What's in a Name? Through Comic Titles to Caecilius Statius

Abstract This article takes a novel approach to fragmentary Roman comic playwright Caecilius Statius by exploring the titles attested for his comedies. Informed by Genette's theory on the title qua paratext, it argues that titles are distinct artifacts of Caecilius’ dramatic production designed to circulate without the texts they label and, consequently, it treats them as legitimate objects of interpretation in and of themselves. Analysis of ten titles in both Greek and Latin reveals that Caecilius Statius’ titles are polysemous, bilingual and profoundly meaningful in their engagement with the genre of New Comedy and with translation as a social and cultural phenomenon of middle republican Rome. But given that the titles of Roman comedy are largely uninvestigated by scholarship, this piece begins by arguing for their author -ity, setting forth the evidence for comic titles’ origins, function and transmission. In so doing, it demonstrates the palliata 's textuality and challenges the communis opinio regarding comic scripts’ passage from stage to page. A Supplementary Appendix available online ( 10.1017/S0075435824000285 ) presents the evidence for the titles of Caecilius’ plays.