Navibus magnis mercaturam faciam: aput reges rex perhibebor.
Post animi causa mihi navem faciam atque imitabor Stratonic.u.m, Oppida circ.u.mvect.i.tabor, ubi n.o.bilitas mea erit clara, Oppidum magnum conmoenibo: ei ego urbi Gripo indam nomen[25].
He shows much greater familiarity with the life of the lower and middle cla.s.ses than with that of those above them in station. He is not always happy in his embodiment of the character of a gentleman.
Nothing, for instance, can be meaner than the conduct of the second Menaechmus, who is intended to interest us, in his relations to Erotion. And this failure is equally conspicuous in another of his favourite characters, Periplecomenus, the "lepidus senex" of the Gloriosus. His indecorous geniality is scarcely compatible with the respectability, not to say the dignity, of age. We recognise in his characters and ill.u.s.trations a vigorous and many-sided contact with life, but no influence derived from a.s.sociation with members of the governing cla.s.s. In this respect he stood in marked contrast to Ennius and Terence, and probably to Caecilius. The two latter, being freedmen, were naturally brought into closer a.s.sociation with, and dependence on, their social superiors. Plautus writes in the spirit of an "ingenuus," in good-humoured sympathy with the ma.s.s of the citizens, and with no feeling of bitterness towards the aristocracy, or indeed to any human being whatsoever. He is at home with all kinds of men, except the highest in rank. He takes a good-natured ironical delight in his slaves, courtesans, parasites, and sycophants. He is not shocked by anything they can do or say. He feels the enjoyment of a man of strong animal spirits in laughing at and with them. Even the "leno," the least estimable character in the repertory of ancient comedy, he treats rather as a b.u.t.t than as an object of detestation.
He does not by a single phrase show any sign of having been soured or depressed by the misfortunes and vicissitudes of his life. We feel, in his dialogues, the presence of irrepressible animal spirits, and a sense of boundless resource and lively intelligence in his characters, especially in his slaves. From no sc.r.a.pe does it seem hopeless for them to find some means of extrication. Like them, he himself has the buoyancy of one, "fortunae immersabilis undis."
From the zest with which he writes of them, we might infer that he had a keen personal enjoyment in eating and drinking, and in the coa.r.s.er forms of conviviality. His favourite dishes,--
Pernam callum glandium sumen, etc.[26]
find no place in the more fastidious gastronomy of our own times, but they were capable of giving great satisfaction to the larger and robuster appet.i.tes of the ancient Italians,--of a people who had been, till the sudden influx of luxury in his own time, described as "barbarous porridge-eaters[27]." Horace has criticised the extravagant gusto with which he makes his parasites dilate on their peculiar pleasures[28]; and the important part which the preparation for the "prandium" or the "cena" plays in several of his dramas is perhaps significant of the attention which he himself bestowed on them in the days of his prosperity. The early revels of Philolaches and Callidamates in the Mostellaria, the manner in which Pseudolus celebrates his triumph over Ballio[29], and Sagarinus and Stichus the return of their masters from abroad[30], the tastes which the poet attributes to the old women in his pieces, as to Staphyla in the Aulularia,--show that the Romans had not learned, in his time, the more cultivated enjoyment of wine, which they brought to perfection in the days of Horace. The experience to which Plautus bears witness, like that attributed to his contemporaries in the lines
Ennius ipse pater numquam nisi potus ad arma Prosiluit dicenda,
and
Narratur et prisci Catonis Saepe mero caluisse virtus,
is indicative rather of the convivial "abandon" of men of vigorous const.i.tutions, than of the more deliberate and fastidious epicureanism of the poets of a later age.
Another criticism of Horace upon Plautus--
Gest.i.t enim nummum in loculos demittere--
may very probably be true, and is by no means to his discredit. The same charge has been brought against some of the most facile and productive creators in modern times, such as Scott, d.i.c.kens, and Balzac, and, to a certain extent, even Shakspeare. To the poets of Nature, or of the higher thought and emotions of men, the pure enjoyment of their art may afford sufficient happiness. In so far as they are true to their higher genius, they are, or ought to be, more independent than any other cla.s.s of men of the pleasures which money can give. But artists whose power consists in vividly realising and representing the various activities, pa.s.sions, and enjoyments of life, may feel, in their own experience, some of the craving and of the satisfaction which they are called on to describe. Nor is it unnatural that they should take any legitimate means of securing for themselves some share in the objects of desire, which are the moving forces of their imaginary world. In the large place which the details of good living fill in his plays, Plautus exaggerates a tendency which is discernible in the more decorous fictions of Scott and d.i.c.kens. In the important part which he a.s.signs to money in many of his dramas, in his business-like mention of specific sums, in the frequency of his ill.u.s.trations from the practice of keeping accounts, he shows a resemblance to Balzac. The experience of his life must have impressed upon him the value of money. The fact that he saved enough in his early employment in connexion with the stage to embark on mercantile speculations is a proof of early thrift and prudence and of a wish to raise himself in the world. In all this he was merely exhibiting one of the most common characteristics of the middle cla.s.s among his countrymen.
Horace adds the further criticism, that so long as he could make money he was indifferent to the artistic merits of his pieces,--
Securus cadat an recto stet fabula talo;--
and this criticism is to a great extent true. His object was to give the largest amount of immediate amus.e.m.e.nt[31]. He was not a careful artist like Terence, studying either finish of style, perfect consistency in the development of his characters, or the working out of his plots to a harmonious conclusion. It was owing to the irrepressible vitality and strong human nature which he could not help imparting to his careless execution, that his plays have survived many more elaborate compositions. Yet he shows a rude kind of consciousness of his art in such pa.s.sages as that in which he makes Pseudolus compare himself to the poet who creates out of nothing--
Set quasi poeta, tabulas quom cepit sibi, Quaerit quod nusquamst gentium, reperit tamen[32];
and he speaks of the pleasure which he took in his play "Epidicus[33]." Cicero also testifies to the joy which he derived from two of the works of his old age, the Pseudolus and the Truculentus[34]. But his delight was that of a vigorous creator, not of a painstaking artist.
Many allusions in his plays attest his acquaintance with works of art, with the stories of Greek mythology or the subjects of Greek tragedies, and with the names, at least, of Greek philosophers. His extraordinary productiveness in adapting works from the new comedy shows that he had a complete command of the Greek language. He not only uses Greek phrases, but has endeavoured to enrich the native vocabulary with a considerable number of Greek words in a Latin form[35]. Yet the knowledge he betrays is that which a man of versatile intelligence, lively curiosity, and retentive memory, would pick up in his varied intercourse with his contemporaries, without any special study of books, except such as were needed for his immediate purpose. The more recondite learning of Ennius was probably as strange to him as that of Ben Jonson was to Shakspeare.
The great movement of his age acted on the mind of Plautus in a manner different from that in which it affected Ennius. To the younger poet the triumphant close of the Second Punic War brought the sense of a mighty future awaiting the Roman Republic. He appealed to the higher national aspirations stirring the hearts of the governing cla.s.s.
Plautus felt the strong rebound of spirits from a long-continued state of tension, from a time of anxiety and self-sacrifice, in a less n.o.ble manner. He appealed to the craving which the ma.s.s of the citizens felt for a more unrestrained enjoyment of the pleasures of life. In the spirit which moved him we seem to recognise the same kind of impulse which prompted the repeal of the Oppian law, and which led to the great increase of public amus.e.m.e.nts of every kind. The newly-acquired peace and ease awoke in him a sense of the immense capacities of the individual for enjoyment. In a pa.s.sage of one of his later plays he seems to claim this indulgence as the natural concomitant of victory:--
Postremo in magno populo, in multis hominibus, Re placida atque otiosa, victis hostibus, Amare oportet omnes, qui quod dent habent[36].
With this new sense of freedom and of fullness of life, the old restraints of religion and of the morality bound up with it were relaxed. The commons began to exercise less and less influence in the state. Their political indifference finds an echo in the slighting allusions which Plautus makes to the duties of public life[37]. The increased contact with the mind and life of the Greeks powerfully stimulated intellectual curiosity, but at the same time was a great solvent of faith, manners, and morals. The frequent use of the words _congraecari_, _pergraecari_, etc., in Plautus, shows that while the highest Roman minds were learning new lessons of wisdom and humanity from the great Greek writers of the past, the ordinary Roman was learning lessons of idleness and dissoluteness from the living Greeks of the time. The armies which returned from the Macedonian wars, and still more from that with Antiochus, brought with them new fashions and new appliances of luxury. Plautus shows a large indulgence, not unmixed with a vein of saturnine humour, for these new ways on which both young and old were eagerly entering. We see in him the unchecked exuberance of animal life, but no sign of the recklessness or the satiety of exhausted pa.s.sions. Though there is more decorum, more refined sentiment, in the life of pleasure as presented by Terence, there is more often in Plautus an expression of a struggle between the new temptations and the old Roman ideas of thrift, active duty, and self-restraint. The conscience, though easily lulled to sleep, is still capable of feeling the sting of the thought contained in the Lucretian line--
Desidiose agere aetatem l.u.s.trisque perire.
Turning now to the particular plays we find that they all belong to the cla.s.s of _palliatae_. They are adaptations or combinations from the works of Menander, Diphilus, Philemon, and other writers of the new comedy. The action represented is generally supposed to take place in Athens, sometimes in other Greek towns, in Epid.a.m.nus, Ephesus, Cyrene, etc. The plays of Plautus, unlike those of Terence and most of those of Caecilius, have generally Latin t.i.tles, but nearly all his personages have Greek names. One or two of his parasites (Peniculus, Saturio, Curculio) are exceptions to this rule: but the absence of all _gentile_ designations among his richer personages would alone prove that he had no intention of presenting to his audience the outward conditions of Roman or Italian life. The social circ.u.mstances implied in all his plays are those of well-to-do citizens engaged in foreign commerce, or retired from business after having made their fortunes.
The only differences in station among his personages are those of rich and poor, free and slave. There is no recognition of those great distinctions of birth, privilege, and political status, which were so pervading a characteristic of Roman life. Old men are indeed spoken of as "senati columen"; and it is made a ground of reproach to a young man that he is not already a candidate for public office, or making a name for himself by defending cases in the law-courts. But such pa.s.sages are probably to be cla.s.sed among the frequent Roman allusions to be found in Plautus, which had no equivalent in his original. The new comedy of Menander was based on the philosophy of Epicurus, which taught the lesson of abstention from all public duties[38]. The life of the young men is almost entirely a life of pleasure, varied perhaps by some partic.i.p.ation in their fathers" foreign business, or occasional service in the army. But the dislike of a military life among the "easy livers" of Athens in the beginning of the third century B.C. is shown as much by the indifference of these young men to their honour as soldiers[39], as by the ridicule which is heaped upon the "Captain Bobadils" who served as mercenaries in the military monarchies of the successors of Alexander. Even a slave regards enlisting as a soldier as the last refuge of a ruined man. The other characters are of Greek origin, though some of them became naturalised in Rome. The ordinary Roman client on the one hand--such as the Volteius Mena of Horace,--and the scurra of Roman satire on the other (Volanerius or Maenius), had a certain likeness to the Greek parasite; though the position of the first was more respectable[40], and the last was a more formidable element in society than a Gelasimus or an Artotrogus. The "fallax servus" of comedy, though a wonderful conception of a humorous imagination, is a character hardly compatible with any social conditions; but it is undoubtedly an exaggeration of Greek mendacity and intelligence, the very ant.i.thesis of Italian rusticity. The commanding part they play in the affairs of their masters seems like a grotesque antic.i.p.ation of the part played under the empire by Greek freedmen,--
Viscera magnarum domuum dominique futuri.
The "meretrix blanda" of Menander was probably more refined, but not essentially different from the "libertina" of Rome. Among the rare glimpses into social life which Livy affords behind the stately but somewhat monotonous pageant of consuls and imperators, armies in the field, senators in council, and political a.s.semblies of the people, none is more interesting than that given in the inquiries into the horrors of the Baccha.n.a.lia at Rome[41]. The relations between P.
Aebutius and the freedwoman Hispala Fecenia bring to mind those existing between the Philematiums, the Phileniums, or Planesiums of comedy and their lovers. The "leno insidiosus" and the "improba lena"
are probably much the same in all times and countries; but there is a vigorous brutality and inhuman hardness about Ballio and Cleaereta which seem more true to Roman than to Greek life. The kind of life which comedy represents must have had great attractions for a race of vigorous organisation like the Romans, after continued success and prosperity had broken down the old restraints on conduct and desire, and the acc.u.mulated wealth of the world had become the prize of their energy. Yet their inherited instincts for industry and frugality must have made it difficult for them to realise gracefully the hollow life of light-hearted enjoyment which came easily to a Greek in the third century B.C. The average Roman learned to exaggerate the profligacy without acquiring the refinement of his teachers.
It might perhaps have been expected that a writer of such prodigal invention and so popular and national a fibre as Plautus would have chosen rather to set before his countrymen a humorous image of themselves, than to transport them in imagination to Athens and to exhibit to them those well-used conventional types of Greek life and manners. But, in the first place, the mere fact that it was more easy for him to adapt than to create would have been a sufficient motive to so careless and unconscious an artist. Again, the state-censorship exercised by the magistrates who exhibited the games would naturally deter a poet, who did not wish to encounter the fate of Naevius, from any direct dealing with the delicate subject of Roman social and family life. The later writers of the _fabulae togatae_ seem for the most part to have reproduced the life and personages of the provincial towns in Italy. The position not only of the magistrate but even of the citizen at Rome was invested with a kind of dignity and even sanct.i.ty, which it would have been dangerous to violate in a public spectacle. Further, the very novelty and unfamiliarity of the ways of Greek life would be more stimulating to the rude imagination of that age than a reproduction of the everyday life of Rome. It requires a more cultivated fancy to recognise incidents, situations and characters suited for art in actual experience, than to appreciate the conventional types of older dramatists. It is a noticeable fact that Shakspeare places the scene of only one of his comedies in England, and that he too introduces the English names and characteristics of Bottom, Snug, Peter Quince, etc., as Plautus does those of Saturio or Curculio into an imaginary representation of Athenian life. But whatever were his motives for doing so, Plautus professes to introduce his hearers to a representation of Greek manners and morals. His frequent use of the word _barbarus_ in reference to Italian or Roman ways, his use of Latinised Greek words and actual Greek phrases, the Greek names of his personages, the dress in which they appeared, the invariable reference to Greek money, perhaps the actual scene presented to the eye, the frequent mention of ships unexpectedly arriving in harbour, the names of the foreign towns visited, etc., would all tend to remind the audience that they were listening to an action and witnessing a spectacle of Greek life.
But while the outward conditions of his dramas are professedly taken from Greek originals, much of the manner and spirit of his personages is certainly Roman. The language in which they express themselves in the first place is thoroughly their own. This is shown by the large number of his puns and plays on words. These by their spontaneity, sometimes by their grotesqueness, sometimes by a Latin play on a Greek word--such as Archidemides[42] or Epid.a.m.nus,--show their native origin. No writer, again, abounds so much in alliterations, a.s.sonances, asyndeta[43], which are characteristic of all early Roman poetry down even to Lucretius, and which have no parallel in the more refined and natural diction of the Greek dramatists. Further, we constantly meet with Roman formulae[44], Roman proverbs[45], expressions of courtesy[46], and the like. The very fluency, copiousness, and verve of his language are impossible to a translator, at least in the early stages of a literature. Nothing can be more spontaneous and natural than the dialogue in Plautus. There is, on the other hand, considerable appearance of effort in the reflective pa.s.sages of the "cantica"; and this is exactly what we should expect in a Roman writer of originality. Reflexion on life was altogether strange to a Roman in the age of Plautus; to a Greek it was easy and hackneyed. In the prolixity and slow beating out of the thought in some of the "cantica" we note the beginning of a process unfamiliar to the Roman mind, for which the forms of the Latin language were not yet adapted. The facility of expressing reflexion appears much more developed in Terence. If Plautus were reproducing a Greek original in such pa.s.sages as Mostell. 85-145, Trinummus 186-273, the thought and the ill.u.s.tration would have lost much in freshness and _navete_ but they would have been expressed with much more point and conciseness.
But it is not only in his language and manner that Plautus shows his independence of his originals. The poems taken from Greek life are in a large measure filled up with matter taken from the life around him.
The Greek personages of his play, without apparently any sense of artistic incongruity, speak as Romans would do of the places familiar to Romans--town in Italy[47], streets, markets, gates, in Rome[48]; of Roman magistrates and other officials, Quaestors, Aediles, Praetors, Tresviri, Publicani; they allude to the public business of the senate, comitia, and law-courts,--to colonies[49], praefecturae, and the provincia of a magistrate,--to public games in honour of the dead,--to the distinctive dress worn by matrons,--to the forms of bargaining and purchasing, of summoning an antagonist into court, of pleading a case at law,--to the times of vacation from business[50],--to the emanc.i.p.ation of slaves,--peculiar to the Romans. The special characteristics of Roman religion appear in the number of abstract deities referred to, such as Salus, Opportunitas, Libentia, etc. A new divinity is invented in the interests of lovers, under the name of Suavisuaviatio[51]. Other better-known objects of Roman worship, such as Jupiter Capitolinus, Laverna, the Lar Familiaris, are also introduced. We find also references to recent events in Roman history--such as the subjugation of the Boii[52], the treatment inflicted on the Campanians after the Second Punic War, the importation of Syrian slaves after the war with Antiochus[53], the introduction of foreign luxuries at the same time[54], the extreme frequency with which triumphs were granted in the first twenty years of the second century B.C.[55] Allusion is made to particular Roman laws, such as the lex alearia[56], probably pa.s.sed about this time to resist the progress of Greek demoralisation. The state of feeling aroused, on both sides, by the repeal of the Oppian law, and the state of society which led to the original enactment of that law, are reflected in many pa.s.sages of the plays of Plautus. A remark of one of the better cla.s.s of matrons--
Non matronarum officium est, sed meretricium, Viris alienis, mi vir, subblandirier[57]--
may serve as a comment on the arguments with which Cato opposed the repeal of the law: "Qui hic mos est in public.u.m procurrendi, et obsidendi vias, et viros alienos appellandi?... An blandiores in publico quam in privato, et alienis quam vestris estis[58]?" The imperiousness of a "dotata uxor," and the spirit of rebellion thereby aroused in the mind of her husband, are themes treated with grim humour in many of the dramas. The stale jokes against the happiness of married life were as applicable to Greek as to Roman life; and Greek husbands may have stood in as much dread of their wives" extravagance in dress, and in as great awe of their surveillance, as were experienced by the elderly husbands of Latin comedy. But the fact that similar criticisms appear in the satirical and oratorical fragments of the second century B.C. indicates that such jokes, whether or not originally due to the Greek writer, came equally home to a Roman audience.
Again, the great fertility of Plautus and his many-sided contact with life are apparent in the number and variety of his metaphors and ill.u.s.trations from, and other references to, many varieties of human occupation. These have, for the most part, both a national and a popular origin. The number of those taken from military operations, and from legal and business transactions, is a clear indication that they were of fresh Roman coinage. There is no character which a slave, who has to conduct some intrigue to a successful issue, is so fond of a.s.suming as that of the general of an army. In one pa.s.sage one of his confederates addresses him as "Imperator." He takes the auspices, he brings his engines to bear on the citadel of the enemy, he brings up his supports, he lays his ambush and avoids that laid for him, he leads his army round by some unknown pa.s.s, cuts off the enemy"s communications, keeps open his own, invests and takes the hostile position, and divides the booty among his allies. The following pa.s.sage for instance is freshly coloured with all the recent experience of the Hannibalian war:--
Viden hostis tibi adesse, tuoque tergo obsidium? Consule, Arripe opem auxiliumque ad hanc rem, propere hoc non placide decet.
Anteveni aliqua aut aliquo saltu circ.u.mduce exercitum, Coge in obsidium perduellis, nostris praesidium para.
Interclude conmeatum inimicis, tibi moeni viam, Qua cibatus conmeatusque ad te et legionis tuas Tuto possit pervenire. Hanc rem age: res subitariast[59].
The ill.u.s.trations from the practice of keeping accounts, from banking and business operations, and the references to law forms, such as the mode of pleading a case by sponsio[60], would come home to the experience and habits which were fostered more in Rome than in any other ancient community[61]. Though the Romans never were a mercantile community, like the Carthaginians or the Greek States in their later days, yet from the earliest times they understood the uses of the acc.u.mulation and skilful application of capital. Another large cla.s.s of metaphors, generally expressive of some form of roguery, and taken from the trade of various artisans--such as the smith, carpenter, butcher, weaver, etc.[62]--speaks to the popular as well as the national characteristics of his dramas. If these metaphorical phrases had been mere translations, they would, as thus applied, have had no meaning to a Roman audience. They must have been more or less of slang phrases, formed by and for the people, and suggested by an intimate familiarity with many varieties of trickery and swindling on the one hand, and with the skill and trade of various cla.s.ses of artisans on the other.
The exuberant use of terms of endearment and of abuse in Plautus may be also mentioned as an original and Roman characteristic of his genius. His lovers" phrases[63], though used by him with a saturnine humour, remind us of the pa.s.sionate use of similar phrases in Catullus. The slave or cook of Greek comedy may probably have indulged freely in the vituperation of his fellows; but there is an idiomatic heartiness in the interchange of curses and verbal sword-thrusts among the slaves, panders, and cooks of Plautus, which seems congenial to the race who enjoyed the spectacles of the amphitheatre. The inexhaustible fund of merriment supplied by references to or practical exemplifications of the various modes of punishing and torturing slaves, tells of a people not especially cruel, but practically callous either to the infliction or the suffering of pain. The Greek nature was, when roused to pa.s.sion, capable of fiercer and more cowardly cruelty than the Roman, but was too sensitively organised to enjoy the spectacle or the imagination of inflictions which form the subject of the stalest jokes in Plautus. The spirit of the new comedy as it existed in Greece, was not, on the whole, calculated to elevate, but it certainly was capable of humanising the Roman character.
We are less able to speak of his originality in the selection of incidents and dramatic situations, in the general management of his plots, and his conception of characters. Though more varied than Terence in the subjects which he chooses for dramatic treatment, yet there is great sameness, both of incident, development, and character, in many of them. His favourite subject is a scheme by which a slave, in the interests of his young master, and his mistress, cheats a father, a mercenary captain, or a "leno," who are treated, though in different degrees, as enemies of the human race and legitimate objects of spoliation. Some of the best of his plays--the Pseudolus, Bacchides, the Mostellaria, and the Miles Gloriosus--turn entirely upon incidents of this kind--"frustrationes in comoediis" as they are called. There is nothing on which the chief agent in such plots prides himself so much as on his success "in shearing," "planing away,"
or "wiping the nose" of, his antagonist in the game: there is no indignity about which the sense of honour is so sensitive as that of having had "words palmed off upon one," and having thus been made an object of ridicule. The invariable enlisting of sympathy in favour of the cheat and against the dupe is a trait more ill.u.s.trative of the countrymen of Ulysses than of Fabricius; but the "Tusci turba impia vici" at Rome had, no doubt, their own native apt.i.tude for cheating and lying.
The "Pseudolus" is perhaps the best and the most typical specimen of a play the interest of which turns on this kind of intrigue. In it the plot is skilfully worked out, the characters are conceived with the greatest liveliness, and admirably sustained and contrasted, and the incidents and motives on which the personages act are never strained beyond the limits of probability. A more fastidious age might have objected to the celebration by Pseudolus of his triumph, as a grotesque excrescence: but it serves to bring out the sensual geniality underlying the audacity and roguery of his character, in contrast to the sensual brutality underlying the audacity and villainy of Ballio. When we consider the vigorous life and even the art with which the whole piece is worked out, we understand why Plautus, with good reason, took, in his old age, especial pleasure in this play.
There is not much to offend a robust morality in the piece; for though the result accomplished cannot be called the triumph of virtue over vice, it is at least the triumph of a more amiable over a more detestable form of depravity.
In the "Bacchides" the slave Chrysalus plays a part similar to that of Pseudolus, with perhaps more subtlety but less vigour and liveliness.
The mode in which both the "pater attentus" and the "senex lepidus" of the piece (Nicobulus and Philoxenus) succ.u.mb to the blandishments of the two sisters, and in the end become the rivals of their sons, is still less edifying than the winding up of the Pseudolus: but the _denouement_ is brought about not unskilfully or extravagantly. It is difficult to say whether Plautus, like the author of Gil Blas, felt a moral indifference to the characters he brought on the stage, so long as he could make them amusing; or whether, like Balzac, but with more humour and less cynicism, he had a peculiar delight in following human corruption into its last retreats. The moral with which the piece winds up--
Hi senes nisi fuissent nihili iam inde ab adulescentia, Non hodie hoc tantum flagitium facerent canis capitibus,
implies that he recognised the difference between right and wrong, or at least between good and bad taste in such matters, but that he did not, perhaps, attach much importance to it. The "Asinaria," which also turns on a scheme by which a slave defrauds his mistress in behalf of his young master, winds up with a scene in which a father is enjoying himself as the rival of his complaisant son, till he is summoned away by the apparition of his wife, and the wrathful and scornful reiteration of "Surge, amator, i domum." The moral expressed there by the "Caterva" implies less sympathy with outraged virtue than with the disappointed delinquent--
Hic senex siquid clam uxorem suo animo fecit volup"
Neque novom neque mirum fecit nec secus quam alii solent.
There are two or three other plays in which a father appears as the rival of his son. None of the characters in Plautus, not even Ballio, or Labrax, or Cleaereta,--the worst of his "lenones" and "lenae,"--excite more unmitigated disgust than Stalino in the "Casina."
The "Miles Gloriosus" and the "Mostellaria" are much less objectionable in point of morality, or at least good taste, than either the "Bacchides" or the "Asinaria." They are among the most popular of the plays of Plautus. There is a great variety of humorous situations in the "Miles": and, although the princ.i.p.al character transcends all natural limits in his self-glorification, his stupid insensibility, and his pusillanimity, the intrigue is carried out with the greatest vivacity by Palaestrio and his army of accomplices; and the humour with which the fidelity and veracity of the slave Sceledrus are played upon almost merges into pathos in the despairing tenacity with which he cannot bring himself to disbelieve the evidence of his eyes--
Noli minitari: scio crucem futuram mihi sepulchrum: Ibi mei sunt maiores siti, pater, avos, proavos, abavos.
Non possunt tuis minaciis hisce oculi mi ecfodiri[63].