Plautus
Titus Maccius Plautus[1] (/ˈplɔːtəs/, PLAW-təs; c. 254 – 184 BC) was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by Livius Andronicus, the innovator of Latin literature. The word Plautine /ˈplɔːtaɪn/ (PLAW-tyne) refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his.
For the Roman noble, see Rubellius Plautus. For the genus also known as Pinguinus, see Great auk.
Plautus
Manuscript tradition[edit]
The oldest manuscript of Plautus is a palimpsest, known as the Ambrosian palimpsest (A), since it is kept in the Ambrosian Library in Milan. It is thought to date to the 5th century,[7] but it was not discovered until 1815. This manuscript is only partly legible, since the parchment was cleaned and a copy of the books of Kings and Chronicles was written on top. Parts of the text are completely missing (for example, nothing survives of Amphitruo, Asinaria, Aulularia, or of the first 475 lines of Bacchides), and other parts are barely legible.[8] The most legible parts of A are found in the plays Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus, and Stichus.[9] Despite its fragmentary state, this palimpsest has proved very valuable in correcting the errors of P.
A second manuscript tradition is represented by manuscripts of the Palatine family, so called because two of its most important manuscripts were once kept in the library of the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg in Germany.[10] The archetype of this family is now lost but it can be reconstructed from various later manuscripts, some of them containing either only the first half or the second half of the plays. The most important manuscript of this group is "B", of the 10th or early 11th century, now kept in the Vatican library. Manuscripts C and D also belong to this family. The lost original P, from which all these manuscripts were copied, is ascribed by Lindsay to the 8th or 9th century.[11] Because of certain errors which both A and the P family have in common, it is thought that they are not completely independent, but are both copies of a single manuscript dating to perhaps the 4th or 5th century AD.[7]
At some stage the plays in the P family were divided into two halves, one containing Amphitruo to Epidicus (omitting Bacchides), and the other containing Bacchides and Menaechmi to Truculentus. The first eight plays are found in B, and the first three and part of Captivi are found in D. The last twelve plays are found in B, C, and D. In addition there was once a fragmentary manuscript called the Codex Turnebi (T), which was used by a French scholar called Turnèbe in the 16th century. Although this manuscript is now lost, some readings from it were preserved by Turnèbe himself, and others were recorded in the margins of a 16th-century edition discovered by Lindsay in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.[12]
There are certain indications (for example, small gaps in the text where there appears to have been in a hole or lacuna in the parchment) that the original P manuscript was copied from an earlier manuscript with 19, 20 or 21 lines to the page, in other words it was a book very similar to A, which has 19 lines to the page, and probably it was about the same age. However, the order of plays in A is slightly different from that in the P family of manuscripts. The headings at the top of the scenes in A, containing character names, which were written in red ink, have been totally washed away, and those in the P family seem to be based on guesswork and so were also probably missing in an ancestor of the lost P codex. For this reason the names of some of the minor characters are not known.[12]
Influences[edit]
Greek New Comedy[edit]
Greek New Comedy greatly differs from those plays of Aristophanes. The most notable difference, according to Dana F. Sutton, is that New Comedy, in comparison to Old Comedy, is "devoid of a serious political, social or intellectual content" and "could be performed in any number of social and political settings without risk of giving offense".[25] The risk-taking for which Aristophanes is known is noticeably lacking in the New Comedy plays of Menander. Instead, there is much more of a focus on the home and the family unit—something that the Romans, including Plautus, could easily understand and adopt for themselves later in history.
Father–son relationships[edit]
One main theme of Greek New Comedy is the father–son relationship. For example, in Menander's Dis Exapaton there is a focus on the betrayal between age groups and friends. The father-son relationship is very strong and the son remains loyal to the father. The relationship is always a focus, even if it's not the focus of every action taken by the main characters. In Plautus, on the other hand, the focus is still on the relationship between father and son, but we see betrayal between the two men that wasn't seen in Menander. There is a focus on the proper conduct between a father and son that, apparently, was so important to Roman society at the time of Plautus.
This becomes the main difference and, also, similarity between Menander and Plautus. They both address "situations that tend to develop in the bosom of the family".[25] Both authors, through their plays, reflect a patriarchal society in which the father-son relationship is essential to proper function and development of the household.[26] It is no longer a political statement, as in Old Comedy, but a statement about household relations and proper behavior between a father and his son. But the attitudes on these relationships seem much different—a reflection of how the worlds of Menander and Plautus differed.
Language and style[edit]
Overview[edit]
Plautus wrote in a colloquial style far from the codified form of Latin that is found in Ovid or Virgil. This colloquial style is the everyday speech that Plautus would have been familiar with, yet that means that most students of Latin are unfamiliar with it. Adding to the unfamiliarity of Plautine language is the inconsistency of the irregularities that occur in the texts. In one of his studies, A.W. Hodgman noted that:
