All The World 'S A Stage: Contemplatio Mundi in Roman Theatre

chapter 10
All the World’s a Stage

Contemplatio Mundi in Roman Theatre
Robert Germany
The Romans render θεωρεῖν as contemplari, θεωρία as contemplatio. This

translation, proceding from the spirit of the Roman language and thus of
the Roman Dasein, obliterates at a single stroke that which is essential in
the import of the Greek words. For contemplari means to section off and
bound. Templum is the Greek τέμενος, which arises from a totally
different experience than θεωρεῖν. τέμνειν means cut, divide.
Martin Heidegger1
10.1 Introduction
Heidegger’s distinction between Roman contemplatio and Greek θεωρία
points to a subtle but important difference all too often lost in the
philosophical and Christian tradition of treating the former as
a straightforward calque for the latter.2 The Latin word does indeed rest
on a religious category and conceptual world at variance with its Greek
“equivalent.” The noun contemplatio is unattested before Cicero, but the
verb contemplari (or contemplare) goes back to the earliest Latin writers, and
as Varro and others explain, the “temples” at play in this word are none
other than the augural templa of the Roman ritual of auspication.3 If the
1
M. Heidegger, Wissenschaft und Besinnung, 1954 (VA 50): “Die Römer übersetzen θεωρεῖν durch
contemplari, θεωρία durch contemplatio. Diese Übersetzung, die aus dem Geist der römischen
Sprache und d. h. des römischen Daseins kommt, bringt das Wesenhafte dessen, was die griechischen
Worte sagen, mit einem Schlag zum Verschwinden. Denn contemplari heißt: etwas in einem
Abschnitt einteilen und darin umzäunen. Templum ist das griechische τέμενος, das einer ganz
anderen Erfahrung entspringt als das θεωρεῖν. Τέμνειν heißt: schneiden, abteilen.”
2
On Heidegger’s Augenblick and its complex debt to Aristotelian θεωρία, see McNeill 1999. Bénatouïl
and Bonazzi 2012 is a good recent survey of the Hellenistic philosophical cult of θεωρία/contemplatio
and its Neoplatonic and Christian Nachleben, but here as usual the Greek and Latin terms are
generally assumed to be interchangeable.
3
Varro (Ling. 7.9) traces both templum and contemplare to tueri (on which, see later in the chapter), but
Festus (Paulus), Gloss. Lat. 34, derives the verb from the noun: “Contemplari dictum a templo, id est
212
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All the World’s a Stage 213
intent gaze of the augur watching for an interpretable sign in the skies
provided the Romans with a handy metaphor for the special kind of
looking implied in contemplatio, there was also an interesting similarity
in the way space was cut and then spectated in Roman theatre. These two
institutions, the taking of auspices in through contemplation of the kosmos
(i.e., the mundus) and the production of plays, have not generally been
connected in scholarship on Republican culture, but I shall argue here that
there is a surprising structural homology between these symbolic spatial
systems, one that emerges as a preoccupation of the plays themselves.
There are scattered hints of interest in augural contemplation across the
fragments of early Roman drama, but I hope to show more particularly that
Plautus, for one, was aware of this happy parallel and ready to exploit it in
his comedies. I shall also cast a brief glance at later refashioning of this
motif in the philosophy and drama of Seneca.
10.2 Θεωρία and Contemplatio: Religious, Philosophical, and

Theatrical
From at least the sixth century bce, Greek poleis would send public
delegates to religious events in other cities, where they would act as official
spectators (θεωροί), returning home afterwards to make a report of what
they saw.4 The philosopher or the mystic likewise undertakes a kind of
journey into the far country of truth, a sojourn from which he may return
to make a report of his vision for the rest of us, so it is not hard to see how
this tradition would find the concept of spectatorial embassy (θεωρία) so
useful a metaphor for its own activity. But before the philosophers ever laid
their claim on the metaphor of θεωρία, it had already been appropriated by
Greek drama, as the spectators in fifth-century Athenian theatre (θεαταί)
could be figured as θεωροί.5 They too went on an imaginative journey
through space and time and saw some amazing sights and then returned to
present-day Athens where they might be expected to bring with them the
wisdom won on their travels to other worlds. Thus theatre first and later
philosophy, with their overlapping but different uses of the category
loco, qui ab omni parte aspici, vel ex quo omnis pars videri potest, quem antiqui templum
nominabant.”
4
Alongside this civic institution, individuals could also undertake θεωρία, on which see Bill 1901: 199;
Ker 2000: 310; and Nightingale 2004: 47–49. This dual public–private character amounts to a further
similarity to Roman augury, which was sponsored by the state but was also conducted privately (Cic.
Div. 1.16).
5
See Rutherford 1998: 135; Goldhill 1999: 5–8; Monoson 2000: 206–26; and (somewhat contra)
Nightingale 2004: 49–52.
214 robert germany
θεωρία, can both be described as anchoring themselves in the metaphorical
register of the same Greek ritual practice.
Laboring in the shadow of Fraenkel’s magisterial work, the study of
Roman comedy has often concerned itself with plautinisches im Plautus, the
elucidation of which elements in the plays were carried over from the
Greek originals and which elements are native to Italian soil. For the most
part scholars have not looked for deep resonances between Roman theatre
and Roman religion. Why would they, after all, since palliata, at least,
announces its Greekness at every turn? But if my argument here is right, we
have missed an echo of Italian ritual practice in Roman comedy. The
metaphor is drawn from auspication, rather than pilgrimage, but contem-
platio is every bit as distinctively Roman as θεωρία is Greek, and to the
extent that the relevant ritual metaphor lives on in theatre and in philoso-
phy, there may be abiding differences between θεωρία and contemplatio,
for the former is closer to tourism and the latter is more like television. If
the Athenian θεατής is a θεωρός, then he takes an imaginitive journey to
a distant land. The Roman spectator analogized to the auspicant sits safely
in his own city and watches an alien mundus through a temporary window
cut into space.
The details of the practice of auspication in ancient Rome are a matter of
scholarly dispute, but Livy’s description of the inauguration of Numa
Pompilius gives some sense of the procedure (1.18). The augur sat on
a stone on the Arx facing south holding the lituus, the distinctive wand
of his office, in his right hand, and with it he “marked out the regions [of
the sky] from east to west” (regiones ab oriente ad occasum determinavit),
defining the southern part of the heavens as right and the northern as left.
Then he fixed upon a distant point as a signum, transferred the lituus to his
left hand and setting his right hand on Numa’s head made his prayer to
Jupiter that if it be heaven’s will that Numa should be king he would reveal
it by sure signs “within those boundaries which I have traced” (inter eos fines
quos feci). The augur described the auspicia he wanted sent, they were sent,
and Numa, now shown to be king, “came down from the temple” (de
templo descendit). This templum Livy refers to, sometimes called an augur-
aculum, is the place where the auspicant sits and watches, waiting for the
birds or other heavenly signs to reveal themselves, but this was not the only
templum in play. We know from multiple ancient sources that the patch of
sky blocked out by the augur was also called a templum.6 For example,
6
Naevius may have the earliest attestation. Probus (ad Ecl. 6.31) says Ennius made Anchises an
augur and Naevius likewise in the first book of the Bellum Punicum: “Postquam avem aspexit in
Servius: templum dicitur locus manu auguris designatus in aere, post quem
factum ilico captantur auguria.7 So the auspicant sat in one temple,
a templum in terris, and gazed expectantly at another, a templum in caelo.8
The former was made of permanent materials and the latter was drawn up
each time for the nonce.9 The semantic connection between these two uses
of the same word seems to be that both involve a cutting (the
Indoeuropean tem- root).10 A line is ritually traced out demarcating
a space that is literally “spoken out and freed” (effatum et liberatum) from
the surrounding continuum.11 The piece of space thus cut out is free to take
on a new significance, charged in fact as the zone of signification, the screen
in the sky at which the auspicant stares and waits for a message from the
gods. Varro (Ling. 7.9) even offers an etymology connecting templum/
contemplatio with tueor. This is, for us, an obviously false etymology, but it
shows something of the radical association of temples in the Roman mind
with this kind of intent watching.
This basic configuration – sitting in one temple and watching another –
bears a remarkable resemblance to the shape of theatrical practice in the
middle Republic. The Imperial architectural habit of combining monu-
mental stone theatres with temples was, of course, years in the future, but
the close association of temple and ludi scaenici seems to go back at least to
the third century bce.12 As Hanson and others have long suggested and
Goldberg has now conclusively shown, Plautus’s temporary stages will
have been erected directly in front of a temple with the audience sitting
directly on the temple steps and pronaos.13 As Cicero tells us, the plays at
templo Anchisa, / sacra in mensa Penatium ordine ponuntur; / immolabat auream victimam
pulchram” (= Naev. fr.com. 3).
7
Serv. ad A. 1.92. Some scholars (e.g. Taylor 2000: 21) have argued that the augural templum in caelo is
not a part but rather the whole sky. This Servian testimony would seem to contradict such a view.
8
For how these templi effectively constitute distinct mundi, see later.
9
Did the internal structure of the permanent temple give shape to the temple above, or was the
former built to conform to the structure assumed to exist naturally in the latter? Torelli 1995a
investigates a Republican augural temple at Bantia where there were six cippi arranged to correspond
to subdivisions of the celestial temple. One cippus seems to be for the god Nocturnus and another
for Sol, two deities similarly juxtaposed, as Torelli notes (107–8), in Plautus (Amph. 272–82).
10
Like Heidegger, quoted earlier, Linderski 1986: 2264 f. 466 follows Ernout-Meillet, but he gives
a summary of other (speculative or discredited) theories as well. Interesting among them, for our thesis,
is Weinstock 1932, which argues that the original sense of templum was Brett, Balken. By synecdoche then
the meaning would transfer from the cross-beam to “die aus diesen Brettern gebaute Hütte” (108) and
finally to the field of observation from this building. Weinstock points to ancient testimony of templum
as “wooden cross-beam,” and even if he is wrong about the etymological causality, this alternative sense
of templum amounts to a tantalizing further connection with the wooden stage.
11
Beard et al. 1998: 22.
12
For private cosmic spaces in Imperial Rome, see Sauron’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 11.
13
Hanson 1959; Goldberg 1998.
216 robert germany
the Ludi Megalenses were staged in ipso Matris magnae conspectu (Har. resp.
24), and this was probably the case for other games as well, with some
variation depending on the festival occasion and the practical suitability of
the relevant deity’s temple to serve such a purpose.14 To be sure, this was
not an augural temple, but it was a temple nonetheless, and it is worth
noting its permanent character, the seated posture of the spectators, and
their gaze trained at a target outside the boundaries of the temple itself. The
stage would not be called a temple, in spite of its altar, but its emphatically
temporary character and its highly stylized code system for constructing
spatial relationships onstage and off render it a similarly legible spatial
register.
The stage and the templum of augural spectation were not only alike in
being delimited in spatial extension and even cut off from the surrounding
continuum, they were also alike in being similarly bounded in time. The
templum in caelo must be redesignated for each observation, and the
Roman stage was reconstructed and torn down afresh for every ludi. This
temporary character of both stage and aerial temple is in contrast to the
permanent temples in which the augur and the theatrical audience sat.
There is another sense, though, in which the templum in caelo is temporally
bounded. Apart from the temple not outlasting a single consultation, the
efficacy of any given auspices was limited to a single day. Likewise, for both
public and private affairs, one had to take the auspices on the day one
wanted to do the task in question, and at the end of the day the auspices,
whether good or bad, were understood to expire.15 However long the
procedure of taking the auspices required (and one assumes it would be
somewhat variable, depending on how cooperative the birds were), the
augury asserted a claim in time a little beyond the performance of the
ritual, but only up to the limit of a single day. Similarly, a Roman comedy
might require only a couple hours to perform and the story-time subtended
by the plot could last somewhat longer, not, however, more than a single day.
This, at any rate, seems to be one of the “rules” of the genre, the so-called
Unity of Time.16 The Roman stage is thus a temporary cut in space, both in
the sense that it will be dismantled after the show and in the sense that the
fictional world onto which it opens a window is itself literally ephemeral.
The spatial construction of the play’s world had another echo with the
augural temple in the semantic overlay between the various senses of the
14
Marshall 2006: 42 speculates that the steps of the temples of Saturn and Concordia may have been
used this way too.
15
Catalano 1960: 42–45. 16 Schwindt 1994, Dunsch 2005, Germany 2014.
word templum and those of the word mundus. Varro tells us there are three
kinds of templum: in the sky, on the earth, and under the earth (Ling. 7.6).
He mentions auspication specifically with reference to the earthly templum,
but when he describes the celestial templum he is clearly thinking of
auspication as well, since he assumes it is viewed facing south (Ling. 7.7):
“of that templum there are said to be four parts, the left from the east, the
right from the west, in front the southern, and behind the northern.” This
sounds very much like how he describes the mundus elsewhere (Festus,
Gloss. Lat. 454): “When you look south from the shrine of the gods towards
the left are the eastern parts of the mundus, on the right the western.
I believe the practice is that they judge auspices on the left to be better than
on the right.” Mundus could refer to the celestial vault above (OLD
mundus3 1), the terrestrial world around us (OLD mundus3 2), and along-
side these maximally expansive senses of the word, a more limited sub-
terranean mundus (OLD mundus4), a kind of underground vault or pit,
sealed on most days by a stone lid called the lapis manalis, but opened up
three times a year (August 24, October 5, and November 8) with the
eldritch proclamation mundus patet.17 On these days the dead were said
to wander among the living, as the door between the upper and lower
worlds was opened. This subterranean world is a kind of mapping or
mirroring of the heavenly sphere, like the subterranean templum which
Varro dubs a similitudine (Ling. 7.6). As Cato says, “The name is trans-
ferred to the mundus from that mundus which is above us; for the shape of
it, as I have found out from those who have entered it, is like the other”
(Festus, Gloss. Lat. 144).
This subterranean mundus, or the opening to it at any rate, is usually
identified with the Umbilicus Urbis in the Forum and connected to
Plutarch’s description of the foundation of Rome:18
A circular trench was dug around the Comitium, and inside it was placed
a first-fruits offering of all natural and customary necessities. Finally, each of
those participating brought a sample of his native soil to place inside the
trench and add to the mix. They call this trench, as they do heaven, by the
name mundus. Then they marked out the city around this, as a circle from
a center.
βόθρος γὰρ ὠρύγη περὶ τὸ νῦν Κομίτιον κυκλοτερής, ἀπαρχαί τε πάντων,
ὅσοις νόμῳ μὲν ὡς καλοῖς ἐχρῶντο, φύσει δ’ ὡς ἀναγκαίοις, ἀπετέθησαν
ἐνταῦθα. καὶ τέλος ἐξ ἧς ἀφῖκτο γῆς ἕκαστος ὀλίγην κομίζων μοῖραν
ἔβαλλον εἰς ταὐτὸ καὶ συνεμείγνυον. καλοῦσι δὲ τὸν βόθρον τοῦτον ᾧ καὶ
17 18
Fowler 1912. See Humm 2004: 50 for discussion and references to earlier scholarship.
218 robert germany
τὸν ὄλυμπον ὀνόματι μοῦνδον. εἶθ’ ὥσπερ κύκλον κέντρῳ περιέγραψαν
τὴν πόλιν. (Plutarch, Life of Romulus 11)
This mundus is multiply isomorphic: it is circular like both the notional
city surrounding it and the universe surrounding that city. It establishes, at
the level of shape, the urbs/orbis homology that runs from Varro down to
the current pope. Its boundary is set by cutting or digging, just like the
boundary of its urban mapping, and yet it functions as a microcosm not
only because it shares the form of the larger world, but because it shares its
substance. The gathering of soils from the native lands of the founders
implies more than just synoecism; it also suggests that the mundus is always
already consubstantial with Rome’s imperium. At the belly button of the
Roman city one finds a self-contained “world” of multiple reference
between here, above, and below and of pointed ambiguity on earth. As
Mircea Éliade noted, “ce mundus était le lieu d’intersection des trois
niveaux cosmiques.”19 Yet we can go further: not only does the earth
meet the sky and the underworld on this spot, but also within the terrestrial
level, various non-Roman geographical alterities are made to intersect just
here. Like the similarly tripartite templum more generally, this mundus is
cut off and ritually freed from its surrounding space and allowed to be
a world unto itself.
10.3 Comedy: Plautus

Roman augury was an impressive science and public event, and the
promise of a window onto divine sanction or the future is always hard to
ignore, so it is no surprise that the language of auspication should come up
often in Roman comedy, since the everyday talk of the audience too must
have taken frequent recourse to this thematic register. More remarkable,
perhaps, is how often the auspication references in Roman comedy pertain
to the events of the play itself. So, for example, in the Rudens, when the
pimp Labrax is unexpectedly forced to deal with Trachalio, the slave of the
lover of one of the girls he has captured, he complains (Rud. 717): non hodie
isti rei auspicavi, ut cum furcifero fabuler. Indeed, Trachalio is probably one
of the last people he expected to see in this play, set as it is, exceptionally, on
the remote shore of Cyrene, far from the furcifer’s home in Athens, where
most comedies are set.20 Of course, we are not to understand that he
19
Éliade 1964: 315.
20
On the peculiarly Roman resonance of Labrax’s exile (and the significance of justice catching up to
him there), see Leigh 2010.
literally took auspices to this effect; he is merely talking about his expecta-
tions, but he casts the Erwartungshorizont for this play’s “today” in the
metaphor of auspication. In the Mercator we meet the horny old man
Demipho at the beginning of Act Two when he reports a prophetic dream
in which he comes into possession of a beautiful she-goat and gives her into
the care of a monkey who becomes angry at him because of the incon-
venience. Then a kid appears and announces that he has stolen the she-goat
and leaves Demipho weeping. After describing this dream Demipho
immediately begins to interpret it by trying to figure out who each figure
represents: the she-goat must be the lovely new slave girl he has just fallen
for, of this much he is sure. The audience meanwhile is playing the same
interpretive game, based on everything that was revealed in Act One.21 At
this moment Lysimachus comes onstage shouting back into his house
instructions to castrate a he-goat who has been making trouble. “I don’t
like that omen or auspicium,” says Demipho in an aside, “I’m afraid my
wife my will castrate me like the he-goat and take for herself the part of the
monkey” (Merc. 274–76).22
Compare the scene in Act Four of Cistellaria, where Halisca comes out
praying for the gods’ help and then the audience’s to find the lost casket
(Cist. 678–81): “Good people, my spectators (mei spectatores), give me some
sign (indicium), if anyone saw who stole it away or picked it up and
whether they set off this way or that. I’m no better off for questioning
and troubling these folks, who take delight in a woman’s travails.” She sets
about looking for tracks, then falls to ruminating on the paradoxical
consequences for herself of the loss of the casket that gives her play its
title (nulla est, neque ego sum usquam. perdita perdidit me, 686). Eventually
she summons herself back to task (693–94): Halisca, hoc age, ad terram
aspice et despice, / oculis investiges, astute augura. The metatheatrical theme
of trying to figure the play out is even clearer here than in the Rudens and
Mercator passages, this time, though, it is not about predicting the future
21
On the dream as a puzzle (for the audience as much as for Demipho), see Marshall 2010: 67. For
a survey of scholarship on this dream, see Augoustakis 2008: 40–42.
22
Once again, this is not a real auspicium but another kind of sign, and it might be objected that unlike
the procedure for formally taking auspices described earlier in the chapter, Demipho is simply
noting an omen that comes up on the fly. Modern scholars distinguish between impetrative auspices
(the intentionally sought kind) and oblative auspices, which pop up unbidden without the auspicant
having to follow any preparatory procedure. However, this distinction, as useful as it is for us in
classifying these phenomena, is unattested before Servius (ad Aen. 6.190), so perhaps we are safe in
seeing a slippage between these types of auspication in Plautus. In any case, Demipho assumes that
the manner of another character’s stage entrance could be read, like an auspicium, and interpreted in
continuity with his prophetic dream of the day’s events.
220 robert germany
but reading a present reality and drawing the spectators directly into the
question as a possible source of a sign. Little does she know it, but Halisca
has an internal audience, Lampadio and Phanostrata, who are even now
reading her behavior and identifying her as the one who lost the casket by
her movement onstage (certe eccam; eum locum signat, 696).23 “He went this
way,” Halisca cries to herself in pursuit of her ever more metatheatrical
quarry, “I see the trace of his comic slipper in the dust” (socci video /
vestigium in pulvere, 697–98). She goes on to reconstruct the blocking of
the previous scene’s stage movement, and then she discovers that he may
still be somewhere very near indeed and perhaps she should direct her
contemplation to the stage: “But he went off this way. I’ll watch for him.
He went from here to here and never left from here” (sed is hac abiit.
contemplabor. hinc huc iit, hinc nusquam abiit, 702).24
Nine times in the extant corpus Plautus uses the phrase in mundo.25 This
strange expression is sometimes translated as “ready” or “to hand” and
explained as deriving from the adjective mundus, -a, -um (OLD1 4 makes
this connection), but apart from the fact that such a phrase as “in the neat”
would seem forced in relation to the concept of readiness or availability,
such a nominalization, mundum, is otherwise totally unattested. Long ago,
Gulick 1896 argued that the phrase in mundo is not from the adjective, but
from the noun mundus, the celestial zone of auspication, and that it means
something like “on the augural horizon,” or perhaps as we might say “on
the cards.” In the Asinaria, for example, Libanus comes onstage exhorting
himself to come up with a plan to save his master. He is pondering where
he should get the cash, whom he should trick, where he should steer the
jollyboat of the play; just then he gets a sign from above (Asin. 258–66):
I’ve got my auspices, my auguries! The birds allow full choice of destination
[impetritum, inauguratumst: quovis admittunt aves]. Woodpecker and crow
on the left, raven and owl on the right, they all say it’s so! I’ll follow your
23
Rather than serving their generically usual purpose of confirming the identity of the long-lost-but-
now-found child, the tokens of recognition in the casket are a sign to Phanostrata that her search for
her daughter is near its end, if only she follows the casket to its owner. See Manuwald 2004:
145. Thus the theme of interpretation around the cistellaria is a two-way street, as Halisca tracks her
(internal) audience and they track her.
24
This metatheatrical play with successful or failed interpretation and the motif of having a role in
a comic plot comes up glancingly in the Captivi. Aristophontes has been temporarily freed, just long
enough to come onstage and spoil everything for Tyndarus, when he fails to catch on to the play-
within-the-play until it is too late. Now that Hegio is herding him offstage and back to his former
condition, his parting lines reveal the limits of his role in this comedy: “I predicted myself out of
chains [exauspicavi ex vinclis]. Now I understand that I must repredict myself back into them” (nunc
intellego redauspicandum esse in catenas denuo, 766–77).
25
Asin. 264, 316; Cas. 565; Epid. 618; Per. 45; Poen. 783; Pseud. 499, 500; Stich. 477.
advice for sure. But what’s this? The woodpecker tapping on an elm?
Coincidence? I think not! One thing I know for sure from the augury of
that woodpecker: there’s rods in mundo either for me or for the steward
Saurea. But what’s that? Leonida running up out of breath? I’m afraid he’s
bringing bad omen for my tricksy treacheries.
Obviously, Libanus is not saying the elm rods are “ready” (“in the
tidy”?); he is forecasting them on the basis of the woodpecker’s behavior.
After a bit of back and forth, Leonida comes up with a great plan, one sure
to make them both worthy of crucifixion, and Libanus exclaims, “Ah,
that’s it! I was wondering why my shoulders have been itching all this time.
They’ve begun to say sooth, that there’s a whipping for them in mundo”
(315–16). Leonida’s plan turns out to involve an intrigue, where he plays
Saurea, and he asks Libanus to take it easy if he has to punch him in the jaw
a little bit. “You won’t lay a finger on me, if you’re smart,” says Libanus, “or
you’ll find you’ve changed your name today with bad auspices” (373–74).
Consider Epidicus, the hero of his own play, who comes onstage in Act
Two to fleece the old men and assures Stratippocles, still back in the house,
“Don’t worry. I’m coming out here with clear auspices, a bird on the left”
(181–82). He is right, of course, the day and the auspices are his, as he seems to
realize in Act Three when he refers to the transfer of money happening <meo>
auspicio (343) and as Stratippocles understands when he attributes the success-
ful outcome to the virtute atque auspicio Epidici (381). But by Act Five things
have become quite a bit more complicated for poor Epidicus, and it is not
clear how a happy ending could still be in store. “Even if Jupiter brings himself
and eleven other gods besides,” he moans, “they won’t be able to rescue
Epidicus from crucifixion” (610). He has seen the old men preparing the
instruments of his torture, but Stratippocles says, “Don’t worry” (the same
thing Epidicus had said to him before). “Naturally,” fires back Epidicus wryly,
“since I’ve got liberty in mundo” (618). Whether he is just being sarcastic or
making the more philosophical point that death, at least, will bring freedom, it
is clear that the metaphor of auspication has turned sour for him.
Likewise, in the Stichus the parasite Gelasimus comes onstage proclaiming:
I’ve come outside with the best of auspices today [auspicio hodie optumo]:
a weasel ran off with a mouse right before my feet. What a windfall of an
omen! Completely clear to me [spectatum]. For just as the weasel found
sustenance for itself today, I hope to do so too. This is what the augury
portends. (Stich. 459–63)
Just then he notices the young spender Epignomus and figures this must
be his promised meal ticket. He greets him and begins fishing for an
222 robert germany
invitation to dinner. The conceit of this scene is that Gelasimus is gener-
ously inviting Epignomus to dinner at his own (that is, Epignomus’)
house, an offer Epignomus presumably cannot refuse. Epignomus sees
through this absurdity, of course, and politely declines the paradoxical
invitation. “Don’t get mad,” says Gelasimus. “You should say yes. I do have
something [nescioquid] in mundo” (476–77). There is a nice irony here. To
the extent that in mundo can mean something as bland as “in store” and
nescioquid can refer to something one does, in fact, already know, this
sentence could be spoken by someone who really is inviting a friend to
dinner. But, of course, nescio quid can also resolve back into “some
I-don’t-know-what” and in fact alongside Gelasimus’ putative promise
that something is up for dinner, he is also saying that he has something
(he does not yet know what) on the augural horizon. None of this works,
and poor Gelasimus is left alone with only the indication that maybe he can
help with the leftovers tomorrow (cras, 496), in other words, definitely not
in this play. “I’m done for,” he realizes, “completely unmoored. It’s all one
Gelasimus less than it was. Never again shall I trust a weasel. I don’t know
a fickler beast. Ten times a day it changes its place, and I staked my life on
auspices from it?” (497–502). In Act Three of the Poenulus the pimp Lycus
reports that the soothsayers have just given him bad omens, but surely they
must be wrong, since things have been turning out so well for him, but
even as he says this Agorastocles and his advocati are spying on him. They
confront him, things get tense, and he curses them (783): “Woe to your
life!” “That’s <in> mundo for your life!” they fire back, thus echoing the
prophecy he thought he had escaped. At the beginning of the Persa, as soon
as Sagaristio agrees to help Toxilus try to find money, the latter is exultant:
nempe habeo in mundo (45). This assurance is neatly balanced by the pimp’s
lament when he finally does give up the money that today was predicted to
be a profitable day: lucro faciundo auspicavi in hunc diem (689). In the
Pseudolus when the hero is asked why he did not keep Simo apprised of his
son’s affair he replies, “I knew the mill was in mundo for me if I said
anything” (499). Simo fires back: “didn’t you know the mill was in mundo
for you when you kept it hidden?” Pseudolus answers that he did, but that
“the one punishment was at hand and the other was further off, the one
present and the other a few days away.” These dieculae (503) are more than
enough to postpone any punishment past the boundary set by the Unity of
Time, the one-day limit of every Plautine world.
In all these hints that the world of the play is a mundus unto itself, cut off
from the surrounding world like the augural mundus in the sky and with an
alien soil like the mundus in the Forum, one sees an instance of the
peculiarly Roman fascination with the paradoxical geography of the stage
and the wormhole that seems to surround its fictional location. For
instance, the prologue of the Menaechmi explains that the “here” of the
stage is “nowhere, unless it’s where it’s supposed to be” (nusquam . . . nisi
ubi factum dicitur, 10). Usually it is Athens, he admits, but the setting can
change just like the fictional residents who live onstage, and today “here” is
Epidamnus. He even offers, for a fee of course, to take care of other
business in Epidamnus if anyone in the audience needs his services
(51–53). There is a similar conceit in the Casina. The prologue explains
that a father and son are in competition for the love of a slave girl, the
eponymous heroine, Casina. In an attempt to secure permanent access to
the girl, the father, Lysidamus, has prompted a loyal slave to seek her hand
in a sham marriage. Meanwhile the son has exactly the same idea and puts
forward his own proxy. To make matters more complex still, Lysidamus’
wife has learned about all this and, because of her jealous desire to thwart
her husband’s happiness, has become her son’s best friend and champion of
his cause with Casina. Thus the play revolves around the overt contest
between two slaves and the covert contest between the master and matron
of the house. To keep the focus on the dispute between man and wife, the
son is left entirely out of the picture. As the prologue says (Cas. 64–66):
“Don’t wait around for him; today, in this comedy, he won’t be returning
to the city. Plautus didn’t want him to and severed a bridge that was in his
way.” The playwright could have left the adulescens totally out of account,
or if he did not want his audience wondering why the lad was not around to
see to his own love life, he could easily enough have come up with
a plausible excuse for his absence, one that did not involve Plautus himself
coming in, like the animator’s eraser in Duck Amuck chasing poor Daffy
around. The bridge he destroys has no existence apart from this line, was
only invented to be cut.26 But this move not only reminds us of the utter
fictiveness of the play’s reality, it also generates a sense of the Athens of this
comedy cut off from the rest of the world, or at least no more accessible
than Plautus wants. An audience member may interfere with the perform-
ance, but genuinely breaking into the play world from without would be
a feat of a different kind. Here too the Unity of Time is part of this game:
a broken bridge will not stop true love forever, but it will slow it down
26
O’Bryhim (1989: 82) reads hodie in hac comoedia as an indication that in Diphilus’ original, the
young lover did return, but as Sharrock (2009: 37 n. 48) rightly notes, this detour is “typical Plautine
messing” and probably not secure evidence of the content of his Greek source. Either way, though,
the bridge is invoked solely to serve as a functional absence, a nonbridge that marks Plautus’
intervention as an act of quarantine, rendering the world of the play effatum et liberatum.
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enough to keep the boy offstage for today (hodie, 64), and as both Plautus
and his audience understand, that will be enough. The play world’s
temporal boundary is as impassable as a river without a bridge and as
hard as the edge of the stage.
The prologue’s closing shot returns to this theme in a subtler form. He
describes Casina herself:
She’ll be found to be chaste and proper, a good Athenian girl, she won’t do
anything naughty, that’s for sure, at least not in this comedy. Soon enough,
once the play’s over, if someone gives her money I imagine she’ll be ready to
wed without waiting for auspices. (81–86)
Casina may not be that kind of girl, but the actress who plays her
probably is, and with a little cash down there will not be any
standing on ceremony (non manebit auspices, 86). The trouble is, of
course, you may have a hard time finding her once the play is done.
Female roles were played by male actors, so if you do rush into
things with this heroine, you will find yourself in exactly the same
position as the slave of Lysidamus does in Act Five, when he thinks
he is bedding Casina only to find that his rival has been substituted
at the last moment for the lovely Casina, and he is tricked into going
to bed with a man in drag.27 The further irony, regarding the
boundary between fictive world and reality, is that Casina herself
never actually appears in the play. So not only is there no actress,
there is no actor.28 Returning to the parallel between theatre and
augury, we can affirm that the Casina who will not wait for auspices
is a Casina who does not exist at all.
The language of auspication makes one more notable appearance in this
play. At the end of Act Three, Scene One, Lysidamus has set everything up
to his advantage and departs to take care of some quick business in the
forum, crowing in expectation of the opportunity he will soon have to
bring his love affair to fulfillment. He leaves the stage empty and some time
has evidently passed when his wife enters for Scene Two. She has
27
Gold 1998 reads Chalinus’ cross-dressing as the focus for the play’s destabilization of gender
essentialism, since “Casina’s” existence as a woman and an onstage character is all performance,
fooling only Olympio, Alcesimus, and Lysidamus. My reading of the prologue is thus an expansion
of her take on this later scene, since the audience is teasingly invited to make a mistake parallel to
that made by the comedy’s dupes.
28
Ehlers 1998 suggests that there was “Wahrscheinlich” (192), a mute, maskless actress/prostitute
onstage during the prologue, and that she was seriously being offered up to the audience for sex
work after the show. Otherwise, he wonders, would her total absence from the play not be
a confusing disappointment: “Eine reine Posse also, einen flauen Witz für männliche Zuschauer?”
(190). I suspect that the interest of this scene is somewhat more sophisticated than that.
uncovered the plan and immediately begins to undermine all his arrange-
ments. When he returns to the stage in Scene Three she is waiting for him,
and he finds that everything has changed in his absence; the balance of
power has shifted, and his chance has passed:
Total stupidity, in my opinion, for any lover to go to the forum, who has the
object of his affections in mundo for that day. I’ve been stupid and done just
that: I’ve frittered away the day standing as advocate for some relative of
mine. (563–67)
When Lysidamus squanders his lucky day with Casina by spending it in
the forum, he is also missing his chance to control events onstage.29 The
kinsman who detains him in the forum too long turns out to have the same
essential role as the broken bridge that keeps his son out of the play
altogether. It is too late now; Casina is not in mundo after all. Or rather,
perhaps, building on what we said earlier, she never really was “in the
world” at all.
10.4 Tragedy: Seneca’s Agamemnon

Looking beyond Plautus, the usual frustration in studies of early Roman
theatre obtains: we have so little else, apart from Terence, that it is hard
to determine how consistent a theme of Roman drama augural contem-
platio was. The fact that Terence seems less interested in auspication
than Plautus may be explained by the presumption that he stays closer
to the spirit of his Greek originals, which would have no particular
reason to play in this metaphorical register. The phrase in mundo is
attested twice in Caecilius (Frs 276 and 278 Ribbeck), but it is hard to
tell much about the context from what little remains. There is
a tantalizing fragment of Ennius, not from a drama, but perhaps in
the paratragic register: contemplor / inde loci liquidas pilatasque aetheris
oras (“From that place I contemplate the bright and piled shores of
heaven,” Sat. 2.3–4). Servius auctus explains the strange word pilatas
here: cum firmas et stabiles significaret quasi pilis fultas (ad A. 12.121). But
surely Ennius’ shores of heaven are supported on piles not, in the first
instance, because they are firm and stable, but rather lofty. In any case
they are the object of contemplation from some particular place and,
29
Typically in ancient theatre, the stage is marked as masculine space and the house is feminine, but as
Andrews 2004 points out in the Casina, the female characters will seize control of the outside world
and pen the men inside together, thus inverting the usual semantic configuration of space.
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like the temporary wooden stage of Ennius’ day, held up by
stanchions.30
It is the collocation of contemplare and templum that prompts Varro to
cite Ennius’s Medea 240 in his discussion of augural temples (Ling. 7.9):
asta atque Athenas anticum opulentum oppidum / contempla et templum
Cereris ad laevam aspice (“Stand and contemplate the ancient, rich town
of Athens and behold the temple of Ceres on the left”).31 This templum is
not an augural temple, of course, nor is it the direct grammatical object of
contempla, but it is certainly part of the oppidum and the pointed object of
spectation (aspice), and the figura etymologica with contempla is striking.
Cicero’s characterization of Ennius’ Medea as a word-for-word translation
of Euripides (de Fin. 1.4) is a slight exaggeration, but most of the fragments
we have of it do indeed hew pretty closely to the Greek original. So the
change of setting in this fragment from Corinth to Athens is hard to
explain. Jocelyn (1967: 344) submitted that these lines are from a second
Ennian tragedy about Medea, an Athenian sequel, but there is no sign that
any ancient writer knew of more than one play. Vahlen (1903: ccviii)
suggested that Ennius fused the plot of Euripides’ Medea with his Aegeus
for a monster tragedy that began in Corinth and ended in Athens, but such
a scene change would be totally unique in Roman tragedy. Various scholars
have proposed that there was only one play, set in Corinth, but that these
lines might come from a scene in which Medea (Plank 1807: 97–98) or the
chorus (Ladewig 1848: 16) or Aegeus (Pascal 1899: 3; Drabkin 1937: 13) or
Jason (Arcellaschi 1990: 55) imagines Medea’s future home in Athens. This
last possibility may be the most plausible and particularly suggestive for our
thesis, in that a character is expected to look at Corinthian space and
imaginatively “contemplate” Athens, just as the audience looks at Roman
space and reads it as Corinth.
This imaginative preview of Medea’s destination (if that is what it is)
would be similar to the most famous moment of contemplatio mundi in
Republican literature, one that had an incalculably vast impact on later
Roman, medieval, and early modern cosmologies: Cicero’s Somnium
Scipionis.32 Earlier in On the Republic Scipio acknowledges the importance
30
Consider also Ennius’s Euhemerus (Fr. 5 G.-M.), where Pan led Saturn up to the mountain called
Sky’s Pillar (Caeli Stel<l>a, 99) from which he looked out (contemplatus est) far and wide. He built
an altar to Sky there, at which Jupiter later sacrificed, and “from this place he looked up to what we
call the sky and that thing called aether, which was beyond the world” (in eo loco suspexit in caelum
quod nunc nos nominamus, idque quod supra mundum erat, quod aether vocabatur).
31
The first line of this fragment is given by Nonius (p. 469.34).
32
There has been much recent work on travel and visual perspective in the Somnium Scipionis. See
especially Stevens 2006, Schweizer-Vüllers 2011, and Zanini 2012.
of auspication in the founding and maintenance of Rome (Rep. 2.16),
and just before the dream, when Scipio meets Masinissa, the African
prince casts his eyes heavenward (suspexit ad caelum, 6.9) and gives
thanks to the celestial bodies among whom his guest will soon be
soaring. But once the dream begins Scipio inverts the direction of
contemplation and looks down on Carthage from the bright starry
vault (de excelso et pleno stellarum, illustri et claro quodam loco, 6.11).
From this unusual perspective, the earth is at the center of the
universal templum, but both the divine templum and the earth are
objects of Scipio’s gaze (templum . . . quod conspicis . . . globum, quem
in hoc templo medium vides, 6.15). But the heavenly templa are also
Scipio’s destination (aspicis, quae in templa veneris, 6.17), just as they
once were Romulus’ (haec ipsa in templa penetravit, 6.24). Here too
mundus functions as a synonym of templum (6.13, 17, 18, 19, and 26).
Scipio wants to keep on contemplating the earth (sedem etiam nunc
hominum ac domum contemplari, 6.20), but he is gently admonished to
train his gaze upwards to the regions that are, in fact, his destiny.
Cicero seems to be building on the rich heritage of the Roman
construction of contemplatio mundi, but Scipio’s dream represents
a somewhat more complicated version of contemplatio and
a departure from the structure I am investigating here, in that the
contemplator is on the move, like the Greek θεωρός, into the realms
that are the usual object of contemplative spectation. His contempla-
tion is not only a journey, however, but also a preview of his later
destination, both immediately, in the case of Carthage (videsne illam
urbem . . . ad quam tu oppugnandam nunc venis, 6.11), and more
remotely, of his final abode in celestial regions, when contemplation
itself will have played its part in liberating the soul from the body
(contemplans quam maxime se a corpore abstrahet, 6.29). If, as I have
argued above, the ritual complex that gives birth to the Greek for-
mulation of θεωρία is essentially peregrine, whereas Roman contempla-
tio, with its roots in augural spectation, is correspondingly stationary,
then Cicero is here working from a fundamentally Greek conception
of contemplation-as-journey, but one that has been Romanized, not
just by the play of temples and worlds, but by the conceit that the
object of vision seen on that journey is yet another place where one has
still to go.
Despite its psychagogic drama, though, Cicero’s dialogic text is not
a play. For a significant continuation of the tragic corpus we must skip
ahead to Seneca and leave early Roman theatre far behind; however, the
228 robert germany
analogy of theatrical spectation with reading signs in the heavens is not just
a Plautine quirk but deep in the Roman associative matrix of contemplatio
mundi, and the theme outlives Republican drama.33 In various places
Seneca expresses the idea, familiar from Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and
many others, that man’s upright stature has destined him peculiarly for
gazing on the heavens. In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods (2.140) this
ability to look up at the sky makes the human race spectatores of the celestial
spectaculum, so the theatrical metaphor of this activity is already explicit
a hundred years before Seneca. But Seneca continues this anthropological
tradition and in the On Leisure (5.4) he refers to our natural design as being
specifically to enable our contemplatio of the heavens.34 As he says in Epistle
64.6: “For me anyway the contemplatio of wisdom tends to take up a lot of
time; I gaze upon it in wonder just as I sometimes gaze on the firmament
[mundus], which I often behold like a first-time theatregoer [spectator
novus].”
Seneca’s drama is particularly rich in the theme of metatheatrical con-
templatio mundi, but unlike Plautus, who usually invokes the auspicant’s
gaze for a momentary gag, Seneca tends to integrate it into his construction
in a more fundamental way, with consequences that ramify through the
whole play.35 So rather than attempting a full survey of his deployment of
this motif, I shall focus here on one play, the Agamemnon. The ghost
of Thyestes opens the tragedy, announcing his arrival from the gloomy pit
of Tartarus and greeting the ancient threshold of the house of Pelops: hinc
auspicari regium capiti decus / mos est Pelasgis (“From here the Pelasgians are
wont to take auspices regarding the royal diadem for the head,” Ag. 8–9).
He means that this is where they inaugurate their reign, of course, but as
Tarrant notes, this is an intrusion into a putatively Greek context, of the
Roman practice of taking auspices, missing only the fasces.36 From this spot
(hinc) Thyestes himself will soon be pronouncing prophecies for the
crown: “I see the royal head [regium video caput, 46] split by the heavy
blow of an ax.” He claims that his own evil deeds while he lived inverted
nature (versa natura est retro, 34) and confounded day with night (miscui
nocti diem, 36), and at the end of the prologue he realizes that his presence is
33
The permanent theatres of the late Republic and the Empire will not, of course, have suggested the
same parallel of ephemerality with the augural mundus as was natural for the older temporary stages,
but there may have been other ways in which these monumental structures could signal their
resonance with the heavens. See Aktüre 2008: 96.
34
Küppers 1996.
35
Also see Shearin’s discussion of the sublime gaze for Stoics and Epicureans in Chapter 12.
36
Tarrant 1976: 165.
delaying the arrival of Phoebus, so he retires back to the world below with
the exhortation, “Give back the day to the world” (redde iam mundo
diem, 56).
Clytemnestra picks up the theme of the delinquent sun and its connec-
tion to Thyestes and to this play. Aegisthus boasts Thyestes as his father,
and Clytemnestra adds that he might as well throw in grandfather. He
redirects around the sticky subject of his incestuous parentage by claiming
that Phoebus is, after all, his ancestor. “Do you call [vocas, 295] Phoebus the
source of your unspeakable family,” she asks, “whom you drove [expulistis,
297] from the sky when he pulled back his reins in sudden night?” The
addressee of vocas is singular and that of expulistis plural, and she means to
refer principally to the Thyestean feast, but as Thyestes’ ghost has already
hinted and as we shall soon see, her indictment is relevant to Aegisthus and
this play too. The examination of heaven for signs of the gods’ sanction or
lack thereof is a major theme of Eurybates’ extended description of the
storm that gathered and broke over the Greek forces as they departed from
Troy, and the mundus was ripped out from its foundations and it seemed
the caelum was broken and the gods falling from it as chaos enveloped the
earth.37 Eurybates ends his 160-line monologue with the return of Phoebus
and the revelation of the night’s destruction, and then Clytemnestra
announces the arrival of the “crazed priestess of Phoebus” (effrena
Phoebas, 588).
The gaze cast from the stage or the world of the play up to the heavens is
now reoriented, as Cassandra regards the scene from her dislocated
perspective:
Where am I? Fled is the gladsome light, deep night covers my eyes and the
sky lies hid in darkness. But look! The day flashes forth with double sun, and
double Argos raises twin palaces. Are these the groves of Ida I see? (726–30)
There is an echo here of the Bacchae’s ecstatic Pentheus, seeing double
Thebes in his enthusiastic intoxication, but Cassandra’s dual vision seems
to be split between Troy and Argos, as the apparitions she describes both
reveal the hidden truth about the latter and superimpose images of the
former. The conceit that Cassandra looks at Argive space and, in the
manner of a theatrical spectator, sees Troy is nothing new in Roman
drama, as we noted a similar phenomenon earlier in the chapter, in the
Menaechmi’s intermural hopscotch between Rome and Epidamus and
37
The messenger’s cosmic perspective is one of the epic elements of this speech, on which see Baertschi
2010.
230 robert germany
(perhaps) in the vision of Athens from Corinth in Ennius’ Medea, but her
role as “Beobachterin und Prophetin” (Riemer 1997: 142) brings Cassandra
into even closer alignment with the Roman contemplative auspicant. After
Agamemnon’s entrance her bifocal perspective between the two cities
continues, and of course her blurring is all insight. Agamemnon asks,
“Do you think you’re seeing Ilium?” “Yes, and Priam too,” she answers
ominously. “This is not Troy,” he objects, to which she replies, “Where
Helen is, I think Troy” (Ag. 794–95).38
Just before this scene with Agamemnon, in a remarkable apostrophe,
Cassandra addresses the dead and exhorts them:
Draw back for a while the covering of the dark vault,
So the flitting throng of Phrygians may gaze on Mycenae.
Behold, wretches. Fate is inverted.
reserate paulum terga nigrantis poli,
levis ut Mycenas turba prospiciat Phrygum.
spectate, miseri: fata se vertunt retro. (Seneca, Agamemnon 756–58)
This last phrase echoes the claim of Thyestes’ ghost in the prologue about
his own behavior inverting nature (versa natura est retro, 34). Cassandra
does not refer to the abode of the dead as a mundus, but nigrans polus seems
like a close equivalent, and she imagines it enclosed by a removable cover,
just like the mundus that gets opened three times a year in Rome. She
addresses the levis turba Phrygum as a theatrical audience (spectate), but
these lines are performed in Rome, before a Roman audience claiming
descent from Phrygian Aeneas, and when Cassandra imagines them as
watching the stage from another world she is speaking the old language of
theatrical contemplatio.39
The chorus now picks up the running theme of Phoebus unnaturally
absent, singing this time about the conception of Hercules, when the law of
the mundus was broken and the hours of night twinned (812–17). The
spinning mundus stood still for that child who would mount heaven
(caelum, 828). As the chorus continues its description of Hercules’ life it
comes eventually to his final labor, the hound of the nether regions dragged
38
On the theme of history’s cyclicity in the Agamemnon, see Boyle 1983: 200–202.
39
The “performance question” – whether these plays were ever publicly staged or only meant for salon
reading – is still debated in some quarters, though the evidence for public performance is very strong
(Sutton 1986). In any case, for our purposes, it is enough to say that they are written “as if” to be
staged (Kohn 2013: 13) and that they are Roman tragedies, coming at the end of a long history of that
genre. Even if, as seems unlikely, they were mere closet dramas, they were still constructed in the
semiotic traditions developed out of real theatrical practice in Rome, so the levis turba Phrygum
addressed by Cassandra here remains at least notionally the Roman audience.
to the world above (tractus ad caelum canis inferorum, 859). Of course,
Hercules did not bring Cerberus to heaven but to Eurystheus, so this use of
caelum amounts to a focalization of our world, as sky, from the perspective
of the underworld, once again very much like Cassandra’s description of
the dead contemplating the play. Cassandra herself, virtually dead already,
now sees the murder of Agamemnon with vision never so clear and gladly
takes the role of spectator (spectemus, 875). For one last time in the tragedy
a character notes the sun’s delay, as Cassandra makes explicit the connec-
tion that Thyestes’ ghost and Clytemnestra have hinted at: stat ecce Titan,
dubius e medio die / suane currat an Thyestea via (908–9).
One of Kant’s better-known aphorisms, chosen by his friends for
inscription on his tombstone, runs, “Two things fill the mind with ever
new and waxing wonder and awe, the more often and steadily they are
considered: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”40
Both of Kant’s two things, and indeed the relationship between them, are
elucidated in Seneca’s work. The primary images for the philosophical life
in antiquity are, as Günther Bien has noted, the Himmelsbetrachter and the
Glücksforscher.41 In Thales and the other Presocratics the former is domi-
nant, and in the Hellenistic schools the latter, but it is probably true that
neither is ever completely absent. The intellectual heritage that runs from
Aristotle to Theophrastus to Menander makes of the New Comic stage
a kind of laboratory of Peripatetic ethics, a screen against which the
audience may study the trajectories of vice. But if the Hellenistic audience
was one of Glücksforscher, translation into Latin and into spatial sensibil-
ities informed by Roman culture made for an audience of
Himmelsbetrachter. The structural parallels between augural contemplatio
and theatrical spectation were too good not to be exploited by Plautus and
presumably other early Roman playwrights, so that Seneca found himself
the inheritor of richly overlapping traditions of analogy between drama-
tized philosophical θεωρία and theatrical contemplatio mundi.
40
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (AA.V.161): “Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und
zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit
beschäftigt: Der bestirnte Himmel über mir, und das moralische Gesetz in mir.”
41
Bien 1982.

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chapter 10

All the World’s a Stage

The Romans render θεωρεῖν as contemplari, θεωρία as contemplatio. This

10.2 Θεωρία and Contemplatio: Religious, Philosophical, and

10.3 Comedy: Plautus

10.4 Tragedy: Seneca’s Agamemnon

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