Curculio

The braggarts of Plautine drama —mostly soldiers and their servants or associates, but also other figures, such as the Sycophanta of the Trinummus— are marvellous storytellers. They fill the stage with their tales of exotic wonders and extraordinary adventures in far-off lands: flying men who are brought down by means of balls of bird-lime catapulted from slings (Poen. 470ff.); a boat sailing upstream the river which flows from the middle of the sky, to arrive under the throne of Jove (Trin. 939ff.); champions who shatter the legs of an elephant with a single blow of their fist or cut the elephant in two with a stroke of their sword (Mil. 25ff., Curc. 424); colossal statues of solid gold which commemorate the conquest of much of the known and the unknown world, including the lands of the Centaurs and the Amazons (Curc. 438ff.); super-babies which play with real swords and shields, serve in legions, and win war spoils as soon as they are born (Truc. 506ff.), etc.

The New Comedy of Menander and his contemporaries or epigones, in so far as it is known, does not provide parallels for this kind of fantastic narratives. Antecedents are found only in the earlier Greek comic tradition, from Aristophanes (e.g. Acharnians 61–90) to Middle Comedy (e.g. Antiphanes fr. 200, Alexis fr. 63, Ephippos fr. 5 and 17, Mnesimachos fr. 7, Timokles fr. 17), where boastful officers or travellers recount equally extravagant stories about unusual feats or marvels of faraway countries. There is, however, a conspicuous difference between these Greek passages and the Plautine tales. The Greek braggarts’ speeches concentrate on the extreme luxury which characterizes the exotic lands; emphasis is placed on the huge amounts of food consumed, the bizarre voluptuousness of customs, or the abundance of wealth. In particular, the Hellenic comic tradition is preoccupied with the world of the symposium, and its tall tales represent grotesque or ludicrously exaggerated distortions of common sympotic practices. Plautus’ blowhards, on the other hand, focus on genuinely fantastic and fairytale aspects, such as fabulous creatures, supernatural elements, extraordinary voyages, superhuman powers, and miraculous exploits. The Greek bragging is Rabelaisian; the Plautine is Munchausenesque.

An explanation of this divergence may be sought in a significant body of “marvel literature” which appeared between the end of Middle Comedy and Plautus’ lifetime: namely, the accounts of Alexander’s expedition and of the wondrous adventures of his troops in the East. In the decades after Alexander’s death, a large number of historical and ethnographic writings were composed about the Macedonian conqueror’s campaigns. Many of them were authored by men who had served in Alexander’s wars (Nearchos, Aristoboulos, Onesikritos, Baiton) or obtained first-hand information from participants (Kleitarchos). The Hellenistic period also saw the circulation of several “letters of wonders” (Wunderbriefe), i.e. fictitious, novelistic epistles, purportedly written by Alexander himself or by his commanders, which related the travels and experiences of the Macedonian army in the remotest areas of Asia and India. Some of these letters were absorbed into the so-called Alexander Romance (e.g. 2.23–41, 3.17, 3.27–28), of which a preliminary form may have been compiled already by the later Ptolemaic age (see the researches of Richard Stoneman). All these works included much lore about the marvels of the Orient. Collectively, they made up the largest literary collection of “soldiers’ tales” in Hellenistic times.

The comparison between this corpus of writings and the discourses of Plautine braggarts reveals a large number of detailed parallels and similarities. For example, Antamoenides’ battle against the flying men (Poen. 470ff.) reproduces a type of tale which recurs many times in the narratives about Alexander’s adventures (mostly in the Wunderbriefe, but also in historiographers). The hero and his army encounter a monstrous population with mixed human and animal characteristics (e.g. humans with heads of dogs or lions, bodies covered with wild beasts’ fur, legs of wild asses, arms like thorny plants etc.; cf. Antamoenides’ homines volatici who have birds’ wings). A clash or battle follows; finally, the hero invents an artifice by which he manages to overcome the monsters. The essence of this stratagem consists precisely in treating the opponents like beasts, in accordance with their zoomorphic parts, rather than like a regular human army to be confronted in tactical warfare. For instance, the hero terrifies the monsters with fire or with the noise of trumpets, or lures them into traps and pitfalls, like hunted animals; cf. Antamoenides’ idea of shooting down the flying men with slings and missiles of bird-lime, the standard tools of fowling. In the Wunderbriefe, Alexander repeatedly encounters anthropomorphic birds with human faces and voices. Behind all these human-avian crossbreeds, we may discern the figures of the winged anthropomorphic genii, which were a standard decorative motif in Mesopotamian palaces, as well as in the Persian monuments of Pasargadae and Persepolis. Alexander’s men would doubtless have seen such images in Babylon and Iran.

Similarly, the Sycophanta’s journey upstream the river to the divine region of Jove (Trin. 939ff.) echoes a prominent theme of Alexander’s historians and geographers: the exploration of the rivers encountered in the course of the eastern campaigns and the search for the sources of these rivers. According to Nearchos, Alexander thought for some time that the Indian rivers Hydaspes and Acesines were flowing into the Nile; he thus planned to navigate them all the way until he would reach the great river of Egypt — which was celebrated since Homer as διιπετής, i.e. literally “flowing down from Zeus”. The colossal golden effigy, which Therapontigonus reportedly puts up as a monument of his conquests (Curc. 438ff.), brings to mind the many statues and stelae of solid gold described in the Wunderbriefe; some of them are dedicated by Alexander himself in commemoration of his own victories, while others are discovered in the course of the campaign, erected by other legendary conquerors. Therapontigonus’ triumphs in the lands of Centauromachia, Unomammia, and Conterebromnia (Curc. 445–446) may allude to Alexander’s fabulous clashes with Centaurs and Amazons and his pursuit of the tracks of Dionysus/Bromius, as set out in the Wunderbriefe and some historians. The Plautine soldiers’ wondrous feats against elephants (Mil. 25ff., Curc. 424) parody episodes from the narratives about Alexander, in which the Macedonian king kills an elephant with a single throw of his javelin, while his soldiers hamstring an entire herd of pachyderms, and some Indians mount on their elephants as easily as on a horse. The superpowers of Stratophanes’ infant son, who is expected to handle weapons and participate in war immediately upon his birth (Truc. 506ff.), are a humorous variation on the common historical theme of Alexander’s youth; in the Alexander Romance the protagonist serves in campaigns and shows his strategic skills already as a child. Other minor Plautine motifs also find characteristic parallels in Alexander lore.

Plautus uses all the classic techniques of parody, in order to transform the fantastic motifs of Hellenistic storytelling into comic material: exaggeration to the point of surreal grotesqueness, replacement of the dangerous aspects with anodyne or ridiculous ones, and materialization of metaphors. Above all, he freely combines or amalgamates elements of diverse provenance, which occur across a wide range of tales about Alexander. The Roman playwright may have found some of these motifs in the Greek plays of New Comedy. The subtle Menander is unlikely to have included such fabulous stuff in his realistic fictions; Menandrian soldiers, when they brag, remain true to the typically Greek preoccupation with the sympotic (see e.g. Bias in the Kolax, who is faithfully reflected in this respect by the Terentian Thraso). However, dramatists who drew more on the resources of popular comedy, such as Philemon and Diphilos, may have parodied the fantastic accounts of Alexander’s veterans in their plays. It must not be excluded that Plautus had also direct access to some Hellenistic writings about Alexander’s expedition, whether historical or novelized ones. A century afterwards, the work of Kleitarchos was widely read by Roman docti such as Cornelius Sisenna and Cicero. Later, in the Imperial age, one of the Wunderbriefe was rendered into Latin, and all the fanciful histories of Alexander were excerpted by the diligent Pliny.

A small specimen of my chapter in this excellent volume, magisterially edited and curated by Sophia Papaioannou and Chrysanthi Demetriou, has been uploaded here. The entire volume is available for preview in Google Books (https://books.google.gr/books/about/Plautus_Erudite_Comedy.html?id=BAfUDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
https://books.google.gr/books?id=BAfUDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=el&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)
and for reading as ebook in GooglePlay
(https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Sophia_Papaioannou_Plautus_Erudite_Comedy?id=BAfUDwAAQBAJ&hl=en_US).
It will soon appear in printed form from Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

The association of the black rot fungus Ciboria batschiana and the chestnut weevil Curculio propinquus was investigated. Insects from a single plantation located in a chestnut area in Viterbo, in the Lazio Region (Italy) were analysed for association with the fungus. Ciboria batschiana was detected in 2 out of 10 adults collected from the ground and 21 out of 22 adults from the trees. Only 33.3% of the larvae were found to be associated to the fungus. The ability of C. propinquus to carry the fungus was confirmed. Its role as a possible vector of this pathogen deserves further study.