Play: Miles Gloriosus

Overview

Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Soldier), first performed around 205 BCE, is a fast-paced Roman comedy set in Ephesus that lampoons martial swagger and male vanity. Its engine is the clever-slave stratagem: a nimble servant orchestrates deceptions to outwit a blustering soldier and reunite a separated pair of lovers. The play’s action unfolds around two adjacent houses, a standard Plautine stage arrangement that enables secret passages, door-banging, and rapid reversals.

Characters and Setup

Pyrgopolynices is the boastful mercenary whose name itself signals bombast. He boasts of impossible conquests while his parasite Artotrogus fawns and fabricates ever greater feats to keep the meals coming. The soldier has abducted the Athenian girl Philocomasium, who actually loves the young Athenian Pleusicles. Palaestrio, once Pleusicles’s slave but captured and sold into Pyrgopolynices’s household, discovers that his former master’s beloved is under the same roof. He makes common cause with Periplectomenus, a worldly, libertine bachelor who lives next door and despises the soldier’s arrogance.

The First Ruse: The Twin Sister

Palaestrio summons Pleusicles to Ephesus and secretly bores a hole in the party-wall, creating a passage between the houses so Philocomasium and Pleusicles can meet. Their luck nearly fails when Sceledrus, the soldier’s watchdog slave, glimpses Philocomasium kissing a man across the way. To silence him, Palaestrio and Periplectomenus stage a dazzling imposture: Philocomasium dashes back and forth through the wall, appearing first as herself and then, in a quick-change, as her supposed twin sister newly arrived from Athens. With bold denials, mock-legal threats, and the authority of the older neighbor, they gaslight the hapless Sceledrus into doubting his eyes and hold his tongue.

The Big Con: Hooking the Braggart

Having secured their present, the conspirators plan an exit. Palaestrio feeds Pyrgopolynices a lure sized to his vanity: Periplectomenus’s wife, a high-born beauty, is madly in love with the soldier. The wrinkle is that Periplectomenus is actually a bachelor; the “wife” is the courtesan Acroteleutium, coached by Palaestrio, with her sly maid Milphidippa as go-between. The women pour on exaggerated adoration, calling Pyrgopolynices irresistible, invincible, and uniquely manly. Inflated beyond buoyancy, he agrees to free up household space by relinquishing Philocomasium, believing he is trading up to a married aristocrat.

Escape and Humiliation

To speed the handover, Pleusicles disguises himself as a ship’s captain ready to convey Philocomasium to her supposed family. With the soldier’s consent, she departs laden with her belongings and escorted by Palaestrio’s allies, slipping safely to the harbor. Then Pyrgopolynices, perfumed and preening, arrives at Periplectomenus’s door for his adulterous triumph. Instead of a tryst, he meets a gauntlet: the neighbor’s household storms him for molesting a married woman, thrashes him, strips him of finery, and drives him into public disgrace. The parasite’s flattering chorus collapses into awkward silence. The lovers sail away together, and Palaestrio’s wit stands vindicated.

Style and Themes

Miles Gloriosus crystallizes the stock type of the braggart soldier, its satire sharpened by Plautus’s wordplay and theatrical self-awareness. The play delights in duplicity, doubling, and doors: identities split and recombine, private desires burst into public view, and a simple wall becomes a comic instrument. Beneath the farce lies pointed social comedy, vanity made ridiculous, power rendered helpless by intelligence, and freedom won through cooperation and theatrical craft.