Again, in 849 sq., where Tranio and his timid master, an antiHerakles, pass by the house-dog, the situation recalls, in a burlesque fashion, Hermes' conduct of Herakles past Cerberus into Hades. Also, when Tranio undertakes (523 sq.) to drive his master away from the door of the haunted house, capite operto, the words: caue respexis, fuge, operi caput might be taken for a burlesque suggestion of the HermesOrpheus-Eurydice tale. It would be only in the two last of these passages that Tranio poses outright as a Hermes; while in the rest he would be but jesting from time to time upon the etymological significance of his own name of "Revealer." But even if we should regard Tranio's rôle as retaining traits of a burlesque Hermes of Middle Comedy, it would not be transgressing the bounds of probability in literary heredity. One purpose, we may call it, of the dramatist in giving his characters tell-tale names is to furnish opportunity for quips and puns. This may be an easy form of wit, but Shakespeare did not disdain it. Thus in The Merry Wives of Windsor there is a servant named Simple employed as a go-between. He has just been shut up in Doctor Caius's closet when the medical man, about to leave the house, says (I, iv, 64): Qu'ai-j'- oublié! dere is some simples in my closet... In the house inspection scene of the Mostellaria (783 seq.), which is full of equivoques (cf. Strong in The Classical Review, XI, 160), Theopropides says (825): quia edepol ambo ab infumo tarmes secat. The previous dialogue has put the audience in a position to understand by ambo (sc. postes) the two 'sticks' of old men, and to divine in tarme <s> 'woodworm' (which we should perhaps write trami<s>, with the manuscripts) an allusion, all unconscious on the part of Theopropides, to Tranio. In 984 Phaniscus describes Tranio in the following language: Tranio is uel Herculi conterere quaes <i>tum potest. Here conterere quaesitum means, by equivoque, 'to make a hole in (=squander) the hoard', and there is small room for doubt that the real purpose in using -terere was to furnish a quip on the name of Tranio. If, further, Tranio is qui teret, quasi 'the Bruiser', then the fear expressed in 903: ne huc exeat (sc. is ?) qui male mulcet may be rendered 'lest he come forth who bruises badly'. That mulcere may originally have had the sense of 'strike, beat' (later confined to mulcare), rather than the gentler sense of 'stroke', is perhaps attested by Ennius, Ann. 257 (Vahlen): mulserat huc nauem compulsam fluctibus pontus, for which the natural sense is 'the sea had buffeted (driven) hither the wave-beaten ship'. The propriety, however, of interpreting mulcet as a (purpose) subjunctive from mulcare is not to be gainsaid. There is another group of passages in which the name Tranio seems to be played upon. In the scene with the old men already referred to (832-840) Tranio points out in the vestibulum a picture of two vultures, the two vultures being the two old men, pecked by a cornix, the cornix being himself (cf. Aristophanes, Eq. 1051, where Kop@vaι are charged with carping at a hawk). 'Vulture' is as common a metaphor in Graeco-Roman comedy for a greedy person as 'cormorant' would be with us, and seems applied here largely as a mere epitheton ornans, greed being a general characteristic of old men in comedy, rather than a specific characteristic of the two old men in the Mostellaria. But when Tranio calls himself a cornix one is tempted to believe that the epithet is explicit in its characterization. The cleverness of the cornix was proverbial, and when Tranio says: quaeso huc ad me specta cornicem ut conspicere possies, he may merely mean to draw attention to his own superior cleverness (cf. Otto, Sprichwörter . . . d. Römer, s. v. cornix); but if Tranio is a revealer, it makes the allusion much more pointed if we stress the prophetic character of the cornix. The prophet bird is a well-known Greek conception, and Aristophanes (Aves 719 sq.) makes especial mockery of the use of the word opus in the sense of omen; while he introduces Euelpides and Peisthetairos as personally conducted in their expedition, the one by a prophetic jackdaw (koλolós), the other by a crow (kopávn cornix): cf. also Epictetus, 1. 17. 2; 2. 7. 3. = Would an audience in the time of Philemon have been apt to appreciate the allusion when a character named Tranio, a burlesque Hermes the revealer, suddenly referred to himself as a prophetic crow (kopón) or raven (kópag)? The Hermes character of Tranio might be plain enough, it would seem, for ever so slight a hint in his make-up-like the wings of the burlesque Mercurius in the Amphitruo (143)—to betray it, supposing the name Revealer not perpetually to suggest it. The text of our play gives no hint, however, of Tranio's make-up, and the raven (Kópaέ) belongs to Apollo, not Hermes.1 In the Greek original, the connection might have been made, not by a make-up, but by a pun on κópaέ ('corvus') and kâpuέa 'herald', a standing epithet of Hermes, but the play bears no trace of such a pun. Accordingly, if cornix (which corresponds to kopŋ, not to kópag) here refers specifically to Tranio, the hint was probably conveyed neither by a make-up nor by a pun. But the term cornix is here perhaps the name of another sort of bird, some one of the cornidae, a daw (koλolós), say, or a magpie (kioσa). The glosses define cornices by corniculae, aues lasciuae, iocosae. Horace (Epist. 1. 3. 29) briefly synopsizes the Aesopic fable of the daw in borrowed plumage, agreeing with the later Aesopic tradition that the disguised bird put on the feathers of all the other birds, rather than with Babrius and Phaedrus, who clothe their daw in peacock's plumes. Horace calls his bird cornicula. That he had in mind thereby the jackdaw rather than the cornix proper seems clear from the words Koloids kopávns viós of the later Aesopic tradition. The gloss already cited lends support to this idea. Either daw (koλotós, the corvus monedula of Linnaeus), jay (kioσa) or magpie (kiooa?) suit well the description aues lascivae, iocosae. The thievish and chattering habits of the magpie are particularly well known, and these characteristics would fit Tranio very neatly. It is obviously impossible, without the Greek original, to tell what bird-name originally stood there for cornix. The field of 'There is a tale (see Thompson's Greek Birds, p. 93) to the effect that Apollo sent his raven (xópag) to fetch water, and had to punish him for dallying by the way: a possible allusion to this occurs in vs. 789, where Tranio's master chides him with the words: antiquom optines hoc tuom, tardus ut sis. Note the pun in Tranio/tardus, and see below on vs. 362. The Kópa was Apollo's kāpuž or Hermes; see last note. conjecture is wide and airy. Recalling the habit of the smaller birds to fight hawks-as to vultures my knowledge permits me not to say we might think of one of the oppoλóyos flock, with the meanings of 'seed-eater' and 'babbler', noting Latin cornicor, defined in the glosses by inepte loquor. Linnaeus called the rook corvus frugilega, and frugilega approaches a Latin rendering of σñeрμodóyos'; Epicharmus and Alexander Myndius (ap. Athen. 398 C-D) mention a bird, the tetrax, with a name etymologically suggestive of 'Tranio', that was σπερμολόγος, (σπερματολόγος), καρποφάγος. The latter also comments on the noise of the τέτραξ: ὅταν ἀοτοκῇ δὲ, τετράζει τῇ φωνῇ; while Athenaeus (398 F.) calls the voice of the τέτραξ harsh (βαρεία). Besides the τέτραξ including besides one of the pheasant tribe (perhaps the Guinea fowl) a small bird-the Greeks had birds named rerpáwv (Lat. tetrao), τέτριξ, τετράδων, τετραῖον, τετράδυσιν (ἀηδόνα), cf. τατύρας, τέταρος, TÍTUPOS ('satyrus, colonus vel avis'): names for all of which the reduplication, as well as the syllable tra (tar, tur), suggests onomatopoetic origin. It is impossible to fix the precise species and nature of these birds. The tetrax, however, had been put upon the stage, so to speak, by Aristophanes (Aves 885), in a list of hero-birds (god-birds), to whom worship should be offered. That it was easy to pun on the name of Tranio with any of these bird names is self-evident, and the susceptibility of Greek audiences to puns may be caught by observing that Aristophanes (Acharn. 725-6) plays on ariavós (pheasant?) and σvkopávτns. The connection of τρανός ' piercing' with τορός 'shrill, with τορεύει and rope 'shrills' (cf. Aristophanes, Pax 381 where ei un Teтоρησ Taûra 'unless I shall proclaim in shrill tones' is put in the mouth of Hermes) would hardly have occasioned difficulty to a Greek audience who would thus have bridged the way from Tranio, via the rérpag, to Hermes.1 But the cornix is not, if we may trust the glosses, the only bird with which Tranio identifies himself. In 823 he says: atque etiam nunc satis boni sunt, si sunt inducti pice, 1 Thompson (in his Greek Birds s. v.) defines σñεрμоλóуоç by 'гook' and cites Hesychius for the gloss σπερμολόγος· κολοιῶδες ζῷον. It is probably only accidental that the lexica do not register an example of τpāvos in the sense of 'shrill': cf. Antiphilus in Anthol. P. 9. 298.6: öpyшa Δηούς κηρύσσων γλώσσης ὄμμασι τρανότερον with Aeschylus Choeph. 452: δ' ὤτων δὲ συντέτραινε μύθον let the tale penetrate thy ears': a life of Demosthenes is cited for τрāvо-πоiéw 'I pronounce clearly', and Empedocles for τρανώματα γλώττης. where the subject of boni sunt is postes 'the posts' but by equivoque, 'the sticks of old men'; si sunt inducti means literally 'if they are overlaid'—but by equivoque 'if they are overreached.' Strong (1. c.) interprets pice as an άπроσdóкητov, but inducti may better be regarded as equivocal if pice joins in the equivoque. This it does if we may follow the gloss pica Kioσa Kai miσoa 'jay (magpie) and pitch (sic).' The magpie and cornix are near enough kin to pass for identical on the stage,' and when Tranio's master says in 839 nullam pictam conspicio hic auem, he may very well, unconsciously to himself, be combining for the audience pice (827) and cornicem (835) into picam (pictam avem), just as his tramis (tarmes 825) unconsciously suggests Tranio. As to the stem-form pic-, Plautus may well have used for pica the noun pix, to be inferred as the source of Festus' gloss picati, appellantur quidam, quorum pedes formati sunt in speciem Sphingum: quod eas Dori ficas vocant. In early borrowings pig (=opiyέ) would pass into Latin as pix, a form already recognized by some scholars for Plautus in Aul. 700, picis (nom. by 'inverse attraction'), diuitiis qui aureos montes colunt, | ego solus supero. Nonius (p. 152, 6), who reads here pici (from picus) gives to the bird the character of the Greek mythological fowl, the ypúέ. That the syllable pic- might suggest, in this connection, to an audience of Romans, either the mischievous domestic thief, the pica, or the mythological Picus', is hardly to be doubted. A further passage, viz., 1104–5, cited above, may be interpreted as allusive to Tranio in his bird character of the pica, or rather, perhaps, the picus ('woodpecker'), if we may suppose Plautus to have identified these birds to the same extent as did Nonius (518, 30): picummus et avis est Marti dicata, quam picum vel picam vocant... et deus qui sacris Romanis adhibetur. The deified Picus was represented in sculpture as sitting, cf. Ladewig's note on Aen. vii. 187: "The statue of Picus differs from the statues of the kings previously mentioned in this respect, viz., that Picus is represented in a sitting posture." The sitting habit of the picus was perhaps regarded as characteristic, cf. Varro, cited by Nonius (1. c.): P. Aelius Paetus cum . . . sedens in sella curuli 1 Cf. also Thompson, l. c., s. v. Kiooα. 'King Celeus was the deified woodpecker (кɛλɛós, koλɩós) of Greece. |