Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

APPENDIX OF AUTHORS AND WORKS
scholarship (Oxford 1968) 1 241 f.) and Accius and others were guilty of passing off
dubious inferences and combinations as fact within the limits of what seemed a priori
likely, for example, that P. should have been an alien of low standing whose livelihood
was precarious and depended on the theatre. The romantic tale of his vicissitudes in
business and of his working and writing in a mill has no authority and is probably
fabricated from well-known themes of P.'s oeuvre — changes in material fortune,
slaves' remarks such as Per. 2if. and fathers' complaints such as Trin. 82ofF. The
statement that P. came from Sarsina looks like an inept construction on the joke at
Most. 770, and the dogmatic allegation that he died in 184 B.C. probably represents an
inference from the absence of later production-notices; maybe P. simply retired, or was
invited to retire by the censor Cato. Although Cicero {Sen. 50) certainly implies that
he and Varro thought that P. was born earlier than 250 B.C., there is no antique
authority for the frequently repeated statement that P. was born either in 254 or 259/
258 B.C. The first date is arrived at by counting back three score years and ten from
184 B.C., while the second depends upon an absurd combination: at M.G. 629 Periplectomenus
mentions that he is fifty-four years of age; since antiquity it has been supposed
(not necessarily rightly) that M.G. 21 if. contains an allusion to the imprisonment of
Naevius in 205/204 B.C.; ergo, P. was born in 259/258 B.C. Either or both of these
arguments is worthy of Accius, but seem to have been worked out in post-Renaissance
times by scholars as yet unidentified (P. Crinitus, De poetis latinis (Florence 1505) is
exonerated). On the available evidence, P. could have been ten years younger than
Cato (b. 234 B.C.). We do not even know his real name: Varro apparently assumed that
Maccius was the real nomen gentile and took Plautus to be a cognomen which had
nothing to do with the writer's profession. T. Maccius Plautus, however, appears to be
a jocose pseudonym connoting ' Phallus the son of Clown (Maccus of Atellane Farce),
the Entertainer {plautus 'flatfoot' = planipes 'mime')', i.e., as it were, 'Dick Dopeson
Prancer'; see A. S. Gratwick, C.Q. n.s.23 (1973) 78—84, W. Beare, The Roman stage,
3rd ed. (London 1964) 47f., F. Leo, Plautinische Forschungen, 2nd ed. (Berlin 1912)
8 iff. On the positive side: all the surviving plays are essentially the work of one hand,
and date, in so far as they can be dated, from between the last years of the Second Punic
War and the mid-180s; the author was associated over a long period with T. Publilius
Pellio (an important actor-impressario); he may have acted in his own productions,
though the only possible direct evidence for this depends upon the interpretation of the
joke at Bacch. 21 iff., which is wittiest if Pellio is playing Pistoclerus and P. himself
Chrysalus; the occasion at which the Pseudolus was produced was a particularly
special celebration for which greater funds than usual were available, and the play calls
for unusually though not uniquely extravagant resources, which implies that P.'s
reputation already stood very high as a successful dramatist; and he was the first to
specialize in a single genre of drama, as had been the standard practice of Greek
dramatists.
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