XIII. The Miles Gloriosus was taken from the Ἀλαζων (Boaster) of the Greek comic drama. Its hero, Pyrgopolinices, is the model of all the blustering, swaggering captains of ancient and modern comedy. The braggadocio carries off the mistress of a young Athenian, who follows him, and takes up his abode in the next house to that in which the girl is concealed. Like Pyramus and Thisbe the lovers have secret interviews through a hole in the party-wall. (The device being borrowed from the “Phantom” of Menander.)[185] When they are discovered, the soldier is induced to resign the lady by being persuaded that another is desperately in love with him, but the only reward which he gets is a good beating for his pains. XIV. In the Pseudolus, a cunning slave of that name procures, by a false memorandum, a female slave for his young master; and when the fraud is discovered the matter is settled by the payment of the price by a complaisant father. Notwithstanding the simplicity of the plot, the action is bustling and full of intrigue; and from a passage of Cicero,[186] it appears that this play and Truculentus were favourites with the author himself. The procurer in this comedy was one of the characters in which Roscius especially excelled. XV. The Pœnulus derives its name from its romantic plot. A young Carthaginian slave is adopted by an old bachelor, who leaves him a good inheritance. He falls in love with a girl, a Carthaginian like himself, who had been kidnapped with her sister, and now belonged to a procurer. The arrival of the father leads to a discovery that they are free-born, and that they are the first cousins of the young man. Thus it comes to pass that the girls are rescued, and the lovers united. The most curious portion of this comedy is that in which Hanno, the father, is represented as talking Punic;[187] and his words bear so close a resemblance to the Hebrew that commentators have expressed them in Hebrew characters, and rendered them, after a few emendations, capable of translation.[188] XVI. The tricks played upon a procurer by a slave, aided by a Persian parasite, furnish the slender plot of the Persa. XVII. The Rudens derives its name from the rope of a fishing-net, and, with the exception perhaps of the Captivi, is the most affecting and pleasing of all the twenty plays. The morality is pure, the sentiments elevated, the poetic justice complete. A female child has fallen into the hands of a procurer. Her lover in vain endeavours to ransom her, and being shipwrecked, the toys with which she played in infancy are lost in the waves, but are eventually brought to shore by the net of a fisherman. She is thus recognised by her father, and is married to her lover, whilst the procurer is utterly ruined by the loss of his property in the wreck.