[Footnote 11: Ritschl, _Parerga_, pp. 405 _seq._ Cf. Menander, _Fragments_, 125, 126.] [Footnote 12: _Bacch._ 912.] [Footnote 13: Hueffner, _op. cit._ pp. 41-42.] [Footnote 14: Cf. Legrand, _op. cit._ p. 18.] INTRODUCTION Little is known of the life of Titus Maccius Plautus. He was born about 255 B.C. at Sarsina, in Umbria; it is said that he went to Rome at an early age, worked at a theatre, saved some money, lost it in a mercantile venture, returned to Rome penniless, got employment in a mill and wrote, during his leisure hours, three plays. These three plays were followed by many more than the twenty extant, most of them written, it would seem, in the latter half of his life, and all of them adapted from the comedies of various Greek dramatists, chiefly of the New Comedy.[15] Adaptations rather than translations they certainly were. Apart from the many allusions in his comedies to customs and conditions distinctly Roman, there is evidence enough in Plautus’s language and style that he was not a close translator. Modern translators who have struggled vainly to reproduce faithfully in their own tongues, even in prose, the countless puns and quips, the incessant alliteration and assonance in the Latin lines, would be the last to admit that Plautus, writing so much, writing in verse, and writing with such careless, jovial, exuberant ease, was nothing but a translator in the narrow sense of the term. Very few of his extant comedies can be dated, so far as the year of their production in Rome is concerned, with any great degree of certainty. _The Miles Gloriosus_ appeared about 206, the _Cistellaria_ about 202, _Stichus_ in 200, _Pseudolus_ in 191 B.C.; the _Truculentus_, like _Pseudolus_, was composed when Plautus was an old man, not many years before his death in 184 B.C. Welcome as a full autobiography of Plautus would be, in place of such scant and tasteless biographical morsels as we do have, only less welcome, perhaps, would be his own stage directions for his plays, supposing him to have written stage directions and to have written them with something more than even modern fullness. We should learn how he met the stage conventions and limitations of his day; how successfully he could, by make-up and mannerism, bring on the boards palpably different persons in the Scapins and Bobadils and Doll Tear-sheets that on the printed page often seem so confusingly similar, and most important, we should learn precisely what sort of dramatist he was and wished to be.