letters. "I know three already," he continues, "What three?" is asked,
"A M O."

While we are glad to mark an advancement in less pleasures being derived
from personal threats and conflicts on the stage, we are pained to find
such an entire want of sympathy with the sufferings of those in a
servile condition. The severity with which slaves were treated in
previous times was not mitigated under the Roman rule, and at the
present day it is difficult to realise the moral state of those who
could derive amusement from hearing men threatened with bull-hidings,
and flogged on the stage. Such terms as "whip-knave" became stale from
repetition, and so many jokes were made even about crucifixion, that we
might suppose it to be a very trifling punishment. Chrysalus, a slave,
facetiously observes, that when his master discovers he has spent his
gold, he will make him "cruscisalus" _i.e._ "cross jumper." In "The
Haunted House," Tranio, who, certainly seems to have been a great scamp,
soliloquises as follows on hearing of his master's return:--

"Is there any one, who would like to gain a little money, who could
endure this day to take my place in being tortured? Who are those
fellows hardened to a flogging, who wear out iron chains, or those who
for three didrachmas[19] would get beneath besieging towers, where they
might have their bodies pierced with fifteen spears? I'll give a talent
to that man who shall be the first to run to the cross for me, but on
condition that his feet and arms are doubly fastened there. When that is
done, then ask the money of me."

Acoustic humour appears not only in puns, but under the form of long
names of which Plautus was especially fond, Periplecomenus,
Polymacharoplagides, and Thesaurochrysonicocræ are specimens of his