Perhaps we can best see the representations of the Greek new comedy[240] in the plays of Plautus, for no complete Greek comedy of this class has come down to us. Terence no doubt transferred more literally from these plays, but his selections do not bring us so closely into contact with the life of the period. It is difficult, however, in Plautus to know whether his pictures refer to Greek or to Roman life--for he unquestionably introduced many allusions to the habits of his Roman audience. Most of the women that appear in the pages of Plautus belong to the slave class. Often, when the Greeks took a city, they razed it to the ground, killed nearly all the men, and carried off the women to be slaves in lands far away from their own homes. These women had to submit to the greatest cruelties and indignities. Plautus borrows his scenes from Greek plays--and accordingly most of his women have become slaves in this way. There can be no doubt, however, that the Romans trafficked in female slaves as well as the Greeks--and thus the picture of the female slaves in the one nation will hold good for the other. When superior officers made these women captive they generally kept them in their own houses; but as such slaves brought a large sum, there were men who made a livelihood by stealing them away. These sold them to persons whose occupation was again to sell them to the rich inhabitants of the cities, sometimes lending them only for a year, and sometimes giving them up for life. The laws regulated the conveyance, if I may so speak, of these women-slaves, and one of the plays turns upon a scoundrel of a slave pretending to be an Eastern, and coming to the slave-dealer’s house with the daughter of another man, a parasite, and selling her at an enormous loss, but without a legal form. The parasite goes at once to the slave-dealer and claims back his illegally sold daughter. These slave-women were employed in various ways. Sometimes they were kept as household servants, sometimes as nurses; but most frequently they were used at banquets to dance before the festive gentlemen, and to sing, play the lyre, and amuse them with witty sayings. They were often, therefore, highly cultivated, conjoining the accomplishments of our most expert acrobat with those of an opera singer and an educated lady. Some of them descend to the lowest degree of coarseness in Plautus; while a few are exceedingly sweet, modest, and gentle.