Note 42 — Chapter VI

But while the outward conditions of his dramas are professedly taken from Greek originals, much of the manner and spirit of his personages is certainly Roman. The language in which they express themselves in the first place is thoroughly their own. This is shown by the large number of his puns and plays on words. These by their spontaneity, sometimes by their grotesqueness, sometimes by a Latin play on a Greek word—such as Archidemides42 or Epidamnus,—show their native origin. No writer, again, abounds so much in alliterations, assonances, asyndeta43, which are characteristic of all early Roman poetry down even to Lucretius, and which have no parallel in the more refined and natural diction of the Greek dramatists. Further, we constantly meet with Roman formulae44, Roman proverbs45, expressions of courtesy46, and the like. The very fluency, copiousness, and verve of his language are impossible to a translator, at least in the early stages of a literature. Nothing can be more spontaneous and natural than the dialogue in Plautus. There is, on the other hand, considerable appearance of effort in the reflective passages of the 'cantica'; and this is exactly what we should expect in a Roman writer of originality. Reflexion on life was altogether strange to a Roman in the age of Plautus; to a Greek it was easy and hackneyed. In the prolixity and slow beating out of the thought in some of the 'cantica' we note the beginning of a process unfamiliar to the Roman mind, for which the forms of the Latin language were not yet adapted. The facility of expressing reflexion appears much more developed in Terence. If Plautus were reproducing a Greek original in such passages as Mostell. 85-145, Trinummus 186-273, the thought and the illustration would have lost much in freshness and naïveté but they would have been expressed with much more point and conciseness.