Tradition and Originality in Plautus: Studies of the Amatory Motifs in Plautine Comedy.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Slightly rubbed, otherwise very good and clean. / Leicht berieben, sonst sehr gut und sauber. - Opinions on the extent of Plautus� dependence, in his adaptations of Greek New Comedy, on his Attic models, have see-sawed between two extremes. Nineteenth-century scholarship, of which the main representatives were F. Leo and his followers, emphasised Plautus� indebtedness to his sources, while since the publication of E. Fraenkel�s important work, Plautinisches im Plautus (1922), which was a turning-point in that it shifted the emphasis from the Greek models to Plautus himself, modem scholars have gone to the other extreme, stressing the wide scope of Plautus� originality. One of the areas in which this new approach to Plautus was applied was that of amatory conventions. While Leo, V. Hoelzer and K. Preston had felt that Plautus drew heavily on his sources when dealing with amatory matters, E. Burck, influenced by Fraenkel�s opening chapter, which argues for Plautine originality on the basis of his use of mythological hyperboles, attributed a considerable number of amatory themes to Plautus. He elaborated his views on Plautine originality by reference to a monody which even scholars such as Leo, who emphasised Plautus� dependence on his models, considered Plautine (i. e. Lysiteles� monody, Trin. 223�75); comparing his results with his analysis of a Propertian elegy (II. 12), he concluded that Plautus exhibited a far lesser reliance on his Attic sources than Propertius did vis-a-vis Hellenistic Epigram. His pupil I. Kistrup exceeded him in the wildness of her claims for Plautine inventiveness; extending Burck�s research methods to the whole of the Plautine Corpus and relating it to the works of the three Elegists Ovid, Propertius and Tibullus, she considered Plautus the source of their ideas on love, seemingly overlooking the fact that all four gained much of their inspiration from the Greek sources on which they modelled their works. P. Flury too subscribed to the new views on Plautine originality in his portrayals of love and lovers, and attributed to Plautus and Terence the introduction of a specifically Roman conception of love into their drama, while nevertheless admitting that Plautus utilised the Greek and Roman conceptions indiscriminately. Prompted by these widely divergent views and by the newly discovered fragments of Menandrian Comedy, the present study of Plautine amatory convention was undertaken in the hope of clarifying, in this area, Plautus� relation to his Attic models of which many scholars seem to have failed to appreciate the true nature. While the study cannot be claimed to be either an exhaustive or, indeed, even an entirely systematic investigation into the amatory motifs in Plautine Comedy, it nevertheless has a clearly defined and twofold object: not only does it attempt to reassess the extent of Plautus� indebtedness, in his depiction of love, to his Attic models at points where he has hitherto been considered original, but it also aims at modifying modern opinions as to where Plautus� originality does lie, and, while putting it into its proper perspective, at analysing an aspect of his inventiveness hitherto overlooked by Plautine scholars. ISBN 9783525251584