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Updated: May 6, 2025
What sound wit, what keenness of observation, what a happy gift of invention, the old comic writers had at their disposal! I took them up again a few years ago, after reading with genuine pleasure in Otto Ribbeck's masterpiece, The History of Roman Poetry, the portions devoted to Plautus and Terence.
Plautus ties and unties the dramatic knot carelessly and loosely, but his plot is droll and often striking; Terence, far less effective, keeps everywhere account of probability, not unfrequently at the cost of suspense, and wages emphatic war against the certainly somewhat flat and insipid standing expedients of his predecessors, e. g. against allegoric dreams.
If you read it, be sure to make yourself mistress of all the terms. But, if you continue your Gibbon, it will find you in employment for some days. When you are weary of soaring with him, and wish to descend into common life, read the Comedies of Plautus. There is a tolerable translation in the City Library.
Plautus writes for the great multitude and gives utterance to profane and sarcastic speeches, so far as the censorship of the stage at all allowed; Terence on the contrary describes it as his aim to please the good and, like Menander, to offend nobody.
Plautus and Terence as Imitators of the Greeks, here examined and characterized in the absence of the Originals they copied Motives of the Athenian Comedy from Manners and Society Portrait-Statues of two Comedians. On the little of the New Comedy of the Greeks that has reached us, either in fragments or through the medium of Roman imitations, all I have to say may be comprised in a few words.
Luther was a genial youth, and gave a supper to his friends before he left them; there were feasting and laughter and a burst of song. That same evening the door of a convent opened to receive a novice with two books, Vergil and Plautus, in his hand. The novice had to perform the meanest tasks, sweeping floors and begging in the street on behalf of his brethren of the Augustinian Order.
This poet used much more license with his subject than Trissino; his plot is less simple and pathetic, but abounds in horror, and his style is florid and rhetorical. As the tragic poets of this century servilely imitated Sophocles and Euripides, the comic writers copied Plautus and Terence.
The words flashed into light from the folded pages of Julian's memory, and with them the dim image of a dead face, and the dying echo of a father's voice. "Pol pudere quam pigere proestat totidem literis." Plautus Trinum, Two, 2.
On the other hand we may regard as characteristic of Plautus, the masterly handling of the language and of the varied rhythms, a rare skill in adjusting and working the situation for dramatic effect, the almost always clever and often excellent dialogue, and, above all, a broad and fresh humour, which produces an irresistible comic effect with its happy jokes, its rich vocabulary of nicknames, its whimsical coinage of words, its pungent, often mimic, descriptions and situations excellences, in which we seem to recognize the former actor.
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.
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