Conversely, when we think of the audience, and then compare these plays with the cinema shows sometimes given to entice crowds of voters to political gatherings, we can only be surprised at the relatively high grade of entertainment that the Roman comedies contain. Rome’s holiday crowds in Plautus’ day consisted of plain folk, but they must have been intelligent and unspoiled. The mimes and farces of a century later certainly reflect a decided deterioration in the theater-goers of that time. Horace was not entirely fair when he accused Plautus of writing down for the sake of filling his purse. Perhaps he did, but after all he did not stoop to the kind of audiences that later entertainers amused for profit. Horace in fact should have compared Plautus with Laberius and Publilius and not, as he did, with the nicer closet drama of his own day which never had a chance of being produced. We may also recall that Plautus wrote for a single performance with no thought of publication, of a reading public or even of a revival of the play. He sold his manuscript and after the play was over the manuscript was placed in the state archives, perhaps never to be seen again. Plautus of course did not know that many of the plays would be dug up for reproduction a generation later when there was a dearth of good writers. We shall also do well to remember that there were no programs distributed at the performances. These circumstances account for the dramatist’s endeavor to make his plays self-explanatory and self-contained, for his willingness to continue the old convention of revealing the plot early, to keep its progress clear and explicit, to get immediate effects and not to concern himself too much as to whether an effective scene at the end is entirely consistent with the implications at the beginning. The spectator could not refer to a published copy, nor return next day to examine the play critically. Most scholarly guessing as to whether blemishes may have crept into these plays by successive revisions is based upon a minute analysis of them in the study, the very kind of analysis that Plautus never expected to receive. Plautus counted to a certain extent on the auditor’s capacity to forget as well as on his ability to remember. One curious result of this habit of presenting a new play at each festival was that a great many plays accumulated in the archives, and so when, in the time of Terence, officials began to resurrect old plays, the available stock glutted the market. At that time the authors of new plays must actually have been hurt by the competition of dead authors.