58 Facts About Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period.

Plautus's comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety.

Plautus wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus.

Plautus's acting talent was eventually discovered; and he adopted the names "Maccius" and "Plautus".

Plautus's studies allowed him to produce his plays, which were released between c and 184 BC.

Plautus attained such popularity that his name alone became a hallmark of theatrical success.

Plautus's comedies are mostly adapted from Greek models for a Roman audience, and are often based directly on the works of the Greek playwrights.

Plautus reworked the Greek texts to give them a flavour that would appeal to the local Roman audiences.

Since Plautus is dead, Comedy mourns, The stage is deserted; then Laughter, Jest and Wit, And all Melody's countless numbers wept together.

The oldest manuscript of Plautus is a palimpsest, known as the Ambrosian palimpsest, since it is kept in the Ambrosian Library in Milan.

The historical context within which Plautus wrote can be seen, to some extent, in his comments on contemporary events and persons.

Plautus was a popular comedic playwright while Roman theatre was still in its infancy and still largely undeveloped.

Plautus was sometimes accused of teaching the public indifference and mockery of the gods.

Plautus did not make up or encourage irreverence to the gods, but reflected ideas of his time.

The state controlled stage productions, and Plautus' plays would have been banned, had they been too risque.

Plautus apparently pushes for the plan to be approved by the senate, working his audience up with the thought of an enemy in close proximity and a call to outmaneuver him.

Therefore, it is reasonable to say that Plautus, according to P B Harvey, was "willing to insert [into his plays] highly specific allusions comprehensible to the audience".

The stock parasite in this play, Gelasimus, has a patron-client relationship with this family and offers to do any job in order to make ends meet; Owens puts forward that Plautus is portraying the economic hardship many Roman citizens were experiencing due to the cost of war.

The poetry of Menander and Plautus is best juxtaposed in their prologues.

Plautus might seem more verbose, but where he lacks in physical comedy he makes up for it with words, alliteration and paronomasia.

Plautus is well known for his devotion to puns, especially when it comes to the names of his characters.

However, because Plautus found humor in slaves tricking their masters or comparing themselves to great heroes, he took the character a step further and created something distinct.

At the time of Plautus, Rome was expanding, and having much success in Greece.

Anderson has commented that Plautus "is using and abusing Greek comedy to imply the superiority of Rome, in all its crude vitality, over the Greek world, which was now the political dependent of Rome, whose effete comic plots helped explain why the Greeks proved inadequate in the real world of the third and second centuries, in which the Romans exercised mastery".

Plautus was known for the use of Greek style in his plays, as part of the tradition of the variation on a theme.

Anderson would steer any reader away from the idea that Plautus' plays are somehow not his own or at least only his interpretation.

Plautus, it seems, is quite open to this method of adaptation, and quite a few of his plots seem stitched together from different stories.

Plautus deconstructed many of the Greek plays' finely constructed plots; he reduced some, exaggerated others of the nicely drawn characters of Menander and of Menander's contemporaries and followers into caricatures; he substituted for or superimposed upon the elegant humor of his models his own more vigorous, more simply ridiculous foolery in action, in statement, even in language.

Plautus took what he found but again made sure to expand, subtract, and modify.

Plautus seems to have followed the same path that Horace did, though Horace is much later, in that he is putting Roman ideas in Greek forms.

However, this was not the case in Rome during the time of the Republic, when Plautus wrote his plays.

The wooden stages on which Plautus' plays appeared were shallow and long with three openings in respect to the scene-house.

So, Plautus seems to have choreographed his plays somewhat true-to-life.

Andrews discusses the spatial semantics of Plautus; she has observed that even the different spaces of the stage are thematically charged.

In disposing of highly complex individuals, Plautus was supplying his audience with what it wanted, since "the audience to whose tastes Plautus catered was not interested in the character play," but instead wanted the broad and accessible humor offered by stock set-ups.

The humor Plautus offered, such as "puns, word plays, distortions of meaning, or other forms of verbal humor he usually puts them in the mouths of characters belonging to the lower social ranks, to whose language and position these varieties of humorous technique are most suitable," matched well with the stable of characters.

Gomme believed that the slave was "[a] truly comic character, the devisor of ingenious schemes, the controller of events, the commanding officer of his young master and friends, is a creation of Latin comedy," and that Greek dramatists such as Menander did not use slaves in such a way that Plautus later did, Harsh refutes these beliefs by giving concrete examples of instances where a clever slave appeared in Greek comedy.

In other instances, Plautus will give a name to a character that only has a few words or lines.

Plautus wrote in a colloquial style far from the codified form of Latin that is found in Ovid or Virgil.

The statements that one meets with, that this or that form is "common," or "regular," in Plautus, are frequently misleading, or even incorrect, and are usually unsatisfying.

The diction of Plautus, who used the colloquial speech of his own day, is distinctive and non-standard from the point of view of the later, classical period.

Hence, many of the irregularities which have troubled scribes and scholars perhaps merely reflect the everyday usages of the careless and untrained tongues which Plautus heard about him.

Plautus employed the use of proverbs in many of his plays.

The most common appearance of proverbs in Plautus appears to be at the end of a soliloquy.

The text of the prayers themselves was probably provided by a Carthaginian informant, and Plautus incorporated it to emphasize the authenticity and foreignness of Hanno's character.

Plautus used more technical means of expression in his plays.

One tool that Plautus used for the expression of his servus callidus stock character was alliteration.

Plautus uses phrases such as "falsiloquom, falsicum, falsiiurium".

Plautus' comedies abound in puns and word play, which is an important component of his poetry.

Plautus is especially fond of making up and changing the meaning of words, as Shakespeare does later.

Plautus did not follow the meter of the Greek originals that he adapted for the Roman audience.

Plautus used a great number of meters, but most frequently he used the iambic senarius and the trochaic septenarius.

Plautus's form was too complex to be fully understood and, as indicated by the Terentius et delusor, it was unknown at the time if Plautus was writing in prose or verse.

The influence of Plautus's plays was felt in the early 16th century.

Plautus even uses a "villain" in The Comedy of Errors of the same type as the one in Menaechmi, switching the character from a doctor to a teacher but keeping the character a shrewd, educated man.

One of the most important echoes of Plautus is the stock character of the parasite.

In terms of plot, or perhaps more accurately plot device, Plautus served as a source of inspiration and provided the possibility of adaptation for later playwrights.

Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, a 1968 book by Erich Segal, is a scholarly study of Plautus' work.