Plautus, from whom we have twenty plays, had staged a few of them before Naevius went into exile, in fact in the _Miles Gloriosus_ he refers to the imprisonment of his fellow-poet. In his plots Plautus kept rather close to the Greek plays, translating, paraphrasing, and adapting as suited his mood. We shall presently discuss his reasons for doing so. What these themes were we need not repeat. The Greeks of Menander’s day had shaped the comedies of intrigue and of romance fairly well on the lines these have followed ever since. Shakespeare’s _Comedy of Errors_ is very close to Plautus’ _Menaechmi_, and though it departs from its original in its search for further entanglements, the construction, the type of humor, and the dramatic devices are the same. In the _Merry Wives of Windsor_, Falstaff illustrates the Menandrian use of self-deception, from his first boasting to his leap into the basket. The Wives are more in evidence than they would have been in Menander but there is little else to distinguish the play from the standard New Comedy. From the Greek, via Plautus and Terence, came practically all the types and all the tricks in which Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy delighted. Here it is my task not to discuss Roman comedy as such, but rather to indicate what in Rome’s life and experiences made itself felt through these plays. In the Plautine adaptations of Greek comedies we find two seemingly inconsistent purposes, one to rewrite in such a way as to make the exotic comprehensible, the other to keep a Greek atmosphere in order not to offend Roman taste by permitting the inference that the author approved of the behavior which he presented. The first purpose required simplification, the second avoided it. It is necessary to dwell upon this distinction for a moment since historians frequently fall into error by assuming either that Plautus reproduced a Greek milieu without alteration or on the contrary that he represented Roman life as he found it. In point of fact he did both or either, as best suited his purpose. In technicalities of law, to take a simple illustration, Plautus’ procedure was to simplify with little regard for consistency. At times when it did not matter he substituted Roman officials or institutions for Greek ones without concern as to whether they were exact equivalents. If in presenting the details of a lawsuit a literal translation of the Greek would seem obscure to a Roman audience, Plautus substituted some comprehensible point and reshaped the whole passage to conform to his illustration. In short, he used mere common sense in adapting foreign plays for stage production. Had Plautus been translating for a reading public he might have given a literal rendering and inserted a note of explanation. But plays written for a single presentation have no occasion for employing explanatory notes.