Letters from Tomis

Book Review

Plautus. Aulularia. In Plautus, edited and translated by Wolfgang de Melo, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 2011.

Plautus’s Aulularia (The Pot of Gold) stands among the most incisive surviving Roman comedies, notable for its psychologically acute portrayal of avarice and its deft manipulation of New Comedy conventions. Although the play is fragmentary in its final act, its extant portions reveal a tightly constructed dramatic exploration of obsession, social anxiety, and the fragile boundaries between private wealth and public life. At its center is Euclio, a miser whose discovery of a hidden pot of gold transforms him into a figure of comic paranoia, yet also of unsettling recognizability.

The dramaturgy of Aulularia is rooted in Plautus’s adaptation of Greek New Comedy, likely drawing from a lost play by Menander. However, Plautus reconfigures his source material with a distinctly Roman sensibility, intensifying both the farcical elements and the social satire. The play’s prologue, delivered by the household Lar, establishes a theological and domestic framework that is crucial to understanding Euclio’s condition. The treasure is both a blessing and a curse, bestowed not as a reward for virtue but as a test of moral equilibrium. This divine framing underscores a central irony: wealth does not liberate Euclio but enslaves him.

Euclio himself represents one of Plautus’s most memorable character types, the miser figure that would echo through Western literature, most famously in Molière’s L’Avare. Yet Plautus’s treatment is less purely satirical than often assumed. Euclio’s miserliness is not merely a vice but a psychological condition shaped by precarity and distrust. His obsessive guarding of the pot produces a comic rhythm of concealment, suspicion, and displacement. He repeatedly relocates the treasure, each new hiding place intensifying rather than alleviating his anxiety. In this sense, Plautus anticipates later literary explorations of possessiveness as a form of alienation. The gold functions not as wealth in circulation but as a static object that isolates its owner from the social world.

The secondary plot, involving the marriage arrangements of Euclio’s daughter Phaedria, provides a structural counterpoint to the miser’s fixation. The young lover Lyconides and the elderly suitor Megadorus represent competing models of social integration. Megadorus’s proposal, which notably rejects the expectation of a dowry, appears at first to offer a resolution to the economic tensions surrounding marriage. However, Euclio interprets even this generosity as a threat, suspecting ulterior motives aimed at his hidden wealth. Plautus thus exposes the corrosive effects of avarice on social trust. What should be a moment of communal alliance becomes another occasion for paranoia.

Formally, Aulularia demonstrates Plautus’s skill in orchestrating comic misunderstanding and dramatic irony. The audience is consistently positioned to recognize the absurdity of Euclio’s fears, even as the character himself experiences them as entirely rational. This tension generates both humor and a degree of pathos. The play’s language, rich in colloquial vigor and verbal play, reinforces this duality. Plautus employs rapid exchanges, exaggeration, and repetition to mirror the obsessive loops of Euclio’s thought. The miser’s speeches often circle around the same anxieties, creating a linguistic pattern that enacts his psychological entrapment.

The fragmentary ending of Aulularia presents a significant challenge for interpretation. Later reconstructions suggest a conventional comic resolution in which the gold is restored and social harmony reestablished. Yet the surviving text resists such closure. Euclio’s transformation, if it occurs, is not fully dramatized, leaving open the question of whether avarice can truly be cured within the comic framework. This incompleteness has led some scholars to read the play as fundamentally unstable, its comic resolution always threatened by the persistence of obsession.

From a broader cultural perspective, Aulularia offers insight into Roman attitudes toward wealth, domestic authority, and social mobility. The tension between hidden treasure and public exchange reflects anxieties within a society increasingly defined by economic expansion and inequality. Euclio’s refusal to spend or display his wealth marks him as aberrant, yet it also reveals the precariousness underlying Roman economic life. Wealth, in Plautus’s portrayal, is both a source of status and a catalyst for fear.

In conclusion, Aulularia exemplifies Plautus’s ability to merge farce with psychological depth and social critique. Through the figure of Euclio, the play transforms a stock comic type into a vehicle for exploring the isolating effects of obsession and the fragile foundations of trust in a monetized society. Even in its incomplete state, the work remains a compelling study of how comedy can illuminate the darker dimensions of human desire.