Representations of Roman Streets in Three Plautine Comedies

Circulio, Mercator, and Asinaria

This is an excerpt from a previously unpublished essay from 2017, “A Brief Roman Social History of Streets and Sidewalks.”

See also:

Ancient Rome: Types of Easements

History of Sidewalks: An Introduction

The Varro Paradox

Abutters’ Responsibilities for Streets and Sidewalks in Ancient Rome

Image 1. Camillo Miola, “Plauto mugnaio,” Oil on Canvas (1864).

This brief essay considers uses of ancient streets in three comedies composed by Plautus (c 254-184 BCE): Curculio, Mercator, and Asinaria. Of the several inferences that we can draw from these Plautine comedies:

• The streets of ancient Rome were congested and street users competed for space

• Violent acts and walking at speed were associated with brutes

• Elites had greater rights to access

• There were sidewalks

• Plautus assumes his audience is familiar with sidewalks and their uses

Out of My Way…

Plautus repeats a theme of the threat of violence to assert a right to move quickly through the city three of his comedies, Curculio, Mercator, and Asinaria. From Curculio:¹

PALINURUS
I see your Parasite running; see, there he is pointing, down at the end of the street [via]. Let's listen from here what he's about.

PHÆD.
I think it's as well. They stand aside.

Enter CURCULIO, at a distance, walking fast.

CURCULIO commission; fly all of you, be off, and get out of the way, lest I should hurt any person in my speed with my head, or elbow, or breast, or with my knee. So suddenly now am I charged with a business of quickness and despatch. And be there no person ever so opulent to stop me in my way [in via], neither general, nor any tyrant, nor market-officer, nor demarch nor comarch, with their honors so great, but that down he goes, and tumbles head first from the footpath into the carriage-road [in via de semita]. And then those Grecians with their cloaks, who walk about with covered heads, who go loaded beneath their cloaks with books, and with baskets, they loiter together, and engage in gossipping among themselves, the gad-abouts; you may always see them enjoying themselves in the hot liquor-shops; when they have scraped up some trifle, with their covered pates they are drinking mulled wine, sad and maudlin they depart: if I stumble upon them here, from every single one of them I'll squeeze out a belch from their pearled-barley diet. And then those servants of your dainty townsmen, who are playing at catch-ball in the road [via], both throwers and catchers, all of them I'll pitch under foot. Would they avoid a mishap, why then, let them keep at home.

Plautus re-employs the same theme in a passage from Mercator:²

ACANTHIO
to himself . With your utmost power and might always try and endeavour that your younger master may by your aid be preserved. Come then, Acanthio, away with weariness from you; take care and be on your guard against sloth. At the same time put an end to this panting; troth, I can hardly fetch my breath; at the same time, too, drive right full against all those persons who come in the way, shove them aside, and push them into the road. This custom here is a very bad one; no one thinks it proper for him to give way to one who is running and in haste; and thus three things must be done at the same moment, when you have commenced upon but one; you must both run and fight, and squabble as well, upon the road. (Tufts translation, bold added)

Plautus reuses the “man on a mission” theme in Asinaria. As a part of a plot to trick an assdealer, Libanus remarks about the attitude of his approaching partner:³

LIBANUS: ….Whoever gets in the way of this hothead is in for a beating.

ASSDEALER: By god even if he walks brimming with the menace and spirit of Achilles himself—if the hothead touches me, the hothead is in for a beating.

However, this example from Asinaria differs from the scenes from in Curculio and Mercator. Libanus and Leonidas conspire to trick the assdealer. Leonidas portrays Saurea by aping his violent gait. Libanus points to Leonidas, but allows the assdealer to believe it is Saurea who is approaching.⁴ Yet the three scenes also share a common characteristic: they all use the concept of the person who would use violence to clear a path on the street.⁵

Plautus Expected his Audience to Understand the Concept of a Sidewalk (and They Were Crowded)

Recalling the scenes from Curculio and Mercator raises four issues related to sidewalks. First, Plautus uses semita and via in these passages to refer to sidewalks and streets, and in some respect, in a manner that modern readers would understand. A sidewalk is a type of exclusive easement that runs along a street. Yet he does not say that vehicles are prohibited there, nor does he rule it out.

Second, at least in these passages, he treats viae and semitae as parallel infrastructure: the sidewalk is separate from the street, and not a street-feature. This leads to some unfortunate consequences for the interpretation of via. We can unpack elements subsumed under the concept of “street:” roadbeds, curbs, and sidewalks. I have mentioned “streets and sidewalks” because it is difficult to have an interesting discussion about sidewalks outside the context of streets. Alternatively, the sidewalk could be understood as a street-element, instead of something that is apart from the street. The conjuncts are under different levels of category, where the conjunct “sidewalk” is subsumed under the conjunct “street.” Curculio threatens to throw someone from the sidewalk to the street. The translator anticipates this problem by using “carriage-way” instead of “street;” therefore, we are imagining some hypothetical person being ejected from the sidewalk (one street-element) to the carriage-way (another street-element). So the tumbling person never leaves the street, he merely transverses from one part of the street to the other. If via can denote both the entire width between the building faces, and it can denote just the area between the curbs, how would we know the intention of the speaker? In other words, via can either include or exclude the sidewalk, or it can be a street lacking a sidewalk altogether. As noted above, the translation of Curculio used above distinguishes “footpath” and “carriage-road,” allowing for specification of a part of the via where vehicles are allowed. In this context, this is clearly the best interpretation. In many contexts, however, the reference of via would not be clear, and these would present a similar problem as common terminology in contemporary American English. I prescribe that “streets” and “roads” should refer to the entire easement, while we should resurrect terms like “roadbed,” roadway,” and “carriageway” in order to specify the principal part of streets and roads where vehicles are allowed.

Third, since Plautus seems to be using semita to mean “sidewalk,” it is most likely that theater-goers were already familiar with the concept, and this may also indicate that some sidewalks already existed in Rome during his time.⁶ Livy (41.27) claims that Quintus Fulvius Flaccus and Aulus Postumius Albinus managed the pavement of raised sidewalks while they were censors of Rome. These appointments began in 174 BCE, about ten years after the death of Plautus. We can reconcile Plautus and Livy by postulating that the earlier sidewalks were composed of rammed dirt, and after 174 BCE, some of these sidewalks were paved.

The usage of via to refer sometimes to a roadbed and sometimes to refer to street as a whole (building line to building line) implies there was no clear taxonomy of easements. This leads to the fourth point. While Latin speakers may have used via equivocally as we use streets equivocally, Plautus probably approached this from a different bias. Romans would have presumed that pedestrians had a right to use the roadbed, even where there was a sidewalk. Pedestrian access to easements must have been the default. Contemporary Americans presume streets and roads are for the convenience of those who are traveling in vehicles, while pedestrians are the interlopers. Most Americans do not consider walking to be a legitimate form of transportation, and pedestrians are expected to defer to drivers. Pedestrians are prohibited on many roads. Even on city streets, pedestrians may use the road only in a carefully circumscribed manner, and many drivers routinely fail to yield to pedestrians even these narrow strips of pavement known as crosswalks. American English further entrenches the hegemony of drivers by defining streets and roads as places where automobility rules.⁷

Social Hierarchies of Streets

In each of these scenes from Curculio and Mercator, a character was on a mission while moving on the sidewalks in haste. Plautus suggests that the sidewalks were congested, making it difficult to move quickly. People of high status demand deference on the sidewalk, but Mercator makes a vow of insolence, and declares he would push anyone out of the way, “from the footpath into the carriage-road regardless of rank [emphasis mine].” These scenes were comedic. Yet their basis for laughter was some measure of shared experience amongst the audience: congested sidewalks, maneuvering and fighting for space, and the greater right to space asserted by people of higher social status. Some of the more important Romans followed the way cleared by armed escorts.⁸ The vow of these insignificant characters to use violence as a way to clear a path for themselves is to claim a right reserved for elites.

There is also reason to think that rushing through the streets was understood as an expression of lack of status. Running or even walking in haste is associated with the behavior of slaves. “It is a well-known motif of Roman comedies that slaves run, so much so that the phrase ‘running slave’ (servus currens), as Cobeill notes is ‘almost tautological.’”⁹ The resentment of Curculio and Acanthio could have been partly directed at higher-class persons who walked with slower gaits. Our protagonists desire to move quickly through city streets, and in doing so, they reveal their class, just as the powerful men who walked at the proper pace and with the proper mannerisms revealed their positions of power.¹⁰

Another lesson emerges from these scenes. The streets and sidewalks convey mostly pedestrian traffic. Many pedestrians competed for space. However, pedestrians are fluid: a pedestrian can transform at any whim from walker to shopper, or from walker to gossiper. “Pedestrian” is a word that expresses a person who is walking, yet a pedestrian can be a shopper at the same time. Acting as a pedestrian in an urban environment is ordinarily multi-functional, and pedestrians move through urban streets, which are also multi-functional. These great numbers of people competed for space on narrow streets while performing a variety of activities. Plautus uses Curculio for his parody, who threatens those who might obstruct his path, “with my head, or elbow, or breast, or with my knee.” While this scene brings the tension created by pedestrians to the forefront, it is not clear whether Plautus is sympathetic to the multi-functionality of Roman streets.¹¹

Plautus may have been tying encounters on the streets to social resentments. Perhaps there was an understanding that higher status conferred priority of who could use the sidewalk. To repeat a snippet from Curculio’s solioquy, “be there no person ever so opulent to stop me in my way, neither general, nor any tyrant, nor market-officer, nor demarch nor comarch, with their honors so great, but that down he goes.” As Jeremy Hartnett writes:¹²

Along the thoroughfares of a Roman city, virtually every urban inhabitant—from slave to emperor—came into spontaneous, face-to-face contact, on a daily basis. Such contact across the entire population must have had a profound impact on how individual Romans conceived of the social hierarchy and their place within it. Moreover, this visibility also rendered the street a stage for people like the dives, on which to craft and display their public image through what they did, wore, and built, and also though their ability to create a nuisance or to move unobstructed through the city.

Was Plautus Referring to Rome?

Plautus set Mercator in Athens¹³ and set Curculio in Epidaurus.¹⁴ Then, why should we suppose that Plautus was alluding to street conditions in Rome? Athens may have been used for color, and the real subject of his play may have been Rome.¹⁵ Gail Kern Pastor elaborates:¹⁶

It is obvious, of course, that Plautus does not make realistic use of the Greek settings in his plays. On the contrary, he uses the recognizable features of daily life in Rome to provide whatever ‘local color’ his comedies possess. The point is not, as some critics have complained, that Plautus fails to create a consistent world; it is rather that he borrows from the manifest ‘reality’ of Rome to breathe vitality into otherwise conventional comic plots and to provide rather trivial comic intrigue with a credible social context.

1. Plautus, Curculio, 278–298, digital reproduction by the Perseus Project. Originally published in Henry Thomas Riley, ed., The Comedies of Plautus (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1912). Bold text added. Citation drawn from Alan Kaiser, Roman Urban Street Networks (London: Routledge, 2011), 31, fn157; Phillip W. Harsh, “’Angiportum,’ ‘Platea,’ and ‘Vicus,’” Classical Philology 32 (1937): 51, fn. 15. Harsh claims that elsewhere, Plautus uses semita to mean “path,” but without citation.

2. Plautus, Mercator 111–119, digital reproduction by the Perseus Project. Originally published in Henry Thomas Riley, ed., The Comedies of Plautus (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1912). Passage cited by Kaiser, Roman Urban Street Networks, 31, fn 157.

3. Plautus (Asinaria 403–6) citation and translation taken from by Timothy O’Sullivan, Walking in Roman Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37.

4. O’Sullivan, Walking in Roman Culture, 37.

5. For more on Plautine characters threatening violence to control public space, see Amy Russell, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 30–4.

6. Claire Holleran, “The Street Life of Ancient Rome,” in Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space, Ray Laurence and David J. Newsome, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 249, fn 22.

7. Peter Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of The Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) claims that the pedestrians’ right to use American streets as they pleased was still assumed in the early 20^th century until various automobile interests (styled as “motordom”) effectively kicked pedestrians to the curb in the 1920s. Cf. Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) observes challenges to pedestrians in the street decades before the automobile.

8. Holleran, “Street Life of Ancient Rome,” 261; Ida Östenberg, “Power Walks” Aristocratic Escorted Movements in Republican Rome,” in The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome, Ida Östenberg, Simon Malmberg, and Jonas Bjørnebye, eds. (London: Bloomsbury, 2015): 15, 17; Favro, Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 29; Jeremy Hartnett, The Roman Street: Urban Life and Society in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 39.

9. O’Sullivan, Walking in Roman Culture, 18.

10. O’Sullivan, Walking in the Roman World, 17–8, passim.

11. For the multi-functionality of Roman streets, see Holleran, “Street Life of Ancient Rome”; Hartnett, Roman Street; Jeremy Hartnett, “The Power of Nuisances in the Roman Street,” in Laurence and Newsome, 135–159.

12. Hartnett, “The Power of Nuisances,” 136.

13. Charles Knapp, “Travel in Ancient Times as Seen in Plautus and Terence,” Classical Philology 2, no. 1 (1907): 3.

14. Knapp, “Travel in Ancient Times,” 4.

15. Gail Kern Paster, “The City in Plautus and Middleton,” Renaissance Drama, New Series 6 (1973): 32, 35.

16. Paster, “The City in Plautus and Middleton,” 35.