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PLAUTUS, with the name that barks,” quips the speaker of the prologue to Casina. An ancient commentator explains the joke by pointing out that “Plautus,” which literally means “flat,” here specifically alludes to the flat ears of a hound. The name Plautus may also give us a clue to the author’s origin, for the word appears to be a Latinized form of an Umbrian word, and ancient sources claim that his home was Sarsina (an Umbrian town to the northeast of Rome). While we have no way of proving that Sarsina was in fact Plautus’ home, it is a reasonable assumption that he, like the overwhelming majority of Rome’s earliest Latin authors, was not a native Roman. Writers since Plautus’ time have usually referred to him simply as Plautus, though several bits of evidence suggest that his full name was Titus Maccius Plautus. This may, in fact, be a pen name. While “Titus” is a common enough first name, “Maccius” is very suspicious, for it clearly derives from “Maccus,” the clown, a stock character of ancient Italian farce. Now if our author was not a native Roman, then he should not have had three names like a Roman patrician ; this suggests that at least part of his name was a pen name. With our suspicions raised, we note that “Plautus” can also mean “flat-footed” and thus could refer to shoeless actors in mimes, and “Titus” might carry the obscene connotation of “penis.” In short, while our author may have been blessed with a name happily appropriate to his profession (like the English poet Wordsworth), it is more likely that he adopted a significant, silly name for himself, one meaning something like “Dick MacClown the Mime-Guy.”1 “ 149 INTRODUCTION The Author 1. For further detail on the name, see A. S. Gratwick, “Titus Maccius Plautus,” Classical Quarterly 23 (1973): 78–84. 03A-T1535-P3 2/20/01 5:35 PM Page 149 150 Plautus and Roman New Comedy 2. Andronicus (dates uncertain, but spanned 240–207 b.c.) wrote tragedies, comedies, and a translation of Homer’s Odyssey; Naevius (died ca. 200 b.c.) wrote an epic on the First Punic War, comedies, tragedies, and plays on Roman History; Ennius (239–169 b.c.) wrote an epic on Roman history, tragedies, comedies, and numerous minor works; Caecilius (died 168 b.c.) wrote comedies. Plautus appears to have been the first to specialize in one genre. Aside from a possible Umbrian origin, we know virtually nothing about Plautus’ life. The scant information about him preserved in other ancient sources is of doubtful veracity, and it is dangerous to use information contained within the scripts to reconstruct the poet’s personal history. We can only speculate that his involvement with the theater included acting or production of plays. Plautus and Early Roman Literature Plautus’ plays were evidently popular with his contemporaries, and Romans continued to perform and read his scripts even after his death. Indeed, such was the popularity of Plautus that by the middle of the second century a.d. approximately one hundred thirty scripts were circulating under his name. Not all were genuine, which suggests that producers or writers sought to increase the marketability of their own works by attaching to them Plautus’ name. The scripts of twenty-one plays have survived; these are almost certainly the twenty-one scripts identified in the first century b.c. by the Roman scholar Varro as the unquestionably genuine works of Plautus. No doubt other scripts of disputed authenticity were genuine, but they have not survived. The traditional dates for Plautus’ period of activity (ca. 210–184 b.c.) rest upon a variety of evidence, including the production notices preserved in our manuscripts that date his plays Stichus to 200 and Pseudolus to 192/1. Lines 11– 19 (in the Latin text) of Casina reveal that the prologue as we have it is not from the original production but from a repeat performance of roughly a generation later and that Plautus and his peers, the cream of Rome’s poetic crop, were already dead. While the speaker of the prologue may exaggerate the qualitative difference between living and deceased authors, it is worth emphasizing that Plautus did indeed belong to a generation of talented and pioneering poets who shaped the course of Latin literature. Unfortunately, the works of those other innovators—Livius Andronicus, Gnaeus Naevius, Quintus Ennius, Caecilius Statius—are almost wholly lost, surviving only in fragmentary...

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