the greatest of the Roman comic dramatists, is almost unknown to us except by his writings. As his personal history was a matter of indifference to his contemporaries, it is not until the writings of a later period that we find even a casual reference to it. Our endeavour to reach the truth is moreover impeded by the many attributes which are generally ascribed to a comic poet, such as humble origin and personal deformity. This may account in some measure for the conflicting statements on almost every point of his life. Until the investigations of Ritschl (De Plauti poeta nominibus) the poet's name was supposed to be Marcus Accius Plautus; but on the discovery of the palimpsest manuscript at Milan, his real name was found to be Titus Maccius Plautus; the one name Maccius having been divided into the two, M. Accius. The word Plautus meant in the Umbrian dialect "flat-footed." Hence perhaps the idea of deformity. In some of the manuscripts the cognomen Asinius is added to his name. Some have supposed that Asinius was the name really given him on account of his having been employed in grinding corn, a work generally performed by asses. Ritschl, however, has proved satisfactorily that Asinius is a corruption of Sarcinias, the ethnic name of the poet. Plautus is generally supposed to have been born at Sarcina, a village in Umbria, on the river Sapis (Sorbo), according to Ritschl (De aetate Plauti), in the year 254 B.C. As to his parentage there are two conjectures; either that he was born of slaves, and, going early to Rome, had an opportunity of associating with learned men, or that he was born of free parents who gave him a good education. For the little we know of his life we are indebted to a passage of Varro, preserved by Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae, iii. 3.) Plautus while yet young went to Rome, where he was employed working for the actors on the stage ("in operis artificum scenicorum," a passage which does not mean, as supposed by Lessing, that he wrote plays). With the money which he gained by this means he made some commercial speculations. These failed, and Plautus was utterly ruined. He returned to Rome, where his difficulties were probably increased by the great scarcity of corn then prevailing. To support himself, he entered the service of a baker, who employed him in grinding corn with a hand-mill. At this time he composed the Satyrus, the Addictus, and another play whose name is unknown. Ritschl supposes this to have been about the year 224 B.C., Plautus being thirty years of age. By these plays, and by his employment, he gained a sufficient sum to enable him to leave his master, and to continue at Rome writing for the stage. Of the rest of his life nothing is known. It is even doubtful whether he ever obtained the Roman franchise. The date of his death is differently stated by St. Jerome and by Cicero. The former (Chronicles of Eusebius) names as the time of his death the 145th Olympiad,—that is, between the years 200 and 196 B.C.; while the latter (Brutus, 15), who is more exact, informs us that he died in the consulship of P. Claudius and L. Porcius, while Cato was censor,—that is, 183 B.C. Thus we find that he flourished during the second Punic war, and was contemporary with Cato.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain how many comedies Plautus actually wrote. Even in the time of Varro, as we see by the chapter in Aulus Gellius already quoted, it was a matter of dispute. Varro, it seems, wrote a book on the subject, entitled Questiones Plautinae. At that time no less than 130 plays claimed Plautus as their author. Of these, Varro chose out 21 as being undoubtedly authentic, which, from this circumstance, were called Varronianae. Among these were the 20 now extant, the Vidularia, which is lost, being the 21st. Varro, however, considered others besides these the work of Plautus; and L. Ellis fixes the number at 25. According to Gellius, several plays, which bore the names of other writers, had internal evidence of their having been written by Plautus (Plautinissimi). Such were the Brodia, the Nercolaria, and the Fretum. The remaining plays attributed to Plautus are accounted for in two ways; either there was another comic poet of the name of Plautius, whose works (Plautiane) were confounded with those of Plautus (Plautinae), from the similarity of the two words; or they were the work of contemporaries, which were retouched (retractate et expolite) by Plautus. Probably both conjectures are true.

It is supposed that the extant comedies were arranged in their present order by Priscian the grammarian, who is also thought to have written the acrostic argument prefixed to each. The comedies follow one another, with one exception, in the alphabetical order:—1. The Amphitryon is the history of the birth of Hercules, in which his father Jupiter appears in a very questionable light. This play, in its ridicule of the gods, approaches the old Greek comedy more nearly than any of the other productions of Plautus. He himself called it a tragic comedy. So popular was it among the Romans that, as Ammianus tells us, it continued to be acted at Rome in the reign of Diocletian. The Amphitryon of Molière, and the Trois Soeurs of Dryden, are both imitations of this play. 2. The Asinaria is a translation of a comedy written, according to Lessing, by Diphilus, a Greek comic poet. It is the story of a father and son in love with the same mistress. It contains much that is amusing, together with a great deal that is obscene. 3. The Aulularia is the story of a miser who discovers in his house a hidden treasure. Unfortunately the end of this play is lost. From the acrostic argument of Priscian, however, Antonius Codrus Urcens, a professor at Bologna, has attempted to supply the deficiency. On it Molière has founded his Avaré; and Shadwell and Fielding their Miser. 4. The Captivi is generally acknowledged to be the masterpiece of Plautus. For it Lessing has an unbounded admiration, and even pronounces it "the best piece which has ever come upon the stage." He tells us that, though he had repeatedly read it, with a view to discovering some fault, far from doing so, on each perusal he had found more reason to admire it. It has an excellent plot, abounds with humour, and, far from having any taint of ribaldry, has a decidedly moral tendency. 5. The Curculio. 6. The Casina, copied from the Greek of Diphilus, is not a play of much merit. The prologue was evidently written long after its first representation, and after the death of Plautus. 7. The Cistellaria is a short piece, containing much that is obscene, and little that is interesting. 8. The Epidicus, a good play, was a great favourite with Plautus himself. 9. The Bacchides, a most ribald farce, is the only case in which the alphabetical arrangement of the plays is not kept. This is accounted for by the fact that, in the 215th line, the Epidicus is mentioned, thereby proving that it was written before the Bacchides. 10. The Mostellaria has been imitated by Reynard in his Unexpected Return, and also by Fielding in his Intriguing Chambermaid. 11. The Memochi is very clever and amusing. It has been imitated by Shakspeare in his Comedy of Errors, and by Reynard. 12. The Miles Gloriosus is one of the best dramas of Plautus. The subject is the outwitting of a braggart. 13. The Mercator, a play of small merit, is founded upon the Εὐρυπόδος of Philémon. 14. The Pseudolus. This play, and the Truculentus, we are told by Cicero (De Senectute), were considered by Plautus himself as his two best. The Pseudolus certainly is very good; but of the Truculentus we cannot say so much. In our opinion, it is the very worst of all the plays, being deficient in plot and filled with obscenity. 15. The Pseudus is remarkable for containing some Carthaginian words, almost the only relics of that language. 16. The Persa. 17. The Rudens, a pleasing play, but with an unsatisfactory conclusion. 18. The Stichus. 19. The Trimnunus is considered by Lessing to be the best production of its author, next to the Captivi. 20. Truculentus. 21. Vidularia. This play is supposed to have followed the Truculentus, and completed the 21 Varronianae, from the fact, that in an old manuscript (Codex of Camerarius), at the end of the Truculentus, are the words "Incipit Vidularia," and that at Plautus, the end of the palimpsest manuscript there are a few sentences of this play.

Horace, in his Ars Poetica (270), has the following severe criticism upon Plautus:

"At vestri proelium Plautius et numeros et Laudaveres salis, minium patienter utrumque Ne dicam statu, mirati, si modo ego et vos Sedem inurbasum lepidi seponere dicto, Legitimunque somnum digitis callentis aut aure."

Lessing has tried to prove that Horace does not mean by these words the unqualified condemnation of Plautus which they seem to imply at first sight, but that he merely condemns his verses. However this may be, we cannot wonder that the polished ear of Horace should have been offended by some of the coarse jokes and irregular lines of Plautus. But, at the same time, Horace ought to have remembered that 150 years had passed since Plautus flourished, and that taste and feeling had much changed in the interval. Such was not, however, the universal opinion of the learned men of the Augustan age. For Cicero (De Officiis, 29) says:

"Comedy is of two very different kinds,—the one illiberal, quarrelsome, shameless, and obscene; the other of great elegance, refinement, genius, and wit; to which latter class belong not only our Plautus and the ancient comedy of the Athenians, but also the books of the Socratic philosophers;" thus placing Plautus on a level with the Athenian philosophers and the writers of the Old Comedy. Quintilian (x. 1) also tells us that L. Aelius Stilo used to have so great an admiration for the works of Plautus as to say that, "If the Muses were to speak Latin, they would adopt the language of Plautus."

If the wit of Plautus sometimes seems to us insipid, and his jokes coarse, we must keep in mind how entirely the force of comedy depends upon the circumstances and manners of the age in which it is produced. As Plautus wrote exclusively for the stage, to gain the applause of the lower classes, he was obliged to have recourse to that low buffoonery which was most attractive to them. Sometimes, indeed, Plautus may have intended, by exposing, to check the immoralities of his day. But if such were his object, he ought not throughout to have made the courtezan the only female who had any attractions in the way of wit or conversation, while the lawful wife is generally a mute or else an intolerable scold, who is to be ridiculed and outwitted. Deducting, however, from Plautus all that is low and disgusting, there still remains a fund of real humour for which no one can refuse him admiration. The comedies of Plautus belong to the Comedia Palliata. His works, and those of Terence, are indeed the only means we have of judging of the New Comedy of the Greeks. For the writings of Menander, Diphilus, Philoxenus, and the other writers of the New Comedy are, with the exception of a few stray sentences, entirely lost. From this fact, we are unable to ascertain how far they were actually copied by Plautus; but from the Roman tone which pervades his characters, their actions, and their jokes, no one can for a moment suppose that he was a servile copyist. Terence probably imitated his Greek models far more exactly than Plautus; for though Terence is certainly the more elegant and refined writer, Plautus is by far the more original and truly Roman. The comedies of Plautus are not perhaps so interesting to us as those of Aristophanes and the writers of the Old Comedy. For Aristophanes rakes up for us the skeleton closets, and shows us the weak points of those ancients whom we worship almost as demigods; whereas the New Comedy is only a transition between the old and that of modern times, without the piquancy belonging to personality, and with none of the polish and fine discrimination of character which marks the comedy of our days. The text of Plautus is very corrupt. Much of the original has been lost, and the text has been filled with interpolations. This is principally owing to all the manuscripts which we had having been copied from one which was itself corrupt. Some years ago, however, there was discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan the palimpsest manuscript, which is as old as the fifth century. This is much purer, though even in it are found some interpolations. Ritschl has already produced six of the plays, with their text, founded on this manuscript.

The oldest edition of the entire works of Plautus which we have is that of Georgius Merula, which was produced at Venice in the year 1472. The best of the earlier editions are those of Taubman, Frankfort, 1605; Wittenburg, 1612 and 1621; Grovonius, Leyden, 1664 and 1669; and at Amsterdam, 1684, the text of which was got by the comparison of six different manuscripts. The best modern editions of the entire works are those of Bothe, Berlin, 1809; and, last, at Leipzig, 1834; and of Weise, Quedlinburg, 1837-38. Ritschl's edition, when completed, will surpass all those previous to it.

The best books we have on Plautus are Lessing's Essay Von dem Leben und den Werken des Plautus, to which we are deeply indebted; and Ritschl's Parergon Plautinorum Terentianorumque.

Plautus has been translated into almost every European language. The best English translation is that of Bonell Thornton, vols. i. ii. (1767); and Richard Warner, vols. iii. iv. (1773), into familiar blank verse.