Leonida and Libanus, the double serui callidi of Plautus’ Asinaria, have obtained the twenty minae that Argyrippus, the young man they are enslaved to, needs in order to purchase a yearlong contract with the sex-labourer he is obsessed with, Philaenium.Footnote ¹ Before they hand the cash over to Argyrippus, though, they decide to use it as leverage over him. First, they coerce Philaenium into some sexual favours for each of them, a sexual violation foreshadowing the other sexual violation she will endure later in the play (828–49/50) at the hands of Argyrippus’ father Demaenetus. Then, Leonida and Libanus make Argyrippus carry Libanus around on his back, with plenty of homoerotic jokes and innuendo, a sexual humiliation foreshadowing the other sexual humiliation he will endure later in the play at the hands of his father Demaenetus (828–49/50).

This scene (591–745) is the play's longest, its climax, and near to the play's structural centre. Naturally, given the title of the play, it becomes a site for much ass-related funny business. In this note, I draw attention to previously unnoticed ass puns that further enrich the play's titularity and play up the scene's sexual suggestiveness.

Several elements contribute to the assiness of this scene. In the lead-in to the scene, Leonida refers to the twenty minae as asses (asini, 588–90).Footnote ² He refers metonymically to the source of the minae, Demaenetus’ sale of Arcadian asini to a certain merchant Pelleus (333–7), who himself, as an assmonger (businassman?), is candidate for the play's title non-character.Footnote ³ During the scene in question, Argyrippus is ridden like an ass (705–10).

Readers picking up on a homoerotic subtext to the riding—that it is not just assplay but arseplay Argyrippus will have to endure—have their suspicions confirmed repeatedly. Most prominent is Libanus’ snipe when he's mounting Argyrippus: sic isti solent superbi subdomari. | asta igitur, ut consuetus es puer olim. scin ut dicam? | em sic (‘this is how uppity ones are brought to heel. Bend over now, just like you used to as a kid, know what I mean? Yeah, that's it’, 702–4). Libanus plays on the dual association of puer (‘boy’ and ‘enslaved man’) with someone who takes the receptive role in homoerotic anal intercourse.Footnote ⁴ The direct homoerotic joke here casts sexual light on the meaning of Argyrippus’ inscende (‘mount me’, 702, 705).Footnote ⁵ Viewers are primed for anal innuendo by Leonida's insult against Libanus early in the scene (cinaede calamistrate ‘you pervert with a perm!’, 627),Footnote ⁶ and for homoerotic humour by a subsequent exchange in which Argyrippus tells Leonida and Libanus to get in a clinch as long as they are whispering together (suauius complexos fabulari, 640), but Libanus responds that neither of them finds the other attractive (641–4). Given this context, it is possible also that Argyrippus’ repeated references to Argyrippus’ being ‘played’ (forms of deludere: 646, 677, 679, 711, 731) draw on a connotation of the verb ludo as being sexually deceived.Footnote ⁷

Lurking behind the jocularity of this scene is the very real peril that enslaved persons such as Leonida and Libanus could face: physical and sexual abuse by enslavers such as Argyrippus, for whom both of the enslaved men were (regardless of their actual age) pueri and thus potential sexual objects, with no more rights or security than his father's Arcadian asses. Indeed, while riding Argyrippus, Libanus threatens: ‘I'll give you to the mill-workers, so you can be tortured to death there by running’ (ad pistores dabo, ut ibi cruciere currens, 708–9). Such could be the ultimate doom for an ass—but, at the same time, the mill and its horrible working conditions were the severest punishment for a person enslaved to an elite Roman landholder, a fate to which Libanus euphemistically alludes earlier in the play (30–40).Footnote ⁸

Plautus’ most pun-focussed pundits have, to date, found plenty of puns involving the play's title and topic, as well as doubles entendres about man-on-man buttsex. Traina finds the latter right at the beginning of the play, in the Prologus’ reside (5), which he argues is a homoerotic jab at the praeco of line 4.Footnote ⁹ Henderson, meanwhile, notices an assy reference in the very same line's auritus, in context meaning ‘attentive’ but implying ‘long-eared’.Footnote ¹⁰ Henderson builds out from that reference to asses as proverbially burden-bearing (onus is collocated with a certain Vinnius Asina in Hor. Epist. 1.13) and braying (citing ὀγκήσαιτο at Callim. Aet. fr. 1.31 and ὀγκωδέστατoς said of Horace by Augustus in Suet. Vita Hor.). He also sees Asinaria wordplay latent in Plautus’ deployment of the term argentarius at lines 116 and 126Footnote ¹¹ and uel patinarium uel assum at line 180;Footnote ¹² and he notes that, in this play, the verb fero almost always denotes bearing the burden of cash.Footnote ¹³ Henderson and Fontaine both handle the homoerotic sex jokes in our scene, including Libanus’ ‘mounting’ of Argyrippus.Footnote ¹⁴

What has not yet been identified in the scholarly record on Asinaria is a brace of ass-related puns, one bilingual and one anal. First off, Argyrippus must twice beg the serui to hand over the cash, first Leonida and then Libanus. And he twice describes the cash as a burden, an onus:

I argue that onus in these lines puns on Greek ὄνος ‘ass’. The two words are not etymologically related, but their pronunciation would be, to a Roman ear, functionally identical.Footnote ¹⁵ Spectators might have the Greek word in the back of their minds thanks to the play's prologue, which states that ‘the name of this play in Greek is “Ass-Driver”’ (huic nomen graece Onagost fabulae, 10).Footnote ¹⁶ Both onus and ὄνος are metonyms for the money, the latter additionally being the mechanism by which the money has been obtained, the former additionally being a standard task for which you would own the latter. In effect, the repeated bilingual pun calls back to the scene's setup, when Leonida tells us that the moneybag contains some fine pieces of ass (588–90). The scene as<s> a {w}hole, particularly the ass-riding sequence, is freighted with weighty words—sustinere (658), labor (659), imponere (659), baiulare (660),Footnote ¹⁷ inanis (660), pressatum umerum (661), af/ferre (672, 699, 700, 732, 733), uehere (699, 700, 701), patior (739)—so the audience would be able to take a load on their mind when thinking about the onus of the cash and Argyrippus as ass. Perhaps onus at lines 658 and 690 would best be translated ‘assload’.Footnote ¹⁸

Second, I argue that onus and patronus at lines 652 and 658 (plus patronus earlier in the scene, at line 621), and especially at lines 689–90, work together to activate a nexus of status- and sex-related wordplay.Footnote ¹⁹ The onus, the cash, will buy Argyrippus a year's access to Philaenium, and so its delivery by Leonida and Libanus may make Argyrippus inclined to free them, and thus become their patronus rather than their dominus.Footnote ²⁰ At the same time, their possession of the cash and his need for it puts him in the position of cliens to their patroni. The scene displays, as Konstan notes, Saturnalian inversion to an extreme.Footnote ²¹ onus jingles on honos, as well, given the questions of status hovering over the exchange.Footnote ²²

And when punning on onus and patronus in a scene rife with anal innuendo, there is another sexual jeu de mots in play: patro ‘to orgasm’. A sexual usage of the verb (‘reach a sexual climax’, per OLD ² s.v. patrō b) in Asinaria would have Plautus anticipating the much later satirist Persius, who offers the only other extant such usage (patranti … ocello, 1.18).Footnote ²³ Here in Asinaria, the equation of patro + onus = patronus is a rich one. Argyrippus must bear the onus of Libanus in order to get the onus of the cash; Argyrippus beseeches Leonida and Libanus as onus-bearing patroni; Libanus’ Argyrippus-ride hints at sex in which Libanus the patronus will get to do the verb patro; the ultimate aim of the onus of the cash is for Argyrippus to get his rocks off—that is, patro—with Philaenium; and by helping Argyrippus get the onus he needs to access the girl with whom he wants to patro, Leonida and Libanus put themselves in a position where they might be freed to call him patronus. When the two Ls have finished tormenting Argyrippus, and Leonida tells him ‘you've got what you want’ (impetrasti, 721), there, too, lies the possibility of orgasmic innuendo.Footnote ²⁴

From there, the potential homoerotic puns multiply. onus could rhymingly invoke anus.Footnote ²⁵ Leonida's insistence that Argyrippus ‘rub his knees’ (genua confricantur, 670; also 671, 678), literally in supplication, foreshadows Argyrippus’ stint on his knees with Libanus astride him, mounted for some assplay. When the onus is the burden, the bearing can be expressed by patior, which can have a sexual sense; at line 739, Argyrippus shows (with patior) he will endure anything to get Philaenium, even (in that line) giving the ius primae noctis to his lecherous father, or (in the scene now coming to a close) letting a man enslaved to him mount him.Footnote ²⁶ While we are talking asses, burdens and assholes, we cannot overlook the Aristoph-anal routine on πιέζομαι.Footnote ²⁷ And Philaenium's plea to Leonida, ‘don't unyoke us lovers’ (ne nos deiunge amantis, 665),Footnote ²⁸ both draws on ass-related terminology and could connote sexual intercourse (as it does at, for example, Curc. 50).

Coming back to the core wordplay on onus and ὄνος—a punderous juncture—asses and onus are collocated also with metaphorical force elsewhere in Plautus. In Aulularia, we have another use of onus with financial connotations, as miserly Euclio frets that marrying his daughter to wealthy Megadorus will have inequitable outcomes: in mentem uenit | te bouem esse et me esse asellum; ubi tecum coniunctus siem, | ubi onus nequeam ferre pariter, iaceam ego asinus in luto (‘it comes to mind that you're an ox and I'm a li'l ass; when I'm yoked to you, when I can't bear my share of the burden, I'll end up an ass in the mud’, 229–30). In Amphitruo, it is again about physical violation, when Mercury says that Sosia is bringing with him a mule (iumentum, 327, 328) that ‘must be burdened with fists’, that is, beaten up (onerandus est pugnis, 328); Sosia responds that he is so tired from his travels (329–30) that he cannot bear such a burden (ne ire posse cum onere existimes, 330).Footnote ²⁹

The Plautine association of asinus with onus weighs heavily on the subsequent tradition, with joint appearances of the words in both Horace and Cicero.Footnote ³⁰ And the bilingual pun—which could be excellent fodder for a folk etymology of the Latin word (for example onus, quod ὄνος fert, akin to the Varronian classic lucus a non lucendo)—is simple and straightforward enough that it does not require high-level Greek expertise to appreciate, but rather could land for a broad band of the diverse Plautine audience.Footnote ³¹