Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/225

Rh P L A P L A 215 ones appeared to recognize a call, swimming rapidly to the hand paddling the water ; and it is curious to see their attempts to procure a worm enclosed in the hand, which they greedily take when offered to them. I have noticed that they appear to be able to smell whether or not a worm is contained in the closed hand to which they swim, for they desisted from their efforts if an empty fist was offered. &quot; When irritated they utter a soft low growl, re sembling that of a puppy. (w. H. F.) PL A U EN, a busy manufacturing town of Saxony, in the government district of Zwickau, is situated on the Elster, 60 miles to the south of Leipsic. It was formerly the capital of the Voigtland, a territory governed directly by the imperial voigts or bailiffs, and this name still clings in popular speech to the hilly manufacturing district in which it lies. The most prominent buildings are the fine Gothic church of St John, the town-house (about 1550), the new post-office, and the loftily-situated old castle of Hradschin, now occupied by a law court. Plauen is now the chief place in Germany for the manufacture of em broidered white goods of all kinds, and for the finishing of woven cotton fabrics. Dyeing, tanning, bleaching, and the making of paper and machinery are also prosecuted ; and an active trade is carried on in these various industrial products. In 1880 the town contained 35,078 inhabitants and in 1884 above 40,000, almost all Protestants. As indicated by the name of the castle, Plauen was probably founded by the Slavs, after whose expulsion it was governed directly by the imperial bailiffs. In 1327 it became a Bohemian fief, but passed into the possession of Saxony in 1466 and remained per manently united to it from 1569 onwards. The manufacture of white goods was introduced by Swabian or Swiss immigrants about 1570, and since then the prosperity of the town has been great, in spite of the storms of the Thirty Years and Seven Years Wars. The advance of Plauen has been especially rapid since its incor poration in the Zollverein. PLAUTUS, T. MACCITJS, was the greatest comic and dramatic genius of Rome, and still ranks among the great comic dramatists of the world. While the other creators of Roman literature, Nsevius, Ennius, Lucilius, &c., are known to us only in fragments, we still possess twenty plays of Plautus. A few of them are incomplete, and in some cases they show traces of later interpolations, but they have reached us in the main as they were written by him in the end of the 3d and the beginning of the 2d cen tury B.C. At the date of his birth Roman literature may be said to have been non-existent. When he died the Latin language had developed its full capacities as an organ of social intercourse and familiar speech, and the litera ture of the world had been enriched by a large number of adaptations from the New Comedy of Athens, animated by the new life of ancient Italy and vivified by the genius and robust human nature of their author ; and these have been the chief means of transmitting the traditions of the ancient drama to modern times. The maturity which comedy attained in a single generation affords a remarkable contrast to the slow processes by which the higher forms of Roman poetical and prose literature were brought to perfection. It may be explained partly by the existence, for some generations before the formal begin ning of literature at Rome, of the dramatic and musical medleys (&quot;saturai impletye modis&quot;) which in their allu sions to current events and their spirit of banter must have had a considerable affinity with the dialogue of Plautus, and partly to the diffusion of the Latin language, as the organ of practical business among the urban com munities of Italy. But much also was due to the indivi dual genius and the command over their native idiom possessed by the two oldest of the genuine creators of Roman literature, Nsevius and Plautus. A question might be raised as to whether Plautus or his younger contemporary Ennius was the most character istic representative of the national literature of their time. Ennius certainly exercised a much more important influ ence on its subsequent development. He arrested the tendency imparted to that development by Naevius and Plautus. He made literature the organ of the serious spirit and imperial ambition of the Roman aristocracy, while the genius of Plautus appealed to the taste and temperament of the mass of the people, at a time when they were animated by the spirit of enjoyment and com paratively indifferent to political questions. The ascend ency of the aristocracy in public affairs for two generations after the end of the Second Punic AVar determined the ascendency of Ennius in Roman literature ; and it may be admitted that, if the genius of Plautus and of Ennius could not work harmoniously together, it was best that that of the younger poet, as representative of the truer genius of Rome, should prevail. The popularity of Plautus was greatest in his own time and in the generation succeeding him, but his plays still continued to be acted with applause till the age of Cicero, and he was greatly admired both by Cicero and by the man among his contemporaries who, both from his learning and taste, retained most of the antique spirit, Varro. The literary taste of the Augustan age and of the first century of the empire was adverse to him ; but the archaic revival in the latter part of the 2d century of our era brought him again into favour, with the result of securing the preservation of his works through mediaeval times and their revival with great acceptance at the Renaissance. That his original popularity was due to genuine gifts of humour and genuine power in represent ing human life is clear from their reception by a world so much altered from that in which he himself had played his part. And if his influence was not felt like that of Ennius in determining the form and spirit of the litera ture of his country, it was not without effect on the two greatest dramatists of modern times, Shakespeare and Moliere. The few facts known of his life rest on the authority of Cicero, of Aulus Gellius, and of Jerome in his continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle. He was born in the earlier half of the 3d century B.C., and died at an advanced age in the year 184 B.C. He was a native of Sarsina in Umbria. His first employment was in some way connected with the stage &quot; in operis artificum scenicorum.&quot; He saved money in this employment, engaged in foreign trade, and return ing to Rome in absolute poverty was reduced to work as a hired servant in a mill ; and then for the first time he began to write comedies. The earliest allusion to any contemporary event which we find in any of his plays is that in the Miles Gloriosus (1. 212-3) to the imprisonment of Naevius, which happened about the year 207 B.C. The Cistellaria and Stichw were apparently written immedi ately after the end of the Second Punic War. The last ten years of his life were the most productive, and the greater number of his extant comedies belong to that period. They do not seem to have been published as literary works during his lifetime, but to have been left in possession of the players, to whom the interpolations and some other unimportant changes are to be ascribed. The prologues to the plays, with three or four exceptions, belong to the generation after his death. In a later age the plays of many contemporary playwrights were attri buted to him. Twenty-one were accepted by Varro as undoubtedly genuine, and of these we possess twenty nearly complete, and fragments of another, the Vidularia. Other nineteen Varro regarded as probably genuine, and the titles of some of them, e.g., Saturio, Addidus, Com- morientes, are also known to us. We get the impression from his works and from ancient