CLAS 357
Elite Male Self-Enslavement (Terence's Eunuchus)
February 26, 2024
Gutiérrez Arribas, Fountain of Cybele (Madrid, ca. 1760)
Key to Examination #1
Creative Project #1 (due March 11 @ 11:59 in D2L)
Jon Stewart on Tucker Carlson in Moscow (re trading freedom for security, order, etc.)
Portrait of Terence (9th century CE manuscript)
Elite males' figurative self-enslavement: Part I – the comic lover, Terence's Eunuchus
- Seneca, Letter 47.17: "Show me who is not a slave. One man is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, all of us to hope and fear. I will give you an ex-consul enslaved to an old-woman, a rich man to his maidservant, I will how you the most nobly born young men who have made themselves slaves of pantomine dancers, no slavery is more shameful than self-imposed slavery."
- Terence's Eunuchus: extremely popular play; festival of the Magna Mater (161 BCE); Cybele's eunuch priests in attendance
- plot?
- status of characters:
free males
main characters:
Phaedria (young lover/client of Thais); "I only wish that our love / Could be on equal terms and our emotions equally matched!" (91-2)
Gnatho (parasite); "I've trained myself to be entirely agreeable. That's the smoothest road to riches" (253)
Chaerea (ephebe, young lover/rapist of Pamphila); "This is the one who starts foaming at the mouth / Like a stallion when he's in love" (299-300)
Thraso (soldier)
minor characters:
Chremes (brother of Pamphila)
Antipho (friend of Chaerea)
Senex (father of Phaedria & Chaerea)
slave characters: Parmeno (Phaedria's slave), Pythias & Dorias (Thais's slaves), Dorus (old eunuch), Sanga (Thraso's slave), Sophrona (slave of Chremes) + Ethiopian girl & Pamphila (mute characters)
free female: Thais
- Scene 5: plot hatched (Parmeno, Chaerea): deception, costume, acting (Roman actors versus soldiers?); gift eunuch (presented with Ethiopian girl), "Here's a eunuch for you! / He has the appearance of a gentleman [liberalis] and is in the bloom of youth" (472-3)
L: Danaë & Zeus (Athenian calyx, 5th century BCE); R: same (South Italian krater, 5th century BCE)
- Scene 10: the rapist's celebration, includes ekphrasis ("description") of Jupiter (Zeus) & Danaë
- usual treatment of rape in New Comedy: 9 months prior to play (alcohol, festival "fog", angry reaction of male guardian > revelation & young man's alleged passage to adulthood)
Eunuchus 580-612 (Chaerea brags to fellow ephebe Antipho)
Chaerea
“I’m off to dinner,”
She says, and takes some maids with her. Just a few of the newer ones
Were left behind to tend to the girl. They start the preparations for her bath.
I encouraged them to be quick about it. As that’s happening,
The girl sits in her room looking up at a painting. The subject of it
Was the story of how Jupiter shot a shower of gold into Danaë’s lap.
I started to gaze at it too. The fact that so long ago he had pulled off
The very same trick made me even more excited:
A god had made himself into a man and secretly penetrated
Another man’s roof, and a woman was tricked via a skylight!
And what a god it was: “He whose thunder rattles the lofty foundations of the sky.”
Could I, a mere mortal, possibly do the same? I could . . . and I did it gladly!
As I’m mulling over all this, the girl is called to her bath.
She left, she bathed, she returned. Then the maids set her down on the bed.
I stood up and awaited my orders. One comes up to me and says: “Hey, Dorus!
Take this fan and create a nice little breeze for her while we take our baths.
You can take a bath if you want when we’re done.” I hiss at her and grab the fan.
Antipho
I’d have loved to see that shameless face of yours at that moment!
You must have had quite the demeanor—and so big an ass as you holding that little fan!
Chaerea
She’d barely gotten the words out of her mouth when they all storm out of the room.
They go off to take their bath with the usual hullabaloo slaves make
When their master’s away. In the meantime, the girl’s overwhelmed by sleep.
I secretly take a sideways peek through the fan like this. At the same time,
I look all around, to see if the coast is clear. It was, and so I bolted the door.
Antipho
Then what?
Chaerea
What do you think, moron?
Antipho
Okay, you got me there.
Chaerea
An opportunity
Like that handed to me, brief and unexpected as it was, but so longed for!
Do you think I was going to pass it up? Then I would have been a eunuch for real!
Gustav Klimt, Danaë (1907)
- reactions to rape; critique of Roman traditional hyper-masculinity?
Eunuchus 645-646 (Pythias)
The scumbag! It just wasn’t enough for him to have his way with her!
He had to rip up the poor girl’s clothes and tear her hair out on top of it all!
Eunuchus 658-660 (Pythias)
Whatever he was, all the evidence clearly shows he did what he did.
The girl’s all in tears, and can’t even say what happened when you ask her.
But that paragon of manhood? Nowhere to be found!
Eunuchus 817-821 (Thais to Pythias)
Damn it, would you stop speaking in tongues with me?
“I know,” “I don’t know,” “He went away,” “I wasn’t there.”
Whatever it is, just give it to me straight.
The girl’s clothing is torn, she’s crying, and won’t say a word.
The eunuch’s gone. Why? What happened? Speak up!
- Chaerea's humiliation: costume? confronted by Thais & Pythias (Scene 19), "I thought she was a fellow-slave" (858); reconciliation
Eunuchus 877ff.
Chaerea
And there’s one thing you should know:
I did it out of love and I didn’t intend to insult you.
Thais
I understand,
And it’s for just that reason that I’m more disposed to forgiving you.
You didn’t imagine I was so without human feelings
Or so naïve that I don’t appreciate the power of love.
Chaerea
As the gods are my witness, I love you too, Thais! . . .
Chaerea
. . . Now I really need your full support in this matter,
And I’m surrendering myself to your protection:
I hereby accept you as my patron. Please, Thais!
I’ll simply die if I can’t marry her!
Thais
But what if your father—
Chaerea
Huh? Oh, he’ll agree to it for sure
If she’s a citizen.
- final compromise/self-interests served (Scene 26): Thraso (via Gnatho), Chaerea & Phaedria? who's enslaved and who's the master?