195 BCE · Titus Maccius Plautus
Pot of Gold
A miser guards his gold while everyone else hunts for it.
Titus Maccius Plautus
Pot of Gold
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Chapters
Chapters · Pot of Gold
Chapter by chapter — short notes, no fluff.
Part 01
Act 1 - The Discovery
The play opens with the Prologue spoken by the Lar Familiaris, the household god, who addresses the audience directly and explains everything they need to know before the action begins. He tells us that Euclio's grandfather found a pot of gold and hid it in the hearth of the house, too miserly to spend it or tell anyone about it. His son was exactly the same. Now Euclio has inherited the house and the Lar has revealed the secret of the gold to him as a reward for the piety of Euclio's daughter Phaedria, who tends the household shrine with genuine devotion. The Lar's hope is that the gold will be used as a dowry so Phaedria can be properly married. This prologue is crucial because it establishes dramatic irony from the very first moment. The audience knows everything. Euclio knows only that he has gold and is terrified of losing it. Euclio appears almost immediately in a state of high anxiety. He chases his old slave woman Staphyla out of the house, convinced that if anyone stays inside they will find the gold. He checks the hiding place obsessively, going back into the house again and again, unable to trust that it is safe even for a moment. Staphyla watches him and mutters to herself that something is clearly wrong with her master, that he has been behaving strangely ever since he found whatever it is he found. She is also quietly dreading the future because she knows that Phaedria is pregnant and that the secret cannot be kept much longer. The act establishes the two central anxieties that will drive the entire play forward: Euclio's terror about the gold and Staphyla's dread about Phaedria's condition.
Part 02
Act 2 - The Proposal
Megadorus, the wealthy old neighbor, enters and has a conversation with his sister Eunomia, who is urging him to get married. Megadorus is not opposed to the idea but he has strong opinions about what kind of woman he wants. He does not want a rich wife with a large dowry because wealthy wives, in his view, bring arrogance and demands and expensive habits into a household. He would rather marry a poor but decent girl. His sister suggests Phaedria, Euclio's daughter. Megadorus agrees and goes to speak to Euclio directly. This scene is both comic and thematically important. Megadorus's long speech about the problems of wealthy wives is one of the play's most famous passages, a piece of social satire about Roman marriage conventions that the audience would have found immediately recognisable. Megadorus approaches Euclio and asks for Phaedria's hand. Euclio's reaction is entirely characteristic. Instead of being pleased or grateful he is immediately suspicious. Why would a rich man want to marry his poor daughter unless he knows about the gold? He interrogates Megadorus obliquely, trying to work out the motive behind the proposal without revealing that there is anything to have a motive about. Megadorus is baffled by Euclio's suspicion and repeats his genuinely simple reason: he wants a modest wife without expensive tastes. Euclio eventually agrees, still suspicious, still convinced there is something going on that he cannot see. The act ends with the marriage agreed and Euclio no more comfortable than he was at the beginning.
Part 03
Act 3 - The Cooks
Megadorus has hired cooks and provisions for the wedding feast and sends them to Euclio's house to prepare. The arrival of strangers in his house sends Euclio into complete panic. He follows the cooks from room to room, convinced they are thieves using the feast as cover to search for the gold. The cooks find him insufferable and say so, loudly, among themselves. They are trying to do their work and their employer's future father in law keeps appearing at their elbows, checking under pots, peering into corners, demanding to know what they are doing and why. The scene is pure physical comedy, the kind of fast moving slapstick that Plautus excels at, and it would have been enormously funny to a Roman audience watching it performed on stage. Unable to bear the presence of strangers in the house any longer Euclio decides to move the gold to a safer location. He takes the pot out of the house and carries it to a grove sacred to the god Silvanus outside the city, where he buries it. He believes he has not been seen. He has been seen. Strobilus, the clever slave of the young man Lyconides, has been watching Euclio and follows him to the grove. He watches exactly where Euclio buries the pot. He waits until Euclio leaves and then digs it up and takes it. The act ends with Strobilus in possession of the gold and Euclio walking back toward the grove, not yet knowing that everything he has been terrified of losing is already gone.
Part 04
Act 4 - The Loss
Euclio returns to the grove to check on the gold and finds it missing. What follows is one of the most celebrated comic speeches in all of Roman literature. Euclio is completely undone. He runs onto the stage in a state of total collapse, addressing the audience directly, begging them to help him find the thief, telling them he is ruined, destroyed, that his life is over. He asks everyone and no one where the thief is. He cannot think straight. He does not know where he is going or where he has come from. The speech tumbles over itself in rapid disconnected questions and exclamations that capture perfectly the state of a man whose entire sense of self has been organised around one thing and who has just lost it. What makes the speech work as more than just comedy is the genuine desperation underneath it. Euclio is ridiculous but he is also in real pain. He has never trusted anyone, never spent the gold, never used it for anything, and yet its loss destroys him completely. This is the play's sharpest moment of psychological observation. The gold was never really about wealth. It was about security, about having something that was entirely his in a world where he trusted nothing and no one. Without it he is not just poor again. He is lost. The act ends with Euclio in pieces, the gold gone, and the resolution still out of reach.
Part 05
Act 5 - The Resolution
Lyconides comes to Euclio to confess that he has seduced Phaedria and made her pregnant, and that he wants to marry her and do right by her. This is the right thing to do and Lyconides knows it, but the timing could not be worse. Euclio, still beside himself about the gold, hears the word confession and immediately assumes Lyconides is confessing to stealing it. What follows is a brilliant scene of cross purposes, both men believing they are talking about the same thing while actually talking about completely different things. Euclio responds to every statement Lyconides makes about Phaedria as though it is a statement about the gold. Lyconides is baffled by responses that make no sense to him. The misunderstanding builds until it finally collapses and both men realise they have been having two entirely separate conversations at the same time. Once the confusion is resolved Lyconides learns from his slave Strobilus that the gold has been stolen and that Strobilus is the one who took it. He forces Strobilus to return it and gives it back to Euclio. Here the surviving text becomes fragmentary. Based on later summaries and the fragments that remain, the ending shows Euclio agreeing to give the gold as a dowry for Phaedria, Phaedria and Lyconides marrying, and Euclio himself finding some measure of peace now that the burden of the gold is off him. The resolution is tidy in the way Roman comic resolutions always are: the young lovers united, the social order restored, and even the miser granted a kind of liberation. The gold that caused nothing but misery as a hoarded secret finally does what the Lar Familiaris intended for it at the very beginning of the play.