Comparing Plautus's Phaechmi And The Haunted House

Writing a prose or a play has art to it: not only does the writer need to make something that will attract an audience, be he needs to pay attention to the patterns that correspond to his piece. What is the theme, who is this story for, will there be a moral lesson are all important questions the author must answer before or during the writing process. Ancient Roman literature also followed a structured pattern corresponding to its genre: comedies are meant to be funny and end on a good note, tragedies are darker and usually end with someone’s death, and epics tell the story of heroes and their journeys. Dramas are shorter and separated into a handful of acts; they are meant to be acted out on a stage, usually at a festival. Epics are very
Plautus’s Menaechmi is about two long lost brothers whose identities are confused. The Haunted House, also by Plautus, is about a slave who has to keep his master from learning of his son’s decadence during his absence. Seneca’s Phaedra and Thyestes are about the immorality that comes from not being rational. In Phaedra a woman lusts for her stepson, and in Thyestes a king seeks revenge on his brother. Lastly, in Statius’s Thebaid a hero leads six other heroes to his brother’s kingdom to usurp the throne. These five stories will be examined to find what each genre does differently and what similarities the stories have to each other. Only stories of different genres will be
In Phaedra, the main character Phaedra commits suicide by stabbing herself. In the Thebiad, Jocasta, the mother of Polynices and Eteocles, also stabs herself. Both women seem to kill themselves out of great shame: Phaedra lies and gets her stepson, who she is in love with, killed and Jocasta was powerless in preventing her two sons from killing each other. The way they kill themselves is important, as well. Normally, Roman women committed suicide or killed bloodlessly; they would rely on poisoning or hanging to end their own or another’s life. This may have been because women were considered weak so spilling blood would be too much for them. It can also be to prevent blood from corrupting their bodies. In Phaedra’s and Jocasta’s cases, they have already been corrupted: Phaedra for lust and indirect murder, and Jocasta for marrying and having children with her son Oedipus. The crimes of familicide and incest were seen as extremely impious among the ancients. In order to atone for her sins, Phaedra stabs herself as an offering to Hippolytus (Seneca 34). It is not clear if Jocasta killed herself out of shame or because she has nothing left to live for: her sons are dead and caused the destruction of Thebes, her home, her husband/son Oedipus has gone mad, and her brother has forbidden the funeral rights to the enemy dead. It would be understandable if she felt so much shame that the only way to