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"The Chrysis is above all a literary exercise, the learned pastime of a humanist. . . ."1
"In the comedy . . . [Aeneas] seems to relive a moment of relaxation and of escape from political and religious disputes. . . ."2
"The Chrysis is . . . the last of [Aeneas's] . . . morally unscrupulous works. . . ."3
"The spirit of the comedy was thoroughly libertine."4
So reads the scholarship on the Chrysis, the one-act Latin comedy penned by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1405-1464). The text was the product of Aeneas's early years of service at the imperial court and, more specifically, of his brief sojourn in Nuremberg in the late summer of 1444. Emperor Frederick III had convened a diet there to help resolve the schism between Pope Eugenius IV and the antipope Felix V-the "religious disputes" that are mentioned above. Aeneas's play, which has survived in a single manuscript and exists now in several modern editions, is one of the few examples of humanist comedy and, within this genre, the earliest with such a heavy classical imprint.5 Many in his cast of characters, including the prostitute who gives the play its title, are named after figures in the comedies of Plautus and Terence; and into its 812 lines, he packs more than sixty allusions to these works.6 If readers are surprised at how many classical references they find in Aeneas's play, they may be still more surprised at how much it makes them blush: without question, the Chrysis is one of the lewdest comedies of its age.
Aeneas's play centers on a day in the life of two prostitutes, Chrysis and Cassina, and the two pairs of lovers who seek their services. One pair consists of two clergymen, Theobolus and Dyophanes, who have paid the women to join them at the public baths and later for a night at the whorehouse. The other pair, two middle-aged men, Sedulius and Charinus, who have a longstanding relationship with these women, seek to take them away from their new lovers long enough to satisfy their own desires. When the play opens, the two clerics are on their way from the baths to the brothel, while Chrysis and Cassina, taking a different route, have stopped...