'PA BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library PA 6585.W52 Original element In Plautus 3 1924 026 478 143 Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026478143 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT IN PLAUTUS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS C. F. CLAY, Manager LONDON t^^Ay^SI EDINBURGH Fetter Lane, E.G. 4 \^^^^4' J°° Princes Street NEW YORK : G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, MADRAS: MACMII.LAN AND CO., I^^td. TORONTO : J. M. DENT AND SONS, Ltd. TOKYO: THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA All rights reserved THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT IN PLAUTUS BY K. M. WESTAWAY, M.A. Cambridge : at the University Press 1917 1 Ui' \ '; -tt^ — Quasi poeta, tabulas quota cepit sibi, quaerit quod nusquam gentiumst, reperit tamen, facit illud ueri simile quod mendacium est, nunc ego poeta flam. Pseudolus, 401-404. ^> ^.M I CONTENTS PAQB INTRODUCTION: The Problem vi CHAPTEE I REMARKS ON INDIVIDXJAL PLAYS 1 1. TB.E Meroator: the problem o¥ liteeal translation . 1 2. The Posnulus and the Miles Oloriosus: oontami- NATIO "... 4 3. The Rubens: the introduction of romance . . 8 4. The Pseubolus and the Truculentus: Plautus' ideal II 5. The Aitphitruo: the oiet of Euripides ... 13 CHAPTER II THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT .16 1. Historical allusions 16 2. Roman qeoqraphy 20 (a) Rome . 20 (6) Italy . . 22 (c) The rest of the Roman world . . .24 3. Military life . . 26 4. polttios and legal customs' 32 5. Social life ^'^ 6. Religion ^^ 7. Money, etc °° 8. Unclassified examples 69 9. Language '" CHAPTER III CONCLUSION: "THE HACK'S PROGRESS" ... 76 a3 INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM "I wish," said the teacher to the student, "that you were working at an artist, and not at a hack hke Plautus." The student, puzzled and discouraged, consulted other authorities as to the precise meaning of "hack," and found that it meant "a hterary drudge, who is much overworked, and therefore a person habitually tired." Now, whatever other failings may be ascribed to Plautus, he certainly never shows signs of being tired ; and although he is often casually set down as being nothing better than a mechanical translator from Greek into Latin, yet a perusal of his plays suggests that many of them are the work neither of a hack nor of a single artist, but of several artists, of whom Plautus was indubitably one. From the vague generahties which are found in treatises on Latin literature, it would seem that the plays of Plautus " are in the main versions or imitations of originals of the New Comedy." Therefore, in proportion to the value which we set upon both the New Comedy and Plautus, it is profitable to examine how the Roman poet treated the material at his command, and to what extent, if at all, he contributed to his work something original, something of his own personality. INTRODUCTION Vll In translating Greek plays into Latin, two courses were open to him. He might have remodelled his play in every detail, changing the scenes, names, and general customs, and adapting them to his own age and country. Such a work would approximate to thefahula togata, the national Eoman comedy. It was a type not common at Rome, by reason of the strict laws which forbade the exhibition of current politics or personalities on the stage. ' Naevius tried it, and paid the penalty. On the other hand, Plautus might with the Greek plot have retained the Greek customs, names, and places, and produced what were called /aZ»Mfee palliatae. This is approximately what he did, and the present problem is to ascertain the value of the result. Chief among the difficulties in this enquiry is our ignorance of the New Comedy. The four longest fragments of Menan- der, precious though they are in the circumstances, are but a yery small fraction of the large literature which they repre- sent. They certainly read as if they had some kinship with Plautus, though much more with the less boisterous Terence, but we have no proof that they are typical of all that is lost. Beyond these, the extant remains of the New Comedy are the merest scraps, chosen by moralists for a special purpose, and the possibihty, always present, that from the sands of Egypt or some other hiding-place of hterary treasure, there will come to light some direct original of a Plautine comedy, makes us hesitate to accept for a certainty even a single suggestion concerning Plautus' originality. Our knowledge of his sources is derived from the prologues, and is hmited to the following hst : The Rudens from the Trijpa of Diphilus. The Casina from the K'K'qpov^evoi, of Diphilus. VUl INTRODUCTION The Mostellaria from the da/ia of Diphilus. The Mercator from the efj.iropo'} of Philemon. The Bacchides from the St? e^a-rrarmv of Menander. The Asinaria from the 6vay6<; of Demophilus. The Miles Gloriosus partly from the dXa^wv of an unknown author. The Poenulus partly from the Kapxrj^ovtot; of an unknown author. y This leaves twelve plays of which we are qxiite unable to trace the originals. We are further handicapped by our ignorance of Plautus' preparation for dramatic work, and of the conditions under which he carried it out. This makes it all the more important to consider him (perhaps more than is usually done) in con- junction with the historical events in which he moved. We know from A. Gellius that he was born of poor parents at Sarsina in Umbria about 254 b.c. ; that he went to Rome, and worked as a stage-carpenter, or possibly as an actor; that he made some money, and lost it later through speculations in foreign trade ; that he then hired himself to a miller, and in his leisure time wrote plays and sold them; and that he died in 184. Such a hfe of hard work, poverty, and misfortune, could hardly have been expected to peld a hterature with sufficient vitahty to survive for more than two thousand years. As was the case with Shakespeare, however, his work in connection with the theatre must have given him an insight into the technicalities of play-producing, and have enabled him to make any necessary modifications of Greek plays for adaptation to the requirements of the Roman stage. Of his education we know nothing, though it seems safe to assume that he knew Greek, while the fifth INTBODtrCTION IX act of the Poenulus suggests that he had at least a working knowledge of Carthaginian. In later ages, a hundred and thirty plays passed under his name. Varro thought there were only twenty-one certainly authentic plays, and it has been suggested that the remainder were other people's works which he merely touched up. Yet it is difficult to see what plays these can have been. He had no predecessors beyond Andronicus and Naevius, and there is no evidence that their plays underwent revision at his hands. In any case he seems to have been a most prolific writer, and the twenty plays now extant do not by any means form the total of his output. It is essential to remember that he stands very early in the Une of Latin writers. In his own country he had singularly Uttle literary tradition behind him. To a degree which we find it hard to reconstruct in imagination, he had to be tentative, ingenious, resourceful, and self-dependent. He is actually the most ancient of extant Latin authors, and as he is in this way, to us, isolated from the few other writers of his age, we cannot fathom any of the motives, other than mercenary, which turned his activity in the direction of play-writing, nor can we estimate the ideals at which he aimed. This at least is certain, that he did not aspire to provide twentieth- century scholars with specimens of pure Greek or pure Roman comedy. He recognised an immediate requirement of his age, and, unaware that Qtuntifian would have reason to lament his countrymen's lack of aptitude for comedy^, he met this need by a literature which retained unbroken popularity on the stage till the time of the actor Roscius a hundred years later. It is unhkely that Jie anticipated or even 1 in comoedia maxime clavdicamus, Quintilian. X INTEODTJCTION desired literary immortality. Of all forms of literature, comedy is perhaps the least hkely to win permanent appre- ciation. We shall try to trace his growing recognition of this fact as seen in his treatment of the bygone Greek drama ; and probably if he ever estimated the prospective hfe of his own works, he took this lesson to heart. Certainly he never supposed that anyone would enquire into his original element, and, apart from his untiring vivacity and exuberant reaUsm, his vivid imagination and power of expression, he has, in collusion with the sands of Egypt mentioned above, wrapped his originahty in an impenetrable veil. Suggestions on the subject can be nothing more than a questionable hypothesis, and by our proposed dissection of his genius we are treating imnaturally one of the most spontaneous writers of any age. There are, as well, minor difficulties in this problem. It is useless to try to separate, in a mechanical way, "the Greek" from "the Roman" in these plays. Such a process is like a double-edged sword, and cuts two ways. In the first place, Plautus must have translated many Greek tech- nical terms, particularly in legal and judicial matters, and to a smaller extent, in the case of mihtary and certain social formulae, by corresponding Roman technical terms. Thus praetor is presumably equivalent to dpxa>v, forum to dyopd, and so on ; and although these words have a Roman colour, we cannot for that reason count them as an "original element" in Plautus. It is impossible to know here where to draw the line. On the other hand, in Plautus' day there must have been a certain amount of Greek assimilated into Latin language and thought. This will be discussed in detail later in the enquiry, but again it is impossible to draw INTRODTTOTION XI a definite line between the two elements. The amount of incorporated Greek must, for historical reasons, have been small compared with what it was in later ages ; but that it was already well-estabhshed and steadily increasing is suggested by the vigorous opposition offered to it in all its branches by Cato, and still more by the fact that in his later days that sturdy old Eoman was forced in some degree to acknowledge its worth and to seek personal advantage from it. Our enquiry will be divided into three parts. First we shall consider the pecuharities of some individual plays which seem to represent different periods of Plautus' maturing art. Secondly, regarding the plays as a whole, and remem- bering the Greek origin which is assumed as the background of them all, we shall see to what extent Plautus has introduced into them genuine elements of contemporary Roman hfe and thought, and how far he has ehminated Grecisms which would strike his audience as being quaint or foreign. Lastly, after this examination of facts derived exclusively from the plays themselves, we shall be in a position to offer some tentative suggestions concerning Plautus' natural hterary endowment and the development which it underwent during his long career. Plautus is difficult to illustrate by parallel quotations, and a word is necessary concerning the value of illustrations derived from other Latin authors. A parallel from Cato, for long the staunch opponent of everything Greek, may reasonably be supposed to mark a Plautine feature as Roman: but later authors were probably influenced by Greek ideas far more than Plautus was, and a quotation from their writings does not at all necessarily contribute xii INTRODtrOTION a Roman rather than a Greek notion. Nevertheless, these illustrations, if chosen with discretion, may possess a con- siderable value, as pointing, at the very lowest estimate, to Roman thought at a somewhat later period. [In the following pages, references to the text of Plautus are in accordance with the Oxford text of Professor Lindsay, and those to Menander follow the Teubner edition of Koerte (1910).] CHAPTER I REMARKS ON INDIVIDUAL PLAYS 1. The Mercator: the peoblem of literai. translation The fact of translation should not, in itseH, detract from Plautus' originaUty as it would from that of a modern writer. Practically all Roman literature, down to his day, was translated Greek. The Romans had simply not reached the stage of composing a literature of their own. One of the chief reasons for this was that so far they had been too busy with other things; but it must also have been due to some inherent quality of the Italian genius, for, in modem times, Madame de Stael, raising the same point about the Itahans who were her contemporaries, asserted that they " are afraid of new ideas, rather because they are indolent than from hterary servihty." Of this latter fault we may declare our author guiltless. He only followed Livius Andronicus and Naevius when he set about his enterprise of translating Greek comedies into Latin. He was entirely without the many aids to Greek trans- lation which beset the modern novice. It was not an age of scholarship, and knowledge of a foreign tongue was almost certain to be practical and not literary. The only tribunal 2 REMARKS OK INDIVIDTJAI; PLAYS [OH. before which Plautus could bring his work was the general pubhc, and that was a body which could only pronounce approval or disapproval; it could not apply analytical and intelhgent criticism. It has been said that a whole nation constitutes the judges of dramatic literature; but where the nation is too young to be a competent judge, it is a serious drawback to the authors of that Uterature. Plautus learnt his lesson in a difficult school, where his faults were made clear enough by his audience, but remedies had to be devised by his own unaided wit. Since in the light of our own generation we have not yet decided what good translation really is, it is hardly surprising that Plautus' conception of it was somewhat inadequate, at any rate at the beginning of his career. Probably his best working standard, and that at which he eventually, if unconsciously, arrived, lay in the words of Newman, the translator of Homer, that a translation "shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers." At first, however, he did not fully grasp the meaning of this condition. He expected that the Eoman theatre would be affected by his Mercator just as Philemon's was by the "Efivopo^. This was a mistake. Philemon's audience felt that it was Ustening to a comedy. Plautus' audience, had it been capable of putting its dis- satisfaction into words, would have said that it was listening to a piece of translation. Of all Plautus' plays, the Mercator, as we shall see later in detail, has been least re-dressed in Roman colours. Besides containing as many references to Greek legend and mythology as do any of the other plays, it goes rather too far in other directions, for instance in the long list of Greek IJ THE MERCATOR 3 cities enumerated by Charinus (1. 646 seq.) and in the details of his imaginary tour through the Greek isles (1. 937 seq.), which would have been better ehminated. There is nothing famihar and Roman to counterbalance the effect of this. Moreover, had Plautus been an experienced playwright, he would have welcomed the opportunity of cutting down the excessively long passage in Act i. Sc. ii., in which Acanthio absurdly delays giving his news to his master. So dull is this (merely by reason of its length) that one could well beheve that the line (160) about the "slumbering audience" was improvised one day by an observant actor, and incorporated later into the text. The Mercator is undoubtedly the least satisfactory of Plautus' plays, because the author had not reahsed that the old magic of Greek comedy was composed largely of the indefinable interplay of sympathies between Uving actors and living spectators; that all this necessarily died by the act of translation, and became to a foreign audience only tiresome and dull. The new Roman play had to have a colour and an intensity of its own, which could be imparted only by the Uving personal touch of the new poet. All the topical allusions and Uttle appeahng Romanisms, with which he adorned his later plays, are absent from the Mercator. Later, when he had more grip over the f eehngs of his audience, he saw truly that a certain shght Greek flavour about his work was essential to success, for it requires a more highly trained intelhgence to appreciate the subtleties of a drama concerned with one's own sphere of Ufe, than it does to enjoy the broader effects of something a httle more remote and strange; and to the former condition the Roman of that age was not yet educated. Plautus learnt, too, that a good 1—2 4 REMAEKS ON INDIVIDUAL PLAYS [CH. translation of a play of tke New Comedy must be not too exclusively palliata, for by not clinging too closely to a literal rendering of the plays he selected, he would reproduce more nearly the spirit, which is the life. But probably the Cistellaria and some other plays were written before he had learnt, in any measure, the lessons of the Mercator. 2. The Poenulus and the Miles Gloriosus: gontaminatio Plautus, like many other playwrights, approached his work as the man in the street. He had no idea of the diffi- culties to be overcome, nor, we may add, of the glory to be obtained by overcoming them. Thus, after he had trans- lated a certain number of comedies with some success, and was beginning to feel some assurance in his workmanship, it seemed the easiest thing in the world to put together two parts of different plays, and make a new and complete drama, and he was inchned to approach this form of jig-saw puzzle rather in the spirit of a child who mechanically puts the pieces together, than in that of an artist who considers the structure as a whole. The technical term for welding parts of different plays into a single whole is, in Latin, coniaminatio. It obviously involves a certain amount of enterprise, indeed of originaUty. Naevius had already availed himself of the method and it is illuminating to see in what measure Plautus profited by it. As a first example we will consider the Poenulus. It is a dull play. Its title suggests that it was written after the end of the second Punic war, when Koman animosity towards I] THE POENULVS 5 Carthage had died down sufficiently to allow a humorous aspect to their relations, but while the interest in Carthage was still prominent in the public mind. This theory is supported by 1. 524, re populi placida...interfectis hoslihus, which is probably a topical allusion because it is so pointless in the context. The Hanno who is responsible for the name of the piece bears the same name as the great general who took part in the war. We know of several Carthaginians named Hanno, and there were probably many more whom we do not know; Macaulay in his poem of Virginia has a Hanno, the keeper of a shop "gUttering with Punic wares," and probably this type was famihar at Rome. The drama in its main plot is one of intrigue, namely, the slave's plan to get money for his master, but the motive of "recognition" plays a part in the denouement, for Hanno discovers at Calydon two long-lost daughters and a nephew who is the lover of one of them. These two motives are apparently derived from separate originals, and are inter- woven by Plautus with reasonable skill; they read Uke a very ordinary translation of a Greek comedy. The whole of the fifth act, however, at least as far as 1. 1030, with its speeches in the Carthaginian language, and their misinter- pretation by word sounds into Latin, may be accounted original to Plautus, as will be shown in detail later in our enquiry. The play is, in fact, a clear case of contaminatio — the Kap')(r)B6vio<; of some unknown author (if we may accept the information in the post-Plautine prologue) plus part of an unnamed play, plus an original composition of Plautus himself. Hanno, amusing enough in Plautus' section of the work, is not exploited to the full. Indeed, when once he 6 REMARKS ON INDIVIDUAL PLAYS [CH. begins latine loqui, he discards all the enchantment of a foreigner except his strange long robe. He has none of the sinister magnetism of Mr Wn, nor even the lighter comic lines of Mr Hook of Holland. Plautus has seized an excellent idea, but he has not nearly done it justice. He ought to have worked over the beginning and end of the play, in order to make it harmonise with his original contribution. This, presumably his first, attempt at contaminatio was thus creditable, but not brilhant. We come now to a later efEort. The Miles Gloriosm undoubtedly suffers from faulty construction. The cause of this has been the subject of considerable discussion, some cfitics believing that it is the result of late confusion of two variant acting editions. It seems far more probable, however, that it is due to con- taminatio by the author himself. A brief examination of the plot will make this clear. The first act introduces Pyrgopolinices, the miles, who keeps imprisoned in his house at Ephesus the beautiful Philocom-asium, whom he has carried ofi from Athens. He has just become the recipient, from a pirate friend, of a gift, namely the captive Paktestrio, the slave of the girl's lover Pleusicles. The latter, hearing thus of his lady's where- abouts, comes to Ephesus and resides next door to the mihs, at the house of his father's hospitable friend Periplectom^nus, and by means of a secret door in the party-wall between the houses, gains communication with PMlocomasium. Their endearments are, however, observed through the impluuium by a slave of the miles, and in the second act of the play, the faithful Palaestrio expends much ingenuity in persuading this worthy that the girl in question is PMlocomasium' s twin sister, and that the scandal he suspects does not exist. l] THE MILES OLORIOSUS 7 Here the story might satisfactorily end, but with the third act it takes a wholly new departure. Palaestrio resolves to overreach the miles by deluding him into the belief that he is loved to distraction by the wife of his neigh- bour Periplectomenus. This act is long, and the sUght progress of the plot is quite out of proportion to its length. The last two acts unfold the execution of Palaestrio' s scheme, which entails the rescue of Philocomasium by her lover, and the proper punishment of the amorous miles. The loose construction of the play is shown not only in the general outline of the plot, which is clearly the fusion of two distinct stories, but in various details : for instance, the parasite who forms such an excellent foil to the miles in the first act, is completely missing from the rest of the play. It is, however, impossible not to feel that the intensely vivid portrayal of the characters, and the excellent boisterous fun of the whole thing, would, in the opinion of the Roman spectators, do much to gloss over the deficiencies of a badly patched plot. The details of the play, as will be seen later, have been considerably Romanised, and the general effect here is much more entertaining than that of the Poenulus. Possibly the Stickus, a weak, uninspired composition, is another example of contaminatio, but it is significant that in his later plays Plautus never had recourse to this process. Probably he concluded that the amount of labour (always hmited, if we may believe Horace) that he was prepared to give to it, was not worth the results obtained. 8 remarks on individual plays [ch. 3. The Rvdens: the introdtjction op romance Much has been written about the dawn of romanticism in Greek literature at the period to which the New Comedy belongs. The comedy itself was, in fact, an immediate product of this innovation of feeUng; it was the expression of individual interests, and of the love of pathos and emotion for their own sake. The Alexandrine love elegies were but the beginning of the vast stream of sentimental fiction which flowed with vigour even down to late Byzantine times. From Menander, Plautus, and Terence, we gain a fairly clear idea of the main features of this romanticism as it appeared upon the stage. The hapless lover, who feeds his grief not so much on silence as on soliloquy, is now the most important member of society, and Diniarchus (in the Trucu- lentus) communing with himself for the space of a hundred lines on the sorrows of love, is suffering from an interesting melancholy, which later received a new impetus from the Renaissance, and has immortahsed countless victims from Petrarch down to the present day. Distressed maidens, too, formerly a neghgible quantity in Greek hterature, have now to be rescued or pursued so frequently from the other ends of the earth, or at least from the other side of the Aegean, that it becomes a habit with them. Pasicompsa (in the Mercator) is but one of many examples. In Plautus, the Rudens is one of the best instances of this kind of hterature. The love interest is strong, not^only in the dramatic adventures of the hero Plesidippus, but also in the passing fancy of Sceparnio for the pretty serving-maid ; the deUghtfuI humour of the slave's obsequiousness in per- forming menial services for her sake, is equalled by the l] THE RUDENS 9 pleasantry of his assertion in a later scene that he could serve either heroine with impartial devotion. The roman- ticism of the play, however, is not confined to this feature, which is common to most of Plautus' dramas. Far more than any other play, the Rudens has a tendency to reveal the natural scenery in which the story is supposed to be set. The characters, at the opening, are all somewhat breathless after the raging tempest of the previous night, a tempest which is said to have blown off the roofs and shattered the windows of all the neighbouring houses, including that of Daemones, which forms the backgroimd of the stage; and by manifold little touches Plautus indicates the clear sunny morning, in which the only reminiscence of the departed storm is the somewhat agitated surf which breaks upon the beach close at hand. This is going farther than the majority of plays in the New Comedy, but it is in line with other branches of Greek hterature of that period. It is due to the fact that poetry had come under the influence of painting (itself now growing sentimental), and was beginning to regard nature with the eyes of Art. When the sun rose in Homer, it simply " gave hght" to the world ; its rise in Alexandrine writers is adorned with a thousand pictorial touches which modern romance has rendered indispensable to our thought. This grea t_j£aj£e-xtf -Jlellenistic. , emotion is in. singular contrast^witLLJ^tie_ reserve Greece, .and. certainly no Jess with the marked austerity of., eMly.^ome. Until towards the end of the third century B.C., Roman literature was practically destitute of romance. Indeed, the people were not prepared for it until Roman supremacy was fairly well established in and beyond Italy, when time and 10 REMARKS ON INDIVIDUAL PLAYS [CH. interest were afforded for relaxation from the continuous strain of a warfaring existence. Credit is due to Plautus and to his contemporary Naevius, in that they perceived that Rome was ready for this element!, and catered efficiently for the new need. The timely introduction into hterature of romance, of which the Evdens is a specimen, denotes a certain amoimt of originahty, even if the work itself takes the form of translation. Greek romance was always a hardy growth, self-sufficing to a large extent, and typical of a hterature which was always accustomed to take httle and to give much. It is not strange that Rome was content to adopt it in its existing form, without attempting to modify it or to blend it with any quahty of her own. The gift of Menander and his fellow-dramatists to Plautus was no more and no less than what, in a far more advanced and literary age, Ovid took from Callimachus. An interesting parallel occurs in the thirteenth century A.D., when Greece and the Aegean islands passed under the rule of Frank invaders, the exponents of western chivalry. The resulting harvest of romances, including stories such as Belthandros and Chrysardza, and Lyhistros and Rhodamne, is essentially Greek in origin, and all the western touches, unmistakably inherited from the French romans d'aventure, are adventitious and decorative. Thus it was not once only that stories and motives of romance travelled from Greece to the West, and proved strong enough to impart to a new literature the power and freshness which had characterised the old. l] THE PSEV DOLUS 11 4. The Pseudolvs and the TRvt'VLENTVs: Platjttts' ideal Qtmm gaiidebat...Triicidento Plaidus, qiiam Pseudolo ! If this tradition, preserved by Cicero, be true — and we have no reasonable ground for doubting it — it is interesting to consider what there was in these two plays that gave Plautus such particular satisfaction. It is true that an artist often singles out for his personal preference one of his works which all critics unite in placing lower in their estimate: Milton, for instance, stands almost alone in regarding Paradise Regained as the most precious monument to his genius. Yet it is probable that the artist himself, in selecting his favourite work, is conscious of something in it most consonant with his own personality. He who, in the process of creation, has experienced every wonderful moment of inspiration, and every despairing difficulty, will know exactly how much of himself, and how much of his best, he has put into a certain work, and will be linked with it by all the sympathy natural towards a most cherished offspring. That is why it is im- portant, in considering the original element in Plautus, to bear in mind these two plays as coming nearest to the author's own ideal of composition. Later opinion has gone fully with his affection for the Pseu- dolvs, from A. Gelhus, who called it a comoedia festiuissima, to Lorenz, who, apparently with Plautus himself, declared it to be the creation of the writer's own genius more than any other play. Plautus here revels in the high dramatic in- vention bequeathed to him by the original Greek author, and all his own most exuberant and spontaneous powers are brought into action to deck it in the best Plautine beauty. 12 REMARKS ON INDIVIDUAL PLAYS [OH. The native Roman element is, as we shall see, particularly strong. The people of that age required broad and striking effects, and in the Pseudolus they certainly found them. The plot is one of the famiUar frustrationes in comoediis, which, so long as they were well worked out, were at that time not too much hackneyed to please. The language of the play is marked by untrammelled flights of native idiom. The dehneation of the characters is completely realistic. The lover Calidorus, "sighing hke a furnace," Ballio, with his unusual depths of heartless villainy, and the sycophant, with his inordinate cleverness, are set with consummate skill to interplay with the imforgettable Puck-hke creation which is Pseudolus, and which, we may well beheve, is nearly akin to a great part of Plautus himself. The Truculentus is, according to modern canons, a less pleasant play. Yet, inasmuch as Plautus resembled Zola in a certain dehght in following human corruption into its last retreats, he may have felt some pride in his extraordi- narily detailed study of the woman Phronesium. The love- lorn braggart captain Stratofhanes, too, certainly plays his part with what Hazhtt was fond of calhng "gusto." The taming of the dour Truculentus is prettily, though slightly, done; as is often the case with Plautus' plays, it is dis- appointing to find so httle made of the suggestions in the title. Nevertheless, the play has its very broad humour, its decided swing of action, and its most gifted observation of the large faults, small foibles, and delicate lighter hues of human character, qualities which go far to make up the quintessence of Plautinism; and it was probably of these that Plautus was most conscious when he judged this drama as belonging to his best work. 1] THE AMPHITRUO IS The Pse-udolus is dated by the didascalia in 191 B.C. It would in any case be unreasonable to suppose that these two plays were the last works of Plautus, for, had they been, there would have remained so little of his hfe in which he could rejoice in their merits, that Cicero's tradition would have had no time to form ; but they certainly belong to the period of his maturer genius, and as such they are to be appreciated. Lastly, they are both quickened by a strong Roman element, and it is not least the reminiscences of Rome, Italy, and all the nearest and most precious associations, that would endear these two plays to the heart of their creator. 5. The Amphitruo: the gift of Euripides The considerable influence of__Buripi^ upon Plautus has been much discussed and is universally admitted. Leo rightly points out that the New Comedy was rooted more in Buripidean tragedy than in the Old Comedy, and though he goes much too far in setting out his very quaint parallels between passages of Euripides and of Plautus, we cannot fail to see that, in the general treatment and structure of the plays, Plautus and Menander are at a point of develop- ment but little beyond that reached by the tragic dramatist in the later part of his career. The Amphitruo, however, is the gift of Euripides in quite a different way, and calls for special comment. The play is constructed on a tragic basis which would satisfy even our most ardent analysts of Euripidean drama: 1 — 152, prologue. 153 — 462, agon between Mercurius and Sosia. 14 REMARKS ON INDIVIDTJAL PLAYS [OH. 463 — 550, a kind of stasimon (at any rate the action remains "stationary"). 551 — 632, agon between Amphitruo and Sosia. 633 — 983, agon between Alcmena and Amphitruo, the latter partly in the person of Juppiter. 984 — 1052, another stasimon. 1053 — 1130, messenger's speech, with threnos. 1131 — 1143, deux ex machina. 1144 — 1145, Amphitruo as chorus, "Well, I never!" We do not know that Euripides wrote an Amphitruo, but he certainly wrote an Alcmena, and that Plautus had at least heard of it is proved by 1. 86 of the Rudens^. Several fragments of it are extant, but none are very certain parallels to any passages in the Roman version. The Plautine story is the well-known Greek legend of Juppiter, Alcmene, and Amphitruo. The whole drama, in an entirely comic vein, is played in the stately world of myth- ology, and from the post-Plautine prologue we learn that such a work was termed tragico-comoedia. The Greek corresponding to this is IXapoTpar/wSia, and it has been suggested that the Amphitruo was based on an original by the Sicihan Rhinthon, who is known to have written dramas of this kind. This is not the place to discuss in detail Plautus' debt to Sicily; in this instance it probably does not go beyond the barest suggestion of the general idea. Another suggestion concerning the Amphitruo is that the original was by a writer of the New Comedy. This seems nearer to the truth, and yet it is not quite in hne with the probabihties. One of the main features of Plautus' play is that it is so thoroughly Roman in every detail. Amphitruo ^ rum uentus fuU, uerum Akumena Euripidi. EBEATUM p. 14 line 8 for deux read deus I] THE AMPHITRUO 15 is just a typical Roman general. His campaign against the Teleboans has been conducted according to Roman methods (as will be seen later in detail). He returns home to the tune of Roman sacrifices and auspices, and is greeted by a wife who is the noblest embodiment of the Roman matron that ever walked the Roman stage. The other outstanding feature of the play is its extra- ordinary vivacity and spontaneity. Tremendously alive as most of Plautus' plays are, they hardly touch the unflagging vigour of the Amphitruo. In the scenes with the slave Sosia, especially, the fun is fast and furious. His complete bewilderment when he meets Mercury arrayed as his double, his semi-conviction that he is not himself, but another man, his further mental entanglements when he tries to explain the novel situation to his master, and his almost pathetic last appeal to Alcmena to elucidate the puzzle, are all por- trayed by a master-mind. No part of the play, from the first line to the last, reads hke a translation. By far the most probable conclusion at which the reader can arrive, is that it is a direct burlesque of Euripides by Plautus, who has taken the old Greek story and inserted it into the ordinary Ufe of his contemporary Romans. Burlesque is often con- sidered a cheap form of hterature, but in those days it was not so hackneyed as it is now, and a comparison of this play with the versions of MoKere and Dryden is sufficient to show that it cannot be less than a mature work of a supreme dramatist, tossed off, perhaps, as the pastime of a Ught or hurried hour, but no unworthy product of a mind, which, beyond rich and rare gifts of its own, owed much to the Euripidean school in which it had unconsciously trained itself. 16 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. CHAPTER II THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT 1. Historical allusions Der den Augenblick ergreift, Das ist der rechte Mann. Goethe. It is ratter a surprise to find historical allusions in Plautus. The New Comedy probably contained little of the kind. It was almost wholly social, the comedy of domestic hfe and manners. Besides this lack of suggestion in his model, the Roman poet was confronted with a strict law against the representation of any poHtics or pubhc personahties upon the stage, a law which was enforced as far as possible by stringent pohce supervision at each performance. It must however have been felt that essentially popular plays like the Plautine comedy made a stronger appeal by containing brief allusions to contemporary pubhc events, and Plautus, in several instances, defies the censorship and presents us incidentally with a certain amoimt of material for dating his plays. In the M. G. (1. 211) the attitude of Palaestrio, who supports his head on his hand and arm, as if on a column (os columnatum), reminds Plautus of his brother-poet Naevius, who was imprisoned for his lampoons on the aristocracy, particularly on the proud Metelli. The im- 207 B C prisonment of Naevius is placed about 210-207 B.C., and the passage was written certainly after the imprison^- ment began, probably while it was still the subject of common talk, and possibly before the release of the victim. The H] HISTORICAL ALLUSIONS 17 allusion is however made more remote by its application, not to Naevius by name, but to a poeta barharus. Plautus here, as frequently elsewhere, uses the word harbarus in the sense it would have in his Greek originals, i.e. "not Greek-speak- ing," and therefore Roman. (Thus in Poen. 598, barbaria is used as a synonym for Italy.) Such a device has the appearance of being derived direct from the Greek, and would make it difficult for the Roman pohce to charge the author with an offence against the regulations in question. In the same play there occurs another historical allusion in the phrase si harunc Baccharum es (1. 1016). The frenzied and disreputable orgies which formed the rites of Bacchus were suppressed by a famous decree of the Senate in 186 B.C., but were probably the subject of much comment and specu- lation before drastic steps were actually taken. Plautus refers again to the same topic, e.g. Cas. 979. The end of the speech of Auxilium in the Cistellaria con- tains an important reference to the second Punic war. It is a stirring appeal to the people of Rome to make a final and supreme effort to gain the victory which is already nearly within their grasp. Other plays appear to contain references to laws which were inaugurated or repealed during Plautus' Ufetime. When Epidicus, in the play of that name (224 seq.) discourses at length on the wanton and reprehensible extravagance of ladies' dress, he doubtless spoke just about the time of the repeal of the lex Oppia sumptuaria in 195. Pseud. 303 alludes to the lex quiniui- cenaria, the law by which young people under twenty-five were incapable of making contracts. Cicero calls it the lex Plaetoria, but its date is unknown. w. B. 2 18 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. The Curculio (1. 508) contains a reference to the kx Sempronia de foenore of 193. But the chief interest of this play, from the historical aspect, lies elsewhere. The scene is laid at Epidaurus, outside the temple of Aesculapius. From the Pluttus of Aristophanes we know what function to expect this highly- esteemed deity to perform. His rdh here is as conventional and blameless as ever. The villain Cappodax has spent the night lying in the temple, to cure himself of certain diseases, and in the morning he issues forth, to the dehght of the audience, not a whit the better for his experiences. It is all meant to be extremely funny, and a good deal is made of it ; but we might beheve that it fell a Uttle flat on Eoman ears, were there not another factor to be considered. At Rome, the worship of this god was introduced by order of the Sibylhne books, on the occasion of the plague of 293, and the deity was brought from Epidaurus in the form of a snake. He had a sanctuary and a much frequented sanatorium on the island of the Tiber. It seems extremely probable that there was some sort of centenary celebration in honour of the god, and Aesculapius being thus prominent in the pubUc mind, Plautus, from the store of Greek comedies at his command, sought and found this particular play to appeal to the popular sense of humour at an opportune moment. This theory is supported, in quite a curious way, by the date of the lex Sempronia mentioned above. It may be noted in passing that Lyco, the banker, is made to do obeisance to Aesculapius capite operto, a distinctly Roman and not Greek custom. In Triri. 542 we are told of the wonderful powers of endurance of the Syrian slaves, a fact which probably did not force itself particularly on the Roman notice until after n] HISTORICAL ALLUSIONS 19 the war with Antiochus in 191. Three Hnes later, how- ever, their strength is said to be surpassed by that of the Campanians, who, as the result of the supplicium inflicted on them for their desertion of Rome in the second Punic war, became so inured to the hardest form^ of slavery, that they could excel all other races in endurance of toil. The mention of their name would fill the Roman spectator with a bitter satisfaction at the proper reward of treachery. In the Bacchides (1. 1073), the slave Chrysalus, assuming, like many of his fellows (as will be seen later), the character of a victorious general, begs the spectators not to be surprised at his not celebrating his achievements with a triumph, on the plea fenuolgatum est. Probably after the four triumphs of the year 189, the Roman people were becom- ing somewhat hlase over these functions, and Chrysalus is here hinting at the fact that triumphs, if made too common, were hkely to lose their value and prestige. References in these plays to Greek history are almost negligible. Agathocles is twice mentioned alone {Pseud. 532, Most. 775), and in Men. 407, there is a curious Httle bit of Sicihan history which seems to stop abruptly withHiero; this suggests that in the original that monarch has been the subject of prolonged eulogies which Plautus thought would bore a Roman audience, and which he therefore cut out in no very skilful manner. The Roman history in these plays must be borne in mind as being of great importance, as its source is so indisputably Plautine and not Greek. 2—2 20 the original element [oh. 2. Roman geography (a) Rome All loads lead to Borne. Proverb. The scene of each play of Plautus is laid in some Greek city, generally Athens, although variants are found, such as Sicyon, Epidamnus, Ephesus and Cyrene. No local colour is attached to any of these places, except perhaps Cjrrene, and beyond one or two occasions when an inhabitant of Athens declares his intention of going to the Peiraeus (e.g. Trin. 1103) no allusion is made to any local topography. But it was not Plautus' way to leave the situation thus neutral or indifierent. Often, indeed, we forget that we are at Athens or at Calydon, only to reahse with a start that we are walking the streets of Rome, with all the setting of immemorial names and associations around us as they surrounded the actors of the plays. The forum is mentioned so frequently and in such general terms, that, although the word entails a marked suggestion of Rome, we can regard it only as a translation of the New Comedy ayopd. There are many other Roman locaUties in Plautus which are perfectly well defined. The Capitol is mentioned at least twice, Trin. 84, and Cure. 269. In the latter play the speech of the choragus describes a kind of route-march through the city. First in the list comes the temple of Cloacina (Venus), the " purifier," so called because the Romans at the end of the Sabine war purified themselves with myrtle-branches near her statue: then the Basilica, which is referred to also in Capt. 815, and is something of a problem, for the first basilica (a portico or arcade) that we hear of at Rome was built by Cato the Censor in 184 (the n] ROMAN GEOGRAPHY 21 year of Plautus' death) and called the basilica Porcia. The Plautine basilica may be an earlier building, otherwise un- known, or an anticipation of something already long planned and discussed by idle tongues : in any case there is no need to agree with certain critics who reject the hnes in which it occurs. Next the choragus takes us to th.& forum, with its crowd of idle and wealthy loungers: then to the unkind chatterers around the laciis (probably the locus Curtius) : then to the temple of Castor, on the spot where three marble pillars of a later date greet the sight-seer to this day ; hence to the "Tuscan region" of doubtful repute, and finally to the TJelabrum, with its bakers, butchers, and soothsayers, and others of a motley gathering. The TJelabrum is mentioned also in Capt. 489, particularly as the market for delicacies of the table, where the oil-sellers were noted for scheming together to keep up the price of salad-oil. The same play (1. 90) contains a reference to the Porta Trigemina (so called from its three archways), which was in one of the busiest parts of Rome, at the corner of the Aventine ; here porters and message-carriers took their stand, and Ergasilus says he will have to take his place among them to earn a Uving (cf. Trin. 423). In the M. G. (1. 359) the phrase extra portam probably refers to the Esquihne Gate, where was the burying-ground of the poor, and where executions took place. In this in- stance, we may note, the Roman gate is placed at Bphesus. (Cf. Pseud. 331, Cas. 354.) 22 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. (b) Italy Open my heait, and you will see Graved inside of it, "Italy.'' Brouming. It would be strange if the original element in Plautus excluded thoughts of Italy, for Italy was a motherland whose spirit was peculiarly present in the hearts of all her sons. We do not expect from a comic poet such a panegyric as Vergil rendered her in later times ; indeed, the date alone would be sufficient explanation of the fact that Plautus could make no attempt at Vergil's "conscious appeal to a nation." The New Comedy of Greece was singularly devoid of national interests, and it is thus all the more remarkable that in the translation of such a Uterature we find fore- shadowed a feehng which attained conscious expression only after years more of silent development. The Hannibalic war did much to awaken and strengthen this feeling. Marsian and Apulian had fought side by side in the Roman army, and had begun to forget the old clan distinctions, and to take a more kindly interest in one another. It was, more- over, a period of road-building, and great arteries hke the Uia Flaminia (220) and the Uia Aemilia (190) did much to link widely-separated regions into a common thought and kinship. Sentiment became less local and detached. This new interest in Italy as a whole does not take in Plautus the form of discourses on the charm of her natural scenery, for Plautus hved in a comparatively unlettered age which had not attained the power of reflection necessary to appre- ciate the beauty which is so familiar as to be unnoticed. His few descriptions of scenery are hmited to seascapes, a charac- teristically Greek attitude of mind, derived probably direct II] ROMAN GEOGRAPHY 23 from his original. His references to the habits and thoughts of the Italian countryside will be considered later. Here we are concerned only with definite allusions to various localities in the peninsula. A single bad pun {Most. 770) is his only reference to his birthplace, Sarsina in Umbria. Even this has no personal connotation, though it may have elicited an extra roar of enthusiasm from an audience acquainted with his origin. Capt. 160 seq. contains a string of puns on a number of Italian place-names — pistor, a miller, and Pistoria, a town in Etruria ; panis, a loaf, and Panna, a town in Samnium ; placenta, a cake, and Placentia, in Cis-padane Gaul; and so on. In a later passage (881 seq.) of the same play we find a similar volley of expletives, beginning with Kopa, which besides being the Greek name of Proserpine, was the name of a town in Latium, and led the excited parasite Ergasilus, by a natural train of ideas, to swear by all the other towns in Latium he could think of — Praeneste, Signia, Frusino, Alatrium. In a different country, after more than two thousand years, this is a cold and uninspiring theme: but it is very significant. Praeneste is ridiculed for its provincialism in Trin. 609, inasmuch as it was addicted to the expression tarn modo; and in Trtic. 691 it is assailed for dropping unaccented syllables in its pronunciation, and saying, for instance, conea instead of ciconia. Finally, a fragment of the first act of the BaccMdes seems to give it a reputation for bragging and conceit. The reason why this city should be singled out as an object of popular raillery is a httle obscure. By its loyalty during the recent war it had, together with Tibur and the neighbouring colonies, done much to save the state. 24 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH- but after the war its treatment by Rome became rather a delicate question. Perhaps its resentment at increased mihtary service and curtailed allotments was sufficient to raise a careless laugh among the populace of victorious Rome. Similarly Aminula is decried in M. G. 648, where Peri- jAectomenus pointedly states that his birthplace was not this httle town of Apuha, but Ephesus. He thus suggests that his Hellenism was the genuine article, not the superficial counterfeit which was found among the ApuUans, who had notorious aspirations in that direction. There are references to Capua {Rud. 631), Sutrium {Gas. 524), Arretium (fr. of the Fretum), Lauinia (True. 275, reading doubtful), Tarentine sheep {True. 649), Tuscan morals {Cist. 562), Campanian carpets (Ps. 146), and, to crown the list, the fruit of the celebrated Massic vine {Ps. 1303), which still awaited Horace's immortaUsing eulogy. It is interesting to note that the phrase tricae (meaning "nonsense," e.g. Cure. 613) is (at least according to Phny, whose testimony must not be overvalued) taken from Triea, the name of a small place in Apulia. In the same way Martial uses Apina, a poor town of the same district. (c) The rest of the Roman world Chi sa la strada, pud andar di trotto. Italian proverb. By the age of Plautus, Rome was becoming conscious / of a large Mediterranean world beyond the compass of its 1 own peninsula. Greece too had been aware of much the same world, but Rome naturally surveyed it from a different \ angle. The country which she regarded from a particularly ,/ Il] ROMAN GEOGRAPHY 25 Roman and revised standpoint was of course Greece itself, and when this standpoint appears in Plautus it must be noted as foreign to the original Greek. A Greek, for instance, would never use the word pergraecari, or its equivalent, as Plautus frequently does (e.g. True. 88, Most. 960), meaning "to indulge in excessively hilarious carousals": neither would he apply the adjective "Greek" to the ordinary things of his hfe, any more than a Scot would talk of a "Scotch mist" in the manner of the detached Southron. In Plautus we find Greek caskets (Trite. 55), Greek sweating- baths (Stick. 226) and Greek honour, or rather the lack of it (Asin. 199), and many other commodities from that side of the Adriatic. Turning farther to the west than the Greek could easily penetrate in thought, we find a reference to Gaul in one of the fragments, to the Boii (Capt. 888), to the people of Massilia (Cas. 963) bearing out what Cicero says of their character in his speech pro Flacco ; and to the Turdetani of Spain (Capt. 163). In the phrase Hilurica fades, and in the innumerable references to things SiciUan, Greek and Roman meet on common ground, and the originality thereof may be attributed to either with equal probabiUty. Names of places in the extreme East of the Mediterranean, and beyond (which are comparatively rare in Plautus) were probably, on the whole, taken direct from the Greek drama. One remembers, for instance, that the despairing lover in Menander's Samia called for his cloak and sword and swore to hide his diminished head in Bactria or Caria. Cn/rcuUo's mission to Caria had thus probably more glamour of daring to his Roman audience than it deserved. 26 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. 3. MlLITABY LIFE Debellare snperbos. Vergil. Plautus during his lifetime witnessed the whole of the second Punic war. It was a war which had come almost to the gates of Bome, and which, by reason of its length and its fierceness, and the issues which it involved, made a far greater impression on the Romans than any other conflict in their whole history. It opened the mind of a people already warlike to wider ideas and more determined ambitions. Every Roman was a thorough soldier at heart, and in his amusements as well as in his sterner occupations, anything of a military flavour was sure to make a welcome This accounts in one way for the prominence of things mihtary in the plays of Plautus. It must however be remembered that a certain warhke tendency was a heritage which came to the Roman stage along with many other features from the New Comedy. The old plays too were written in an age which rivalled the period of the Carthaginian conflict in the "pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war," and probably in the years following the death of Alexander, war was as much a necessity of thought as it has been at any time. It seems impossible, however, that a man of such tremendous creative and energising power as Plautus should not have infused into his comedies some- thing of the warhke strength and fervour of the men around him, something, in fact, of the vitahty of his own experience. The character which comes first to one's mind in con- sidering this aspect of the Plautine comedy is Pyrc/opolinices,-^ in the Miles Gloriosus. This play, as we learn from 1. 86, II] MILITARY LIFE 27 is founded on the 'AXafwi/ of a Greek poet now unknown to us. T) aXa^oveia, says Theophrastus, Sofet elvai 7rpocnrolrial,i} Tt? ajaOwv ovK ovreov, 6 8e d\a^o)v toiovto^ t*?, oto<;... avvohoi-rropov Se airoXavaai ev rij ohm Beivo^, Xeyav, to? fier AXe^dvSpov eaTpaTevaaro, kui otto)? uvtoj el'X^e, koX ocra XidoKoWrjTa iroTtjpia eKofitae-.-Kal ravra ^rjaai, ovSa/jLov (K TTj? TToXea)? diroSeSTjfirjKwi;. Deforme est, says Cicero, de se ipsum praedicare, falsa praesertim, et cum irrisione audientium imitari mUitem gloriosum. "I am a rogue," says FalstafE, "if I were not at half- sword with a dozen of them two hours together. I have 'scaped by miracle. I am eight times thrust through the doublet, four through the hose ; my buckler cut through and through; my sword hacked like a hand-saw — ecce signum." From this, even if our own experience failed us, we might conclude that the character exploited by Plautus in this play is universal rather than particular, and we should hesitate to assert that Pyrgopolinices was essentially Greek or essentially Koman. It is quite obvious that he is not mechanically lifted out of a foreign play. He breathes a Ufe of his own, which has made him one of the most famous characters in all literature. He is childishly stupid and almost incredibly vain, and somehow all his characteristics are stamped with a Eoman die. He calls on Mars, and talks of his legiones and the hostile peditastelli: he wears a clupeus, a circular iron shield adopted by the Romans from the Etruscans. His conversation in the first scene with the fawning parasite Artotrogus, brings out his inordinate conceit in full measure: the parasite recalls his friend's glorious 28 THE ORIOINAL ELEMENT [OH. conflicts in Cilicia, in Scytholatronia, and other strange places, and the thirty men of Sardis, and the sixty of Mace- donia, whom he slew in one day. " How many altogether ? " enquires Pyrgopolinices. " Seven thousand," stoutly answers his ally — a method of arithmetic shared by Livy and the modem press. The miUtary atmosphere infects the other characters of the play. The wise and old Periplectomenus lays his plans (1. 219) against the miles as a general schemes his campaign, bidding his comrades lead round their army by a pass, besiege the enemy, cut off his supplies, and guard the road which their own A.S.C. is to pass along. The play abounds in stray technicaUties taken from the Roman military system, e.g. Palaestrio in 1. 815 — si centuriati iene sunt manuplares mei, and 1. 266 — ad eum uineam plwleos- qvA ogam, just as the Great War has almost led some of us to think of ordinary things in terms of platoons and counter- attacks. Other plays of Plautus contain milites gloriosi of smaller fame. Very similar to our last hero is Stratophanes in the Truculentus, who proudly and bluntly assures us that his prowess is executed in deeds rather than assumed in wordy harangues to a bored audience, and who roars out a playful enquiry whether his supposed newly-born son has yet joined his legion and brought back from war the spoils of victory. This soldier too fights under the kind auspices of Mars. Other characters of the same type are Polymachaeroplagides {Pseudolus), Antamoenides {Poenidics), Therapontigonus Pla- tagidorus (Curculio), Cleomachus (Bacchides) and Stratippocles (Epidicus). All these people produce records of glorious achievement as long as their highly suggestive names. ll] MILITARY LIFE 29 Much as we ridicule their small faults and foibles, we feel that Plautus treats them as Shakespeare treats Falstafi, with a very human sympathy, because probably he had known a great many of them personally, and hailed them as his brothers. We find the military element just as strong, but differ- ently presented, in the Amphitruo. The Greek origin of this story is obvious, and has been already discussed. The point that concerns us here is that Amphitruo himseK is a thoroughly Roman general. In particular, Sosia's account of his campaign against the Teleboans, beginning 1. 188, Uictores uictia hostibua legiones reueniunt domum, is most remarkably Roman in style. Indeed, one is tempted to postulate a family-tree, beginning with an unknown ancestor, from whom are descended the whole of Livy and this Httle piece of Plautus. The passage is, even in details, extra- ordinarily Livian. For the use of cavalry at the end of a battle, we may compare the tactics of Tarquin at the end of the Sabine war, Livy i. 37. The ftentes principes of Plautus recall the crestfallen Samnites of Livy ix. 45, to whom, suppliciter agewtibus, the Romans granted peace: such a frame of mind in an enemy was one in which Rome took a pecuUar and widely expressed deUght. The slave Sosia follows his master in all things with great zeal and an in- exhaustible treasury of humour. Impera, imperium exse- quar (1. 956) is his obhging attitude. The legio figures largely in his conversation, and when the blows of Mercury rain upon his hapless person, his thoughts turn instinctively to the formaUties of peace-making. He must have been a tjrpical military servant; probably the generals who fought against Hannibal were very famiUar with the blessings and 30 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. discomforts which accrued from the type. The whole play is absolutely Roman in tone, largely because the military atmosphere is so thoroughly Roman in detail. In such a character, the Amphitruo stands alone among the plays of Plautus. It is not only in the official military circles of the Plautine world that we find the martial element. There is no rdle which his intriguing slaves more love to adopt in the prose- cution of their schemes than that of a renowned and parti- cularly successful general. The rascal, whose every morrow may bring the scourge or the scafiold, faces the world quite unabashed, and dreams the greatest of all Roman dreams, the life of a general. This seems to be a peculiarly Roman trait. Even if the original Greek held the germ of the idea, Plautus, we may fairly urge, ampUfied it, and by a consistent use of Roman military technicalities, gave it a thoroughly Roman flavour. Pseudolus is perhaps the best example. He plans his campaign (1. 574 seq.) according to his fights, and though his nebulous course of action would make the expert gasp, his enthusiasm is worthy of the great maiores whom the Roman slave can own only in fancy. He closes with the enemy, then invests their city, after this brings up his legions and sets them forth in array for battle : then he proceeds to divide the spoils, and sees as in a vision that the glory of his deeds wiU never die. In this we are reminded of the pecuUar ideas of mediaeval warfare entertained by the dreaming hero in the second act of "When knights were bold." Of aU the Plautine slaves who had need of skilled tactics to extricate them from the direst consequences of their intriguing, none was in a more urgent pfight than the cele- II] MILITARY LIFE 31 brated Tranio in the Mostellaria. Indeed, after he has "led out his legions," and "withdrawn his maniples to safety," he feels compelled, hke many a sorely-tried consul, to call an imaginary senate, from which he sees himself summarily ejected, and reduced to the devices of a turbulent and incon- sequent mob. Stasimus in the Trinummus appears as a mihtary servant who finds it advisable to abandon his present mode of Uf e. Non sisti potest — " things are past mending "— is his verdict and he decides to take up his knapsack and buckle on his shield, and depart to other scenes of action. The following are examples of the numerous Roman mihtary technicahties scattered through the ordinary con- versation of Plautus: imperator {Capt. 307, Ps. 1171), trium- phus {Ps. 1051), adscriptiui (Men. 183), manuplares (Most. 312, 1048, Tnic. 491), maniplatim (Ps. 181), uelitatio (Rud. 525), dihctus (Eud. 1279), pro infrequente militia (Tntc. 230), concenturiare (Trin. 1002, Ps. 572, Cure. 585), stipendium {Epid. 38, Most. 131), conlatis signis (Cas. 352), castra (Epid. 381), moenia (Rud. 692), weapons and engines such as hallista, catapidta, aries (Capt. 796, Pers. 28, Trin. 668), clau/itor (Rud. 804). It is instructive to note that Greek mihtary technicahties figure in our author hardly at all. There is the machaera curiously attributed to Pyrgopolinices in the Miles Gloriosus, and appearing again Ps. 735. The word strategus appears occasionally, e.g. Stich. 702 and Cure. 285, and stratioticus, e.g. Ps. 918; but these are of interest as illustrating the introduction of Greek words into the ordinary Latin language, rather than from the mihtary point of view. 32 the original element [ch. 4. Politics and legal customs Suppose I take a spurt, and mix Amang the wilds o' politics, Electors and elected. Bmms. In trying to ascertain the original element in Plautus under this heading, we find ourselves upon somewhat difi&cult ground. It is true that the Roman mind ran always in a legal groove. From the evolution of the Twelve Tables down to the illustrious jurists of the later Empire the stream of Roman law continued in a perfectly steady course. Legal formahties regulated the ordinary hfe of the people at every turn, and legal formulae were on their lips in even the most ordinary conversation. Law was to them an ever-hving interest, and it appears quite natural and characteristic that this trait should be prominent in Roman comedy such as that of Plautus. At the same time it must be remembered that the Greeks too possessed this interest in law to a very marked degree. Philodeon of the Wasfs was not so unique in his bent as his slave might lead us to suppose^. There was perhaps this difierence between the nations, that while the average Greek was absorbed in the particular legal problem of the moment, the Roman created and constructed forms and institutions which should carry on all future generations. 5,Qme^was_ more conscious of he^ pfinoaneHt /value, and worked not only^^^Jor' the liiimediate to-morrow, f but even for the far-ofE and hardly suspected barbarians Who were to deem it their greatest glory to deck themselves ^n some shreds of her purple. 1. 88, (plXijXiaoTTjS €s ov^us dvrjp. n] LEGAL CXTSTOMS 33 Probably political thought figured less largely in the New Comedy (which was domestic, and had a narrower outlook) than in Plautus. Nevertheless, to a certain extent the legal and political formulae of the Roman writer are mere translations from the Greek. Most of his praetors, for instance, were probably in the beginning archons, and although their new name has a Roman imphcation, we cannot on that accovmt attribute originality to Plautus. It is unusually difiicult to know exactly where to draw the hne in this matter, and although the long hst of Roman technicahties about to be detailed are in themselves very suggestive, the fact of translation must be borne in mind, and a certain reserve exercised in assigning to Plautus original thought in this respect. In reading Plautus we run through practically the whole gamut of magistrates who took upon themselves care for the well-being of Rome. There are two notable exceptions ; — the consul and the censor are never mentioned. Perhaps their honourable station was felt to be above the flippancy of comedy ; perhaps they were mentioned in plays now lost, and the merest chance has robbed us of references to them. Their colleagues appear in formidable array. There is mention of a dictator (Ps. 416, Trin. 695), while in Pers. TIQ the fascinating Lemniselenis is called a dictatrix; praetor (very frequently, e.g. Capt. 450, 505, Merc. 664); tribunus (humorously, Pers. 22); quaestor (Bacch. 1075); aedilis (Capt. 823, Pers. 160; True. 557, where they are caUed pvhlici, the officials responsible for the cleanliness of the city; Rud. 373, where Neptune, in his capacity of ship- wrecker, is referred to as a discriminating aedile); tresuiri, who, as the overseers of prisons and of punishments generally, w. E, 3 34 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [OH. are made much of, as a natural consequence of the usual trend of plot in Plautus (Amph. 155, Asin. 131, Pers. 72, Aul. 416) ; likewise their attendant lictores (Asin. 575, the ocio vulidi of Amph. 160) ; and the reciperatores, a board for summary trial especially in cases concerning property (Rud. 1282, Bacch. 270). Moreover, the term praefectura occurs {Capt. 907, Cas. 99), and prouincia, as a magistrate's sphere of administration, is very common (e.g. Capt. 474, M. G. 1159, Cas. 103). None of these officials figure as persons in the drama. They are passing references and, in a way, extraordinarily remote from the men of the same titles who swayed the fierce pohtical emotions of the Rome of that day. , They are names whose utterance instigated no man to sing an election song or to stab his rival voter at the poll. The police regulations already referred to are probably responsible for their sojourn in a calmer sphere. The word senatus is found quite frequently, but it gener- ally bears the rather vague connotation of "consultation," e.g. Epid. 159, iam senatum conuooaho in corde consiliarium (cf. Asin. 871, Aul. 549). In M. G. 594, Periplectomenus, pursuing his designs against the miles, sees the possibihty of calling afrequens senatus of his supporters, and at the close of the scene hastens to meet it, ne, dum absum, illis sortitus fuat. This latter phrase is an allusion to the sortitio prouin- ciarum of the Roman senate ; as the provinces were allotted to the different magistrates, so at the coming conference there would be assigned to each character his or her part in over- reaching the victim. In Cas. 536 Cleustrata refers ironically to her husband as the senaius columen, and the phrase recurs Epid. 189. The Captiui provides an allusion to the comitia tributa II] LEGAL CUSTOMS 35 (I. 476) and the comitia centuriata (1. 155, in the phrase imperare exercitum). The latter body also appears speci- fically in Ps. 1232. The common remark, uttered, for instance, by the petrified Diniarchiis (True. 819), meo illic nunc sunt capiti comitia, seems to be a colloquial expression for the verge of a catastrophe. In Ps. 748 we find the word plefyiscitum. Judicial matters figure largely in these plays. In the Poenulus and the Rudens, for example, a good deal of the plot turns on legal actions, but as far as details go, the processes seem to be more or less common to Greece and Rome. Equivalent to the aduocati who are characters in the former play and mentioned in the latter (1. 890), the Greeks had KXr)Tr]pe<; (e.g. Wasps, 1408), the witnesses who gave evidence that the summons had been served. They correspond exactly to the phrase licet antestari which saved Horace from his celebrated dilemma on the Sacred Way^. In fact this very word antestari occurs Pers. 747 and Cure. 621 . Other ways of summoning an opponent are found in Rud. 718 (te ego appello, tecum ago) and Asin. 480 (in ius uoco te). Other judicial phrases in Plautus are : rem facesso (Rud. 1061, "I am a plaintiff"); in ius rapiam exsulem (Rud. 859, meaning an act of ejectment, e^ovX-r)^ SUtj); uades (Pers. 289, cf. Aul. 319) ; iure factum iudico (M. G. 1435) ; diem dieam (Capt. 494); ubi res prolatae sunt (Gapt. 78, "when business is adjourned"); [uenter gutturque] resident [essurialis] ferias (Capt. 468, cf . feriae residentur in Cic. Leg. II. xxii. 55). In Pers. 143 the word decuria, properly a board of judges, is used in jocular fkshion for a circle of boon companions. 1 Sat. I. ix. 76. 3—2 36 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. The formaUties of colonisation are twice mentioned. Epidicus in a flight of metaphor talks (1. 343) of carrying provisions into his colony under his own auspices ; and the enraged Simo (Ps. 1100) threatens to make Psevdolus give his name to the colony of Molae, i.e. the millstones which were often driven by delinquent slaves. The phrase sine sacris hereditas (Capt. 775, Trin. 484) was a Koman proverb for "a rose without a thorn." Roman estates were so often encumbered with reUgious dues that an estate not so vexed was a singularly lucky windfall. Sacra priuata perpetua manento was a provision of the Twelve Tables. Other legal terms found are : usu fecisti tuom [Amph. 375), scriptura (the tax paid on pubhc pastures. True. 144), tuas res tibi habeto (the injunction of a husband to the wife he is divorcing, Trin. 266, cf. Amph. 928), and ciuis immunis (a citizen exempt from the payment of taxes, Trin. 350). So thoroughly has Plautus Romanised this section of his world, that only the rarest traces are left of unmistakably Greek institutions. Besides agoranomi (clerks of the market, Capt. 824, Cure. 285) and demarchi (presidents of the demos, Cure. 286) there is the magister curiae of Aul. 107, who must really represent the rpiTTvdpxv:, for such distributions as are here described were for long common in Greece, but not in Rome before the Empire. In Cist. 100, there is a reference to the Athenian law that the nearest kinsman of an orphan heiress (^ eTrt/cXiy/so?) should be obUged to marry her; thus Selenium is in despair that her lover Alcesimarchus will needs take to wife his kinswoman, sua cognata Letnniensis. The word crvyypaavXov,^« oo pounds. Am. 809. centumpondium, a weight of a hundred pounds (recognised as Roman on the authority of Cato), Asin. 303. 11} UNCLASSIFIED EXAMPLES 69 amphora (M. G. 824), about six gallons, and thus equi- valent to the quadrantal of Cure. 110. Liquid congius, about six pints, in the phrase con- Measure. gialisfidelia of Aul. 622. hemina, half a pint (used also by Cato), M. G*. 831. (The Greek metreta, or nine gallons, occurs Merc. 75.) tnodius, a peck, a Roman corn measure, St. 253, Capt. 916. The Greek medimnics, which was equivalent to n^y six modii, occurs quite frequently in Plautus. Measure. peSj a foot, as a measure of length, Asin. 603, Bacch. 550, Trin. 903, Cure. 441. Measure. 8. Unclassified examples Many ventures make a full freight. Proverb. The following points cannot be classified imder any of the above headings, but are worthy of notice. In the fourth act of the Trinummus, the sycophant, having forgotten the name of Charmides, the man he professes to come from, tries to recall it with the help of the unrecog- nised Charmides himself. He assists with the prehminary fact that the name begins with C, and Charmides makes the following suggestions : Callias, Callippus, Gallidemides, Callinicus, CalUmarchus, Chares, Charmides. Now in Greek the last two begin with x, and the rest with k ; only in Latin have they all a common initial, and this disposes us to beheve that the passage at least in part is Plautine, not Greek, in origin. In Ps. 1302, Simo gives an estimate of the amoimt of wine Pseicdolus can drink in an hour, and the slave retorts. 70 THE OEIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. *'Nay, in a winter's hour" (hiberna hora). This was accord- ing to Koman reckoning, by which the short days of winter were divided into the same number of hours as the long days of summer, so that winter hours were of shorter duration. In Amph. 275, there is a small matter of astronomy. The constellations usually known by their Greek names, Orion, Hesperus, and the Pleiades, are called by their thoroughly Roman titles lugvlae, Uesperugo, and TJergiliae, which are recognised by Festus, though they do not seem to have been adopted into hterary Latin. 9. Language Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee. Ben Jonaon. Aehus Stilo, in a famous epigram, said that if the Muses spoke Latin they would choose to speak in the language of Plautus. At first this may seem a little puzzhng, but it really shows admirable judgment on the part of the ancient critic, for although the ordinary language of Plautus is hardly consonant with our idea of poetry, yet it is one of the most marvellous hnguistic monuments in the whole of Latin Uterature. Plautus was a past-master in the art of words, a bom creator, matchless and inexhaustible. His wonderful imagination and his infinitely quick and dehcate sensibihties worked a kind of magic with the ordinary language of the day.' As he is the sole extant representative of his type (for Terence seems cold and ordinary beside him), we cannot say whether he stood alone in this respect among his countrymen, or whether he typifies a people, unlettered indeed, but gifted with the rarest versatihty and picturesque- n] LANGUAGE 71 ness of expression. At any rate, this aspect of his work must needs be considered in estimating his originality. Its treatment here is necessarily very inadequate ; we can only try to give the broadest idea of his unique genius. His pearls of expression defy criticism as they do apt translation. We can do little more than quote — and marvel. To Plautus the world was not divided into labelled and pigeon-holed sections. By him, thoughts of the wildest oppo- sites could be welded together in glorious confusion, and hence comes his infinite power of metaphor. Examples are : calceatis dentibus (with boots on one's teeth, Caft. 187), uettistate uinum edentulum (wine toothless with age, Poen. 700), odos demissis pedibus in caelum uolat (the savour flies to heaven with down-hanging feet, Ps. 841), ulmea uirgidemia (a crop of elm-cudgels, Rtid. 636), monumentis bi^ulis (with reminders of bull's hide. Stick. 63), oculatae manus (hands that have eyes, Asin. 202). All his metaphors are taken quite hghtly from the ordinary things of life around him, and there is something in them of the whimsicahty of Edward Lear. He comes nearest to poetry in the Rudens, where his language is inseparable from the romantic atmosphere of the whole story. It is particularly Gripus, the strange old man from "the fishy briny places," whom he endows with a picturesqueness of expression beyond almost any other of his characters. He can invent magnificent words to fit any meaning — dentifrangibula, a tooth-breaker (Bacch. 596), ueriuerhium, truehood {Capt. 568). He works miracles of fun with super- latives — occissumus, ever so dead (Gas. 694), patruissime ! my super-uncle! {Poen. 1197), ipsissumus, myselfself {Trin. 72 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. 988). He can conjugate anything, be it verb or not — char- midatus es, you've been Charmidised — rursum te decharmida, now un-Charmidise yourself again (Trin. 977). Equally wonderful is he as a wizard in diminutives ; even Catullus, with his ingenuity fired by tenderness and passion, and his intellect aided by the additional hundred years of Uterary activity behind him, failed to outdo him here. Examples are countless. The hne (Ps. 68) papillarum horridularum oppressiunculae is typical, and so is the LiUiput of natural history in Asin. 666, passerculum, agnellum, etc. Plautus displays no less facihty in the matter of puns. There is one pun in the extant fragments of Menander, but anyone who has approached the unprofitable pastime of translating Plautine puns into EngHsh, will be ready to beUeve that Plautus, brimming over as he was with witty sparkles, invented his own pims, which is much quicker and easier, at his own pleasure, instead of trying to immortahse the dreary witticisms of an earlier age. His puns, good, bad, and indifierent, are simply beyond counting. Of all the plays, perhaps the Bacchides is the most afflicted in this respect, but none is entirely free from it. Some puns are on proper names — Sosia and socius {Amph. 383), damnum in Epidamno ("less at Leicester," Men. 264), Persa me pessum, dedit ("the Injun has injured me," Pers. 740) r some are merely common — arcam and arcem (Bacch. 943), palla pallorem incutit {Men. 610), inuitm and inuitat (Trin. 27) ; some are plays on single woida—imiocatusm the senses of " uninvited " and " invoked " (Capt. 70); and hunc ad te diripiundum adducimus (Poen. 646), we bring him, either to tear you to pieces, or to you to tear to pieces, in Latin a delicate ambiguity of which the Enghsh is incapable. II] LANGTTAQB 73 In this connection must be considered the Carthaginian passage in the Poenulus. It has always been a crux, and is likely always to remain so. The innumerable interpreta- tions of it, all contradictory and subversive of one another, by long generations of scholars, fill us with the sanguine suspicion that once it reaUy had a specific meaning. Beyond this, we can but echo the indisputable statement of Boch- artus — in lis expUcandis multi hactenus frustra sudarunt. Faihng any evidence to the contrary, we will assume that at least one of the alternative versions of Hanno's introductory speech (11. 930-939, or 940-949) was written by Plautus. The point that chiefly concerns us here is that in the following scene all MUphid's misinterpretations by word-sounds of Hanno's "Carthaginian" are done into genuine Latin, and cannot be derived, anyhow directly, from a Greek original. Thus Hanno's effusion lechla-chan- amli-minichot conveys to his bewildered interpreter only the Latin words lingulas, canales, nuces; palumergadetha be- comes palas and mergas, and so on. All this, then, Plautus evolved from his own brain, reahsing that such a hnguistic feat was sure of a warm reception. It is almost comparable with Shakespeare's scene, in which Henry V learns French by the most direct method, only the Plautine humour lacks that dehcate flavour of romance. As if to corroborate our confidence in Plautus' knowledge of Carthaginian, there is extant a fragment of one of his lost plays, the Caecus, which contains a Carthaginian word. This unadorned but suggestive treasure runs thus, A : Quis tu es qui ducis me ? B : Mu. A : Perii hercle ! Afer est. Alliteration, assonance, and asyndeton in Plautus have been so frequently brought before the pubhc notice that 5-5 74 THE ORIGINAL ELEMENT [CH. they need not be treated here at length. They abound in every play. The passage Cist. 206 seq. is worthy of attention for its excessive asyndeton, as denoting the emotions of an agitated lover. The chief point to notice is that these features are characteristic of Latin writings and entirely absent from Greek. It is in fact impossible to feel that Plautus' native literary style was in any way influenced by the works he was translating. Connected with his language, a great problem arises in the considerable amount of Greek scattered through his plays. Syntactically and idiomatically he is not affected by it, but in his vocabulary this feature is remarkable. Accord- ing to our received text, some of it is in Greek script, while some has been transUterated, but this of course is no criterion of what Plautus himself wrote. In a few instances the Greek runs to whole sentences, e.g. Stich. 707, ^ -n-ivT f) rpla •jrlv fj fir) rerrapa, and Gas. 728, Trpdy/MUTd fioi Trasjoej^et? In the majority of cases, however, the Greek consists of single words which have been naturahsed to the extent of having Latin inflexions; nouns — zamiam (Aul. 197); pro- thymiae {Stich. 634) ; verbs, — harpagauit (Ps. 139, Aul. 201), paratragoedat {Ps. 707), malacissandus {Bacch. 73) ; and adverbs — eicge, euscheme hercle astitit et dulice et comoedice {M. G. 213), basilice agito eleutheria {Pers. 29). Sometimes Plautus taxes bis hearers' proficiency in Greek by making Latin puns on Greek proper names, e.g. Lycus and lupus {Poen. 776), Gelasimus and ridiculus {Stich. 174). This hst is by no means exhaustive, and at first sight it is surprising that so much Greek should be found in plays written primarily for an unlettered and untravelled people, and apparently very well received by them. It is safe to II] LANGITAGE 75 assume that the audiences would never have approved plays which they considered stilted or spoilt by a learning beyond their ken. Although communication between the Roman and Greek worlds was by that time in a comparatively early stage, a considerable amount of Greek must already have been adopted into the Latin tongue. It is significant that Plautus, originally a rough countryman whose very name was thorough-going Umbrian, should have been such a supreme master in the understanding of Greek. It is this "dimkle Mittelgebiet," as Leo calls it, between Greek and Roman, both in language and in matter, which makes it so impossible to define exactly where the gift of the New Comedy ends and the originahty of Plautus begins. In any case, it is quite unthinkable that these stray bits of Greek were stopgaps because Plautus was unable to think of the Latin for them ! In these plays they come chiefly from the Hps of slaves (e.g. Stichus and Stasimus), and probably at that time they were an innovation of speech which had not reached the more exalted circles of society. The names of Plautus' characters are, with the exception of Hanno, Greek. But his soldiers are not the plain Poletno's and Thraso's of the New Comedy. Many names like PyrgopoUnices and Antamoenides carry us back to the Old Comedy, where impressive compounds such as AiKatoTroXt? and (i>eiSiTnrlSrj<; are frequent. Plautus' reversion to the older method was probably for comic effect, but it is inter- esting to note that his enterprise occasionally went a httle too far, and led him to make what Aristophanes would have regarded as etymologically false formations. 76 conclttsion: "the hack's peogress" [ch. CHAPTER III CONCLUSION: "THE HACK'S PROGRESS." Our evidence, not exhaustive, but at least fair and representative, is before us. To what conclusion does it lead? The first point to notice is that a considerable original element in Plautus certainly exists. The second point is that it is stronger in some plays than in others. The third point, which requires a httle elucidation, is that as far as it is possible to date the plays, the original element appears to be stronger in the later plays, and com- paratively lacking in the earUer. It is, in fact, possible to trace, with a reasonable amount of probability, the develop- ment of Plautus' methods as a playwright, and the effect of his gradually changing views upon his work. He seems to have begun to write comedies before the end of the second Punic war, and, as we have already seen, he probably first produced plays which were tolerably literal — and dull — translations of the original Greek. Fairly probable examples of these early works are the Mercator and the Cistellaria. The latter is indeed more or less dated by the reference, at the end of the prologue-hke speech of Auxilium, to the still unfinished war with Carthage — parite laudem et lauream^, vt uobis uicti Poeni poenas sujferant. 1 This jingle is curiously echoed more than a century later in Cicero's celebrated patriotic fragment cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi. in] CONCLUSION : " THE HACK'S PROGRESS " 77 The closing pun, and the appropriateness of the sentiment to a definite period, make it certain that this passage, even if not the whole speech, was an original composition of Plautus. Beyond this, the play seems to owe little to the hand of the Roman poet, and we have already seen (chap, ii) that one or two of its minor features are essentially Greek. These two plays may thus be taken as specimens of Plautus' 'prentice-work. It appears, however, that after a few trials he grew more enterprising, and began to impart new hfe to his comedies by personal touches adapted to the requirements and humours of his public. To this still early and somewhat progressive period may be assigned three plays. The Asinaria is shghtly Romanised, but has no particularly interesting feature to redeem its general sordidness. The Mostellaria is the excellent story of an old man who, returning home after a long absence abroad, is told by his slave Tranio that his house is haunted, and is thus nearly prevented from discovering that it really conceals the untimely revels of his son with a merry company of friends. Plautus has done full justice to the many possi- biUties of this theme, and the old story Uves again with unabated vigour. It is the military and legal flights of Tranio's fancy that contain the most noticeably Roman elements. The Menaechmi is another good story Arigorously revived. Something of the effect produced by this we can guess for ourselves, for Shakespeare, in his farce the Comedy of Errors, has taken this same ancient plot, and reproduced it in an even less completely revised setting. If the citizen of Ephesus would have stared, as he undoubtedly would, at Plautus' nonchalant references to aediles, patroni, and the hke, he would have been no less surprised when introduced 78 coNCLtrsiON: "the hack's progress" [oh. by Shakespeare to such personages as Pinch, the school- master, and AemiUa, the abbess, and by the attribution to himself of such advanced sentiments as, " Oh, for my beads, I cross me for a sinner." It may be noticed that as far as vividness of representation is concerned, Plautus does not suffer by comparison with the great master who at this one point joins hands with him across a great gulf of time and thought. Just before the turn of the century may be placed Plautus' chief efforts at contaminatio, abeady discussed. Part of the Miles Gloriosvs, as we have seen, was probably written earlier, but it is such a patchwork that the history of its composition can hardly be reconstructed now. Its production in its present lively form was probably later than that of the Poenulus, which marks the end of the war, and earUer than that of the Stichus, which is too dull to invite any particular date, from internal evidence, but is placed by Varro at 200 B.C. The scenes of revelry belowstairs, with which it closes, have been reproduced by Plautus in Roman guise, and are marked by a vivacity of which the rest of the play is hardly worthy. The following decade of peace and of growing settlement and comfort at Rome, was productive of a number of good plays, which demonstrate an ever-increasing power and originahty on the part of the author. The Ejndicus, cer- tainly, does not belong to his best work; its failure on the stage may not be due exclusively to the bad actor who is mentioned in the Bacchides as having spoilt it. We have already dated it about the time of the repeal of the lex Oppia in 195, and critics have found in the third act of the Aulularia a reference to the same event. Although Plautus was not responsible for the original conception of the miser Euclio, in] concltjsiok: "the hack's progress" 79 this unforgettable personage has lost not a jot in his appear- ance in Roman comedy. Every detail of this extraordinarily harsh and morbid character is reproduced by Plautus largely in Roman colours, and with a truthfulness which even his imitator MoUere failed to surpass. The Rudens, which pro- bably belongs to this period, we have already seen to be a masterpiece from the point of view of language and general atmosphere. To compare it with Shakespeare's Tempest is perhaps hardly just, nor as illuminating as some critics have thought; yet Plautus' workmanship is able to bear even this severe test. The Persa probably owes to its original creator an ordinary plot and dull execution, and to Plautus the enUvening gift of a goodly number of puns and more stirring scenes of Roman feasting. The Curculio has been definitely dated 193, by its reference to the kx Sempronia and its connection with the worship of Aesculapius. Into this play Plautus has introduced an unadulterated Roman element in the speech of the choragus, which has already been noticed for its numerous allusions to the topography of Rome. In details, too, he has gone farther in the process of Romanisation than in any of the preceding plays. The Psetidolus, the favourite of Plautus and of many critics, belongs to the year 191. This too has been seen to contain a great number of Roman details. It is further remarkable for its language, which, besides containing a certain number of Greek words, especially in the speeches of Pseitdolus himself, is marked by an originahty and picturesqueness of expression, especially in a wide vocabulary of endearment and abuse, which was now reaching its full development in Plautus, and becoming the hall-mark of his work. The Trinummus is fairly Roman but not particularly striking. 80 conclusion: "the hack's progress" [oh. From internal evidence, as we have seen, it may be assigned to a date not earlier than 190. The Bacchides is dated not much later than 189 by its apparent reference to the four triumphs of that year, and in passing we cannot but regret its excessive share of puns, although an infaUible sign of Plautus' originaUty at work. To this period probably belong the Trucvlerdus, whichis singularly immune from Grecisms, and contains, in patches, a consider- able Roman element, especially in the character of Stratophanes and in the allusions to ItaUan geography: and the Casina, very strongly Romanised in the scenes containing the casting of the lots and the celebration of the marriage, and obviously written before the prohibition of the Bacchanaha in 186. There remain two plays of Plautus, the Captiui and the Amphitnio, to which it is impossible to assign a definite date. It is, however, only reasonable to suppose that they were among his latest works. The Captiui is, from a dramatic standpoint, extraordinarily good; Lessing, no mean critic, went so far as to call it the best play that had ever been put upon the stage. It would indeed be no unworthy fruit of the many years of labour which Plautus had devoted to the writing and producing of plays. Its original is unknown. It is unhke most other Plautine comedies in its serious tone, and it has been suggested that the most amusing scenes, which are those in which the parasite Ergasilus appears, were Plautus' own invention. This is plausible, and, if true, may be accounted doubly to the credit of the author, for the play runs very smoothly, and the supposed original passages, apart from their individual merits, are inserted with the utmost skill. In almost every detail we have seen the play to be compatible with genuinely Roman ideas, and Ill] conclusion: "the hack's progress" 81 it abounds in vividly Roman touches, such as the many allusions to Roman and Itahan locaUties. The Amphitnto is a different type of play, but no less vigorous and striking. We have already estimated its originahty and its conformity in details to contemporary habits and thoughts at Rome. In the scenes with Alcmena it contains some singular Uttle touches of tenderness and pathos ; and yet its general effect is that of a roaring farce. It was no common mind that could unite such diverse features in a single work without producing the effect of absurdity or disjointedness. We have now briefly reviewed the twenty extant plays of Plautus. Considered as a whole, they vary greatly in merit, just as the best among them vary in the manner of their charm. The importance of Plautus, as eUcited by this enquiry, is twofold. In the first place, he is an instance of hterary development, at a time when the possibiUty of such a develop- ment had only just been reached, and had not yet been com- prehended or analysed in Roman thought. His progress is the more interesting, as he owed it chiefly to himself, and was almost independent of previous tradition or contemporary study. It is difficult to pick out a play or a passage, and say, "Here he was an artist," because in so many cases there were earUer Greek artists behind him; but we can say that the man who could produce, on the one hand, the Mercator, and on the other the Pseudolus, the Captiui, and the Amphitruo, was endowed at the beginning with a wonder- ful adaptability and capacity for progress, united to a great dramatic sense and power of creation. The nature of his work afforded practically no scope for excellence in original 82 CONCLUSION : " THE HACK's PROGRESS " [OH. in dramatic construction — that was abeady done for him ; but in the portrayal of the men around him, and in the power of imparting fresh, wide-open Ufa and fun and mirth, he surely developed a gift which is the possession of a few who are as precious as they are infinitely wise. Lastly, with a httle discrimination we can learn from Plautus a great deal of the way in which the Romans of his day thought and spoke and acted. This is important, because, beyond the twenty extant plays of Plautus, the fragments of Ennius, and some scanty writings of Cato, that age has bequeathed to us no Uterary expression of itself; and the fragments of Cato, for all their independence and staunch ideals, lack the extraordinary vitality, the sym- pathies, and the quick unerring humour, which make the plays of Plautus so much more personal and valuable a record. His value, perhaps temporary, as the main source of our knowledge of the New Comedy, has been frequently laboured, and has rather led to the obscuring of his individual merit. In some respects he and we are poles asunder ; yet, when we have considered him in the Ught of his own standards and conditions, he remains a vivid figure, memorable, and perhaps greater than we can understand. OAMBRIDQE: PMHTED by J. B. peace, M.A., at the UNTVEBSITY PEE3S.