«md» · 61 · 2008 Rolando Ferri Politeness in Latin Comedy. Some Preliminary Thoughts* W hile some polite modiiers, such as quaeso, rogo, sodes, sis, obsecro, have received a great amount of attention, a wider study of linguistic politeness in Latin is absent.  In this article I shall attempt to point to some of the problems attending a com- prehensive study of politeness strategies and polite phrases in Latin. Concentrating mainly on Latin comedy, I shall attempt to identify a number of possible ‘variants’ adopted by speakers in a limited number of interaction types, under the inluence of dif- ferent contextual, pragmatic and sociolinguistical factors. The set of examples examined in this article will be limited to the situ- ation type ‘calling for attention-initiating a conversation-moving on to a diferent subject’. Other interactional types which I intend to focus on in a following paper are ‘contradicting without giving ofence’, ‘asking for a favour (loan of money)’, ‘suggesting to go somewhere-asking permission to go’. The framework in which I analyze the conversational and inter- actional material in Plautus and Terence is roughly that elaborated by the so-called Brown-Levinson ‘politeness in the light of face- threat theory’. The study of linguistic politeness received great im- petus from the publication of the Cambridge 1987 monograph by Penelope Brown and Barry Levinson, Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. The Brown-Levinson theory is deined as the study of the linguistic strategies by the means of which a speaker ‘saves face’ or social reputation. Brown and Levinson start from the as- * This article owes much to the ‘politeness’ of E. Dickey and J. N. Adams who read or heard diferent versions, and helped and gave encouragement in various ways. They do not, however, necessarily agree with either my methodology or my conclusions. I have included in this bibliography Dickey’s unpublished paper on « please and related expressions in Classical and Later Latin » (Dickey 2006), which is part of Dickey’s ongo- ing work on politeness in Greek and Latin. I wish to thank also my co-editors, M. J. Seo and K. Volk, as well as L. Battezzato and F. Lechi, for helpful and stimulating comments on a irst draft.  The most signiicant exceptions are Adams 1984, with several important observa- tions about polite modiiers, Hofmann 1985, Risselada 1993, Nuñez 1995, Müller 1997, De Melo 2007, Ferri 2008. Other relevant titles, mostly dealing with the Greek evidence on politeness, polite manners, and urbanitas generally, are listed in the inal bibliography.