Door Inscriptions in Plautus’ Comedy (Merc. 409-412; Asin. 759-760)

Visuality, Agency, and Property

Abstract

This paper examines the interplay between inscription, materiality, and comic dynamics in Plautus’ Mercator and Asinaria, situating these passages within the broader cultural and material context of Roman epigraphic practice and domestic architecture. Beginning with an introduction that outlines the aims of the study and the cultural familiarity of audiences with inscribed media, it will then show the theoretical approaches that will be used in the analysis of the two passages.

Through these examples, the paper investigates how Plautus mobilises the door—illuminated by material reconstructions based on Vesuvian archaeological evidence—not merely as an architectural element but as a site of visual and material writing, a semiotic interface that shapes the audience’s interpretive horizon. In Mercator, the imagined door covered with charcoal inscriptions becomes a medium of comic excess, transforming the respectable domus into a brothel-like facade and exposing anxieties of class, gender, and social transgression. In Asinaria, the instruction given to the meretrix to inscribe occupata est literalises the inscription’s power to project ownership and control, turning the door into an active agent in the negotiation of desire and possession.

By reading these scenes through the lens of inscriptional practices—comparing literary imagination with archaeological and epigraphic evidence—the paper highlights how Plautus stages the act of writing as a dynamic negotiation between object and body.