The chapter uses the dialogues of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence) to examine the correlation between the characters’ perception of im/politeness and the practice of interrupting. By adopting the methods of Conversation Analysis, the study sets out criteria to distinguish interruptions from other non-hostile or non-salient types of interventions in a dramatic text without explicit stage directions. According to the main argument, proper interruptions – just like impolite behaviour – are constructed interactionally and their identification depends on how the affected party reacts to someone invading their speaking turn. The analysis of face work in various types of turn-taking incidents, either collaborative or disruptive and antagonistic, helps to justify why given talk is not handled as an interruption. After comparing some qualitative and quantitative data, the chapter shows that there are many examples of face-threatening and hostile interventions in the comedy corpus that cannot be analysed as interruptions but rather should be associated with the type of interaction (e.g. conflictual talk) or the speaker’s dominant position within.

The chapter endeavours to extend the search for politeness rituals in non-literary sources where some dialogue interaction is represented. Significant dialogic interaction is preserved in Roman juridical texts, a source hitherto neglected in studies of ancient politeness. Transcripts of political meetings, of magistrates’ and emperors’ hearings and, above all, of court sessions have been preserved both in papyrus documents and in medieval manuscripts; they enable scholars to widen their knowledge of the forms of linguistic interaction in court debate beyond the little that is known anecdotically about Roman advocacy, and also to observe the evolution of politeness formulae across time.