#plautus

[latin-literature-tourney]

Latin Literature Tournament - Round 2

Propaganda under the cut!

Seneca the Younger Propaganda:

Seneca my chronically ill beloved...

His tragedies are the rawest, most gut-wrenching, and visceral pieces in pre-modern drama. His Oedipus is so fucking gnarly and it's my favorite thing ever written

I think he's super underrated as an innovator of form and genre. Between his Epistulae Morales and his tragic corpus, he was really just fucking around in the coolest way

Plautus Propaganda:

This is some of the oldest Latin we have, giving us insights into both archaic and colloquial Latin

His writing is really cleverly idiosyncratic and vibrant, with a lot of fun wordplay and neologisms

Plautus' influence on subsequent comedy can't be overstated--commedia dell'arte, Shakespeare, early sitcoms, it's all just Plautus

[hexjulia]

some incredible insults in Plautus

[sen-de-oku]

Yüreğimiz var ama yüreğimizi dayayacak yer yok.

Plautus

[gwydpolls]

Time Travel Question 58: Performances IV

These Questions are the result of suggestions from the previous iteration.

This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct grouping.

Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration.

*The Broadway Premiere names were lost over a year ago because I didn't realize how big this was until I'd spent several hours on first day telemetry for the very first Time travel poll.

Please Feel Free to share ones you want to see for future polls.

[underratedalpaca]

We're doing Plautus' comedy "Menaechmi" in my Latin class, and we will probably do a rappresentation of it, and, I'm in charge of the changes in the script, (to make it more 2024-ish) and I'm so happyyyyyy

[fluentisonus]

(^ narration by the lar in the prologue)

re: how easily you could reread roman comedy as horror thinking about this bit & the way the whole plot of the aulularia is set in motion because the household god wants to reward the daughter of the house for her devotion to him, so he decided to help her situation (she has been raped by an unknown man and is pregnant) by ensuring that she is given what she is rightfully due (i.e. him marrying her). and like this sort of transactional result would have been seen as a happy ending, i.e. the young man took something from her and now is being made to do his duty towards her in return. but you could really play it so so easily -- and in fact to a modern audience at least it could read so easily -- as sort of. idk. local-level divine horror where the lar of the house loves you so much he'll do everything to make you happy & make everything turn out 'well' for you in the sort of societal sense, but he's working off a moral system that has absolutely no grounding in you as a person & ends up more and more trapping you forever in this horrifying situation through his honest desire to reward you

[rustedhills]

Merobiba's Etymology: A Classical Discussion

The most likely place you've seen the word 'Merobiba' is Drawfee on Youtube - which has coined it as the name for a goofy little puppet-Merida from the hit film 'Bwave'.

Fig. 1: A screenshot from the original Drawfee video, posted Feb 2, 2023.

They pulled the word (among others) from the twitter account Weird Medieval, which posted this (Fig. 2) on Dec 6, 2022.

Fig. 2, the original 'merobiba' tweet, accessed via proxy

Weird Medieval sources the word (and others in the thread) to The dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght, written 1490? - 1546, according to the University of Michigan Library [via the Early English Books Text Creation Partnership].

But where did syr Eliot acquire the word?

Fig. 3: the cover of Plautus' Curculio: Revised Edition, With Introduction and Notes by John Wright, which is what I'm currently using for class.

It was likely in a contemporary transcription of Plautus' Curculio, a Roman comedic play published around 200BCE. - Specifically act 1, line 77 (though different versions have slightly different numbering):

Transcribed from Plautus' Curculio: Revised Edition, With Introduction and Notes by John Wright:

77 - PH. nomen Leanaest, multibiba atque merobiba.

78 - PA. Quasi tu lagoenam dicas, ubi unium Chium

79 - solet esse. PH. quid opust uerbis? uinosissuma est;

The two characters - Phaedromus (PH), a young man madly in love, and Palinurus (PA), his sassy, unimpressed slave, are discussing an enslaved woman in the supporting cast (ancilla). Merobiba references her ability to drink very strong wines, and multibiba references the amount. As T. H. M. Gellar-Goad translates it in Plautus: Curculio: "she's a super-drinker and stupor-drinker" (pg. 10) [multibiba atque merobiba]. Phaedromus goes on to state uinosissuma est, which Gellar-Goad translates to "She's winetastic" (pg. 10). Phaedromus may not have game, but he has... a way with words...?

Gellar-Goad goes on to state that "Plautus has coined [multibiba and merobiba] by smashing together smaller, familiar words. ... Plautus' plays are chock-full of this sort of inventive, fast-and-loose wordplay, and it's a challenge for translators to keep up" (pg. 11).

Given Plautus' propensity for creating weird, cognate words for the sole purpose of sounding silly, it's highly likely that this is the truly first use of the word 'Merobiba'.

So, next time you hear "I'm merobiba!" and chuckle sensibly, remember:

You are keeping a 2200 year-old word alive. Thank you.

Note: If you've read to this point and think you've got an even earlier version--probably also in the colloquial/comedic Latin literature tradition--please rb with your findings!! And if I forgot a source pls lmk.

[local-queer-classicist]

Why does Plautus taunt me with his casual vocabulary that wasn’t in my textbook and abnormal grammatical constructions that weren’t covered in my textbook and untranslatable jokes that I wasn’t prepared for by my textbook

[blackswaneuroparedux]

quasi nix tabescit dies.

- Plautus, Stichus 648

The day is melting like snow.

[prideandparchment]

01.11.2023.

18/100 days of productivity

Today was very productive day. Maybe, because of the little change staying at my dad's means. Also, they were out visiting cemetery almost all day, so I was alone.

finished the Menaechmi by Plautus

wrote one of my papers due after the break

outlined the other paper

started reading The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd for uni

cooked lunch

had a meeting for a campaign I'm handling the communication of

[double-dare-designs]

https://www.zazzle.com/z/uzl426jc?rf=238828267405258083

“Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words.”

Plautus

[latin-literature-tourney]

Latin Literature Tournament - Round 1

Propaganda under the cut!

Plautus Propaganda:

This is some of the oldest Latin we have, giving us insights into both archaic and colloquial Latin

His writing is really cleverly idiosyncratic and vibrant, with a lot of fun wordplay and neologisms

Plautus' influence on subsequent comedy can't be overstated--commedia dell'arte, Shakespeare, early sitcoms, it's all just Plautus

Seneca the Elder Propaganda:

Father of my boy Seneca the Younger, who slaps severely

Really pedagogically important collections of declamations, controversiae, and suasoriae

Wrote a strong critique of the mannerist turn in Latin literature, which relied on more grand, sweeping, and visceral poetic effects, in comparison to the more classically elegent Latin of the previous generation

[hexjulia]

delighted by this description of a sailor disguise because!!! it sounds in a slightly abstract way not unlike a pirate costume a child might now wear! There is a broad brimmed brown hat! An eye patch! A cloak! Even a very visible belt!

Would a 21st century child recognise a 2nd century bc captain's costume as a strange pirate, and would a 2nd century bc roman recognise our pirate costume as a strange sailor? Maybe!

[shakespearenews]

But the legalistic opening scene reminds us that The Comedy of Errors received its first documented performance on 28 December 1594 at Gray’s Inn, one of London’s ancient law schools. We know about this early performance because someone wrote an account of the Inn’s Christmas festivities of which the play formed a part. 

...On the night in question, a ‘great presence of lords, ladies and worshipful personages’ crammed into the hall to welcome an ‘embassy from ‘the State of Templaria’ (more prosaically, Inner Temple – another Inn of Court half a mile to the south). Such was the crush that the worshipful personages rioted, sending the ‘Templarians’ off in a huff. It was before this mêlée that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who had been commissioned to provide the after-dinner entertainment, performed The Comedy of Errors, which the educated audience recognised as being remarkably ‘like to Plautus his Menaechmus.’ The anonymous author of the Gesta Grayorum also observed that that play’s concerns were pertinent to the disarray of that day’s celebrations: ‘so that night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever after called, The Night of Errors.’

[soulmaking]

Plautus, Pseudolus (trans. E. F. Watling)

[hornyforpoetry]

Chaotic comedy plays for chaotic academics *

• Asinaria – Plautus (unknown date)

• The Frogs - Aristophanes (405 BC)

• As You Like It – William Shakespeare (1602)

• Volpone – Ben  Jonson(1605)

• The Miser – Molière (1668)

• The Servant of Two Masters - Carlo Goldoni (1746)

• The Marriage of Figaro - Pierre Beaumarchais (1784)

• The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde (1895)

• The Seagull – Anton Chekhov (1896)

• Six Characters in Search of an Author – Luigi Pirandello (1925)

• The Threepenny Opera - Bertolt Brecht (1928)

*the years represent when the play was finished/published, not when it was performed for the first time