In the treatment of female characters Plautus’ procedure is somewhat different. Greek New Comedy had a type of woman in the rather respectable hetaerae well adapted to its purpose, and in fact the only type usable, since the Greek housewife was so bound to the dull routine of the rear-of-the-house that she was too devitalized for literary treatment. The metic companion—of Aspasia’s station and juristic standing—moved about freely in the city, could be placed in almost any social group, and could by an easy fiction and the proper birth tokens be discovered to be an unrecognized citizen. Since this was the only respectable class available for Menander’s intrigues, he naturally employed hetaerae for his many plays that contained love scenes. Roman adapters, however, encountering such heroines, who represented a social class foreign to Roman society, found considerable difficulty in transplanting them to Italian soil. It may be remembered that in the Victorian period the plays of Dumas fils could not readily be transposed into English, just as the romantic English plays of that day failed of comprehension in France, because the relations between the sexes were based on different customs in each country. What, for instance, would Plautus have done on the Roman stage with Habratonon, the shrewd but generously human hetaera of Menander’s _Arbitrants_, who, when she had to make her choice, surrendered her own advantages over her lover and restored him to his wife and child? Plautus if he had used such a play would have had to substitute for her a Roman courtesan or else destroy the plot. And if he did employ a courtesan, Roman realism would have demanded that she be depicted without generosity, for at Rome it would not do to let a woman of such a class seem virtuous. The matrons of Rome would have objected.[10] In the Roman society of Plautus’ day family relations were puritanic, divorce was almost unknown, and the Roman matron was her husband’s equal in the home and in society. She was not relegated to the spinning room in the back of the house as in Greece; she did not mope in her chamber while her husband went to dinner parties and to the theater with his boon companions. She was the companion. In such a society there may be and were some “daughters of joy” for pagan youth, but they were not spoken of, they did not appear, they were in the dark where generous virtues do not grow. One might suppose that Plautus could have abandoned the Greek scene, eliminated the demi-monde, and staged a normal Roman comedy. But if he were to keep the love story he would have had to resort to the postmarital triangle used in such circumstances by the French—a device unthinkable in the social atmosphere of his day—or to the romances of free adolescents—a theme not easily illustrated from the urban life of southern countries where young girls are carefully cloistered. In other words, Plautus was very nearly compelled to choose either to