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The -litteratores- of the following century reckoned up as many as 130 such "Plautine pieces"; but of these a large portion at any rate were merely revised by Plautus or had no connection with him at all; the best of them are still extant.
Political Neutrality The compilers were still more decidedly prohibited from naming any living person in terms either of praise or censure, as well as from any captious allusion to the circumstances of the times. In the whole repertory of the Plautine and post-Plautine comedy, there is not, so far as we know, matter for a single action of damages.
Non pertractate facta est neque item ut ceterae, Neque spurcidici insunt versus immemorabiles, Hic neque periurus leno est nec meretrix mala Neque miles gloriosus is really a severe condemnation of two other groups of Plautine plays.
While the latter had been in the previous period supplanted by the more tasteful but in point of comic vigour far inferior Terence, Roscius and Varro, or in other words the theatre and philology, co-operated to procure for him a resurrection similar to that which Shakespeare experienced at the hands of Garrick and Johnson; but even Plautus had to suffer from the degenerate susceptibility and the impatient haste of an audience spoilt by the short and slovenly farces, so that the managers found themselves compelled to excuse the length of the Plautine comedies and even perhaps to make omissions and alterations.
That the public still in the Sullan age expected to see such, appears from the reproductions belonging to this epoch of Plautine comedies with the titles and names of the persons altered, with reference to which the managers well added that it was better to see a good old piece than a bad new one.
It was Laetus who introduced and conducted the representations of ancient, chiefly Plautine, plays in Rome. Every year, he celebrated the anniversary of the foundation of the city by a festival, at which his friends and pupils recited speeches and poems. Such meetings were the origin of what acquired, and long retained, the name of the Roman Academy.
The lazy Plautine hostelry, the very unconstrained but very charming damsels with the hosts duly corresponding, the sabre-rattling troopers, the menial world painted with an altogether peculiar humour, whose heaven is the cellar, and whose fate is the lash, have disappeared in Terence or at any rate undergone improvement.
Now and again one is reminded of the Winter's Tale, with fishermen instead of shepherds for the subordinate characters; more frequently of a play which, indeed, has borrowed a good deal from this, Pericles Prince of Tyre. The remainder of the Plautine plays may be dismissed with scant notice.
The -litteratores- of the following century reckoned up as many as 130 such "Plautine pieces"; but of these a large portion at any rate were merely revised by Plautus or had no connection with him at all; the best of them are still extant.
There is yet one more of the Plautine comedies which deserves special notice, as conceived in a different vein and worked out in a different tone from all those already mentioned the charming romantic comedy called Rudens, or The Cable, though a more fitting name for it would be The Tempest.
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