Paper short abstract:

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the use of various ritual communication techniques on the Republican stage in order to draw conclusions about the dialogue with supernatural beings.

Paper long abstract:

The genre of comedies represents a unique source to study ritual practices in the Roman Republic. Historians can rarely draw on any other literary sources than Drama in the period of the early as well as the middle Roman Republic to get a picture of ritual practices of Roman society. If we look behind the fictional and constructional nature of the comedies, I will argue that the analysis of the performative aspects of Roman comedy can open a new perspective on the role and status of ritual practices. The methodological challenge of my paper is to find a conceptual framework for the diverse forms of both direct and indirect communication with the supernatural performed on the republican stage. Based on the example of Terence's comedies, I will show that, in terms of ritual practices, his six comedies (most of which have been preserved in their entirety) differ significantly from those of his predecessors. While Plautus incorporates rituals on the level of performance as practical action, Terence rarely performs this. Nevertheless, I will argue that rituals still represented an integral part of Roman comedy, even if in some cases (as in Terence) they were expressed only at the level of (verbal) communication between actors. Therefore, the analysis of dialogues and monologues can help us to see these communicative practices as a special method of performing rituals. Developing this idea, I will argue that Terence's comedies, not less than those of Plautus, made use of ritual practices. Based on this analysis, I will propose to consider rituals reflected in Roman comedy as a valuable source of knowledge of social conventions regarding techniques of communication with the supernatural in the Roman Republic.