Two other plays are remarkable from the fact that, though neither in construction nor in workmanship do they rise beyond mediocrity, the leading motive of the plot in one case and the principal character in the other are inventions of unusual felicity. The Greek original of both is unknown; but to it, no doubt, rather than to Plautus himself, we are bound to ascribe the credit of the _Aulularia_ and _Menaechmi_. The _Aulularia_, or _Pot of Gold_, a commonplace story of middle-class life, is a mere framework for the portrait of the old miser, Euclio--in itself a sketch full of life and brilliance, and still more famous as the original of Moliére's Harpagon, which is closely studied from it. The _Menaechmi_, or _Comedy of Errors_, without any great ingenuity of plot or distinction of character, rests securely on the inexhaustible opportunities of humour opened up by the happy invention of the twin-brothers who had lost sight of one another from early childhood, and the confusions that arise when they meet in the same town in later life. There is yet one more of the Plautine comedies which deserves special notice, as conceived in a different vein and worked out in a different tone from all those already mentioned--the charming romantic comedy called _Rudens_, or _The Cable_, though a more fitting name for it would be _The Tempest_. It is not pitched in the sentimental key of the _Captivi_; but it has a higher, and, in Latin literature, a rarer, note. By a happy chance, perhaps, rather than from any unwonted effort of skill, this translation of the play of Diphilus has kept in it something of the unique and unmistakeable Greek atmosphere--the atmosphere of the _Odyssey_, of the fisher-idyl of Theocritus, of the hundreds of little poems in the Greek Anthology that bear clinging about their verses the faint murmur and odour of the sea. The scene is laid near Cyrene, on the strange rich African coast; the prologue is spoken, not by a character in the piece, nor by a decently clothed abstraction like the figures of Luxury and Poverty which speak the prologue of the _Trinummus_, but by the star Arcturus, watcher and tempest-bearer. _Qui gentes omnes, mariaque et terras movet, Eius sum civis civitate caelitum; Ita sum ut videtis, splendens stella candida, Signum quod semper tempore exoritur suo Hic atque in caelo; nomen Arcturo est mihi. Noctu sum in caelo clarus atque inter deos; Inter mortales ambulo interdius_.