Plautus and comedy

The story

An author who made the Romans laugh

Have you ever laughed at a case of mistaken identity, at a servant cleverer than his master, at an old miser hiding a treasure? These situations, which we find in comedies and films today, are more than two thousand years old. They were brought onto the stage in Rome by an author called Titus Maccius Plautus, the most famous writer of comedies in ancient Rome.

We know less about Plautus than we would like. He was born at Sarsina, a small town in the Apennines which in antiquity lay in Umbria and which today is part of Romagna. He died in Rome in 184 BC: this date is certain. We do not know the year of his birth precisely, and scholars work it out from a remark by Cicero, between 255 and 250 BC. He was not Roman by birth but he was a free man. An old legend had him forced to work at a mill wheel to earn a living, but scholars today consider it invented.

Even his name is a small mystery. “Maccius” seems linked to Maccus, the name of a comic mask in popular farces. “Plautus”, according to ancient authors, would be a nickname meaning “flat-footed”. Perhaps Plautus worked in the world of the theatre as an actor or as an author of farces, but about this too there is no certainty.

Greek comedies in Roman versions

Plautus did not invent his plots from scratch. He took Greek comedies, above all of the so-called “New Comedy”, which told stories of families and lovers, and rewrote them in Latin for the Roman public. He often combined several Greek comedies into one, a technique the Romans called contaminatio. Comedies in Greek dress, with Greek characters and settings, were called palliatae, from the pallium, the Greeks' cloak. For one of his comedies, the Bacchides, the model was a text by the great Greek playwright Menander.

His success was enormous. According to ancient scholars, about 130 comedies circulated under Plautus's name. The learned Varro chose 21 that he considered certainly his. Of these, 20 have come down to us complete, and one, the Vidularia, only in pieces.

The characters and the tricks of comedy

In Plautus's comedies the same types of character always come back, like the cards in a pack. There is the old miser or old man in love, the young man in love, the boastful soldier who brags about deeds he never did, the parasite who eats at other people's expense and the slave trader. And above all there is the clever slave, who with a series of tricks helps the young master get what he wants. In a world where slavery was normal, seeing on the stage the slave cleverer than his master made people laugh and was also a small revenge.

Some comedies have remained famous. The Aulularia, the “comedy of the pot”, tells of an old miser, Euclio, who hides a pot full of gold and lives in terror that someone will steal it. The Menaechmi is about two twins separated as children who find themselves in the same city, and everyone mistakes one for the other: it is the prototype of the comedy of errors. The Miles gloriosus has a boastful soldier as its main character. The Amphitryon is the only comedy by Plautus with a story inspired by mythology. The Pseudolus has a tricky slave as its hero. The Captivi, “The Prisoners”, is an unusual comedy, with no love plots.

Plautus was also a master of language. He mixed words from everyday speech, Greek words, invented words, puns and double meanings. His comedies were partly sung, with musical accompaniment. The comedy came from the situations: the mistaken identities, the disguises, the misunderstandings.

Where were they performed?

In Rome, in Plautus's time, there was no permanent theatre. The comedies were staged during public festivals in temporary wooden structures, put up for the occasion and then taken down. Roman law, in fact, forbade stone theatres: only temporary wooden constructions were allowed, near places of worship. The first stone theatre in Rome was built much later by Pompey, and finished in 55 BC: to get around the Senate's ban he had it built as a great flight of steps leading up to a temple, the Temple of Venus Victrix.

Plautus's legacy

After his death Plautus's comedies continued to be performed and studied. The Menaechmi was the source of William Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. In 1962 a Broadway musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, took its inspiration from the Miles gloriosus and the Pseudolus; the director Richard Lester later made it into a film. When we laugh at a misunderstanding in a comedy today, we are using without knowing it one of the tricks that Plautus had already perfected.