Pot of Gold

Themes · Pot of Gold

The ideas it keeps circling back to.

1. 01

   The Burden of Possession

   The central argument of the play is that possessing something you cannot use, share, or enjoy is not wealth but imprisonment. Euclio before the gold was poor but at least functional. After the gold he is paralysed. He cannot sleep, cannot trust anyone, cannot think about anything else. The gold gives him nothing except fear. Plautus is making a point that goes deeper than simple moralising about greed. He is observing that wealth without the psychological capacity to use it generously is meaningless, and that the anxiety of keeping something can be more destructive than the poverty of having nothing. Euclio's liberation at the end, when he gives the gold away as a dowry, is a liberation from himself as much as from the gold.

2. 02

   Appearance and Reality

   Euclio spends the entire play suspecting the wrong people. He suspects the cooks, Megadorus, his slave woman, his neighbors, practically everyone he encounters. He is wrong about all of them. The one person he does not suspect, Strobilus watching him from behind the trees in the grove, is the actual thief. His anxiety has distorted his perception so completely that he cannot see reality clearly. He sees threat everywhere except where the real threat is. This is a comic inversion of the usual dramatic situation where the clever character sees more than the foolish ones. Euclio's intelligence is entirely consumed by his fear and so it is useless to him.

3. 03

   Wealth and Marriage

   The play engages seriously, underneath its comedy, with the Roman institution of the dowry and what it meant for marriage and family life. Megadorus's speech about preferring a poor wife is a genuine piece of social criticism. Large dowries, he argues, give wives power over their husbands and create resentment and imbalance in the household. A poor girl with no dowry comes into a marriage without leverage and therefore with genuine humility. The resolution of the play, in which the gold becomes Phaedria's dowry, navigates this neatly: the dowry exists but it comes from Euclio himself rather than from inherited family wealth, which makes it a gift and an act of love rather than a transaction.

4. 04

   Trust and Human Connection

   Euclio's fundamental problem is that he cannot trust anyone. This is presented as comic but it is also a kind of tragedy. He has no friends, no real relationship with his daughter, no warmth with anyone in the play. His miserliness is not just about money. It is a complete withdrawal from human connection. The gold is a symbol of everything he has hoarded and refused to give, including himself. The moment he gives it away, even under pressure, is the moment the play allows him to rejoin the human community around him. Plautus suggests, quietly and without sentimentality, that generosity and trust are not just virtues but necessities, that a life organised entirely around self-protection is not really a life at all.

5. 05

   Social Class and the Comic World

   Roman New Comedy operates in a world of fixed social types, the old miser, the young lover, the clever slave, the wealthy neighbor, and Aulularia uses all of them. But Plautus gives these types enough individual texture that they feel like people rather than cardboard figures. The class dynamics of the play are also worth noting. Euclio is poor and his poverty makes his sudden possession of gold both comic and genuinely destabilising. He does not have the social infrastructure to handle wealth, no network of clients and obligations and social trust that wealth normally comes embedded in for a Roman of higher standing. The gold drops into his life from nowhere and he has no idea what to do with it except hide it, which is the response of a man who has never had anything and cannot imagine that having something could be anything other than a target on his back.