Note 3 — Chapter VII

He composed about forty plays. Most of them had Greek titles, and a considerable number of these are identical with the titles of comedies by Menander. Two of the longest of his fragments express with more bitterness and less humour the feelings which husbands in Plautus entertain towards their wives. In one of these passages he has adapted his Greek original to the coarser Roman taste with even less fastidiousness than Plautus generally shows3. Another passage, from the Synephebi, is more in the spirit of Terence than of Plautus. It is one in which a young lover complains that the 'good nature' (commoditas) of his father made it impossible to cheat him with an easy conscience. Occasionally we find specimens of those short maxims which probably led the Augustan critics to attribute to him the character of gravitas, such as the