The element of social comment in this last passage is not typical. Plautus was above all an entertainer and a poet. He
uses colloquial speech, but Romans presumably did not often speak in the alliterative style with which this passage
opens: 'Ut hoc utimur maxime more moro molestoque multum!' He abounds in wordplay and puns (at Rudens 102 a
roof whose tiles have been blown off in a storm lets the daylight through 'quam cribrum crebrius': it is 'more
perforated than a percolator'), in startling personifications (Rudens 626 'twist the neck of wrongdoing'), and in
riddling expressions (Mercator 361 'My father's a fly: you can't keep anything secret from him, he's always buzzing
around'). It is the sheer enjoyment in playing with words that is the hallmark of Plautus' genius.
Terence
The next Latin works to have survived are six comedies written by Terence in the 160s B.C. These too are based on
Greek New Comedies and written in verse. But there is a world of difference between Terence and Plautus. We do
not have any substantial portions of the Greek originals of Terence's plays; but (although we know him to have
changed some things) he seems to have preserved far more carefully than Plautus the ethos and general construction
of the Greek plays. Roman technical language is occasionally used, but not as obtrusively as by Plautus. There is a
considerable musical element, but hardly anything as extensive or as exotic metrically as a Plautine canticum. Above
all, the comedy remains essentially situation comedy, in which consistency of characterization and clarity of plot
construction are of vital importance.
The plots are once again concerned with love affairs and with the misunderstandings which arise from ignorance. In
Andria ('The Woman from Andros') Simo wants his son Pamphilus to marry the daughter of Chremes, a respectable
Athenian citizen; but Pamphilus is in love with a girl from Andros (Glycerium) who appears to be far less
respectable. Intrigues and counter-intrigues lead to a number of emotional complications, which are resolved by the
discovery that Glycerium is herself a daughter of Chremes. In Hecyra ('The Mother-in-Law') a young man (another
Pamphilus) has married a woman already pregnant (though he does not know this) as the result of being raped. When
she gives birth to a child of which there is every reason to suppose that he is not the father, their marriage appears to
be at an end. In the course of the play his wife's attempt to conceal her condition gives rise to various
misunderstandings: in particular, we see her mother-in-law being blamed by her father-in-law for the breakdown of
the marriage. But all ends happily when it is discovered that it was Pamphilus himself who had raped her one night
when drunk in the street. (It seems that the Greek society portrayed in these plays was prepared to take a tolerant
attitude to rape, as being a natural result of youthful drunkenness or high spirits.
The girls in question led secluded lives, and young men had few opportunities to strike up acquaintance with them in
a more leisurely way. Also, a citizen girl who had succumbed before marriage to a sustained campaign of seduction
would have made a less sympathetic heroine than one who had been overcome by force. But the playwrights are not
insensitive to the predicament of the victims of rape.) In Eunuchus ('The Eunuch') young Chaerea disguises himself
as a eunuch in order to gain access to the bedroom of the girl with whom he is infatuated and there rapes her. The girl
turns out to be the daughter of respectable Athenian parents, and Chaerea's father agrees to his marrying her. At the
centre of the action is the prostitute Thais, who has taken the girl under her wing and is determined to help her find
her parents. The picture of Thais is thrown into sharper relief by the fact that other characters in the play entertain
quite unjustified suspicions of her behaviour.
These plots are less varied than those of Plautus, but their basic structure is not very different. The main difference
between the two playwrights lies in the use which they make of their plots. Terence does not treat them as a
springboard for extraneous jokes but preserves from the Greek originals the more elusive and ironic humour which
arises out of a carefully constructed dramatic situation. We are told that Greek influence at Rome had increased
considerably in the 160s, and Terence's plays have been taken as evidence that Greek refinement was now more