LT4207 Roman Comedy

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Module description

The module aims to delve into the comic world of the Latin playwrights Plautus and Terence and its cultural background. At the beginning of its political rising in the Mediterranean, when Rome was still, from a cultural point of view, a provincial Hellenistic city, the comic genre became one of the fields in which the new-born literature took its first steps, trying to keep pace with its other more sophisticated rivals. The names of Plautus and Terence emerge from that time and their plays form a corpus which is only slightly smaller than that of the Homeric poems. Key topics that will be considered in the analysis of this variegated theatrical universe are: the relation with the Greek originals and its problems; the influence of other cultural traditions, such as the Italic and the Hellenistic, and their interaction with the more distinctive elements of Roman culture; the comparison between Plautus and Terence; the impact of historical events such as the victory over Carthage, Pergamum and Greece; genre conventions, stock-characters and their subversion. The module will also examine the reception of comedy in later Latin literature, and its influence on the history of theatre and culture.