Orient Or Rome

Still funny after two thousand years, the Roman playwright Plautus wrote around 200 B.C.E., a period when Rome was fighting neighbors on all fronts, including North Africa and the Near East. These three plays—originally written for a wartime audience of refugees, POWs, soldiers and veterans, exiles, immigrants, people newly enslaved in the wars, and citizens—tap into the mix of fear, loathing, and curiosity with which cultures, particularly Western and Eastern cultures, often view each other, always a productive source of comedy. These current, accessible, and accurate translations have replaced terms meaningful only to their original audience, such as references to Roman gods, with a hilarious, inspired sampling of American popular culture—from songs to movie stars to slang. Matching the original Latin line for line, this volume captures the full exuberance of Plautus's street language, bursting with puns, learned allusions, ethnic slurs, dirty jokes, and profanities, as it brings three rarely translated works—Weevil (Curculio), Iran Man (Persa), and Towelheads (Poenulus)—to a wide contemporary audience. Richlin's erudite introduction sets these plays within the context of the long history of East-West conflict and illuminates the role played by comedy and performance in imperialism and colonialism. She has also provided detailed and wide-ranging contextual introductions to the individual plays, as well as extensive notes, which, together with these superb and provocative translations, will bring Plautus alive for a new generation of readers and actors.

Publisher description

Excerpt from China and the Roman Orient: Researches Into Their Ancient and Medieval Relations as Represented in Old Chinese Records My interpretation of these records leads to the conclusion that the ancient country of Ta-ts'in, called Fu-lin during the middle ages, was not the Roman Empire with Rome as its capital, but merely its oriental part, viz., Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor; and Syria in the first instance. If applied to the Roman Orient the greater part of the facts mentioned by the Chinese can be traced, and a reasonable explanation may be found for them without resorting to improbabilities; while, if applied to the whole empire, or to Italy, or to any other part of ancient Rome, the matter contained in the Chinese tradition does not agree with reality. As I read the Chinese notices they contain tolerably exact statements regarding the contemporaneous geography of western Asia; they would indeed be puerile nonsense - as I believe Colonel Yule calls them somewhere in his Cathay - if applied to any other part of the world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.