles’s half-sister. Stratippocles, who seems to
have few redeeming qualities, now tells Epidicus that he’ll send him to work at
the mill (exhausting, miserable work used to punish disobedient slaves) unless
Epidicus quickly finds a way to pay back the money Stratippocles had borrowed
to buy Telestis.
The quick-thinking Epidicus comes up with another scheme; one which, as
Barbiero notes, is essentially a repetition or reverse of his first trick (see chapter 5
of her forthcoming book). Epidicus tells Periphanes (Stratippocles’s father) that
Stratippocles has borrowed a lot of money with the plan of buying a lyre-playing
courtesan (supposedly Acropolistis) so that he can set her free. Periphanes is
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horrified, and jumps at Epidicus’s plan, which is that Periphanes should buy the
woman before his son can and then sell her to a wealthy soldier so that she’ll be
out of Stratippocles’s reach. Periphanes gives Epidicus the money to make the
purchase, but Epidicus uses the money to pay off Stratippocles’s debt instead.
Meanwhile Epidicus hires a freedwoman (that is, a former slave) who is also a
lyre-player and brings her home to play the part of Acropolistis.
Epidicus may have temporarily achieved his aim (of getting Stratippocles
what he wants), but he knows that there is no way to prevent the truth from

6 Here the Latin is quite clear that rape is meant: Stratippocles says that he hasn’t used violence
nor violated her chastity (at pudicitiae eius numquam nec uim nec uitium attuli, line 110).

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 14 Epidicus by Plautus

coming out once the hired lyre-player is discovered not to be Acropolistis.

Indeed, when Periphanes tries to sell the false Acropolistis to a wealthy soldier
who had been planning on buying the real Acropolistis, he finds out that
Epidicus has tricked him. He doesn’t yet realize that he was also tricked into
thinking the real Acropolistis was his daughter Telestis, but that trick too is soon
discovered: Philippa, Telestis’s mother whom Periphanes had abandoned years
ago, arrives looking for her daughter whom she knows has been made a captive.
Periphanes happily tells her that he has Telestis safe in his house, but when
Philippa sees Acropolistis and of course knows she is not her daughter Telestis,
the truth comes out. Periphanes has now been tricked into giving up two large
sums of money to buy slave women who were not who he thought they were,
and he intends to punish Epidicus harshly.
Epidicus, knowing this, talks wildly of running away, but then he comes
face to face with the real Telestis, whom he has so far in the play only heard
about as an unnamed war captive (line 43). He recognizes her as his master’s
long-lost daughter and knows that Periphanes will forgive everything in his
joy at being reunited with her. Stratippocles isn’t pleased to find out that his
newly acquired courtesan is his own half-sister, but Epidicus tells him to make
do with Acropolistis. Epidicus then guilt-trips Periphanes into promising him
many rewards, and the play ends with the triumphant celebration of how the
clever slave won his freedom thanks to his own bad behaviour.

Loose Ends
Over a century of scholarship has reflected worries about the apparent loose
ends and small holes in the plot of Epidicus. Some people have been bothered
by the fact that we are not given the expected happy conclusion to the young
master’s love affair, for example. Stratippocles is left looking foolish, as the
object of his desire turns out to be his half-sister and therefore out of bounds,
and he does not respond with any obvious enthusiasm to Epidicus’s suggestion
at line 653 that he make do with Acropolistis after all. Another apparent loose
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end is the fact that the marriage of Periphanes and Philippa is not announced
with the fanfare we might expect (though probably Periphanes asking to take
Philippa’s hand at line 559 implies a marriage — see Maurice 2006: 42; James
2020: 114). Periphanes’s plan (line 190) to get his son Stratippocles married off
and thus to clear the way for Periphanes to marry Philippa is dropped without
any explanation. Epidicus’s original plan (lines 364–370) to trick the pimp into
playing a role in the fake purchase of the hired lyre-player is not mentioned
again (we don’t know if Epidicus ended up carrying out this part of his plan or
not). We don’t know if the Euboean soldier of line 153 is the same as the Rhodian
soldier of line 300, and if they are, why Epidicus refers to them by different

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 Introduction  15

demonyms. Epidicus’s plan to coach the hired lyre-player to convincingly play

the role of Acropolistis seems not to have been carried out, since the hired lyre-
player’s response to getting found out suggests instead that she was lied to
by Epidicus rather than coached to play a role. There is no explanation as to
how Epidicus thought he could sell Acropolistis to the rich soldier of line 153
when he has already convinced Periphanes that she is his daughter Telestis. We
never find out what is to happen to Acropolistis: will she become Stratippocles’s
concubine, or will Periphanes punish her for her part in Epidicus’s tricks by
sending her out of town as suggested in line 279?
Some of the loose ends might be due to abridgments of the play made
by later producers, to the loss of an original prologue and/or epilogue that
tidied up the loose ends, or to Plautus retaining only parts of a now lost Greek
original plot. Ultimately these loose ends shouldn’t matter, however. There is
certainly no need, as Niall Slater put it, to interpret the Epidicus as “a ham-fisted
re-writing of the ending of a lost Greek original” (Slater 2001: 191). Plautus’s
comic genius was to use the Greek plot lines as a jumping off point for the
exuberant interactions between the trickster and his dupes, so we ought not
to expect such a carefully constructed plot as we might find in Greek comedy.
Plautus, Malcolm Willcock rightly wrote, “is more concerned with vivid comic
scenes than with the antecedents of the plot, or for that matter the future of the
characters (Willcock 1995: 28).
The play should be evaluated on its own terms, as a Roman comedy. The
supposed problems may simply be due to a mistaken assumption by modern
critics that the plays of Plautus are fundamentally love stories. The Greek New
Comedies on which Roman comedy was based were, as Sharon James notes,
“a marriage-minded genre”, but in the plays of Plautus a concluding marriage
for the young man (adulescens) and the freeborn young woman (uirgo) is not
the primary goal (James 2020: 109). James argues that Plautus in fact had a
“constitutional lack of interest in setting up citizen marriages, families, and
social harmony”, and his plays were not focused on marriage as the happy
ending, even when the plot ended with a marriage (James 2020: 119).
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If, instead of focusing on the happy conclusion of the freeborn man’s love
affairs in Epidicus, we realize that the play is about the trickster Epidicus’s
impressive ability to outwit his masters, then the plot’s loose ends become
unimportant. “The very weakness of Epidicus’s plans” emphasizes his brilliance
in nevertheless achieving his ends (Maurice 2006: 43). Especially when seen
in performance, the Epidicus’s complicated plot and madcap approach to the
various tricks of the title character are unlikely to cause any real confusion, or
prevent readers or spectators from thoroughly enjoying the play.

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 16 Epidicus by Plautus

The Roman Theatre

What would a performance of a Plautus play have been like for late-third- /
early-second-century BCE Romans? For moral and political reasons, the Roman
senate refused to allow the building of any permanent theatres in the city of
Rome until the middle of the first century BCE. As a consequence, every time
plays were produced for one of the religious festivals a temporary wooden stage
was built, and possibly seating as well. References in Plautus’s plays make it fairly
clear that in his day most of his audiences were usually or always seated — this
was half a century before the senate attempted to ban the spectators from sitting
(Sear 2006: 55).7 For the original performances of Plautus’s plays either a stage
and seating was built for each dramatic festival, or a stage was built in front
of pre-existing seating, such as the steps of the temple for the deity in whose
honour the festival was being held. The seating area would not have been very
large: an estimate for the seating area at the Temple of Magna Mater where
Plautus’s Pseudolus was staged in 191 BCE suggests that the audience might
have been between 1300–1600 (Goldberg 1998: 14). The comparatively intimate
space for Roman plays (as opposed to the much larger spaces of Greek theatres)
would have allowed the actors, such as the speaker of the prologue, the hungry
hanger-on (parasitus, or “parasite”), or the wily slave, to create a rapport with
the audience (Moore 1998: 33).
Unlike Greek theatrical productions, which used both the lower orchestra
level and the raised stage, the plays of Plautus were staged on a single level,
intended to represent a street with one or more houses (Vitruvius 5.6.2). The
characters could go in and out of doors that led into the “houses”, or they could
move on and off stage from the right and left. The set for Epidicus had the house
of Periphanes on the spectators’ left and the house of Chaeribulus on their right;
the exit at stage left (to the spectators’ right)) represented the direction of the
forum, while the other exit (stage right) indicated the direction of the harbour
(Duckworth-Wheeler 1940: 97).
The troop of actors was called a grex, a Latin word also used to mean
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a “flock” or “herd” of animals. Amy Richlin draws a picture of how a troop

of actors might have looked in the middle of the third century BCE, touring
central Italy mostly on foot (Richlin 2017: 3–4). She suggests a group of eleven
men and boys, most of them not native Latin speakers. Five of them are slaves,
in Richlin’s scenario, owned by their fellow actors and trained from an early
age to perform on stage; several of those who aren’t slaves are former slaves

7 
There was a brief attempt in the middle of the second century BCE by the senate to require
spectators to stand during dramatic performances. Sitting down was deemed an immoral
luxury and was associated with Athenian democratic principles (Athenians sat at their
political assemblies, which seemed, to the oligarchic Roman senatorial class, to explain their
dangerously democratic approach to government — see Cicero Pro Flacco 16).

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 Introduction  17

(freedmen). The social status of actors was low, and they lived precarious lives
(Richlin pictures them as “hardly ever get[ting] enough to eat” - 3). In Plautus’s
play the Cistellaria, the grex speaks the final lines in unison, promising that the
actors who performed badly would be flogged, while those who had performed
well would get a drink (qui deliquit uapulabit, qui non deliquit bibet — 785). In
Plautus’s Casina the speaker of the prologue promises that the boy playing the
part of the young girl Casina will be available for paid sex after the play (lines
84–86). Even if these were just jokes they suggest that the enslaved actors, at
least, could face violence and exploitation in their jobs.
The status of the playwrights was also low, and their financial situation
precarious despite the money they could make selling their plays for
performances. An ancient tradition (Gellius, Noctes Atticae 3.3.14) tells us that
Plautus lost his savings and hired himself out to work at a mill, writing three
of his plays during this period of grueling labour. Richlin argues that, though
such backstories for ancient authors must be treated with skepticism, having
to resort to physical labour to make ends meet is plausible for a playwright
of Plautus’s independent status who had no patron to support him through
periods of financial disaster (Richlin 2017: 5–6).
By Plautus’s time there may have been twenty-five to thirty days per year
dedicated to theatrical performances in Rome (Marshall 2006: 19). Plays were
put on as part of the many state-sponsored religious festivals, and, as far as we
know, anyone could attend them free of charge. Slaves probably had to stand
at the back, but men and women could sit together and, though no doubt rich
theatre-goers tended to be able to get the best seats by sending slaves ahead to
reserve spaces for them, segregated seating for the senatorial class was not yet
official in Rome (Sear 2006: 2).8
Given that the class of the wealthiest Romans paid for the performances,
and that it is only because members of the elite valued Plautus that any of
his plays survive to this day, it is not unreasonable to assume that the plays
were composed for the elite, rather than for the less privileged members of the
audience (see especially McCarthy 2000 on this). Nevertheless, the enjoyment
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of the audience as a whole was important to the success of the performance,

which means that the plays were performed with an awareness of how they
might be received by rich and poor, slave owners and slaves, men and women.

8 
It may have been that case that, even before seats were officially reserved for senators in 194
BCE, no one would have dared to sit in front of the senators (Jocelyn 2001: 263 n.4).

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Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Latin Text of Epidicus
with Language Notes

From the Latin text of W. M. Lindsay,

with vocabulary and grammar help
by Catherine Tracy

[Note: for the acrostic argumentum (plot summary) that was added to the play perhaps
around 150 CE, see page 173]
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© 2021 Catherine Tracy, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0269.01

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Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Helpful Information for Reading
the Latin Text

Students who read the play in Latin will see that there are a few ways in which
this text differs from the Latin introduced in most beginners’ textbooks. This is
partly because, between the time of Plautus and the time of Cicero and Caesar,
the spelling of some Latin words changed, and partly because poetic Latin
retained some variant forms after they had disappeared from Latin prose. The
Latin of Plautus’s day is called “Early Latin”, as opposed to the later “Classical
Latin” that most Latin textbooks teach. The following points will enable readers
of the Latin text of Epidicus to take in their stride most of the quirks of Plautus’s
Latin as they appear in this play.
1. The letter “u”: When writing, the Romans did not distinguish between
the vowel “u” and the semivowel that was later written as “v” (which
was pronounced like our “w”), and the Latin text of the play used
in this volume (which is Lindsay’s widely used edition from 1903)
therefore uses the letter “u” for both the vowel and the semivowel.
When written in upper case both the vowel and the semivowel are
written like a capital “V”.
For example, in the word “iuuenis” (line 5 of the play), the first “u”
is a vowel, while the second is a semivowel, and it would consequently
be spelled “iuvenis” in most Latin textbooks (like its English derivative
“juvenile”). The reason introductory Latin textbooks distinguish
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between the two is because it is believed to help beginners learn how

to pronounce Latin correctly. Those whose Latin skills have reached
the point where they can read this play should have no real trouble
distinguishing the vowel “u” from the semivowel “u”.
2. Avoidance of “uu”: Early Latin tended to avoid placing the vowel “u”
immediately after another “u”. For this reason we find that “seruus”
(nominative singular) and “seruum” (accusative singular) in Plautus
are usually spelled “seruos” and “seruom”, respectively. Similarly
we see the Early Latin spellings “aequom”, “confluont”, “emortuom”,
“saluos”, “suom”, “tuom”, “uolt”, “uoltu”, etc. (instead of the Classical

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 22 Epidicus by Plautus

Latin spellings of these words: “aequum”, “confluunt”, “emortuum”,

“saluus”, “suum”, “tuum”, “uult”, “uultu”).
3. “Quo-/qu-” where you might expect “cu-”: the conjunction that was
later spelled “cum” is spelled “quom” in Early Latin (though the same
is not true for the preposition “cum”, which is so spelled in both Early
and Classical Latin). In this Latin text we also see “quoius/quoiius”,
“quoi”, “quor/qur”, and “utquomque” (instead of the Classical Latin
“cuius”, “cui”, “cur”, and “utcumque”).
4. “Qui” where you might expect “quo”, “qua” or “quibus”: the singular
and plural ablative forms of the relative and interrogative pronouns,
and of the interrogative adjective (which are normally “quo”, “qua”,
and “quibus”) can be instead written as “qui” in Plautus. Similarly in
this play we see “quicum” (instead of the more standard “quacum”)
and “aliqui” (instead of “aliquo”).
5. The spelling “-ei-” where you might expect “-ī-”: some words that, in
Classical Latin, came to be spelled with a long “i” were spelled instead
with “ei” in Early Latin; in this play we see “preimum”, “quei”, “sei”,
“seic”, “sein”, and “uestei” (instead of the Classical Latin “primum”,
“qui”, “si” “sic”, “si+ne”, and “uesti”).
6. The spelling of prepositional compounds: where a preposition has
become the prefix of a word, this Latin text preserves the original
spelling, so that we see “inmortales”, “adligabit”, and “adcurentur”
(instead of the Classical Latin “immortales”, “alligabit”, and
“accurentur”.)
7. “Aps”, “ap-” where you might expect “a”, “ab-”: the preposition “a”
(short for “ab”) before the word “te” was usually “aps” in the time of
Plautus. Prepositional compounds that in Classical Latin would begin
with “abs-” in Early Latin are spelled “aps-”; thus we see “apscedat”,
“apsentem”, “apsoluam”, “apstulit”, and “apsurde”, etc. (instead of the
Classical Latin “abscedat”, “absentem”, “absoluam”, “abstulit”, and
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“absurde).
8. Superlative adjectives/adverbs ending in “-umus” instead of
“-imus”, etc.: in Early Latin the superlative forms of adjectives and
adverbs were often spelled with a “-u-” for the penultimate vowel
instead of the “-i-” that was standard in Classical Latin. Hence in
this play we see the forms “festiuissumus”, “maxumae”, “meritissumo”,
“optuma”,“ planissume”, “proxumum”, etc. (instead of the Classical
Latin spellings “festiuissimus”, “maximae”, “meritissimo”, “optima”,
“planissime”, “proximum”).

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 Helpful Information for Reading the Latin Text  23

9. The syllable “uo-” where you might expect “ue-”: some words that
in Classical Latin include the syllable “ue-” (such as “uertere”) were
written instead with the syllable “uo-” (like “uortere”). Hence in this
play we find the forms “uorsutior”, “uortitur”, and “uotuit” (instead of
the Classical Latin “uertitur”, “uersutior”, and “uetuit”).
10. “Illic”, “istoc”, etc.: students will be familiar with the “-c” that ends
half of the Classical Latin forms of the demonstrative pronoun/
adjective “hic”, “haec”, “hoc”. This final “-c” (originally it was “-ce”)
could also be added, in Early Latin, to forms of “ille” and “iste”, so we
get “illic”, “illoc”, “istac”, “istaec”, “istanc”, “istoc”, “istuc”, etc. (instead
of the Classical Latin “ille”, “illo”, “istā”, “ista”, “istam”, “isto”, “istud”).
11. Variant verb forms:
a. Future in “-so”: in this play we see the alternate future forms
“faxo” (from “facio”) and “adempsit” (instead of adimet, from the
verb “adimo”). “Faxo” does not, however, simply substitute for
“faciam” (which Plautus uses in its essential future sense), but
tends to function as a statement of the speaker’s certainty, so
should be translated as “I promise” or “definitely”.
b. Future in “-asso”, “-assis”, etc.: in clauses introduced by si,
nisi, nei (ni), ubi, or siue, Plautus used an older form of the
future tense of some first-conjugation verbs by adding “-asso”,
“-assis”, “assit”, etc. to the stem; hence we find “commostrasso”,
“comparassit” and “orassis” (instead of the Classical Latin
“commonstrabo”, “comparabit”, and “orabis”).1
c. Future in “-ibo”, “-ibis”, etc.: the future tense signifier “-bi-”
which in Classical Latin is used only for the first and second
conjugations and in the verb “eo”, can also appear in Early Latin
in verbs of the fourth conjugation, so that in this play we see
“reperibitur”, “saeuibunt”, and “scibit” (instead of the Classical
Latin “reperietur, “saeuient”, and “sciet”).
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d. Imperfect in “-ibam”, etc.: The imperfect active forms of fourth-

conjugation verbs sometimes have no “-e-” before the tense
signifier “-ba-”; thus in this play we see the form “exaudibam”
(instead of the more standard “exaudiebam”).
e. Singular imperatives “face” and “duce”: whereas in Classical
Latin the singular imperatives of the verbs “dico”, “duco”, “facio”,

1 There is some scholarly uncertainty as to the mood and tense of these forms (see Duckworth-
Wheeler 1940: 178–179).

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 24 Epidicus by Plautus

and “fero” are“ dic”, “duc”, “fac”, and “fer”, respectively, in Early
Latin the forms “dice”, “duce”, and “face” (but not “fere”) could
be used. In this play we see “duce” and “dice” once each, and
“face” twice, but also “fac” several times.
f. “Euenat” and “euenant” instead of “eueniat” and “eueniant”:
the present subjunctive third-person singular and plural of the
verb “euenio” appears in Early Latin as “euenat” and “evenant”.
g. Present passive infinitive in “-ier”: Plautus sometimes used
an older form of the present passive infinitive, which ended in
“-er”, so that in this play we see “percontarier” and “praestolarier”
(instead of the Classical Latin “percontari” and “praestolari”).
h. Perfect system forms of “sum” in perfect passive tenses:
perfect passive forms of verbs that in Classical Latin use “sum”,
“eram”, or “ero” (indicative) or “sim”, “essem” (subjunctive)
sometimes use instead the perfect system forms “fui”, “fueram”,
“fuero” (indicative) and “fuerim”, “fuissem” (subjunctive). Thus
in this play we see “fuero elocutus” and “induta fuerit” (instead of
the Classical Latin “ero elocutus” and “induta sit”).
i. Present subjunctive of “sum”: alternative forms to the Classical
Latin “sim”, “sis”, “sit”, and “sint” often appear in Early Latin
as “siem”, “sies”, “siet”, and “sient” (in this play only “sies” and
“siet” appear).
12. Contractions: the final “-s” of words normally ending in “-us” or “-is”
was pronounced weakly enough that it did not affect the scansion of
the line the way a normal consonant would, and in this version of the
Latin text the weak final “-s” is not written. Hence we get “minu’”,
“dici’”, “rebu’”, and “priu’”, etc. (contracted from “minus”, “dicis”,
“rebus”, and “prius”).
For the same reason, a word ending in “-us” followed by the word
“es” or “est”, is written without the final “-s” of the first word and
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the initial “e-” of “es/est” when the meter requires it. Hence we get
“captiost”, “mercatust”, “timidu’s”, and “ueritust”, etc. (instead of
“captio est”, “mercatus est”, “timidus es”, and “ueritus est).
The initial “e-” of “es/est” when it follows a word ending in “-m”
or in a vowel was either not pronounced or pronounced very lightly,
and thus Lindsay’s text does not write that final “-e”. Hence we see
“corruptumst”, “ergost”, “tu’s”, and “ubist”, etc. (contracted from
“corruptum est”, “ergo est”, “tu es”, and“ubi est”).
When metrically necessary, the interrogatory suffix “-ne/-
n” is often shortened to “-n” even when not followed by a

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 Helpful Information for Reading the Latin Text  25

word beginning with a vowel, such as “nouistin” (instead of

“nouistine”), “meministin” (instead of “meministine”), “perpetuen”
(instead of “perpetuene”), and “men” (instead of “mene”).
A final “s” disappears before the suffix “-ne” (usually shorted to
“-n”), so that we get “ain”, “audin”, “patierin”, “potin”, “satine”, “scin”,
“uiden”, etc. (instead of “aisne”, “audisne”, “patierisne”, “potisne”,
“satisne”, “scisne”, and “uidesne”).
13. “Med” instead of “me”: Plautus at least sometimes used the Early
Latin ablative/accusative forms of the personal pronouns (med and
ted); in this play we find “med” instead of ”me” twice, though he used
“me” more commonly.
14. “-ii-” for the semivowel “-i-”: we see the forms “eiius”, “huiius”, and
“quoiius” (instead of the later spellings “eius”, “huius” and “quoius/
cuius”).
15. Poetic forms “mī” and “nīl”: Plautus used the forms “mī” and “nīl”
(for “mihi” and “nihil”) when the rhythm of the line required it.
16. Other common variant forms: Plautus preferred to use the variant
form “lubet” and its cognates (such as “lubens” and “lubentius”),
instead of the later spelling of these words with “lib-”. We also find
the spelling “sacruficas”, “periclum”, and “caussa” (which in Classical
Latin would be “sacrificas”, “periculum”, and “causa”).
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Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The Rhythm of Plautus

The actors in Plautus’s plays often broke into song, in a variety of very complicated
meters (“meter” refers to the rhythmic structure of the line) that continued the
play’s action rather than, like the choral interludes in Greek drama, being a
break from the action. Furthermore, much of the dialogue was sung or spoken
with accompaniment on one or more musical instruments (usually a woodwind
instrument called a tibia and some sort of percussion); these sections of sung or
chanted dialogue are commonly called in English “recitative”, like the “spoken”
parts of an opera that are sung to accompanying music but that are not self-
contained arias or songs. Songs and recitative made up nearly two-thirds of
the lines in Plautus’s plays, while the remaining third, written in a meter called
iambic senarii, was spoken without music (Duckworth 1952/1971: 363).
Those who want to experience Epidicus in at least some of its metrical
complexity are encouraged to consult a book on Latin meter (The Meters of Greek
and Latin Poetry by Halporn et al. is a good place to start2). Beginners who have
learned the basic rules of elision and vowel length should practice reading the
two most common meters of Plautus: trochaic septenarii (which was generally
recited or chanted to the music of the tibia), and the spoken passages in the
iambic senarius meter.

Trochaic Septenarii
A line of trochaic septenarii is theoretically made up of seven trochees plus an
additional anceps (either long or short) syllable at the end. A basic trochee is a
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long syllable followed by a short syllable (— ⋃), but in a line of Latin trochaic
septenarii the short syllable in the first six trochees can be either long or short.
An anceps syllable is usually represented by X, so that a trochee, where the
so-called short syllable is actually an anceps, would be symbolized like this:
— X.
Furthermore, since the important thing about syllable length in Latin meter
is literally how long it took to pronounce, two short syllables can replace a long

2 
Any good Latin grammar, such as Bennett’s New Latin Grammar or Allen & Greenough’s New
Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges, will provide a helpfully simplified explanation of Latin
meter.

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 28 Epidicus by Plautus

syllable, allowing a so-called trochee to potentially be replaced by a spondee

(— —), a dactyl (— ⋃ ⋃), an anapaest (⋃ ⋃ — ), a tribrach (⋃ ⋃ ⋃), or a
proceleusmatic (⋃ ⋃ ⋃ ⋃). That so many variations are possible may sound
anarchic, but with enough practice it is possible to get a sense of the unifying
rhythm that makes each line of trochaic septenarii distinct from the other
meters in the play. Plautus used meter changes to differentiate between different
characters and different aspects of his plays, so getting a feel for the rhythm will
add to an appreciation of the play.
Almost the whole of scene 2 in Act 1 (lines 104–163) is written in trochaic
septenarii. We can visualize the scansion of lines 104–105 as follows:

    
— | — | — | —— — | —— | — | X
rem tibi | s um elo- | -cutus | omnem Chaeri- | -bul e at- | -qu e admo- | -dum

  
—— | —— | — | —— — | —— | — | X
m e orum | maero- | -r um atqu e a- | -morum summ am e- | -dicta- | -ui ti- | -bi

• The letters printed in subscript are elided, which means they were
— either| barely pronounced,| or not
— —pronounced
— — at |all. X
  
— | — — |
quod pol e- | -go metu- | -o si | senex | resci- | -uerit
• A naturalpause in the line, where

a diaeresis (a word 
and the metrical
foot ending in the same
faci- place)
| -at qucoincides
us- | -quwith
atton- a |pause
-deant in the sense of
—— | — | — | — | —— | X
n ulmos
e | parasi- | -tos ae e

the line, is represented by this symbol: ║ and usually appears after

the fourth foot. This diaeresis is one of the distinct aspects of a line of
trochaic septenarii.
• In line 105, the “e” and the “o” of “meorum” are pronounced together
as a long syllable (this is called synizesis).
• The final syllable of a line of verse can be either long or short regardless
of the meter, since a1 reader or actor would pause at the ends of lines,
thereby effectually lengthening a short final syllable.

The following lines of Epidicus are in trochaic septenarii: 1–2; 23; 44–45; 50–51;
86; 88; 90; 91; 93; 95; 97; 99–163; 190–305; 333; 547–733.
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Iambic Senarii
A line of iambic senarii is theoretically made up of six iambs. A basic iamb is a
short syllable followed by a long: ⋃ —, but the “short” syllable of the iamb in
Roman comedy is an anceps (can be either long or short) in all but the last foot;
in fact, the anceps is more often long than short in Plautus’s iambic senarii. To
further complicate matters, any of the first four iambs in the line can be replaced
with a dactyl (a long followed by two shorts: — ⋃ ⋃) or with an anapaest (two
shorts followed by a long: ⋃ ⋃ —). Since a long syllable can be replaced by two

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 The Rhythm of Plautus  29

    
— | — | — | —— — | —— | — | X
shortrem
syllables
tibi | s(except
um elo- |for the
-cutusfinal |syllable
in a omnem line of
Chaeri- iambic
| -bul esenarii),
at- | -quone of
e admo- | -dum

Plautus’s
——
iambs
|
can
——
potentially
| —
 look like this: ⋃ ⋃ ⋃ ⋃.
| —— —

| —— | —

| X
We can visualize
m orum
e | maero- the
| -rscansion
atqu e a-of| lines
um 310–311,
-morum bothe-in| the
summ iambic
-dicta- | senarius
-ui ti-
am | -bi

meter, as follows:

  
— | — | — — | —— | —— | X
quod pol e- | -go metu- | -o si | senex | resci- | -uerit

   
—— | — | — | — | —— | X
n e ulmos | parasi- | -tos faci- | -at qu ae us- | -qu e atton- | -deant

• The prominent caesurae are here marked with the same notation as
for the diaeresis in the trochaic septenarii above: ║.
A caesura is the ending of a word in the middle of a foot; in Plautus
a line of iambic senarii usually has a prominent caesura (where a
pause in the sense of the line coincides with a caesura) in the third or
fourth foot. 1

The following lines of Epidicus are in iambic senarii: all of the Argumentum; 24;
46–47; 177; 306–319; 382–525.
A dedicated student of Plautine meter will eventually need to learn the more
complicated choral meters to fully experience the play, but beginners can start
slow, and there is no need to feel discouraged if you can’t scan a particular line.
Aim instead to acquire a sense of the rhythm by scanning the less complicated
lines. Timothy Moore’s article on introducing students to the music of Roman
comedy provides useful suggestions to instructors as to how best to approach
teaching scansion in Plautus (Moore 2013).
A word of encouragement: Latin poets took occasional liberties with the
strict rules of meter (see section 367: “Special Peculiarities” in Bennett’s New
Latin Grammar and Moore 2013: 229–230), which can make scansion more
complicated. Furthermore, the plays of Plautus have not come down to us
without numerous copying errors creeping in, and though experts attempt to fix
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these errors (and the faulty meter of a line can be a hint that an error has crept
in), sometimes it can be quite challenging to work out the meter of a line. If you
find you can’t scan a line properly, move on and try another.

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Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

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 The Play in Latin
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 PERSONAE

ACROPOLISTIS: FIDICINA (a lyre-player and female slave who was Stratippocles’s

girlfriend till just before the action of the play begins; she is first mentioned by
Epidicus in Act 1, scene 1 as the “fidicina” that Stratippocles ordered Epidicus to buy
for him)

APOECIDES: SENEX (an old man, friend of Periphanes, first appearing in Act 2, scene 1)

CHAERIBVLVS: ADVLESCENS (a freeborn young man, friend of Stratippocles, first

appearing in Act 1, scene 2)

DANISTA (the moneylender from whom Stratippocles borrowed in order to buy Telestis;
he first appears in Act 5, scene 1)

EPIDICVS: SERVOS (a male slave of Periphanes’s household who is the con-man hero
of the play)

FIDICINA (a freedwoman and professional musician who appears in Act 3, scene 4a)

MILES (a wealthy and boastful soldier, first appearing in Act 3, scene 4)

PERIPHANES: SENEX (an old man, father of Stratippocles, first appearing in Act 2,
scene 1)

PHILIPPA: MVLIER (a poor middle-aged woman, mother of Telestis; she first appears
in Act 4, scene 1)
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SERVOS (unnamed male slave belonging to Periphanes’s household who appears in

Act 3, scene 3)

STRATIPPOCLES: ADVLESCENS (a freeborn young man, son of Periphanes, who is

first mentioned in Act 1, scene 1, and first appears in Act 1, scene 2)

TELESTIS: VIRGO (a freeborn young woman, illegitimate daughter of Philippa and

Periphanes; Stratippocles, not knowing she is his half-sister, buys her as a war captive;
she first appears in Act 5, scene 1)

THESPRIO: SERVOS (a male slave of Periphanes’s household who appears in Act 1,

scene 1

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Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ACTVS I

1.1 EPIDICVS, THESPRIO

Scene summary: Thesprio, a slave in the Athenian household of Periphanes,
returns from Thebes where Periphanes’s son Stratippocles has been serving as
a soldier. He encounters Epidicus, another of Periphanes’s slaves, and the two
begin a comic routine, each insulting the other. We find out that Stratippocles
has abandoned his weapons in battle (showing us that he is a cowardly soldier),
and that he has borrowed a large sum of money with which he has bought a
young woman who was taken captive when the Athenian army had captured
Thebes. Epidicus is horrified because, before Stratippocles had left for the war,
his young master had been in love with a different young slave woman, a lyre-
player called Acropolistis. Stratippocles had insisted that Epidicus find a way to
buy Acropolistis for him while he was away in Thebes, and the clever, scheming
Epidicus had done so by tricking Periphanes into buying her, after making him
believe that Acropolistis was actually his long-lost illegitimate daughter Telestis.
The scene ends with Epidicus desperately trying to think of some way to get out
of the inevitable punishment he’ll get from Periphanes when his trick is found
out.

Epidicus: Heus,1 adulescens! Thesprio: quis properantem me

reprehendit pallio?
Epidicus: familiaris. Thesprio: fateor,2 nam odio es3 nimium
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familiariter.4
Epidicus: respice uero, Thesprio. Thesprio: oh,
Epidicumne ego conspicor?5

1 
heus: “hey!” (used to try to get someone’s attention).
2 
fateor, fateri, fassus sum: “admit”, “confess”.
3 
odio es (odio is dative of purpose): “you are an object of hatred”.
4 
familiaris… familiariter: this is a play on words: familiaris means “fellow slave”, while familiariter
means “on friendly terms”.
5 
conspicor, conspicari, conspicatus sum: “catch sight of”, “see”.

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 36 Epidicus by Plautus

Epidicus: sati’6 recte oculis uteris.7 5

Thesprio: salue. Epidicus: di dent quae uelis.
uenire saluom gaudeo.8 Thesprio: quid ceterum? Epidicus: quod eo
adsolet:9
cena tibi dabitur. Thesprio: spondeo — Epidicus: quid? Thesprio: me
accepturum,10 si dabis.
Epidicus: quid
tu agis?11 ut uales?12 Thesprio: ex- 9a
emplum adesse13 — Epidicus: intellego. eugae!14 9b
corpulentior uidere atque habitior. Thesprio: huic gratia.
15 16
10
Epidicus: quam quidem te iam diu
17

perdidisse18 oportuit.19 11a

Thesprio: minu’20 iam furtificus21 sum quam antehac. Epidicus: quid
ita?22 Thesprio: rapio propalam.23
Epidicus: di inmortales24 te infelicent,25 ut tu es gradibus grandibus!26
nam ut27 apud portum te conspexi, curriculo28 occepi29 sequi:

6 sati’ = satis: “enough”, “sufficiently”.

7 uteris (second-person singular present deponent indicative) < utor, uti, usus sum (+ ablative).
8 uenire saluom gaudeo: “I am glad that you’ve come home safe and sound” (a formulaic
greeting).
9 quod eo adsolet: “what’s usual with that [greeting]” (eo is an adverb here, meaning “there”, “in
that place”).
10 
spondeo me accepturum [esse] is an indirect statement.
11 
quid tu agis: “what’s up with you?” “how are you doing?”
12 
ut: “how”.
13 
exemplum adesse: “the very model of good health is before [you]” (the introductory verb is
missing from this indirect statement, or else Epidicus’s intellego is meant to complete it. I have
followed Duckworth-Wheeler in moving intellego from Thesprio’s line to Epidicus’).
14 eugae = euge (exclamation of approval or joy): “good”, “well done”.
15 
habitior (a comparative adjective < habeo): “better kept”, “in better condition.”
16 huic gratia: “thanks to this” (“this” refers to his left hand).
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17 
quam (fem. acc. sing. of the relative pronoun; the antecedent is huic in line 10).
18 
perdo, perdere, perdidi, perditus: “ruin”, “lose”.
19 oportuit (impersonal verb); translate here as “you ought”.
20 
minu’ = minus.
21 
furtificus, -a, -um: “thievish”, with the implication of furtive sneakiness.
22 
quid ita?: “why so?”
23 
propalam (adverb): “openly”, “publicly”.
24 
inmortales = immortales.
25 
infelico, -are: “grant bad luck”.
26 
gradibus grandibus < gradus, -us (m.): “step”, “stride” and grandis, -e (adjective): “huge”,
“enormous” (they are datives of reference); translate the phrase: “what enormous steps
you’re taking”.
27 
ut: “when”.
28 
curriculo (adverb): “by running”, “at full speed”.
29 
occipio, occipere, occepi / occoepi, occeptum: “begin”.

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ACTVS I  37

uix adipiscendi30 potestas modo fuit. Thesprio: scurra31 es. Epidicus: 15

scio
te esse equidem hominem militarem. Thesprio: audacter32 quamuis33
dicito.34
Epidicus: quid agis? perpetuen35 ualuisti? Thesprio: uarie.36 Epidicus:
qui uarie ualent,
capreaginum37 hominum non placet38 mihi neque pantherinum
genus.
Thesprio: quid tibi uis dicam nisi quod est? Epidicus: ut illae res *?39
Thesprio: probe.40
Epidicus: quid erilis41 noster filius? Thesprio: ualet pugilice atque 20
athletice. 42

Epidicus: uoluptabilem mihi nuntium tuo aduentu adportas,

Thesprio.
sed ubist43 is? Thesprio: aduenit simul.44 Epidicus: ubi is ergost?45 nisi
si in uidulo46
aut si in mellina47 attulisti. Thesprio: di te perdant! Epidicus: te
uolo —
percontari:48 operam da, opera reddetur tibi.49
Thesprio: ius 25

30 adipiscendi (gerund) < adipiscor, adipisci, adeptus: “overtake”, “catch up”.

31 scurra, -ae (m.): a fashionable man of the town; an idler.
32 audacter (adverb): “boldly”.
33 quamuis (adverb): “as much as you want”.
34 dicito (second-person singular future imperative active) < dico, dicere.
35 perpetuen = perpetue + ne (adverb): “continually”.
36 uarie (adverb): “so-so” (uarie could also mean “spotted” or “striped”, hence Epidicus’s
reference to (presumably spotted) goats and leopards. His joke refers to slaves being “striped”
due to having been severely beaten.
Copyright © 2021. Open Book Publishers. All rights reserved.

37 capreaginus, -a, -um: “goatlike”, “goaty” (modifies genus).

38 While placet is singular, its subject is nevertheless qui uarie ualent.
39 ut illae res* (some word(s) missing): “how did it go?”.
40 probe: “fine”.
41 erilis, -e (adjective): “relating to the erus (master)”.
42 pugilice atque athletice: “like a boxer and like an athlete”.
43 ubist = ubi est.
44 simul (adverb): “right now”, “at the same time”.
45 ergost = ergo est.
46 uidulus, -i (m.): “suitcase”.
47 mellina, -ae (f.): a bag made of the skin of a marten or badger (meles).
48 percontari is a complementary infinitive after uolo; te is the direct object of percontari.
49 operam da, opera reddetur tibi: literally “pay attention, [and] attention will be paid to you”. This
seems to have been a formulaic phrase used in the law courts, which is why Thesprio jokes
about ius in the next line.

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 38 Epidicus by Plautus

dicis. Epidicus: me decet.50 Thesprio: iam tu autem 25a

nobis praeturam geris? Epidicus: quem
51 52
25b
dices53 digniorem esse hominem hodie Athenis54 alterum?
Thesprio: at unum a praetura tua,
Epidice, abest.55 Epidicus: quidnam?56 Thesprio: scies: 27a
lictores duo, duo ulmei
57 58
27b
fasces uirgarum.59 Epidicus: uae tibi!
sed quid ais? Thesprio: quid rogas? Epidicus: ubi arma sunt
Stratippocli?60
Thesprio: pol61 illa ad hostis62 transfugerunt.63 Epidicus: armane?64 30
Thesprio: atque quidem cito. 65

Epidicus: serione66 dici’67 tu? 30a

Thesprio: serio, inquam: hostes habent. 31
Epidicus: edepol facinus inprobum. Thesprio: at iam ante alii
68 69 70

fecerunt idem.71
erit illi illa res honori.72 Epidicus: qui? Thesprio: quia ante aliis fuit.73

50 Epidicus says me decet probably because ius dicis sounds a bit like the name Epidicus (it’s the
sort of terrible joke that an audience will enjoy because it’s so terrible).
51 nobis praeturam geris: “you’re acting the praetor for us”.
52 quem... hominem... alterum: “what other man”.
53 dices introduces indirect discourse with the infinitive esse. The accusative subject of esse is
quem… hominem… alterum.
54 Athenis (locative).
55 The subject of abest is unum, in line 27.
56 quidnam (from quisnam, quidnam, a more emphatic version of quis, quid).
57 Lictors were officials whose job was to walk in front of magistrates to give them status and
authority. Lictors carried bundles of sticks (sometimes including a double axe head) called
fasces, which symbolized the magistrate’s authority to scourge and even execute citizens.
The urban praetor had two lictors, while the ruling consul had twelve. The modern term
“fascism” comes from the Roman fasces.
58 ulmeus, -a, -um: “[made of] elm wood”.
59 uirga, -ae (f.): “sticks,” “rods”.
60 Stratippocli (dative) < Stratippocles, -is.
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61 pol: “by Pollux” (see note 8 on page 131 for the use of the swear words pol and edepol).
62 hostīs (accusative plural).
63 transfugio, -ere, -fugi, – : “go over to the enemy”, “desert”.
64 armane = arma + ne (making the sentence into a question).
65 cito (adverb): “quickly”, “speedily”.
66 serio (adverb): “seriously”.
67 dici’ = dicis.
68 edepol: “by Pollux”.
69 facinus inprobum = facinus improbum (accusative of exclamation): “what a shameful deed!”,
“what a crime!”
70 iam ante: “before now”.
71 idem: “the same thing”.
72 honori (dative of purpose); erit illi illa res honori “that affair will end up honourably for him”.
73 quia ante aliis fuit: “because it has ended up honourably for others before him”. This may be
a disparaging reference to the fugitives from the Battle of Cannae who were thought to have

Tracy, Catherine. Epidicus by Plautus : An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation, Open Book Publishers, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ACTVS I  39

Mulciber,74 credo, arma fecit quae habuit Stratippocles:

trauolauerunt75 ad hostis.76 Epidicus: tum ille prognatus77 Theti78 35
sine79 perdat:80 alia adportabunt81 ei Neri82 filiae.
id modo uidendum est, ut83 materies84 suppetat85 scutariis,86
si in singulis87 stipendiis88 is ad hostis89 exuuias90 dabit.
Thesprio: supersede91 istis rebu’92 iam. Epidicus: tu ipse ubi lubet93
finem face.94
Thesprio: desiste percontarier.95 Epidicus: loquere96 ipse: ubist97 40
Stratippocles?
Thesprio: est caussa qua caussa98 simul mecum ire ueritust.99
Epidicus: quidnam100 id est?

been honoured undeservedly for their defeat (see Duckworth-Wheeler 1940: 125).
74 Mulciber, Mulciberis (m.): another name for Vulcan, the Roman blacksmith god, and god of
fire generally.
75 trauolauerunt = transuolauerunt < transuolo, -are, -aui, -atus: “fly across”.
76 hostīs (accusative plural).
77 prognatus, -a, -um: “sprung from”, “descended from” (followed by the ablative; the word was
archaic even in Plautus’s time, and is here intended to parody the language of tragedy or
epic — see de Melo 2013: 340).
78 Theti: alternative ablative form of Thetis, Thetidis (f.), the name of a sea goddess, mother of the
Greek hero Achilles.
79 sine (second-person singular present imperative active) < sino, sinere, siui, situm: “allow”,
“permit”.
80 sine perdat: “let [that son of Thetis] lose [them].
81 adportabunt = apportabunt.
82 Neri (alternative genitive singular form of Nereus, a sea god and father of Thetis).
83 uidendum est introduces the ut clause (construction found only in Plautus).
84 materies, -ei (f.): “wood”, “material” [for making shields].
85 suppeto, -ere, -iui, -itus (+ dative): “be at hand”, “be equal to”, “be sufficient for”, “agree
with”.
86 scutarius, -i (m.): “shield-maker” (the scutarii probably refer to the divine helpers of Vulcan).
87 singuli, -ae, -a: “each”, “every”.
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88 stipendium, -i (n.): “military campaign”.

89 ad hostis: “to the enemy” (we would expect hostibus, dative of indirect object).
90 exuuiae, -arum (f.): “spoils”, “booty”.
91 supersedeo, -sedere, -sedi, -sessus: “be superior to”, “refrain from” + ablative.
92 rebu’ = rebus.
93 lubet = libet: “it is pleasing”; ubi lubet: “whenever you want”.
94 face = fac < facio, -ere, feci, factum.
95 percontarier = percontari.
96 loquere (second-person singular present imperative deponent) < loquor, loqui, locutus sum.
97 ubist = ubi est.
98 est caussa quā caussā = est causa quā causā: “there is a reason [that he’s not here] and it’s
because…”.
99 ueritust = ueritus est (perfect passive participle masculine nominative singular) < uereor,
uereri, ueritus sum.
100 
quidnam (from quisnam, quidnam, a more emphatic version of quis, quid).

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 40 Epidicus by Plautus

Thesprio: patrem uidere se neuolt101 etiamnunc. Epidicus:

quapropter?102 Thesprio: scies.
quia forma lepida et liberali103 captiuam adulescentulam104
de praeda105 mercatust.106 Epidicus: quid ego ex te audio? Thesprio:
hoc quod fabulor.107
Epidicus: qur108 eam emit? Thesprio: animi109 caussa.110 Epidicus: 45
quot illic 111
homo animos habet?
nam certo,112 priu’ quam113 hinc114 ad legionem abiit domo,
ipse mandauit115 mihi ab lenone116 ut fidicina,117
quam amabat, emeretur sibi. id118 ei impetratum119 reddidi.120
Thesprio: utquomque121 in alto122 uentust,123 Epidice, exim124 uelum125
uortitur.126
Epidicus: uae misero mihi, male perdidit me! Thesprio: quid istuc?127 50
quidnam | est?

101 
neuolt = non uult.
102 
quapropter: “why?” “for what reason?”.
103 
formā lepidā et liberali (ablative of description).
104 
adulescentula, -ae (f.): “young woman”, “teenaged girl”.
105 
de praeda: “from the spoils/booty [he acquired from the campaign]”.
106 
mercatust = mercatus est < mercor, -ari, -atus sum: “buy”.
107 
hoc quod fabulor: “what I’m telling you.”
108 
qur = cur.
109 
animus, -i (m.): (in this context) “pleasure”, “whim”.
110 
caussa = causa.
111 
illic = ille.
112 
certo: “certainly”.
113 
priu’ quam = prius quam: “before”.
114 
hinc: “from this place”, “from here”, “hence”.
115 
mandauit mihi […] ut fidicina emeretur sibi (indirect command): “he ordered me to buy a
lyre-player”.
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116 
leno, -onis (m.): “pimp”, “brothel keeper”.
117 
fidicina, -ae (f.): a woman trained in playing the lyre, who was usually a slave or freedwoman
and who was assumed, like all female performers, to be a sex worker.
118 
id (refers to the act of buying the fidicina).
119 
impetro, -are, -aui, -atum: “achieve”, “bring to pass”.
120 
reddo, -ere, reddidi, redditus: (in this context) “render”, “cause [something] to be”. The phrase
id ei impetratum reddidi should be translated “I made it happen for him” or “I did what he
asked.”
121 
utquomque = utcumque: “however”, “whichever way”.
122 
altum, -i (n.): “the sea”.
123 
uentust = uentus est; uentus, -i (m.): “wind”.
124 
exim (adverb): “so”, “in that way”.
125 
uelum, -i (n.): “sail”.
126 
uortitur = uertitur < uerto, -ere, uerti, uersum: “turn”, “direct”.
127 
quid istuc: “what are you talking about”.

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 ACTVS I  41

Epidicus: quid128 istanc129 quam emit, quanti130 eam emit? Thesprio:

uili.131 Epidicus: haud istuc te rogo.132
Thesprio: quid igitur? Epidicus: quot133 minis?134
Thesprio: tot: quadraginta135 minis. 52a
id adeo 136
argentum 137
ab danista 138
apud Thebas 139
sumpsit 140
faenore
141

in dies minasque argenti singulas nummis.142 Epidicus: papae!143

Thesprio: et is danista aduenit una144 cum eo, qui argentum petit. 55
Epidicus: di inmortales! ut ego interii 145
basilice! 146
Thesprio: quid
iam? aut quid est,
Epidice? Epidicus: perdidit147 me. Thesprio: quis? Epidicus: ille qui
arma perdidit.
Thesprio: nam quid ita? Epidicus: quia cottidie ipse ad me ab legione
epistulas
mittebat — sed taceam optumum est,
plus scire satiust148 quam loqui seruom hominem;149 ea sapientia est. 60
Thesprio: nescio edepol quid [tu] timidu’s, 150
trepidas, 151
Epidice, ita
uoltu 152
tuo

128 
quid: “anyway”.
129 
istanc = istam (here intensifying quam): “that girl whom [he bought]”.
130 
quanti (genitive of indefinite price): “for how much [money]”.
131 
uilis, -e (adjective): “[for a] cheap [price]”.
132 
haud istuc te rogo: “that’s not what I’m asking you.”
133 
quot: “how many” is answered by Thesprio with tot: “this many” (no doubt illustrating the
number with his fingers).
134 
minis (ablative of price) < mina, -ae (f.): a Greek unit of money equivalent to 430g of silver.
135 
quadraginta (indeclinable): “forty”.
136 
adeo: “precisely”, “exactly”.
137 
id adeo argentum: “this exact amount of money”.
138 
danista, -ae (m.): “moneylender”.
139 
apud Thebas: “in Thebes”.
140 
sumo, -ere, sumpsi, sumptum: “obtain”, “get”.
141 
faenus, faenoris (n.): “interest”, “usury”.
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142 
nummus, -i (m.): “coin” (possibly a sestertius, a small silver coin, theoretically equal to 2.5
grams of silver); in dies minasque argenti singulas nummis: “at the rate of a sestertius a day for
each silver mina” (this is an extortionate rate of interest).
143 
papae: an expression of surprise, or, as in this case, of horror.
144 
unā: “at the same time”, “along with him”.
145 
intereo, interire, interiui / interii, interitus: “perish”, “die”, “be ruined”.
146 
basilice (adverb): “royally, “completely”.
147 
perdo, perdere, perdidi, perditus: “ruin”, “lose” (note that the same word is used in different
ways here and at the end of this line, but the pun is difficult to replicate in English).
148 
satiust = satius est; satius = comparative form of satis: “better”.
149 
plus scire satiust quam loqui seruom hominem: “it is enough for a slave to know more than he says
[aloud]”; seruom = seruum; hominem is in apposition to seruom.
150 
timidu’s = timidus es.
151 
trepido, -are, -aui, -atum: “tremble”, “be in a state of anxiety”.
152 
uoltu = uultu from uultus, -us (m.): “face”, “expression”. The manuscript tradition has uoltum
tuom, which Lindsay retains, but the emendation to uoltu tuo makes more sense.

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päinvastoin kirkon tulee sulkea itseensä koko valtio eikä vain saada
siitä jokin nurkka ja että jos tämä jostakin syystä nyt on mahdotonta,
niin, asiain todellisen laadun mukaan arvostellen, se on ehdottomasti
pantava kristillisen yhteiskunnan koko seuraavan kehityksen
suoranaiseksi ja tärkeimmäksi päämääräksi.

— Aivan oikein, — lausui lujasti ja hermostuneesti isä Paísi,

harvapuheinen ja oppinut pappismunkki.

— Puhtainta ultramontaanisuutta! — huudahti Miusov asettaen

kärsimättömästi jalan toisen jalkansa päälle.

— Heh, eihän meillä ole vuoriakaan! — huudahti isä Josef ja jatkoi

kääntyen luostarinvanhimman puoleen: — He vastaavat muun
muassa vastustajansa, hengelliseen säätyyn kuuluvan henkilön —
huomatkaa se — seuraaviin »oleellisiin ja perusmielipiteisiin».
Ensiksi: siihen, että »ei yksikään yhteiskunnallinen liittymä voi eikä
sen pidä omistaa itselleen valtaa — käyttää jäsentensä kansalais- ja
valtiollisia oikeuksia». Toiseksi: että »rikosoikeudellinen ja
siviilioikeudellinen tuomiovalta ei saa kuulua kirkolle eikä ole
sopusoinnussa sen luonteen kanssa, se kun on jumalallinen laitos ja
ihmisten yhteenliittymä uskonnollisia tarkoitusperiä varten». Ja
vihdoin kolmanneksi: siihen, että »kirkko on valtakunta, joka ei ole
tästä maailmasta»…

— Mitä arvottominta sanoilla leikkimistä pappismiehen puolelta! —

keskeytti taas isä Paísi malttamatta olla ääneti. — Minä olen lukenut
tämän kirjan, jota vastaan te olette esittänyt väitteitä, — sanoi hän
kääntyen Ivan Fjodorovitšin puoleen, — ja minua ihmetyttivät
hengenmiehen sanat, että »kirkko on valtakunta, joka ei ole tästä
maailmasta». Jos se ei ole tästä maailmasta, niin sitä siis ei voi olla
maan päällä ollenkaan olemassa. Pyhän evankeliumin sanoja: »ei
tästä maailmasta» on käytetty väärässä merkityksessä. Tuollaisilla
sanoilla leikkiminen ei käy laatuun. Meidän Herramme Jeesus
Kristus tuli nimenomaan perustamaan kirkkoa maan päälle. Taivaan
valtakunta tietysti ei ole tästä maailmasta, se on taivaassa, mutta
siihen ei voi päästä muuta tietä kuin kirkon kautta, joka on perustettu
ja asetettu maan päälle. Ja sentähden ovat maalliset sanaleikit tässä
mielessä mahdottomia ja arvottomia. Kirkko on todellakin valtakunta,
ja sen määränä on hallita, ja lopulta sen täytyy epäilemättä olla
valtakuntana koko maan päällä, — siitä on meillä olemassa lupaus…

Hän vaikeni äkkiä aivan kuin hilliten mieltään. Ivan Fjodorovitš,

joka oli kuunnellut häntä kunnioittavasti ja tarkkaavasti, jatkoi erittäin
levollisesti, mutta edelleenkin halukkaasti ja vilpittömästi,
luostarinvanhimman puoleen kääntyen:

— Minun kirjoitukseni pääajatus on se, että muinoin kristityn ajan

ensimmäisinä kolmena vuosisatana kristillisyys maan päällä ilmeni
vain kirkkona ja oli vain kirkko. Mutta kun Rooman pakanallinen
valtakunta tahtoi tulla kristityksi, niin kävi pakostakin niin, että
tultuaan kristityksi se vain sulki itseensä kirkon, mutta jäi edelleen
entiseen tapaan pakanalliseksi valtakunnaksi hyvin monissa
toimissaan. Todellisuudessa epäilemättä pitikin näin käydä. Mutta
Roomassa valtiona säilyi sangen paljon pakanallista sivistystä ja
viisautta, kuten esimerkiksi itse valtion tarkoitusperät ja perusteet.
Kristuksen kirkko taas ei valtioon astuttuaan epäilemättä voinut
luovuttaa mitään perustastaan, siitä kivestä, jolle se rakentuu, eikä
voinut tavoitella muuta kuin omia tarkoitusperiään, jotka Herra itse
kerran sille oli määrännyt ja osoittanut, muun muassa: muuttaa koko
maailma ja siis koko muinainen pakanallinen valtio kirkoksi. Näin
ollen (tulevaisuuteen nähden) ei kirkon tule etsiä itselleen määrättyä
paikkaa valtiossa niinkuin »jokainen yhteiskunnallinen liittymä» tai
»ihmisten yhtymä uskonnollisia tarkoitusperiä varten» (kuten kirkosta
lausuu tekijä, jota vastaan väittelen), vaan päinvastoin jokaisen
maallisen valtion pitäisi vastaisuudessa täydelleen muuttua kirkoksi
eikä olla mitään muuta kuin vain kirkko sekä luopua kaikista
päämääristään, jotka eivät ole sopusoinnussa kirkollisten kanssa.
Eikä tämä kaikki millään tavoin sitä alenna, ei riistä sen arvoa ja
kunniaa suurena valtiona, ei sen valtiaitten kunniaa, vaan ainoastaan
johdattaa sen valheelliselta, vielä pakanalliselta ja väärältä tieltä sille
ainoalle oikealle ja totiselle tielle, joka vie iäisiin päämääriin.
Tämänpä vuoksi »Kirkollis-yhteiskunnallisen tuomioistuimen
perusteet» nimisen kirjan tekijä arvostelisi oikein, jos hän etsiessään
ja esitellessään noita perusteita pitäisi niitä väliaikaisena, meidän
syntisenä ja täyttymisen hetkestä kaukana olevana aikanamme vielä
välttämättömänä kompromissina eikä minään muuna. Mutta heti kun
näitten perusteitten keksijä uskaltaa julistaa, että perusteet, joita hän
nyt esittää ja joista osan äsken juuri isä Josef luetteli, ovat
järkähtämättömiä, alkuaineisia ja ikuisia perusteita, niin hän
suorastaan on ristiriidassa kirkon sekä sen pyhän, ikuisen ja
järkähtämättömän tehtävän kanssa. Siinä on koko kirjoitelmani,
täydellinen selostus siitä.

— Se on lyhyesti sanoen, — alkoi isä Paísi taas puhua pannen

painoa joka sanalle, — että eräitten teoriain mukaan, jotka ovat kovin
hyvin selvinneet yhdeksännellätoista vuosisadallamme, kirkon on
muututtava valtioksi aivan kuin kehittyen alemmasta olotilasta
korkeampaan ja sitten hävittävä siihen väistyen tieteen, ajanhengen
ja sivistyksen tieltä. Jos se ei tahdo sitä tehdä ja panee vastaan, niin
sille suodaan sen takia valtiossa vain jokin nurkka, ja siinäkin se on
valvonnan alaisena. Näin on kaikkialla meidän aikanamme
nykyaikaisissa eurooppalaisissa maissa. Venäläisen käsitystavan ja
vahvan toivon mukaan taas ei kirkon ole muututtava valtioksi
ikäänkuin kehittyen alemmasta tyypistä korkeammaksi, vaan
päinvastoin valtion pitää lopulta päästä siihen, että se voi muuttua
ainoastaan kirkoksi eikä miksikään muuksi. Niin tapahtuukin, niin
tapahtuu!

— No, myönnänpä teidän nyt minua hiukan rohkaisseen, —

naurahti Miusov siirtäen taas toisen jalkansa toisen päälle. — Mikäli
ymmärrän, on tässä siis kysymyksessä jonkin äärettömän kaukaisen
ihanteen toteuttaminen tulevan ajan jälkeen. Kernaasti minun
puolestani. Ihana haaveellinen unelma sotien, diplomaattien,
pankkien y.m. katoamisesta. Jotakin semmoista, mikä muistuttaa
sosialismiakin. Minä luulen, että se oli vakava asia ja että kirkko nyt
esimerkiksi rupeaa tuomitsemaan rikosasioissa ja määräämään
raippoja ja pakkotyötä, ehkäpä myös julistamaan kuolemantuomioita.

— Jos nyt jo olisi olemassa vain kirkollisyhteiskunnallinen

tuomioistuin, niin kirkko ei nytkään lähettäisi pakkotyöhön eikä
tuomitsisi kuolemaan. Rikoksen ja mielipiteitten siitä täytyisi silloin
epäilemättä muuttua, tietysti vähitellen, ei äkkiä ja heti, mutta
kuitenkin jokseenkin pian… — lausui Ivan Fjodorovitš rauhallisesti ja
silmää räpäyttämättä.

— Tosissanneko te? — kysyi Miusov katsoen häneen pitkään.

— Jos kaikki olisi kirkkoa, niin kirkko erottaisi yhteydestään

rikollisen ja tottelemattoman, mutta ei silloin hakkaisi ihmisiltä päätä
pois, — jatkoi Ivan Fjodorovitš. — Kysyn teiltä, mihin tuolla tavoin
pannaanjulistettu menisi? Silloinhan hänen pitäisi poistua ei vain
ihmisten yhteydestä, kuten nyt, vaan myös Kristuksen yhteydestä.
Hänhän ei olisi rikoksellaan noussut kapinaan ainoastaan ihmisiä,
vaan myöskin Kristuksen kirkkoa vastaan. Onhan tarkasti ottaen
asian laita nytkin niin, mutta sitä ei ole kuitenkaan julistettu, ja
nykyajan rikoksentekijän omatunto ryhtyy usein ja useimmiten
tinkimään: »varastin, mutta en toimi kirkkoa vastaan, en ole
Kristuksen vihollinen», näin puhelee itselleen nykyajan rikollinen aina
ja kaikkialla, no, mutta kun kirkko tulee valtion sijalle, silloin hänen
olisi vaikeata sanoa näin, jos ei tahdo kieltää koko kirkkoa koko
maan päällä: »kaikki (muka) erehtyvät, kaikki ovat joutuneet
harhaan, kaikki kuuluvat valheelliseen kirkkoon, minä, murhaaja ja
varas, yksinäni muodostan oikean kristillisen kirkon». Onhan hyvin
vaikeata sanoa itselleen näin, se vaatii harvinaisen suuria
mahdollisuuksia sekä semmoisia olosuhteita, jommoisia ei usein
satu. Asettukaapa nyt toiselta puolen kirkon katsantokannalle
rikokseen nähden: eikö nykyisen, miltei pakanallisen katsantokannan
pidä muuttua toiseksi, ja eikö sen sijaan, että taudin saastuttama
jäsen mekaanisesti hakataan pois, niinkuin nykyisin tehdään
yhteiskunnan varjelemiseksi, ole tuleva, vieläpä täydellisesti eikä
valheellisesti, ihmisen uudestisyntymisen aate, hänen
ylösnousemuksensa ja pelastuksensa aate…

— Mitä tuo toisin sanoen oikein on? En taaskaan enää ymmärrä,

— keskeytti Miusov, — taaskin jokin haave! Se on jotakin
muodotonta, jota ei voi ymmärtääkään. Millainen yhteydestä
erottaminen, mikä pannaanjulistus? Epäilenpä, että te vain puhelette
huviksenne, Ivan Fjodorovitš.

— Oikeastaanhan on asia nytkin aivan samalla tavalla, — alkoi

yht'äkkiä luostarinvanhin puhua, ja kaikki kääntyivät heti häneen
päin. — Jos nimittäin nyt ei olisi Kristuksen kirkkoa, niin ei olisi
mitään, mikä pidättäisi rikollista pahasta teosta, eikä edes
rangaistusta rikoksesta, nimittäin todellista rangaistusta, ei
mekaanista, kuten he äsken juuri sanoivat, joka mekaaninen
rangaistus useimmissa tapauksissa vain vihoittaa sydämen, vaan
puuttuisi todellinen rangaistus, se, joka yksin vaikuttaa, joka yksin
peloittaa ja sovittaa, nimittäin oman omantunnon tietoisuus.

— Kuinka siis tarkoitatte, saanko kysyä? — kysyi Miusov osoittaen

mitä vilkkainta mielenkiintoa.

— Kas tällä tavalla, — alkoi vanhus. — Kaikki nuo pakkotyöhön

lähettämiset, joihin ennen liittyi pieksäminen, eivät paranna ketään
eivätkä, mikä on tärkeintä, peloita juuri ainoatakaan rikoksentekijää,
eikä rikosten lukumäärä ollenkaan vähene, vaan on aikojen kuluessa
yhä kasvanut. Täytyyhän teidän olla samaa mieltä. Ja tulokseksi
tulee, että yhteiskuntaa ei tällä tavalla ollenkaan saada varjelluksi,
sillä vaikka vahingollinen jäsen hakataankin pois mekaanisesti ja
lähetetään kauas pois näkyvistä, niin hänen sijaansa ilmestyy heti
uusi rikollinen tai mahdollisesti kaksikin. Jos mikään suojelee
yhteiskuntaa meidänkin aikanamme ja myös parantaa
rikoksentekijän tehden hänestä uuden ihmisen, niin se taaskin on
ainoastaan Kristuksen laki, joka tunnetaan omassatunnossa. Vain
tuntiessaan syyllisyytensä Kristuksen yhteiskunnan, toisin sanoen
kirkon poikana rikollinen voi tuntea syyllisyytensä itse
yhteiskunnankin, se on kirkon, edessä. Näin ollen nykyaikainen
rikoksentekijä kykenee ainoastaan kirkon edessä tuntemaan
syyllisyytensä eikä valtion edessä. Jos nyt yhteiskunta kirkkona
käyttäisi tuomiovaltaa, niin silloin se tietäisi, kenet se voi vapauttaa
pannasta ja ottaa taas yhteyteensä. Nyt sensijaan kirkko, jolla ei ole
minkäänlaista varsinaista tuomiovaltaa, vaan ainoastaan siveellisen
tuomitsemisen mahdollisuus, vetäytyy itsekin pois rikollisen
tehokkaasta rankaisemisesta. Kirkko ei erota rikoksentekijää
yhteydestään, ei jätä häntä ilman isällistä ohjaustaan. Vieläpä
enemmänkin: se koettaa säilyttää rikollisen kanssa kaiken kristillisen
kirkollisen yhteyden, päästää hänet kirkollisiin jumalanpalveluksiin ja
osalliseksi pyhistä sakramenteista, antaa hänelle almuja ja kohtelee
häntä enemmän epävapaan kuin syyllisen tavoin. Ja miten
kävisikään rikollisen, oi Jumala! jos kristillinen yhteiskuntakin, toisin
sanoen kirkko, hylkäisi hänet samalla tavoin kuin hänet hylkää ja
hakkaa pois maallinen laki? Miten kävisi, jos kirkkokin rankaisisi
häntä yhteydestään erottamisella heti ja joka kerta kun valtio on
antanut tuomionsa? Ei voisi joutua syvempään epätoivoon ainakaan
venäläinen rikoksentekijä, sillä venäläiset rikoksentekijät vielä
uskovat. Kukapa muuten tietää: kenties silloin tapahtuisi kauhea
asia, — rikollisen epätoivoisesta sydämestä kenties katoaisi usko, ja
mikä siitä olisi seurauksena? Mutta kirkko hellänä ja rakastavana
äitinä itse luopuu käyttämästä tehokasta rangaistusta, koska valtion
tuomioistuin on jo ilman kirkon rangaistusta liian kipeästi rangaissut
syyllistä, ja edes jonkun täytyy häntä sääliä. Mutta etupäässä se
luopuu rangaistuksesta sen tähden, että kirkon tuomio on ainoa
tuomio, johon sisältyy totuus, eikä se tämän vuoksi voi oleellisesti
eikä siveellisesti yhtyä mihinkään toiseen tuomioon, ei edes
väliaikaiseen kompromissiin. Tässä ei voi enää ruveta tinkimään.
Ulkomainen rikollinen, niin kerrotaan, harvoin katuu, sillä kaikkein
nykyaikaisimmatkin opit vahvistavat sitä hänen ajatustaan, että
hänen rikoksensa ei ole rikos, vaan ainoastaan
epäoikeudenmukaisesti häntä sortavan voiman vastustamista.
Yhteiskunta hakkaa hänet irti itsestään täysin mekaanisesti
voimallaan, joka on suurempi kuin hänen, ja tämän erottamisen
lisäksi se vihaa häntä (näin he ainakin itse kertovat itsestään
Euroopassa), — vihaa ja on täysin välinpitämätön hänen
myöhemmästä kohtalostaan ja unohtaa hänet, veljensä. Näin kaikki
tapahtuu ilman vähintäkään kirkollista sääliä, sillä useissa
tapauksissa ei siellä enää ollenkaan ole kirkkoja, on jäänyt jäljelle
vain kirkon miehiä ja komeita kirkkorakennuksia, mutta itse kirkot
ovat jo kauan pyrkineet siirtymään alemmasta, kirkon muodosta
ylempään, valtion muotoon, hävitäkseen kokonaan siihen. Niin
näyttää olevan asian laita ainakin luterilaisissa maissa. Roomassa
on näin jo tuhat vuotta ollut kirkon sijalla valtio. Siksi rikoksentekijä
itse ei enää käsitä olevansa kirkon jäsen ja erillään siitä on
epätoivoinen. Jos hän taas palaa yhteiskuntaan, niin hän usein on
täynnä niin suurta vihaa, että itse yhteiskunta tavallaan erottaa hänet
yhteydestään. Miten tämä päättyy, sen voitte itse ymmärtää. Useissa
tapauksissa näyttävät meillä asiat olevan samalla tavoin. Mutta
siinäpä se onkin, että meillä paitsi tavallisia tuomioistuimia sen
lisäksi vielä on kirkkokin, joka ei koskaan menetä yhteyttään
rikollisen kanssa, pitää häntä rakkaana ja yhä edelleenkin
kallisarvoisena poikanaan, ja tämän lisäksi on olemassa ja säilyy,
vaikkapa vain ajateltuna, myöskin kirkon tuomiovalta, jota tosin nyt ei
käytetä, mutta joka yhä elää tulevaisuutta varten, jos ei muuten niin
unelmana, ja jonka itse rikoksentekijäkin epäilemättä sydämensä
vaiston vaikutuksesta tunnustaa. Totta on sekin, mitä täällä äsken
sanottiin, nimittäin että jos kirkon tuomiovalta todellakin tulisi
käytäntöön kaikessa voimassaan, toisin sanoen, jos koko
yhteiskunta muuttuisi vain kirkoksi, niin kirkon tuomio vaikuttaisi
rikollisen parantumiseen aivan toisenlaisessa määrässä kuin mitä se
nyt tekee, vieläpä kenties tosiaan rikosten lukumääräkin vähenisi
uskomattoman pieneksi. Ja kirkkokin, siitä ei ole epäilystä,
ymmärtäisi tulevaisuudessa rikollisen ja tulevaisuuden rikoksen
monissa tapauksissa aivan toisin kuin nyt ja osaisi palauttaa erotetun
yhteyteensä, ehkäistä rikosta suunnittelevan teon ja saada
langenneen uudestisyntymään. Tosin, — vanhus hymähti, —
kristillinen yhteiskunta ei nyt vielä itsekään ole valmis ja on vain
seitsemän vanhurskaan varassa, mutta koska nämä eivät väsy, niin
se pysyy yhä järkähtämättömänä odotuksessaan, että se
täydellisesti uudistuu siten, että yhteiskunnasta, joka on vielä miltei
pakanallinen liitto, tulee yksi ainoa, yleismaailmallinen ja hallitseva
kirkko. Niin tapahtuukin, tapahtuu, vaikkapa vasta aikojen lopussa,
sillä vain tämä on määrätty tapahtumaan! Eikä ole syytä olla levoton
aikojen ja määrähetkien takia, sillä ajat ja hetket määrää Jumalan
viisaus, Hänen kaikkitietäväisyytensä ja Hänen rakkautensa. Ja mikä
inhimillisen arvioinnin mukaan kenties vielä on hyvinkin kaukana, se
saattaa Jumalan ennaltamääräyksen mukaan olla toteutumisensa
aaton edessä, aivan ovella. Tämä viimeksimainittu tapahtuu,
tapahtuu.

— Tapahtuu! Tapahtuu! — vakuutti hartaasti ja vakavana isä Paísi.

— Omituista, mitä suurimmassa määrässä omituista! — lausui

Miusov ei vain kiihkeästi, vaan ikäänkuin salaa mielessään
paheksuen.

— Mikä teistä näyttää niin omituiselta? — tiedusti isä Josef

varovasti.

— Mitä tämä sitten oikein on? — huudahti Miusov aivan kuin olisi
äkkiä alkanut purkaa mieltään. — Maan päältä poistetaan valtio, ja
kirkko koroitetaan valtion arvoon! Tämä ei ole enää
ultramontaanisuutta, tämä on enemmän kuin ultramontaanisuutta!
Paavi Gregorius seitsemäs ei olisi osannut uneksia tuommoisesta!

— Suvaitsette ymmärtää aivan päinvastoin! — lausui isä Paísi

ankarasti. — Ei kirkko muutu valtioksi, ymmärtäkää se. Se on
Rooma ja sen unelma. Se on perkeleen kolmas viettelys.
Päinvastoin valtio muuttuu kirkoksi, kohoaa kirkon tasalle ja tulee
kirkoksi koko maan päällä, — mikä on aivan päinvastaista kuin
ultramontaanisuus ja Rooma ja teidän tulkintanne, ja siinä on
oikeauskoisuuden suuri tehtävä maan päällä. Idästä tämä tähti
nousee.

Miusov vaikeni merkitsevästi. Koko hänen muotonsa ilmaisi

tavatonta oman arvon tuntoa. Ylpeän alentuvainen hymy ilmestyi
hänen huulilleen. Aljoša seurasi kaikkea kovasti sykkivin sydämin.
Koko tämä keskustelu kuohutti häntä sydämen pohjaa myöten. Hän
sattui katsahtamaan Rakitiniin. Tämä seisoi liikkumatta entisellä
paikallaan oven suussa kuunnellen ja katsellen kaikkea
tarkkaavaisesti, vaikka silmät olivatkin alas luodut. Mutta poskien
hehkuvasta punasta Aljoša arvasi, että Rakitinkin oli kuohuksissaan,
nähtävästi yhtä paljon kuin hänkin. Aljoša tiesi, miksi hän oli levoton.

— Sallikaa minun kertoa teille eräs pikku anekdootti, hyvät herrat,

— lausui äkkiä Miusov merkitsevästi ja omituisella tavalla arvokkaan
näköisenä. — Pariisissa minä muutama vuosi sitten, kohta joulukuun
kumouksen jälkeen, kävin tervehtimässä erästä tuttuani, erittäin
huomattavaa ja siihen aikaan johtavassa asemassa olevaa henkilöä,
ja kohtasin hänen luonaan erään sangen mielenkiintoisen herran.
Tämä individi oli jonkinmoinen valtiollisen poliisikomennuskunnan
päällikkö, omalla tavallaan varsin vaikutusvaltainen virkamies.
Käyttäen tilaisuutta hyväkseni minä tyydyttääkseni suurta
uteliaisuuttani ryhdyin hänen kanssaan puheisiin. Koska hän ei ollut
tullut taloon tuttuna, vaan alemmassa asemassa olevana
virkamiehenä, joka oli tullut antamaan määrätynlaatuisen
selostuksen, niin hän puolestaan, nähdessään, millä tavoin hänen
esimiehensä suhtautui minuun, oli minua kohtaan jonkin verran
avomielinen, — no, tietysti vain jossakin määrin, hän oli, niin
sanoakseni, pikemmin kohtelias kuin avomielinen, juuri sillä tavoin
kuin ranskalaiset osaavat olla kohteliaita, sitäkin suuremmalla syyllä,
kun hän näki, että olin muukalainen. Mutta minä ymmärsin hänet
hyvin hyvästi. Oli puhe sosialistivallankumouksellisista, joita silloin
muun muassa vainottiin. Jättäen syrjään keskustelun varsinaisen
sisällyksen mainitsen nyt vain yhden sangen mielenkiintoisen
huomautuksen, joka äkkiä pääsi tuon herrasmiehen suusta: »Me»,
sanoi hän, »oikeastaan emme kovin paljon pelkää kaikkia noita
sosialisteja, anarkisteja, jumalankieltäjiä ja vallankumouksellisia. Me
pidämme heitä silmällä ja tunnemme heidän pyrkimyksensä. Mutta
heidän joukossaan on, vaikkakin vain pieni määrä, jonkin verran
erikoisia ihmisiä: ne uskovat Jumalaan ja ovat kristittyjä, mutta
samalla he myös ovat sosialisteja. Näitäpä juuri me eniten
pelkäämme, ne ovat peloittavaa väkeä! Kristitty sosialisti on
peloittavampi kuin jumalankieltäjä sosialisti.» Nuo sanat
hämmästyttivät jo silloin minua, ja nyt teidän luonanne, hyvät herrat,
ne äkkiä johtuivat mieleeni…

— Siis te sovitatte ne meihin ja pidätte meitä sosialisteina? —

kysyi isä Paísi suoraan ja kiertelemättä. Mutta ennenkuin Pjotr
Aleksandrovitš pääsi selville, mitä hän vastaisi, avautui ovi ja sisään
astui Dmitri Fjodorovitš, joka oli näin paljon myöhästynyt. Häntä oli
oikeastaan jo lakattu odottamasta, ja hänen äkillinen saapumisensa
synnytti ensihetkessä jonkin verran ihmettelyäkin.

6.

Miksi sellainen ihminen elää!

 Dmitri Fjodorovitš, kahdenkymmenenkahdeksan vuoden ikäinen
nuori mies, joka oli keskikokoinen ja jolla oli miellyttävät kasvot,
näytti paljon vanhemmalta kuin oli. Hän oli vahvajäntereinen, ja
saattoi nähdä, että hänellä oli huomattavat ruumiinvoimat, mutta
kuitenkin hänen kasvoissaan kuvastui jotakin sairaalloista. Hänen
kasvonsa olivat laihat, posket olivat kuopalla, ja niiden värissä oli
sairaalloisen keltainen vivahdus. Suurenpuoleiset, tummat,
pullottavat silmät näyttivät katselevan lujan itsepintaisesti, mutta
niiden katse oli samalla jollakin tavoin epämääräinen. Silloinkaan
kun hän oli kiihdyksissä ja puhui suuttuneesti, ei hänen katseensa
oikein näyttänyt mukaantuvan hänen sisäisen mielentilansa mukaan,
vaan ilmaisi jotakin muuta, toisinaan semmoista, mikä ei ollenkaan
ollut siihen hetkeen kuuluvaa. »On vaikea tietää, mitä hän ajattelee»,
sanoivat joskus ne, jotka puhelivat hänen kanssaan. Tapahtui, että
jotkut, jotka näkivät hänen silmissään jotakin miettivää ja juroa, äkkiä
hämmästyivät hänen odottamatonta nauruaan, joka todisti hänen
ajatelleen jotakin iloista ja leikillistä juuri silloin, kun hän oli niin juron
näköinen. Muuten saattoi jossakin määrin sairaalloinen leima hänen
kasvoissaan tällä hetkellä olla ymmärrettävä: kaikki tiesivät tai olivat
kuulleet erittäin remuisasta ja »ryypiskelevästä» elämästä, johon hän
juuri viime aikoina oli antautunut, samoinkuin kaikki tunsivat sen
tavattoman kiihtymyksen, jonka valtaan hän oli joutunut riidellessään
isänsä kanssa kiistanalaisista rahoista. Kaupungilla kerrottiin jo
useita juttuja siitä. Totta oli, että hän kyllä jo luonnostaankin oli
ärtyisä, »hillitön ja epäsäännöllinen älyltään», kuten hänestä
kuvaavasti lausui rauhantuomarimme Semjon Ivanovitš Katšaljnikov
eräässä seurassa. Hän astui sisälle moitteettomasti ja muodikkaasti
puettuna, nuttu kiinninapitettuna, käsissä mustat hansikkaat ja
silkkihattu. Äskettäin palveluksesta eronneena sotilaana hän oli
antanut viiksiensä kasvaa ja ajanut partansa. Hänen tummanruskea
tukkansa oli lyhyeksi leikattu ja sillä tavoin kammattu, että ohimoilla
olevat hiukset olivat eteenpäin kääntyneet. Hän kulki päättävästi,
leveästi, niinkuin rintamassa. Hetkeksi hän pysähtyi kynnykselle ja
luotuaan silmäyksen kaikkiin meni suoraan luostarinvanhimman luo
arvaten, että hän oli isäntä. Hän kumarsi syvään vanhukselle ja pyysi
siunausta. Vanhus nousi seisomaan ja siunasi häntä. Dmitri
Fjodorovitš suuteli kunnioittavasti hänen kättään ja lausui hyvin
kiihtyneenä, melkein suutuksissaan:

— Suokaa hyväntahtoisesti anteeksi, että olen antanut näin kauan

odottaa! Mutta palvelija Smerdjakov, jonka isäukko lähetti, vastasi,
kun täsmällisesti kysyin häneltä aikaa, minulle kaksi kertaa hyvin
varmalla äänellä, että on määrätty kello yhdeksi. Nyt saan äkkiä
kuulla…

— Älkää olko millännekään, — keskeytti luostarinvanhin, — ei tee

mitään, viivästyitte hiukan, ei se haittaa…

— Olen teille erittäin kiitollinen enkä vähempää voinut odottaakaan

hyvyydeltänne. — Tokaistuaan tämän lauselman Dmitri Fjodorovitš
kumarsi vielä kerran, kääntyi sitten äkkiä »isäukkoonsa» päin ja
kumarsi tällekin yhtä kunnioittavasti ja syvään. Näkyi, että hän oli
harkinnut tuon kumarruksen jo edeltäpäin ja päättänyt sen
vilpittömällä mielellä pitäen velvollisuutenaan sillä tavoin ilmaista
kunnioituksensa ja hyvät aikomuksensa. Fjodor Pavlovitš, vaikka
tämä olikin hänelle yllätys, säilytti kuitenkin omalla tavallaan
mielenmalttinsa: Dmitri Fjodorovitšin kumarruksen johdosta hän
hypähti seisomaan ja vastasi pojalleen yhtä syvällä kumarruksella.
Hänen kasvonsa tulivat äkkiä arvokkaan ja vakavan näköisiksi, mikä
kuitenkin teki hänet ehdottomasti häijyn näköiseksi. Tervehdittyään
sitten yhteisesti kaikkia huoneessa-olijoita kumarruksella Dmitri
Fjodorovitš astui pitkin ja päättäväisin askelin ikkunan luo, istuutui
ainoalle vapaana olevalle tuolille isä Paísin läheisyyteen ja ojentaen
koko ruumistaan tuolilla eteenpäin valmistautui heti kuuntelemaan
keskeyttämänsä keskustelun jatkoa.

Dmitri Fjodorovitšin tulo ei ollut vienyt kuin pari minuuttia, ja

keskustelun täytyi viritä uudelleen. Mutta isä Paísin itsepintaiseen ja
miltei ärsyttävään kysymykseen ei. Pjotr Aleksandrovitš tällä kertaa
katsonut tarpeelliseksi vastata.

— Sallikaa minun jättää tämä puheenaihe, — lausui hän

jonkinmoisella maailmanmiehen huolimattomuudella. — Sitäpaitsi
tämä aihe ei ole mutkallinen. Tuossa Ivan Fjodorovitš hymähtelee
meille: luultavasti hänellä on jotakin mielenkiintoista lausuttavana
tästäkin kohdasta. Kysykää häneltä.

— Ei mitään erikoista, vain pieni huomautus, — vastasi heti Ivan

Fjodorovitš, — ja se koskee sitä, että yleensä eurooppalainen
liberalismi ja myös meikäläinen venäläinen liberaalinen diletantismi
usein ja jo kauan on sekoittanut sosialismin ja kristinopin lopulliset
tulokset toisiinsa. Tämä kummallinen johtopäätös on tietysti kuvaava
piirre. Muuten eivät sosialismia ja kristinoppia sekoita, kuten on
nähty, ainoastaan liberaalit ja diletantit, vaan yhdessä heidän
kanssaan monissa tapauksissa myös santarmit, tietysti
ulkomaalaiset. Teidän pariisilainen anekdoottinne on varsin
luonteenomainen, Pjotr Aleksandrovitš.

— Yleensä pyydän vieläkin saada jättää tämän kysymyksen, —

toisti Pjotr Aleksandrovitš, — ja sen sijaan minä kerron teille, hyvät
herrat, toisen anekdootin Ivan Fjodorovitšista itsestään, sangen
kiintoisan ja kuvaavan. Siitä ei ole sen enempää kuin viisi päivää,
kun eräässä täkäläisessä seurassa, jossa oli etupäässä naisia, hän
väitellessään juhlallisesti julisti, että koko maailmassa ei ole
olemassa kerrassaan mitään, mikä saisi ihmiset rakastamaan
kaltaisiaan, että sellaista luonnonlakia, joka panisi ihmisen
rakastamaan ihmiskuntaa, ei ensinkään ole olemassa ja että jos on
ja tähän saakka on ollut rakkautta maan päällä, niin sitä ei ole ollut
luonnonlain vaikutuksesta, vaan yksinomaan sen vuoksi, että ihmiset
ovat uskoneet omaan kuolemattomuuteensa. Ivan Fjodorovitš lisäsi
samalla sivumennen, että siinä juuri koko luonnonlaki onkin, niin että
jos hävitätte ihmiskunnasta uskon kuolemattomuuteensa, niin
samassa loppuu sekä rakkaus että kaikki muukin elävä voima, joka
tekee kykeneväksi jatkamaan maallista elämää. Eikä siinä kyllin:
silloin ei enää ole olemassa mitään epäsiveellistä, kaikki on sallittua,
yksinpä antropofagia. Eikä vielä siinäkään kyllin, vaan hän vakuutti
lopuksi, että jokaisen yksityisen ihmisen kohdalta, esimerkiksi
semmoisten kuin me nyt, joka ei usko Jumalaan eikä omaan
kuolemattomuuteensa, luonnollisen siveyslain täytyy heti muuttua
täydelliseksi vastakohdaksi entiselle, uskonnolliselle, ja että aina
konnuuteen asti menevä itsekkyys on jokaiselle ihmiselle luvallinen,
vieläpä se juuri on tunnustettava välttämättömäksikin, kaikkein
järkevimmäksi ja melkeinpä jaloimmaksi ratkaisuksi hänen
asemassaan. Tämmöisestä paradoksista voitte päätellä, hyvät
herrat, millaista on kaikki muu, mitä suvaitsee julistaa ja mitä ehkä
kauankin aikoo julistaa rakas eksentrikkomme ja paradoksalistimme
Ivan Fjodorovitš.

— Sallikaa kysyä, — huudahti aivan odottamatta Dmitri

Fjodorovitš, — jotta en kuulisi väärin: »konnuutta ei ainoastaan ole
sallittava, vaan se on tunnustettava kaikkein välttämättömimmäksi ja
järkevimmäksi ratkaisuksi jokaisen jumalankieltäjän asemassa»!
Oliko se niin vai eikö?
 — Juuri niin, — sanoi isä Paísi.

— Panen sen mieleeni.

Tämän lausuttuaan Dmitri Fjodorovitš vaikeni yhtä äkkiä kuin oli

puuttunut keskusteluun. Kaikki katsoivat häneen uteliaina.

— Onko teillä todellakin tuollainen vakaumus siitä, mitä seuraa,

jos ihmiset menettävät uskon sielunsa kuolemattomuuteen? — kysyi
äkkiä luostarinvanhin Ivan Fjodorovitšilta.

— Niin, sitä minä vakuutin. Ei ole hyvettä, jos ei ole

kuolemattomuutta.

— Onnellinen te, jos niin uskotte, tai sitten hyvin onneton!

— Minkä tähden onneton? — kysyi Ivan Fjodorovitš hymyillen.

— Sen tähden, että luultavasti itse ette usko sielunne

kuolemattomuuteen ettekä edes siihen, mitä kirjoititte kirkosta ja
kirkollisesta kysymyksestä.

— Kenties olette oikeassa!… Mutta kuitenkaan minä en puhunut

myöskään vain pilaa… — lausui äkkiä Ivan Fjodorovitš tehden
omituisen tunnustuksen ja äkkiä punastuen.

— Ette puhunut vain pilaa, se on totta. Tämä idea ei ole vielä

selvinnyt teidän sydämessänne ja kiusaa sitä. Mutta kiusatustakin on
toisinaan hauskaa huvitella epätoivollaan aivan kuin tekisi sen
epätoivoissaan. Toistaiseksi epätoivo saa teidätkin huvittelemaan —
sekä aikakauslehtiin kirjoittamalla että väittelemällä seuroissa, vaikka
ette usko omaa dialektiikkaanne, vaan kirvelevin sydämin nauratte
sille itseksenne… Teissä tämä kysymys ei vielä ole ratkaistu, ja siinä
on teidän suuri surunne, sillä se vaatii välttämättömästi ratkaisua…

— Mutta voiko se minussa tulla ratkaistuksi? Myönteiseen

suuntaan ratkaistuksi? — jatkoi Ivan Fjodorovitš omituista kyselyään
katsellen kaiken aikaa vanhusta selittämätön hymy huulillaan.

— Jos ei voi tulla ratkaisua myönteiseen suuntaan, niin ei koskaan

tule ratkaisua myöskään kielteiseen suuntaan, tunnettehan itse
tämän sydämenne ominaisuuden, ja siinäpä koko sen kärsimys
onkin. Mutta kiittäkää Luojaa, joka on antanut teille ylevän sydämen,
semmoisen, joka kykenee tuollaista kärsimystä tuntemaan,
»tavoitella ja etsiä niitä, kuin ylhäällä ovat, sillä meidän
asuinpaikkamme on taivaassa». Suokoon Jumala teidän sydämenne
päästä ratkaisuun jo maan päällä ja siunatkoon Jumala teidän
tienne!

Vanhus kohotti kätensä ja aikoi paikaltaan siunata ristinmerkillä

Ivan Fjodorovitšia. Mutta tämä nousi äkkiä tuoliltaan, astui hänen
luokseen, otti vastaan hänen siunauksensa ja suudeltuaan hänen
kättään palasi äänettömänä paikalleen. Hän oli lujan ja vakavan
näköinen. Tämä teko ja koko edellinen keskustelu vanhuksen
kanssa, jommoista ei Ivan Fjodorovitšilta voitu odottaa,
hämmästyttivät kaikkia salaperäisyydellään ja eräänlaisella
juhlallisuudellaan, niin että kaikki vaikenivat hetken ajaksi ja Aljošan
kasvoissa kuvastui miltei pelästys. Mutta äkkiä Miusov kohautti
olkapäitään, ja samalla hetkellä Fjodor Pavlovitš hypähti tuoliltaan.

— Jumalallinen ja pyhä vanhus! — huudahti hän ja osoitti Ivan

Fjodorovitšia. — Tämä on minun poikani, liha minun lihastani, minun
rakkain jälkeläiseni! Tämä on minun mitä kunnioitettavin, niin
sanoakseni, Karl Moor, mutta tuo poikani, joka juuri tuli sisälle, Dmitri
Fjodorovitš, ja jota vastaan etsin teiltä oikeutta, — hän on kaikkea
muuta kuin kunnioitettava Franz Moor, — molemmat Schillerin
Rosvoista, kun taas minä itse näin ollen olen Regierender Graf von
Moor! Tuomitkaa ja pelastakaa! Emme tarvitse ainoastaan
rukouksianne, vaan myöskin profeetallista toimintaanne.

— Puhukaa hassuttelematta, älkääkä aloittako loukkaamalla

omaisianne, — vastasi vanhus heikolla, väsyneellä äänellä.
Nähtävästi hän alkoi uupua yhä enemmän ja hänen voimansa olivat
ilmeisesti loppumassa.

— Arvotonta ilveilyä, minkä aavistin jo tänne tullessani! —

huudahti Dmitri Fjodorovitš paheksuen ja hypähti myös paikaltaan.
— Suokaa anteeksi, arvoisa isä, — hän kääntyi luostarinvanhimman
puoleen, — minä olen sivistymätön mies enkä edes tiedä, miten teitä
on nimitettävä, mutta teidät on petetty ja te olitte liian hyvä, kun
sallitte meidän kokoontua luoksenne. Isäukko tahtoo vain
skandaalia, mitä varten — sen hän tietänee itse. Hänellä on aina
omat laskelmansa. Mutta luulenpa nyt tietävänikin, mitä hän tahtoo…

— Kaikki minua syyttävät, kaikki nuo! — huusi vuorostaan Fjodor

Pavlovitš. — Myös Pjotr Aleksandrovitš syyttää. Syytitte, Pjotr
Aleksandrovitš, syytitte! — kääntyi hän äkkiä Miusovin puoleen,
vaikka tällä ei ollut aikomustakaan keskeyttää hänen puhettaan. —
Syyttävät minua siitä, että olen muka piilottanut lasten rahat
saappaanvarteen ja ottanut ruplan ruplalta. Mutta hyväinen aika,
eikö ole olemassa tuomioistuinta? Siellä lasketaan teille, Dmitri
Fjodorovitš, teidän omien kuittienne, kirjeittenne ja sopimustenne
mukaan, kuinka paljon teillä on ollut, kuinka paljon olette kuluttanut
ja paljonko teillä on jäljellä! Miksi Pjotr Aleksandrovitš ei tahdo
lausua tuomiota? Hän tuntee Dmitri Fjodorovitšin. Sen tähden, että
kaikki tahtovat käydä kimppuuni, mutta Dmitri Fjodorovitš on
lopputilissä minulle velkaa, eikä niin vähänkään, vaan useita
tuhansia, mihin minulla on kaikki paperit! Koko kaupunkihan tärisee
ja kaikuu hänen ryyppyretkistään! Mutta siellä, missä hän
aikaisemmin palveli, siellä hän sai maksaa tuhat ruplaa ja
kaksituhatta kunniallisten neitojen viettelemisestä. Sen me
tiedämme, Dmitri Fjodorovitš, kaikkein salaisimpia yksityiskohtia
myöten, ja minä näytän sen toteen… Pyhä isä, uskotteko: hän sai
itseensä rakastumaan jalosukuisen neidon, hyvästä perheestä ja
varakkaan, jonka isä oli hänen entinen esimiehensä, urhoollinen
eversti, ansioitunut mies, jolla oli kaulassa Annan ritarikunnan tähti
miekkoineen, häpäisi tytön kosimalla häntä, nyt tyttö on täällä, nyt
hän on orpo, tuo hänen morsiamensa, mutta hän käy tämän nähden
erään täkäläisen viettelijättären luona. Vaikka tämä viettelijätär onkin
elänyt niin sanoakseni siviiliavioliitossa erään kunnioitetun miehen
kanssa, niin hän on luonteeltaan itsenäinen, hän on kaikille
valloittamaton linnoitus, aivan samanlainen kuin laillinen vaimo, sillä
hän on hyveellinen, — niin, pyhät isät, hän on hyveellinen! Mutta
Dmitri Fjodorovitš tahtoo avata tämän linnoituksen kultaisella
avaimella, siksi hän nyt rehentelee minulle, tahtoo riistää minulta
rahoja ja onkin jo tuhlannut tuhansia tälle viettelijättärelle. Sitä varten
hän ottaa yhtä mittaa rahoja, muun muassa arvaatteko keneltä!
Sanonko sen vai enkö, Mitja?

— Suu kiinni! — huudahti Dmitri Fjodorovitš. — Odottakaa,

kunnes poistun, mutta älkää uskaltako minun läsnäollessani tahria
jalosukuista tyttöä… Jo sekin, että uskallatte ynähtää hänestä, on
hänen häpäisemistään… Minä kiellän!

Hän läähätti.
 — Mitja! Mitja! — huudahti Fjodor Pavlovitš heikkohermoisen
tavoin ja pusertaen kyyneliä silmistään. — Eikö isän siunaus
merkitse mitään? Entäpä jos kiroan sinut, miten silloin käy?

— Häpeämätön mies ja teeskentelijä! — kiljaisi Dmitri Fjodorovitš

raivoissaan.

— Näin hän puhuu isästään, isästään! Kuinka sitten muitten

kanssa? Hyvät herrat, ajatelkaahan: täällä on köyhä, mutta kelpo
mies, entinen kapteeni, hänelle kävi huonosti ja hänet erotettiin
virasta, mutta ei julkisesti, ei oikeudenkäynnin kautta, vaan hänen
kunniansa säilyi tahrattomana. Hänellä on suuri perhe niskoillaan.
Kolme viikkoa sitten meidän Dmitri Fjodorovitš kapakassa tarttui
hänen partaansa, veti hänet parrasta kadulle ja pieksi häntä kadulla
kaiken kansan nähden, ja tämän kaiken hän teki sen tähden, että
mies on minun salainen asiamieheni eräässä asiassani.

— Se on kaikki valhetta! Pinnalta totta, sisältä valhetta! — huusi

Dmitri Fjodorovitš vihasta vavisten. — Isä, minä en puolusta tekojani.
Niin, kaiken kansan nähden tunnustan sen: minä käyttäydyin
petomaisesti tuota kapteenia kohtaan ja olen nyt pahoillani ja inhoan
itseäni petomaisen vihani takia, mutta tuo teidän kapteeninne, teidän
asiamiehenne, meni tuon saman rouvan luo, jota te sanotte
viettelijättäreksi, ja alkoi ehdotella hänelle teidän puolestanne, että
hän ottaisi teidän hallussanne olevat vekselini ja antaisi minulle
haasteen saadakseen minut näitten vekselien perusteella
vankeuteen, jos minä liiaksi ahdistan teitä koettaessanne anastaa
omaisuuden. Nyt te moititte minua siitä, että olen mieltynyt tähän
rouvaan, vaikka te itse opetitte häntä viekottelemaan minua!
Kertoohan hän itse sen päin naamaa. Hän kertoi sen minulle pilkaten
teitä! Vankeuteen taas te tahdotte toimittaa minut ainoastaan sen
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