Who's tricked: Models of Slave Behaviour in Plautus' Psedolus

Roberta L. Stewart

In this paper I analyse the plot of Plautus' Pseudolus as an example of a trickster tale and from the perspective of its slaves. I consider the comportment of slave tricksters with each other and with masters to identify the behaviours that identified Roman tricksters. As an analytical category, the 'role model' helps to assess the role of the slave in the moral logic of the slave society and to explore the problem of identifying slave's agency in a system of domination. The trickster emerges as a role model and an anti-model.

From the perspective of the masters, the trickster is shown as an anti-model, one who does not adhere to Roman (elite) ideals. So the play rhetorically underscores the moral superiority of master over slave and implicitly legitimises slavery as a moral system. In Plautus' staging, the Roman trickster is also identified as one who acknowledges and defends the rightness of slavery to the proper master, and the ambivalence of the trickster's behaviour is explored only in the comportment of slaves with each other. As performance, the play could thus in its characterisation and in its plot serve to allay Roman anxiety about the forced compliance of their slaves.

From the perspective of the slaves, the trickster emerges as a model and an anti-model. The behaviour of the trickster represents one of the solutions to the problem of survival (both physical and cognitive) posed by slavery and so a model for slaves. The trickster uses reticence as a primary tool of resistance and of the trick. The play shows that a trick, of self assertion by the trickster, stands behind the obvious trick in the interests of the master. The trickster's mode of self-assertion thus represents an anti-model, of cloaked self assertion.

Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College, 307 Reed Hall, Hinman Box 6086, Hanover, NH 03755.

Roberta.L.Stewart@Dartmouth.edu

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