Pot of Gold

Titus Maccius Plautus was born around 254 BC in Sarsina, a small town in Umbria, central Italy. Very little is known about his early life with certainty. Ancient sources suggest he worked in the theatre in some capacity as a young man, possibly as a stage hand or actor, which would explain his extraordinary instinct for what works on stage. According to one tradition he lost money in a business venture and was forced to work in a mill grinding grain, and it was during this period that he began writing plays. Whether or not this story is literally true it captures something real about Plautus: he was not an aristocrat writing for other aristocrats. He understood working people, their anxieties, their humor, their relationship with money and luck and social position, and his comedies are alive with that understanding.

Plautus wrote during the period of the Roman Republic, at a time when Rome was expanding rapidly across the Mediterranean world and coming into sustained contact with Greek culture. Roman audiences had developed a taste for adaptations of Greek New Comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, and Plautus supplied this taste with extraordinary energy and productivity. He is credited with writing around 130 plays, of which 21 survive, making him the most prolific Latin playwright whose work has come down to us. He died around 184 BC.

What distinguishes Plautus from his Greek sources is the quality of his language and his humor. He took the plots and character types of Greek New Comedy and ran them through a Roman sensibility that was earthier, faster, louder, and funnier. His comedies are full of wordplay, slapstick, characters breaking the fourth wall, and a delight in chaos and misrule that feels remarkably modern. His influence on later European comedy is enormous. Shakespeare drew on him directly for The Comedy of Errors and indirectly for many other plays. Moliere's The Miser is based directly on Aulularia. Ben Jonson, and practically every writer of Renaissance comedy, owes something to Plautus.