In the Mostellaria: An Adapted Latin Play, Afer should be caring for his master’s son, Bucco. Instead of helping to raise an honorable young man, Afer is drinking wine, eating extravagant dinners, and letting his young charge rack up a ridiculous amount of debt to purchase and free his girlfriend Flora.
Afer’s not exactly a role model of childcare, but he’s pretty happy all the same. That is, until his master Priscus returns after three years in Egypt. Afer will dole out as many outlandish tricks as it takes to preserve the life he has, to keep Bucco happy (and the wine and food coming), and to avoid Priscsus’ anger.
Who gets the last laugh in this adaptation of Plautus’ Mostellaria?
The Mostellaria is suitable for use in Latin III or IV. This play may be appropriate at other levels depending on the readers’ years of study and its intended use. The first scene is available here.
The Mostellaria: An Adapted Latin Play is available on Amazon for $12 and with a bulk discount on Bombax Press.
About the Plot of the Mostellaria: An Adapted Latin Play
Afer is a slave whose master Priscus has been in Egypt for three years. He is supposed to be caring for Bucco… but instead, they are all living a raucous lifestyle with fine food and fine wine and music every night. His young charge, Bucco, has also taken out a loan that he cannot repay to buy and free his girlfriend Flora. Their worlds come crashing down when Priscus returns from Egypt.
Afer takes action immediately and starts thinking of increasingly outlandish and ridiculous tricks to prevent Priscus from learning the truth. After all, if Priscus learns the truth, not only will he be mad at Bucco, but he’ll beat Afer. So, Afer convinces Priscus that his own house is haunted by a ghost so Bucco can keep the party rolling inside the house without Priscus knowing. This, of course, is a house of cards (or perhaps ghosts).
How long can Afer keep this charade up? Is there any hope of repaying the Bucco’s debt? Who laughs loudest and last in this adaption of Plautus’ Mostellaria?
Personae in the Mostellaria
- Bucco is a wealthy noble and Priscus’ son. He has recently purchased his girlfriend Flora, who was a slave, on borrowed money and freed her. His name means fool.
- Priscus is a wealthy merchant who has spent the last three years in Egypt, trusting that his son is living righteously. His name means very ancient.
- Afer is enslaved by Priscus and Bucco. He encourages Bucco to live an unhonorable lifestyle. He is very clever and always has a new trick up his sleeve. Or tunic. His name means African.
- Calidus is a wealthy young noble and Bucco’s friend. His girlfriend Macula is a music girl and a slave. His name means hot-headed or brash.
- Flora was a music girl and a slave until Bucco purchased and freed her. She is Bucco’s girlfriend. Her name means blooming.
- Scapha is an older female slave who attends Flora. She is cynical and jaded. Her name means boat.
- Simo is the owner of a large home next door to Bucco and Priscus’ house. His name means flat-nosed.
- Lurco is a moneylender who lent Bucco the money to buy Flora. Lurco’s name means greedy. Lurco’s name is gender neutral.
- Caepio is enslaved by Bucco and Priscus. Caepio is usually in the country but came to town to prepare food for Bucco’s party. Caepio means onion seller. Caepio’s name is gender neutral.
- Sphaerio is a slave who has a minor role in the play. Sphaerio means circle.
- Macula is a music girl and Calidus’ girlfriend. She is a slave. Her name means a spot or blemish.
- Rutilus is enslaved by Calidus. He tries to humor him to prevent being beaten. Rutilus means reddish gold hair.
- Dorsuo is enslaved by Calidus. Dorsuo is sarcastic and dislikes Rutilus. Dorsuo means large back and is gender neutral.
About the Vocabulary and Grammar
Roman comedy is colloquial and rife with idiomatic expression. I tried to maintain some of the flavor by selecting specific idioms and conversational expressions from the original play to use and reuse throughout my adaptation. I have taken the greeting di te ament and reused it and even turned it into jokes. I have reused the exclamations vah, vae mihi, and perii throughout the play just as I’ve used the oaths pol, ecastor, and hercle. I have also chosen two terms of abuse (frutex and mastigia) and two terms of endearment (ocellus and mel) to help create the colloquial tone.
The vocabulary is intentionally sheltered to allow for more extensive and independent reading. The play contains about 9,000 words, and it uses 237 total unique words. Of those words, some are clear cognates, names, or glosses that were essential to the story but appeared fewer than ten times. When those words are removed from the 237 words that constitute the novella’s 9,000 word length, a student would need a working vocabulary of 171 words to read this text.
In addition, I paid careful attention to the frequency that words appear in Latin literature. When choosing between synonyms, for example, I chose the more common word. I am also careful about what I consider to be a cognate and choose only words that I consider to be especially clear and in most students’ English vocabulary. After all, it doesn’t matter if a word is a clear cognate if it’s not in a typical student’s vocabulary.
Unlike the vocabulary, the grammar is not sheltered. Although I liberally used stage directions, because this is a play, most of the content is dialogue. In particular, the grammar and dialogue includes the perfect and imperfect tenses, the future tense, indirect speech, hortatory subjunctives, and present active participles. There is even a rare grammar-based joke when Bucco asks, “Quid ago?” when he should ask “Quid agam?” and Afer quips back at him. Please look for it!
About Roman Comedic Traditions
Roman comedy is heavily indebted to earlier Greek comedies. These comedies traditionally had stock character types, like the clever slave, the parasite, the lovelorn young man, the braggart soldier, the money lender, a love interest, usually of a socially unacceptable class, and old man who thought the younger generation just was not up to par. Conflicts are often between the older and younger generations and resolved happily by the play’s conclusion.
Beyond the use of stock character types, Roman comedies included sung choruses in different meters and was likely accompanied with music. In this simplified adaptation, there is no meter, only spoken dialogue written in prose.
Roman comedy did use a lot of slapstick, puns (sometimes between Greek and Latin), physical humor—including the use of or threat of violence—and ridiculously unbelievable situations. Cases of mistaken identity were everywhere. Social customs were also often upended, which allowed the audience to laugh without feeling as if their own customs should be questioned too closely. For example, the clever slave character often orders about a master who is never quite in on the joke. Slaves, not masters, often have the power through much of the play.
Playwrights generally took Greek comedies and more or less translated them into Latin. Plautus, though, liked to push the envelope. He did not feel as compelled to be faithful to the original Greek play and was even criticized for this characteristic in antiquity. He invented words, spliced plays together, omitted scenes, and gave his plays more Roman flavor. The setting was still Greek. The character names were still Greek. The original source material was Greek, but it was a Roman play for a Roman audience.
Plautus’ Mostellaria and This Adaption
Plautus’ Mostellaria contains superior language and wit. I am not Plautus, so the wit is comparatively lacking, and the language has been intentionally changed. I tried, as much as I was able, to stay true to the core kernel of events and characterization in each scene. Where possible, I even tried to include some similar jokes. Due to the overall difficulty of the play, though, I did deviate substantially in important ways from Plautus’ original play beyond reducing the lexical and syntactical difficulty.
Because Plautus’ plays are much earlier than other surviving Latin texts, he uses earlier forms of words. For example, he would use admirarier instead of admirari and sies instead of sis. I have chosen to use the forms that students would find more familiar to aid in comprehension.
On a surface level, I stepped away from the Greek names of Plautus’ original. Most of our students reading this play are studying Latin, not Greek, and nearly all of the names are incredibly long or present comprehension roadblocks. For example, Philolaches is the young son who is in love with Philematium. Reading in another language can be hard enough without such similar names that can result in confusion. So, I ultimately further Romanized the play by choosing Roman names that reflect the underlying stock character type.
I did also rename some characters that are otherwise perfectly Roman names, but they come with some other name-related baggage. For example, students who are reading Cambridge have a very clear conception of who Grumio is, and I did not want a single student to make a joke about Tranio’s name and intentionally or unintentionally hurt another student.
In addition, I provided a significant amount of stage directions. I believe that stage directions can help students read a play and better understand what is happening. More stage directions appear than are typically used in translations of the play or in the play itself. After all, the manuscripts we have of these comedies do not use them. This can sometimes result in confusion, which is why I liberally used stage directions.
I significantly toned down both the original violence in Plautus’ play and the rampant sexist jokes. For example, the original opening scene includes a physical brawl, but I switched it to focus on other elements of Plautine humor: puns and slapstick. I also toned down some of the drunken elements in the play. If students are to act out this play, I do not want them to feel as uncomfortable as some of them undoubtedly would have been with these elements left untouched in place. Granted, these elements still do appear in the play (except for the excessive, rampant sexist jokes) because they are inherent to Roman comedy, but they have been significantly toned down.
While I did aim to keep to the core element of each of Plautus’ scenes in my own adaptation, I did sometimes deviate substantially. For example, in one scene, the clever slave stock character reports about letting the son and his friends out of the house. We do not see it happen, and they have disappeared without having said another word since the second act when they enter the house to carry on the party. I wanted the opportunity to allow these characters to speak again. I also suspect that a modern audience would really want to hear from them again. For that same reason, I brought the son and the father together in the final scene, which is a sizable difference from Plautus’ original. Roman comedies wrap up with the conflict resolved. When that conflict is generational, fathers and sons reconcile. It is hard to have that reconciliation if one of them is not on stage.
If you would like to read further about my process for adapting this play, visit this link.
About the Artwork and Stage Setup for the Mostellaria: An Adapted Latin Play
The original cover art for the Mostellaria is an image by Cari R. from Pixabay. My neighbor Linda Renaud, whose nature photography and watercolor wax batik artwork are on www.lindarenaudart.com, altered the image with Photoshop to turn the picture into a design cover. Because this is a play, there is no interior artwork beyond a layout of the stage.
The stage directions include actions such as exiting to the right or left of the stage and hiding in the road between the two houses. In two scenes, actors enter or are in the houses and interact with elements of the house before disappearing further offstage into those houses. For example, Afer and Caepio have an onion-based food fight in the kitchen of Priscus’ house, and Afer and Priscus inspect the columns of a portico in Simo’s house before disappearing further to look at the baths. The majority of the play’s action, though, occurs in the street in front of both houses.
About the Text Features
The Mostellaria has a full index of word forms. In the index, the reader can look up all unknown words. The index lists verbs separately. As such, a reader could independently look up both pellam and pepuli without knowing the dictionary entry of the word. The index provides a general translation of the word. Verbs include a translation that is grammatically appropriate and would fit the context of the sentence. This text also contains a dictionary. This dictionary offers all the principal parts. The dictionary notes how frequently the words appear in Latin Literature according to the Core Latin Vocabulary or Essential Latin vocabulary.
If you would like to review the vocabulary used in the Mostellaria: An Adapted Latin Play, the dictionary is available here.
