The Plot of the Miles Gloriosus

Author(s): Blanche Brotherton

Source: Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association , 1924,
Vol. 55 (1924), pp. 128-136
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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 128 Blanche Brotherton [1924

IX.- The Plot of the Miles Gloriosus

BY PROFESSOR BLANCHE BROTHERTON

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE

The plot of the Miles Gloriosus is as follows. A captain,

Pyrgopolinices, has abducted a girl, Philocomasium, and
carried her off to Ephesus. Her true lover, Pleusicles, has
followed her and is staying at the house of an old man, next
door to the captain's. A hole has been cut in the wall between
the two houses that the lovers may meet and converse.
Sceledrus, a servant of the captain, catches sight of the lovers
through a skylight. Another slave, Palaestrio, really be-
longing to the lover Pleusicles and loyal to his interests, but
forced to serve the captain, convinces Sceledrus that he has
seen, not Philocomasium, but a twin sister of hers. For the
purpose of deceiving Sceledrus completely, Philocomasium
dashes back and forth through the hole in the wall, one moment
appearing as herself, the next posing as her twin sister. When
Sceledrus is fully persuaded of the reality of the twin sister, and
any danger of his disclosing the truth to the captain is pre-
vented, the intriguers plan for the rescue of Philocomasium
from the soldier and her restoration to Pleusicles. This rescue
is achieved, not by means of the hole in the wall, but by a new
trick played on the captain. As a professional lady-killer he
is lured into thinking that the alleged wife of the next door
neighbor has fallen in love with him, and he willingly agrees to
the release of Philocomasium that he may enjoy his new love-
affair. Too late he discovers that Philocomasium has eloped
with her true lover and that he himself has no recourse.
In the opinion of many modern scholars 1 the structure of the
1 Contamination in the play has been much discussed: Lorenz, Einleitung 2,
31 ff.; F. Schmidt, Jahrb. f. klass. Phil., Suppl. ix, 323 ff.; Ribbeck, Alazon,
72 ff.; Langen, Plaut. Stud. 313 ff.; Leo, Plaut. Forsch.2 178 ff.; Hasper, Festschr.
.f. d. 44ste Versamml. d. deutsch. Phil. und Schulm.; Franke, De militis glor.
Plautinae compositione, Leipzig, 1911, pp. 178 ff.; Kakridis, Rh. Mus. LIX, 626 ff.;

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Vol. Iv] The Plot of the Miles Gloriosus 129

play reveals numerous awkward and perplexing features, such

as the apparent lack of coherence between the end of Act II
and the beginning of Act III, the singular verses at the end of
Act III, scene 1, the episodic Lurcio scene, and a number of
lesser details scattered through the play. These many struc-
tural peculiarities have furnished confirmatory evidence for a
theory of contamination. The essential starting-point of such
a theory lies, not in the various awkward features of structure,
but in what has seemed to many scholars a conspicuous weak-
ness of the main plot, the fact, namely, that the hole in the
wall which in the first part of the play facilitates the meeting
of the lovers is lost sight of completely in the latter part of the
action: the lovers, it would seem, might easily have escaped
through this hole in the wall, but instead of using it for this
purpose they invent a new trick. On these grounds Leo, for
example, postulates two Greek comedies, one of which provides
Acts I, III (scenes 2, 3), iv, v of the Roman play, the other Acts
II, III (scene 1). Plautus, in this theory, has blended the theme
of the hole in the wall and the tricking of Sceledrus in oine
Greek play with the plot of another Greek play in which the
braggart captain was tricked out of a sweetheart by being
lured into an afaire d'amour with a new mistress. Awkward
dovetailing of these two plots is revealed in the peculiar
features of structure mentioned above.
For his view of the situation Leo found some comfort and
confirmation in a study made by Zarncke 2 of a large number
of European and Asiatic tales in which the hole in the wall is a
prominent feature. In many of Zarncke's stories the hole in
the wall provides a means of escape for the lovers. Leo was
accordingly encouraged in his opinion that the hole in the wall
in Plautus's play originally provided a means of escape for the
lovers in one of the two plays that Plautus adapted and com-
bined. The disaDDearance of this motif from the end of the
Walter, De contaminatione apud PI. et Ter., Jena, 1910; Koehler in the fourth
edition of Brix-Niemeyer's commentary on the Miles, Einleitung, 10 ff.; Mesk,
Wiener Stud. xxxv, 226 ff.; Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus, 253 ff.
2 Rh. Mus. xxxix, 1 ff.

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 130 Blanche Brotherton [1924

Roman play is occasioned by Plautus's substitution of a

different ending from the other of the two Greek plays that he
used. It should be noted, however, that Zarncke himself does
not admit that the hole in the wall is dropped entirely from the
last two acts of Plautus's play, but asserts that this theme is
merely superseded by a second theme, the affaire d'amour with
the neighbor's wife; and Zarncke finds in his tales that, al-
though the hole in the wall continues as a factor in the develop-
ment of the ultimate escape, yet this escape itself in the
Oriental and Occidental stories has so many points in common
with the particular method of escape in Plautus's play that,
contaminated as Plautus's play may be, we cannot disassociate
the escape in Plautus from the hole in the wall and regard the
two as totally alien to each other.
I have no immediate interest in source-study, least of all in
comparative literature and folklore. But simply accepting
Zarncke's material and methods and reexamining the tales in
question I find very positive evidence against any theory of
contamination in Plautus's play. Neither Zarncke nor Leo, in
my opinion, has fully seen the significance of the first three
tales that Zarncke reports, in all of which, after the develop-
ment of the hole-in-the-wall motif, the union of the lovers is
effected by a trick played upon the husband quite apart from
the hole in the wall, although the hole in the wall continues as
an essential feature of the incidental action.
According to an Albanian tale,3 a priest had a pretty wife.
Among their neighbors was a merchant. The merchant fell in
love with the priest's wife. Seeing her sitting at the window
every day he declared his love. " But what shall we do," said
the wife, "since I am married to the priest?" The merchant
replied: "I'll go and live in the house adjoining yours that I
may have you near me." After several days the merchant
moved into the next house. The party wall had a door opening
into the wife's chamber. One day she remarked to the
merchant that if he wished to marry her she could arrange it.
I Meyer-K6hler, Archiv f. Litteraturgesch. xiI, Heft i, 92 ff., no. 12.

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 Vol. Iv] The Plot of the Miles Gloriosus 131

"You tell the priest," she said to the merchant, "that Sunday
you wish to be married and ask him to come to your house to
perform the ceremony." When Sunday came, the wife made
ready her husband's paraphernalia for the wedding and told
him to hurry home from the ceremony so as not to leave her
alone too long. While the priest was going to the house next
door his wife dressed herself as a bride and passed through the
door to the merchant's house, arriving before the priest. The
priest was astonished at the resemblance of the bride to his
own wife, and pretending to have left some papers at home,
went back to make sure that it was not really she. Of course
the wife retired again through the door and was found peace-
fully at home by the priest. After three such attempts the
priest was ashamed to make further tests, and performed the
marriage ceremony. A wedding banquet follows, at which the
priest is made drunk, his beard is shaved off, he is dressed up in
rags and provided with pistols. Thus disguised as a robber,
he is carried off to sleep in the moonlight. The rext morning
he awakes, feels for his beard, finds it gone, feels his head and
finds a fez, discovers his ragged clothes and pistols, calls for his
wife-in vain. Presently some armed men pass by. He in-
quires who they are. "All five of us are robbers," they reply.
" I, too," says the poor priest, " am a robber. You are five. I
make six." So the inference is that the merchant and the wife
are freed from the encumbrance of the priest. It will be ob-
served that in this tale the hole in the wall is used up to the
completion of the marriage ceremony. The new trick im-
mediately follows.
A version of the same tale found in The Thousand and One
Nights 4 substitutes a fuller for the priest, a trooper for the
merchant, and represents the husband as dressed up like a
Turk. The husband in this masquerade goes off to Ispahan,
4 Zarncke refers to the Breslau translation of The Thousand and One Nights,
xiv, 60-64, night no. 896. I have used Payne's translation, i, 261 ff. An
article by W. Schwering has been called to my attention (N. Jahrb. f. Klass. Alt
xxxviI, 167 ff.), in which the author incidentally mentions the fact that this tale
combines two motifs.

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 132 Blanche Brotherton [1924

leaving the lovers free to enjoy each other. In another, a

Syrian version,5 the two lovers take no chances and poison the
husband. These two stories both differ from the Albanian
story of the priest and his wife in so far as the hole in the wall
is not planned to promote the meeting of the lovers but is
explicitly mentioned only in close connection with the playing
of the trick upon the husband.
One suspects that there are two elements in such tales: (1) a
hole in the wall used to facilitate the meeting of lovers and
later convenient as a help in deceiving the husband; (2) the
actual deception of the husband bv a masquerade and mental
suggestion. This suspicion is confirmed when we find two
tales with each of these two elements existing as separate units.
So in the variant versions of the Tale of Three Women these
two units occur independently of each other. Three women,
in order to win something at stake, agree that the one who
deceives her husband most cleverly shall be adjudged victor.
In Lassberg's 6 version one of the three is in love with a knight
who lives next door. To insure safe intercourse she cuts a hole
in her bedroom wall. One day she is accidentally discovered
by her husband in the knight's house. Too angry for utterance
her husband returns home only to find her safe at home, in her
own bed. She persuades him that an extraordinary likeness
must have deceived him. In a French version as recounted by
Liebrecht I one of the three wives makes her husband drunk,
shaves his head, dresses him in a monk's cowl, and with the
assistance of her lover carries him to the gates of a monastery.
Upon awakening the husband argues himself into the belief
that God has destined him for holy life and applies to the
Abbot for admission to the monastery. The wife is ac-
cordingly left free for her lover.
So far as the hole in' the wall itself is concerned, it is clear
alson t.ha t hiq mntif mav be variou1slv iised either (1 ) as a means
5 Syrische Sagen und Mdrchen, ed. Prym-Socin (Neu-Arameische Dialekt des
Tar 'Abdin, zweiter Teil), 37 ff.
6 Lassberg, Liedersaal, iII, 5 ff.
7 Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, 124 ff.

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Vol. lv] The Plot of the Miles Gloriosus 133

primarily and exclusively of facilitating the meetings of the

lovers, or (2) as a means of assisting the lovers to meet in the
earlier stages of the story and then serving as a more or less
important feature in the final trick played upon the husband.
So a story in Wendunmuth 8 of an intriguing wife illustrates the
appearance of the hole in the wall quite apart from the princi-
pal plot: a husband pretends to be going off on an extended
business trip; the wife immediately sends her next door
neighbor's wife to summon her lover, who is in the habit of
meeting her by means of a hole in the wall between the two
neighbors' houses. The husband returns but the lover escapes
through the hole in the wall. Suspicious of his wife the
husband ties her up and goes to bed himself. Meantime the
next door neighbor's wife, at the lover's instigation, has dis-
covered the wife;'s plight and taken her place as captive. The
wife goes next door to her lover. The husband awakening
calls to his wife. The substitute fears her voice may betray
her and so keeps silent. The husband in anger cuts off her
nose. The wife on returning and discovering the situation
calls on God to restore her nose so sure as she is innocent of all
guilt. Thus her innocence is established and the husband is
penitent. Here obviously the hole in the wall serves only for
the primary deception of the husband through the lovers'
meeting. In this respect it is quite different from the Alba-
nian, Syrian, and Arabian stories outlined above, in which
more or less explicitly the hole in the wall is useful in the second
chapter of the intrigue. And particularly in a Tartar story,9
although the hole in the wall is primarily constructed to insure
meetings of the lovers, it is equally important in the carrying
out of the elopement at the end of the story.'0
8 Wendunmuth (ed. Oesterley), VII, 164 (Vol. iv, 356).
9 Radloff, Volkslitteratur der tiirkischen Stdmme Siud-Sibiriens, iv, 393 ff.
10 "Die Goldschmiedin und der treue Fischersohn " (Hahn, Griech. und Alban.
Mdrchen2, I, 164 ff.) illustrates in a different way the common tendency of one
theme to combine with another. In this story meetings and a later elopement
by means of a hole in the wall are a part of a still larger theme, the loyalty of the
fisherman's son, and constitute a single exhibition of it.

10

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 134 Blanche Brotherton [1924

The other stories in Zarncke's collection, with which I am

not at present concerned, are tales which emphasize somewhat
more the use of the hole in the wall in association with a final
trick or as the final trick. These tales are the ones that sup-
port Leo's theory of contamination. But it seems to me
equally clear (and the lesser amount of evidence does not lessen
the value of the evidence) that we have in Zarncke's study
positive assurance of the plausibility of tales in which, as in the
Miles of Plautus, the hole in the wall is devised primarily to
facilitate the meetings of the lovers and later in the action
drops into a more or less insignificant position, sometimes inci-
dentally used to promote the trick on which the denouement
depends, sometimes almost completely lost sight of as the
interest centers upon a masquerade or elopement as the means
of uniting the lovers and eliminating the husband. And
certainly the statement in the prologue of the Miles that de-
scribes the hole specifically as providing only a meeting-place
for the lovers (138 ff.) is a clear intimation that, as in some of
Zarncke's stories, this is the primary and exclusive function of
the hole in the wall. Once this is granted, the addition in the
Miles of a trick to deceive the soldier is clearly in accord with
the same stories in Zarncke, which, after developing the motif
of the hole in the wall, bring the action to a conclusion by some
trick played upon the husband that results in freeing the bride
and her lover without any emphatic use of the hole in the wall
as auxiliary to the final issue.
In conclusion it may be added that other features of the
Roman play that have excited the partizans of contamination
are easily explained as due to special social conditions or to
necessary manipulations of the action so soon as the formula
of the plot substitutes a soldier and concubine for the husband
and wife who recur in Zarncke's stories. So, for example, the
fact that the initial deception is practised upon a slave, Scele-
drus, rather than on the captain himself, finds an easy expla-
nation. In Zarncke's stories a husband cannot be expected
to release his wife voluntarily; he must be made to believe that

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Vol. lv] The Plot of the Miles Gloriosus 135

the woman who is leaving him is not his wife and only re-
sembles her: consequently the trick must be played on him.
The captain .in the Roman play, on the other hand, regularly
turns from one mistress to another, so that any plausible reason
will serve to justify him in releasing his present concubine.
The transfer of the trick to the slave Sceledrus opens up more
possibilities of comic effect because of the slave's greater
timidity. Once transferred, the trick and the hole in the wall
become a subordinate feature of the intrigue, and the ultimate
interest centers upon the elopement at the end of the play.
Again, the play puts the role of arch-intriguer upon Palaestrio,
a slave, not upon the woman in the case as in the Oriental tales
in Zarncke's study. To this transfer no objection is ever made:
it is due to Greek social conditions and to the different role of
the heroine as mere concubine instead of lawful wife. Simi-
larly, so far as the denouement is involved, once given a
boastful soldier as the main character and (lupe, conditions of
Greek society and conventions of the drama make it imperative
that this soldier shall be tricked by his own weakness for the
ladies. Correspondingly, the denouements of the Oriental
tales reproduce the social customs of the countries which pro-
duced them, for example, the robber-masquerade at the end of
the Albanian tale.
Finally, Zarncke's interesting observations regarding these
denouements should be carefully noted. He observes that
many Oriental tales in which the hole in the wall functions
throughout the story present details startlingly like the details
of the elopement in the MIiles. The escape by ship, assistance
by the dupe himself, the gift of articles of value by the dupe,
the dupe's surrender of the faithful slave as a gift to the de-
parting heroine, occur here and there in Oriental tales as well
as in Plautus. Why then should we follow Leo in asserting
that the elopement at the end of the Miles is alien to the hole in
the wall in the earlier portion of the play, if elopements con-
taining just the details of the departure in the Miles recur in
Oriental stories-in combination with the motif of the hole in the
wall?

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 136 Blanche Brotherton [1924

The purpose of most comedies is to depict the union of two

lovers. In the Miles also this purpose, clearly stated by
Palaestrio in the prologue (126 ff.)., is accomplished by per-
suading the soldier through a trick to allow the heroine to
depart. Before the trick is in operation, while the lovers are
merelv enjoying one another's company, their whole happiness
is threatened by the danger of the betrayal of her disloyalty
to the captain. When once this obstacle to the dramatic de-
velopment is overcome, the action moves on to its final end.
Now to the use of two tricks in a single play there can be no
possible objection. Even if the Poenulus and the Pseudolus
cannot be adduced as evidence, since they, too, fall under the
charge of contamination, yet the Bacchides, and better still the
title of its Greek original (Als 'EtararCov), is ample proof of the
fondness of Greek poets for developing a succession of tricks in
the working out of the plot. Now if it had happened in the
Miles that the intrigue to free the girl had been started at the
beginning of the play, and that then in dramatic fashion an
obstacle had arisen which had to be overcome by a second
trick, and that after that second trick the first trick had been
continued, probably no one would have thought of attacking
the dramatic unity of the play. But in the attempt to bring
out the really effective unity of the present plot, I do not intend
to deny that such structural peculiarities as appear in the
third act require explanation. My contention is simply that
we cannot blame Plautus for combining the hole-in-the-wall
motif and the union of the lovers by an additional trick, when
these elements are combined in such Oriental tales as Zarncke
presents. It is much more likely that the Greek original had
already so combined them.

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