The Woman from Andros (Andria) by Terence

        The Woman from Andros, alternately called Andria is the next play in my collection of Latin Classics in translation. It’s another comedy based around misunderstandings, secrets, and deceptions in along the lines of the previous Latin play I’d examined, Plautus’ The Haunted House.

The premise of this one is essentially a long game of marital chicken. Simo, an Athenian nobleman, is worried about his son Pamphilus’ morals and future. Simo suspects his son has fallen in love with a lowly woman, Glycerium—and indeed he is correct—and so sets about planning his marriage to Philumena. It’s a similar overbearing father situation akin to something like The Taming of the Shrew. While Simo is actually absolutely correct, he’s missing more information: not only is Pamphilus in love with Glycerium, he is also secretly engaged to her and she is pregnant with his child, about to deliver. Meanwhile, Charinus, who is actually in love with Philumena, is crushed by his friend’s sudden engagement to her. So, they’re all in a love triangle and trying to avoid the wedding.

Simo instructs Davus, Pamphilus’ slave, to ensure that the marriage goes off without a hitch, leaving him torn between allegiances. Does he help his master to remain faithful to his true beloved or avoid the inevitable punishment if he gets in the way of the wedding? The idea of tricky slaves trying to avoid punishment seems to be emerging as a theme in Latin theater…

Davus discovers that the wedding is a sham and engages in a series of deceptions for Pamphilus to save face. Simo is trying to expose Pamphilus and so he’s certain Pamphilus will refuse the marriage; Davus encourages him to agree to the wedding, which puts father and son into a game of chicken: who will back down from this wedding nobody actually wants?

The play is reasonably straightforward in that sense and has some comic moments with its dramatic irony. It doesn’t have the flowery language of a Shakespeare comedy, at least not in this translation, so the comedy is principally based on the situation and the characters’ refusals to concede. There are also some funny misunderstandings where Simo gets so close to knowing the truth but then misreads it. For example, when he overhears a baby being born he thinks it’s a tactic to scare the partners away from the marriage and that it’s all a ruse. Davus very kindly lets him fool himself and then speaks honestly, sort of, to suggest that the baby is a tactic from Glycerium to scare Pamphilus off from his marriage. 

The plot gets more complicated from there and I won’t trouble you with the details. Besides, for the humour to land, you’ll need to be at least a little surprised by the kinds of tricks the characters play.

It’s a fun little play that will take you about two hours to read. Might as well give it a shot.

Happy reading!

The Haunted House of Plautus

    The first time I moved into a house that was not my parents’ was around 2009. It was an attic bedroom in a student house in Kingston, and when I went into the closet I discovered a set of history textbooks someone had left behind, sometimes with post-it notes still embedded. One of those books was an anthology, Classics in Translation Volume II, edited by Paul MacKendrick and Herbert M. Howe. I don’t know what compelled me to pick up the book so many years later, but the first play in the collection is The Haunted House of Plautus, elsewhere titled Mostellaria.

    Most of us, I think of classics as exclusively Greek tragedies, but Plautus offers here a Latin comedy. You know that trope in movies and TV where the kids are having a house party and then the parents come home unexpectedly and everyone has to hide and pretend there was no party? Well, that’s The Haunted House. Philolaches is a young man whose father, Theopropides, has been abroad for three years. While he’s been away, Philolaches has been engaging in debauchery with his friends, hosting alcohol-fueled ragers. He has also paid to have a sex worker become his exclusive mistress. When they discover that his father has returned, the house goes into a panic and Tranio, one of their slaves, has to take action.

    Tranio develops a plot that requires more and more effort to sustain. He tells everyone to lock themselves inside the house and then when Theopropides returns, Tranio emerges to warn him that the house is haunted and that by even knocking on the door, he may be cursed. It’s like an episode of Fraser from there, where one lie requires another, requires another, requires another, requires another. Tranio is nearly a comic version of Iago, praising the value of lying as he digs himself in deeper. Philolaches owes a lender money for all the booze and Tranio develops a plot to have Theopropides pay off the debt because—oh, it’s not for booze or buying the freedom of a sex worker—it’s because the house was haunted, so they bought the neighbour’s house at a huge discount. When Theopropides wants to go into the house, Tranio has to approach the neighbour and say that Theopropides is looking to do some renovations and wants to inspect the house. Luckily, he’s able to get in and inspect without too many questions, but the tension of the play is that the lie is ready to unfold at any moment. It’s a fun, short little piece that tells an essentially sitcom-esque story. I think it’s hard to genuinely connect with a piece so old. Our expectations of stories have changed over time, and so there’s always a bit of a distance (cf. Irving Howe’s History and the Novel). I think comedies in particular are difficult to sustain over a long period, but the comedy comes primarily through the situation rather than the language, so The Haunted House maybe has an advantage in that respect.

    Structurally, the play is pretty interesting. The opening scene of the play is an interaction between the city slave and the country slave to set the stage. Throughout the play, we get songs (?) where characters offer their life philosophies. There are also tangents that take up a significant amount of time, the most notable of which is a lengthy exchange between Philematium (Philolaches’ mistress) and her elderly maid Scapha with Philolaches eavesdropping. It’s a comic moment where Philolaches offers comment on Scapha’s advice and he’s getting increasingly annoyed with her.

    Other than Tranio, Philolaches is probably the character about whom we learn the most. In his life philosophy song, he explains how life is like a house that needs constant repair. He displaces responsibility from himself and blames his father for not maintaining him well and allowing cracks to form in him. In those cracks, love seeps in and now he sees himself as no good, giving up his life for his lover. It’s an insight into Athenian life, which is also noted in the introduction by the translator, about how much influence parents ought to have on their children.

    I wouldn’t put Plautus on the same level as current playwrights, but I was surprised by how ‘modern’ the work seems relative to other narratives. Perhaps it’s because the play had to appeal to lowest common denominator, but it actually has stayed an entertaining premise, even if it’s not going to change my world.

    Short play, short review. Happy reading!