Varro's Bimarcus and Encounters with the Self in Plautus's Epidicus and Amphitruo

The current scholarly communis opinio holds that the referent of the title of Varro’s Bimarcus and the Menippean satire’s two speakers are not (as previously believed) two different men named Marcus but rather two sides of the Varro-ego himself, arguing in an internal dialogue.1 Joel Relihan sees the split-author dialogue of Persius poem 1 as a reiteration of Bimarcus, and Kirk Freudenburg argues that Bimarcus is the inspiration both for the split persona of the satirist in Persius poem 3 and for the bewildering nested quotations of Damasippus in Horace’s Sermones 2.3, while Mikhail Bakhtin presents Bimarcus as the foundation for the enduring western literary trope of the author split in two.2 I argue, in turn, that