The Brothers Menaechmus

Food and drink have significant roles in the characters’ preoccupations and motivations. Peniculus’s goal is to secure his place at Menaechmus and Erotium’s feast, while Menaechmus II is persuaded to throw Messenio’s caution to the winds partly because of the prospect of a lavish meal. Not only does this contribute to the carnivalesque, excessive materiality of the comedy, it also signals the chasm between the play and the audience’s reality. Much of the food that Menaechmus orders, for example, was explicitly banned in the abstemious, austere Rome of Plautus’s day, in an indication of the dissolution of Epidamnus in particular, and Greece in general, to Roman eyes (210-11).

To strengthen the connection between feasting and entertainment, Plautus also uses the language of food and drink to characterize the play itself. When he is introducing the play, the Chief Actor announces that he will “pour a lot of plot for you. / Not just a cupful, fuller up, more like a pot / […] brimming full of plot!” (14-15). He thus imagines the play as a vessel and the plot as wine. Moreover, the language itself echoes and enhances the imagery, with the