Humani nil a me alienum puto : The Ethics of Terentian Performance

Abstract

Humani nil a me alienum puto: The Ethics of Terentian Performance Niall W. Slater Questions of “how” tend to dominate our studies of performance in antiquity and today: how did the actors deliver their lines or enter, how were they costumed, how did the chorus dance, how did music shape the overall performance, and how do we achieve similar effects in performances today? The question almost never raised is whether these plays should be performed on the modern stage at all. This is not surprising: whatever love of theater motivates us as scholars, we tend to be united by our belief that the plays of antiquity spoke in powerful ways to the audiences of their time and have the power to speak across time to audiences today. We are zealots. Many of us feel we have had to fight long and hard for this approach to the theatrical treasures of antiquity against more traditional literary approaches. Let me offer a brief analogy. At Princeton University , where the music department is famous for its theoretical and compositional bent, one cannot major in music performance. A student there once asked the chairman of the music department why the department gave no courses for credit in music performance. The chairman replied “Well, the English Department doesn’t teach typing .” In truth, few of us have ever encountered an opposition to our 2 Syllecta Classica 10 (1999) performance-based studies of ancient drama quite as fierce as that. The notion that the texts we study are simply one annotation of a vanished performance has always received at least lip service from the most traditionally-minded critics—and we in turn have just as readily absorbed and adopted the traditional notion of the classic. We take it as axiomatic that these texts are monuments of culture that deserve to live again through performance. I do not intend to launch an all-out attack on that belief here, but I want to make us more critically aware of what performance across a gap of millennia involves. And let me frame this discussion with another anecdote. In the spring of 1994, the Carlos Museum at Emory hosted a show of art from Punic and Roman North Africa entitled “From Hannibal to Saint Augustine.” Just as most museums do today, the Carlos wanted to stage some thematically related events during the course of the exhibition. They contacted a director in the theater department, who contacted me: the museum was interested in a performance or at least a staged reading of something related to ancient North Africa. The selection, as you can imagine, is not wide. It may be something of a fraud to consider Terence a North African writer despite his origins in the province. Certainly nothing of his literary style or the performance practices of his plays seems influenced by his African background. Still, he was Roman and from Africa, so this was deemed good enough. The play we chose, in part simply because it is one that fascinates me, was The Mother-in-Law (Hecyra). I had no further contact with the production until I attended one of the two performances of the staged reading, a peripatetic one held in the museum, where both performers and audience moved from gallery to gallery in the course of the event. There was one major surprise. About two-thirds of the way through the script, the director (who was also reading one of the parts) stopped the production, broke out of the illusionistic frame, and explained how he and his cast did not really approve of the actions of Pamphilus, the play’s central figure—but, he continued, that character and his actions were simply part of the conventions of Slater: Humani nil a me alienum puto 3 Roman comedy and so had to be endured. Then he and the cast resumed their characters and finished the reading of the play. To understand this moment of performance, a brief recapitulation of the plot of The Mother-in-Law is in order. At the play’s beginning young Pamphilus has been married for some seven months to Philumena, but has also been away on business for some time. His...