40 pages • 1 hour read
PlautusThe Braggart Soldier
Fiction | Play | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
A character named Prologue, who doubles as the play’s director, enters. Prologue announces that the play takes place in Ephesus and the title, Alazṓon, is the Greek word for “braggart.” Suddenly, Palaestrio enters, angry that Prologue has stolen his speech. They argue, and the stage manager ushers Palaestrio offstage. Prologue continues, explaining that the braggart is a soldier named Pyrgopolynices who “believes he’s the gods’ gift to women” (1). Palaestrio is his slave. In Athens, Palaestrio’s master “was a fine young man, named Pleusicles” (2). Pleusicles lovesd an Athenian courtesan named Philocomasium. While Pleusicles was away from Athens on a quest, the soldier Pyrgopolynices charmed the courtesan’s mother and kidnapped Philocomasium, taking her to Ephesus. Palaestrio immediately left Athens to find his master. Prologue pauses here to tell the audience that this sort of thing only occurs in “romance novels and plays” (2).
Prologue resumes storytelling, describing how Palaestrio’s ship was attacked by pirates who coincidentally gifted Palaestrio as a slave to the braggart soldier Pyrgopolynices.. Soldier and slave traveled to Ephesus, where Palaestrio found Philocomasium, who told him how unhappy she was and that what she wanted was to go home and be with Pleusicles. Palaestrio sent a letter to Pleusicles, who traveled to Ephesus. Pleusicles is now staying with the soldier’s neighbor, Periplectomenus, a “kindly old man, who is doing all that he can to assist Pleusicles” (2). Palaestrio has made a passage between the two properties so that Philocomasium and Pleusicles can meet in secret. Prologue adds, “Now you know how things stand to this point. My job is done. I hope that I have explained things well enough, and in the process saved poor Palaestrio a bit of work” (2).
Prologue Analysis
Erich Segal’s version of The Braggart Soldier adapts and reshapes the play, placing the isPprologue at the beginning rather than as a long monologue for Palaestrio at the beginning of Act TwoII. Prologue’s rendition of Palaestrio’s speech offers the same information to the audience, and allows for the joke in which Palaestrio complains about his missing lines. In Roman theatre, there was no concept of a director or a stage manager as we understand it today. Tand the insertion of these roles accompanies Segal’s efforts to adapt the play into language that speaks to modern audiences in a way thatand fulfills the original comic intentions of the play rather than preserving a literally translated relic. AOften ancient plays often receive translations that use highly formal language that works to replicate the meter and structure of the original, but ,this methodin comedies, sometimes loses the wittiness of texts that were written for the entertainment of popular audiences, like comedies.. A work that was designed to be highly accessible becomes mired in thick poetic language.
Segal’s reformulation of the speech also pokes fun at Plautus’s well-known tendency to include overly -verbose prologues. Prologue notes the ridiculousness of the storyline, preparing audiences for a play that requires them to abandon any expectations of realism. While aAncient Roman audiences would have been familiar with the structure of popular comic theatre, a 20th or 2/21st century audience would be accustomed to different conventions. Segal’s restyling and rearrangement of the prologue tells audiences what to expect by breaking the fourth wall (speaking directly to the audience), reminding audiences that they are watching a play, and inserting Plautus’s typical sarcasm and theatrical in-jokes. For instance, iIn his play Casina, for instance, which, like all of Plautus’s plays, is based on a Greek original, the Pprologue informs audiences that Plautus has changed the story. Neither title character nor her young lover appears onstage at all because, as the Pprologue explains, “Plautus noluit,” or, “Plautus didn’t want to.” Placing the pPrologue at the beginning also makes the play fit much more closely into an Aristotelian plot structure, also illustrated by the Freytag model, which is byto arrangeing the exposition at the beginning of the play.
