Hanno's Punic Heirs: Der Poenulusneid des Plautus

I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me.If you like a right mess, then Plautus' Poenulus (‘The Little Carthaginian’) is the play for you. When it is not being slatered, it is konstanly passed by, rarely translated [& then only for completeness' sake: one series or another] and left out of the chiefest recuperations of the oeuvre, of the chicest innovations of the genre (viz. Konstan, 1983; Slater, 1985: but do see Endnote). Poen. gets written off as ‘One of the least successful…’. [Only successful, it may be, in getting waves of Orientalist experts to brush up our Mediterranean languages. If that counts: little Latine, lesse Greek—and now beginners' Punic.] Otherwise, study of Poenulus has centred on two projects: ‘logical’ analysis of the unacceptabihty of the structuring of the plot and ‘archaeological’ dialysis of the text as botched, contaminated, interpolated miscegenation. That is, in both cases, everything that can hardly be dumped on the Greek dramatist Alexis, if it was his lost ‘Karkhēdónios' play that first Plautus mauled and meshed, then in succession his theatre-companies thrashed and threaded and through time his scribes sliced and stitched. Even its warmest admirers must hack Poenulus to bits, for a start, in order to suture some sort of text to admire (Maurach 1975, Zwierlein 1990). And the finicky pundits of this play impugn away with impunity, their fun the display of pungent finesse. Try reading them for laughs—and smile through the Poen.