Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period, remembered for comedies that are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote in Palliata comoedia, a genre devised by Livius Andronicus, the innovator of Latin literature. The word “Plautine” came to refer both to Plautus’s own plays and to works like them or shaped by them, a sign of how strongly his comic style was recognized.

Little is known with certainty about Plautus’s early life. He is believed to have been born around 254 BC in Sarsina, a small town in what is now Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, in the ancient region of Umbria. According to Morris Marples, Plautus worked in his early years as a stage-carpenter or scene-shifter, and it may have been there that his love of theater began. His acting talent was eventually discovered, and he adopted the name “Maccius,” from Maccus, a clownish stock character in Atellan Farce, and “Plautus,” usually understood as “flat-footed.”

Tradition says that Plautus made enough money to enter the nautical business, but that the venture collapsed. He is then said to have worked as a manual laborer while studying Greek drama in his leisure, especially the New Comedy of Menander. Those studies shaped the plays he wrote between about 205 and 184 BC. Plautus mostly adapted Greek models for Roman audiences, often drawing directly on Greek playwrights, but reworking the material to give it a flavor that would appeal locally in Rome.

Among his surviving plays are Amphitruo, in which Jupiter disguises himself as Amphitruo and visits Alcumena, while Mercury, disguised as the slave Sosia, keeps watch; Asinaria, where cunning slaves help a young lover by cheating money out of others; and Aulularia, “The Pot of Gold,” centered on the miser Euclio and his anxious guarding of hidden wealth. Bacchides follows young men, twin courtesans named Bacchis, and the deceptions of the slave Chrysalus. Some of these plays survive with gaps or missing endings, but their plots still show Plautus’s taste for mistaken identity, clever servants, family conflict, greed, desire, and sudden reversals.

Plautus became so popular that his name alone was taken as a mark of theatrical success. His influence reached far beyond Roman comedy, including Shakespeare and Molière; Molière’s The Miser is partly modeled on Plautus’s Aulularia. His own epitaph imagined Comedy mourning him, the stage deserted, and Laughter, Jest, Wit, and Melody weeping together. That image fits the writer preserved in his plays: fast, noisy, practical, and deeply aware of how people try to fool one another, save face, get money, and win love.