Pot of Gold

Aulularia, latin for Pot of Gold, is at its core a study of fear disguised as a comedy about greed. Plautus structures the entire play around a single psychological truth: that a man who has spent his whole life with nothing does not know how to have something. Euclio is not a villain and he is not simply a fool. He is a recognisably human figure whose poverty has taught him that the world is hostile, that nothing good lasts, and that the only rational response to having something valuable is to hide it from everyone including yourself. The gold does not corrupt him because he was not innocent before it arrived. It simply gives his existing fear a concrete object to organise itself around. Every scene in the play is a variation on this single idea, Euclio's terror expanding outward until it fills every relationship and every space around him.

What makes the play structurally brilliant is the way Plautus layers two entirely separate plot lines, Euclio's obsession with the gold and Lyconides's love for Phaedria, and keeps them running in parallel until the final act forces them together. For most of the play Euclio is completely unaware of his daughter's situation and Lyconides is only dimly aware of the gold. The two men exist in the same house and the same social world but in entirely different emotional realities. When they finally meet in Act 5 and have their great misunderstanding scene, talking past each other about two different things while believing they are having the same conversation, it is not just a comic set piece. It is the structural payoff of everything Plautus has been building since the prologue. The two plots collide and the collision resolves both of them simultaneously.

The play's moral argument is delivered through comedy rather than statement, which is what makes it so effective. Plautus never pauses to tell the audience that Euclio is wrong to hoard the gold. He simply shows, scene by scene, what the hoarding costs him. By Act 3 Euclio has driven strangers out of his house, alienated everyone around him, and moved his most precious possession into a wild grove outside the city, further and further from human community, further and further from the domestic warmth the household god intended the gold to create. The movement of the gold from the hearth of the house outward to the grove of Silvanus is a symbolic journey away from society and toward isolation, and it ends, inevitably, in loss. The gold is stolen precisely because Euclio took it out of the world of human relationships and trust where it might have been protected and hid it in a lawless place where anything could happen to it.

The resolution of the play works on every level at once. Phaedria and Lyconides are united, which is the standard resolution of Roman New Comedy. The gold is returned and given as a dowry, which fulfills the intention the Lar Familiaris announced in the very first lines of the play. And Euclio is freed, not just from the gold but from the fear the gold represented. The ending is comic and tidy in the way Roman comedy always is, but it earns its tidiness. Everything that happens in the resolution was set in motion by the prologue, every thread is gathered and resolved, and the miser who spent the entire play running away from human connection is finally, at the very end, allowed back into it. Plautus leaves us with the sense that the real treasure was never in the pot at all but in the daughter Euclio barely noticed, the young man willing to do the right thing, and the social world of trust and generosity that Euclio had been refusing to participate in from the very beginning.