To the memory of Eduard Fraenkel, 1888-1970

I.

Plautus and Terence both claim to be translating or adapting particular Greek plays, yet they clearly did so with a certain amount of freedom. This gives rise to a number of questions, most of which may well be unanswerable in principle: why did they choose these plays to adapt? What changes did they make, and why? Where they did not make changes, can we say whether and in what ways the plays would have been received differently by their Roman audience from the way in which they were received by the original Greek audience? Plautus and Terence preserve (at least in outline) the Greek world of their originals. This very fact creates a new screen of some kind between the Roman audience and the characters they are watching. But can we say anything sensible about the effect of this screen²? The circumstances of production of their plays (as far as we know about them) were significantly different from those which had obtained at Athens. This must have made theatregoing quite a different experience in the two cities, and it may help to account for some differences between Greek and Roman New Comedy. But can we take our account beyond the level of plausible generalisation?

Well, before we can account for the differences, we have to define them, and that is hard enough, given the minute proportion of Greek New Comedy which has survived. But at least we have considerably more now than we did thirty years ago. This new material has provided a wealth of lessons to be learnt, and almost anything we learn about Menander is likely to illuminate our study of Plautus and Terence. If I wanted to give a survey of what the Bodmer codex and other recent discoveries have contributed to our understanding of Roman Comedy, I should in effect have to summarise everything that we have learnt from them altogether. I hope that it will be more profitable and instructive to take one topic as an illustration. The endings of some Roman comedies are an area where scholars have suspected that Plautus and Terence have made significant changes. In the second half of this paper I shall discuss the last 70 lines of Terence’s Eunuchus in detail. In certain respects, this ending must be quite different from what Terence found in Menander’s Eunouchos. But I shall argue that Terence cannot be shown to have made one particular change which some scholars have claimed to indicate a significant difference between Athenian and Roman taste. This is an area where the Bodmer codex should be particularly helpful, since it contains two endings (those of Dyskolos and Samia) which we can discuss in their dramatic context. These are the only two complete final acts by Menander which we possess, though we can also say a certain amount about the endings of several other plays which have survived in a more fragmentary state.

II.

A great deal has been written about Menander’s endings since the publication of Dyskolos. In particular, chapter 4 of Holzberg’s excellent study of Menander’s dramatic technique surveys the field so well that I can take a number of details for granted in what follows. Holzberg stresses two aspects of Menander’s construction which have also been much stressed by others: (i) that in all essentials the plot reaches its preordained conclusion at the end of Act IV, by which stage the main complications have been sorted out and the central misunderstandings elucidated; (ii) that the last act ends the play in a relatively relaxed manner, sometimes introducing a new development, and often echoing earlier scenes for comic effect. There is room for argument particularly over what counts as the preordained conclusion of the plot of Dyskolos, but no one (I think) would dispute the essential correctness of these observations³.

At the very least, the new evidence offered by the Bodmer codex must affect the terms in which we now discuss familiar problems. Plautus’ Stichus may be taken as an example. To start with a detail, twice in the closing scenes of this play (715-724, 758-768) a slave breaks the dramatic illusion by addressing the tibicen. Could such a thing happen in a play by Menander, the author of the Greek original of Stichus? Yes it could, it happens in the last act of Dyskolos at line 880. On a larger scale, the ending of Stichus shows two slaves having a party on stage with their girl friend; at the end they dance. In 1910 Süss argued that this was a survival from the traditional revelry which we see at the end of some comedies by Aristophanes and that it was therefore not at all unthinkable for the ending of a Menandrian comedy. Dyskolos does not show slaves having a party on stage, but its ending does contain a number of features which have been seen by scholars as deriving from the same tradition of revelry, including a description of the party off-stage which the old man Knemon is being forced to join and which includes dancing. So it is hard to deny that Menander could have written an even more unbuttoned ending in the manner of Stichus. But this observation does not remove the problem of the ending of Stichus, which concerns its lack of connexion with the overall structure of the play. What happens at the end of Dyskolos is essentially the taming of Knemon, an action which links the final scene as closely as could be desired with those which have gone before. There is no similar link between the ending and the preceding scenes in Stichus, and two of the three characters on stage have not been seen before at all. Even Aristophanes does not attach the final revelry quite as loosely to his plays as this; can we believe that Menander did so, or is it more likely that Plautus has expanded an element which may have played a much smaller part at the end of his Greek original⁴?

One of the most intractable problems of dramatic coherence in Roman Comedy arises at the end of Terence’s Adelphoe⁵. For four fifths of the play Micio is presented as superior to his brother Demea in his understanding of how to handle their adolescent sons. At the end, Demea dominates at the expense of Micio and establishes himself as the one with the truer insight into this question. If this leads us to reconsider some of the earlier scenes, in which Micio clearly dominated Demea, then we may well find reasons to be glad to see Demea winning the love of his sons, and to see Micio as the victim of the absurd proposals that Demea makes. But that Demea should lecture Micio right at the end of the play, that he should turn out to be superior to Micio in his understanding of how to bring up the boys, is completely at odds with the whole balance of the play⁰⁶. There is also, at least on the surface, a contradiction between the monologue with which Demea introduces the final scenes, where he explains that he has decided to abandon his former way of life in order to win the love of his sons, and the explanation for this change of behaviour which he gives to Micio at the very end. He says there (986-988) that his aim has been to bring out Micio’s shortcomings, to show that his life lacks a solid basis. In his earlier monologue (855ff.) he did indeed announce that he was planning to compete with Micio in being charming and generous, but he never suggested that his aim was to expose him; he was going to change his behaviour because he was genuinely convinced that this was the way to win his sons’ love⁷. At the end of the play he suggests quite a different motivation.

Such contradictions would not surprise us in Aristophanes. Above all, it is only towards the end of Clouds that the chorus reveal that they have been leading Strepsiades on to his own destruction⁸. The audience had no more reason than Strepsiades to suspect this in the early stages of the play. In addition, the course of the play takes a new direction at the end, when Strepsiades sees the results of the education which he has procured for his son and turns against Sokrates. Holzberg (pp. 123-124) takes the ending of Clouds as paradigmatic for the way in which the Greek comic tradition incorporated a number of standard elements in its endings, and he argues (following in the footsteps of Süss) that it foreshadows the endings of Menander’s comedies in several respects. His chapter on the fifth act in Menander concludes (p. 171) with the remark that there is no reason to think that Terence has changed the ending of Adelphoe, since it is entirely Aristophanic in its effect. Holzberg allows that the type of humour to be expected did change to some extent during the fourth century, but in essence an Aristophanic ending is (for him) also a Menandrian ending⁹.

Does this imply that questions of balance and dramatic coherence do not matter at the end of a comedy by Menander? If so, Demea presents no problem; Menander’s audience perhaps accepted his triumph as comic by virtue of its very unexpectedness. But I do not believe that any known Menandrian comedy does end with a comparable reversal¹⁰. The final acts of Dyskolos and Samia are well integrated with their plays, even if there is some relaxation in them of the tension of the preceding acts, and even if they are not entirely straightforward to interpret¹¹.

Some scholars have seen a contradiction in the second half of the last act of Dyskolos which is similar to the reversal which I have found at the end of Adelphoe. At the end of Act IV we had come to feel some sympathy for Knemon and to understand that there were reasons for his previously inexplicable antisocial behaviour. He had been badly hurt by falling down the well in his house and had now seen that he had been wrong in his estimate of his fellow men and of his relations with them. Now (in Act V) we seem to go back to the world of Act III, as the slave Getas and the cook Sikon get their revenge for his treatment of them in that act and force him to join the party in the shrine. Except that he is now crippled, it is almost as if Act IV had never taken place – indeed it is precisely the fact that he is crippled which has upset some scholars, who have felt that his unsympathetic treatment in Act V is all the harder to accept because of the sympathy which Menander had engineered in Act IV¹². I myself do not see a problem in this ending. At the end of Act IV, Knemon asks to be allowed to continue living in his own way. This is realistic, since we should hardly expect an immediate change in his behaviour, but it does mean that he is failing to apply all the lessons that he should have learnt from his fall down the well. It is Knemon, not Menander, who tries to behave as if Act IV had never taken place. More importantly, it would be quite unacceptable as an ending to the play if Knemon were allowed to remain in his self-imposed isolation; since he will not join the party of his own free will, he must be forced to join it. This ending does not contradict what went before. The taming of Knemon has many obvious comic elements but is, I think, the necessary continuation and conclusion of the play¹³. To this extent I wish to modify the view of Holzberg and others about the point which has been reached by the end of Act IV, though clearly much has been sorted out by that stage.

On my view, then, if Knemon were left on his own at the end of Dyskolos, an important loose end would be left untied. But Menander does not always tie up every end that we might expect him to. In the case of Samia, we now know¹⁴ that Chrysis, the concubine of Demeas, did not turn out to be an Athenian citizen, or receive any other kind of reward, at the end of the play; indeed, we do not even see her receiving an apology from Demeas for his appalling suspicion and treatment of her. Demeas came to suspect that she had seduced his adopted son, Moschion, and drove her out of his house. On learning that his suspicions were false, he does briefly at 537-538 apologise to Moschion. But it was in fact Chrysis that he had principally blamed, and Chrysis whose very livelihood had been put at risk as a result of his suspicions. He does take her back into his house, but she then fades totally into the background. Given that she is the Samian woman of the play’s title, we might well have expected something more. But perhaps the Athenian audience did not share our expectations¹⁵. At any rate, Menander evidently had other interests. The last act is devoted to Moschion, who is clearly not satisfied with the apology he has received and is determined to frighten his father and teach him a lesson for having harboured such a dreadful suspicion of him. At first sight he has something in common with Getas and Sikon in his desire to influence his father’s future behaviour. He says at 636-638 «He will be more careful in future not to treat me unfeelingly, when he sees that I do not take this lightly»; similarly, Getas says at Dysk. 902-905 «We absolutely must tame the man… If he’s going to be like this forever, it’ll be a job to put up with him», and at the end (960-3) he warns Knemon «Watch it! If we catch you putting a foot wrong again, we won’t treat you at all gently then, be sure of that¹⁶!» But Getas and Sikon succeed in taming Knemon, whereas Moschion loses the initiative altogether to his father. In pretending that he plans to enlist as a mercenary, Moschion hopes that Demeas will beg him to stay (664-667, 682-684). But Demeas immediately perceives the reason for his behaviour¹⁷, and in the event it is he who lectures Moschion (694-712), while Moschion himself just looks silly – as indeed it was silly of him in the first place to think of teaching his father a lesson. He dismisses his father’s lecture as a lot of «waffle» (philosophein, 725), and there is no sign that either of them has learnt anything much in the course of the act¹⁸. At the end of it, Moschion is formally betrothed to the girl next door. But this could just as easily have happened at the beginning of the act (or even sooner than that); nothing in the course of the act has carried the action forward to this conclusion. It looks as if Menander wanted to dwell a little longer towards the end of his play on the relationship between Demeas and Moschion, just as he had devoted a large part of Moschion’s opening monologue to describing this relationship in Act I. But in the event there does not seem to be any particular point to it all, except to show Demeas’ quick and sympathetic understanding and to remind us how very silly Moschion is¹⁹. On the face of it, there is far more dramatic meat and dramatic logic in the ending of Dyskolos. There is no worrying contradiction at the end of Samia; the puzzling question is whether this act makes a substantial contribution to the play, either thematically or structurally. Above all, what is the point of making Demeas give Moschion an apparently serious and even quite moving lecture, if Moschion is shown to take no notice of it?

One possible explanation is precisely that this is the point. Thus Grant argues that the relationship between Demeas and Moschion is here exposed as one which has not worked: «The absence of any real reconciliation at the end the play is one indication of this; Demeas has finally spoken with frankness to Moschion about their relationship (694ff.), but Moschion does not reciprocate… Moschion seems unable to meet Demeas halfway and to make his own contribution towards establishing a new kind of relationship» (p. 183). Grant’s explanation does give the act some dramatic point, and the play’s troubles have stemmed very much from the failure of Demeas and Moschion to be open with each other; so their relationship has clearly not been entirely successful. I do not myself believe that Demeas is here trying to establish a new kind of relationship; his aim is to get Moschion to do what he is told, show due gratitude for past favours received, and stop making a public display of his anger²⁰. I also feel that it would be unlike Menander to dwell on a lack of reconciliation at the end of his play in the manner suggested by Grant. But I do not think we have the evidence to rule out such a possibility, and it certainly is the case that Moschion does not reciprocate.

An alternative explanation for this is that Menander is walking a tightrope at the end of his play. He does feel the need to focus on Demeas and Moschion, but he wants to preserve the more relaxed mood which is traditionally expected in the fifth act. When Demeas finishes his little lecture at 712, Menander could have made Moschion say «Yes, you’re quite right; I’m sorry». But he felt that this would tip the balance too far towards seriousness, that it would make the moment too solemn. He preferred to save Moschion from the need to make any reply by bringing another character unexpectedly on stage. He hoped that it would be satisfying to make Demeas say his say, even if it was seen to have no effect on Moschion. And he has indeed been praised for his skill in preserving the balance in this act, and for his «delicate blend of the serious and the farcical»²¹. This case (however we interpret it) perhaps increases the likelihood that it is Terence rather than Menander who is responsible for Demea’s preaching at the end of Adelphoe; and even on Grant’s view there is laughter at the expense of Moschion for the spectator of Act V of Samia.

There is much more that could be said about Menander’s final acts. My aim in this highly selective survey has been to bring out that each requires to be interpreted in the context of the whole of which it is a part. If they are problematic, it is their relation to the scenes which have preceded them that gives rise to the problem. It will also already be clear that the endings of these two plays are quite different in tone and give rise to different questions, and I should like to conclude this part of my paper by bringing out some further differences between them.

First, the preparation for the final act is different in each case. In Dyskolos, Kallippides arrives 11 lines from the end of the fourth act and goes into the shrine for his lunch; this is his first appearance in the play. In the last three lines Sostratos goes in to join him, and Gorgias goes into Knemon’s house; he assures Sostratos that he will stay there, and Sostratos says he will call for him shortly. This leads us to expect something more, and there is no rounding-off at the end of the act. This is characteristic of this play; not only do new characters turn up towards the end of acts (a feature of Menandrian technique which Handley²² has documented), but the last words of the act look forward to future developments, they do not look back at the act which has preceded. Act IV ends with Sostratos saying «I’Il call for you shortly», just as Act III had ended with Gorgias saying «I’Il come back soon as well»; each in turn promises to come out soon from the party in the shrine – and of course at the end of Act III the audience is also in suspense wondering what will happen to Knemon in the well.

By contrast, Act IV of Samia is quite clearly rounded off by Demeas. The complications of this play had arisen from his suspicions; he ends the act by thanking all the gods that none of them has turned out to be true²³. He has calmed Nikeratos (his next-door neighbour) and apologised briefly to Moschion. He has not apologised to Chrysis (as we have noted), but he has taken her back into his house in a scene which clearly balanced the scene of her expulsion in Act III. We have reached a point of rest at the end of the act, and in this play too there is a similarity and balance with the ending of Act III, where Nikeratos took Chrysis into his house and assured her that Demeas would recover from his temporary insanity²⁴.

Secondly, the structure of the final act itself is quite different in these plays. Act V of Samia has only 122 lines and essentially one main feature, Moschion’s plan to teach Demeas a lesson, and its consequences. Act V of Dyskolos has 186 lines and two main strands of action, since the ragging of Knemon is preceded by the agreement of all the relevant men that Gorgias should marry Sostratos’ sister. There are also metrical differences between the two plays. In Dyskolos, the act opens with 96 lines in iambic trimeters; when Getas has appeared, the metre changes and we have 78 lines of catalectic iambic tetrameters, at least some of which are accompanied on a pipe; and when Knemon has finally acknowledged defeat, Getas rounds off the play with 11 lines of iambic trimeters. In Samia we have 54 lines of iambic trimeters followed by 68 lines of trochaic tetrameters; there is no sign of musical accompaniment, and no reversion to iambic trimeters at the end. (The last act of Aspis must have been similar in length to that of Samia, or perhaps even shorter; it differed from the other two in that it began with trochaic tetrameters²⁵).

It is thus clear that there was no regular Menandrian pattern for the endings of plays, for the construction of the fifth act, or for its relationship to the preceding acts. In these circumstances, who can say what would or would not have been possible for Menander, particularly on the basis of such a small sample? I do not myself find the ending of either Dyskolos or Samia comparable with that of Adelphoe in what I believe to be the most important respect. But comparisons and analogies are matters of judgement, and any account of a particular play depends on interpretation. It is in fact one of the more interesting lessons of the last thirty years that the endings of Menander’s comedies can prove quite as controversial and difficult to interpret as those of Plautus and Terence (as some of my footnotes show!). This fact alone should make us hesitate to reconstruct the endings of the Greek originals of Roman comedies with any confidence or to expect any great measure of agreement. Barbara Smith reminds us on p. 118 of her book on Poetic Closure (cf. n. 23) that Dickens, at the end of his original version of Great Expectations, did not reunite Pip and Estella; he was prevailed upon by Bulwer-Lytton to change the ending and make it clear that they would marry. «It was apparently not enough for Lytton», she says, «that by the last chapter every other character in the novel, major and minor, had been brought to the altar or the grave». But Dickens had originally thought otherwise.

III.

Discussion of the ending of Terence’s Eunuchus, and of its likely relationship to that of Menander’s Eunouchos²⁶, is complicated by the fact that it includes two characters (the soldier Thraso and the parasite Gnatho) who have been imported by Terence from a different play, Menander’s Kolax. Thraso is the rival of the young Athenian citizen Phaedria for the love of the prostitute Thais, and the ending of Terence’s play may be considered from three different angles, since it shows (1) Phaedria ageeing to share Thais with Thraso, (2) Thraso treated as an object of mockery, and (3) Gnatho triumphantly furthering his own interests. The third of these, Gnatho’s triumph, is the element least likely to correspond to anything which Terence could have found in Menander’s Eunouchos (since there is no reason to believe that that play included any comparable character); it is a strong comic element but not easy to account for in terms of poetic justice in the light of the part played by Gnatho in the rest of the play. (But I refer in n. 32 to some recent attemps to make this element of the ending central to the interpretation of the play as a whole). Menander’s Eunouchos must have included a rival lover, and he may even have been a soldier²⁷; we do not know whether he was as objectionable as Thraso, and we are therefore in no position to judge whether he would have been such an appropriate object of mockery at the end of the play. But at least the mockery of Thraso presents no problem at the end of Terence’s play, and it seems to me the predominant effect. It is the first element, the sharing of Thais, which some scholars have found most disturbing. I shall try to show that it does not present us with serious problems of dramatic coherence in Terence’s play, and I shall argue that there is no solid reason to doubt that similar sharing could have been an element in the ending of Menander’s Eunouchos as well. But I shall also suggest that it would be a waste of time to speculate further about the ending of that play, given our lack of evidence for it. If the sharing of Thais does not come from Menander’s Eunouchos, Terence may have spun it entirely out of his own head, thereby combining characters from his two Greek originals, or he may have taken it from a similar arrangement in Menander’s Kolax. But we have no evidence for such an arrangement in Kolax, and my aim is not to speculate about its origins but to show that it is an acceptable element in the ending of Terence’s play.

The problem area comes in the last 70 lines, which, if they correspond to anything at all in Menander’s play, almost certainly correspond to only part of his final act. Terence, unlike Menander, did not divide his plays into acts, and it is not a straightforward matter to identify the portion of his text which corresponds with the final act of his Greek original. In 1974, Holzberg (159-160) supposed the fifth act of Menander’s Eunouchos to have begun at the equivalent of v. 923 in Terence’s play; in the same year, Büchner (289f.) and Webster (141) both placed it at v. 817, over 100 lines earlier. In either case, the fifth act will have included at least the scenes in which the slave Parmeno is punished by the maid Pythias for his part in helping his young master Chaerea (the brother of Phaedria) to dress up as a eunuch and gain access to the girl with whom he has fallen in love. This notion of punishment after the play’s main problems have been solved is familiar from the final acts of Dyskolos and Samia, but Parmeno’s discomfiture is short-lived, because he soon learns (1034-1037) that all has been forgiven and Chaerea is to marry the girl with his father’s approval. At 1044-1049 Chaerea, who has sent Parmeno off to report to Phaedria, bridges the gap with a monologue: «What should I mention first or praise most? Should I praise the man who advised me to do it, or me who had the courage to embark on it, or Fortune who guided it, who has packed so many things of such importance so conveniently into one day, or my delightful and obliging father? O Jupiter, I beg you, preserve these good things for us!» The last act of Dyskolos provides an interesting parallel: at 860-865 Sostratos has a similar linking monologue in which he reflects on his achievement in winning his bride in the course of a single day. His summary of the day’s events rounds off the story of his love life before the playwright turns our attention back to Knemon for the remaining 100 lines of the play. In the same way in Eunuchus Chaerea’s monologue rounds off the presentation of his own love life and allows the play to end with the focus on the other lovers, Phaedria, Thais and (above all) Thraso, and on Thraso’s companion, Gnatho. I am a little surprised that Büchner²⁸ felt this monologue to make a suitable ending to the play as a whole, although of course similar devices can serve different functions in different plays.

But it is the sharing of Thais which has provoked debate²⁹. The play has established that she is genuine in her love for Phaedria, and that she has been tolerating the attentions of Thraso only for a particular purpose, namely to obtain from him as a gift the girl who had been brought up together with her as a child – the very girl, in fact, with whom Chaerea has fallen in love and whom he is to marry at the end of the play. Thais has succeeded in her aim, and Thraso has been ignominiously driven off (792-816). We might not expect to see him again, but he reappears at 1025, together with Gnatho, determined to surrender to Thais and abide by her terms (1026). He and Gnatho overhear the following conversation between Chaerea and Parmeno at 1037ff: «And then I’m happy because my brother Phaedria’s love affair is entirely clear of the storms. We’ve become one household; thais has asked my father for his protection, she’s entrusted herself to our patronage and safekeeping.» «So Thais belongs totally to your brother?» «Certainly.» «Now here’s another cause for rejoicing: the soldier will be driven out.» But Thraso cannot abandon his hope, and he turns to Gnatho for help at 1054: «Make sure by begging or bribery that I stick with Thais in some way at least.» Gnatho agrees to do what he can on the following terms (1058): «If I achieve this, my request is that your house should be open to me whether you’re there or not, and that there should always be a place for me without invitation.» «I promise.» He makes the proposal to Phaedria at 1072 (Chaerea is also on stage at this point): «I propose that you let in the soldier to share her»³⁰; he points out at 1075 that Phaedria is not very well off, whereas Thais is very demanding, and at 1076ff. he draws attention to the advantages which Thraso can bring: «To provide adequate supplies for your love affair to meet all these demands without costing you a penny, there’s no one more suitable or more useful to you. For a start, he’s got the money to give, and no one gives more generously than he does. He’s stupid, boring and slow, and he snores night and day. And you needn’t be afraid that the woman will fall in love with him; you can easily drive him out whenever you like.» «What shall we do?» «What is more, there’s this point, which I think the most important of all: there’s absolutely no one who entertains better or more liberally.»

Phaedria is persuaded by this, which I think makes it clear that nothing very serious is going on in this scene; and he and Chaerea also agree (for no reason that is given) to a further request from Gnatho (1084-1085): «I’ve just got this one further request, that you let me join your gang; I’ve been pushing this rock up the hill for long enough now.» The implications of this are not entirely clear and perhaps do not bear close scrutiny. The contrast in 1084-1085 between vostrum gregem («your gang») and hoc saxum («this rock») appears to suggest that Gnatho is hoping to transfer his attentions from Thraso to the brothers. But the grex is in fact going to include Thraso (without whom it would perhaps be odd to call it a grex at all), and if it did not Gnatho would scarcely want to join it (if he was right to draw attention to Phaedria’s poverty at 1075). In any case, Gnatho has previously (1058ff.) persuaded Thraso to support him for life, so it is not clear what he now negotiates for himself which he has not already secured.

But the main aim of this scene is, I think, mockery of Thraso. Indeed, the next thing that Gnatho says (1087) is «I present him to you; may you eat up his larder and have a good laugh at him!»; and the play ends with the emphasis on Thraso’s buffoonery (1089ff.), when Gnatho says to him «These people didn’t know you; after I’d shown them what you’re like and praised you in line with your deeds and your merits, I got what we wanted.» «You’ve done well; thank you very much indeed. I’ve never yet been anywhere where they didn’t all adore me.» «Didn’t I tell you that this man had true Attic elegance?» «He is just as you promised.» Since Thraso has previously been an obstacle to the smooth course of Phaedria’s and Thais’ love affair (as well as a disagreeable and buffoonish character), it is appropriate that he should be mocked now that the future of that affair has been made more secure. We may compare the mockery of Smikrines in Act V of Epitrepontes, and doubtless also (if only we had the ending) of his namesake in Aspis, as well as that of Knemon at the end of Dyskolos. In this respect, the treatment of Thraso at the end of Eunuchus is entirely Menandrian. It is, no doubt deliberately, not made explicit what Gnatho has negotiated for him; is he really just going to snore night and day and pay all the bills? What is Thais going to give him in return? If Phaedria can drive him out whenever he wants (1080), he cannot represent too great a threat to Phaedria’s own love-life³¹. But we are not invited to explore the implications of all this, any more than we are invited to think about Gnatho’s future relationship with Thraso. Such details are subordinate to the aim of making Thraso a figure of fun³².

But how many implications is it reasonable to ignore? It seems that Phaedria is at least in some sense agreeing to share the woman he loves with another man; Gnatho does after all call Thraso Phaedria’s rivalis (1072). Thais loves Phaedria, and he has been portrayed as a jealous and demanding lover; why should either of them tolerate Thraso’s company for a moment longer than necessary? Thais is a free woman of independent spirit; how can they take it for granted that she will agree to what they propose? Phaedria’s father has accepted her into his clientela and fides, and it was seen as the natural consequence of this at 1041 that she would have nothing more to do with the soldier. Does not this arrangement at the end of the play ignore important aspects of the main characters and of the way the plot has developed? If you see the play’s central theme as lying in the contrast between Thais’ sincerity and the view which other people have of her as a typical, scheming and self-seeking prostitute³³, then you may well feel that this ending is at odds with the picture which the rest of the play has so carefully constructed. Gnatho says at 1075 that Thais is demanding, and it does appear to be true that she is the sort of woman who asks for Ethiopian girls and eunuchs and expects to be given them (cf. 163-169). But is it right for the play to end with the emphasis on this aspect of her character?

Terence’s Eunuchus was an unprecedented success, so we must presume that his Roman audience was entirely happy with this ending. Those scholars who are unhappy with it, for some or all of the reasons which I have just listed, argue that Menander’s Eunouchos cannot have ended in this way. It is not that the sharing of a hetaira was in itself objectionable by the standards either of Athenian life or of Athenian comedy³⁴; it might well have made an acceptable ending for a play by Menander, and some of these scholars indeed believe that Terence got the idea from Menander’s Kolax. But will it do, and would Menander have felt that it would do, as the ending of this play?

One difficulty in discussing this is that the only play we possess is Terence’s, not Menander’s. We cannot tell what small shifts of emphasis Terence may have introduced in the process of adaptation, perhaps by making more explicit the demanding nature of Phaedria’s love or Thais’ protestations of her sincerity. And there are some features of Terence’s ending which are (in varying degrees) unlikely to have been taken from Menander’s Eunouchos: (i) there are four speaking actors on stage (as there are at the end of all Terence’s plays except Andria and Hecyra). We do not yet know of a scene by Menander which had more than three, and I think there are good reasons for believing that he did not write any³⁵; (ii) the staging is awkward at 1025-1060: (a) when Thraso and Gnatho enter, Parmeno is already on stage. But he takes no notice of them, and they take no notice of him; he just stands around for six lines; (b) Thraso and Gnatho remain unobserved until 1060, while Parmeno goes off to fetch Phaedria, Chaerea has his monologue at 1044-1049, and Phaedria appears. Most awkwardly of all, at 1053 Phaedria and Chaerea, who still do not know that there is anyone else on stage, stop talking and stand around for eight lines while Thraso and Gnatho have a little dialogue on their side of the stage. Only after that do the two sides make contact. Denzler³⁶ has drawn attention to the exceptional nature of this sequence. No doubt good actors could bring it off convincingly, but it is hard not to link the oddities with the fact that Terence achieves a four-character scene by bringing on two characters from a different Greek original (see my next two points); (iii) the central figure in the negotiation at the end is Gnatho. His portrayal as a parasitus is very much to the fore, and (as I have already said) there is no reason to believe that Menander’s Eunouchos included such a character; (iv) the emphasis on the mockery of Thraso is appropriate for the foolish soldier who has been imported from Kolax. Was the rival lover in Menander’s Eunouchos as objectionable as Thraso? If not, would it have been appropriate to give this emphasis at the end of the play?

This last point is particularly uncertain. Terence in the prologue is defending himself against attack and does not explain what he means when he says that he has imported the parasite and the soldier from Kolax. If he refers only to one or two particularly striking scenes³⁷, then the portrayal of the rival lover may well have been substantially the same in Menander’s Eunouchos. In particular (given the rôle which he plays in the plot), this lover is unlikely to have been given a very sympathetic characterisation. But in our ignorance of how he was portrayed in detail, it may seem foolish to speculate at all about the ending of Menander’s Eunouchos. It seems that we have to imagine a play in which the portrayal of Gnatho, and perhaps also of Thraso, may have been quite different, not only at the end but throughout the play – but it may not; and, if it was, we do not know what sort of portrayal to put in its place. The question is not «Would Menander have ended Terence’s play the way Terence does?» (an entertaining but absurd question), but rather «Can we believe that Menander ended his own play the way Terence ends his, mutatis mutandis?» Since the required mutations are inevitably ill-defined, this too may come to seem an absurd question.

But perhaps I am creating unnecessary difficulties by concentrating on the figures of Gnatho and Thraso in this context. The worries about the ending which I summarised were worries about Phaedria and Thais, and it may be worth exploring them in a little more detail. Has Terence sacrificed consistency in his presentation of these characters, in order to achieve a comic effect at the expense of Thraso? Gnatho reminds Phaedria that he is relatively poor (1075). This has not previously been a theme in the play; there has been no suggestion that Phaedria is ever short of money. At 79 Parmeno describes Thais as the «blight» of their estate (implying that her demands are generally satisfied), and at 163-164 Phaedria himself claims that he has given Thais everything she wanted. On the other hand, we should not necessarily believe him (he is having an argument with Thais at the time), and the Ethiopian girl and eunuch he has bought for her on this occasion are evidently rather poor specimens³⁸. Perhaps they are the best that he can do within his means, and perhaps Gnatho makes a telling point here. But I confess that it would be aesthetically more satisfactory if more had been made of Phaedria’s shortage of funds at an earlier stage in the play; it is hard not to feel that this motif has been invented at this point for the sake of the ending³⁹.

What of Thais herself? She has been demanding in the past, but does Gnatho ignore the fact that she has found a new security thanks to the patronage of Phaedria’s father⁴⁰? What difference does that patronage make to her? Is (for instance) Holzberg right to declare that Thais is «not really any longer a hetaira»⁴¹? Here once again we come across the difficulty that Terence does not explore the implications of the arrangement. Thais has, no doubt, been grasping from economic necessity, but she has been doing very well; she has been left a certain amount by a former lover (120), and she keeps a large establishment with a number of female slaves (581-582), whose earnings as prostitutes would presumably supplement her own. Is she now going to disband this establishment, selling off the slaves and settling down to a quiet concubinage with Phaedria? Phaedria’s father is clearly well disposed towards her and towards Phaedria’s relationship with her; but does that mean that they can now form a partnership for life together? As a foreigner at Athens, she cannot become his wife. But he could take her as his pallake and set up house with her on a more or less permanent basis, as Demeas appears to have done in Samia with the former prostitute Chrysis. Is this the sort of relationship that a grateful father would sanction? Has Phaedria’s father agreed to incur the cost of feeding two extra women out of the resources of his oikos, Thais as well as Chaerea’s bride? If so, there is indeed no need for her to continue practising the trade of a hetaira, and no need for her to exploit Thraso in the way that Gnatho proposes. (In fact, even the life of a pallake could be precarious, as Samia shows; but it would be easy enough to forget that in the general celebrations at the end of the play.)

That is one possible solution for Thais, and I do not rule out that it could have been Menander’s solution. But another solution seems to me no less possible, and perhaps slightly more likely, namely that Phadria’s father was prepared to tolerate his son’s liaison with Thais for an unspecified length of time, but with no expectation on any side that it would be a permanent relationship, or at least no explicit discussion in the text of how long it was likely to last. I have no idea what sort of financial commitment this would have represented, or how that would have been defined. But it is in any case not explained in Terence’s play how Phaedria has obtained the funds to buy gifts for Thais in the past, and perhaps such details were not explored in Menander’s play either. The important point is that Thais’ status and way of life would (as far as the audience could tell) be essentially unchanged; the patronage of Phaedria’s father would offer her some degree of protection if ever she needed it, but it would not alter the economic basis of her existence. In other words, she would continue to be a hetaira⁴², and Gnatho’s remarks at the end of Terence’s play would have been accepted by an Athenian audience as acknowledging the realities of the situation⁴³. On this assumption, it is the arrangement with Thraso, not the arrangement with Phaedria’s father, that is going to make her daily life easier for her; it is Gnatho’s proposal that helps to secure Thais’ own financial future. If we thought about the emotional implications, we might not feel entirely happy to end the play this way. But the emphasis on Thraso’s stupidity diverts us from this line of thought, and it is particularly helpful that Thais herself is not on stage. If she were present while others negotiated over her future, her lack of control over her own fate would strike the audience more forcibly⁴⁴.

I certainly do not believe that it was strictly necessary to hear any more about Thraso or Gnatho at this stage of Terence’s play⁴⁵. We could have had an entirely satisfactory ending without them, and the arrangement proposed by Gnatho is a surprising development, particularly after lines 1040-1041. But it is a comic development, it brings about a reconciliation (of a kind) at the end of the play, and I have tried to show that it is not seriously at odds with the inner logic of Terence’s plot. We may compare the marriage of Gorgias which is agreed upon in the first half of Act V of Dyskolos; this too is a surprising development which was not strictly necessary, but it is well integrated with the rest of the play in a number of ways and makes a positive contribution to it. I think it quite likely (or at least perfectly possible) that in Menander’s Eunouchos Thais remained a hetaira at the end. In this case, some sort of sharing arrangement which helped to secure her future could have seemed appropriate. But without Thraso and Gnatho (as I have said) the effect may well have been so different that it seems pointless to speculate further about it.

Unfortunately, we do not have the ending of a Menandrian play which portrays a woman in Thais’ position. The endings that we know of are almost entirely concerned with bringing about marriage between citizens, or (in Epitrepontes) restoring such a marriage when it had been in danger of breaking down. At the end of Samia, Demeas’ relationship with his foreign pallake is similarly restored. At the end of Epitrepontes it is likely that the slave-prostitute Habrotonon obtained her freedom, enabling her to become a free operator like Thais, and quite possible that she entered on some sort of relationship with Chairestratos; but we know nothing of the details. Nor do we get much help from a passage of Plutarch⁴⁶ which tells us that in Menander’s plays affairs with hetairai are (depending on the character of the hetaira) either – if they are bold and audacious – broken off or – if they are good and return a man’s love⁴⁷ – continued in one of two ways: the girl can turn out to be of citizen birth (in which case she can marry her young man), or the affair can be allowed to continue for a time (chronos tis). Plutarch is commending the plays of Menander as suitable dinner-party entertainment for men who will go home to their wives at the end of the evening. I suspect that he would not have commended a play which ended with two men sharing the favours of a prostitute, but his formulation also seems to exclude the possibility that a relationship with a hetaira was turned explicitly into a permanent concubinage at the end of a play by Menander. If Plutarch’s evidence were worth anything, it would support the idea that Thais’ affair was more probably continued for a limited and unspecified length of time at the end of Menander’s Eunouchos, in other words that she remained a hetaira – but it would not follow that she was shared between Phaedria and the soldier! In fact, however, Plutarch’s characterisation of hetairai is over-schematic, and it is unlikely that he has surveyed the full range of possibilities. From one point of view, Habrotonon in Epitrepontes is «bold and audacious», but these epithets scarcely do justice to the portrayal of her relationship with Charisios; and she is the only prostitute we can study in the surviving remains of Menander. On the other hand, Thais in Eunuchus might be seen as belonging to both of Plutarch’s classes of hetaira, since she has some elements of boldness and audacity but does also «return a man’s love». Plutarch fails to capture the subtlety of these protrayals, and I see no reason to suppose that his classification of possible endings is any more satisfactory⁴⁸.

But even if we do not have a Menandrian ending which includes a woman in Thais’ position, I hope that my examination of Terence’s ending has shown that it is not particularly problematic by the standards of Menander. Dyskolos and Samia suggest that we are right to look for coherence at the end of the play, but also that comic effects are very much to be expected. The mockery of a disagreeable character was found in Act V not only of Dyskolos but of Epitrepontes and probably also of Aspis. Although Getas does try to influence Knemon’s future behaviour at the end of Dyskolos, the question of his future relations with society is not examined in any detail⁴⁹. At the end of Samia (however we interpret it), Menander leaves us free to think what we will about Moschion’s future relations with his father and his bride. To explore the implications of the ending of Eunuchus for Thais and Phaedria is, I suspect, more scholarly than Menandrian. But even scholars need not be disturbed by them⁵⁰.