He had no early gentlemanlike associations to interfere with his delineations of Roman character in low life. His contemporary, Ennius, was a gentleman; Plautus was not: education did not overcome his vulgarity, although it produced a great effect upon his language and style, which were more refined and cultivated than those of his predecessors. Plautus must have lived and associated with the class whose manners he describes; hence his pictures are correct and truthful. The class from which his representations of Roman life was taken is that of the _ærarii_, who consisted of clients, the sons of freedmen, and the half-enfranchised natives of Italian towns. His plots are Greek, his personages Greek, and the scene is laid in Greece and her colonies; but the morality, manners, sentiments, wit, and humour, were those of that mixed, half-foreign, class of the inhabitants of the capital, which stood between the slave and the free-born citizen. One of his characters is, as was observed by Niebuhr,[175] not Roman, for the parasite is a Greek, not a Roman character; but then a flatterer is by profession a citizen of the world, and his business is to conform himself to the manners of every society. How readily that character became naturalized, we are informed by some of the most amusing passages in the satires of Horace and Juvenal. The humble occupation which his poverty compelled him to follow was calculated to draw out and foster the comic talent for which he was afterwards distinguished, for Varro[176] tells us that he acted as a stage-carpenter (_operarius_) to a theatrical company; he adds, also, that he was subsequently engaged in some trade in which he was unsuccessful, and was reduced to the necessity of earning his daily bread by grinding in a mill. To this degrading labour, which was not usually performed by men, except as a punishment for refractory slaves, it has been supposed that he owed his cognomen, Asinius, which is sometimes appended to his other names. Ritzschl, however, has most ingeniously and satisfactorily proved that the name of Asinius is a corruption of Sarsinas (native of Sarsina:) he supposes that Sarsinas became Arsinas, that this was afterwards written Arsin, then Asin, and that this was finally considered as the representative of Asinius.