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The apparitions were generally believed to frighten people, just as they are at present, though the well-authenticated stories of such occurrences would seem to show that genuine ghosts, or whatever one likes to call them, have the power of paralyzing fear. In the Mostellaria, Plautus uses a ghost as a recognized piece of supernatural machinery.
This service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously, by making two Carthaginian soldiers talk Phoenician; that service Moliere rendered, by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of dialects. Here objections spring up afresh. Phoenician, very good! Levantine, quite right! Even dialect, let that pass!
These art-critics probably took Caecilius under their wing, simply because he was more regular than Plautus and more vigorous than Terence; notwithstanding which he may very well have been far inferior to both. Moral Result
If the Roman public of this period was in some degree familiar, as the comedies of Plautus show, with the Homeric poems and the legends of Herakles, and was acquainted with at least the more generally current of the other myths, this knowledge must have found its way to the public primarily through the stage alongside of the school, and thus have formed at least a first step towards the understanding of the Hellenic poetry.
Sometimes they were from Terence, Plautus, or Aristophanes; sometimes modifications of the ancient mysteries, meant to enforce the Evangelical theology; sometimes comedies full of the contemporary life. There are several men that have earned mention in the history of German literature by writing plays for students. The representations became a principal means for celebrating great occasions.
Make him a courtier; a statesman; a philosopher; a scholar who does not blench even from the difficult Latin of Ovid and Plautus. Let this almost omniscient being possess supreme poetic genius, extensive classical attainments, and a tendency to make false quantities.
He told us of Cooke, who translated Hesiod, and lived twenty years on a translation of Plautus, for which he was always taking subscriptions; and that he presented Foote to a club, in the following singular manner: 'This is the nephew of the gentleman who was lately hung in chains for murdering his brother.
They have plucked away from the people the Holy Communion, the Word of God, from whence all comfort should be taken; the true worshipping of God also, and the right use of sacraments and prayer; and have given us of their own to play withal in the meanwhile, salt, water, oil, boxes, spittle, palms, bulls, jubilees, pardons, crosses, censings, and an endless rabble of ceremonies, and, as a man might term with Plautus, "pretty games to make sport withal."
This is the date generally adopted by authors who deal with literature as subordinate to political history. But the writer of the standard English work on Latin grammar limits his field to the period included between Plautus and Suetonius; while another scholar, extending his scope three centuries and a half further, has written a history of Latin literature from Ennius to Boethius.
The characters become not so much individuals as impersonations of social or domestic relationships, though drawn, it is true, with a life-like touch. This defect, which is shared to a great extent by Plautus, is doubtless due to the imitative nature of Latin comedy.
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