Osannus derives an argument unfavourable to the authenticity of the play. The parasite exclaims against the person who first distinguished hours, and set up the sun-dials, of which the town was so full. Now, Osannus maintains, that there were no sun-dials at Rome in the time of Plautus, and that the day was not then distributed into hours, but into much larger portions of time(276). The _Nervolaria_ was one of the disputed plays in the time of Au. Gellius; and also the _Fretum_, which Gellius thinks the most genuine of all(277). Varro, in the first Book of his _Quæstiones Plautinæ_ gives the following words of Attius, which, I presume, are quoted from his work on poetry and poets, entitled _Didascalica_. “For neither were the _Gemini_, the _Leones_, the _Condalium_, the _Anus Plauti_, the _Bis Compressa_, the _Bœotia_, or the _Commorientes_, by Plautus, but by M. Aquilius.” It appears, however, from the prologue to the _Adelphi_ of Terence, that the _Commorientes_ was written by Plautus, having been taken by him from a Greek comedy of Diphilus(278). In opposition to the above passage of Attius, and to his own opinion expressed in the _Quæstiones Plautinæ_, Varro, in his treatise on the Latin Language, frequently cites, as the works of Plautus, the plays enumerated by Attius, and various others; but this was probably in deference to common opinion, or in agreement with ordinary language, and was not intended to contradict what he had elsewhere delivered, or to stamp with the character of authenticity productions, which he had more deliberately pronounced to be spurious(279).