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Plautus

Plautus

c. 254 BCE–c. 184 BCE · Rome

Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BCE) was a Roman comic playwright whose works are the earliest surviving complete Latin literary texts. Active in Rome during the late third and early second centuries BCE, he adapted Greek New Comedy—chiefly the work of Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon—into Latin verse comedies known as the fabula palliata. Twenty complete plays survive (plus the fragmentary Vidularia) from the twenty-one-play canon assembled by the scholar Varro, among them Miles Gloriosus, Pseudolus, Menaechmi, Aulularia, and Trinummus. His comedies are marked by farcical plots, stock characters such as the scheming slave and the braggart soldier, metrical inventiveness, and song-like cantica. According to ancient tradition he was born at Sarsina in Umbria; his plays later influenced Renaissance and early modern European drama.

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Stop 1 of 1254 BCE–184 BCELived

RomeרומאItaly

What they did here

Comic playwright active in Rome.

Rome in this era

In the late Republic (2nd-1st centuries BCE) Rome was a city-state ruling a Mediterranean empire, governed by the Senate and annual magistrates amid growing civil wars. Educated Romans studied Greek philosophy and rhetoric, and Latin writers such as Lucretius and Cicero set out to carry Greek thought into Latin.

About Rome

Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.

In Rome at the same time

Terence

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Plautus’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

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The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Plautus’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(20)