after the girl) in which one of the tricks used to thwart the father is the impersonation of Casina in the bedroom by a
male slave. Rudens ('The Rope') is set on the coast of north Africa near Cyrene: a slave-dealer is shipwrecked there
in a storm, and one of the girls in his possession turns out to be the long-lost daughter of a man living there in exile
from Athens. But beneath the surface variety of the plays the basic structure of the plot (preserved from the Greek
original) nearly always concerns the removal or overcoming of some apparent obstacle to the course of true love.
Bronze Bust Of Menander (c.342-292 B.C.), the most famous exponent of the 'New' Comedy which inspired the Latin
playwrights Plautus and Terence. In contrast to the rumbustious burlesque of Aristophanes and his contemporaries,
Menander wrote situation comedies involving such stock characters as the stern father, profligate son, scheming
slave, and good-hearted prostitute.