Looking Through the Past
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As is the case with a lot of ancient authors, it’s hard to get a handle on Plautus. If you’ve never heard of him, he was one of the most famous writers of comedic plays in ancient Rome. He lived and wrote in the late 200s and early 100s BCE and was regarded by Romans as a real master of his craft, following in the footsteps of (and lifting material from) Greek playwrights like Menander.
But we don’t know much about the man himself. Theater in this period of Roman history was a disreputable endeavor; citizens were not allowed to become actors. So he really only became famous after his death.
Even his name is likely a nom de plume — though his first name, Titus, is common, his middle name, Maccius, refers to a famous clown, and Plautus, means something like “flat on the ground.” It’s a suitably wacky name for a playwright whose work centers on misunderstandings and mistaken identities. We don’t know about his life — he was maybe a manual laborer who wrote in his spare time, but who knows? We don’t even know what he wrote. Scholars have argued since ancient times about which of “his” plays are really his. This is especially confusing because many of Plautus’ works are reworkings of earlier plays anyway. Oh, and most of the plays attributed to Plautus aren’t complete — we have fragments of varying size rather than full scripts.
