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MODUS OPERANDI OF AN ARCHITECTUS DOLI

Architectural cunning in the comic plays of Plautus

Lisa Landrum

In a well-known passage at the end of De architectura, Vitruvius asserts that civic liberty has been more often won by the “cunning” (sollertia) of architects than by the power of war machines (10.16.12). Leon Battista Alberti begins his treatise on the art of building with a comparable claim: that the enemy has been more often defeated by the “ingenuity” (ingenium) of architects than by the sword of generals.¹ Beyond the context of battles won by wit, these authors deemed cunning ingenuity as equally imperative in peaceful situations, since it was this inventive capacity that enabled architects to perform essential tasks of their discipline: such as discovering hidden opportunities and relationships in given situations; foreseeing, with good judgment, perfect designs; adjusting these designs in relation to peculiarities of sites; and tempering ornament according to cultural contexts. This manifold capacity, which Vitruvius mainly called sollertia and Alberti ingenium, has roots and tendrils spanning a long tradition: from pre-philosophical notions of “cunning intelligence” (me-tis) expressed in Greek myth;² to nuanced definitions of “practical wisdom” (phrone-sis) described by Aristotle;³ to humanist theories of “invention” (inventio) developed in the Italian Renaissance;⁴ to elucidations of embodied knowledge, situated understanding, and etho-poetic imagination articulated by recent practitioners of philosophical hermeneutics.⁵ But when Vitruvius and Alberti valorized cunning ingenuity as a modus operandi specifically appropriate to architects, they were also tapping into a commonplace fundamental to comic drama: a topos as old as comedy itself, whereby an unlikely protagonist would overcome difficulties andultimately restore social order via admirably inventive yet paradoxically dubious means. This comic topos first became associated directly with architects in two Athenian dramas of the late fifth century BCE (Aristophanes’ Peace, and Euripides’ Cyclops), and was later reinforced and expanded in the Latin plays of Plautus staged in Rome between 201 and 184 BCE.

Plautus’ elaboration of the cunning slave character has long been considered one of his most original contributions to Latin drama; but the “architect” terms associated with these slaves (and with Jupiter) were likely transposed from the now largely lost Greek comedies that Plautus adapted and translated into Latin. These five imported “architects” were generally ignored in early studies of Plautine inventiveness.6 They eventually gained attention, however, in an important 1952 study on The Nature of Roman Comedy.⁷ Since then, Plautus’ architectus figure has been interpreted in a variety of ways within classical scholarship: as a euphemism for the play’s lowly agent of intrigue;⁸ as a proxy for the scheming playwright;⁹ and as a media-reflexive figure associated with other craft imagery used throughout Plautus’ plays to qualify and vivify not only acts of scheming and plot construction, but also moral edification.¹⁰ Yet, there are further interpretations to be made and important questions to be asked from the perspective of the architectural discipline. What links might the architectus doli have to the cunning ingenuity of actual architects? How can the ethically ambiguous deeds and dilemmas of the “architects” in these plays shed light on the comparable acts and conundrums of architects in society – both then and now? And, given that Plautus’ plays were performed around 200 BCE (two centuries before Vitruvius’ De architectura, and two centuries after architects arose as figures of cultural significance in Greece), how might the appearance of cunning “architects” in the speculative arena of Roman theatre be understood as participating in a re-emergent theorization of the architect’s role?

This essay cannot answer these questions in full, but it will initiate an interpretation of Plautus’ architectus doli with such questions in mind. By lifting this Roman dramatist up out of the footnotes of architectural scholarship (where he is sometimes merely credited with providing the earliest extant use of the Latin term architectus), the following study prepares the grounds for discovering how the cunning agents and agencies of Plautus’ comedies meaningfully illuminate the modus operandi of architects.

It is appropriate to begin this discussion with the opening words of the prologuist in Truculentus, for it is in this play that the transformative work of the dramatist is both compared to and contrasted with the work of architects. First, however, we must set the stage by recalling that Plautus’ plays were performed not in permanent stone theaters, but on temporary wooden platforms constructed for special events in the open forums and circuses of Rome. These public areas of the city were not designated for plays throughout the year, rather they were transformed into theatrical settings on certain occasions, including recurring festivals, temple dedications, military triumphs, and funerals.11 With such civic transformation in mind, the opening words of Truculentus are all the more suggestive. Speaking directly to the assembled audience, the actor delivering the prologue says:

Although “architects” are involved here only to be dismissed, the manner of their dismissal suggests that dramatists and architects share – in some contentious yet complementary sense – in the related activities of place-making and plot-making. Being staged in Rome but set in Athens, this play’s inaugural speech act transforms the city, or rather the spectator’s perception of it, through the dramatist’s architect-like powers of persuasive conjuration. Like the prologuist at the start of another comedy, Menaechmi, who announces “I bring you Plautus by tongue, not by hand” (3), the actor inaugurating Truculentus has no need for architects because (in the public place provided) Plautus will build his enduring work with dramatic language and human interaction, not stones.

We may discern in these two prologues an underlying contest between words and monuments – a polemic echoing Pindar, who once promised to erect a monument of song more lasting than stone.13 Yet, we should also hear in these opening lines a productive complicity between dramatic and architectural modes of transformation. Plautus’ inaugural words reveal a creative tension between place-making and plot-making in which these arts are not simply bound by analogy, but intertwined by their cooperatively transformative agency. In other words, by expressly dismissing “architects” the poet cunningly appropriates their craft, asserting that the dramatist’s medium likewise builds on situational and social conditions already available in the urban milieu. As Vitruvius’ contemporary, Ovid, would write, “the place (locus) itself provides the subject matter for the poet.”¹⁴ Thus, what “architects” contribute to Plautus’ Truculentus is not a simple image of dramatic poetry as monumental work, but a more complex demonstration of dramatic action as a potent mode of civic transformation.

This dramatic sense of civic transformation is reinforced at the beginning of another play. At the start of Poenulus, the prologuist initially establishes the scene conventionally: providing the play’s title; acknowledging its Greek model; reminding the audience of theatrical etiquette; and soliciting the indulgence of authorities (1–45). He then announces, more dramatically, that he “shall now determine the regions, limits and confines” of the “plot” (argumentum) – a task for which he has been designated not the play’s architectus, but its finitor, or “surveyor,” one who delineates boundaries (48–9). At the time of this play’s performance (circa 189 BCE), a land surveyor would have been an extremely busy and controversial figure, since the Roman Republic, surging with confidence after defeating Carthage and Macedon in the second Punic War (in 201 BCE), was ramping up its policy of territorial expansion by founding numerous colonies.¹⁵ In this colonial context, the authority of Plautus’ finitor is called upon, comically, not to delineate a new piece of the Republic abroad, but to inscribe a commensurable area of foreign land (in this case Calydon) within Rome. This nested and comparative layering of sites reinterprets the limits, mutability, and potential reversibility of the Roman situation. Many other instances of allusively layered places and plots occur in Plautus’ plays. Most overtly, midway through Curculio, a character refers directly to the markets, courts, colonnades, and shrines of the Roman Forum, thereby linking the actual performative situation in Rome to the play’s imagined Greek setting (in Epidaurus).¹⁶ By appropriating features of the surrounding milieu into the fictional plot, Plautus’ architect-like characters invite audiences to compare real and represented places, and to consider the drama underway as an illuminating mimesis of their mutually transformative potential.

A further point must be emphasized concerning Truculentus. Though the opening lines of this play serve to compare the topographies of Rome and Athens, the rhetorical dismissal of “architects” also foregrounds the power of speech to dramatically alter human circumstances. This power is demonstrated in Truculentus by the speech of a courtesan named Phronesium. As a cynical, yet seductive, embodiment of phronēsis (practical wisdom), this Athenian courtesan – who claims to have been taught by her own ingenio (453) – personifies both the ambiguous efficacy of language and the need for interpretation in relation to changing circumstances. This courtesan’s ploys, like those of the architectus, are successful because she understands (and knowingly manipulates) circumstantial conditions: not least of which is the gullibility of her solicitors – those men who desire Phronesium but, ironically, possess no phronēsis.

Dolus and dolosus, meaning “trick” and “tricky,” are terms used throughout the comedies of Plautus to qualify deceptive schemers, scheming, and schemes. In Miles Gloriosus, the architectus-slave practices “learned tricks” (147), concocts a “perfect trick” (248), and enlists collaborators who are themselves full of “trickery” – knowing “every phony phrase, the phony ways, [and] phony plays” (191–92).17 Further, this architectus shares the “rationale” (ratio) behind his “tricks” (773), and teaches his collaborators to perform their dolus with subdolus, or “subtlety” (355–7). Like architectus, dolus and dolosus stem from Greek terms: dólos (δÓλος) and dólios (δÓλιος). In Greek myth, Odysseus, who embodies mētis, also exemplifies dóliotēs (trickery): as when he overcomes the Cyclops by “guile” (dólō), not might.¹⁸ Elsewhere in the Odyssey, dólos names tricks involving cunning artifacts: the Trojan Horse is a dólos (8.494); so, too, is the bed of invisible bonds crafted by Hephaestus to ensnare his wife (Aphrodite) and her lover (Ares) in their adulterous affair (8.276). Like a fisherman’s lure offered as bait for a potential catch, such artifacts (when knowingly deployed) have ­treacherous appeal. But Plautus’ architectus doli does not devise treacherous artifacts. Rather, cunning schemes of action are his trick. Although these schemes involve the knowing manipulation of physical artifacts (including urban and theatrical settings), their success depends on more subtle skills akin to those that Vitruvius and Alberti would later valorize: persuasive leadership, timely judgment, practical forethought, and a keen interpretation of the limits and potential of circumstances – all thoughtfully exercised in the midst of highly problematic (even preposterous) situations.

Paradoxically, the success of tricky schemes in Plautus often depends on true deliberation. In Miles Gloriosus, the architectus earnestly deliberates before and throughout the scheme. Initially, he calls his inner wits to counsel as though convening a veritable “assembly” (197). Later, he likens a conference with fellow conspirators to a “well-attended senate meeting” (594). Such mock senatorial sessions led by a dubious architect–slave may have parodied the false counsel reputedly practiced by contemporaneous Roman senators and generals, whose strategizing was, at times, deemed as dishonorably cunning as Rome’s arch-enemy Hannibal.19 But, parody aside, these same scenes also show true deliberation to be imperative for concocting schemes capable not only of deceiving empowered oppressors but of liberating others from unwelcome predicaments. When such deception is enacted for the sake of accomplishing a genuine good on behalf of others, it is called a “just deception.” As the tragedian Aeschylus once wrote, Zeus does not object to “just deception.”²⁰ The scheme in Miles Gloriosus provides a good example, since it culminates with reunited lovers escaping oppressive misfortune on a ship, leaving in their wake a brutally punished warrior. Several other plays of Plautus end similarly, with amorous and familial reunions. The architectus, then, brings about justly deceptive schemes while keeping a deliberative eye on a larger plot.

Modes of representation

Together with transformation, deception and deliberation, the architectus in Plautus also practices modes of representation. First, Plautus and his “architects” deploy a variety of architectural metaphors, using terms drawn from related trades, including masonry, carpentry, ship-building, weaving and pottery. With such artisanal metaphors, Plautus gives representation to largely invisible processes of scheming.²¹ For instance, the plan of Plautus’ architectus is sometimes called a “piece of craft” (after the Greek techne-), and a “fabricated thing.” A fellow schemer is an “artist” and “builder,” and the general work of scheming is “building.” The elements of a scheme might be “glued together,” as bricks are joined with mortar in a well-bonded wall. A highly-refined plan may be “polished” like marble or silver; whereas a preliminary trick may be “hewn” and “rough-hewn” like heavy timber, or “hammered-out” after the manner of a smith working metal in a forge. Some slaves carefully “weave” an intricate plot; others quickly “stitch” an improvisatory trick. A scheme may be “moulded” in the manner of a potter working malleable clay: as Palaestrio boasts in Miles Gloriosus, “this affair is shaping up well under my hands” (873, 1143).22 Palaestrio’s collaborators also offer an extended analogy between devising a scheme and building a ship. As the schemers prepare to launch their trick, one remarks on how their architectus has firmly established the keel, setting it well “in line,” now it’s up to them, the “experienced builders,” to complete the work on time (915–21). Beyond the relatively obvious compositional and tectonic parallels between well-crafted schemes and well-made artifacts, this imagery also makes vivid the collaborative, iterative and immersive aspects of scheming.

Plautus further uses architectural imagery to draw ethical arguments. For instance, in Mostellaria, the youth who misbehaves in his father’s absence incants an extended monologue in which he likens himself to a house and his parents to builders (85–156). Although his parents initially raised him up with strong foundations and proper finishes (a good liberal education), he realizes that he has poorly maintained their work. Now, having suffered a storm of love, he is “being eaten away by metaphorical rain and hail,” and his timbers are rotting.²³ Central to this youth’s song is the problem of finding a proper model, or exemplum: he finds a well-built house to be an exemplum of man, and a self-disciplined man to be an exemplum for others. The slave’s later introduction of “some architect” who deems a particular house exemplary (760), participates in this edifying imagery, suggesting that architects (and architecture) have some role to play in restoring ethical capacity.

Finally, the “architects” of Plautus implicate features of the setting (the scaena) into their scheme, giving representation to architecture’s ominous, appealing and revelatory agencies. For example, in Mostellaria, Tranio convinces a father that his house is haunted so that he will not enter it and discover how his son misbehaved in his absence. Through situational allusions and deceit, Tranio changes not the house, but the father’s perception of it. Tranio subsequently persuades the father to regard the neighbor’s house as exemplary by alluding to “some architect” who praised it (760–1), and by describing appealing features of its otherwise invisible interiors. In Miles Gloriosus, adjacent houses also aid and abet the scheme. With a secret tunnel and well-placed windows, Palaestrio, the architectus, makes one woman appear as two to those less skilled in the interpretation of appearances. These portals perform epistemologically, giving selective access to the truth of events. The architectus in this play persuasively controls what is seen and unseen, and how what is seen and unseen are understood.24 Having initially involved the scaena to make the warrior’s slave not see what he has seen, Palaestrio later involves his collaborators to make the warrior see what he has not. Preoccupied with his own image, this warrior, who brags of his own ability to blind enemies with radiant weaponry, is shown, ironically, to be himself blind to the subtle devices mobilized against him. Seeing only what he desires, the braggart succumbs to flattery, perceiving the architect’s trick only after it is too late.

Negotiating ambiguity

In the prologue of Amphitryon, Mercury introduces Jupiter as “architect of all” – of all “good deeds” performed for the people (45). This seemingly straightforward qualification of Jupiter’s benevolent omnipotence takes on subtler layers of meaning when considered in dramatic context, since Jupiter himself performs in this comedy as a deceptive schemer in pursuit of mortal love. Impersonating a returning war general, Amphitryon, Jupiter enjoys the affections of this general’s wife, Alcmena. Meanwhile, Mercury, impersonating Amphitryon’s slave Sosia, ensures that Jupiter’s philandering goes unnoticed. The play unfolds as a series of episodes involving double, mistaken, and lost identities, and culminates with a near tragedy when Amphitryon discovers what he believes to be his wife’s infidelity. This crisis turns to comic resolution, however, when Jupiter reveals himself as the source of trouble and reconciles the situation by adjusting time such that Alcmena gives birth to twin sons: one mortal, one divine. Thus, when Mercury introduces Jupiter as “architect of all,” this “all” implies the play’s every action (large and small), every complication (good and devious), plus the tragicomic resolution. This comprehensive plot-making realigns the architectus figure with the dramatist Plautus, who may well have played the role of Jupiter himself.²⁵

Beyond reinforcing performative similarities between architects and dramatists, Amphitryon reveals the complex status shared by these comparable agents: a shifty, ambiguous, and contradictory status somewhere between a lowly actor (on par with a wily slave) and a supreme god (acting as a mortal general). Mercury delights in these ambiguities, urging the audience to pay attention while Jupiter stoops to take up the “histrionic art” (86–90, 152). As a comedic playwright, Plautus, likewise, delights in ambiguities of status. All his plot-driving agents of doli and ingenium were officially powerless: slaves, women, prostitutes, old men, and foreigners. Like actors and dramatists, builders and architects in the Roman Republic were generally foreigners, freedmen, or slaves.²⁶ Yet, in spite of their subordinate position, they were tasked with authority and obliged to act with expertise and comprehensive knowledge. Like slaves in Roman society, architects were mercurial mediators: moving between echelons of society, between public and private domains, and between noble intentions and underhanded means. Given twenty-first century anxieties over the authority, respectability, and relevance of architects, the architect–slaves of Plautus provide a timely model for theorizing persistent ambiguities of status inherent to the architect’s role.

This essay has largely emphasized the good intentions of an architectus doli, and the ethical benefits of their transformative, deceptive, deliberative and representative deeds. But the actions and intentions of cunning architects are not always good. Indeed, the word “architect” has been used as a pejorative epithet for villainous schemers since at least the fourth century BCE.27 When Vitruvius and Alberti composed their respective treatises, they were each eager to distance the architect’s modus operandi from malfeasance. For instance, although Vitruvius valued sollertia as a kind of cunning proper to architects, he also sought to distinguish true architects from those who “term themselves architects falsely” (6.pref.7). Similarly, although Alberti valued ingenium and wit, he also deemed “deceit and guile” of the masses and “unscrupulous cunning” of the powerful to be serious threats to civic order.²⁸ Plautus’ architectus doli, then, should be seen as treading a thin line between propriety and impropriety, helping us to recognize and navigate the ethical ambiguities architects face while striving for happy endings.

Notes

  1 Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor, Leon Battista Alberti: On the Art of Building in Ten Books (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 4.

  2 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978).

  3 Nicomachean Ethics 1140a24–1145a11.

  4 Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980).

  5 Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Mario J. Valdés, A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). In architectural discourse, see Marco Frascari, “Sollertia,” Off Ramp 1, no. 5 (2001): 51–3; David Leatherbarrow, “Adjusting Architectural Premises: The Conscience of Design,” Practices 5–6 (1997): 175–84; and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Architect’s Métier,” in Carleton Folio (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1985).

  6 Eduard Fraenkel, Plautine Elements in Plautus, trans. Tomas Drevikovsky and Frances Muecke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), first published as Plautinisches im Plautus, 1922.

  7 George E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952).

  8 George Fredric Franko, “The Characterization of Hanno in Plautus’ Poenulus,” American Journal of Philology 117, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 425–52; and C. Stace, “The Slaves of Plautus,” Greece & Rome 15, no. 1 (April 1968): 64–77.

  9 Stavros A. Frangoulidis, “Palaestrio as Playwright: Plautus, Miles Gloriosus 209-212,” Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History 7, no. 227 (1994): 72–86; Timothy J. Moore, The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 75–6; Alison Sharrock, Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Niall W. Slater, Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Eva Stehle, “Pseudolus as Socrates, Poet and Trickster” in Classical Texts and their Traditions: Studies in Honor of C.R. Trahman, ed. David F. Bright and Edwin S. Ramage (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), 239–51.

10 W. Forehand, “The Use of Imagery in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus,” Rivista di Studi Classici 21 (1973): 5–16; Mason Hammond, Arthur M. Mack and Walter Moskalew, T. Macci Plauti: Miles Gloriosus (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, reprinted 1997), esp. 48; and Eleanor Windsor Leach, “De exemplo meo ipse aedificato: An Organizing Idea in the Mostellaria,” Hermes 97, no. 3 (1969): 318–32.

11 Gesine Manuwald, Roman Republican Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 41–68.

12 James Tatum, trans., Plautus: The Darker Comedies, Bacchides, Casina, and Truculentus (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 153. Unless otherwise noted, all other translations of Plautus in this essay are from Wolfgang de Melo, ed., Plautus, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

13 Olympian Ode 6.1–4.

14 14Fasti 4.807.

15 Erich S. Gruen, “Plautus and the Public Stage,” in Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 124–57.

16 For an interpretation of this scene, see Timothy Moore, “Palliata Togata: Plautus, Curculio 462-86,” American Journal of Philology 112, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 342–62.

17 Plautus. Three Comedies: The Braggart Soldier, The Brothers Menaechmus, The Haunted House, trans. Erich Segal (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

18 Odyssey 9.406–8.

19 On Plautus’ parodying of military strategizing, ambitions and triumphs, see Fraenkel, Plautine Elements in Plautus, 163–6.

20 Aeschylus Frag. 301.

21 For an introduction to this topos, see M. L. West, “Poetry as Construction,” in Indo European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 35–6.

22 See note 10 above for references to craft imagery.

23 I use Kristina Milnor’s words here to capture the gist, see “Playing House: Stage, Space, and Domesticity in Plautus’s Mostellaria,” Helios 29.1 (2002): 10.

24 On “vision and confusion” in Plautus, see Sharrock, Reading Roman Comedy, 100–15.

25 David Christenson, ed., Plautus, Amphitruo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2.

26 James C. Anderson, Roman Architecture and Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 37; and Manuwald, Roman Republican Theatre, 90–1.

27 Demosthenes, Speeches 40.42; 56.11.

28 De re aedificatoria, 5.1; and Caspar Pearson, Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 119–20.