Disorienting Empire | 2021
Double Vision
Abstract
Chapter 1 centers on a reading of Plautus’s Menaechmi, the quintessential “Comedy of Errors,” both for the repeated misrecognitions that structure its plot and for the recurring physical wanderings of its twin protagonists. Plautus, the chapter argues, connects its lead characters’ feelings of disorientation with geographical regions into which the Romans were actually expanding in his day, especially the cities of Syracuse, Tarentum, and Epidamnus. The brothers’ wanderings and mistakes, on the one hand, seem to respond to a sense of superiority in Plautus’s audience, since the play can be seen to celebrate Rome’s access to new regions and justify the Roman presence in these areas, whose Greek inhabitants can’t seem to get anything straight. But the errores associated with the twins also function as a reminder of the way in which travel to distant lands can result in the erosion of one’s sense of self and its blurring or confusion with the identity of the other. The cross-dressing of the first Menaechmus brother (Men. I) in particular puts him between Greek and Roman culture and, queerly, between masculine and feminine identity. By having him compare himself to paintings of Ganymede and Adonis likely to recall Roman plunder from recent conquests in the Greek world, Plautus evokes both alluring and threatening aspects of Greek culture. Both brothers’ experiences of getting lost are potentially all the more engaging because this lostness happens in places where Plautus’s audience members, who very likely included merchants and military veterans familiar with these regions, could themselves have had disorienting encounters.