Note 8 — Chapter VI

Our chief authorities for the life of Plautus are a short statement of Jerome, one or two slight notices in Cicero, and a somewhat longer passage in Aulus Gellius (iii. 3. 14). As he died at an advanced age, in the year 184 b.c.8 (during the censorship of Cato), he must have been born about the middle of the third century b.c. He was thus a younger contemporary of Naevius, and somewhat older than Ennius. His birthplace was Sarsina in Umbria. That this district must have been thoroughly Latinised in the time of Plautus, is attested by the idiomatic force and purity of his style9. He probably came early to Rome, and was at first engaged 'in operis artificum scenicorum,'—in some kind of employment connected with the stage. He saved money in this service, and lost it all in foreign trade,—what he himself calls 'marituma negotia'10. Returning to Rome in absolute poverty, he was reduced to work as a hired servant in a mill; and while thus employed he first began to write comedies. The names of two of these early works, Saturio and Addictus, have been preserved by Gellius. From this time till his death he seems to have been a most rapid and productive writer. We have no means of determining at what date he began to write. A passage quoted from Cicero has been thought to imply that he was writing for the stage during the life-time of P. and Cn. Scipio, i.e. before 212 b.c. But the earliest allusion to contemporary events that we find in any of his extant plays, is that in the Miles Gloriosus, to the imprisonment of Naevius, probably in 206-5 b.c.11 We have no certainty that any of the extant plays were written before that date, although the mention of Hiero in the Menaechmi, and the use of some more than usually archaic inflexions in that play, have been supposed to indicate an earlier date for it. Of the other plays, the Cistellaria and Stichus were written within a year or two of the Second Punic War12. The larger number of the extant comedies belong to the last ten years of the poet's life. His plays do not seem to have been published as literary works during his life-time, but to have been left in possession of the acting companies, by whom passages may have been interpolated and others omitted, before they were finally reduced into a literary shape. Most of the prologues to his plays belong to a later time, probably that of the generation after his death13. Of the twenty-one plays which Varro accepted, on the ground of their intrinsic merits, as certainly genuine, we possess twenty, and fragments of the remaining one, the Vidularia. The names of some other genuine plays, such as the Saturio, Addictus, and Commorientes, are also known to us.