‘Between Wife and Husband’: the Long Echo of Sira’s Lament (Plautus,Merc. 817 ff.)

Abstract

Sira’s monologue in Merc. 817 ff. is one of the most well-known scenes in the play: she offers a surprising – and at times paradoxical – meditation on the behaviour of a husband and wife. In the ironic ‘feminism’ of this anus one inevitably glimpses literary constructions and problematic knots, capable of reviving, albeit with a comic smile, a subject of great cultural and legal relevance.