Summary

Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus) was a Roman comic playwright active in the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries bce. Twenty Plautine plays have come down to us intact. These fabulae palliatae are the earliest works of Latin literature to survive complete. Plautus’s comedies are all translations from Greek New Comedy (fabula palliata literally means “play in Greek dress”) and feature the stock characters and plots of that genre: young lovers kept apart by a rival or a pimp, mistaken identities, long-lost children, and acts of rape. Resolution comes via happy coincidences or through deceptions that are distinctly metatheatrical in their use of costumes, rehearsal, and even scripts. Such dramatic self-consciousness pervades the Plautine corpus and is concentrated especially in the “low” characters who are its stars and heroes: slaves, women, and the members of the urban poor are the main plot drivers and comic winners in Plautus’s palliatae, and their elevation amounts to an inversion of the power dynamics of real-life Roman society. Plautus’s comedies were immensely popular in antiquity and exercised a significant influence on subsequent literature, especially Roman elegy. While initially less popular among ancient literary critics than Terence, Plautus continued to be read into late antiquity and the Renaissance, and his work was important in the development of modern European comedy.