ere. Apart from the many allusions in his comedies to
customs and conditions distinctly Roman, there is evidence enough in
Plautus's language and style that he was not a close translator. Modern
translators who have struggled vainly to reproduce faithfully in their
own tongues, even in prose, the countless puns and quips, the incessant
alliteration and assonance in the Latin lines, would be the last to
admit that Plautus, writing so much, writing in verse, and writing with
such careless, jovial, exuberant ease, was nothing but a translator in
the narrow sense of the term.

Very few of his extant comedies can be dated, so far as the year
of their production in Rome is concerned, with any great degree of
certainty. _The Miles Gloriosus_ appeared about 206, the _Cistellaria_
about 202, _Stichus_ in 200, _Pseudolus_ in 191 B.C.; the _Truculentus_,
like _Pseudolus_, was composed when Plautus was an old man, not many
years before his death in 184 B.C.

Welcome as a full autobiography of Plautus would be, in place of such
scant and tasteless biographical morsels as we do have, only less
welcome, perhaps, would be his own stage directions for his plays,
supposing him to have written stage directions and to have written
them with something more than even modern fullness. We should learn
how he met the stage conventions and limitations of his day; how
successfully he could, by make-up and mannerism, bring on the boards
palpably different persons in the Scapins and Bobadils and Doll
Tear-sheets that on the printed page often seem so confusingly similar,
and most important, we should learn precisely what sort of dramatist
he was and wished to be.

If Plautus himself greatly cared or expected his restless,
uncultivated, fun-seeking audience to care, about the construction
of his plays, one must criticize him and rank him on a very different
basis than if his main, and often his sole, object was to amuse the
groundlings. If he often took himself and his art with hardly more
seriousness than does the writer of the vaudeville skit or musical
comedy of to-day, if he often wished primarily to gain the immediate
laugh, then much of Langen's long list of the playwright's dramatic
delinquencies is somewhat beside its intended point.

And in large measure this--to hold his audience by any means--does
seem to have been his ambition: if the joke mars the part, down with
the part; if the ludicrous scene interrupts the development of the
pl