In 'Ars Cladis': Violence and Elite Speech in Plautus, Mahalia Way, Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Classics, examines what she calls the “politics and poetics of physical mutilation.” Looking particularly at the comedies of Plautus, she argues that because the Romans assumed a fundamental equivalence between noble social status and physical integrity, marring the body was a method of testing, inscribing and advertising another identity, and by contrast, one’s own; hence, physical mutilation became a type of political language, a dialect of the elite, with a semiotics and grammar all its own.