Laudator Temporis Acti

Amy Richlin, Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 40-41 (footnote omitted):

How could a troupe of low-class actors voice a critique of the state? Or of the treatment of slaves by owners? Many have felt such a critique to be out of the question, and certainly not what was going on in the palliata. The state paid for the performances at the ludi, it is argued, and so the content of the palliata must be pro-state; the ludi served the purposes of the "elite"; the audience was restricted to slave-owning Roman citizens (an instance of dogmatic drag). A short answer is provided by an important fragment of the comedy Faeneratrix, attributed to Plautus by the first-century-BCE scholar Sinnius Capito (Festus 512L = Plautus fr. 71–3):

"Vapula Papiria" in proverbio fuit antiquis, de quo Sinnius Capito sic refert: tum dici solitum est, cum vellent minantibus significare se eos negligere et non curare, fretos iure libertatis. Plautus in Feneratrice: "Heus tu! in barbaria quod fecisse dicitur libertus suae patronae, ideo dico <tibi>: 'Libertas salve, vapula Papiria.'" in barbaria est in Italia.

"Get beat up, Papiria" was a saying they had in the old days, on which Sinnius Capito reports as follows: "They used to say this, when they wanted to convey to people threatening them that they held them of no account and did not care, relying on the rights of liberty. So Plautus in She Charged Interest: 'Hey you! Like they say the freedman in barbarian-land did to the lady who used to own him, so I say to you: "Hello liberty; get beat up, Papiria."' 'In barbarian-land' is in Italy."

Apart from what Sinnius Capito thought this meant: Plautus here expresses the idea of snapping your fingers in the face of power, but at a triple remove. A masked character says the line; he compares himself (or herself) to a freedman speaking to his patrona; the freedman is in barbaria. The character speaks the freedman's line to "you": first "Hello, liberty," then the enigmatic vapula Papiria. Whoever or whatever Papiria was, she/it is vehemently disrespected in this catchphrase. The expression libertas salve is a meta-expression of the greeting to the newly freed slave (chapter 8); vapula Papiria, satisfyingly onomatopoeic, adapts a verb that, in the first person, means "I get beat up" (so Sosia in Amphitruo), but which, as an imperative, means something like "Fuck you!" For a freedman to say it to a patrona is a marked reversal of roles; we do not know what character was addressed as "you," but it seems safe to assume the speaker is expressing defiance. The shift in person is a protective device, just like the shift in place that turns Italy into barbaria: here, but not here.

Erasmus, Adages IV iii 1 to V ii 51. Translated and Annotated by John N. Grant and Betty I. Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 111-112 (IV iv 75):

75 Vapula Papiria
You be hanged, Papiria

'You be flogged, Papiria.' Sisinius Capito writes that this was a proverb frequently used whenever persons wanted to show that they did not pay any attention to someone else's threats. We find this only in the fragments of Festus Pompeius.¹ I suspect that it originated with Papirius Praetextatus, whose mother tried to extract from him what had happened in the senate, in vain, even though she threatened a flogging.² Therefore one should read Papiri,³ not Papiria, unless one prefers to understand lege 'law,' so that the words are a threat to inflict the punishment of the lex Papiria.⁴ Unless you prefer to understand it as referring to Papiria, the wife of Paulus Aemilius, who was divorced by her husband although no one could find the reason for it.⁵ What can one do? We must engage in conjecture when no sources can help us.

75 Pompeius Festus (see n1). Otto 1846. Added in 1515

1 Pompeius Festus 512.15-19 Lindsay. On the fragments of Festus see Adagia iv iv 52 n3 (96 above). The proverb was not preserved in Paul the Deacon's excerpts of Festus. 'Sisinius' (for 'Sinnius') is the reading in Erasmus' immediate source, the 1513 Aldine edition. Sinnius Capito was a grammarian of the late 1st century BC; see Funaioli 457-66.

2 The story is told in Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 1.23. While still a boy (and thus wearing the toga praetexta) the young Papirius was taken to the senate by his father. Because he refused to divulge to his mother what he had heard, he was honoured by being given the nickname 'Praetextatus.' Gellius does not say anything of the mother threatening to flog her son; it is an embellishment of Erasmus.

3 The vocative of Papirius. The proverb would then reflect what the mother allegedly said to her son.

4 The translation would be 'be flogged under the lex Papiria.' The lex Papiria, introduced by Caius Papirius Carbo in 131 or 130 BC, extended the use of the secret ballot to legislative assemblies. See T.R.S. Broughton The Magistrates of the Roman Republic (New York 1951-2) 1.502.

5 See Plutarch Aemilius 5.1-3.

See also Marcus Deufert, Textgeschichte und Rezeption der plautinischen Komödien im Altertum (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 109-110.