Bacchides is a Latin comedy by the early Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. The title has been translated as The Bacchises, and the plot revolves around the misunderstandings surrounding two sisters, each called Bacchis, who work in a brothel. It includes Plautus' frequent theme of a clever servant outwitting his supposed superior to get money. The play is probably an adaptation of the play Δὶς Ἐξαπατῶν (Dis Exapaton), meaning Twice Deceiving or The Double Deceiver, by the Greek playwright Menander. The beginning of it is lost, but the outline of the missing scenes can be partly reconstructed from twenty surviving fragments. One feature of the play which has puzzled scholars is that while Menander's original play was called "The Twice Deceiving", there appear to be three deceptions in the Bacchides. Various solutions to this have been suggested. Several scholars have proposed that the third deception was added by Plautus himself and was not in the original Menander play. Because of the variety of musical passages, the Bacchides is believed to have been written late in Plautus's career, either before or after the Pseudolus. The play is set in Athens. The stage set shows two houses, that of Bacchis and that of Nicobulus. Between them is a shrine or altar of Apollo.

Plot summary

While the young man Mnesilochus is abroad in Ephesus, collecting a debt on behalf of his father, he falls in love with a courtesan called Bacchis. But Bacchis is taken against her will to Athens by a soldier who has hired her services. His friend Pistoclerus, who has been instructed to look for Bacchis in Athens, falls in love with Bacchis's twin sister, also called Bacchis. When Mnesilochus and his cunning slave Chrysalus return home, Chrysalus deceives Mnesilochus's father Nicobulus into thinking that part of the money is still in Ephesus; in this way Mnesilochus will be able to keep some of the money to pay for Bacchis's release from her contract with the soldier. But when by chance Mnesilochus hears that Pistoclerus has acquired a girlfriend called Bacchis, in his anger he gives all the money to his father, keeping none back. Too late, he learns from Pistoclerus that there are two Bacchises. He begs Chrysalus to play another trick on his father to get the money he needs. Chrysalus therefore tells Nicobulus that Mnesilochus has been making love to the wife of a soldier called Cleomachus who is threatening to kill Mnesilochus. To protect his son, Nicobulus willingly promises to pay the money. Later, in yet another deception, Chrysalus persuades Nicobulus to pay another 200 gold pieces to prevent his son committing perjury. Shortly afterwards Nicobulus meets the soldier and learns that Bacchis is only a courtesan who owed the soldier money. Furious, Nicobulus and Pistoclerus's father Philoxenus go to the Bacchis sisters' house to confront their sons; the two sisters come out, tease them and charm them and persuade them to come in and enjoy the party.

Metrical structure

Plautus's plays are traditionally divided into five acts. However, it is not thought that the act-divisions go back to Plautus's time, since no manuscript contains them before the 15th century. Also, the acts themselves do not always match the structure of the plays, which is often more clearly shown by the variation in metres. A common pattern in Plautus is for a metrical section to begin with iambic senarii (which were unaccompanied by music), followed optionally by a musical passage or song, and ending with trochaic septenarii, which were recited or sung to the music of a pair of pipes known as tibiae. This pattern is referred to as the "ABC succession", where A = iambic senarii, B = other metres, and C = trochaic septenarii. Some of Plautus's plays, however, begin with song (for example, Persa and Cistellaria). The Bacchides is notable for the variety of its musical passages. These include a polymetric song (612–669), in which Mnesilochus blames himself bitterly for losing his temper. This song has several changes of metre (trochaic, anapaestic, bacchiac, cretic) and includes a passage of 12 lines of the rarely found wilamowitzianus (626–631a). Later in the play there is a long passage of iambic octonarii, mixed with trochaic octonarii and septenarii, in which Chrysalus celebrates his triumph (925–996a); and there are also passages of cretics (1107–1116) and bacchiacs (1120–1140a), and two long passages in anapaestic metres (1076–1108 and 1149–1211). If the trochaic septenarii passages are taken as indicating the end of each metrical section, the play can be analysed metrically as follows: Clark (1976) analyses the play as having a symmetrical structure, centring around the intervention of the soldier's parasite in 573–611. The events in the first half are echoed in reverse order in the second half. He sees a structure such as the following (omitting the first two scenes): Clark points out various verbal echoes between the corresponding scenes: for example, in sections 1 and 7, Pistoclerus and his father both compare the girls' sweet talk to bird-lime (viscus), used to trap birds (50, 1158); in sections 2 and 6, Nicobulus talks of the necessity of sailing to Ephesus (342–3, 775–6); and both Lydus (372) and Cleomachus (869) use the word sorbeo of sucking blood. Similar symmetrical or chiastic structures can be found in other Plautus plays, such as Asinaria, Miles Gloriosus, Captivi, and Pseudolus. The first two or three scenes of the Bacchides (perhaps 200 lines) are missing in the manuscripts of the P family, presumably because they all derive ultimately from an ancient copy which was damaged; they are also missing in the Ambrosian palimpsest (A), which in this play begins only at line 476. Some 20 short fragments quoted by ancient writers are thought to belong in this gap: these are numbered lines 1–31 in the Oxford text. Some of the fragments are in metres suitable for song (cretic, bacchiac, and one iambic octonarius), while others are in iambic senarii. The order of the fragments differs in different editions and is not entirely certain. However, it is most likely that, like most of Plautus's plays, Bacchides began with the spoken iambic senarii verse. The reconstruction given below is based on the arguments of Bader.

The Bacchises seduce Pistoclerus

Chrysalus's first trick

Mnesilochus's anger

Mnesilochus's distress

Chrysalus's second and third trick

The Bacchises seduce Philoxenus and Nicobulus

Plautus and Menander

In 1968 were published, pieced together from 13 fragments of papyrus discovered in Egypt, some 80 lines of a play believed to be Menander's Dis Exapaton (Δὶς Ἐξαπατῶν), allowing scholars to see in detail for the first time how Plautus made use of Menander's material. These lines correspond to Bacchides 494–562. It is evident that Plautus adapted, rather than simply translated, the Menander play. In Menander the characters have different names. Lydus is still Lydos, but Mnesilochus is Sostratos, Pistoclerus is Moschos, and Chrysalus is called Syros. In Menander's play, there is a scene where Sostratus tells his father about the money; this is followed by a choral interlude and then another (fragmentary) scene involving Sostratos and his father. All of this is omitted by Plautus. The simple meeting between Sostratos and his friend Moschos in Menander is greatly expanded in Plautus (534–539) to an elaborate symmetrical monologue more typical of the Plautine style. In lines 526–72 Plautus has used recitative verse (trochaic septenarii) in place of Menander's spoken iambic trimeters. Plautus may have made other changes in his adaptation. For example, in Plautus, it is possible that the scene where Lydus comes out of the brothel has been moved to later in the play: since Lydus himself says that he spent only a few moments there, it is likely that in Menander he came out almost at once rather than nearly 200 lines later. Plautus may have moved the scene to replace a choral interlude in Menander. Another change that it has been suggested that Plautus may have made is to introduce a third deception to Menander's play. The third deception involves the concept of fides ("loyalty, faith, keeping one's word"), which is a particularly Roman one. It is argued by Owens (1994) that the typically Roman behaviour of Nicobulus is contrasted with the untrustworthy deceptive behaviour of Chrysalus, which to a Roman audience might have seemed typically Greek. In the scene between Mnesilochus and Pistoclerus also, Plautus has greatly expanded on the importance of keeping one's word (lines 540–542), whereas in the corresponding Menander passage Sostratos merely accused Bacchis of acting unjustly.

Etymology

Several of the characters names are significant. Nicobulus ironically means Victorious in counsel, Chrysalus means Goldie, Cleomachus means Glorious fighter, and Bacchis means Bacchant, a female worshipper of Bacchus, god of wine.

Translations