Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/421

Rh evidence of having been composed by him. 3. Those which were not assigned to Plautus by the authorities, or were even attributed to other writers, but which appeared to Varro to have such internal evidence in their favour (adductus filo atque facetia sermonis Plauto congruentis), that he did not hesitate to regard them as the genuine works of the poet. To this third class, which naturally contained but few, the Boeotia belonged. There is a statement of Servius in the introduc- tion to his commentary on the Aeneid, that ac- cording to some, Plautus wrote twenty-one, accord- ing to others forty, and, according to others again, a hundred comedies. Ritschl supposes, with great ingenuity, that the forty comedies, to which Ser- vius alludes, were those which Varro regarded as genuine, the twenty-one, which were called pre- eminently Varronianae, belonging to the first class, spoken of above, and the other nineteen being comprised in the second and third classes.

In order to understand clearly the difficulties which the Roman critics experienced in determin- ing which were the genuine plays of Plautus, we sliould bear in mind the circumstances under which they were composed. Like the dramas of Shak- spere and Lope de Vega they were written for the stage, and not for the reading public. Such a public, in fact, did not exist at the time of Plautus. His plays were produced for representation at the great public games, and, content with the applause of his contemporaries and the pay which he re- ceived, he did not care for the subsequent fate of his works. A few patrons of literature, such as the Scipios, may have preserved copies of the works; but the chief inducement to their preservation was the interest of the managers of the different troops of actors, the domini gregis, who had origin- ally engaged the poet to write the comedies, and had paid him for them, and to whom the manuscripts accordingly belonged. It was the interest of these persons to preserve the manuscripts, since they were not always obliged to bring forth new pieces, but were frequently paid by the magistrates for the representation of plays that had been previously acted. That the plays of Plautus were performed after his death is stated in several authorities, and may be seen even from some of the prologues (e. g. the Prologue to the Casino). But when, towards the middle of the sixth century of the city, one dramatic poet arose after another, and the taste for stricter imitations from the Greek began to pre- vail, the comedies of Plautus gradually fell into neglect, and consequently the contractors for the public games ceased to care about their preserva- tion. Towards the latter end of the century, how- ever, no new comic poets appeared; and since new comedies ceased to be brought before the public, attention was naturally recalled to the older dramas. In this manner Plautus began to be popular again, and his comedies were again fre- quently brought upon the stage. Owing, how- ever, to the neglect which his works had sustained, it would appear that doubts had arisen respecting the genuineness of many of his plays, and that several were produced under his name, of which the authorship was at least uncertain. Thus the grammarians, who began to draw up lists of his plays in the seventh century of the city, had no small difficulties to encounter; and the question re- specting the genuineness of certain plays was a fertile subject of controversy. Besides the treatise of Varro already mentioned, which was the stan- dard work on the subject, A. Gellius (l. c.) also refers to lists of his comedies drawn up by Aelius, Sedigitus, Claudius, Aurelius, Accius, and Mani- lius.

After the publication of Varro's work, the twenty-one comedies, which he regarded as un- questionably genuine, were the ones most fre- quently used, and of which copies were chiefly preserved. These Varronian comedies are the same as those which have come down to our own time, with the loss of one. At present we possess only twenty comedies of Plautus; but there were originally twenty-one in the manuscripts, and the Vidularia, which was the twenty-first, and which came last in the collection, was torn off from the manuscript in the middle ages. The last-men- tioned play was extant in the time of Priscian, who was only acquainted with the twenty-one Varronian plays. The ancient Codex of Camerarius has at the conclusion of the Truculentus the words incipit vidvlaria; and the Milan Palimpsest also contains several lines from the Vidularia.

The titles of the twenty-one Varronian plays, of which, as we have already remarked, twenty are still extant, are: 1. Amphitruo. 2. Asinaria. 3. Aulularia. 4. Captivi. 5. Curculio. 6. Casina. 7. Cistellaria. 8. Epidicus. 9. Bacchides. 10. Mos- tellaria. 11. Menaechmi. 12, Miles. 13. Mer- cator. 14. Pseudolus. 15. Poenulus. 16. Persa. 17. Rudens. 18. Stichus. 19. Tiinummus. 20. Truculentus. 21. Vidularia. This is the order* in which they occur in the manuscripts, though pro- bably not the one in which they were originally arranged by Varro. The present order is evidently alphabetical; the initial letter of the title of each play is alone regarded, and no attention is paid to those which follow: hence we find Captivi, Cur- culio, Casina, Cistellaria: Mostellaria, Menaechmi, Miles, Mercator: Pseudolus, Poenulus, Persa. The play of the Bacchides forms the only exception to the alphabetical order. It was probably placed after the Epidicus by some copyist, because he had observed that Plautus, in the Bacchides (ii. 2. 36), referred to the Epidicus as an earlier work. The alphabetical arrangement is attributed by many to Priscian, to whom is also assigned the short acrostic argument prefixed to each play; but there is no cer- tainty on this point, and the Latinity of the acrostic arguments is too pure to have been composed so late as the time of Priscian. The names of the comedies are either taken from some leading cha- racter in the play, or from some circumstance which occurs in it: those titles ending in aria are adjec- tives, giving a general description of the play: thus Asinaria is the "Ass-Comedy." Besides these twenty-one plays we have already remarked, that Varro, according to Ritschl's conjecture, regarded nineteen others as the genuine productions of Plau- tus, though not supported by an equal amount of testimony as the twenty-one. Ritschl has collected from various authorities the titles of these nineteen plays. They are as follows: 22. Saturio. 23. Ad- dictus. 24. Boeotia. 25. Nervolaria. 26. Fretum. 27. Trigemini. 28. Astraba. 29. Parasitus niger. 30. Parasitus medicus. 31. Commorientes. 32. Con- dalium. 33. Gemini leones. 34. Foeneratrix. 35. Frivolaria. 36. Sitellitergus. 37. Fugitivi. 38. Cacistio. 39. Hortulus. 40. Artemo. Of the still larger number of comedies commonly ascribed to Plautus, but not recognised by Varro, the titles of