INTRODUCTION


Little is known of the life of Titus Maccius Plautus. He was born
about 255 B.C. at Sarsina, in Umbria; it is said that he went to Rome
at an early age, worked at a theatre, saved some money, lost it in a
mercantile venture, returned to Rome penniless, got employment in a
mill and wrote, during his leisure hours, three plays. These three
plays were followed by many more than the twenty extant, most of them
written, it would seem, in the latter half of his life, and all of
them adapted from the comedies of various Greek dramatists, chiefly of
the New Comedy.[15] Adaptations rather than translations they
certainly were. Apart from the many allusions in his comedies to
customs and conditions distinctly Roman, there is evidence enough in
Plautus’s language and style that he was not a close translator. Modern
translators who have struggled vainly to reproduce faithfully in their
own tongues, even in prose, the countless puns and quips, the incessant
alliteration and assonance in the Latin lines, would be the last to
admit that Plautus, writing so much, writing in verse, and writing with
such careless, jovial, exuberant ease, was nothing but a translator in
the narrow sense of the term.

Very few of his extant comedies can be dated, so far as the year
of their production in Rome is concerned, with any great degree of
certainty. _The Miles Gloriosus_ appeared about 206, the _Cistellaria_
about 202, _Stichus_ in 200, _Pseudolus_ in 191 B.C.; the _Truculentus_,
like _Pseudolus_, was composed when Plautus was an old man, not many