This chapter continues the preceding chapter’s mobilization of post-colonial perspectives and interrogation of traditional accounts of beginnings of Latin literature relative to Greece by studying the ‘double-drag’ of slave-women characters wearing blackface masks in Plautine comedy. It begins from the premise that some palliata texts, often taken to be foundational in Roman self-fashioning vis-à-vis Greece, are not strictly Roman at all, but that they do deliberately adopt an inferior position—indeed, multiple inferior positions: at the time the palliata was developed and performed, it belonged to acting troupes of lower-class and slave men, none Roman by birth, who traveled around central Italy, making the palliata out of bits and pieces of comedy in current circulation. Focusing in particular on Plautus’ Poenulus, this chapter offers reflections on the identity politics of the palliata as assertions of a barbarian identity, spoken by and to displaced and deracinated people.
