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

and the Greek play was produced shortly
after 314 B.C. Others[14] assume that the scene of the play would not
be Aetolia unless Aetolia had become an important state, and that the
war was therefore one of the third century B.C.
[Footnote 1: See especially Hueffner, _De Plauti Comoediarum
Exemplis Atticis, Göttingen, 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 Plautus’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

Langen’s long list of the playwright’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 “stage business†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 “stage
business†are not as obvious, where an actor’s high seriousness
might elicit catcalls, and burlesque certainly would elicit chuckles,
Plautus wished his players to