A Farce

One like others not yet done

Mercator by Plautus, translated by Henry Thomas Riley

It is not only in the spring time that the thoughts of young men turn to love. And those thoughts are rarely quite so light as Tennyson might claim. As many a dramatist, a comic poet, will attest. For many, the question is an all-year, all-day occupation. Full-time, quite full-on, and rather distracting. Much bitterness, much anguish, accompanying. But as Plautus will show, it’s not only young men who suffer so foolishly as all that from this affliction.

The plot of this play need not detain us for long. It is a classic farce, in a way, akin to many others you will have seen or heard or read. A young man returns from his travel abroad as a merchant with a beautiful slave girl in his possession. He has purchased the girl, after falling painfully, agonisingly in love with her overseas. He is bringing her back, of course, not as his wife but as his mistress. It not being the done thing to wed beautiful slaves. And so he must contrive a devious reason for her being there. This he is pondering and wondering about, while he hopes to install her in such a situation as will mean he can make his visits without trouble.

But there is a snag.

The man’s father, he claims because of a prophetic dream, happens to be by the sea shore that day, and chances upon the harbour just as his son’s baggage is being unloaded and carried down. Among the detritus, he spots the beautiful slave girl, and before anything can be done to prevent it, he has seen her — with his own eyes. And has soon enough, entranced, the old man engaged her in conversation. There is much wailing and lamentation in the retainer of the young man, at this outcome. It was something he was meant to prevent, but in reality, he could not avert it. But the young man’s bondsman believes he might yet save the day, however, with a cunning lie.

Who is that girl? the old man may have said to him.

She is a possession of your son, the cunning bondsman may have said (but not, he meant to imply, for lascivious ends). Yes, the girl, she is being brought by your son as a gift for your wife, brought as a maid to assist her in her domestic duties. That is why she has been disembarked here.

Meant to mollify the father and to allay suspicion, this remark instead sets the cat well and truly among the pigeons. Such a fine girl, the father thinks, should not be a domestic maid. She is not built for it. Instead, she must be his — the father’s property — to do with as he will. If she is introduced to his wife, the young man’s mother, there will be hell to pay, I can assure you.

This is what the old man thinks.

And so while the son and his retainer scheme to avert this crisis, the old man hatches his own scheme. The son is told that because the slave girl is not made for dowdy ordinary work, she is to be sold to a friend of the father’s. The buyer is at this very moment tearing his arm off, the father implies, desperate to offer more and more money to complete the purchase.

Naturally, this is not wholly true: the would-be buyer is just a proxy, a cut-out, for the father, for his aged Casanovaism.

And this very arrangement causes domestic trouble for the lined-up buyer, too. It causes him trouble enough, as his very own wife returns from the country and wonders why, precisely, a beautiful woman not known to her is now living in her house.

It’s just for a brief moment! her husband pleads; I’m holding her for two friends while they adjudicate their claims to her ownership. But his wife is not convinced.

This is, in a sense, a play like many others — a play like those that came before it but did not survive, and like every farce that arrived afterwards. There’s chaos; there’s a lot of misunderstanding. People are accused of things they have not done. Other people lie without shame because the plot and their own scheming demands it. We see into the deviousness and venality of these people and we are amused and entertained by their selfishness, their endless capacities for deceit and double-dealing and hypocrisy.

If Plautus has a lesson in mind, and I doubt it, it’s that old men should not chase women as young men do. This is something that, no doubt, would be met with approval from young men throughout history, who have glumly noticed that not only will older men pursue the same women as they, but that the older and richer men will — more often than seems fair — prove successful.

The play ends with the characters saying to the young men in the audience that, if they want their elders bound by a stricter moral code when it comes to wooing women, they should applaud. I’m sure they did applaud, quite loudly, two thousand years ago. And the young men would probably do so again if the play were newly put on.