- The First Roman Literature
(By P.G. McC. Brown)Plautus
Latin literature begins with a bang, with a dazzling display of virtuoso verbal fireworks in twenty comedies written
by Plautus between about 205 and 184 B.C. The start of Latin literature is conventionally dated to the performance of
a play by Livius Andronicus at Rome in 240 B.C., but these comedies by Plautus are the earliest works to have
survived complete. They arc modeled on Greek comedies, nearly all of them 'New Comedies' written by Menander
and his contemporaries about 100 years before Plautus. Like the Greek comedies, they are written in verse. Greek
comedies were written for performance in a permanent theatre at Athens, as central elements in a religious festival.
Roman comedies were also performed at religious festivals, but they were one source of entertainment among many,
and they were performed on a temporary stage erected for the occasion. Romans of all classes came to watch. We
cannot tell to what extent Plautus adapted his style to the taste of his audience and to what extent he helped to form
that taste; but he has imported into his plays a boisterousness and a broadness of comic effect which remind us more
of Aristophanes (though there is much less obscenity) than of Menander.
The Greek originals of Plautus' plays have not survived, though a tattered papyrus published in 1968 contains the
lines on which Bacchides ('The Bacchis Sisters') 494-561 are based and enables us to study Plautus' techniques of
adaptation at first hand for this stretch of the play. Plautus has preserved the basic plot and sequence of scenes, but he
has cut two scenes altogether, and at one point he reverses the order of entry of two characters so as to eliminate a
pause in the action where there was an act-break in the original (Roman comedy was usually written for continuous
performance, and the act- and scene-divisions found in modern editions do not go back to the authors). The
tormented monologue of a young man in love has had some jokes added to it. Passages which would have been
spoken without musical accompaniment in the original Greek are turned into passages in longer lines to be
accompanied on a reed-pipe. Plautus' play is still set in Athens, and his characters have Greek-sounding names; but
he has changed most of them from the original, most significantly that of the scheming slave who dominates the
action: Plautus calls him Chrysalus (Gold-finger) and adds some colour to his part by punning on this name (240
'Gold-finger's got to get his fingers on some gold', 361-2 'He'll change my name from Goldfinger to Gallowsbird',
etc.). The papyrus shows that this character in the original had the less striking name of Syrus (The Syrian), which
adds spice to Chrysalus' boast at 649 that he is superior to run-of-the-mill slaves with names like Parmeno and Syrus-
though the joke would doubtless have been lost on most of Plautus' audience.