Curr Psychol
ï How many people, one wonders, are sane but not recognized as such in our
psychiatric institutions? […] How many have feigned insanity in order to avoid
the criminal consequences of their behavior…?
ï It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric
hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meaning
of behavior can easily be misunderstood. (p. 257, with omissions)
It is, I argue, precisely these concluding questions and contentions that are
dramatized in Plautus’
Menaechmi. It is time to turn to it directly.
Menaechmi
Plautus’ (fl. 210–184 BC) comedy is named for identical twin brothers, both named
Menaechmus. One brother had been kidnapped at the age of seven and brought to the
Greek city of Epidamnus (modern Durrës in Albania), where he has since grown up
and now finds himself in an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile, the other brother had
originally been named Sosicles, but upon the loss of their son (the first Menaechmus)
his parents renamed him Menaechmus in honor of his kidnapped brother. Having
grown up himself, too, Menaechmus-Sosicles has been scouring the world, blindly
searching for his long-lost brother. “Today”—that is, the day of the show—he has
arrived in Epidamnus, the home of the first Menaechmus, and is promptly mistaken
by everyone for him.
To minimize confusion, I henceforth refer to Menaechmus-Sosicles—the wander-
ing brother—as simply Sosicles. But I stress that throughout the play, both he
and the
Epidamnian brother are known to everyone simply as Menaechmus.
Through a delightful series of coincidences and errors, the two brothers narrowly
avoid meeting up or appearing onstage at the same time until the climax late in the
play. In the interim, confusion rapidly compounds, as no one can figure out why
Menaechmus is acting so strangely or so inconsistently.
Remarkably, characters in the play attribute each other’s confusion to “insanity”
(e.g.
certe hic insanust homo, 282)—and they do so a whopping 35 times. This is,
then, a definite theme of the play; no such extended charges appear in Amphitryo,
Plautus’ other comedy of errors. Notably too, moreover, some characters in
Menaechmi believe that sanity resides in the brain (505–6) and that insanity is a
disease (morbus, 872, 874, 889, 911, discussed below). In other words, they believe
in what we today call “mental illness.”
The charges begin to fly the moment Sosicles meets his first local resident of
Epidamnus.
3
In separate encounters, he chances on first a cook, then a courtesan, and
finally a “parasite,” or errand boy, that are all familiars of (the local) Menaechmus.
All three greet him warmly and by name (i.e. Menaechmus), and in the ensuing
confusion Sosicles or his manservant, Messenio, accuses each character of insanity
(282, 292, 325, 336; 373, 390, 394; 505–6 [cf. 633], 510, 517). The cook, too,
accuses Sosicles of insanity (309, 310–5). Some charges are made in asides to the
audience, but most are made to each other’s face.
3
An earlier charge (198) is colloquial rather than clinical.
Curr Psychol
The action then takes a farcical turn as Sosicles enters the courtesan’s
house and enjoys both a free lunch and then, to his delight, her favors. He
emerges later (701), however, to find his twin brother’s wife waiting outside.
She is furious at (what she believes is) her husband’s boorish behavior. Her
enraged shouting brings us to the climactic scene comprised of verses 753–
875, which I will now call the “Sosicles as pseudopatient” scene. I contend
that this and the following scene (898–965) enact and anticipate a form of the
Rosenhan experiment.
Let me emphasize that Plautus’ play parallels Rosenhan’s paper only in the
first two of its three parts. The third segment of Rosenhan’s paper deals with the
experience of ongoing hospitalization following psychiatric commitment. Since
mentally ill individuals were confined at home in antiquity, where there were no
mental asylums (Rosen
1968
; Stok
1996
), there is no such parallel in Plautus’
comedy. I accordingly pass over it here, though in §6 below I will come back to
the issue of coercive confinement.
Plautus’ play parallels Rosenhan’s paper in the following two parts:
ï Getting Admitted. Just as Rosenhan and his pseudopatients feigned hearing voices
to gain admission to the hospitals, so too must Sosicles feign hearing voices to
convince his interlocutors that he is insane.
ï Sanity on the Ward. Just as Rosenhan and his pseudopatients reverted to
normalcy in talking to doctors on the ward, so too does Menaechmus revert
to normalcy in talking to a doctor, in which Epidamnus itself is effectively
“the ward.”
Getting Admitted (Menaechmi 831–875)
Sosicles is trapped. Who’s this angry woman shouting at him? And now she’s
called her father to come and take action against this bum husband of hers!
Sosicles, of course, has no idea who she is or how, when he arrives, the father-
in-law already knows his name. What’s worse, he cannot think of a way out of
this jam.
Suddenly Sosicles gets it—he will pretend to be insane, and that will frighten them
off. So he turns to the audience, breaks the dramatic illusion, and asks us a rhetorical
question (831–2):
quid mihi meliust, quam quando illi me insanire praedicant,
ego med adsimulem insanire, ut illos a me absterream?
Since they’re both declaring I’m insane, what better could I do than pretend I
am insane, and scare them both away from me?
And already he’s hearing voices—now that of the god Apollo, now that of
Dionysus. They’re telling him to get violent (833–71). This at last prompts the
father-in-law to comment: “Good grief! He’s ill—and how!” It is at this moment that
the father-in-law, for the first time in the play, explicitly connects “insanity” with
“illness”—that is, he invokes and subscribes to the medical model of mental illness