Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus was one of the two most famous comic playwrights of ancient Rome, alongside Terence. He wrote in Latin during the Old Latin period, when the Roman republic was expanding fast, and his comedies are the oldest Latin literary works to survive complete. That is why he matters: his plays show what popular Roman comedy looked like before the classical literary tradition took shape.

Little is known about his life, and most of it is uncertain. He was probably born around 254 BC in Sarsina, in the region of Umbria. His name has been much debated. "Maccius" may come from Maccus, a clownish stock character of the Atellan farce, and "Plautus" sounds more like a nickname than a family name. Ancient writers explained it in several ways, linking it to flat feet or to the drooping ears of hounds, or suggesting it was an Umbrian form of Plotus. Tradition holds that in his youth he worked in the theatre, perhaps as an actor or stagehand, and later tried his luck in the shipping trade. That venture supposedly failed and left him penniless. He is said to have worked at a mill, although some scholars think the ancient phrase about pushing the millstone meant extreme poverty rather than literal labour.

His career as a playwright was built on Greek models. Plautus drew mainly on the New Comedy of Menander, though he also borrowed from other Greek authors. He did not simply translate them. He adapted the plots for Roman audiences and added songs, dances and a colloquial style full of wordplay, alliteration and invented words. He often merged two plots into one, a practice the Romans called contaminatio, which made the action more tangled. To keep the audience from losing track, he sometimes included a prologue that explained the story. His characters are easily recognised types: the miserly old man, the boastful soldier, the clever slave, the parasite, the courtesan. In Aulularia and Miles gloriosus he portrays these types with real psychological sharpness, anticipating the later comedy of character.

Varro reduced the roughly 130 plays once attributed to him to twenty-one that were considered authentic. Several of these survive complete, while others, such as Vidularia, are badly damaged. His reputation was lasting. His name became a byword for theatrical success, and ancient writers said that if the Muses spoke Latin, they would speak it in his style. In the Middle Ages the nun Hrotsvitha drew on his work, and in the Renaissance his comedies were models for humanist playwrights. Shakespeare based The Comedy of Errors on the story of the Menaechmi, and Molière took the core of his plot for The Miser from Aulularia. His influence runs right into modern European theatre.