Reti di 'amicitia' nel 'Trinummus'. Paradossi delle relazioni e paradossi comici.

The paper focusses on the central topic of friendship in the ‘Trinummus’ and observes the emerging paradoxes in the text’s staging of relationships between individuals. As it is well known, a specific aspect of this comedy is the representation of ‘amicitia’ as an interactive system involving both affective bounds and social hierarchies, kinship and economic exchanges. The analysis of some passages of the text highlights how the characters may become ‘enmeshed’, i.e. clumsily trapped in the ambiguities and contradictions of these complex relational networks. This analysis allows to investigate, on an anthropological level, the reasons for the unease of the individuals who struggle amid the paradoxes of amicitia, but also to explore, on a dramaturgical level, the ways in which Plautus plays with this complexity and this unease and presents them as comic devices.