Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus was the earliest Roman dramatist whose plays survive complete. Ancient tradition, as reported by later writers, has him born at Sarsina in Umbria around the middle of the third century BC and dead in 184 BC; little else about his life is securely known. His name is conventionally given as Titus Maccius Plautus, though the second element may have begun as a stage nickname.

Plautus wrote comedies for the Roman stage, adapting Greek New Comedy to Latin audiences with songs, puns, invented compounds and a strong comic sense of plot. Twenty plays survive, with a twenty-first in fragments; among them are the Captivi, the Menaechmi, the Miles Gloriosus and the Aulularia. His comedies later influenced writers from Shakespeare to Molière.

The Captivi, set in Aetolia during a war with Elis, turns on an exchange of identities between a master and his slave. It is unusual among his plays: the prologue boasts that it contains no wenching and no cheating, and the closing speech praises its chaste manners. It is given here in Henry Thomas Riley's literal English translation of 1852.