Silenzio tragico e echi funerari nel prologo del Pluto

In the opening scene of Aristophanes’ Plutus the god of wealth appears on the stage blind and wearing ragged clothing, an allusion to the tragic heroes. In the first half of my paper, I propose to assess also his silence during the first 57 verses as an allusion to the silence kept by tragic heroes and parodied in Aristophanes’ Vespae and Ranae. In the second part of this paper, I evaluate Plutus’ silence as a mournful and ‘statuesque’ one : by focusing on the verses where Plutus finally breaks his silence, I hint allusions to funerary epigrams, and I compare the dialogue between Plutus, Chremylus and Charion with some Aristophanes’ scenes that involve speaking statues. Hence I would suggest keeping the text transmitted by the manuscripts at v. 17, where we read ἀποκρινομένωι (or ἀποκρινομένου)…οὐδὲ γρῦ, in order to refer the verb to Plutus, instead of adopting Bentley’s generally accepted emendation ἀποκρνόμενος, related to Chremylus.