Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi | Page 2

one of the third century B.C.
[Footnote 1: See especially Hueffner, _De Plauti Comoediarum Exemplis Atticis, G??ttingen, 1894; Legrand, Daos_, Paris, 1910, English translation by James Loeb under title The New Greek Comedy, William Heinemann, 1916; Leo, Plautinische Forschungen, Berlin, 1912.]
[Footnote 2: Amph. 203 seq.]
[Footnote 3: Produced later than the Epidicus. Cf. Bacch. 214.]
[Footnote 4: Amphitruo, Thebes, Captivi, Aetolia, Cistellaria, Sicyon, Curculio, Epidaurus (the Caria first referred to in v. 67 was a Greek town, not the state in Asia Minor), Menaechmi, Epidamnus.]
[Footnote 5: Asin. Prol. 10-11.]
[Footnote 6: Asin. 713.]
[Footnote 7: Asin. 334.]
[Footnote 8: Asin. 499.]
[Footnote 9: Aulul. 299, 301.]
[Footnote 10: Aulul. 504.]
[Footnote 11: Ritschl, Parerga, pp. 405 seq. Cf. Menander, Fragments, 125, 126.]
[Footnote 12: Bacch. 912.]
[Footnote 13: Hueffner, op. cit. pp. 41-42.]
[Footnote 14: Cf. Legrand, op. cit. p. 18.]

INTRODUCTION
Little is known of the life of Titus Maccius Plautus. He was born about 255 B.C. at Sarsina, in Umbria; it is said that he went to Rome at an early age, worked at a theatre, saved some money, lost it in a mercantile venture, returned to Rome penniless, got employment in a mill and wrote, during his leisure hours, three plays. These three plays were followed by many more than the twenty extant, most of them written, it would seem, in the latter half of his life, and all of them adapted from the comedies of various Greek dramatists, chiefly of the New Comedy.[15] Adaptations rather than translations they certainly were. Apart from the many allusions in his comedies to customs and conditions distinctly Roman, there is evidence enough in Plautusa�?s language and style that he was not a close translator. Modern translators who have struggled vainly to reproduce faithfully in their own tongues, even in prose, the countless puns and quips, the incessant alliteration and assonance in the Latin lines, would be the last to admit that Plautus, writing so much, writing in verse, and writing with such careless, jovial, exuberant ease, was nothing but a translator in the narrow sense of the term.
Very few of his extant comedies can be dated, so far as the year of their production in Rome is concerned, with any great degree of certainty. The Miles Gloriosus appeared about 206, the Cistellaria about 202, Stichus in 200, Pseudolus in 191 B.C.; the Truculentus, like Pseudolus, was composed when Plautus was an old man, not many years before his death in 184 B.C.
Welcome as a full autobiography of Plautus would be, in place of such scant and tasteless biographical morsels as we do have, only less welcome, perhaps, would be his own stage directions for his plays, supposing him to have written stage directions and to have written them with something more than even modern fullness. We should learn how he met the stage conventions and limitations of his day; how successfully he could, by make-up and mannerism, bring on the boards palpably different persons in the Scapins and Bobadils and Doll Tear-sheets that on the printed page often seem so confusingly similar, and most important, we should learn precisely what sort of dramatist he was and wished to be.
If Plautus himself greatly cared or expected his restless, uncultivated, fun-seeking audience to care, about the construction of his plays, one must criticize him and rank him on a very different basis than if his main, and often his sole, object was to amuse the groundlings. If he often took himself and his art with hardly more seriousness than does the writer of the vaudeville skit or musical comedy of to-day, if he often wished primarily to gain the immediate laugh, then much of Langena�?s long list of the playwrighta�?s dramatic delinquencies is somewhat beside its intended point.
And in large measure this--to hold his audience by any means--does seem to have been his ambition: if the joke mars the part, down with the part; if the ludicrous scene interrupts the development of the plot, down with the plot. We have plenty of verbal evidence that the dramatist frequently chose to let his characters become caricatures; we have some verbal evidence that their a�?stage businessa� was sometimes made laughably extravagant; in many cases it is sufficiently obvious that he expected his actors to indulge in grotesqueries, well or ill timed, no matter, provided they brought guffaws. It is probable, therefore, that in many other cases, where the tone and a�?stage businessa� are not as obvious, where an actora�?s high seriousness might elicit catcalls, and burlesque certainly would elicit chuckles, Plautus wished his players to avoid the catcalls.
This is by no means the universal rule. In the writer of the Captivi, for instance, we are dealing with a dramatist whose aims are different and higher. Though Lessinga�?s encomium of the play is one to which not all of us can assent, and though even the Captivi shows some