Plautus, M. ACCIUS (or more correctly T. Maccius), the chief comic poet of Rome, and probably among his own countrymen the most popular Roman author of any age, was born about 250 B.C. at Sarsina, a village in Umbria, a district which at this time have been thoroughly Latinised. We have no knowledge of his early life and education, but it is probable that he came into Rome while still young, and acquired there his complete mastery of the most idiomatic Latin. Though born in the country, he introduces countrymen chiefly as subjects for ridicule; he always writes as a townsman, familiar with city life, especially among freedmen, craftsmen, and the middle classes. At Rome he found employment in connection with the stage, of what kind precisely we do not know. In this position he saved money enough to enable him to leave Rome and start in business on his own account in the way of foreign trade; and such early thrift shows strong character and determination to rise in the world. His plays evince close familiarity with seafaring life and adventure, and an intimate knowledge of all the details of buying and selling and keeping accounts—experience probably acquired during this period. We know that he failed in business, and returned to Rome in such poverty that he had to earn his livelihood in the service of a baker by turning a hand-mill, work generally performed by slaves. At this time, shortly before the second Punic war broke out, he was probably about thirty years of age, and while in this humble occupation he composed three plays which he sold to the managers of the public games. The price paid him enabled him to leave the mill, and he spent the rest of his life at Rome. Probably he commenced to write about 224 B.C., and for forty years, until his death in 184, he continued to produce comedies with wonderful fecundity. Most of the plays we have belong to the last ten years of his life. It is not certain whether Plautus ever obtained the Roman franchise. He was the contemporary of Nævius and of Ennius.
His plays appear not to have been published during his lifetime, but to have been left in the hands of the actors, who probably both interpolated and omitted passages to suit them for the stage. Almost all the prologues were written after his death. About 130 plays were attributed to him in the time of Gellius, who held most of them to be the work of earlier dramatists, revised and improved by Plautus. Roman critics considered most of them to be spurious. Varro in his treatise Quæstiones Plautinæ limited the genuine comedies to twenty-one; and these so-called 'Varronian comedies' are the same which we now possess, only one, the Vidularia, being lost. Plautus' plays were immensely popular on the stage, not only with the people, but with the educated classes, and were acted, as Arnobius tells us, in the time of Diocletian, five centuries later. Plautus borrowed his plots to a large extent from the New Attic Comedy, which dealt with social life to the exclusion of politics; he doubtless imitated its general types of character, but he 'adapted' very freely, and infused into his borrowed framework a new and robust life, which was Roman to the very core. His perfect spontaneity, vivacity, and vigour of language, and the comic power of his dialogues, show that these are the genuine fruit of his own genius. The scenes of his comedies are always laid in Athens or in some Greek town. Had he depicted the family life of Romans as so corrupt, the magistrates would no doubt have interfered; but the Greek personages of his plays speak and act in every respect like Romans; they refer familiarly to places in Italy, to streets, magistrates, and customs at Rome. Not even Shakespeare is more careless about inconsistency of this kind. It is probable that Plautus wrote with great rapidity; some of his finest comedies are spoilt through the action being too hurried towards the close. Roman comedy expressed 'a rebound from the severer duties of life'; Plautus' audience were in holiday mood, and did not expect to be admonished as to duty or entertained with serious reflection. His leading characters possess boundless animal spirits, infinite resource in difficulty, and but small conscience. His heroines show that, as Sellar says, Plautus was more familiar with the ways of 'libertinæ' than of Roman ladies. His favourite subject is a plot by which a slave, on behalf of his young master and the mistress of the latter, cheats a father or some one else. Plautus shows no feeling for nature, though he is fond of describing the sea in calm and storm; his lack of any sense of natural beauty and of high imagination makes a deep gulf between him and Aristophanes. Yet he shows distinct creative power, as in the character of Euclio the miser in the Aulularia, who, though entirely possessed by his one idea, is still honest and independent and not contemptible. Fine touches are not wanting. In the Captivi the slave Tyn-darus, cheerfully willing to sacrifice all for his young master, shows that Plautus had the power to conceive a really noble character. The charm of Plautus, lying in his genuine humour and powerful grasp of character, goes deep down to the roots of human nature; he delights his readers to-day as truly as when he made Roman theatres ring with applause, or when St Jerome solaced himself in his cell by reading the well-loved comedies. His joyous sense in all circumstances of the gladness of life is the sign of a strong and manly nature; he makes his reader look involuntarily at the bright side of things. According to Sellar, the five best plays are Aulularia, Captivi, Menechmi, Pseudolus, Rudens. Shakespeare has imitated the plot of the Menechmi, entirely recasting it, in his Comedy of Errors. Molière's L'Avare is borrowed from the Aulularia.
English translations are by Thornton and Warner (1767-74), and H. T. Riley (1880). Ritschl has shown great acuteness in restoring Plautus' text, which is very corrupt (2d ed. 1871). The complete edition which he contemplated was continued by his pupils, G. Goetz and others (1878 et seq.). See also Sellar, Roman Poets of the Republic.