Ancient Classics for English Readers 
 
 EDITED BY THE 
 
 REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A. 
 
 PLAUTUS AND TEBENCE
 
 The Volumes published of this Series contain 
 
 HOMER : THE ILIAD, BY THE EDITOR. 
 HOMER : THE ODYSSEY, BY THE SAME. 
 HERODOTUS, BY GEORGE C. SWAYNE, M.A. 
 C.<ESAR, BY ANTHONY TROLLOPE. 
 VIRGIL, BY THE EDITOR. 
 HORACE, BY THEODORE MARTIN. 
 AESCHYLUS, BY REGINALD S. COPLESTON, M.A. 
 XENOPHON, BY SIR ALEX. GRANT, BART., LL.D. 
 CICERO, BY THE EDITOR. 
 SOPHOCLES, BY CLIFTON W. COLLINS, M.A. 
 PLINY, BY A. CHURCH, M.A., AND W. ]. 
 
 BRODRIBB, M.A. 
 
 EURIPIDES, BY WILLIAM BODHAM DONNE. 
 JUVENAL, BY EDWARD WALFORD, M.A. 
 ARISTOPHANES, BY THE EDITOR. 
 HESIOD & THEOGNIS, BY JAMES DAVIES, M.A. 
 
 The following Authors, by various Contributors, are 
 in preparation : 
 
 TACITUS. 
 LUCIAN. 
 
 OTHERS WILL FOLLOW. 
 A Volume will be published Quarterly, price 2s. 6d.
 
 PLAUTUS AND TERENCE 
 
 REV. ]W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A. 
 
 t - 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 ETONIANA,' 'THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,' ETC. 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 MDCCCLXXIII
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. INTRODUCTORY THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA, . 1 
 
 II. MENANDER, ......... 6 
 
 III. PLAUTUS, . . 30 
 
 IV. THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS : .... 35 
 
 THE THREE SILVER PIECES THE BRAGGADOCIO 
 THE HAUNTED HOUSE THE SHIPWRECK THE CAP- 
 TIVES THE TWO MEN.ECHMI AMPHITRYON THE 
 POT OF GOLD THE TRICKSTER THE YOUNG CAR- 
 THAGINIAN STICHUS, ETC. 
 
 V. TERENCE, 95 
 
 VI. THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE : .... 100 
 THE MAID OP ANDROS THE MOTHER-IN-LAW THE 
 SELF-TORMENTOR THE ETHIOPIAN SLAVE PHOR- 
 MIO THE BROTHERS.
 
 NOTE, 
 
 THESE pages are much, indebted to M. Guizot's volume 
 entitled ' Menandre ; Etude Historique, &c. : ' also to 
 Mr Dunlop's ' History of Eoman Literature.' 
 
 No attempt has been made to avoid roughness in 
 the metre of the translations from Plautus and Ter- 
 ence ; they can hardly be, in this respect, more 
 irregular than the originals. 
 
 W. L. C.
 
 PLAUTUS AND TEKENCE. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 THE Comedies of Plautus and Terence are all that 
 remains to us of the Eoman Comic Drama. It is 
 impossible to deal with the works of these writers, 
 even in so slight a sketch as is contemplated in 
 this volume, without some previous reference to the 
 Greek originals from which they drew. For the 
 Eoman drama was, more than any other branch of 
 Eoman literature, an inheritance from Greece; one of 
 those notes of intellectual sovereignty which that mar- 
 vellous people impressed upon their conquerors. The 
 plays which, during five hundred years, from the days 
 of the Scipios to those of Diocletian, amused a Eoman 
 audience, had as little claim to be regarded as national 
 productions as the last happy " adaptation " from the 
 French which enjoys its brief run at an English 
 theatre. 
 
 But when we speak of Greek Comedy in its relation 
 to the Eoman Drama, we must not form our idea of 
 
 A. c. vol. xvi. A
 
 2 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 Comedy from the plays of Aristophanes. It so happens 
 that he stands before us moderns as the sole surviving 
 representative, in anything like discernible shape, of 
 the comic drama at Athens. But his brilliant bur- 
 lesques, with their keen political satire, their wealth of 
 allusion, their mad extravagance of wit pushed even to 
 buffoonery, have not much more in common with the 
 plays of Plautus and Terence than with our modern 
 parlour comedy as we have it from Mr Robertson or 
 Mr Byron. 
 
 It has been said, when we parted from Aristophanes 
 in a former volume of this series, that the glories of 
 the old Athenian comedy had departed even before the 
 great master in that school had put his last piece upon 
 the stage. The long War was over. The great game 
 of political life no longer presented the same intense 
 excitement for the players. Men's lives and thoughts 
 had begun to run in a narrower channel. As a poli- 
 tical engine, there was no longer scope or occasion for 
 the comic drama. And again, it was no longer easy 
 to provide that costly and elaborate spectacle, the 
 numerous Chorus, highly trained and magnificently 
 costumed, the machinery, the decorations, and the 
 music, which had delighted the eyes of Athenian 
 playgoers none the less because their intellect was keen 
 enough to appreciate every witticism of the dialogue. 
 It must be remembered that the expense of mounting 
 a new play and this must always have been consider- 
 able where the theatres were on such a vast scale was 
 not a matter of speculation for author or manager, as 
 with us, but a public charge undertaken in turn by 
 the richer citizens ; and in which those who sought
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 3 
 
 popularity, in order to advance their own political 
 claims, vied with each other in the liberality of their 
 expenditure. But at the close of the Peloponnesian 
 War, many a noble family found itself impoverished 
 by the long and terrible struggle, and the competition for 
 public office had probably lost much of its charm. The 
 stage followed the temper of the nation : it became less 
 violently political, less extravagant and more sedate. 
 Shall one venture to say that, like the nation, it lost 
 something of its spirit 1 There was method, we must 
 remember, in the mad licence of Aristophanes. Bitter 
 as he was against his political opponents, it was an 
 honest bitterness, and Cleon was his enemy because he 
 believed him to be the enemy of the state. Socrates 
 and Euripides were caricatured in the most unsparing 
 fashion, for the amusement of the audience, and it was 
 convenient for a professional jester to have two such 
 well-known characters for his subject ; but he had 
 always the apology that he really believed the teaching 
 both of the philosopher and of the tragedian to have an 
 evil influence upon public morality. There was a certain 
 earnestness of purpose which gave respectability to the 
 Aristophanic comedy in spite of its notorious offences 
 against decency and good manners. 
 
 The new style of Comedy, which was the original of 
 that of Plautus and Terence, and which developed in 
 later times into what we call Comedy now, did not per- 
 haps fully establish itself at Athens until nearly half a 
 century after the death of Aristophanes. But the germ 
 of it may be found in the later tragedies of Euripides. 
 His heroes, and even his gods, are as unlike as possible 
 to the stately figures who move in the dramas of
 
 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 . He may call them by what names he 
 pleases, but they are the personages of ordinary life. 
 His drunken Hercules, in his beautiful drama (tragedy 
 it can hardly be called) ' Alcestis,' is as really comic as 
 any character in Menander's plays. His unsparing 
 satirist Aristophanes, in his ' Frogs,' when he intro- 
 duces ^Eschylus and Euripides pleading before Bacchus 
 their respective claims to the chair of tragedy, makes 
 it one of the charges against the latter that he had low- 
 ered the whole tone of tragedy : that whereas ^Eschylus 
 had left the ideal men of the drama " grand figures, 
 four cubits high," his rival had reduced them to the 
 petty level of everyday life poor mean gossips of the 
 market-place.* He allows Euripides indeed to plead 
 in his defence that while the elder tragedian had given 
 the audience nothing but high-flown sentiment and 
 pompous language which was quite above their compre- 
 hension, he had brought before them subjects of common 
 household interest which all could understand and 
 sympathise with. Both accusation and defence were 
 true. Euripides had violated the severe simplicity of 
 classic tragedy : but he had founded the domestic 
 drama. 
 
 The oligarchy of Rome would scarcely have permitted 
 to the writers for the stage the licence of personal satire 
 which the Athenian democracy not only bore with, 
 but encouraged and delighted in. The risk which 
 Aristophanes ran from the political partisans of Cleon 
 would have been as nothing, compared with the perils 
 of the comic dramatist who should have presumed to 
 
 * Frogs, 953, 910.
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 5 
 
 take the same liberty with any members of the " old 
 great houses " of Rome. There had been at least one 
 example of this in the fate of the poet Nsevius. We 
 know very little, unfortunately, of what his dramas 
 may have been like, for in his case we have remain- 
 ing to us only the merest fragments. But he seems to 
 have made an attempt to naturalise at Eome the old 
 Aristophanic style of comedy. A plebeian by birth, 
 and probably a democratic reformer in politics, he had 
 ventured upon some caricature of, or satire upon, the 
 members of the great family who bore the name of 
 Metellus, and who, as he complained, were always 
 holding high office, fit or unfit. " It is fatality, not 
 merit," he said, in a verse which has been preserved, 
 " that has made the Metelli always consuls of Eome." 
 The family or their friends retorted in a song which 
 they chanted in the streets, the burden of which was, 
 in effect, that " Nsevius would find the Metelli a fatality 
 to him." They very soon got him imprisoned, under 
 the stringent libel laws of Eome : and, since that was 
 not enough to break his spirit for he is said, after his 
 release, to have written comedies which were equally 
 distasteful in high quarters, they succeeded at last in 
 driving him into banishment. We hear of no more 
 ambition on the part of Eoman dramatists to assume 
 the mantle of Aristophanes. They were content to be 
 disciples in the later school of Menander, and to take 
 as the subject of comedy those general types of human 
 nature under which no individual, high or low, was 
 obliged to think that his own private weaknesses were 
 attacked.
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 MENANDER. 
 
 MENANDER was born at Athens, B.C. 342, of a family 
 in which dramatic talent was in some degree heredi- 
 tary, for his uncle Alexis had written comedies of 
 some repute. It would appear that the faculties which 
 make the successful comic writer commonly develop 
 themselves at an early age ; for Menander, like his 
 predecessor Aristophanes, won his first prize for comedy 
 Avhen he had barely reached manhood : and the same 
 may be remarked as to the early and rapid success of 
 some of our modern humorists.* But this youthful 
 triumph was not followed, as might have been ex- 
 
 * Of course he did not escape the charge of presumption 
 and precocity from older candidates. He had to defend him- 
 self on this occasion, like Pitt, from "the atrocious crime of 
 being a young man." His defence, if we may trust the anec- 
 dotist, was by a parable. He brought upon the stage some 
 new-born puppies, and had them thrown into a vessel of water. 
 Blind and weak as they were, they instinctively tried to swim. 
 "Athenians," said the young author, "you ask how, at my 
 years, I can have the knowledge of life which is required in the 
 dramatist : I ask you, under what master and in what school 
 did these creatures learn to swim ? "
 
 MENANDEH. 7 
 
 pected, by many such victories. He wrote more than a 
 hundred comedies, and he only won the crown eight 
 times. He was beaten in the contest, again and again, 
 by his elder rival Philemon. Of this writer's plays 
 nothing but the merest fragments remain to us, and we 
 are thus unable to form any opinion as to the justice of 
 the popular verdict. But critics who probably had the! 
 means of comparing the performances of both authors,', 
 do not hesitate to impute this preference of Philemon : 
 to Menander by the contemporary public to other 
 causes than the comparative merits of the rivals. Quin- 
 tilian goes so far as to say that the wonderful genius 
 of Menander robbed all his contemporary dramatists 
 of what might have been their reputation, and that 
 " the blaze of his glory threw their merits into the 
 shade." 
 
 The honours which were refused to the poet by his 
 fellow-citizens were liberally offered him by powerful 
 patrons elsewhere. Demetrius " Poliorcetes " both pro- 
 tected him when he occupied Athens and invited him 
 to his court when he had seated himself upon the 
 throne of Macedonia : and Ptolemy Lagus, when he 
 founded his celebrated library at Alexandria, would 
 gladly have imported the living dramatist as well as 
 the manuscripts of his predecessors' works. Menander 
 refused the invitation, though the king offered him 
 " all the money in the world ; " but whether it was, 
 as he declared, because he could not tear himself 
 from a certain fair lady at Athens, or because he found 
 that the invitation had been extended to his rival 
 Philemon, may not be so certain. 
 
 But it is said that the injustice of his fellow r dti^eus
 
 8 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 broke the poet's heart. In his bitter mortification 
 at one undeserved defeat (so goes the story) he threw 
 himself into the sea off the wall at the Piraeus, and was 
 drowned, while yet in the fulness of his powers not 
 much over fifty years of age. The authority is sus- 
 picious, and the act is very little in accordance with 
 the philosophy of Menander, as we gather it from the 
 remains of his plays. A contemporary and probably a 
 personal friend of Epicurus (they were born in the 
 same year), he seems to have adopted heartily the easy- 
 going optimism of that much-abused teacher. To take 
 human life as it was ; to enjoy its pleasures, and to 
 bear its evils cheerfully, as unavoidable : not to expect 
 too much from others, as knowing one's own infir- 
 mities ; to remember that life is short, and therefore 
 to make the most of it and the best of it, not to 
 waste it in vain regrets ; this is the philosophy of 
 Menander's comedies, which on these points are oc- 
 casionally only too didactic. The whole secret of it lies, 
 he says, in three words " Thou art man." 
 
 " The sum of all philosophy is this 
 Thou art a man ; than whom there breathes no creature 
 More Liable to sudden rise and fall." * 
 
 This is the principle on which, by the mouth of his 
 various characters, he is continually excusing human 
 weaknesses, and protesting against the unreasonable- 
 ness of mortal regrets and expectations : 
 
 " Being a mortal, ask not of the gods 
 Escape from suffering ; ask but to endure ; 
 For if thou seekest to be ever free 
 
 * Meineke, Menandri Eeliq. , 188.
 
 MENANDER. 9 
 
 From pain and evil, then thou seekest this, 
 To be a god, or die." * 
 
 One does not wonder that Horace, when he shut him- 
 self up in his country villa in December, to escape 
 from the noisy riot of the Saturnalia at Eome, took 
 with him into his retirement a copy of Menander as 
 well as of Plato. No doubt he read and appreciated 
 the philosopher ; and the manuscript looked well upon 
 his table when his friends called. But we may be 
 sure that the dramatist was his favourite companion. 
 In him Horace found a thoroughly congenial spirit ; 
 and we shall probably never know how far he was 
 indebted to him for his turn of thought. 
 
 Menander's private habits seem to have been too much 
 those of an Epicurean in the lower sense of the term ; 
 and if Phsedrus is to be trusted in the sketch which he 
 gives of him in a couple of lines, he had a good deal 
 of the foppishness not uncommon to popular authors. 
 Phaedrus describes him as " scented with delicate per- 
 fumes, wearing the fashionable flowing dress, and 
 walking with an air of languor and affectation." t 
 
 It is possible, indeed, that the philosophic and didac- 
 tic character of Menander's comedies may have been 
 one reason why they failed so often to win popular 
 applause. Horace himself must have been the poet of 
 the court, and of what we call " Society," rather than 
 of the million. The comedy of manners, which deals 
 with the problems of domestic life and such is the 
 comedy of Menander had not so strong an attraction 
 
 * Meineke, Menand. Rel., 203. ' + Fabul., v. 1.'
 
 10 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 for the multitude as the uproarious farce which formed 
 so large an ingredient of the Old Comedy. So far as we 
 can judge from the mere disjointed fragments which 
 alone have survived, there was very little of broad fun or 
 of comic situations in the plays of Menander. It was 
 in the finer delineation of character, as is admitted by 
 all his critics, that he most excelled. He had studied 
 carefully, and reproduced successfully, the various 
 phases of that human nature which was the Alpha and 
 Omega in his philosophy. The saying of the wise 
 man of old "Know thyself" was a very insufficient 
 lesson, he considered, for the dramatist. 
 
 " It was not, after all, so wisely said, 
 That precept ' Know thyself ; ' I reckon it 
 Of more advantage to know other men." * 
 
 How real the characters in his dramas appeared to those 
 who had the best means of judging may be gathered 
 from the terse epigram ascribed to the grammarian 
 Aristophanes, the librarian of Alexandria, who lived 
 about a century after him : 
 
 " Life, and Menander ! speak, and say 
 
 Which copied Iwhich 1 orjnature, or the play ?" 
 } I 
 
 There certainly does not seem to have been that variety 
 in the characters introduced which we expect and find 
 in the modern drama. But life itself had not then the 
 variety of interest which it has now : and the sameness 
 of type which we observe in the persons of the drama 
 probably existed also in society. It must be re- 
 
 * Meineke, Menand. Eel., 83.
 
 MENANDER. 11 
 
 membered also that, owing to the immense size of, 
 the theatres, every performer wore a mask in which 
 the features were exaggerated, just as he wore buskins 
 which increased his stature, in order to make his face 
 and figure distinctly visible to the distant rows of the 
 audience. These masks necessarily presented one fixed 
 expression of features; they could not possibly be . 
 made to display the variable shades of emotion which 
 a real comedian knows how to throw into his face ; 
 nor could the actor, if he was to preserve his identity for 
 the audience, change his mask together with his mood 
 from scene to scene. This difficulty would naturally limit 
 the dramatic author's sphere of invention : he would feel 
 that he had to confine himself to certain recognised 
 generalities of character, such as the mask-moulder could 
 contrive more or less to represent, and that the finer 
 shades of distinction which, in spite of so much that is 
 identical, distinguish man from man, must be left for 
 the descriptive poet, and were outside of the province 
 of the author who worked for the stage. The 
 cold severity of Greek tragedy did not suffer much 
 from this limitation of the actor's resources : the level 
 and stately declamation of the text might be accom- 
 plished perhaps as well with a mask (which was even 
 said to increase the volume of sound) as without it. 
 So also, in the Old Comedy of Aristophanes and his 
 contemporaries, the exaggerated style of their humour 
 found apt expression in the broad grotesque which the 
 mask-maker and property-man supplied, just as they 
 do now in our burlesques and extravaganzas. The 
 delicate play of features and expression which are 
 so essential to the due impersonation of some of the
 
 12 
 
 THE AXCIEST COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 most original characters in our modern drama was 
 plainly impossible to an actor who wore a mask : one 
 might as reasonably look for it from a company of 
 Marionettes. The manufacturer of masks for the 
 ancient comic drama worked according to fixed rules, 
 which were perfectly well understood both by the 
 performers and by the audience. There was a tolerably 
 large repertory of these contrivances always at the 
 disposal of the stage-manager : but each mask had its 
 own specific character ; its features were so moulded as 
 to be typical of a class. We are told with great par- 
 ticularity that about the period during which these 
 comedies were placed upon the stage, there were nine 
 different characters of masks representing old men, ten 
 for younger characters, and seven for slaves. For the 
 women, three varieties were considered enough for the 
 older personages, the matrons and nurses of the scene. 
 The young ladies, as was their due, were better pro- 
 vided for ; no less than fourteen varieties of face were 
 kept in stock for them. And the mask, in their case 
 unlike some masks which are still worn on the stage 
 of real life was made not to conceal but to indicate 
 the character of the wearer, and even her age. There 
 was to be found, in the theatrical wardrobe, the face 
 and head-dress, all in one, which denoted " the 
 talkative young woman," and the "modest young 
 woman ; " the one who was still fairly on her promotion, 
 and the one who was past her prime ; there was a 
 ', special mask for the young lady " with the hair," and 
 one still more peculiar, the " lamp " head-dress, as it 
 was called, for the young lady whose hair stood up- 
 right like a lamp. There was the head-dress " with
 
 MENANDER. 13 
 
 the gold band," and that with " the band of many 
 colours ; " and, if we did not know that in the classical 
 comedy, as on our own stage in former times, even the 
 female parts were taken by men, we might have 
 fancied that there was some jealous rivalry as to the 
 right to wear these latter distinguished costumes. 
 The advantage of the system, if any, was this : that 
 the moment the performer appeared upon the scene, 
 the audience had the key to the character.* 
 
 The range of characters which were available for the 
 purposes of the dramatist was limited again by the 
 nature of the scenic arrangements. By long theatrical 
 tradition, intelligible enough amongst a people who 
 led essentially an outdoor life, and where the theatre 
 itself was, up to a comparatively late period, open to 
 the sky, all the action of these dramas was supposed 
 to take place in the open air. In the comedies which 
 we are now considering, the scene is commonly a pub- 
 lic street, or rather, probably, a sort of " place " or 
 square in which three or four streets met, so that there 
 was (as has been more than once attempted on the mo- 
 dern stage) a virtual separation of it into distinct parts, 
 very convenient in many ways for carrying on the action 
 
 * Should any English reader be inclined to smile, with 
 some degree of superciliousness, at these simple contrivances 
 of the earlier drama, let him remember there was a time when a 
 provincial actor in an English strolling company would bor- 
 row of some good-natured squire a full-bottomed wig and lace 
 ruffles in which to perform the part of Cato ; without which 
 conventional costume it was thought no audience could recog- 
 nise the "noble Roman." George Harding tells us an 
 amusing story of the Eton amateurs of his day impressing a 
 cast-off wig of the Vice-Provost's for the purpose.
 
 14 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 of the piece. A party coining down one street towards 
 the centre of the stage could hold a separate conversa- 
 tion, and be quite out of the sight of another party in 
 the other street, while both were equally visible and 
 audible to the spectators. This will help to explain 
 the stage directions in more than one scene in the 
 comedies of Plautus and Terence. But this limitation 
 of the locality of the scene limited also the range of 
 characters. These were usually supposed to be resi- 
 dents in the neighbourhood, and occupants of some of 
 the houses in the street. Practically, they will be 
 very often found to be members of two neighbouring 
 families, more or less closely connected, whose houses 
 occupied what we should now call the right and left 
 wings of the stage. Occasionally (as in the ' Aulularia ' 
 and ' Mostellaria ' of Plautus) the scene changes to the 
 inside of one of the houses, or a temple which stands 
 close by ; but such scenes are quite exceptional, and 
 in those cases some kind of stage chamber appears to 
 have been swung round by machinery to the front. 
 
 For these reasons, perhaps, as well as for others, 
 the principal characters in the repertory of the 
 " New " Comedy are few, and broadly marked. They 
 seem to have occurred over and over again with but 
 little variation in almost every piece. There are 
 the fathers, heads of families, well-to-do burghers, 
 occupying their house in the city, and commonly 
 having a farm in the adjacent country besides, but 
 seldom appearing to have any other particular occu- 
 pation. Their character is almost always one of two 
 recognised types, either stern and niggardly, in which 
 case they are duly cheated and baffled by their spend-
 
 MENANDER. 15 
 
 thrift sons and their accomplices : or mild and easy, 
 when they go through the process of having their 
 purses squeezed with less resistance and less suffering. 
 There is the respectable mother of the family, who is 
 sometimes the terror of her husband and sometimes 
 tyrannised over by him. One or two sons, and some- 
 times a daughter to which number the household of 
 comedy seems limited make up the family group. 
 The sons are young men about town, having apparently 
 nothing to do but to amuse themselves, a pursuit 
 which they do not always follow after the most re- 
 putable fashion. Then there are the slaves, on whom, 
 depends in very great measure the action of the piece. j 
 It is very remarkable how in Greek comedy, and in 
 the Eoman adaptations from it, this class supplies 
 not only the broadly comic element, but the wit 
 of the dialogue, and the fertility of expedient which 
 makes the interest of the drama. They are not 
 brought upon the stage merely to amuse us by their 
 successful roguery, or by its detection and consequent 
 punishment, by their propensity to gormandise and 
 their drunken antics, this kind of "low comedy 
 business " is what we might naturally expect of them. 
 But in witty repartee, and often in practical wisdom, 
 they are represented as far superior to their masters. 
 And this ability of character is quite recognised by the 
 masters themselves. ' They are intrusted, 
 
 in the 'Eunuchus' of Terence, with the care of the sons 
 of the house, even at that difficult age when they are 
 growing up to manhood, during the father's absence 
 abroad : or like his namesake in the ' Plocium ' of 
 Menander, and Geta in the 'Two Brothers' of Terence,
 
 16 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 they are the trusted friend and mainstay of a struggling 
 ^aniily: It is by no means easy to explain satisfac- 
 torily this anomalous position. The slave no doubt 
 in many cases, owing the loss of his personal liberty 
 to the fortunes of Avar, being either a captive or a 
 captive's child, might, although a foreigner, be of 
 as good birth and hereditary intellect as his master. 
 In many households he would go to the same 
 school, and enjoy the same training in many 
 ways as the young heir of the family : he would 
 be taught many accomplishments, because the more 
 accomplished he was, the more valuable a chattel he 
 became. But was it also that these Athenian citizens, 
 from whom Menander drew, held themselves some- 
 what above the common practical business of life in 
 short, like the Easterns in the matter of dancing, 
 considered that they " paid some one else to do their 
 . thinking for them " in such matters 1 The witty slave 
 occupied a position in those households somewhat akin 
 to the king's jester in late times allowed to use a free- 
 dom which would not have been suffered from those of 
 higher rank, but limited always by the risk of condign 
 personal chastisement if he ventured too far. The 
 household slave was certainly admitted to most of his 
 master's secrets ; admitted, it must be remembered, 
 almost of necessity, as many of our own modern servants 
 are a condition of things which we are all too apt to 
 forget. He might at any moment by his ability and 
 fidelity win, as so many did, his personal freedom, and 
 became from that moment his master's friend ; not, in- 
 deed, upon terms of perfect equality, but on a much 
 nearer level than we in these days should be willing
 
 MENANDER. 
 
 17 
 
 to allow. I^o stronger instance of this need be sought 
 than that of Cicero's freedman Tiro, between whom and 
 his master we find existing an affection almost fraternal. 
 The slave who had gained his freedom might rise for 
 it was Terence's own case to be a successful dramatist 
 himself, and to sit down at table with such men as 
 Scipio and Laelius. The anomaly is that a man 
 who stood in such confidential relations to his master, 
 and with such possibilities in his future, should feel 
 himself every moment liable, at that master's slightest 
 caprice, to the stocks and the whip. But it is an 
 anomaly inherent to the institution of slavery itself ; 
 and no worse examples of it need be sought than are 
 to be found in the annals of modern slave plantations. 
 In the few fragments of Menander which remain 
 to us we find the poet adopting, as to the slave's 
 position, a much higher tone than we might have ex- 
 pected, and which is very remarkable in a writer who 
 would certainly never have dreamed of the abolition 
 of a system which must have appeared to him a neces- 
 sity of civilisation. It is a tone, be it said, which we 
 do not find in his Eoman imitators, Plautus or Terence. 
 He plainly feels slavery to be an evil a degradation 
 to the nature of man. His remedy is a lofty one 
 freedom of soul : 
 
 " Live as a free man and it makes thee free." * 
 The young men are, as has been said, usually very 
 much of the same type, and that not a very high 
 one : hot-blooded and impulsive, with plenty of self- 
 ish good-nature, and in some cases a capacity for 
 
 Meineke, Menand. Eel 
 
 A. c. vol. xvi. 
 
 .,afo. 
 
 J
 
 18 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 strong and disinterested friendship. We have too 
 little opportunity of judging what Menander made of 
 them ; "but in Terence they have commonly the re- 
 deeming point of a strong affection for their parents 
 underlying all their faults, though it does not prevent 
 them from intriguing with their slaves to cheat them 
 in order to the gratification of their own passions or 
 extravagance. Yet their genuine repentance when de- 
 tected, and the docility with which they usually accept 
 their father's arrangements for them in the matter of 
 a wife, are a remarkable proof of the strength of the 
 paternal influence. The daughter of the family may be 
 said (in quite a literal sense) to have no character at 
 all. She is brought up in something stricter than even 
 what Dry den calls " the old Elizabeth way, which was 
 for maids to be seen and not heard ; " for she is never 
 seen or heard, though we are always led to believe that 
 she is an irreproachable young lady, possessing a due 
 amount of personal charms, and with a comfortable 
 dowry ; which combined attractions are quite sufficient 
 to make one of the young gentlemen happy some- 
 times at very short notice in the last scene of the 
 play. But it was not etiquette for an unmarried 
 woman at Athens to make her appearance in the public 
 streets and in the streets, for the reasons already 
 given, the action of the piece invariably takes place. 
 Of some of the ladies who do appear on the stage the 
 same remark as to character (in a different sense) might 
 be made ; and if something less were seen and heard 
 of them, it might be better. 
 
 This entire absence of what we should call love- 
 scenes, places these dramas at an enormous disadvantage
 
 MENANDER. 19 
 
 before the modern reader. Yet in one direction, a great 
 approach to modern ways of thought had been made 
 in this New Athenian Comedy. Love, with the 
 dramatists of this school, is no longer the mere animal 
 passion of some of the older poets, nor yet that fatal and 
 irresistible influence which we see overpowering mind 
 and I reason in the Medea of Euripides, or in the 
 Dido of Virgil. It has become, in Menander and his 
 followers, much more like the love ofTnodern romance. 
 It is a genuine mutual affection between the sexes, 
 not always well regulated, but often full of tender- 
 ness, and capable of great constancy. Still, the mo- 
 dern romance is not there. It was very well for ancient 
 critics to say that Menander was emphatically a writer 
 of love-dramas that there was no play of his which 
 had not a love-story in the plot : and it is true, if we 
 may judge from the Latin adaptations, that his come- 
 dies usually ended in marriage. But a marriage with 
 a bride whom the audience have never been allowed 
 to see, and for whose charms they must take the bride- 
 groom's word, has not a very vivid interest for them. 
 The contrivances by which, in order to suit what were 
 then considered the proprieties, the fair object is kept 
 carefully out of sight while the interest in her fortunes 
 is still kept up, will seem to an English reader a 
 striking instance of misplaced ingenuity. 
 
 If, however, in these comedies of ancient domestic 
 life we miss that romance of feeling which forms so 
 important an element if it may not rather be said to 
 be of the very essence of the modern drama, we escape 
 altogether from one style of plot which was not only the 
 reproach of our old English comedy-writers, but is still
 
 20 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 too common a resource with modern writers of fiction, 
 romantic or dramatic. The sanctities of married life 
 are not tampered with to create a morbid interest for 
 audience or reader. The husband may sometimes be a 
 domestic tyrant, or his wife a scold, and their matri- 
 monial wrangles are not unfrequently produced for the 
 amusement of the audience ; but there is little hint of 
 any business for the divorce court. The morality of 
 
 ' these comedies is lax in many respects, chiefly because 
 the whole law of morality was lower on those points 
 (at least in theory) in the pagan world than it is in the 
 Christian : but the tie of fidelity between husband and 
 wife is fully recognised and regarded. In this respect 
 
 ' some advance had been made, at least so far as popular 
 comedy was concerned, since the time of Aristophanes. 
 His whole tone on such points is cynical and sneering ; 
 and when he lashes as he does with such out-spoken 
 severity the vices of the sex, it seems to be without any 
 consciousness of their bearing upon domestic happi- 
 ness. The wife, in his days at least, was not the 
 companion of her husband, but a property to be kept 
 as safe as might be, and their real lives lay apart. 
 Some considerable change must have taken place in 
 these relations at the time when Menander wrote, if 
 we may judge from scattered expressions in his lost 
 comedies. He is not, upon the whole, complimentary 
 to marriage, and he makes capital enough out of its 
 risks and annoyances ; he does not think (or perhaps 
 professes not to think) that good wives are common. 
 " Needs must that in a wife we gain an evil, 
 Happy is he who therein gains the least."* 
 
 * Meineke, Menand. Rel., 190.
 
 MENANDER. 21 
 
 But, if a really good wife can be found, lie admits 
 with the wise Hebrew king that " her price is above 
 rubies." Verses like the following, salvage from the 
 wreck of his plays, passed into proverbs : 
 
 " A virtuous woman is a man's salvation." 
 " A good wife is the rudder of the house." 
 
 He is honest enough, too, to lay the fault of ill-assorted 
 marriages at the door of those who have to choose in 
 such a matter, as much as of those who are chosen ; in 
 this, as in other things, he recognises a certain law of 
 supply and demand. 
 
 " What boots it to be curious as to lineage 
 Who was her grandfather, and her mother's mother 
 Which matters nought ? while, for the bride herself, 
 Her whom we have to live with, what she is, 
 In mind and temper, this we never ask. 
 They bring the dowry out, and count it down, 
 Look if the gold be good, of right assay, 
 The gold, which some few months shall see the end of ; 
 While she who at our hearth must sit through life, 
 We make no trial of, put to no proof, 
 Before we take her, but trust all to chance."* 
 
 The gibes which he launches against women seem 
 to have been not more than half in earnest. He pro- 
 bably borrowed the tone from Euripides, of whom he 
 was a great admirer, and whose influence may be 
 pretty clearly traced in the style and sentiment of his 
 comedies. 
 
 We usually find, then, the chief parts in the comedy 
 filled by the members of one or two neighbouring 
 
 *Meineke, Menand. Rel., 189.
 
 22 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 families. Of the other characters who are introduced, 
 two of the most common, and therefore, we must sup- 
 . pose, the most popular, are the Braggadocio and the 
 Parasite. The former is usually a soldier of fortune 
 who has served in the partisan wars in Asia, under 
 some of those who were disputing for the fragments of 
 Alexander's empire ; who has made money there, and 
 come to Athens as a modern successful adventurer 
 might go to Paris to spend it. He has long stories to 
 tell of his remarkable exploits abroad, which no one 
 is very well able to contradict, and to which those 
 who accept his dinners are obliged to listen with such 
 patience as they may. His bravery consists much 
 more in words than deeds : he thinks that his repu- 
 tation will win him great favour from the ladies, but 
 on this point he commonly finds himself very much 
 mistaken. How far such a character was common at 
 Athens in Menander's time, we cannot say: he appears, 
 with variations, in at least five of his comedies of Avhich 
 fragments have reached us, and in no less than eight 
 out of the twenty which remain to us of Plautus. He 
 would evidently present salient points for the farce- 
 writer, and it is not surprising to find him repro- 
 duced, no doubt an adaptation from these earlier 
 sketches, as the " Spanish Captain" of Italian comedy, 
 or the " Derby Captain " of our own. He is the Don 
 Gaspard of Scarron's ' Jodelet Duelliste,' Le Capitaine 
 Matamore of Corneille's ' L'lllusion Comique,' and the 
 Bobadil of Jonson's ' Every Man in his Humour.' In 
 Spain or Italy he is perhaps more in Ms natural place 
 for these military adventurers were not uncommon in 
 the Continental wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
 
 MENANDER. 23 
 
 turies than lie is in the plays of Plautus or of Terence, 
 who transferred him bodily from their Greek original : 
 for the Romans themselves were not likely to furnish 
 examples of him, and no hired mercenary would have 
 ventured to swagger in those days at Eome. To a 
 Roman audience this could only have been one of those 
 conventional characters, made to be laughed at, which 
 an easy public is very often willing to accept from an ._ 
 author's hands. He is sometimes accompanied by the r\ " ^ 
 Parasite, who is content to eat his dinners on condition 
 of listening to his military reminiscences, and occasion- 
 ally drawing them out for the benefit of others, act- 
 ing, in short, generally as his humble foil and toady. 
 This is a character almost peculiar to the comedy of 
 this school, and which has not found its way much 
 into the modern drama. In the Athens of Menander, 
 and in the Rome of Plautus and Terence, when life 
 Avas altogether more in public, and when men of any 
 moderate position seldom dined alone, the character, 
 though not in the exaggerated form which suited the 
 purpose of the comic dramatist, appears to have been 
 sufficiently common. Athenseus, from whose curious 
 ' Table-Talk ' we learn so much about the social life of 
 those times, notes three distinct cjasaes^xif-fehe Para- 
 site. There was the professed talker the narrator of 
 
 anecdotes and sayer of good things who was in- 
 vited to " make sport " for the guests who might be too 
 grand or too dull to amuse each other ; and this useful 
 class of " diner-out " is not altogether unknown in 
 modern society. This variety of the character seems 
 to have not unfrequently " read up " carefully in pre- 
 paration for the display of the evening, as modern
 
 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 
 professors of the art of conversation have been reported 
 to do. " I will go in and have a look at my common- 
 place-books, and learn up some better jokes," says 
 Gelasimus in the 'Stichus' of Plautus, when he is 
 afraid of being superseded by some new pretenders. 
 There was, again, the mere toady and flatterer, of 
 whom we shall see a specimen presently in one of the 
 fragments of Menander, as well as in the comedies of 
 Plautus ; * and of whom we have some historical ex- 
 amples fully as ludicrous as any inventions of the stage, 
 if the biographers of Philip and Alexander of Macedon 
 are to be trusted. We are told, that whenever King 
 Philip ate anything sour or acid, and made wry 
 faces at it, his flatterer Cleisophos went through exactly 
 the same grimaces ; when the king hurt his leg, 
 Cleisophos immediately put on a limp ; and when the 
 king lost his right eye by the arrow at Methone, the 
 courtier appeared next morning with the same eye 
 bandaged up. It is also said that to wear the head a 
 h^tleon one side became quite the fashion in the court 
 nt' Alexander, because he himself had a slight deformity 
 ofthekindr Another variety of the parasite was the 
 still meaner humble companion, who carried messages 
 and did little services of all kinds, sometimes worse 
 than menial, for his richer patron. 
 
 An amusing soliloquy of one of these hungry guests 
 who is waiting for his dinner (having possibly found 
 no entertainer, and therefore no dinner at all, the day 
 before) has been preserved for us by Aulus Gellius out 
 of a lost comedy which he attributes to Plautus, 
 
 * See p. 44.
 
 MENANDER. 25 
 
 ' The Boeotian,' founded upon one of the same name 
 by Menander : 
 
 " The gods confound the man who first invented 
 This measuring time by hours ! Confound him, too, 
 Who first set up a sun-dial chopping up 
 My day into these miserable slices ! 
 When I was young, I had no dial but appetite, 
 The very best and truest of all timepieces ; 
 When that said ' Eat,' I ate if I could get it. 
 But now, even when I've the chance to eat, I must not, 
 Unless the sun be willing ! for the town 
 Is grown so full of those same cursed dials, 
 That more than half the population starve." * 
 
 These persons are represented, of course, as having 
 not only the habit of living as far as possible at other 
 men's expense, but as bringing an insatiable appetite 
 with them to their entertainers' tables 
 
 " 'Tis not to gather strength he eats, but wishes 
 To gather strength that he may eat the more." f 
 
 Neither host nor servants are sparing in their gibes' 
 as to the gormandising propensities of this class of self- 
 invited guests. The cook in 'The Mensechmi' of 
 Plautus is ordered to provide breakfast for three : 
 
 Cook. What sort of three ? 
 
 Erotium. Myself, Mensechmus, and his Parasite. 
 Cook. Then that makes ten. I count the parasite 
 As good as any eight. 
 
 Although the character of the Parasite is a direct 
 importation from the Greek stage, it was likely to be a 
 very common one also in Roman society. The rela- 
 
 * Aul. Gell. , iii. 3. t Fragment of Plautus.
 
 26 
 
 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 tion of patron and client, which meets us everywhere 
 in the Koman city life of those days when the great 
 man was surrounded with his crowds of hangers-on, all 
 more or less dependent upon and obsequious to him, 
 and often eating at his table was sure to breed in 
 plenty that kind of human fungus. 
 
 Among the remaining characters common to this 
 Menandrian Comedy we meet with the waiting-maid, 
 more or less pert and forward who, although a slave, 
 seems to have had considerable liberty of tongue, and 
 who maintains her ground upon the modern stage 
 with little more change in the type than has followed 
 necessarily with the changes of society. There is, again, 
 the family nurse, garrulous but faithful ; and some- 
 times we have another of the household in the person 
 of the family cook. Lastly, there is the hateful slave- 
 merchant, the most repulsive character in the Greek 
 and Roman drama, and upon whose ways and doings 
 there is no need for us here to dwell. 
 
 The philosophy of Menander has been spoken of as 
 distinctly of an Epicurean character, and his morality 
 is certainly no whit higher than that of his age and 
 times. Yet fragments of his have escaped the general 
 wreck, which have in them a grave melancholy not 
 usually associated in our ideas with the teaching of 
 that school, and which have led a modern scholar, than 
 whom no one understood more thoroughly the spirit of 
 Greek literature, to remark that Menander after all 
 seems to have been " more adapted to instruct than 
 to entertain." * Such a fragment is the following : 
 
 * -Walter Savage Landor.
 
 MENANDER. 27 
 
 " If tliou wouldst know thyself, and what thou art, 
 Look on the sepulchres as thou dost pass ; 
 There lie within the bones and little dust 
 Of mighty kings and wisest men of old ; 
 They who once prided them on birth or wealth, 
 Or glory of great deeds, or beauteous form ; 
 Yet nought of these might stay the hand of Time. 
 Look, and bethink thee thou art even as they."* 
 
 We find also passages quoted as his, though their 
 genuineness is somewhat doubtful, which breathe a 
 higher tone still. The sentiment expressed in the fol- 
 lowing lines, attributed to the poet by Clement of 
 Alexandria, is almost identical with that of the grand 
 passage with which Persius concludes his second 
 Satire : 
 
 " Trust me, my Pamphilus, if any think 
 By offering hecatombs of bulls or goats, 
 Or any other creature, or with vests 
 Of cloth of gold or purple making brave 
 Their images, or with sheen of ivory, 
 Or graven jewels wrought with cunning hand, 
 So to make Heaven well-pleased with him, he errs, 
 And hath a foolish heart. The gods have need 
 That man be good unto his fellow-men, 
 No unclean liver or adulterer, 
 Nor thief nor murderer from the lust of gain, 
 Nay, covet not so much as a needle's thread, 
 For One stands by, who sees and watches all." t 
 
 The same writer has quoted another line as from the 
 Greek dramatist, referring to the purification required 
 
 * Menand. Eel., 196. f Clem. Alex. Strom., v. c. 14.
 
 28 THE ANCIENT COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 of the worshipper of the gods, which is a close parallel 
 to the Christian teaching : 
 
 " He is well cleansed that hath his conscience clean." 
 
 Another father of the Church has cited a terse 
 apophthegm, which he attributes to Menander, as an 
 argument to show the folly of idolatry : 
 
 " The workman still is greater than his work." * 
 
 We owe the loss of Menander's plays most probably 
 to the fierce crusade made by the authorities of the 
 early Church against this kind of heathen literature. 
 Yet it is plain that this feeling was not shared by the 
 ecclesiastical writers who have been quoted ; and it is 
 singular that we have one sentence of his embalmed 
 in the writings of a still higher authority St Paul : 
 
 " Evil communications corrupt good manners." 
 
 A manuscript of some at least of these comedies was 
 said to have been long preserved in the library of the 
 Patriarch at Constantinople, but it seems to have 
 escaped the search of modern scholars, and has pro- 
 bably in some way disappeared.t 
 
 How great the loss has been to the literary world 
 cannot be measured, though something may be guessed. 
 It may be said of him as was said of our own Jeremy 
 Taylor "His very dust is gold." The number of 
 single verses and distiches caught up from his plays 
 which passed into household proverbs show how 
 widely his writings must have leavened the literary 
 
 * Justin Mart., Apol. i. 20. t See Journ. of Educ., i. 138.
 
 MENANDER. 29 
 
 taste both of Athenians and Eomans. The estima- 
 tion in which he was held by those who had access 
 to his works in their integrity is fully justified by 
 what we can trace of his remains. " To judge of 
 Menander from Terence and Plautus is easy but 
 dangerous," says M. Guizot ; dangerous, because we 
 cannot tell how mucTrhe"ma'y have lost in the process 
 of adaptation to the Koman stage. Caesar has been 
 thought to have spoken slightingly of Terence when 
 he called him "ahalf-Menander:" but the Roman poet 
 in all likelihood bore no such proportion to his great 
 original.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PLAUTUS. 
 
 ALL the writers of Comedy for the Roman stage, of 
 whose works we have any knowledge, were direct imi- 
 tators of Menander and his school. Plautus, however, 
 was probably less indebted to him than were his succes- 
 sors, Csecilius, Lavinius, and Terence. Of the two inter- 
 mediate authors we know very little ; but Plautus and 
 Terence have been more fortunate in securing for them- 
 selves a modern audience. Their comedies may not have 
 been really better worth possessing than those of other 
 writers who had their day of popularity : but theirs 
 alone have been preserved, and it is from them that 
 we have to form our judgment of the Comedy of Re- 
 publican Rome. 
 
 Titus Maccius Plautus the second would be what 
 we should call his surname, and the last simply means 
 " flat-foot " * in the dialect of Umbria, the district in 
 
 * Literary tradition in some quarters asserted that in one of 
 his comedies he introduced a sketch certainly not too flattering 
 of his own personal appearance : 
 
 " A red-haired man, with round protuberant belly, 
 Legs with stout calves, and of a swart complexion : 
 Large head, keen eyes, red face, and monstrous feet. " 
 Pseudolus, act iv. sc. 7.
 
 PLAUTUS. 31 
 
 which he was born, was a man of humble origin, the 
 son, according to some authorities, of a slave. But little 
 is known with any certainty on these points. He is said 
 to have made money in trade, and to have lost it again ; 
 to have then worked as a stage carpenter or machinist, 
 and so perhaps to have acquired his theatrical taste. 
 These early associations are taken also, by some critics, 
 as an explanation of some rudeness and coarseness in his 
 plays ; for which, however, the popular taste is quite 
 as likely to have been accountable as any peculiar 
 tendencies of the writer. Like that marvel of dra- 
 matic prolificness, Lope de Vega, who quotes him as 
 an apology, Plautus wrote for the people, and might 
 have pleaded, as the Spaniard did, that " it was only 
 fair that the customers should be served with what 
 suited their taste." The masses who thronged 
 the Roman theatres had not the fine intellect of the 
 Commons of Athens. Aristophanes could never have 
 depended upon them for due appreciation of his double- 
 edged jests, or appealed to them as critical judges of 
 humour. The less keen but more polished dialogue and 
 didactic moralising of Menander would have been still 
 less attractive to such an audience as that to which 
 Plautus had to look for favour. The games of the circus 
 the wild-beast fight and the gladiators, the rope-dan- 
 cers, the merry-andrews, and the posture-masters, were 
 more to their taste than clever intrigue and brilliant 
 dialogue. 
 
 Plautus we know him now only by his sobriquet 
 began his career as a dramatist B.C. 224. He continued 
 to write for the stage, almost without a rival in popu- 
 larity, until his death, forty years later. How many
 
 32 THE ROMAN COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 comedies lie produced during this long service of the 
 public we do not know : twenty remain bearing his 
 name, all which are considered to be genuine. All, 
 with the exception probably of ' Amphitryon,' are 
 taken from Greek originals. It is not necessary here 
 to give a list of their titles ; the most interesting of 
 them will be noticed in their order. With Greek 
 characters, Greek names, and Greek scenery, he gives 
 us undoubtedly the Eoman manners of his day, which 
 are illustrated more fully in his pages than in those of 
 the more refined Terence. Let the scene of the drama 
 lie where it will, we are in the streets of Rome all the 
 while. Athenians, Thebans, or Ephesians, his dramatis 
 personce are all of one country, just as they speak one 
 language; they are no more real Greeks than Shak- 
 speare's Othello is a Moor, or his Proteus a " gentle- 
 man of Verona" except in the bill of the play. So 
 little attempt does he make to keep up anything like 
 an illusion on this point, that he even speaks of " tri- 
 umvirs " at Thebes, builds a " Capitol " at Epidaurus, 
 and makes his characters talk about " living like those 
 Greeks," and " drinking like Greeks," utterly careless 
 of the fact that they are supposed to be Greeks them- 
 selves. He is as independent of such historical and 
 geographical trifles as our own great dramatist when 
 he makes Hector quote Aristotle, or gives a sea-coast 
 to Bohemia. But he has the justification which all 
 great dramatists would fairly plead; that his characters, 
 though distinctly national in colour, are in a wider 
 sense citizens of the world ; they speak, in whatever 
 language, the sentiments of civilised mankind. 
 
 However coarse in many respects the matter and
 
 PLAUTUS. 33 
 
 style of Plautus may appear to us, it is certain that 
 good judges amongst those who were more nearly his 
 contemporaries thought very highly of his diction. It 
 was said of him by ^Elius Stolo that " if the Muses 
 ever spoke Latin, it would be the Latin of Plautus." 
 Perhaps he was the first who raised conversational Latin 
 to the dignity of a literary style. 
 
 His plays are in most cases introduced by a prologue, 
 spoken sometimes by one of the characters in the play, 
 and sometimes by a mythological personage, such as 
 Silenus or Arcturus. The prologue generally gives an 
 outline of the plot, and this has been objected to by 
 some critics as destroying the interest of the action 
 which is to follow. But a similar practice has been 
 adopted of late years in our own theatres, of giving 
 the audience, in the play-bill, a sketch of the leading 
 scenes and incidents ; and this is generally found to in- 
 crease the intelligent enjoyment of the play itself. The 
 prologues of Plautus frequently also contain familiar ap- 
 peals on the part of the manager to the audience, and 
 give us a good deal of information as to the materials of 
 which the audience was composed. The mothers are 
 requested to leave their babies at home, for the babies' 
 sakes as well as for the sake of other people ; and the 
 children who are in the theatre are begged not to make 
 a noise. ' The slaves are desired not to occupy the seats, 
 which are not intended for them, but to be content 
 with standing-room; protests are made against the 
 system of claqueurs, friends of some favourite actor, 
 who gave their applause unfairly, to the discredit of 
 others : and the wives are requested not to interrupt 
 the performance with their chatter, and so annoy their 
 
 A. c. vol. xvi. c
 
 34 THE ROMAN COMIC DRAMA. 
 
 husbands who are come to see the play. Remarks of 
 this kind, addressed to the " house," are not confined, 
 however, to the prologue, but occur here and there in 
 the scene itself; these last are evident relics of the 
 earlier days of comedy, for we find no such in the plays 
 of Terence.
 
 CHAPTEE IY. 
 
 THE COMEDIES OP PLAUTUS. 
 I. THE THREE SILVER PIECES. 
 
 THE plot of this little comedy, which is confessedly 
 borrowed from the Greek of Philemon, and is called in 
 the original with perhaps more propriety " The Buried 
 Treasure," is simple enough. Charmides, a rich citizen 
 of Athens, has been half ruined by an extravagant son. 
 He goes abroad, leaving this son and a daughter in 
 charge of his old friend Callicles, begging him to do 
 what he can to keep young Lesbonicus from squander- 
 ing the little that is left of the family property. At the 
 same time, he intrusts his friend with a secret. He has 
 buried under his house a treasure three thousand gold 
 Philips.* This, even if things come to the worst, will 
 serve to provide a marriage portion for his daughter, 
 in the event of his not living to return to Athens. 
 Callicles has striven in vain to persuade the young man 
 to mend his ways ; Lesbonicus has gone on in the same 
 course of extravagance, until he has nothing left but a 
 
 * Gold coins struck by the Macedonian kings, and worth about 
 two guineas apiece.
 
 36 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 small farm outside the city, and the house in which he 
 lives and where the treasure is buried. This house 
 at last he offers for sale : and Callicles is only just in 
 time to buy it in for himself, and so to preserve for 
 his absent friend the precious deposit. 
 
 The action of the piece is introduced by a short 
 allegorical ' Prologue/ in which Luxury introduces her 
 daughter Poverty into the house of the prodigal, and 
 bids her take possession : a very direct mode of en- 
 forcing its moral upon the audience. This moral, how- 
 ever, is by no means carried out with the same distinct- 
 ness in the catastrophe. 
 
 So much of the story is told at the opening of the 
 play by Callicles to a friend, who seems to have called 
 purposely to tell him some disagreeable truths as is 
 the recognised duty of a friend. People are talking 
 unpleasantly about his conduct : they say that he has 
 been winking at the young man's extravagance, and 
 has now made a good thing of it by buying at a low 
 price the house which he is obliged to sell. Callicles 
 listens with some annoyance, but at first with an 
 obstinate philosophy. Can he do nothing, his friend 
 asks, to put a stop to these evil rumours 1 
 
 I can, and I can not ; 'tis even so ; 
 
 As to their saying it, that I cannot help ; 
 
 I can take care they have no cause to say it. 
 
 But, on his old friend pressing him, he yields so far as 
 to intrust him with the whole secret. 
 
 A suitor now appears for the hand of the young 
 daughter of the absent Charmides. It is Lysiteles, a 
 young man of great wealth and noble character, the
 
 THE THREE SILVER PIECES. 37 
 
 darling of an indulgent father, who consents, though 
 with some natural unwillingness, not only to accept 
 her as a daughter-in-law without a portion, but even to 
 go in person and request the consent of her brother 
 Lesbonicus, who is known to be as proud as he is now 
 poor, and who is very likely to make his own poverty 
 an objection to his sister's marrying into a rich family, 
 though the lover is his personal friend. The father 
 has an interview with him, but can only obtain his 
 consent to such a marriage on condition that his friend 
 will accept with her such dowry as he can give the 
 single farm which he has retained in his own possession 
 out of all the family estate, and from which his faith- 
 ful slave Stasimus the classical prototype of Scott's 
 Caleb Balderstone is contriving to extract a living for 
 his young master and himself. This honest fellow is 
 present during part of th'e interview, and is horrified 
 to hear the prodigal generosity with which the ruined 
 heir insists, in spite of all the other's attempts to 
 decline it, upon dowering his sister with the last re- 
 mains of his estate. At last he draws Philto the 
 suitor's father aside on some pretence, and the follow- 
 ing dialogue ensues : 
 
 s. I have a secret for your ear, sir only you ; 
 Don't let him know I told you. 
 Philto. You may trust me. 
 
 Stas. By all that's good in heaven and earth, I warn 
 
 you, 
 
 Don't take that land don't let your son set foot on it 
 I'll tell you why. 
 
 Phil. Well, I should like to hear.
 
 38 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 Stas. Well, to begin with (confidentially) the oxen, 
 
 when we plough it, 
 
 Invariably drop down dead in the fifth furrow. 
 Phil, (laughing). Stuff ! nonsense ! 
 Stas. (getting more emphatic). People say there's devils 
 
 in it ! 
 
 The grapes turn rotten there before they're ripe. 
 , Lesbonicus (watching their conversation, and speaking 
 to himself}. He's humbugging our friend 
 there, I'll be bound ! 
 'Tis a good rascal, though he's stanch to me. 
 
 Stas. Listen again in the very best harvest seasons, 
 You get from it three times less than what you've sown. 
 
 Phil. An excellent spot to sow bad habits in ! 
 For there you're sure they won't spring up again. 
 
 Stas. There never was yet a man who had that land, 
 But something horrible always happened to him ; 
 Some were transported some died prematurely 
 Some hung themselves ! (pauses to watch the e/ect.} And 
 look at him, now, there (motioning towards 
 his master). The present owner what is he ? 
 a bankrupt. 
 Phil, (pretending to believe him). Well, heaven deliver 
 
 me from such a bargain ! 
 Stas. Amen to that ! Ah ! you might say ' deliver 
 
 me,' 
 
 If you knew all. Why, every other tree 
 Is blasted there by lightning ; all the hogs 
 Die of pneumonia : all the sheep are scabbed ; 
 Lose all their wool, they do, till they're as bare 
 As the back of my hand is. Why, there's not a nigger 
 (And tliey'll stand anything) could stand the climate ; 
 Die in six months, they all do, of autumn fever. 
 
 Phil, (coolly). Ah ! I daresay. But our Campanian 
 
 fellows 
 Are much more hardy than the niggers. Still,
 
 THE THREE SILVER PIECES. 39 
 
 This land, if it's at all what you describe it, 
 Would be a fine place for a penal settlement, 
 To banish rascals to, for the public good. 
 
 Stas. 'Tis just a nest of horrors, as it is ; 
 If you want anything bad, there you may find it. 
 
 Phil. No doubt ; and so you may in other places. 
 
 Stas. Now please don't let him know I've told you 
 this! 
 
 Phil. Oh honour bright ! I hold it confidential. 
 
 Stas. Because, in fact, you see, he's very anxious 
 To be well rid of it, if he can find a man 
 That's fool enough to take it. You perceive ? 
 
 Phil. I do : I promise you, it shan't be me. 
 
 Philto is unwilling either to accept the farm, or to hurt 
 the feelings of Lesbonicus by the refusal he will leave 
 the two young friends, he says, to settle that matter 
 between them. And poor old Stasimus is quite satis- 
 fied that his pious falsehood has saved this remnant 
 of the family property. 
 
 Young Lysiteles is as reluctant to accept the offered 
 marriage portion as his friend is determined, for his 
 honour's sake, to give it : and the struggle hetween the 
 two young men, which almost leads to a quarrel, gives 
 occasion to a fine scene, though perhaps somewhat too 
 wordy for our English taste. Lysiteles is the more hurt 
 at his friend's obstinacy, because he has discovered his 
 intention of quitting Athens, now that his patrimony 
 is all gone, and taking service under some potentate 
 in the East, the great field which was then open to 
 young men of spirit and enterprise. Stasimus' despair, 
 when he too learns this last resolution on the part of 
 his young master, is highly comic : he will not desert 
 him, even if he could, but he has no taste for a mili-
 
 4:0 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 tary life wearing clumsy boots, and carrying a heavy 
 buckler, and a pack on his shoulders. 
 
 But Callicles has heard of the proposed marriage, 
 and will by no means allow his absent friend's daugh- 
 ter to go to her bridegroom dowerless, when there is 
 money stored away specially for that object. But how 
 is it to be done without discovering to the public the 
 secret of the buried treasure, which is sure to confirm 
 the suspicion of his underhand dealings ? and which 
 treasure if the young spendthrift once com.es to know 
 of, the rest of it will very soon follow the estate. If 
 Callicles gives the money as out of his own pocket, 
 people will only say that he Avas now doling out a part 
 of some larger fund, left in his hands in trust, and 
 which the girl and her brother ought to have had long 
 ago. He adopts the scheme of hiring one of those un- 
 scrupulous characters who hung about the law courts 
 at Athens, as they do about our own, ready to under- 
 take any business however questionable, and to give 
 evidence to any effect required " for a consideration." 
 This man shall pretend to have just landed from foreign 
 parts, and to have brought money from Charmides 
 expressly for his daughter's marriage portion. The 
 required agent is soon found, and his services engaged 
 by Callicles for the " Three Silver Pieces," which gives 
 the name to the play. He is equipped in some out- 
 landish-looking costume, hired from a theatrical ward- 
 robe, and knocks at the door of Charmides' house (a 
 small apartment in which is still occupied by his son) 
 as though just arrived from sea. But at the door he 
 meets no less a person than Charmides himself, who 
 has just returned from his long absence, has noticed
 
 THE THREE SILVER PIECES. 41 
 
 this strange-looking personage on his way from the 
 harbour, and is much astonished to find him knocking 
 at his own door. Still more surprised is he to hear 
 that he is inquiring for his son Lesbonicus, and that 
 he is bringing him a letter from his father. The scene 
 between the pretended messenger and the returned 
 traveller whose agent he professes to be, the man's 
 astonishment and embarrassment when he finds that he 
 is talking to Charmides himself, and the consummate 
 effrontery with which he faces the situation to the very 
 last, long after he knows he is detected, is one of the 
 most amusing scenes in Plautus, though unfortunately 
 too long for insertion here. The impostor has not been 
 prepared for any kind of cross-examination, and has even 
 forgotten the name of Lesbonicus' father, from whom he 
 asserts that he brings the money. His efforts to recover 
 this name which he says he has unfortunately "swal- 
 lowed" in his hurry; his imaginary description of Char- 
 mides, who stands before him in person ; the account he 
 gives of his travels in countries he has never seen, are 
 all highly farcical. One argument in proof of the reality 
 of his mission he advances triumphantly the thou- 
 sand gold pieces which he carries with him ; if he did 
 not know Charmides personally, would he ever have 
 intrusted him with the money ? At last his inquisitor 
 announces himself " I am Charmides so hand me 
 over my money." The other is staggered for the 
 moment : " Bless my life ! " he says to himself " why, 
 here's a greater impostor than I am ! " But he soon 
 recovers his coolness. "That's all very well," he replies; 
 " but you never said a word about your being Char- 
 mides until I told you I had the gold. You are only
 
 42 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 Channides for a particular purpose and that won't do." 
 "Well, but if I am not Charmides," says the father 
 not very cleverly "who am I?" " Nay," says his op- 
 ponent " that's your business ; so long as you are not 
 the person I don't intend you to be, you may be anything 
 you please." As he is shrewd enough, however, to dis- 
 cover that Charmides is the person whom he claims to 
 be, and as the latter threatens to have him cudgelled 
 if he does not leave his door, he makes his exit at last 
 not in the least crestfallen, and congratulating him- 
 self that, come what will, he has safely pocketed the 
 Three Silver Pieces : he has done his best, he declares 
 (as indeed he has), to earn them fairly, and can only go 
 back to his employers and tell them that his mission 
 has failed. 
 
 The first person who meets Charmides on his return 
 home is Stasimus. He has been drowning his dread 
 of a military life in the wine-flagon, and has reached 
 the sentimental stage of intoxication. His maundering 
 moralities upon the wickedness and degeneracy of the 
 present age, and the wickedness of the world in general, 
 and his sudden recollection that while he is thus gene- 
 ralising upon questions of public interest his own 
 particular back is in great danger, for having loitered at 
 the wine-shop, are admirably given. His old master is 
 all the while standing in the background, listening with 
 much amusement to his soliloquy, and throwing in an 
 occasional remark aside, by way of chorus. When at 
 length he discovers himself, the joy of the faithful old 
 tippler sobers him at once, and he proceeds to tell his 
 master how affairs have been going on in his absence. 
 Charmides is shocked to hear of the continued extrava-
 
 THE THREE SILVER PIECES. 43 
 
 i 
 
 gance of his son, of his sale of the house, and the 
 consequent loss of the buried treasure on which he had 
 depended, and still more at the faithlessness of his- 
 friend, who has not only taken no care to prevent 
 this catastrophe, but has employed his knowledge of 
 the jsecret to his own advantage in the most shameless 
 manner, by becoming the purchaser of the house. 
 
 Of course such misunderstanding is soon cleared up. 
 The father hears with joy of his daughter's approach- 
 ing marriage, and thanks young Lysiteles warmly for 
 his generous conduct, though he will not allow him 
 especially as he has made money during his absence 
 abroad to take into his house a portionless bride. 
 But the young man has a favour to ask of much more 
 importance : it is that Charmides will overlook and 
 forgive the extravagance of his dear friend, his son, 
 who will, he assures him, do better in future. Some- 
 what reluctantly the father consents he can refuse 
 nothing at such a moment, and to so generous a 
 petitioner. His judgment upon the offender forms a 
 characteristic ending to the piece. 
 
 Charm. If you'll reform, my old friend Charicles 
 Here offers you his daughter a good girl ; 
 Say, will you marry her ? 
 
 Lesion, (eagerly}. I will, dear father ! 
 
 I will and any one else besides, to please you. 
 
 Charm. Nay one's enough : though I am angry with ye, 
 I'll not inflict a double chastisement ; 
 That were too hard. 
 
 Collides (laughing). Nay, scarcely, for his sins 
 A hundred wives at once would serve him right.* 
 
 * This is the only comedy of Plautus which has been presented 
 by Westminster scholars of late years. When it was acted in
 
 44 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 II. THE BRAGGADOCIO. 
 
 The hero if he can "be so called who is the very 
 opposite of a hero in this comedy is one of those 
 swaggering soldiers of fortune who have already been 
 briefly described. His name, which is a swagger in 
 itself, is Pyrgopolinices "Tower of Victory." He is 
 in the pay of Seleucus, for whom he is at present re- 
 cruiting ; but he has also served, by his own account 
 
 " On the far-famed Gorgonidonian plains, 
 Where the great Bumbomachides commanded 
 Clytomestoridysarcliides's son." * 
 
 He is attended by his obsequious toady Artotrogus 
 " Bread-devourer " Avho flatters his vanity and swears 
 
 1860, the humorous modern Latin Epilogue which now always 
 follows the play (and which is really a short farce in itself) took 
 an especially happy turn. A project was then on foot for remov- 
 ing the School to a different site, and Lesbonicus is introduced 
 in this epilogue as offering to sell the old College premises ; 
 while "College John," as the scholars' official is always called, in 
 the character of the slave Stasimus, endeavours to prevent the 
 sale by enlarging upon the horrors of the Thames water and the 
 squalor of Tothill Fields. The negotiation is stopped by the 
 entrance of the Ghost of Dr Busby, who informs them of a 
 treasure which he had buried under the old foundations. They 
 proceed eagerly to dig, and the treasure proves to be a gigantic 
 ROD ! which is exhumed and displayed in triumph to the audi- 
 ence. This is, the old Master declares, the real key to honours 
 the "golden bough" of classic fable 
 
 " Aurea virga tibi est, portas qua pandit honorum." 
 * We need not go far to seek the original of the opening lines 
 of ' Bombastes Furioso,' where the hero asks 
 " Aldibarontiphoskifornio, 
 How left you Chrononhotonthologos ? "
 
 THE BRAGGADOCIO. 45 
 
 to the truth of all his bragging stories " maintaining 
 his teeth," as he says, " at the expense of his ears." 
 The Captain's stories are of such an outrageously lying 
 description as to he somewhat too improbable for the 
 subject of legitimate comedy, and we can only suppose 
 that in this kind of fun the taste of a Roman au- 
 dience preferred a strong flavour. He affects to believe 
 that not only do all the men dread his prowess, but 
 that all the women are charmed with his person : and 
 his companion and flatterer does his best to persuade 
 him that it is so. ^ 
 
 , Artotrogus. You saw those girls that stopped me yester- 
 day ? 
 : Pyrgopolinices. What did they say ? 
 
 Art. Why, when you passed, they asked me 
 
 " What, is the great Achilles here ? " I answered, 
 " No it's his brother." Then says t'other one 
 " Troth, he is handsome ! What a noble man ! 
 What splendid hair ! " 
 
 Pyrg. Now, did they really say so ? 
 
 Art. They did indeed, and begged me, both of them, 
 To make you take a walk again to-day, 
 That they might get another sight of you. 
 
 Pyrg. (sighing complacently}. 'Tis a great nuisance being 
 so very handsome ! * 
 
 This hero gentleman has just carried off from 
 Athens by force, however, and not by the influence 
 of his personal attractions a young lady who is an 
 object of tender interest to a gentleman of that city, 
 
 * So Le Capitan Matamore, in Corneille's ' L'lllusion 
 Comique ' 
 
 " Ciel qui sais comme quoi j'en suis persecute ! 
 Un peu plus de repos avec'moins de beaute."
 
 46 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 who is at the time gone upon a voyage to Kaupactus. 
 His faithful slave Palestrio takes ship to follow him 
 thither, but on his way falls into the hands of pirates, 
 by whom he is sold, and, as it happens, taken to 
 Ephesus and there purchased by Pyrgopolinices. He 
 finds the lady shut up in half-willing durance in the 
 Captain's house, and at once writes information of the 
 fact to her Athenian lover, his master Pleusicles, who 
 sails at once for Ephesus. On his arrival, he finds 
 that an old friend of the family occupies the adjoining 
 house : a jolly old bachelor, of thorough Epicurean 
 tastes and habits, and quite ready to forward a lover's 
 stratagem. By his good-natured connivance a door is 
 broken through his house into the women's side of his 
 neighbour's mansion, by which Pleusicles is enabled to 
 hold communication with the object of his affections. 
 But a servant of the Captain's, who has been specially 
 charged to keep an eye upon the lady, happens to be 
 running over the roof of the two houses in the pursuit 
 of an escaped monkey, looks down through a skylight 
 with the curiosity of his class, and is a witness of one 
 of these stolen interviews between the lovers. How 
 Philocomasium (for that is the lady's long Greek name*) 
 has found her way into the house next door is what 
 he does not understand; but there she is, and he is 
 determined to tell the Captain. First, however, he 
 
 * These Greek female names are anything but euphonious to 
 English ears. But we must remember that what seems to us a 
 harsh termination was softened away in the Latin pronuncia- 
 tion, and that in its Greek form it was a diminutive ; so that 
 names ending in " ion " conveyed to their ear a pet sound, as in 
 our Nellie, Bessie, &c.
 
 THE BRAGGADOCIO. 47 
 
 takes into his counsels his new fellow-servant, Palestrio, 
 and confides to him his discovery. Palestrio tries to 
 persuade him that his eyes have deceived him, but 
 finding him obstinately convinced of their accuracy, 
 invents a story of a twin-sister, who by a curious 
 coincidence has just come to Ephesus and taken the 
 house next door, where she allows a lover of her own 
 to visit her. The chief fun of the piece, which is 
 somewhat of a childish character, consists in the in- 
 genuity with which Philocomasium, with the aid of 
 Palestrio, contrives by a change of costume to play 
 the double part of herself and the imaginary twin- 
 sister; much to the bewilderment of the Captain's 
 watchful and suspicious retainer, who is ignorant of 
 the existence of the secret passage by which at her 
 pleasure she flits from house to house. 
 
 The catastrophe is brought about by the absorbing 
 vanity of the military hero. He is persuaded by 
 the ready Palestrio that a lady in the neighbourhood, 
 of great charms and accomplishments, has fallen vio- 
 lently in love with him, and that if only out of charity 
 it behoves him to have compassion on her. She has a 
 jealous husband, and dare not invite him to her house, 
 but asks to be allowed to call upon him at his own. 
 In order to have the coast quite clear, he sends off 
 Philocomasium for a while, in charge of the trusty 
 Palestrio, who willingly undertakes to escort her 
 with her mother and the twin-sister, as he thinks 
 really with her lover Pleusicles, who, in the guise of a 
 shipowner, carries her off to Athens. The fate of 
 the Captain is that of Falstaff, in the ' Merry Wives 
 of Windsor.' As soon as the love-stricken lady who is
 
 48 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 only a lady's-maid employed for the occasion is ascer- 
 tained to be paying her expected visit to this pro- 
 fessional Adonis, his bachelor neighbour, from next 
 door, enters in the character of the jealous husband, 
 with a band of stout slaves, and beats him to a jelly. 
 
 III. THE HAUNTED HOUSE (MOSTELLARIA). 
 
 The Latin name of this play means something like 
 "The Goblin;" but perhaps the English title here 
 given to it will better express the nature of the plot. 
 A worthy citizen of Athens has been away for three 
 years on a trading voyage to Egypt, and during his 
 absence his son Philolaches, though a young man of 
 amiable disposition, has gone altogether wrong, kept 
 very dissolute and extravagant company, and spent the 
 greatest part of his father's money. In this he has been 
 aided and abetted by Tranio, his valet and factotum, 
 one of those amusing rascals who seem to take delight 
 in encouraging their young masters in such things, 
 though they feel it is at the risk of their own backs. 
 
 The youth is just sitting down to supper with some 
 of his friends (one of whom has come to the party 
 already drunk), when Tranio, who has been down to 
 the harbour to buy fish, comes in with the startling in- 
 telligence of the father's return from sea ; he has just 
 got a glimpse of him as he landed. Philolaches feels 
 that the evil day has come upon him at last. His fust 
 idea naturally is to get rid of his friends, have the 
 supper-table cleared away, and make things look at 
 least as quiet and respectable as possible. But his 
 friend Callidamates is by this time so very drunk and
 
 THE HAUNTED HOUSE. 49 
 
 incapable that it is impossible to hope to get him safely 
 off the premises in time ; especially as, in his drunken 
 independence, the only notice he takes of the news is 
 first to " hope the old gentleman's very well ; " secondly, 
 to advise his son, if he doesn't want him, to " send 
 him back again ; " and, lastly, to offer to fight him, then 
 and there. 
 
 Philolaches. Who's that asleep there ? Wake him up, 
 
 do, Delphium ! 
 Delphium. Callklamates ! Callidamates wake ! (shaking 
 
 him.) 
 Call, (looking up drowsily). I am awake all right. 
 
 Pass us the bottle. 
 
 Delph. Oh, do awake, pray do ! His father's come 
 From abroad, you know ! (Shakes him again) 
 
 Call, (just opening his eyes). All right hope 's pretty 
 
 well. 
 Phil, (angrily}. He's well enough, you ass! I'm very 
 
 bad. 
 
 Call. Bad ! why, what 's 'matter 1 
 Phil. Do get up, I say, 
 
 And go my father's come. 
 
 Call, (drowsily). Father's come, is he ? 
 
 Tell him go back again. What the deuce 'a want 
 
 here ? 
 Phil, (in despair). What shall I do 1 Zounds ! he'll be 
 
 here in a minute, 
 
 And find this drunken ass here in my company, 
 And all the rest of ye. And I've no time 
 Beginning to dig a well when you're dying of thirst, 
 That's what I'm doing ; just beginning to think 
 What I'm to do, and here's my father come ! 
 
 Tranio (looking at Call.) He's put his head down and 
 
 gone to sleep again ! 
 A. c. vol. xvi. D
 
 50 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 Phil. Will you get up 1 (shaking him.} I say, my father's 
 
 here ! 
 Call, (jumping up). Father here ? where ? Give me my 
 
 slippers, somebody ! 
 
 My sword, there ! polish the old gentleman off in no time 
 
 Act ii. sc. 2. 
 
 But Tranio proves equal to the occasion. He desires 
 them all to keep quiet where they are, to let him lock 
 the house up and take the key of the street-door, and 
 go to meet his elder master with a story which he has 
 ready for him. The good citizen makes his appearance 
 in the next scene, congratulating himself heartily on 
 having escaped the perils of this his first and, as he 
 is determined it shall be, his last sea voyage. 
 
 Enter THEUROPIDES slaves following with his luggage. 
 TRANIO looking round a corner, and listening. 
 
 Theu. I do return you hearty thanks, good Neptune, 
 For letting me out of your clutches safe and sound, 
 Though scarce alive ; but if from this time forward 
 You catch me setting foot in your dominions, 
 I give you leave free leave that very instant, 
 To do with me what you've just tried to do. 
 Avaunt ! Anathema ! I do abjure ye 
 From this same day ! (looking back towards the harbour, 
 
 and shaking his fist). I've trusted to ye once, 
 But never will I run such risk again. 
 
 Tran. (aside). Zounds, Neptune, you've just made a 
 
 great mistake 
 Lost such a charming opportunity ! 
 
 Theu. Three years I've been in Egypt : here I am, 
 Come home at last ! How glad they'll be to see me ! 
 
 Tran. (aside). There's only one we had been more glad 
 
 to see 
 The man who brought us word that you were drowned.
 
 THE HAUNTED HOUSE. 51 
 
 [THEUROPIDES advances to Ms own door, at which he 
 knocks, and looks up at the closed windows. Tranio 
 comes forward. 
 
 Tran. Who's this ? who ventures near this house of ours ? 
 
 Then. Why, this is my man Tranio ! 
 
 Tran. 0, dear master, 
 
 0, welcome home ! I am so glad to see you 
 Are you quite well 1 
 
 Then. Quite, as you see (knocks again). 
 
 Tran. Thank heavens ! 
 
 Then. But you, are ye all mad ? 
 
 Tran. Why so ? 
 
 Then. Because 
 
 Here you are walking about, and nobody in. 
 (Knocks and kicks at the door.) Not a soul seems to hear. 
 
 Will nobody open ? (Kicks again.} 
 I shall kick the door down presently. 
 
 Tran. (shuddering and shrieking). O Oh ! 
 Don't ye do that, dear master don't ye, don't ye ! 
 
 Act ii. sc. 2. 
 
 Then Tranio begins his story. The house is haunted. 
 There is a ghost there, of a man who was murdered 
 in it by the last owner for the sake of his gold, and 
 buried under the floor. This ghost had come to 
 young Philolaches in his sleep, nearly frightened him 
 out of his senses, and warned him to quit his pre- 
 mises at once. Pluto would not admit him into the 
 Shades, he said, because he had not been properly 
 buried, and so he was obliged to live in this house, and 
 he wanted it all to himself. So they had shut it up, 
 Tranio tells the father, and left the ghost in possession ; 
 and, for the present, his son is gone into the country. 
 Just in the agony of the tale, a noise is heard inside
 
 52 THE COMEDIES OF PLAVTUS. 
 
 the party there are not keeping so quiet as they 
 ought. 
 
 Trail, (pretending to be frightened, and catching his 
 
 master by the arm.) 
 Hush-sh ! (Listening.) 
 Then, (trembling). Eh ! what was it ? 
 Tran. (looking aghast at Then.) Was it him, d'ye 
 
 think? 
 (Listening at the key-hole.) I heard a knocking. 
 
 Theu. Eh ! my blood runs cold ! 
 
 Are the dead men coming from Acheron to fetch me ? 
 Tran. (aside). Those fools will spoil it all, if they're 
 
 not quiet. 
 
 Theu. What are you saying to yourself, sir eh ? 
 Tran. Go from the door, sir, pray run, do, I heg 
 
 you ! 
 The u. (looking round in terror). Where shall I run to ? 
 
 why don't you run yourself ? 
 Tran. (solemnly). Well I've no fear I keep an honest 
 
 conscience. 
 Callidamates (inside). Hallo there, Tranio ! (Theuro- 
 
 pides runs off.) 
 Tran. (going close to the door, and whispering). Don't 
 
 call me, you fool ! 
 (Aloud, as to the ghost.) Don't threaten me it wasn't / 
 
 kicked the door. 
 Theu. (putting his head round the corner). dear_! 
 
 what is it ? why do you shake so, Tranio ? 
 Tran. (looking round). Was it you called me ? Well, 
 
 so help us heaven, 
 
 I thought it was the dead man scolding me 
 For making all that rapping at his door. 
 But why do you stand there ? why don't you do 
 What I just told you ? 
 
 Theu. (clasping his hands). dear ! what was that ?
 
 THE HAUNTED HOUSE. 53 
 
 Tran. Run, run ! don't look behind you and cover your 
 
 head up ! 
 
 [THEUROPIDES runs off with his cloak over his head. 
 
 Act ii. sc. 2. 
 
 There may not be very much wit in the scene, but 
 it is a fair specimen of the style in which Plautus 
 seems to have excelled. It is full of bustle and spirit, 
 and would act, as is the case with so many of his 
 scenes, far better than it reads. If any reader will im- 
 agine the two characters in the hands of say Mr Keeley 
 and Mr Bucks tone, he will perhaps admit that it would 
 be sufficiently laughable even if it were put exactly as 
 it is upon the stage of a modern minor theatre. 
 
 The " Ghost " is left, for the present, in undisturbed 
 possession. But Tranio's plan is nearly frustrated at 
 the outset ; for, as he is following his master down the 
 street, they meet a money-lender to whom the son is 
 indebted, and who is come to demand his interest. 
 The old gentleman overhears the conversation between 
 the creditor and Tranio, who vainly tries to prevent 
 him from bawling out his complaints of non-payment. 
 He succeeds, however, in persuading the father that 
 his son has only been borrowing in order to pay the 
 deposit-money upon the purchase of a house (which 
 he has been driven to buy in consequence of the 
 Ghost's occupation of the old one), and which is, as he 
 assures him, a most excellent bargain. Theuropides 
 is naturally anxious to see the new house at once ; 
 and Tranio, almost in despair, declares that it is' that of 
 their next-door neighbour, Simo, whom he sees just 
 coming exit of his door on his way to the Forum. 
 Tranio goes up to this person and requests permission
 
 54 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 for his master to look over the house, which he wishes 
 to copy, as a model of admirable contrivance, in some 
 new buildings which he is about to make on his own 
 ground. The owner, much flattered, begs them to 
 walk over it "just as though it were their own ;" an 
 expression which rather amuses Theuropides, as he is 
 about to make it his own in reality by paying the rest 
 of the purchase-money. Tranio adroitly whispers to 
 him not to say a word about the sale, " from motives of 
 delicacy :" poor Simo, he assures him, has been obliged 
 to part with his family property owing to reduced cir- 
 cumstances, and the whole transaction is naturally a 
 sore subject to him. Theuropides takes the hint at 
 once, praising his servant at the same time for his 
 thoughtfulness and good feeling. He is charmed with 
 the house, with the terms of the purchase, and with 
 the business-like habits of his excellent son. 
 
 But the father's dream is speedily dispelled. He 
 meets in the street, near his own door, a slave of the 
 young gentleman who is at this moment sleeping off 
 his debauch in his son's apartments, and who has come, 
 in obedience to the prudent orders issued beforehand 
 upon such occasions, to convey his master home. 
 Theuropides would fain persuade him that there is some 
 mistake ; he must have come to the wrong house ; this 
 has been shut up and unoccupied for some time ; and 
 his son Philolaches is quite unlikely to keep the kind 
 of company to which this roysterer belongs. But the 
 slave knows his business better, and in defence of his 
 own assertions tears the veil somewhat rudely from 
 the old gentleman's eyes. If he could be supposed to 
 have any doubts remaining, they are removed by a
 
 THE HAUNTED HOUSE. 55 
 
 second interview with his neighbour Simo, who laughs 
 at the notion of his house having been sold without 
 himself being aware of it. It only remains for the 
 deluded father to take vengeance on Tranio, and this 
 he will set about at once. One favour he will ask of 
 Simo " Lend me a couple of stout slaves, and a good 
 whip or two ;" and, thus provided, he goes in quest of 
 the culprit. 
 
 Tranio discovers that all is lost except his spirit. 
 That still keeps up : and he appears to have propped 
 it with an extra cup or two. His soliloquy, in the 
 hands of a good actor, would no doubt be effective. 
 He has succeeded in getting the revellers out of the 
 house before the angry father comes into it ; but they 
 have now lost all faith in him as an adviser, and what 
 step he is to take next is by no means clear even to 
 himself. 
 
 TRANIO (solus). 
 
 The man who loses heart when things go crooked, 
 
 In my opinion, he's not worth a rap 
 
 What a " rap " means, now, blest if I can tell ! 
 
 Well' when the master bid me fetch the young one 
 
 Out of the country (laughs to himself), ha, ha ! Well, I 
 
 went 
 
 Not into the country to the garden-gate ; 
 And brought out the whole lot of 'em male and female. 
 When I had thus safely withdrawn my troops 
 Out of their state of siege, I called a council 
 A council of war, you know of my fellow-rascals; 
 And their very first vote was to turn me out of it. 
 So I called another council of myself; 
 And I am doing what I understand
 
 56 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 Most people do in awkward circumstances 
 Make 'em as much more awkward as they can. 
 
 Act v. sc. 1. 
 
 His master comes to look for him, followed by 
 two slaves carrying whips and fetters, whom he keeps 
 in hiding for the present in the "background ; but 
 Tranio, quite aware of what is in store for him, takes 
 refuge at the family altar, and will listen to no per- 
 suasions to come away. From this vantage-ground 
 he holds an argument with his master ; persuades 
 him that his prodigal son has done nothing out of 
 the way only what other young men of spirit do ; 
 and when Theuropides vents his wrath against such a 
 shameful piece of deception in a slave, gravely advises 
 him to hold his tongue at all events on that point. 
 With his grey hairs, he surely ought to have been 
 wiser; if people once come to know how he has 
 allowed himself to be duped, they will infallibly work 
 him into a plot for the next new comedy. 
 
 Tranio gets off at last, by the intercession of Callida- 
 mates, who has sobered himself sufficiently to come for- 
 ward and express repentance on the part of his young 
 friend, and to entreat that all may be forgotten and 
 forgiven ; offering, handsomely enough, to pay off out 
 of his own pocket the little debt to the money-lender. 
 Tranio assures his master that he will not lose much 
 by forgiving him this time the whipping which he is 
 longing to give now need only be a pleasure deferred, 
 inasmuch as he is quite certain to do something to 
 deserve one to-morrow. Which very characteristic 
 witticism brings down the curtain. 
 
 Upon this comedy Eegnard, who perhaps ranks next
 
 THE SHIPWRECK. 57 
 
 to Moliere of the French comic dramatists, founded 
 his play, in one act, of ' Le Re tour Impre'vu ; ' and 
 Fielding's 'Intriguing Chambermaid' is little more 
 than a translation of it. But Dunlop remarks that 
 neither the French nor the English adapters have 
 availed themselves of the hint which Plautus left for 
 them, of a telling scene in which the previous occupant 
 of the " Haunted House " might be charged by the 
 excited father with the murder of his imaginary guest. 
 
 IV. THE SHIPWRECK (RUDENS). 
 
 This is a play of a different character in many re- 
 spects, and comes nearer to what we should call a melo- 
 dramatic spectacle than anything else. The Latin title 
 is simply " The Rope " given to it because the rope 
 of a fisherman's net is an important instrument in the 
 denouement. But the whole action turns upon a ship- 
 wreck, and this is the title preferred by some English 
 authorities. 
 
 The prologue, which is in a higher strain than Plau- 
 tus commonly aspires to, is spoken in the character of 
 Arcturus, the constellation whose rising and setting 
 was supposed to have very much to do with storms. 
 The costume in which he appears is evidently brilliant 
 and characteristic. 
 
 Of his high realm, who rules the earth and sea 
 
 And all mankind, a citizen am I. 
 
 Lo, as you see, a bright and shining star, 
 
 Revolving ever in unfailing course 
 
 Here and in heaven : Arcturus am I hight. 
 
 By night I shine in heaven, amidst the gods ;
 
 58 THE COMEDIES OF PLAVTUS. 
 
 I walk unseen with men on eartli by day. 
 So, too, do other stars step from their spheres, 
 Down to this lower world ; so willeth Jove, 
 Ruler of gods and men ; he sends us forth 
 Each on our several paths throughout all lands, 
 To note the ways of men, and all they do ; * 
 If they be just and pious ; if their wealth 
 Be well employed, or squandered harmfully ; * 
 Who in a false suit use false witnesses ; 
 "Who by a perjured oath forswear their debts ; 
 Their names do we record and bear to Jove. 
 So learns He day by day what ill is wrought 
 By men below ; who seek to gain their cause 
 By perjury, who wrest the law to wrong ; 
 Jove's court of high appeal rehears the plaint, 
 And mulcts them tenfold for the unjust decree. 
 In separate tablets doth he note the good. 
 And though the wicked in their hearts have said, 
 He can be soothed with gifts and sacrifice, 
 They lose their pains and cost, for that the god 
 Accepts no offering from a perjured hand. 
 
 After this fine exordium, so unlike the ordinary tone 
 of the writer that we may be sure he is here translat- 
 ing from a great original, the prologue goes on to set 
 forth the story of the piece. The speaker gives the 
 audience some description of the opening scene, and a 
 key to the characters. It is the tradition of the com- 
 
 * The same idea occurs in a well-known passage in Homer : 
 " Gods in the garb of strangers to and fro 
 Wander the cities, and men's ways discern ; 
 Yea, through the wide earth in all shapes they go, 
 Changed, yet the same, and with their own eyes leare 
 How live the sacred laws, who hold them, and who spurn." 
 
 Odyss. xvii. 485 (Worsley's Transl.)
 
 THE SHIPWRECK. 59 
 
 mentators, and the wording of the prologue corroborates 
 it, that the mounting of this piece, both in scenery and 
 machinery, was very costly and elaborate. It opens, 
 like Shakspeare's ' Tempest/ with a storm or rather 
 on the morning after.* The sea forms the background; 
 on one side is the city of Gyrene in the distance, on the 
 other, a temple of Venus, with a cottage near. This 
 cottage is the residence of Daemones, once a citizen of 
 Athens, but who, having lost his property and met 
 with other troubles, has left his native country and 
 settled down here in retirement. He and his slaves 
 are come out to look to the repairs of their cottage, 
 which has suffered by the storm. A boat appears 
 struggling through the waves in the distance, which, 
 as it gets nearer, is seen to contain two girls, who after 
 great danger (described by one of the slaves, who is 
 watching, in a passage which a good actor would no 
 doubt make sufficiently effective) make good their land- 
 ing among the rocks, and meet at last upon the stage, 
 each having thought the other lost. One of them is 
 Palasstra : a free-born girl of Athens, but stolen and 
 sold, as she tells us, in her infancy. Pleusidippus, a 
 young Athenian, had seen her at Gyrene, fallen violent- 
 ly in love with her, and made proposals to the slave- 
 merchant for her ransom. But that worthy individual, 
 thinking that he could make a better bargain for such 
 wares in Sicily, had just set sail for that island, carry- 
 ing Palaestra and her fellow-captives with him, when 
 the whole party are wrecked here on the coast, just 
 going out of harbour. 
 
 * Possibly the storm was represented on the stage during the 
 delivery of the prologue, before the action of the piece began.
 
 60 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 The two girls, drenched as they are, take refuge in 
 the Temple of Venus, where they ask the protection 
 of the Priestess. That good lady is the very model of 
 an ecclesiastical red-tapist. Though they tell their sad 
 story, she objects that they ought to have come in the 
 proper garb of supplicants in a white robe, and 
 bringing with them a victim ; and is hardly satisfied 
 with poor Palaestra's explanation of the great difficulty 
 which a young woman who had narrowly escaped 
 drowning herself would find in carrying a white dress 
 and a fat lamb with her. 
 
 Labrax, the slave-dealer, whom every one hoped had 
 been drowned according to his deserts, has also escaped 
 from the wreck and got ashore. Not without the loss, 
 however, of all his money, which has gone to the 
 bottom, and with it a small case of jewellery, family 
 tokens belonging to Palaestra, of which he had obtained 
 possession. He hears that the two girls who are his 
 property are hidden in the temple, and proceeds to drag 
 them thence by force. He is met there, however, by a 
 servant of young Pleusidippus, who is in search of his 
 master, and who runs to Daemones's cottage for help. 
 The owner comes out with two stout slaves, rescues 
 Palaestra and her companion, and leaves Labrax in 
 custody, the slaves standing over him with cudgels, 
 until the case can be investigated. Pleusidippus soon 
 arrives upon the scene, his servant having hurried to 
 inform him of the state of affairs that his dear 
 Palaestra has escaped from the wreck, and taken 
 refuge in the temple, from which Labrax would have 
 dragged her but for the timely interference of a very 
 worthy old gentleman. The young man hauls the
 
 THE SHIPWRECK. 61 
 
 slave-dealer off, with very little ceremony, before the 
 nearest magistrate, to answer both for his breach of con- 
 tract and his attempt at sacrilege. And with this 
 scene ends the third act of the drama. 
 
 Then there is an interval of time before the com- 
 mencement of the fourth act. Gripus, one of Daemones's 
 slaves, has been out fishing. He has taken no fish ; 
 but has had a haul which will prove, he hopes, to be of 
 more importance. He has brought up in his net a 
 heavy wallet, and feels certain that it contains gold ; 
 enough, no doubt, to purchase his freedom, and to 
 make him a rich man for the rest of his life besides. 
 His soliloquy, as to what he will do with all his riches, 
 reminds us not a little of the dream of Alnaschar. 
 
 Now, this shall be my plan I'm quite determined : 
 I'll do it cunningly ; I'll go to my master, 
 With just a little money from time to time, 
 To buy my freedom : then, when I am free, 
 I'll buy a farm I'll build a house I'll have 
 A great many slaves. Then I shall make a fortune 
 By my big merchant-ships. I shall be a prince, 
 And talk to princes. Then I'll build a yacht, 
 Just for a fancy, and like Stratonicus 
 Sail round the seaport towns.* When my renown 
 Spreads far and wide, then then, I'll found a city ; 
 I'll call it " Gripe," in memory of my name 
 And noble acts ; I'll found an empire there. 
 I do resolve great things within this breast (sinking his 
 chest) ; 
 
 * Stratonicus was treasurer to Philip and Alexander, and 
 probably thought himself a greater man than either of his 
 masters. The allusion to Alexandria in "Gripe " is obvious.
 
 62 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 But for the present, I must hide my windfall. 
 
 (Takes his breakfast out of his scrip, and looks at it.) 
 But more's the pity that so great a man 
 Must for to-day have such a sorry breakfast ! 
 
 Act iv. sc. 2. 
 
 Before he has time to hide his booty, Trachalio, the 
 slave of Pleusidippus, who has been watching all 
 Gripus' s proceedings, comes up, and wants to claim 
 half-shares in the contents. The dialogue between the 
 two has some amusing points, though it is rather too 
 much spun out for modern taste. Trachalio declares 
 that he knows the person to whom the wallet formerly 
 belonged; Gripus replies that he knows to whom it 
 belongs now, which is of much more importance it 
 belongs to him. All that he catches belongs to him, 
 clearly ; nobody ever disputed it before. Trachalio argues 
 that this is not a fish. It is a fish, declares Gripus ; 
 " all's fish that comes to the net " using our pro- 
 verb in almost so many words. This sort of fish 
 doesn't grow in the sea, says the other. Gripus de- 
 clares that it does only the species, he is sorry to say, 
 is very seldom caught. He is a fisherman, and knows 
 a good deal more about fish, he should hope, than a 
 landsman. Trachalio protests it is with him a matter 
 of conscience : since he has seen the vvallet fished up, 
 unless he goes and tells the owner, he shall be as great 
 a thief as Gripus ; but he is willing to share that re- 
 sponsibility, provided he shares the prize. They very 
 nearly come to blows about it ; but at last Trachalio 
 proposes to submit the dispute to arbitration ; and as 
 the cottage of Daemones is close at hand, they agree that 
 he shall decide as to the disposal of the property
 
 THE SHIPWRECK. 63 
 
 Trachalio not being aware of Gripus's connection with 
 the old gentleman, and Gripus hoping that his master 
 will surely give an award in his favour. 
 
 When the wallet is opened, it is found to contain, 
 besides valuable property belonging to Labrax, the 
 precious casket containing Palaestra's family relics : and, 
 by desire of Daemones, she describes the articles which 
 pught to be in it, in order to prove her claim to its 
 ownership. To his joy and surprise, one of these 
 relics, a small toy implement, bears his own name, and 
 another that of his wife. Palaestra is their long-lost 
 daughter, stolen in her childhood, and thus restored. 
 Of course she is handed over to her lover Pleusidippus, 
 a free woman. 
 
 The disposal of the claims to the rest of the wallet's 
 contents hardly meets our notions of dramatic justice. 
 Daemones retains in his possession the prize which 
 poor Gripus has fished up, in order to restore it to its 
 owner ; not only without any hint of salvage-money, 
 but with the addition of a long moral lecture to his 
 slave upon honesty. This is all very well ; but the 
 subsequent proceedings serve to show that if it was 
 a characteristic of the slave to be always ready to cheat 
 his master, the master had also his peculiar idea of 
 honesty as between himself and his slave. Gripus 
 meets Labrax lamenting for his lost wallet, and as 
 a last hope of making something out of his good luck, 
 agrees to inform him of the whereabouts of the missing 
 treasure for the consideration of a talent of good money 
 paid down. Daemones, when he comes to hear of the 
 arrangement, ratifies it so far as this : Gripus is his 
 property ; therefore, what is Gripus's is his. Labrax
 
 64 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 has to pay the talent into the hands of Dsemones, who 
 applies half to the ransom of his daughter's friend and 
 companion in misfortune, and allows the other half as 
 the price of Gripus's freedom. The reply which that 
 personage makes previously to his master's lecture on 
 morality seems to show that he took it for about as 
 much as it was worth. 
 
 Ah ! so I've heard the players on the stage 
 
 Rehearse the very finest moral sentiments, 
 
 And with immense applause ; showing quite clearly ] 
 
 All that a wise man ought to do : and then 
 
 The audience would go home, and not a soul of 'em 
 
 Would follow that grand preaching in their practice.* 
 
 The play called CISTELLARIA " The Casket " 
 turns upon the same incidents the loss of a daughter 
 when young, and her discovery by her parents by means 
 of a casket of trinkets which had been attached to her 
 person, t The copies of this play are very imperfect, and 
 there is a want of interest in the scenes. One passage, 
 in which Halisca, the slave who has dropped the casket 
 in the street and returns to look for it, appeals path- 
 
 * A portion of this comedy appears to have been performed 
 as an afterpiece in the Dormitory at Westminster in 1798, when 
 a very clever "Fisherman's Chorus," written in rhyming Latin, 
 by the well-known " Jemmy Dodd," then Usher, was introduced. 
 See Lusus Alt. Westm., i. 177. 
 
 t Parents had no hesitation in "exposing" a child whose 
 birth was for any reason inconvenient ; leaving it to die, or be 
 picked up by some charitable stranger, as might be. But it was 
 held a sin to do this without leaving something valuable on the 
 child's person : and jewels, or other articles by which it might 
 possibly be recognised afterwards, were often fastened to its 
 clothes.
 
 THE CAPTIVES. 65 
 
 etically to the audience, to know whether any of them 
 have picked it up, and will restore it, and so save her 
 from a whipping, may remind a modern reader of Mo- 
 liere's Harpagon looking among the audience for the 
 thief of his money. The despairing taunt with which 
 she turns away, after pausing for some reply 
 
 " Tis no use asking there's not one among ye 
 Does aught but laugh at a poor woman's troubles " 
 
 is strong presumptive evidence that the spectators at a 
 Konian comedy were almost exclusively men. 
 
 V. THE CAPTIVES. 
 
 This pretty little drama is quite of a different com- 
 plexion from the rest. The author tells us, in his 
 prologue, that we are not to expect to find here any of 
 the old stock characters of comedy, who, as he is free 
 to confess, are not always of the most reputable kind. 
 The interest is, in fact, rather pathetic than comic, and 
 the plot is of the simplest kind. Almost the only 
 comic element is supplied by the speaker of the pro- 
 logue, who has a joke or two for the audience, of a 
 very mild and harmless kind. The principal characters 
 in the play appear to have been grouped in a kind of 
 tableau on the stage while the prologue was delivered, 
 in this as in some other plays. The prologist informs 
 the audience that the two captives who stand in chains 
 on his right and left, are Philocrates, a young noble of 
 Elis, and his slave Tyndarus. There is war between 
 Elis and the j5tolians ; and these two prisoners, re- 
 cently taken in battle, have been purchased amongst 
 others by Hegio, a wealthy citizen of ^Etolia, whose 
 
 A. c. vol. xvi. E
 
 66 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 own son is now, by the fortune of war, a prisoner in 
 El is. The father is sparing no cost in purchasing such 
 captives of rank and birth as are brought to ^Etolia and 
 sold as slaves, in the hope of being able thus to effect 
 an exchange for his son. He feels the loss of this son 
 all the more, because his younger brother was carried 
 off in his infancy by a revengeful slave, and he has 
 never seen him since. " Do you understand, now 1 " 
 says the speaker to the audience " I hear a gentleman 
 standing up at the back of the gallery say ' no.' Then 
 come a little nearer, sir, if you please ; I'm not going 
 to crack my voice in bawling to you at that distance. 
 And if you've not money enough to pay for a seat, 
 you've money enough to walk out, which I recommend 
 you to do. And now you gentlemen that can afford 
 to pay for your seats, have the goodness to listen, 
 while I continue my story." He goes on, after the 
 fashion which has been noticed as common in such 
 prologues, to sketch in brief the whole plot. He begs, 
 however, to assure the audience, confidentially, that 
 they need not be alarmed because there is a war 
 going on in this play between Elis and ^Etolia. He 
 promises them quite in the spirit of Bottom and his 
 company of players that they " will leave the killing 
 out ; " all the battles shall be fought behind the scenes. 
 It would never do for them, he says, a company of 
 poor comedians, to encroach upon the domain of tragedy. 
 If any gentleman present wants a fight, he must get 
 one up on his own account and it shall go hard but 
 that the present speaker will find a match for him, if 
 he be so inclined. He concludes by asking their favour- 
 able verdict in the dramatic contest :
 
 THE CAPTIVES. 67 
 
 And so I make my bow. Sirs, fare ye well ; 
 
 Be gentle judges of our comedy, 
 
 As ye are doubtless valorous hearts in war. 
 
 The interest of the drama lies in the generous devotion 
 of the slave Tyndams to his young master. Hegio 
 has ascertained that his captive Philocrates is the 
 only son of a man of great wealth, and hopes that by 
 sending a message to the father he may enlist his 
 interest at Elis in making search for his own son 
 among the ./Etolian prisoners there, and sending him 
 home in exchange for Philocrates. But this latter has, 
 at the suggestion of Tyndarus, exchanged clothes with 
 him, and the slave, who is nearly of the same age, and 
 of noble presence, personates the master. Under this 
 mistake Hegio sends the slave (as he thinks) to Elis to 
 negotiate there with the father of Philocrates the re- 
 lease of his son. But it is really the young noble who 
 is sent, and Tyndarus who personates him remains a 
 prisoner in his place. There is a fine passage in which 
 the disguised slave appeals to Hegio for generous treat- 
 ment during his captivity. 
 
 As free a man as was your son, till now, 
 
 Was I ; like him, the hapless chance of war 
 
 Robbed me of liberty ; he stands a slave 
 
 Among my people, even as here I stand 
 
 Fettered before you. There is One in heaven, 
 
 Be sure of it, who sees and knows all things 
 
 That all men do. As you shall deal with me, 
 
 So will He deal with him. He will show grace 
 
 To him who showeth grace ; He will repay 
 
 Evil for evil. (Hegio appears moved.) Weep you for 
 
 your son ? 
 So in my home my father weeps for me.
 
 68 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 The parting between Tyndarus and his master gives 
 rise to another scene which would be highly effective 
 in the hands of good actors. The two young men had 
 been brought up together, it must be remembered, from 
 childhood, had played the same games, gone to the 
 same school, and served in the same campaign. There 
 is an equality of feeling between them, which even the 
 miserable conditions of slavery have not been able 
 to prevent. Philocrates, speaking as Tyndarus, asks 
 the latter if he has any message to send home to his 
 father. 
 
 Tyndarus (as Philocrates). Say I am well ; and tell him 
 
 this, good Tyndarus, 
 We two have lived in sweetest harmony, 
 Of one accord in all things ; never yet 
 Have you been faithless, never I unkind. 
 And still, in this our strait, you have been true 
 And loyal to the last, through woe and want, 
 Have never failed me, nor in will nor deed. 
 This when your father hears, for such good service 
 To him and to his son, he cannot choose 
 But give you liberty. I will insure it, 
 If I go free from hence. 'Tis you alone, 
 Your help, your kindness, your devoted service 
 Shall give me to my parents' arms again. 
 
 Philocrates (as Tyndarus). I have done this : I'm glad 
 
 you should remember ; 
 
 And you have well deserved it : (empliatically) for if I 
 Were in my turn to count up all the kindness 
 That you have shown to me, day would grow night 
 Before the tale were told. Were you my slave, 
 You could have shown no greater zeal to serve me. 
 
 Act ii. sc. 3.
 
 THE CAPTIVES. 69 
 
 Hegio is touched by the affection shown by the young 
 pair ; and Tyndarus is treated as liberally as a prisoner 
 can be. But there is another prisoner of war of whom 
 Hegio has heard, who knows this young man Philo- 
 crates and his family, and is anxious to have an inter- 
 view with him, which Hegio good-naturedly allows. 
 This man at once detects the imposture ; and though 
 Tyndarus attempts for a time (in a scene which must be 
 confessed to be somewhat tedious) to maintain his 
 assumed character in spite of the other's positive asser- 
 tions, he is convicted of the deception, and ordered by 
 the indignant Hegio to be loaded with heavy chains, 
 and taken to work in the stone-quarries ; which would 
 seem to have been as terrible a place of punishment in 
 Greece as we know they were in Sicily. In vain does 
 Tyndarus plead his duty to his master : in vain does 
 he appeal to Hegio's feelings as a father 
 
 Tyn. Think, now if any slave who called you master 
 Had done this for your son, how you had thanked him ! 
 Would you have grudged him liberty, or no ? 
 Would you have loved him above all the rest ? 
 Nay answer me. 
 
 He. I grant it. 
 
 Tyn. Oh, why then 
 
 Are you thus wroth with me for doing likewise ? 
 
 He. Your faith to him was treachery to me. 
 
 Tyn. What ! would you ask that one brief night and day 
 Should give you claim on a poor captive's service 
 Just fallen within your power, to cancel his 
 With whom I lived and whom I loved from childhood ? 
 
 Heg. Then seek your thanks from him. Lead him 
 away. 
 
 In vain does his fellow-captive, whose evidence has
 
 70 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 brought down Hegio's wrath upon him, plead on his 
 behalf. Tyndarus is dragged off to the quarries, pre- 
 serving his calmness of demeanour to the last. 
 
 Well death will come thy threats can reach no further ; 
 
 And though I linger to a long old age, 
 
 Life's span of suffering is but brief. Farewell ! 
 
 I might find plea to curse thee but farewell ! 
 
 Act iii. sc. 5. 
 
 The denouement comes rapidly. There is a long sup- 
 posed interval between the third and the two last 
 brief acts of the drama, which in a modern play 
 would be rather termed scenes. Philocrates returns 
 from Elis, and brings with him Hegio's son Philopole- 
 mus, whom he has ransomed from captivity. But he has 
 not forgotten his faithful Tyndarus, and has come in 
 person to insure his liberation. But this is not all. He 
 has also met with the runaway slave who, twenty years 
 ago, had stolen from his home the younger son of 
 Hegio. When this man is now cross-examined by his 
 old master, it is discovered that he had fled to Elis, and 
 there sold the child to the father of Philocrates, who 
 had made a present of him to his own boy, as was not un- 
 usual, to be a kind of live toy and humble playfellow. 
 It is this very Tyndarus, who now stands before his 
 father loaded with chains and haggard with suffering 
 of that father's infliction. The noble nature displayed 
 by the captive is explained by his noble blood. 
 
 No one will deny that it is a pretty little drama, 
 with a good deal of quiet pathos in it. But (if we have 
 the piece complete, which may be doubtful) whatever 
 pathos a modern audience would find in these last
 
 THE TWO MENjECHMI. 71 
 
 scenes would be due to such force of expression and 
 by-play as could be thrown into them by clever actors ; 
 they are very bald indeed in the reading. The claim 
 which the speaker of the brief epilogue makes for the 
 play, that its morality is of the purest and simplest, is 
 well deserved. It contains, strange to say, no female 
 character whatever. For these and other reasons ' The 
 Captives,' in spite of the lack -of comic element, used to 
 be a very favourite selection with English schoolmasters, 
 in the days when the performance of a Latin comedy 
 by the elder scholars seems to have formed part of the 
 annual routine in most of our large schools. Yet, strange 
 to say, there is no record of it having ever been per- 
 formed at Westminster. Perhaps the absence of those 
 distinctly comic characters and situations which are 
 made so telling in the annual performance by the 
 Queen's Scholars has been the reason of its neglect. 
 
 VI. THE TWO MEN^CHMI. 
 
 This comedy deserves notice not so much for its 
 own merits for whatever they might have appeared 
 to a Eoman audience, they are not highly appreciable by 
 our taste but because upon it Shakspeare founded 
 his ' Comedy of Errors.' It appears to have been the 
 only work of Plautus which had at that time been 
 translated into English, which may account for its being 
 the only one from which Shakspeare seems to have 
 borrowed. The plot is improbable in the highest 
 degree, though admitting some farcical situations. 
 It all turns upon the supposed resemblance between 
 two twin-brothers so strong as to deceive their
 
 72 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 servants, their nearest friends, and even their wives. 
 Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse 
 are but reproductions of Menaechmus of Epidamnus 
 and Mensechmus Sosicles the twins of Plautus's 
 comedy, who were separated in their youth, and 
 whose marvellous likeness, which makes it impossible 
 to distinguish between them, leads to the series of 
 ludicrous mistakes and 'entanglements which are at 
 last set right by their personal meeting on the stage. 
 Shakspeare has added the pair of Dromios, who, like 
 their masters, are duplicates of each other : thereby 
 increasing the broad fun of the piece, such as it is, 
 and not materially increasing the improbability. The 
 use of masks upon the Eoman stage made the pre- 
 sentation of the likeness comparatively easy ; whereas 
 in the English play all has to depend upon exact 
 similarity of costume and the making up of the faces 
 of the two actors, which is not always satisfactory. 
 The incidents in the Latin play are not so amusing as 
 in Shakspeare's version of it, and the morals much 
 more objectionable. 
 
 VII. AMPHITRYON. 
 
 1 Amphitryon ' is also founded on a famous case of 
 mistaken identity. It is termed by Plautus a " tragi- 
 comedy ; " which does not mean that there is anything 
 in it to which we should apply the word " tragic," 
 but merely that the introduction of gods amongst the 
 characters gives it some of the features of classic 
 tragedy. In saying that it is a dramatic version 
 of the myth of Jupiter and Alcmena, enough has 
 been said to indicate that the morality in this case
 
 AMPHITRYON. 73 
 
 is that common to pagan mythology. This did not 
 prevent it from being acted at Westminster so late 
 as 1792. There are well-known French and English 
 imitations of it : the ' Amphitryon ' of Moliere and 
 ' The Two Sosias ' of Dryden. It must be said, at. 
 least, in favour of the great French dramatist, that the 
 morality in his play is higher than that of the original. 
 ' Amphitryon/ however, has some wit, which is more 
 than can be well said for the ' Menaechmi." Here, too, 
 it is possible that we have the original of the two 
 Dromios in Shakspeare's comedy. For, as Jupiter has 
 assumed the character and likeness of Amphitryon, so 
 he has directed Mercury to put on the resemblance of 
 Sosia, Amphitryon's body-slave. The scene in which 
 poor Sosia, sent by his master (who has just returned 
 from his campaign) to announce his arrival to his wife 
 Alcmena, is met at the door by his double in the 
 person of Mercury, is very comically drawn. It has 
 the defect of being, at least to our modern taste, some- 
 what too prolonged, and only a portion of it can be 
 given here. Mercury insists upon it that he is the 
 true and original Sosia, gives the other a drubbing as 
 an impudent impostor, and threatens to give him a 
 worse if he does not at once take himself off. Sosia 
 becomes extremely puzzled as to his own identity when 
 his rival, in reply to his questions, shows an intimate 
 knowledge of all his master's movements during the 
 late campaign, and especially in the matter of a gold 
 cup presented to him out of the spoils, which is 
 secured in a casket under Amphitryon's own seal 
 which seal, however, this duplicate Sosia can describe 
 perfectly.
 
 74 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 Sosia {aside). He beats me there. I must look out, it 
 
 seems, 
 
 For a new name. Now where on earth could this fellow 
 Have been, to see all that ? I'll have him yet ; 
 Things that I did by myself, with no one near 
 What I did in the tent it can't be possible 
 He'll tell me that. (Aloud.) Now look if you be Sosia, 
 "What was I doing in my master's tent, 
 That day they'd such hard fighting in the front ? 
 Come tell me that, my friend and I'll give in. 
 Mercury (slily). There was a cask of wine : I filled a 
 
 pitcher 
 
 Sos. (to himself). He's not far out. 
 
 Mer. Filled it with good red wine 
 
 As honest stuff as ever grew in grape. 
 
 Sos. Marvellous ! unless this chap was in the cask ! 
 Fact I did fill the pitcher and drank it too. 
 
 Mer. How now ? have I convinced you I am Sosia ? 
 Sos. (puzzled). D'ye say I'm not ? 
 
 Mer. How can you be, if I am ? 
 
 Sos. (half crying). I swear by Jove I am Sosia it's no lie. 
 Mer. I swear by Mercury it is : Jove won't believe you ; 
 He'd trust my word far sooner than your oath. 
 Sos. Who am I then, I ask you, if not Sosia ? 
 Mer. That I can't tell you but you can't be Sosia, 
 So long as I am : when I've done with the name, 
 Then you may take it. Now be off with you, 
 Name or no name, unless you want a thrashing. 
 
 Sos. Upon my life, now that I look at him, 
 And recollect myself (I take a peep 
 Into my master's glass occasionally) 
 
 It strikes me that there is an uncommon likeness. (Ex- 
 amines Mercury furtively.) 
 
 The broad-brimmed hat and surcoat just the same ; 
 He looks as like me as I do myself ! 
 Legs feet proportions short-cropped hair bull-neck
 
 AMPHITRYON. 75 
 
 Eyes nose lips cheeks the very chin and beard 
 
 The whole of him is me ! the very ditto ! 
 
 I wonder whether he's got whip-marks on his back 
 
 If so, the copy's perfect.* (Cogitating.} Still it seems, 
 
 When I consider on't, I must be I : 
 
 I'm the same man I was ; I know my master 
 
 I know his house, there 'tis. I've got my senses ; 
 
 (Pinching himself.} And I can feel. No ; I will not 
 
 believe 
 A word this fellow says. I'll knock again. (Goes up to 
 
 the door.) 
 
 Mer. (rushing up}. Hallo ! where now ? 
 Sos. Home, to be sure. 
 
 Mer. Be off 
 
 Be off like lightning, if you'd keep whole bones! 
 Sos. Mayn't I give master's message to his lady ? 
 Mer. To his by all means ; only not to ours : 
 If you provoke me more, I'll break your head. 
 Sos. (running away}. No no ! I'll go! Poor devil that 
 
 I am! 
 
 Where did I lose myself 1 when was I changed ? 
 How did I lose my corporal capacity ? 
 Did I forget myself, when I went abroad, 
 And leave myself at home here, by mistake ? 
 For he's got what was me, there's no doubt of it ; 
 All the outside, I mean, that I used to have. 
 
 * Moliere has improved upon this passage, in the scene in 
 which Sosia tells his master of the beating which he has just re- 
 ceived from his own double, and how he was at last convinced 
 that this latter was the real man : 
 
 " Longtemps d'imposteur j'ai traite* ce moi-meme ; 
 Mais a me reconnaltre enfin il m'a forc6 : 
 J'ai vu que c'e'tait moi, sans aucune stratagkme ; 
 Des pieds jusq'a la tete il est comme moi fait, 
 Beau, 1'air noble, bien pris, les manieres charmantes ! " 
 Amphit., act ii. sc. 1.
 
 76 THE COMEDIES OF PLUATUS. 
 
 Well ril go back again and tell my master : 
 Perhaps he won't own me ! The gods grant he don't ! 
 I shall be free then, even if I'm nobody. 
 
 Act i. sc. 1. : 
 
 The scene in which the pilot of the ship is unable 
 to decide between the false Amphitryon and the true, 
 when at last they are brought upon the stage together, 
 is probably only a "restoration " of the mutilated work 
 of Plautus. Moliere has substituted Sosia for the 
 pilot, and makes him decide in favour of the false pre- 
 tender. The convincing argument which confirms him 
 in this decision has passed into a proverb, better 
 known perhaps in itself than in its context. Jupiter, 
 in his assumed character of Amphitryon, is made to 
 reserve the disputed identity for the verdict of the 
 Thebans in full assembly : meanwhile he invites all 
 the company present to dinner : 
 
 " Sosia. Je ne me trompais, Messieurs, ce mot termine ', 
 Toute 1'irresolution; 
 Le veritable Amphitryon 
 Est 1'Amphitryon ou Ton dine." * 
 
 VIII. THE POT OF GOLD (AULULAR1A). 
 
 The prologue to this comedy is spoken in the char- 
 acter of the " Lar Familiaris," as the Eomans called him 
 a sort of familiar spirit supposed to be attached to 
 every Roman household, who had his own little altar 
 
 * Dunlop shows, however, that this is really borrowed from 
 an older comedy on the same subject by Rotrou ' Les Deux 
 Sosies ' which the later author has laid under contribution 
 in other scenes. Sosia' s words in Rotrou' s play are "Point, 
 point d' Amphitryon ou Von ne dine point."
 
 . THE POT OF GOLD. 77 
 
 near the family hearth, and whose business it was, if 
 duly cultivated, to look after the family fortunes, a 
 private " Robin Goodfellow." He informs the audience 
 that the owners of the establishment over which he 
 presides at present have been a generation of misers. 
 The grandfather had buried under the hearth a " Pot 
 of Gold," intrusting the secret only to him, the Lar, 
 and praying him to see to its safe keeping ; and too 
 covetous, even at his death, to disclose this secret to 
 his son. The son was rather worse than his father, 
 grudging the Lar his sacrifices even more than the old 
 man had ; and therefore, the Lar saw no good reason 
 for discovering the treasure to him. And now the 
 grandson, Euclio, is as bad as either father or grand- 
 father. But he has a daughter ; rather a nice young 
 woman, the Lar considers : she is constantly paying 
 him little attentions, bringing incense, and wine, and 
 garlands, and \ suchlike, to dress his altar : and as the 
 Lar must have seen a good deal of her, and the audi- 
 ence is never allowed to see her at all, they have to take 
 his word for her attractions. She will be expecting a 
 husband soon : and the family guardian has fixed upon 
 one for her Lyconides, nephew to one of their next- 
 door neighbours, Megadorus. But as he has some 
 reason to know that the young man would not be ac- 
 ceptable to her father, he will contrive that the uncle 
 shall ask the girl in marriage for himself, and after- 
 wards resign in his nephew's favour. And he has 
 made known to Euclio the secret of the buried treasure, 
 in the hope that out of it he will provide a liberal 
 dowry for the young "lady who is so zealous in her 
 household devotions.
 
 78 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 But Euclio has no intention of using the gold in that 
 or in any other fashion. It becomes his one delight, 
 and his perpetual torment. He leaves it buried in its 
 hiding-place : but he is in continual terror lest it should 
 be discovered. He scarcely dares move from home, 
 lest when he returns he should find it gone. Every 
 noise that he hears, he fancies proceeds from some at- 
 tempt to carry off his treasure. He leads Ms poor old 
 housekeeper, his one slave Staphyla, a wretched life, 
 from his perpetual worrying. When his neighbour 
 Megadorus comes to ask the hand of his daughter in 
 marriage, he is sure that it is because he has heard in 
 some way of the gold. His continual protest is that 
 he is miserably poor. One of the most ludicrous situa- 
 tions is the dilemma in which he finds himself placed, 
 when upon some occasion a dole of public money is 
 announced for the poorer citizens. If he does not at- 
 tend and claim his share, his neighbours will think he is 
 a rich man, and be sure to try to hunt out his money : if 
 he goes to the ward-mote to receive it, and has to wait 
 perhaps some time for the distribution, what may not 
 have become of his darling " Pot " during his absence ? 
 Acute critics have said, apparently with truth, that in 
 Euclio we have the pure miser ; who has no desire to 
 increase his store, no actual pleasure in the possession, 
 no sense of latent power in the gold which he treasures, 
 but who is a very slave to it in the terror of losing it. 
 
 Euclio, though much alarmed at first as to the pro- 
 bable motives of Megadorus's request, consents to give 
 him his daughter; still, however, under protest that 
 he is a very poor man, which the other fully believes. 
 He can give no dowry with her : but Megadorus is
 
 TEE POT OF GOLD. 79 
 
 prepared to take her without; he will even provide 
 out of his own purse all the expenses of the wedding- 
 feast, and will send in to Euclio's house both the pro- 
 visions and the cooks required for the occasion. 
 
 But the cooks, when they come, and begin to busy 
 themselves in the house, are a source of continual 
 agony to the miser. He hears one of them call for a 
 " larger pot : " and he rushes at once to the protection 
 of his gold. He finds his own dunghill-cock scratching 
 about the house ; and he is sure that these new-comers 
 have trained him to discover the buried treasure, and 
 knocks the poor bird's head off in his fury. In the 
 end he drives them all off the premises under a shower 
 of blows, and only when he has in their absence dug up 
 the precious pot, and got it safe under his cloak, will 
 he allow them to come back again. "When the bride- 
 groom expectant, in the joy of his heart, invites him to 
 drink with him, he feels satisfied that his intention is 
 to make him drunk, and so to \vring from him his 
 secret. 
 
 The miser carries off the pot, and proceeds to bury 
 it afresh in the temple of Faith, placing it under that 
 goddess's protection. He finds that this proceeding has 
 been watched by a slave belonging to Megadorus, and 
 carries the gold off again to the sacred grove of Syl- 
 vanus, where he buries it once more. This time, however, 
 the slave takes his measures successfully, by getting up 
 into a tree ; and when Euclio is gone, he unearths the 
 pot, and carries it off rejoicing. The discovery of his 
 loss almost drives the miser frantic : and the scene is 
 worth extracting, if only because Moliere has borrowed 
 it almost entire in the well-known soliloquy of Harpa-
 
 80 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 gon in ' L'Avare.' It shall be given in as literal a prose 
 version as it will bear, in order to its more ready com- 
 parison with the French imitation. 
 
 EUCLIO (solus, rushing on the stage). 
 
 I'm ruined ! dead ! murdered ! where shall I run 1 
 Where shall I not run to ? Stop him there, stop him ! 
 Stop whom ! Who's to stop him ? (/Striking his forehead 
 in despair.} I can't tell I can see nothing I'm going 
 blind. Where I'm going, or where I am, or who I am, I 
 cannot for my life he sure of ! ( Wringing his hands, and 
 appealing to the audience.) Oh pray I beseech you, help 
 me ! I implore you, do ! Show me the man that stole 
 it ! Ah ! people put on respectable clothes, and sit there 
 as if they were all honest ! (Addressing a spectator in the 
 front seats.) What did you say, sir ? I can believe you, 
 I'm sure I can see from your looks you're an honest man. 
 (Looking round on them all) What is it ? Why do you 
 all laugh 1 Ah, I know you all ! There are thieves here, 
 I know, in plenty ! Eh ! have none of them got it ? I'm 
 a dead man ! Tell me then, who's got it ? You don't 
 know ? Oh, wretch, wretch that I am ! utterly lost and 
 ruined ! Never was man in such miserable plight. Oh, 
 what groans, what horrible anguish this day has brought 
 me ! Poverty and hunger ! I'm the most unhappy man 
 on earth. For what use is life to me, when I have lost all 
 my gold ? And I kept it so carefully ! Pinched myself, 
 starved myself, denied myself in everything ! And now 
 others are making merry over it, mocking at my loss and 
 my misery ! I cannot bear it ! 
 
 Act v. sc. 2.* 
 
 The scene which follows between the miser and the 
 * Compare Moliere's 'L'Avare,' act iv.'sc. 7.
 
 THE POT OF GOLD. 81 
 
 young man Lyconides, who has anticipated his uncle 
 in the love of the miser's daughter, has also been bor- 
 rowed by Moliere. Lyconides comes to confess that 
 he has stolen the young lady's affections ; but Euclio is 
 so full of his one great loss, that he persists in interpret- 
 ing all Lyconides's somewhat incoherent language tc 
 imply that he is the thief of the gold. The play upon 
 the Latin word o?Za, which means " pot," and is also 
 the old form of ilia, " she," helps the equivoque materi- 
 ally. But the French version is far more amusing ; and 
 the words of Harpagon, when, in reply to Valere's talk 
 about " la passion que ses beaux yeux m'ont inspired, 
 he exclaims in bewilderment, " Les beaux yeux de ma 
 cassette !" * has passed, like so many of Moliere's lines, 
 into a favourite proverb. 
 
 This play is imperfect, and we only know what the 
 catastrophe Avas from the brief sketch in the metrical 
 prologue, which Priscian the grammarian is said to 
 have affixed to. each of these comedies. The lover 
 recovers the pot of gold for its owner ; and by some 
 miraculous change in the miser's nature is presented 
 with it as a dowry for the daughter. The later scenes 
 have indeed been supplied by more than one ingenious 
 " restorer ; " but such restorations are unsatisfactory at 
 the best. 
 
 Besides the admirable adaptation of this comedy in 
 the French, no less than three English dramatists, 
 Fielding, Shadwell, and "Wycherley, have each a 
 comedy called ' The Miser,' the plot and materials of 
 all which are borrowed more or less from Plautus. 
 
 _* ' L'Avare,' act v. sc. 1. 
 A. c. vol. xvi. F
 
 82 THE COMEDIES Of PLAUTUS. 
 
 IX. THE TRICKSTER (PSEUDOLUS). 
 
 This comedy would deserve special notice, if only 
 because it was, if we may trust Cicero, the " darling " 
 of Plautus. An author, however, is not an infallible 
 judge of his own works ; and though the action of the 
 piece is very busy and lively, and the tricks of Pseu- 
 dolus fairly amusing, few modern readers would be 
 likely to select it as their favourite. Probably it might 
 act better than it reads. Its plot is the old story of 
 money which has to be raised in some way for the 
 ransom of a slave-girl out of the hands of the dealer, 
 and the humour consists entirely in the devices of 
 Pseudolus to procure it for his young master. But 
 one of the early scenes contains such a graphic picture 
 of one of these hateful traffickers in human flesh and 
 blood, that portions of it may be worth presenting to 
 the reader. 
 
 Enter BALLIO, the slave-dealer, and four flogging-slaves, 
 all armed with whips : other slaves following. 
 
 Come out, here ! move ! stir about, ye idle rascals ! 
 
 The very worst bargain that man ever made, 
 
 Not worth your keep ! There's ne'er a one of ye 
 
 That has thought of doing honest work. 
 
 I shall never get money's worth out of your hides, 
 
 Unless it be in this sort (lays about them with the whip], 
 
 Such tough hides too ! 
 
 Their ribs have no more feeling than an ass's 
 You'll hurt yourself long before you'll hurt them. 
 And this is all their plan these whipping-posts 
 The moment they've a chance, it's pilfer, plunder, 
 Rob, cheat, eat, drink, and run away's the word.
 
 THE TRICKSTER. 83 
 
 That's all they'll do. You'd better leave a wolf 
 
 To keep the sheep, than trust a house to them. 
 
 Yet, now, to look at 'em, they're not amiss ; 
 
 They're all so cursedly deceitful. Now look here ; 
 
 Mind what I say, the lot of ye ; unless 
 
 You all get rid of these curst sleepy ways, 
 
 Dawdling and maundering there, I'll mark your backs 
 
 In a very particular and curious pattern 
 
 With as many stripes as a Campanian quilt, 
 
 And as many colours as an Egyptian carpet. 
 
 I warned you yesterday ; you'd each your work ; 
 
 But you're such a cursed, idle, mischievous crew (gives 
 one of them a cut at each word) 
 
 That I'm obliged to let you have this as a memorandum. 
 
 Oh ! that's your game, then, is it ? So you think 
 
 Your ribs are as hard as this is ? (SJiows his whip.} Now, 
 just look ! 
 
 (Turning to his whipping-slaves). They're minding some- 
 thing else ! Attend to this, 
 
 (Striking one of the others.} Mind this, now, will you ? 
 Listen, while I speak, 
 
 You generation that were born for flogging ; 
 
 D'ye think your backs are tougher than this oow-hide ? 
 
 (Lays about him with it.} Why, what's the matter ? Does 
 it hurt ? O dear ! 
 
 That's what slaves get when they won't mind their masters. 
 
 Act i. sc. 2. 
 
 There was a highly comic element in this, we may be 
 sure, to an audience of Roman freemen. Even if there 
 were, as it is certain there must have been, present in 
 the theatre, many who had been slaves themselves, and 
 whose fathers had been in slavery, and many who were 
 slaves still, we may feel only too sure that their laugh 
 was amongst the loudest. Among the curses of modern
 
 84 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 slavery has teen the selfish disregard of human suffer- 
 ing which it encouraged not only amongst the masters 
 but amongst the slaves themselves ; and it is well 
 known that a negro overseer has often shown far more 
 cruelty towards those of his own colour than the 
 white owner of the plantation. 
 
 The slave Pseudolus, who is the hero of this piece, 
 and from whom Moliere seems to have borrowed in 
 some degree his character of Mascarille in 'L'Etourdi,' 
 is somewhat of a more intellectual rascal than others 
 of his type who appear in these comedies. He looks 
 upon successful roguery as a highly intellectual ac- 
 complishment. 
 
 Just as the poet, when he takes his pen, 
 
 Seeks things which upon earth have no existence, 
 
 And straightway finds them, and makes that like truth 
 
 Which is but very falsehood ; thus will I 
 
 In my way be a poet ; these gold pieces 
 
 Which are not, shall be ; genius shall create them. 
 
 The scene in which he meets his master Simo, who is 
 looking for him in order to make some inquiries as to 
 the late discreditable goings-on of his son, in which he 
 thinks with some justice that Pseudolus has been aiding 
 and abetting, is a good specimen of cool effrontery. 
 Simo is accompanied by his friend Callipho, and Pseu- 
 dolus sees them coming. 
 
 Pseudolus (to himself). A bold behaviour in a doubtful 
 
 cause 
 
 Is half the victory. (Bowing profoundly to Simo.) Sir, 
 my best respects
 
 THE TRICKSTER. 85 
 
 They are my master's due. (Solving to Callij)ho.) My 
 
 second best, 
 
 Such as are left me, sir, I offer you. 
 Simo (gruffly). Good morning. Where may you be 
 
 going, eh ? 
 Pseud. I'm standing still, sir, as you might observe 
 
 (striking an attitude). 
 Si. Look at the fellow's posture, Callipho ! 
 Stands like a lord there ! 
 
 Callipho. Well, he's not afraid ; 
 
 That's a good sign. 
 
 Pseud. I hold, sir, that the slave 
 
 Who has an honest conscience (lays his hand on his heart) 
 
 should feel proud, 
 Especially in the presence of his master. 
 
 Si. Hark to him ! Now he'll so philosophise, 
 A.nd choke you with a flood of clever words, 
 You'd think he was not Pseudolus, but Socrates.* 
 
 Pseud. You hold me in contempt, sir that I know ; 
 You do not trust me ; ah ! you'd have me be 
 A rascal ; no, sir I'll be honest still. 
 
 Act L sc. 5. 
 
 His master asks himVhether he can answer honest- 
 ly a few questions about his son : and Pseudolus assures 
 him that his replies shall be " as the oracles of Delphi." 
 His son has got into trouble ? Yes. Owes money ? 
 Yes. He, Pseudolus, is trying to procure it for him ? 
 Yes. Probably intending, by some tricks or cajolery, 
 to extract it out of his the father's pocket 1 ? Pseudo- 
 lus confesses that he had such intention. And, after 
 
 * This reputation for " sophistry " seems to have followed 
 Socrates from the pages of Aristophanes to those of his brother 
 dramatist.
 
 86 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 some satirical compliment from Simo upon his candour, 
 and thanks for having thus put him on his guard, he 
 coolly assures his master that he retains this intention 
 still, and is confident of succeeding in it. Nay, more 
 when Simo challenges him to try, he will undertake 
 not only to get from him the money required for the 
 ransom of the young person upon whom his son has set 
 his heart, but to get her away from her present owner 
 without any ransom at all. It ends in a promise from 
 Simo to make him a present of the sum required, if he 
 succeeds in his design upon Ballio the slave-dealer. The 
 old gentleman, however, gets so uneasy on the subject, 
 that he succeeds in " hedging " his own stake in the 
 matter by telling Ballio of the plot which is laid for 
 him, and making a wager with him to the same amount 
 that Pseud olus will beat him in spite of all precautions. 
 He does ; and his master who is evidently as proud 
 of possessing such a clever slave as some people are of 
 a specially mischievous child hands him over the 
 money ; with the less reluctance, because he gets re- 
 couped at the expense of the wretched Ballio, who 
 loses both his slave and his wager. Pseudolus liber- 
 ally offers to return his master half, if he will join him 
 at a supper which he has ordered in celebration of his 
 double triumph ; and Simo, in accordance with that 
 curious combination of familiarity and despotism which 
 has been remarked as pervading all the relations be- 
 tween master and slave, accepts the invitation at once, 
 although Pseudolus is very far from sober when he gives 
 it. Simo suggests that he should also invite the audi- 
 ence ; but Pseudolus replies that none of them have 
 ever yet invited Mm. If, however, they will now sig-
 
 TEE YOUNG CARTHAGINIAN. 87 
 
 nify their approval of the comedy, he will give them 
 an invitation to-morrow. 
 
 The plays named 'Eproicus' and 'BACCHIDES' both 
 turn upon incidents very similar to the preceding, the 
 clever and unscrupulous slave being the leading charac- 
 ter in both. They call for no particular notice here ; 
 unless it be to mention that the ' Epidicus ' must have 
 been, like the play just noticed, a special favourite with 
 its author, since he makes one of the characters in his 
 ' Bacchides ' say that he "loves it as well as his own 
 life ; " * and that this latter play, like the ' Pseudolus,' 
 appears to have suggested to Moliere some points in his 
 1 L'Etourdi.' One of its scenes t has also (as Thornton 
 thinks) been imitated by him in ' Les Fourberies de 
 Scapin.' 
 
 X. THE YOUNG CARTHAGINIAN (PCENULUS). 
 
 This play has an interest apart from any literary 
 merit, because, written as it was during the Second 
 Punic War, it has some Carthaginians introduced into 
 it. "We may conclude that the sketches were such as 
 Plautus judged likely to meet the popular taste; and 
 if so, they are creditable to the Eoman contemporary 
 estimate of their powerful enemies. With the excep- 
 tion of a joke or two about long trailing foreign dresses, 
 and their being "pulse-eaters," just aswe used to affect 
 to believe that Frenchmen lived upon frogs, and a 
 hit in the prologue at the proverbial " Punic faith," 
 which on a Eoman's tongue meant Punic faithlessness, 
 there is nothing derogatory to their national character 
 
 * Bacch., act ii. sc. 2. t Act iii. sc. 3.
 
 88 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 in this impersonation of the Carthaginians "by the Roman 
 dramatist. The elder of the two, who is introduced 
 tinder a very historical name Hanno is a highly 
 straightforward and unselfish character, who at once 
 gives up to his cousin, Agorastocles, the " young Cartha- 
 ginian," as soon as he discovers their relationship, the 
 property which had been left to himself by the young 
 man's father, in the belief of his son's death. Agoras- 
 tocles himself is neither better nor worse than the Athe- 
 nian (or, as they really are, Roman) youths who figure 
 in the comedies. And as for Adelphasium Hanno's 
 lost daughter, with whom the hero of the piece has 
 fallen passionately in love in her position as a slave 
 there is more character in her than, in any one of the 
 heroines (the word must be used because there is no 
 other to be found) of Plautus or of Terence. It is diffi- 
 cult to separate her from the very disagreeable interlo- 
 cutors in the dialogues in which she takes a part : but 
 the quiet way in which she treats her sister's love of 
 finery, and her half-affected indifference to the flat- 
 teries of her lover, and disregard of all his raptures so 
 long as he fails in his promise of obtaining her freedom, 
 mark her out very distinctly from most of the female 
 characters in Plautus. There is an amusing scene in 
 which her lover, finding that she will not listen to him, 
 begs his servant Milphio, in whose rhetorical powers 
 he feels more confidence, to plead his cause with her. 
 Milphio consents to do it warning his master, at the 
 same time, that he may possibly think his ambassador 
 too energetic. So the young man listens in the back- 
 ground, while Milphio, speaking on his behalf, entreats 
 Adelphasium, in the most approved style of lovers'
 
 THE YOU NO CARTHAGINIAN. 89 
 
 language, to have some pity upon his unfortunate 
 master. He throws himself so heartily into his com- 
 mission, that the Carthaginian listens to his rapturous 
 expressions with dismay, and at last can endure it no 
 longer. He rushes forward, and seizes his ambassador 
 by the collar, wholly regardless of the presence of the 
 lady and her sister, who look on with much amusement. 
 
 Agorastocles. Now am I not worth purchase at three 
 
 farthings, 
 If I don't break that scoundrel's head. Come here, sir ! 
 
 (seizes Milphio.) 
 There's for your " sweets," and " dears," and " pretty 
 
 darlings " (beats him at each word). 
 Here's " heart's delight " and " lovely charmer " for you ! 
 
 (beats him again.} 
 
 Milphio. Oh, master, master ! it's rank sacrilege ! 
 You're beating an ambassador ! 
 
 Agor. I'll beat him 
 
 More yet. " Kiss her all day," sir, could you ? 
 I daresay ! (striking him again.} " Nestling of your 
 
 bosom," is she ? 
 Mil. (roaring and rubbing his shoulders). Oh ! that's 
 
 enough ! 
 
 Agor. Was that the fashion, sirrah, 
 
 In which I meant you to address the lady ? 
 Mil. Why, what was I to say, then ? 
 Agor. Say, you rascal ? 
 
 Why, this " Light of my master's eyes queen of his 
 
 soul 
 
 Breath of his life joy of his heart," and so on : 
 Instead of that, sir, in your cursed impudence, 
 You've been calling her your darling all the time ! 
 
 Mil. Oh ! now I see ! (goes up to Adelphasium, and 
 begins again.)
 
 90 THE COMEDIES OF PL A UTUS. 
 
 I implore you, gracious madam, 
 Joy of his heart but my abomination 
 Queen of his soul but enemy of my ribs 
 His pet, my pest his angel, but my devil 
 Light of his eyes but black as night to me 
 Don't be so very cross to him, if you can help it. 
 
 Adelphasium (laughing and turning away). Go hang 
 yourself ! you and your master too ! 
 
 Mil. I shall lead a precious life of it, I see, through you ; 
 I've got a back already in your service 
 Whealed like an oyster-shell. 
 
 Add. It's your own back 
 
 That you think most of, I suspect ; not him, 
 Or how he cheats me with deceitful promises. 
 
 When Hanno has discovered that these two sisters are 
 the long-lost daxighters in search of whom he has 
 journeyed to Calydon, he determines to play upon their 
 feelings for a while in the most unnecessary and un- 
 likely fashion by pretending to them that he merely 
 comes to claim them as his slaves. And here, again, 
 there are little touches on the part of Adelphasium 
 which almost redeem the scene from tediousness. 
 Hanno pretends to summon the girls before the magis- 
 trate, in order to prove his claim ; and the lover, who 
 is present, and helps (though with evident impatience) 
 to humour the father's jest, asks him if he shall at once 
 make Adelphasium his prisoner. She has heard him 
 address the stranger as his " cousin ; " and the fine 
 scorn with which, as she draws back from his eager 
 arm, she exclaims 
 
 " Said you this person was your kinsman, sir ? " 
 could not fail to be effective from the lips of a clever
 
 THE YOUNG CARTHAGINIAN. 91 
 
 actress. So, too, when she requests to know the nature 
 of Hanno's claim to her, and the lover, eager to put an 
 end to the equivoque, says that all shall be told if 
 she will but accompany the stranger, she scornfully 
 replies 
 
 " What ! does my own dog bark at me 1 " 
 
 it is not difficult to sympathise with the young Cartha- 
 ginian's intense admiration of her as she stands there 
 defying him. He vows that for her sake Jupiter would 
 soon " send Juno packing;" and when at last she throws 
 her arms round her father's neck, he laments that Apel- 
 les and Zeuxis died too soon they had never such a 
 subject for their pencil. These are by far the most 
 life-like pair of lovers in any comedy of either 
 Plautus or Terence. Granted that he is a little 
 foolish, and she something of a coquette, that does 
 not make the characters either less natural or less 
 entertaining. 
 
 Nevertheless, all this absurd mystification on the 
 part of the father does make this scene tedious, as are 
 some others in the play. Hanno carries on his heavy 
 joke so long, that at last his young cousin, who is im- 
 patient for the recognition of his dear Adelphasium, 
 appeals to him by pointing to the audience : 
 
 " Sir, cut it short these gentlemen are thirsty." 
 
 There is no symptom of relenting disclosed 011 the 
 part of Adelphasium towards her suitor, even after her 
 true position as a free-woman has been secured ; but, 
 as Hanno unhesitatingly promises her hand in marriage 
 to her new-found cousin, and daughters in the comic
 
 92 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 drama are very dutiful on such points, \ve are left to 
 conclude that his constancy is rewarded. Mr Dunlop 
 whose critical judgment is entitled to so much re- 
 spect has pronounced this to be the dullest of all the 
 author's productions. Plot there certainly is none ; 
 and the heavy badinage of the excellent Hanno is 
 enough to put any critic out of temper. But there 
 is certainly more point in the dialogue than in most of 
 the comedies of Plautus. 
 
 The play has a special interest for scholars, indepen- 
 dently of any literary merit. It is supposed to contain 
 the only existing specimen of the Carthaginian language, 
 in which Hanno is made to speak when first he appears 
 upon the stage.* There are eighteen lines of it (some 
 of them, however, containing a mixture of Latin 
 words), besides a few scattered phrases. This philo- 
 logical curiosity has naturally much exercised the in- 
 genuity of the learned. Scaliger, Petit, and others, 
 consider the language to be merely a variation of He- 
 brew, and in Pareus's edition of Plautus the lines are 
 printed in Hebrew characters. Others have sought to 
 identify it with Chinese, Persian, or Coptic. Some 
 modern philologers incline to consider it a mere un- 
 meaning jargon, invented by Plautus for the occasion ; 
 and the frequent admixture of Latin words and ter- 
 minations in the last lines of the passage (as though 
 the writer were tired of keeping up the farce) certainly 
 lends some countenance to this view. The vocalisation 
 of some of the words bears no slight resemblance to 
 
 * Act v. sc. 1.
 
 THE COMEDIES OF PL A U TVS. 93 
 
 Welsh. But the question of the affinities of language 
 is not one to be discussed here. 
 
 The remaining Comedies may he dismissed with brief 
 notice. The stock characters the parasite, the mili- 
 tary swaggerer, and the cunning slave reappear upon 
 the stage in very similar combinations, and in less 
 respectable company. 'Stichus,' which is in other 
 respects deficient in interest, having no plot whatever, 
 and which some authorities do not consider to have 
 been written by Plautus, deserves notice as containing 
 the pretty female character of Pamphila (or Pinacium, 
 as she is called in some copies), the exemplary young 
 wife who maintains her fidelity to her absent husband 
 in spite of the strong probabilities of his death or deser- 
 tion. In vain has her father urged upon her and his 
 other daughter, in accordance, no doubt, with the feeling 
 of society on such points, the propriety of unprotected 
 young women in their circumstances marrying again. 
 Their husbands have now been absent, ostensibly on a 
 trading voyage, for above three years, and have sent no 
 word home. But Pamphila will listen to 110 such 
 suggestion, and encourages her sister in steady resist- 
 ance to all temptations to such breach of their first 
 vows. Of course both husbands return home in due 
 time, enriched by the profits made in their foreign 
 voyages ; and such is the whole story of this brief and 
 inartistic drama, remarkable only for its pleasant com- 
 panion pictures of the two young wives. Six more plays 
 make up the list of Plautus's surviving comedies, and if
 
 94 THE COMEDIES OF PLAUTUS. 
 
 these had not survived, we should certainly have had 
 no loss. Their names are ' Casina ' which seems to 
 have furnished Beaumarchais with part of the plot of 
 his ' Mariage de Figaro ' ' Curculio,' ' The Ass-dealer ' 
 (Asinaria), ' The Churl ' (Truculentus), 'The Merchant,' 
 and 'The Persian.' The morality of all these is of 
 the very lowest, and the three last are stupid besides.
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 TERENCE. 
 
 A DRAMATIC generation elapsed between Plautus and 
 Terence \ for the latter was only ten years old at the 
 date of Plautus's death. The great name which filled 
 the interval in the annals of Roman comedy was that of 
 Caecilius ; but of his works nothing remains except a 
 few disjointed passages to be found here and there in the 
 works of other authors. Horace mentions him with ap- 
 proval, while Cicero accuses him of bad Latin. Csecilius, 
 too, was a copyist from Menander, and a very indifferent 
 copyist in the opinion of Aulus Gellius, who gives us 
 an additional testimony to the genius of the Greek 
 dramatist, when, in comparing a passage from one of 
 his lost comedies with the imitation of it by Csecilius, 
 he says that the difference in brilliancy is that of the 
 golden armour of Glaucus compared with the bronze of 
 Diomed. 
 
 Such biographical record as we have of Ter- 
 ence is mainly derived from a source which is very 
 apocryphal. There is a " Life " of him, ascribed to 
 Suetonius, but more probably written by the gram- 
 marian Donatus : we do not know what authority the
 
 96 TERENCE. 
 
 writer had for his details, and the anecdotes which it 
 contains have a suspicious colouring. 
 
 Though the name by which he is known Publius 
 Terentius is Eoman, we are told that he was by 
 birth a Carthaginian, whence came his sobriquet 
 of "Afer" (the African), and that he was either 
 born in slavery or had become a prisoner of war. 
 He was brought up in the household of a Eoman 
 senator named Terentius, and, as was not uncommon 
 among slaves when they obtained their freedom, took 
 the name of his patron. That under these circumstances 
 he should have had a liberal education need not 
 discredit the story ; for in many Eoman families we 
 know that such young slaves as showed ability were 
 allowed ample opportunities of instruction. But 
 other opportunities are said to have fallen to the lot 
 of Terence such as few in his position could have 
 hoped for. He was admitted, while yet a young 
 man, to an intimate association with Scipio and 
 Lselius ; and this pair of accomplished friends were 
 even said to have had a large share in the composition 
 of the dramas which were brought out in the name of 
 their humbler associate. There is a story that Lselius, 
 being one evening busy in his library, and slow to 
 obey his wife's summons to dinner, excused himself by 
 saying he had never been in a happier mood for com- 
 position : and forthwith recited, as part of the result, 
 a passage from what was afterwards known as 'The 
 Self-Tormentor' of Terence. The dramatist himself, 
 perhaps very naturally, seems partly to have encouraged 
 the popular notion that he enjoyed such distinguished 
 help ; for though in his prologue to the comedy which
 
 TERENCE. 97 
 
 was said to have been really the work of his aristocratic 
 friend he speaks of this report as " a weak invention of 
 the enemy," yet in the prologue to a subsequent drama, 
 'The Brothers,' he evidently treats it as a compli- 
 ment, and does not care altogether to refute so flattering 
 an accusation. 
 
 For as to that which carping tongues report, 
 That certain noble friends have lent their hand 
 To this his work, and shared the poet's toil, 
 What they would fling at him as a reproach 
 He counts an honour, to be thus approved 
 By those whom universal Rome approves.* 
 
 Cicero thought it probable that his illustrious friends 
 did help him, though it might have been only by 
 judicious hints and corrections. It is also more than 
 possible that the dramatist may have been indebted 
 for much of the refinement of his dialogue, directly or 
 indirectly, to the accomplished women whose society 
 he enjoyed in the household of Lselius. The ladies of 
 that family were all charming talkers ; and Lselia, the 
 eldest daughter of Scipio's friend, is mentioned by her 
 son-in-law Crassus, the famous orator, as reminding 
 him, in the elegance of her language, of the dialogues 
 of Najvius and Plautus. 
 
 It is said that when he offered his first play to the 
 ^diles, who as the regulators of the public games had 
 to choose the pieces which were to enjoy the honour of 
 public representation, he found the officer to whom he 
 brought it to read seated at table. The young author 
 was desired to take a stool at a distance, and begin : 
 but he had scarcely got through the opening passage 
 
 * Prologue to the Aclelphi, 1 5. 
 A. c. vol. xvi. G
 
 98 TERENCE. 
 
 of ' The Maid of Andros ' when the ^Edile motioned 
 him to a seat by his own side, and there the reading 
 was completed. 
 
 The six comedies which follow are probably all that 
 their author ever put upon the stage. In the midst of his 
 dramatic career, he left Eome in order to travel in 
 Greece, and is said during his tour to have employed 
 himself in the translation of upwards of a hundred 
 of Menander's comedies. He seems never to have 
 returned, and tradition says that he was lost at sea on 
 his voyage homeward, and that his precious manu- 
 scripts perished with him. Another story is that he 
 himself escaped from the wreck, but died of grief for 
 the loss of his literary treasures. 
 
 His plays have far more elegance, but less action, 
 than those of Plautus. He is perhaps more adapted 
 for the library, and Plautus for the stage. Very much 
 of the fun of the latter is broad farce, while Terence 
 seldom descends below parlour comedy. But the two 
 writers had moved in very different circles : Plautus 
 had been familiar with life in the Suburra the St 
 Giles's of Rome while Terence had mixed in the 
 society of the Palatine. Their tastes had thus been 
 formed in very different schools. It is probable that 
 Terence gives us a better notion of what Menander was 
 than either Plautus or Caecilius. A criticism of Caesar 
 has been already quoted, in which he calls Terence a 
 " half-Menander." In the same lines he speaks of his 
 "pure diction" and "smoothness," and regrets his de- 
 ficiency in that lively humour (" vis comica") which 
 Menander seems to have succeeded in combining with
 
 TERENCE. 99 
 
 the Attic elegance of his style. There seems much 
 justice in this criticism. 
 
 The brief prologues with which Terence introduces 
 his plays, unlike those of Plautus, contain no kind of 
 explanation of the plot. They are personal appeals 
 of the poet to his audience, informing them honestly 
 of the sources from which he has borrowed his piece 
 (for to the honours of original invention no Roman 
 dramatist of those days seems to have thought of 
 aspiring), or defending himself against some charge of 
 unfair dealing brought against him by his rivals. In 
 this respect they bear a strong resemblance to the 
 " parabasis," as it was called, introduced here and there 
 between what we should call the acts, in the old Attic 
 Comedy of Aristophanes and Cratinus.
 
 CHAPTER VI. ' 
 
 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 I. THE MAID OF ANDROS. 
 
 ' THE Maid of Andros ' the earliest in date of 
 Terence's comedies with which we are acquainted 
 is confessedly founded upon two plays of Menander, 
 his ' Andria' and 'Perinthia ;' and the Roman dramatist 
 tells us, in his prologue, how certain critics complained 
 that in this adaptation he had spoilt two good pieces 
 to make a single indifferent one. How much truth there 
 maybe in the accusation we cannot even guess. But there 
 seems to have been generally a lack of incident in the 
 comedies of his great original, which, supposing such 
 adaptation to be permissible at all, would quite justify 
 a writer who had to make his own work effective in 
 supplying himself with sufficient material from as 
 many separate pieces as he thought proper. Even as we 
 have the play, the incidents are so few and simple, that 
 its defect, if acted before a modern audience, would be 
 the want of sufficient interest in the plot. A lady 
 named Chrysis has come from the island of Andros to 
 Athens, and there, from lack of money or friends, after
 
 THE MAID OF ANDROS. 101 
 
 a hard struggle to make an honest livelihood, has "been 
 driven to make a market of her beauty. Amongst the 
 visitors to her house, one of the most constant has 
 "been the young Parnphilus, who may be considered the 
 hero of the piece. But, whatever the lady's reputation, 
 the relations between her and Pamphilus have been of 
 the most innocent kind : and of this fact none are 
 better convinced than his father Sirno, and the freed- 
 man Sosia who is, in spite of his humble position in 
 the household, the confidential friend and adviser of 
 both father and son. The scene between Sosia and his 
 master gives us, as most of these comedies do, a very 
 pleasant idea of the kindly relations which in a well- 
 regulated Roman household might subsist between the 
 head of the family and his dependants, even under the 
 hateful conditions of slavery. For we must still re- 
 member that, though the scene is laid in Athens, the 
 words, and in a great degree the manners also, are 
 Roman ; though Terence is more careful on this point 
 than Plautus. Simo tells his freedman that he wants 
 his services in a matter which involves trust and secrecy 
 qualities in which he has not hitherto found him 
 wanting. 
 
 Simo. You know that, since I bought you when a boy, 
 You found me as a master j ust and kind ; 
 Then from a slave I made you free ; and this 
 Because you had served me with a free goodwill ; 
 The greatest boon I had to give, I gave you. 
 
 Sosia. I don't forget it. 
 
 Si. Nor do I repent it. 
 
 So. If aught that I have done, or can do, pleases you, 
 It is my pleasure : if you thank me for it,
 
 102 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 I thank you for the thanks'. But that you name it 
 Troubles me somewhat ; thus reminding me 
 Seems half to charge me with ingratitude ; 
 Sir, in one word, what would you have me do ? 
 
 Simo will tell him. It was true, there was nothing 
 between his son and Chrysis ; his visits were really 
 not to her. But Chrysis died a short time ago ; and 
 Pamphilus, as a mark of respect to an old acquaintance, 
 had followed amongst the mourners at her funeral. 
 Simo one of the many idle old gentlemen who were 
 wont to be spectators on such occasions had seen his 
 son actually wipe away a tear. He was charmed, he 
 tells Sosia, at such a mark of true sensibility. " If he 
 weeps, said I to myself, for a person who was a mere 
 common acquaintance, what would he not do for me 
 his father ! " Suddenly a young woman, hitherto un- 
 known, attracted his attention : of such a ravishing 
 beauty that the staid father of the family grows posi- 
 tively enthusiastic rather to the surprise of the discreet 
 Sosia in his description. When the corpse is laid, ac- 
 cording to Athenian custom, on the funeral pile, this 
 interesting young stranger, in the agony of her grief, 
 crept so close to it as to be almost caught by the flames ; 
 when a young man rushed forward, clasped her in his 
 arms with the tenderest expressions of affection, calling 
 her his " darling Glycerium," and led her off sobbing 
 very familiarly on his shoulder quite as if she was used 
 to the situation. And this young man was Pamphilus 
 and his father looking on with his own eyes ! He had 
 gone home, as he tells Sosia, in such mood as might be 
 imagined after witnessing this outrageous conduct in
 
 THE MAID OF ANDROS. 103 
 
 the promised bridegroom of his old friend's daughter. 
 Yet, after all, he continues 
 
 I had scarce ground enough, methinks, to chide him ; 
 He might reply " Have I deserved this, father ? 
 "What have I done ? Wherein have I offended ? 
 She would have thrown herself into the flames ; 
 I hindered it I saved her life ! " Such plea 
 Sounds fair and honest. 
 
 So. Marry, so it does ; 
 
 For if you chide him that would save a life, 
 What will you say to him that seeks to take it ? 
 
 However, the father is in great tribulation. His friend 
 Chremes has heard of the matter, and is told that 
 Pamphilus is privately married to this young foreigner ; 
 and very naturally declines any longer to look upon him 
 as a future son-in-law. But Simo is determined to find 
 out the truth, and to be satisfied whether his son has 
 really got into this disreputable entanglement. He 
 means to pretend to him that the marriage with Chre- 
 mes's daughter, so long meditated, is at last finally settled, 
 and is to come off at once, this very evening, the day 
 originally named. Young men in Athenian society 
 must have been usually very obedient to their fathers 
 in such matters : for Simo has no doubt of his son's 
 compliance, unless he can show good and reasonable 
 cause to the contrary. If this Andrian girl really 
 stands in the way, Pamphilus will make decided objec- 
 tions to the being disposed of in marriage, and then 
 then, this indulgent father, who evidently dreads noth- 
 ing so much as having to find fault with his son at 
 all, will know how to deal with him. So Sosia is
 
 104 : THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 charged to keep up the deception, and to assure every 
 one that his young master is to be married this very 
 evening. 
 
 But, if Sosia justly enjoys the confidence of his 
 master, the young heir of the house has his confidant 
 too. This is a slave named Davus the "best-known 
 representative in classical comedy of the familiar char- 
 acter who has been described in a previous chapter.* 
 He has considerably more cleverness than Sosia, but 
 nothing of his honesty : except, indeed, a kind of span- 
 iel-like fidelity to his young master's private interests, 
 partly attributable to the mischievous pleasure which 
 he finds in thereby thwarting the plans and wishes of 
 the elder one. Davus has heard of this sudden re- 
 newal of the marriage-contract, and comes upon the 
 stage soliloquising as to how this complication is to be 
 dealt with. His master enters at the same time on 
 the other side, listening. 
 
 Davus. Ah ! I was wondering where all this would end! 
 The master was so quiet, I suspected 
 He must mean mischief. When he heard that Chremes 
 Downright refused his girl, he never spoke 
 An angry word, nor stormed at any of us. 
 
 Simo. (aside at the wing, shaking his stick at Davus). 
 He will speak soon, and to your cost, you rascal ! 
 
 Da. (still aside). So, so! he thought to take us unprepared, 
 Lapping us up in this fools' Paradise, 
 To swoop upon us at the last, too late 
 To give us time to think, or opportunity 
 To hinder this curst wedding. (Ironically.) Clever man ! 
 Si. (trying to listen). What is he muttering ? 
 
 * See p. 15.
 
 THE MAID OF ANDROS. 105 
 
 Da. (discovering Simo). Ha ! my master there ! 
 
 I had not seen him. 
 
 Si. (coming forward}. Davus ! 
 
 Da. (pretending not to have seen him before). Hey ? 
 what is it ? 
 
 Si. Here, sirrah, come this way ! 
 
 Da. (aside). What can he want 1 
 
 Si. What say you ? 
 
 Da. What about ? 
 
 Si. D'ye ask me, sirrah 1 
 
 They say my son has a love affair ? 
 
 Da. Good lack ! 
 
 How folks will talk ! 
 
 Si. D'ye mind me, sir, or no ? 
 
 Da. I'm all attention. 
 
 Si. Well to inquire too closely 
 
 Into the past were harsh let bygones rest. 
 But now he must begin a different life ; 
 New duties lie before him from this day : 
 And you I charge you (changing his tone) nay, indeed, 
 
 good Davus, 
 
 I rather would intreat you, if I may, 
 Pray help to keep him straight. 
 
 Da. (affecting suprise) Why what's all this ? 
 
 Si. Young men, you know, with such whims, do not care 
 To have a wife assigned them. 
 
 Da. (carelessly). So they say. 
 
 Si. Then if a young man have a knavish tutor 
 Who trains him in such courses, why, the evil 
 Will grow from bad to worse. 
 
 Da. (looking stolid). Hercules help ine ! 
 
 I can't tell what you mean. 
 
 Si. (ironically). No really ? 
 
 Da. No ; 
 
 I'm only Davus I'm no (Edipus. 
 
 Si. You'd have me speak more plainly is it so ?
 
 106 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 Da. Indeed I would. 
 
 Si. Then, if I catch you scheming 
 
 To disappoint this match of ours to-day, 
 By way of showing your own curst cleverness, 
 I'll have you flogged within an inch of life, 
 And sent to the mill on this condition, look you 
 When I let you out, I'll go and grind myself. 
 Now, sir, d'ye understand me ] Is that plain ? 
 
 Da. Oh, perfectly ! (bowing). You state the case so 
 
 clearly, 
 
 With such entire correctness of expression, 
 So free from ambiguity it's quite charming ! 
 
 But Davus is not deterred by these threats. He 
 meets Chremes going about with a very gloomy face, 
 not at all like a happy father-in-law : he meets his foot- 
 boy corning home from market with a penny bundle 
 of pot-herbs and a dish of sprats very unlike pro- 
 visions for a wedding-supper. He peeps into their 
 kitchen ; no culinary preparations whatever. More- 
 over, there is no music, as there should be, before the 
 door of the bride's house. He is satisfied that his 
 suspicions are correct ; that there is really no wedding 
 on foot, at least for the present ; that Chremes still 
 firmly refuses to allow his daughter to marry a young 
 man whom he believes to be married already ; and that 
 Simo is only using this pretended renewal of the en- 
 gagement as a test for ascertaining how matters really 
 stand between his son and the fair Andrian. He 
 goes in search of his young master to acquaint him 
 with this discovery, and to advise him to checkmate 
 his father by consenting at once to the proposed 
 marriage ; which, as there is no bride forthcoming, will
 
 THE MAID OF ANDROS. 107 
 
 evidently pose the old gentleman considerably, besides 
 convincing him that his son is free from the entangle- 
 ment which he suspects. There will be a respite 
 gained, at any rate : and in the meanwhile, Davus 
 hopes, " something will turn up." 
 
 He finds Pamphilus in a state of great perplexity, 
 and very indignant against his father for proposing 
 to marry him off-hand at such very short notice; 
 the perplexity not being lessened by his Glycerium pre- 
 senting him with a baby on this his wedding-day that 
 is to be with another lady. Simo has heard a report 
 of this little stranger's arrival : but he believes it to 
 be a mere plot to impose upon him and Chremes, and 
 to confirm his friend in his resolution to refuse his 
 daughter. 
 
 Acting upon the advice of Davus, Pamphilus assures 
 his father at their next interview that he is quite ready 
 to take the wife suggested to him. But Davus has 
 been too clever by half. Simo goes straight to his 
 friend, assures him that all is over between Pam- 
 philus and Glycerium, that his son will gladly fulfil 
 the contract already made for him, and begs of him, 
 by their long friendship, not to refuse any longer a 
 connection which will be for his son's advantage and 
 for the happiness of all. Chremes with some reluc- 
 tance consents : and in the joy of his heart Simo calls 
 Davus, to whose good offices he thinks he is chiefly 
 indebted for his son's compliance. 
 
 Simo. Davus, I do confess, I doubted you : 
 I had my fears ; slaves common slaves, I mean 
 Will do such things, that you were cheating me, 
 As to this matter of my son's.
 
 108 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 Davus. (with an air of injured innocence). I, master ! 
 could you think it 1 cheat ? Oh dear ! 
 
 Si. (soothingly). Well, well I fancied so : and with 
 
 that thought 
 I kept the secret which I tell you now. 
 
 Da. What's that? 
 
 Si. Well, you shall hear : for now at last 
 
 I almost think that I may trust you may I ? 
 
 Da. At last, sir, it seems, sir, you appreciate me. 
 
 Si. This wedding was a mere pretence. 
 
 Da. (with feigned surprise). No ! really ? 
 
 Si. A scheme of mine, to test my son and you. 
 
 Da. Indeed ! 
 
 Si. Yes, really. 
 
 Da. Look ye ! what a wit 
 
 Our master has ! I never could have guessed it. 
 
 Si. Listen ; when I dismissed you, I met Chremes 
 
 Da. (aside.) We're lost I know it. 
 
 Si. Listen ; straight I told him 
 
 What you told me, that Pamphilus was ready. 
 I begged and prayed that he would give his daughter ; 
 At last I moved him. 
 
 Da. (aside). Then I'm done for. 
 
 Si. Hey ! did you speak ? 
 
 Da. I only said " well done," sir. 
 
 Si. And I beseech you, Davus, as you love me, 
 Since you alone have brought about this wedding 
 
 Da. I ! oh dear, no ! pray 
 
 Si. For my son I ask you, 
 
 Still do your best to regulate his morals. 
 
 Da. I will, I will, sir trust me. [Exit Chremes. 
 
 (Throws himself on the ground and tears his liair.) 
 
 h ! h ! 
 
 I'm gone a thing of nought. Why don't I go 
 Straight to the mill-prison of myself ? Forgiveness ? 
 No hope of that, from any one. I've played
 
 THE MAID OF ANDROS. 109 
 
 The very mischief with the total household ; 
 
 Cheated the master got the son a wife 
 
 This very night, much to the old gentleman's 
 
 Astonishment, and his son's disgust. Ah ! well ! 
 
 This comes of cleverness. Had I held my tongue, 
 
 No harm had happened. Hist ! here comes young master ; 
 
 (Looking about.) Is there any place here high enough, I 
 
 wonder, 
 For a man to break his neck from ? 
 
 There is another lover in the plot, which is perhaps 
 to our modern notions more complicated than interesting. 
 This daughter of Chremes, to whom Pamphilus has 
 been contracted by his father, has a favoured admirer in 
 his friend Charinus. Pamphilus has assured him that he 
 himself has no aspirations whatever in that quarter, in 
 spite of the arrangement between the two fathers : and 
 the young lover is naturally indignant when he dis- 
 covers, as he thinks, the treacherous part which his 
 friend has played in the matter, in now coming forward 
 to fulfil an engagement which he had always professed 
 to repudiate. There is a spirited scene between the 
 two young men, in which Pamphilus at last succeeds in 
 convincing his friend of his own unchanged views in 
 the matter he will never marry the girl of his own 
 free-will. Poor Davus narrowly escapes a thrashing from 
 both, for his unlucky interference. He undertakes, 
 however, if they will but have patience with him, to 
 set matters right yet : and his next step is to persuade 
 the nurse to allow him to lay Glycerium's baby down 
 at his master's door a silent claim upon his grand- 
 father just as Chremes, full of his daughter's marriage, 
 is coming to call on his old friend. Chremes finds out
 
 110 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 as Davus intends that he should whose child it is, 
 and is more than ever indignant at the deception which 
 is being repeated upon himself and his daughter. He 
 goes straight to Simo and once more recalls his consent. 
 But meanwhile a stranger has arrived at Athens, 
 who announces that this Andrian girl was really no 
 sister of Chrysis, but a free-born daughter of Athenian 
 parents, and that therefore Pamphilus will be bound 
 by Athenian law to marry her- if they are not married 
 already. When Davus comes to announce this news 
 to Simo, the old gentleman's indignation at this new 
 ruse on behalf of the conspirators as he thinks it 
 knows no bounds ; and poor Davus, who is now speak- 
 ing the trath for the first time in the whole business, 
 is for his reward tied neck and heels by order of his 
 irate master, and carried off to prison. But the tale 
 is true. An Athenian citizen had been shipwrecked 
 upon the island with a little child ; had died there, 
 and left the infant to be brought up by Chrysis. 
 This shipwrecked stranger turns out to have been 
 Ohremes's own brother, to whose charge he had com- 
 mitted his little daughter this Glycerium, long 
 supposed to be drowned, and now restored to her 
 father. All difficulties are over; Pamphilus shall yet 
 be son-in-law to Chremes only the bride is Glycerium, 
 not Philumena. The latter young lady, who never 
 makes her appearance, and whose charms, like those of 
 Glycerium, must be taken on report by the audience, is 
 with dramatic justice handed over to her lover Charinus. 
 Davus is released ; he comes in rubbing his neck and 
 legs, which are still suffering from the very uncomfort- 
 able kind of stocks a veritable " little-ease " which
 
 THE MOTHER-IN-LAW. Ill 
 
 the Romans used to punish their slaves, but too good- 
 humoured and light-hearted not to rejoice in the re- 
 stored harmony of the family. He conchides the piece 
 by begging the audience not to expect an invitation 
 to the weddings, which will take place, he assures them, 
 (juite privately.* 
 
 II. THE JMOTHER-INXLAW. 
 
 The plot of 'The Mother-in-law,' though it is an 
 extremely pretty play, and its moral excellent, turns 
 upon incidents which would justly offend the reticence 
 of modern manners. Here it can only be sketched 
 generally. A young wife, but a few months married and 
 of really irreproachable character, fancies that she has 
 so fatally compromised herself with her husband under 
 circumstances in which she was really not to blame, 
 that in his absence she leaves the roof of his 
 father and mother, with whom she has been living 
 since her marriage, and takes refuge with her own 
 parents. Laches, her father-in-law, a choleric and 
 despotic personage, fancies that his wife Sostrata, the 
 " mother-in-law," must necessarily be the cause ; al- 
 though that gentle and kindly woman has really a 
 sincere affection for the runaway, to whom she has 
 always shown every kindness. The scolding which 
 Laches inflicts upon his wife in one of the early scenes 
 of the play, will serve to show how little originality 
 
 * Upon this play Michel Baron, the French dramatist, founded 
 his comedy of ' L'Andrienne,' the two first acts being little more 
 than a translation. Steele's ' Conscious Lovers ' is also bor- 
 rowed from it.
 
 112 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 there is in those conjugal dialogues which have always 
 been so popular an ingredient in modern farce. If 
 humour of this kind cannot be said to be in the very 
 best taste, it may at least claim a high classical an- 
 tiquity. 
 
 Laches. Good heavens ! what a strange race these women 
 
 are ! 
 
 They're all in a conspiracy ! all just alike, 
 In what they will and what they won't ; not one of 'em 
 But sings to the same note ; with one consent 
 Each stepmother detests her daughter-in-law, 
 Each wife is bound to contradict her husband ; 
 There must be some school where they all learn wicked- 
 ness ; 
 And my own wife must be head-mistress in it. 
 
 Sostrata. Poor me, poor me ! I don't know what I 
 am charged with ! 
 
 La. (sneering). Oh ! you don't, don't you ? 
 
 Sos. On my life, dear Laches, 
 
 No as I hope to live and die with you ! 
 
 La. The gods deliver me from such a prospect ! 
 
 Sos. (sobbing). Well, when I'm gone, you'll know how 
 cruel you've been. 
 
 La. Cruel, forsooth ! what words are strong enough 
 For your base conduct, madam ? You've disgraced 
 Me, and yourself, and all the family ; 
 You've ruined your son's happiness made enemies 
 Of our best friends, who gave their daughter to us. 
 'Tis you, and only you, have done it all. 
 
 Sos. I ! 
 
 La. Yes, you, madam ! What ! am I a stone ? 
 
 Have I no feelings, think you ? Do you fancy 
 Because lam in the country, I don't know 
 How you all go on here while I am away ? 
 Ay ! better than I know what goes on there.
 
 THE MOTHER-IN-LAW. 113 
 
 Your conduct, madam, makes me common talk. 
 I knew my son's wife hated you yes, long ago ; 
 No wonder 'twould be a wonder if she didn't. 
 But that for your sake she had taken a hatred 
 To the whole family, this I did not know. 
 Had I only known it, I'd have packed you off, 
 And made her stay I would indeed, my lady ! 
 Look how ungrateful, too, is this behaviour ; 
 All to please you, I take a place in the country ; 
 I work like a horse there more than at my years 
 I ought to do to keep you here in idleness, 
 Spending my money ; 'twas the very least 
 You might have done, to keep a quiet house. 
 
 Sos. 'Twas not my fault, indeed, indeed, dear Laches ! 
 
 La. I say it was your fault, and no one else's ; 
 You'd nought to do but make things pleasant here ; 
 I took all other burdens off your hands. 
 Shame ! an old woman like you to go and quarrel 
 With a poor girl ! You'll tell me now, 'twas her fault 1 
 
 Sos. No, no ! dear Laches, I have never said so. 
 
 La. Well, I am glad, for my son's sake, you've the grace 
 To confess that. You don't much harm yourself 
 By the confession ; in your precious character 
 A fault or two the more don't make much odds. 
 
 You mothers never rest until your sons 
 
 Get them a wife ; and then your whole delight 
 
 Is to make mischief between wife and husband. 
 
 Some of the scenes in this play are the most 
 dramatic of any which have come down to us from 
 the author's hands. The grief of the young husband 
 when, on his return from a voyage on business, he 
 finds that his wife has left his father's roof and gone 
 home to her own parents, and when she refuses him an 
 
 A. c. vol. xvi. H
 
 114 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 interview on the plea of illness ; when he believes 
 that there is some cause of quarrel which is concealed 
 from him between her and his mother, whom he dearly 
 loves ; and the struggle between his love for his wife, 
 and his sense of what is due to his own honour, when 
 he learns the real cause of her withdrawal, are all very 
 finely drawn. So are the little passages in which poor 
 Sostrata, still believing that the cause of Philumena's 
 estrangement is some unaccountable dislike which she 
 has taken to herself, though conscious that she has 
 done her best to make her a happy home, proposes to 
 give up her pleasant town-house and retire into the 
 country, and so leave the young pair to themselves. 
 Laches himself is touched at last by her simple and 
 unselfish goodness ; and though the indications of this 
 are slight in the Roman play, compared with the fuller 
 and more gradual development which would be 
 thought necessary in a modern comedy, there is in the 
 short scene between them a simple pathos which, when 
 the characters were played by good actors, no doubt 
 touched the feelings of the audience as it was meant 
 to do. 
 
 La. Well, well ; we'll go into the country ; there 
 You'll have to bear with me, and I with you. 
 
 Sos. (throwing her arms round her husband and sobbing}. 
 
 Husband, I hope we may ! 
 La. (disengaging himself awkwardly, and trying to hide 
 
 his emotion}. There, there ! go in ; 
 (Jet ready all you want I've said the word. 
 
 Sos. I'll do your bidding aye, and gladly. 
 
 Pamphilus (who lias entered unperceived). Father ! 
 
 La. Well, Pamphilus, what is it ?
 
 THE MOTHER-IN-LA W. , 115 
 
 Pam. What means this ? 
 
 My mother leave her home ? It must not be. 
 
 La. Why not ? 
 
 Pam. Because I am not yet resolved 
 
 As to my wife. 
 
 La. You bring her back, of course. 
 
 Pam. I wish it it is hard to give her up ; 
 But I must do that which I feel is best. 
 She and my mother will be friends apart. 
 
 La. You can't tell that. Besides, what matters it ? 
 Your mother will be gone. (Turns away from his son, 
 
 who tries to interrupt him.) We're getting old 
 We're only troublesome to younger folk ; 
 We'd best be moving on. (Turning again to Pamphilus 
 
 with a smile.} In short, my boy, 
 We're only " the old man and woman," now. 
 
 But everything is made right in the end. Philu- 
 mena goes "back to her husband a wife without 
 reproach, and we are allowed to hope that Laches did 
 not wait for Sostrata's death to repent of his injustice 
 to her character. The dramatist had not altogether lost 
 his pains, if he had done something to qualify the 
 vulgar notion of a " mother-in-law." The play appears 
 to have met with no success when first brought out, 
 for it has come down to us with a " second prologue," 
 written for what seems to have been its third repre- 
 sentation, in which the author takes the opportunity 
 to remark on its previous failures. He attributes these 
 in both cases to the more powerful attractions of the 
 rope-dancers and the gladiators. On the second oc- 
 casion the audience were so impatient for the appear- 
 ance of these latter, that they would not even sit out 
 the comedy.
 
 116 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 III. THE SELF-TORMENTOR. 
 
 The comedy of 'The Self - Tormentor ' is in great 
 measure borrowed, as well as its Greek name of ' Heau- 
 ton-timorumenos,' from a lost comedy of Menander, of 
 which we have but some ten lines. It has very much 
 the same kind of dramatis personce as the preceding 
 play. Two fathers and two sons, a young lady for 
 each, and a scheming slave, devoted to the interests of 
 his young master make up the leading characters. 
 Chremes and Menedemus, the fathers, have for the last 
 few months been neighbours in the country ; engaged, 
 as Roman gentlemen who preferred a country life com- 
 monly were, in farming ; an occupation in which it 
 must be confessed they were generally much more suc- 
 cessful than the average English squire. Chremes has 
 noticed that since Menedemus bought his present farm, 
 he has worked upon it himself from morning till night, 
 as hard as though he were a slave instead of a master ; 
 in fact, that he does more work than any of his slaves, 
 and that the time which he spends himself in manual 
 labour might, so far as the interests of the farm are con- 
 cerned, be much more profitably employed in looking 
 after them. He has no reason to suppose that his 
 neighbour is poor ; and he has a curiosity to learn the 
 secret of this " self-tormenting." He succeeds in doing 
 so in the opening scene, though not without some diffi- 
 culty. Menedemus gruffly expresses his surprise that 
 his neighbour should have so much leisure from his 
 own affairs as to concern himself about those of others.
 
 THE SELF-TORMENTOR. 117 
 
 Chremes makes answer in those famous words, which 
 can only be inadequately given in any English trans- 
 lation ; words at which, as St Augustine tells us, the 
 whole audience, though many of them rude and ignor- 
 ant, broke out into thunders of applause : 
 
 " I am a man ; nothing in human life 
 Can fail to have its interest for me." * 
 
 Menedemus then tells him that he had once (he almost 
 fears he can no longer say he has) an only son, who 
 had fallen in love with a young Corinthian stranger 
 of humble fortunes, who had come to Athens (the 
 " Maid of Andros," in fact, under another title), and 
 had wished to marry her. The father's pride had re- 
 fused to consent ; almost any marriage with a foreigner 
 was held, it must be remembered, to be a mesalliance 
 for a citizen of Athens. He had spoken harshly to his 
 son ; and the young man, not choosing to be so dealt 
 with, had entered upon that field of adventure which 
 was open in those times to all young men of spirit : 
 he had taken service with a body of mercenaries, 
 and gone to seek his fortunes in the East. Distracted 
 at the consequences of his own severity, and the loss 
 of a son whom he deeply loved, Menedemus had sold 
 his house in Athens, and retired into the country, de- 
 termined to punish himself for what he considers his 
 unnatural harshness by a life of rigid asceticism. He 
 will live no life of ease after driving his son into exile 
 and poverty ; whatever he can save by self-denial shall 
 
 * " Homo sum ; human! nihil a me alienum puto."
 
 118 THE COMEDIES Of TERENCE. 
 
 be saved for him. at his return if ever that happy day 
 should come. 
 
 It comes with the very next scene. Young Clinia 
 has returned from the "wars, and has just been received 
 into the house of Chremes introduced there by his 
 son, Clitipho, who had been an intimate friend of the 
 wanderer, though the father does not seem to have been 
 aware of it. Clinia has begged his friend to send at 
 once to his dear Antiphila, and, if she has been as 
 faithful to him in his absence as he hopes, to entreat 
 her to pay him a visit in his temporary domicile. And 
 now the complication begins. Syrus, the slave to 
 whom young Clitipho intrusts his friend's errand, his 
 confidant in all business, lawful or unlawful deter- 
 mines to take the opportunity of doing his young 
 master a special kindness. Clitipho has also, as 
 Syrus is well aware, a love affair of his own upon his 
 hands, with a very dashing and extravagant lady in- 
 deed, to gratify whose expensive tastes in the way of 
 presents he has already taxed his father's good-nature 
 to the uttermost. Syrus has hit upon the brilliant 
 idea of introducing this lady into his master's house- 
 hold as a visitor, instead of the modest and quiet 
 Antiphila, as the object of Clinia' 's affections ; that 
 Clitipho may thus enjoy the pleasure of a few days in 
 her society. Antiphila meanwhile is sent into the 
 ladies' apartments which were quite distinct from 
 the other rooms in the house there to be entertained 
 by Sostrata, Chremes's wife. How Clinia is brought 
 to consent to an arrangement which would give 
 him very little opportunity for interviews with his 
 dear Antiphila or how husband and wife, in such a
 
 THE SELF- TORMENTOR. 119 
 
 modest establishment as this seems to have been, could 
 each have entertained a young lady guest for some 
 days (as seems to have been contemplated by Syrus) 
 without each other's knowledge, is not so clear as it might 
 be. But even on our modern stage we are continually 
 obliged, if we go to be amused, to swallow glaring 
 improbabilities ; and to expect to criticise the Athenian 
 or the Eoman stage by the light of our modern ignor- 
 ance, is an occupation, perhaps, more tempting than 
 profitable. 
 
 The hospitable Chremes is somewhat astonished at 
 the ways of the dashing lady to whom all to oblige 
 his son's friend he has given* shelter. He meets 
 Menedemus the next morning, and warns him in a 
 friendly way that Clinia's wife that is to be seems an 
 extremely fast young person. 
 
 Chr. First, she's brought with her half a score of inaids, 
 Tricked out, the jades, with gold and jewellery ; 
 "Why, if her lover were an Eastern prince, 
 He couldn't stand it how on earth can you ? 
 
 Men. (mildly}. Oh ! is she here, too 1 
 
 Chr. Is she here, do you ask ? 
 
 (Ironically}. Oh yes ! she's here. There's no doubt as 
 
 to that. 
 
 I know it to my cost. They've had one dinner, 
 She and her party. If I give another 
 Such as last night, why I'm a ruined man. 
 She's very curious, mind you, as to her wines ; 
 Knows the best brands, and drinks them. " Ha ! " 
 
 she'd say, 
 
 " This wine's not dry enough, old gentleman 
 " Get us some better, there's a dear old soul ! " 
 I had to tap my oldest casks. My servants
 
 120 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 Are driven almost wild. And this, remember, 
 Was but one evening. What's your son to do, 
 And you, my friend, that will have to keep her always ? 
 
 Men. Let him do what he will : let him take all, 
 Spend, squander it upon her ; I'm content, 
 So I may keep my son. 
 
 Chremes sees that it is impossible to argue with the 
 remorseful father in these first moments of his son's 
 return. But it will be a very dangerous thing for 
 young Clinia to know that his father is thus offering 
 him carte Handle for all his own and his mistress's ex- 
 travagances. He therefore begs his friend, instead of 
 openly supplying tha money, to allow himself to be 
 made the victim of a kind of pious fraud. The amount 
 of expenditure for the present may not be of so much 
 importance, provided the son is not led to believe that 
 he has unlimited command of his father's purse. 
 Chremes will manage that the supplies required for 
 the lady's demands shall be drawn from Menede- 
 mus on some specious pretext. He has evidently a 
 great fancy for transacting other people's business ; for 
 though he has an arbitration case which he ought to 
 attend to-day, he will go and have it put off, that he 
 may have time to arrange this matter for his friend. 
 The happy father willingly consents, and is all impa- 
 tience to be cheated. 
 
 Syrus meanwhile is racking his wits to know how 
 he is to get money for his young master to lavish upon 
 the extravagant Bacchis. In this mood his elder 
 master meets him ; and knowing him to possess the 
 talent for intrigue and deception which is common to 
 his class, asks his help to impose some tale upon
 
 THE SELF-TORMENTOR. 121 
 
 Menedemus whom he affects to abuse as " a covetous 
 old wretch " in order to make him a little more 
 liberal to his unfortunate son, whom he has once 
 already driven from home by his harshness. " That poor 
 young man ought to have had some clever servant," 
 says Chremes, " who would have managed the old 
 gentleman for him." Syrus is astonished, as he may 
 well be, at such a proposal from such a quarter ; but 
 it suits his own purpose exactly. 
 
 Syr. Oh ! I can do it, sir, if you insist 
 I have, methinks, some modest gifts that way. 
 
 Chr. Egad ! so much the better. 
 
 Syr. I'm not used 
 
 To so much lying but 
 
 Chr. Do it you'll oblige me. 
 
 Syr. But hark ye, sir, remember this, I pray you ; 
 In case I say in case men are but men 
 Your son should get in some such scrape hereafter. 
 
 Chr. That case won't happen, I trust. 
 
 Syr. Nay, heavens forefend ! 
 
 I trust so too. Don't think, because I mention it, 
 That I have any suspicion not the slightest ; 
 But still he's young, you see such things will happen ; 
 And if they should (Rowing], I shall know how to act, 
 By following your excellent instructions. 
 
 Chr. (laughing). Well, well ; we'll see to that, my 
 
 worthy Syrus, 
 When the day comes ; now go about this business. 
 
 [Exit Chremes. 
 
 Syr. I vow I never heard my master talk 
 More to the purpose never had I before 
 Free leave and licence given to be a rascal ! 
 
 The behaviour of his young guests is somewhat
 
 122 THE COMEDIES OF TEREXCE. 
 
 puzzling to Chremes, though, he is quite unsuspicious 
 as to the real state of affairs. Clinia and the supposed 
 object of his affections conduct their love-passages in 
 the most calm and decorous fashion ; hut young 
 Clitipho, to the great annoyance of his father, who 
 understands what is right and proper under such cir- 
 cumstances, insists upon thrusting his company upon 
 them on all occasions. He naturally grudges his 
 friend all the tete-a-tetes with his own beloved Bacchis, 
 which his good-natured father is so anxious to secure 
 for them. Clinia does not seem to mind these inter- 
 ruptions on the part of his friend ; but Chremes is 
 indignant at his son's want of ordinary tact and good 
 manners, especially as he has detected little acts of 
 glaring flirtation between him and Bacchis, which 
 seem to imply gross disloyalty to his friend. He 
 taxes him with this in an amusing scene, in the 
 presence of Syrus, who is much alarmed lest his young 
 master's want of self-command should lead to the detec- 
 tion of the imposture ; for he, too, has seen him very 
 distinctly toying with Bacchis's hand. Both of them 
 beg him to go and leave the young couple to themselves. 
 
 Clittpho (helplessly). Where shall I go, sir ? 
 
 Syrus. Go ? why, bless my life, 
 
 Go anywhere only leave them go for a walk. 
 
 Clit. Where shall I walk to ? 
 
 Syr. Zounds ! why, anywhere 
 
 There's plenty of walks go this way that way any 
 way. 
 
 Chremes. The man's quite right, sir, go. 
 
 Clit. (moving off gloomily). Well, then I'm going. 
 (Shaking hisjist at Syrus as lie goes.)
 
 THE SELF-TORMENTOR. 123 
 
 Devil take you, rascal, for your interference ! 
 Syr. (aside to him}. You keep your hands to yourself, 
 young man, hereafter. ( Watching him as he goes 
 off urith apparent interest, and turning to Chremes.) 
 Indeed, sir, he's too bad. What will he come to ? 
 You had best give him very serious warning, 
 And keep him tight in hand 
 
 Chr. I will, I will. 
 
 Syr. Before it is too late. 
 Chr. I will, I say. 
 
 Syr. I hope you will, sir. As for my advice, 
 (Shrugging his shoulders.} He minds it less and less, I 
 grieve to say. 
 
 Chremes's wife has meanwhile made the discovery, 
 by the common test of a family ring, that the girl 
 Antiphila is a long-lost daughter whom she had sent 
 away immediately after her birth, in obedience to her 
 husband's threats that, in case one should be born 
 to him, he would never bring up such a troublesome 
 addition to his family. This, of course, makes every- 
 thing clear for Clinia's marriage with her ; and that 
 young gentleman is accordingly made happy, by the 
 consent of all parties. But not before the busy Chremes 
 has been hoisted with. his own petard, by Syrus's 
 contrivance. Acting very much upon the principle 
 recommended to him by his master himself, the cunning 
 rascal has extracted from him fifty pounds as an im- 
 aginary ransom for his own daughter Antiphila, whom 
 he declares to have been purchased in her infancy by 
 Bacchis : and the gold is actually sent to that lady by 
 the hands of his own son. There is some complication 
 in this part of the plot, fairly amusing as worked out
 
 124 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 in detail in the original, but not worth analysis. It 
 is very long before Chremes can be brought to believe 
 that it is his own son, and not Clinia, who is the real 
 lover of the dashing young lady whom he has been 
 entertaining out of complaisance, as he considered, 
 to his son's friend. Menedemus, no longer a " self- 
 tormentor," is equally gratified to find that, after all, 
 he is to have such a modest and highly respectable 
 daughter-in-law, and amused at the collapse of his 
 scheming friend. 
 
 MENEDEMUS (solus, laughing to himself]. 
 
 I don't profess myself to be a genius 
 I'm not so sharp as some folk that I know : 
 But this same Chremes this my monitor, 
 My would-be guide, philosopher, and friend, 
 He beats me hollow. Blockhead, donkey, dolt, 
 Fool, leaden-brains, and all those pretty names 
 They might suit me ; to him they don't apply : 
 His monstrous folly wants a name to itself. 
 
 Poor Chremes grows very crestfallen in the closing 
 scenes, when he looks forward to the ruin which his 
 son's extravagant tastes, with the fair Bacchis's assist- 
 ance, will bring upon him. ^lenedemus retorts upon 
 him his own advice, not to be too hard upon his 
 son young men Avill be young men: but Chremes 
 fails to take the same philosophical view of his own 
 case as he had done of his friend's. He vows at first 
 that he will disinherit his young prodigal, and settle 
 all his property upon his new-found daughter and her 
 husband ; but he is persuaded at last to alter this 
 determination.
 
 THE ETHIOPIAN SLAVE. , 125 
 
 Clitipho promises on his part to give up Bacchis 
 altogether, and take to wife at once a neighbour's 
 daughter, a most unobjectionable young lady upon 
 whom, with the facile affections of such young gentle- 
 men, he seems to have had an eye already. 
 
 IV. THE ETHIOPIAN SLAVE. 
 
 The comedy of 'The Ethiopian Slave,' which is 
 partly taken, as the author tells us in his prologue, 
 from Menander, introduces to us once more, under 
 another name, our old friend Pyrgopolinices of Plau- 
 tus. Captain Thraso, who has fought or who says he 
 has fought under Seleucus in the East, and his toady 
 Gnatho, are the most amusing characters in the play. 
 The plot is more simple and well-defined than is usual 
 in these comedies ; and though it must be modified 
 a little to suit either these pages or an English stage, 
 it will not suffer much from such treatment. This 
 Thraso, a rich braggart, who takes Gnatho about with 
 him everywhere to act as a kind of echo to his senti- 
 ments and to flatter his vanity, is one of the suitors 
 of a lady named Thais, who prefers a young gentle- 
 man named Phaedria, though she does not care to 
 discard altogether her rich lover. Poor Phsedria is in 
 despair, when the play opens, at having been refused 
 admittance when he called on the lady the day before, 
 because, as he understood, " the Captain " was with 
 her. His slave Parmeno, who is much more of a 
 philosopher than his master, gives him the very sensi- 
 ble advice to keep away altogether for a little while, 
 when, if Thais really cares for him, she will soon call
 
 126 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 him back. It is advice which he is not very willing to 
 follow, until Thais herself entreats him to do some- 
 thing of the same kind. She has particular reasons 
 at this moment for not wishing to offend the Captain. 
 He has just made her a very handsome present, a 
 slave-girl of exceeding beauty. But this is not her 
 value in her new owner's eyes. Thais discovers that 
 this poor girl, whom the Captain has bought in Caria, 
 and brought home with him, was a child whom her 
 mother had brought up, and who had been to herself 
 as a younger sister. The story was, however, that she 
 had been originally stolen by pirates from the coast of 
 Attica. Upon her mother's recent death, the brother 
 of Thais, intent only upon gain, 'had sold this girl 
 well-educated and very beautiful once more into 
 slavery ; and so she had come into the hands of Thraso. 
 Thais who, though a heartless flirt of the worst de- 
 scription, still has her good points is anxious to rescue 
 her old companion, and, if possible, to restore her to 
 her friends, to whom she hopes she has already found 
 some clue. She fears that if her military lover believes 
 her to prefer Phaedria as she assures that young gen- 
 tleman she really does he will break his promise, 
 and not give her this girl. Phsedria, who has him- 
 self just sent her a present of a pair of Ethiopian 
 slaves, consents, under many protests : he will not call 
 again " for two whole days : " he -will go into the 
 country : but Parmeno tells him that he fully believes 
 he " will walk back to town in his sleep." The im- 
 passioned words in which the lover takes his unwilling 
 leave, begging Thais not to forget him when in the 
 company of his rival, have always been greatly admired,
 
 THE ETHIOPIAN SLAVE. , 127 
 
 and often, consciously or unconsciously, imitated. 
 Addison, in the ' Spectator,' calls them " inimitably 
 beautiful : " 
 
 Be, in his presence, as though absent still ; 
 Still love me day and night ; still long for me ; 
 Dream of me, miss me, think of me alone ; 
 Hope for me, dote on me, be wholly mine, 
 My very heart and life, as I am thine. 
 
 Act i. sc. 2. 
 
 Gnatho is deputed by his magnificent friend to con- 
 duct the young slave girl to Thais's house. On the way 
 he is met by Parmeno : and even that unimpressible old 
 servitor is struck by the girl's wondrous beauty. The 
 scene between the two officials of the rival powers is 
 very good. 
 
 Gnat/io (to himself as Parmeno comes up). I'll have a 
 
 little sport, now, with this knave. 
 (Aloud, making a low 3>ow.) My excellent Parmeno, is it 
 
 you? 
 
 Your most obedient. Hoio d'ye find yourself 1 
 Parmeno (coolly). I hadn't lost myself. 
 Gna. You never do.* 
 
 Nothing unpleasant in this quarter eh ? 
 
 (Pointing over his shoulder to Thais's house.) 
 Par. There's you. 
 Gna. That I can fancy. Nothing else ? 
 
 * This is not the literal joke in the original, but may serve 
 to express it. Colman quotes an illustration of the same kind of 
 humour from ' The Merry Wives of Windsor : ' 
 
 " Falstaff. My honest lads, I'll tell you what I am alout. 
 Pistol. Two yards, or more. "
 
 128 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 Par. What makes you ask 1 
 
 Gna. You look so glum. 
 
 Par. (sulkily). Not I. 
 
 Gna. Don't I can't bear to see it. But this girl, 
 (Whispering) The Captain's present, what d'ye think 
 of her? 
 
 Par. (affecting to eye her carelessly). Oh ! she's not bad. 
 
 Gna. (aside). I've hit my friend on the raw. 
 
 Par. (overhearing him). Oh no, you haven't ! 
 
 Gna. But you must surely think 
 
 That Thais will be pleased with our new offering ? 
 
 Par. You've cut us out, you mean ? Well wait a while ; 
 Your turn to-day it may be ours to-morrow. 
 
 Gna. For some six months, I promise you, Parmeno, 
 You shall have rest no running to and fro 
 With notes and messages ; no sitting up 
 Till late at night to wait for your young master ; 
 Isn't that a comfort ? Don't you feel obliged to me ? 
 
 Par. Oh, vastly ! 
 
 Gna. Well I like to oblige my friends. 
 
 Par. Quite right. 
 
 Gna. But I detain you perhaps you've business 1 
 
 Par. Oh, not at all ! 
 
 Gna. Be so good then, if you please, 
 
 To introduce me here you know the party. 
 
 Par. Oh ! such fine presents introduce themselves 
 They're your credentials. 
 
 Gna. (as the door opens). Could I take a message ? 
 
 [Parmeno makes no reply, and Gnatho goes in with 
 the slave-girl. 
 
 Par. (shaking his fist after him). 
 Let me but see two days go by, my friend 
 But two short days, I say and this same door, 
 That opens now to your lightest finger-tap, 
 You may kick at all day, till you kick your legs off. 
 
 Act ii. sc. 2.
 
 THE ETHIOPIAN SLAVE. 129 
 
 As he goes homewards, Parmeno meets the younger 
 son of his master's family, Chserea, an officer in the 
 City Guard. He is in a great state of excitement, 
 raving to himself about some young beauty whom he 
 had seen in the street on his way from guard, and fol- 
 lowed for some time, but has suddenly lost sight of. 
 The family servant is in despair, for he knows the tem- 
 perament of the young soldier. Phaedria, the elder 
 brother, is inflammable enough in such matters ; but his 
 is mere milk-and-water passion compared with Chserea's. 
 It is love at first sight, in his case, with a vengeance. 
 He confides his whole story a very short one to Par- 
 meno ; reminds him of all the tricks they played 
 together when he was a boy; how he used to rob the 
 housekeeper's room to bring his friend in the servants' 
 hall good things for supper : and how Parmeho had 
 promised what he would do for him when he grew up to 
 be a man. Parmeno, with the usual inclination of his 
 class to oblige his young master in such matters, asks 
 him some questions about this interesting stranger: and 
 from Chserea's description of her companions Gnatho, 
 and a maid-servant and the fact of her having disap- 
 peared somewhere in this little by-street, he comes to 
 the conclusion that she can be no other than the beauti- 
 ful slave-girl whom he has just seen pass into the house 
 of Thais. He begs Cheerea to discontinue his pursuit : 
 the object is unworthy of him. But when the young 
 officer learns that Parmeno knows who she is, and 
 where she is to be found, he becomes still more eager 
 in his quest. At last Parmeno suggests a possible 
 mode of introduction if Chserea likes to black his 
 face, and change clothes with the Ethiopian whom his 
 A. c. vol. xvi. i
 
 130 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 brother is going to send as a present to Thais, he, 
 Parmeno, who has instructions to convey the pair to 
 her house on this very day, will venture to introduce 
 Chaerea in this disguise. He makes the proposal, as he 
 declares, more in jest than earnest: but the young 
 man, as may be supposed, catches at it eagerly, and in- 
 sists upon it being carried at once into execution. 
 
 The next act of the play opens with a highly 
 amusing scene between the Captain and his obsequious 
 friend. Thraso wishes to know how the lady has. 
 received his present. 
 
 Thraso. I say was Thais very much obliged ? 
 
 Gnatho. Immensely. 
 
 Thra. She was really pleased, you think ? 
 
 Gna. Not with the gift so much as that you gave it ; 
 'Tis that she's proud of. 
 
 Thra. I've a happy way 
 
 I don't know how but everything I do 
 Is well received. 
 
 Gna. I've noticed it myself. 
 
 Thra. Yes. Even the King himself, after an action, 
 Would always thank me in person. 'Twas a thing 
 He never did to others. 
 
 Gna. Well, with gifts like yours, 
 
 A man gets double credit, while poor souls 
 Like us work hard, with nobody to thank us. 
 
 Thra. Egad, you have it ! 
 
 Gra. Ah! no doubt his Majesty 
 
 Had his eye on you, always. 
 
 Thra. Well, he had. 
 
 I may tell you I was in all his secrets 
 Had the whole army under me, in fact. 
 
 Gna. (with deep interest). No really !
 
 THE ETHIOPIAN SLAVE. 131 
 
 Thra. Yes. And then, when he was tired 
 
 Of seeing people, or grew sick of business, 
 And wanted to unbend him, as it were, 
 You understand ? 
 
 Gra. I know something, you mean, 
 
 In what we call the free-and-easy line ? 
 
 Thra. Just so he'd ask me to a quiet dinner. 
 
 Gna. Indeed! his Majesty showed fine discernment. 
 
 Thra. That's just the man he is one in a thousand 
 There are few like him. 
 
 Gna. (aside). Very few, I fancy, 
 If he could stand your company.* 
 
 Thraso goes on to relate to his friend some of the 
 excellent jokes which he made during the time he en- 
 joyed this intimacy with royalty ; jokes at which the 
 parasite (who was paid for it in good dinners) laughs 
 more perhaps than the reader would. Here is a speci- 
 men. 
 
 Did I ever tell you 
 How I touched up the Rhodian once at dinner ? 
 
 Giut. Never ! pray tell me (aside) for the hundredth 
 
 time. 
 TJrra. This youth was dining with us ; as it chanced, 
 
 * A fragment preserved by Athenseus from a lost comedy 
 of Menander ' The Flatterer' from which this play is partly 
 taken, has the following passage. [Bias is the original of 
 Thraso, and Strouthias is his "flatterer."] 
 
 liiax. I have drunk off, in Cappadocia, Strouthias, 
 A golden goblet that held full ten quarts 
 And three times filled. 
 
 Stroutkias. Why, sir, you nrust have drunk 
 
 More than the great King Alexander could ! 
 
 Bins. Well perhaps not less by Pallas, no ! 
 
 &tr. Prodigious !
 
 132 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 There was a lady there, a friend of mine ; 
 
 He made some joke about it ; "What," said I 
 
 "What, you young puppy, have you learnt to bark?" 
 
 Gna. (laughing). Ha, ha, ho, ho ! dear ! 
 
 Thra. You seem amused. 
 
 Gna. (roaring still louder). Oh! good indeed! delicious J 
 
 excellent ! 
 
 Nothing can beat it ! Tell me now, though, really 
 Was that your own ? I thought it had been older 'I 
 
 Thra. (somewliat disconcerted). What? had you heard 
 it? 
 
 Gna. Often ; why, it's reckoned 
 
 The best thing out. 
 
 Thra. (complacently). It's mine. 
 
 Act iii. sc. 1. 
 
 The new Ethiopian slave, Phaedria's gift, is intro- 
 duced by Parmeno, and even Thraso, who is present, is 
 obliged to confess that, black man as he is, he is a very 
 good-looking young fellow. Parmeno assures them 
 that his person is his least recommendation ; let them 
 test his accomplishments in literature, in music, in 
 fencing they will find them such as will make him a 
 most valuable addition to a lady's retinue.* And Par- 
 meno hopes that Thais will show a little kindness to 
 his young master in return for bis well-chosen present ; 
 which, however, in the Captain's presence, she will by 
 no means profess herself inclined to do. 
 
 But this new servitor soon causes a terrible scandal in 
 
 * " Viola. I'll serve this duke ; 
 Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him : 
 It may be wortli thy pains ; for I can sing, 
 And speak to him in many sorts of music." 
 ^ Twelfth Night, act i. sc. 2.
 
 THE ETHIOPIAN. SLAVE. 133 
 
 the household. Before morning it is discovered that 
 the fair slave whom Thraso had so recently presented 
 to Thais has eloped with the Ethiopian. The virtuous 
 indignation of every waiting-gentlewoman in the estab- 
 lishment is roused by such an outrageous breach of all 
 the proprieties, and they rush on the stage with 
 voluble outcries " Eloped ! and with a black man ! " 
 A friend of Chserea's has been considerably astonished 
 at meeting him hurrying along the street in a strange 
 costume and with his face blacked; but the young 
 man makes him his confidant, and obtains from him 
 a change of clothes. Phsedria, who, as his slave 
 Parmeno had foretold, has found it impossible to re- 
 main even two days in the country away from, the 
 object of his affections, and who has returned to the 
 city and is. lingering about Thais's door,- hears the 
 story, and goes off to his own house to see if anything 
 has been heard there of the fugitives. He finds the 
 real Ethiopian hidden there in Chasrea's clothes, and 
 hauls him off, under a shower of blows, to be cross- 
 examined by Thais and her domestics. But they all 
 agree that this is not at all like their Ethiopian, who 
 was a much better-looking fellow : and Phsedria extracts 
 at last from the terrified man that this is some trick, 
 which promises to have serious consequences, of his 
 madcap brother's. 
 
 The Captain meanwhile has quarrelled with Thais, 
 believing that after all she prefers PhaBdria to himself ; 
 and not altogether satisfied with the private interviews 
 which she has lately been holding with a young gentle- 
 man from the country a somewhat rustic sort of per- 
 sonage, but whom Thais seems for some reason to treat
 
 134 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 with very marked attention. As niggardly as he is 
 jealous, Thraso conies to demand back again from his 
 lady-love the expensive present he has made to her, 
 this young slave, whom it is not agreeable or convenient, 
 for more reasons than one, for Thais to give up. She 
 flatly refuses ; and Thraso determines to take her from 
 the house by force. The " young man from the country," 
 who is at this moment paying a visit to Thais, is really 
 the brother of this girl, who has been stolen in her in- 
 fancy; and Thais now calls upon him to stand by her 
 in defence of his sister. He would much prefer to go 
 and fetch the police ; but there is little time for that, 
 for Thraso is seen approaching with a party of followers, 
 and Thais, who with all her faults has plenty of spirit, 
 barricades her door and defies him. 
 
 The scene must have been sufficiently effective, 
 especially if artistically arranged, upon so wide a stage, 
 when the gallant Captain leads his forces to the attack. 
 
 Enter THKASO, with his sword drawn, at the head of a 
 motley retinue of hangers-on and household slaves. 
 
 Thra. You, Donax, with the crow-bar, lead the centre ; 
 Simalio, you command on the left wing ; 
 Syriscus, you the right. Bring up the reserve ! 
 Where's our lieutenant, Sanga, and his rascals ? 
 They can steal anything from a loaf to a woman. 
 
 Sanga. Here, Captain, here am I ! 
 
 Thra. Why, zounds ! you dolt, 
 
 Have you come out to battle with a dish-clout ? 
 
 San. Brave sir, I knew the mettle of my Captain 
 I knew his gallant men ; this fight, quoth I, 
 May not be without blood 'I'll stanch the wounds. 
 
 Thra. (looking round doubtfully on his troops). 
 Where are the rest of ye ?
 
 THE ETHIOPIAN SLAVE. . 135 
 
 San. Rest ? we're all here 
 
 We've only left the scullion to keep house. 
 
 Thra. (to Gnatho}. Form them in line ; my post is in 
 
 the rear ; 
 Thence will I give command, and rule the fight. 
 
 Gna. (half-aside to the others}. Most admirable tactics ! 
 
 we to the front ; 
 He takes the rear-guard to secure retreat. 
 
 Thra. It was the plan great Pyrrhus always practised. 
 
 Act iv. sc. 7. 
 
 Thais soon discovers, as she says, that the champion 
 whom she has called in as her protector has more need of 
 a protector himself for he is a fair match for Thraso in 
 cowardice. However, he plucks up spirit enough to 
 threaten that gallant officer, from the safe vantage of 
 an upper window, with all the terrors of Athenian 
 law, if he ventures to lay a hand upon his sister Pam- 
 phila a free-born woman of Athens, as he openly 
 asserts her to be'; and since Thraso, somewhat daunted 
 by this double peril, confines his hostile operations to 
 a battle of words, the lady and her party very naturally 
 get the best of it. By the advice of Gnatho who 
 has also more appetite for dinners than for fighting 
 the Captain determines to await the surrender of his 
 enemy, which Gnatho assures him will follow next day, 
 and withdraws his army ; reminding his lieutenant, 
 the cook, that for him, as for all good soldiers, as there 
 is a time to fight, so also 
 
 " There is a time to think of hearth and home ; " 
 a sentiment which Sanga fully reciprocates 
 
 " My heart has been in the stew-pan long ago ; "
 
 136 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 and which, appealing to their business and their "bosoms, 
 the whole body cheer vociferously as they move off. 
 
 There is not much worth notice in the comedy after 
 this scene. If this girl Pamphila, whom Chserea 
 has carried off, is really an Athenian citizen, as she 
 is soon proved to be, there is no difficulty as to his 
 marrying her, and he does so with his father's full 
 consent. Indeed we are allowed to suppose that the 
 quiet old gentleman, as well as the trusty Parmeno, 
 must have been glad to see such a scapegrace respect- 
 ably settled in any way. Phaedria and the Captain are 
 left rivals for the good graces of Thais as before, but 
 Gnatho contrives to patch up the quarrel between them 
 for the present ; doing this good office, as he assures 
 them, from the most unimpeachable motives his own 
 personal interest, inasmuch as he hopes to get many a 
 dinner from both of them. 
 
 This is said to have been the most popular of all 
 the author's productions ; he received for it from the 
 /Ediles (who had to provide the dramatic entertain- 
 ments for the people) something like sixty pounds. 
 Not a large sum, but more, it is said, than had been 
 paid for any comedy before. It must be remembered 
 that the ancient theatres were open only at festivals, 
 for a few days at a time, and therefore no piece could 
 have a long " run," as on the modern stage.* 
 
 * Upon this comedy were founded ' Le Muet ' of Brueys, 
 ' L'Eunuque ' of Fontaine, and Sir Charles Sedley's ' Bellamira.' 
 It has furnished Shakspeare with a quotation which he puts into 
 the mouth of Tranio, in the 'Taming of the Shrew,' act i. sc. 1, 
 " Kedime te captum quam queas minimo." Johnson, however, 
 thinks that he went no farther for it than Lilly's Grammar.
 
 PHORMIO. 137 
 
 V. PHORMIO. 
 
 The play called 'Phormio' is taken also from a 
 Greek original, not, however, by Menander, but by 
 Apollodorus, a prolific writer of the same school. 
 Here the principal character is the parasite Phormio ; 
 a fellow with an enormous appetite, consummate im- 
 pudence, a keen eye to his own interest, and a not 
 over -scrupulous conscience, but by no means a bad 
 heart. He and the slave Geta have between them 
 all the brains which carry on the plot ; for these gilded 
 youth of Athens, who are the lovers in these comedies, 
 are not, it will be observed, more largely furnished in 
 this particular than their modern successors, and the 
 fathers are commonly the easy prey of the adroit and 
 unscrupulous slave who from pure love of mischief, 
 it would seem, and often at the risk of his skin as- 
 sists the young heir in his attack upon the paternal 
 purse. The respectable victims in this play are two 
 brothers Chremes and Demipho who have both 
 gone abroad on business, and left their sons under the 
 guardianship of Geta, the confidential slave of the 
 younger brother. Their confidence is not very well 
 repaid. The youths give the old man so much trouble, 
 that he soon grows tired of asserting an authority 
 which in his position he has no means of enforcing ; 
 in fact, as he complains in the opening scene, his wards 
 lay the whip about his back whenever he interferes. 
 He finds it more to his interest to humour them in 
 everything to the top of their bent. And it has 
 come to this ; that Phsedria, the son of Chremes, has 
 taken a fancy to a little music-girl whom he insists on
 
 138 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 ransoming from her rascally master, who of course 
 raises his price to an exorbitant figure as soon as he 
 finds out the young gentleman's infatuation. Antipho, 
 his cousin, had for a long time given promise of great 
 steadiness : but these still waters run deep, and he 
 plunges all at once into a romantic passion for a beauti- 
 ful Cinderella, whom he discovers with bare feet and 
 in a shabby dress, mourning over a dead mother who 
 has left her a portionless orphan. And, finding that 
 she is of free birth, he actually marries her. His 
 acquaintance Phormio whose friendship is at any 
 young man's service who can give a good dinner has 
 suggested to him a plan by which he may in some 
 degree escape his father's anger at this very imprudent 
 match. There is a law at Athens which, like the old 
 Levitical law, obliges the next of kin who is available 
 to marry an orphan of the 'family. Phormio under- 
 takes to appear before the proper court on behalf of 
 the girl, and to bring evidence that Antipho is her 
 nearest unmarried male relative : and, since the young 
 lover of course makes no attempt to disprove it, the 
 court gives judgment that he is to make her his wife, 
 which he does forthwith. 
 
 All this has taken place before the action of the 
 piece begins. And now a letter has arrived from 
 Demipho to say that he is coming home, and both the 
 son and Geta are in great alarm as to how he wpl take. 
 the news which awaits him. Antipho, like others who 
 have married in haste, is beginning to feel something 
 very like repentance at leisure ; he feels, he says, in 
 the position of the man in the proverb who has " got 
 a wolf by the ears he can neither hold her nor let
 
 PHORMIO. 139 
 
 her go." Geta is conscious that he has no very satis- 
 factory account to render of his stewardship, and has 
 prophetic visions of the stocks and the mill-prison. 
 The son has made up his mind, by Geta's advice, to 
 meet his father with something very much like bluster ; 
 but the moment the old gentleman makes his actual 
 appearance, his courage evaporates, and he makes off, 
 leaving his cousin Phsedria, with Geta's assistance, to 
 make such apologies on his behalf as they can. 
 
 The father's indignation, though it does not spare 
 either Geta or Antipho, is chiefly directed against the 
 parasite Phormio, this disreputable Mentor of youth, 
 who has trumped up such an imposture. But Phormio 
 is equal to the occasion ; indeed, his nature is rather 
 to rejoice in these kind of encounters with his angry 
 dupes, in which he feels confident his natural audacity 
 and shrewdness will carry him through. "It is a 
 tough morsel," he says drawing his metaphor from 
 his familiar sphere of the dinner-table "but I'll 
 make a shift to bolt it." Geta, who regards him with 
 a kind of respectful envy, as a knave of higher mark 
 than himself, wonders how, considering all the more 
 than doubtful transactions he has been engaged in, he 
 has hitherto escaped the meshes of the law. 
 
 Phormio. Because, my friend, no fowler spreads his net 
 For hawk or kite, or such-like birds of prey ; 
 'Tis for the innocent flock, who do no harm ; 
 They are fat morsels, full of juice and flavour, 
 Well worth the catching. Men who've aught to lose, 
 Such are in danger from the law ; for me 
 They know I've nothing. " Nay, but then," you'll say, 
 " They'll clap you up in jail." Oh ! will they ? Ah !
 
 140 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 (Laughing and patting himself.} They'd have to keep me 
 
 and they know my appetite.* 
 Xo they're too wise, and not so self-denying, 
 As to return me so much good for evil. 
 
 The father has taken the precaution to provide him- 
 self with no less than three lawyers to back him in his 
 interview with Phormio. It must be remembered that 
 all interviews, even of the most private character, 
 according to the conventionalities of the classic stage, 
 take place in the public street. Should this seem to 
 shock our notions of the fitness of things, we have only 
 to remember the absurd anomalies of our own attempts 
 at realistic scenery, where the romantic forest which 
 forms the " set " at the back has a boarded floor and a 
 row of footlights in the front. Phormio and Geta see 
 their adversaries coming round the corner of the street, 
 and at once engage in a spirited controversy between 
 themselves, purposely intended for the other party to 
 overhear. Phormio professes to be shocked at the want 
 of common honesty on the part of his friend's father. 
 What ! will he really repudiate the connection 1 disown 
 his excellent relative Stilpho (which is the name of the 
 pretty Phanium's father), merely because he died poor 1 
 Well ! what will not avarice lead to ! Geta, like a 
 faithful servant, defends the character of his absent 
 master : and the pair appear to be coming to actual 
 blows on the question, when Demipho steps forward 
 and interrupts them. Phormio meets the old gentle- 
 
 * The creditor, both at Athens and at Rome, though he had 
 the right to imprison a debtor who failed to pay, was bound to 
 maintain him while in confinement.
 
 PHORMIO. 141 
 
 man's remonstrances with perfect coolness. It is no 
 use to tell him, that a man does not remember his first 
 cousin ; Demipho has evidently a convenient memory. 
 If poor old Stilpho had left a large fortune behind 
 him, he would have routed out the whole family pedi- 
 gree. If he is not satisfied with the award of the 
 court, he can appeal, and have the cause tried over 
 again. But law, he must remember, is an expensive 
 luxury; his own advice would be, that Demipho 
 should try to make himself comfortable with his new 
 daughter-in-law who is really a very nice young per- 
 son. If he turns her out of his house, he, Phormio, 
 as her father's friend, will feel it to be his duty to 
 bring an action against him. And so he wishes him a 
 very good-morning. 
 
 When Demipho turns to his legal friends for advice, 
 he scarcely finds wisdom in the multitude of coun- 
 sellors. For these counsellors by no means agree. The 
 first delivers it as his opinion that what the son did in 
 such a matter, in the absence of the head of the family, 
 is void in law. The second holds that the judgment of 
 the court cannot now be overruled, and that it would 
 not be for Demipho's credit to attempt it. The third, 
 the oldest, and as cautious as the most doubting of 
 English Lord Chancellors, wishes to take time to con- 
 sider. So the client dismisses them, each with their 
 fee, declaring that their valuable advice has left him 
 more bewildered than ever.* 
 
 * This scene, with the three lawyers seems to have given 
 Moliere the hint for several scenes in which he has introduced 
 legal consultations, e.g., in ' Le Mariage ForceV sc. ix., 
 where he makes Sganarelle say, " L'on est aussi savant a la
 
 142 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 Young Phaedria adds to Geta's troubles by coming 
 to beg him to extract from his uncle Demipho, by some 
 contrivance or other, the sum needful for the purchase 
 of his dear music-girl from her master only a poor hun- 
 dred guineas. " She's a very dear bargain," remarks 
 the old servitor. Phsedria insists, of course, that she is 
 cheap at any price ; and Geta promises to do his best 
 to get the money. 
 
 The return of Phsedria's father Chremes, the elder 
 of the two brothers from the island of Lemnos, 
 threatens to complicate matters : but it turns out that 
 he brings with him the key to at least the great diffi- 
 culty. He has been to the island on some private 
 business, the nature of which is known to his brother 
 Demipho, but which is kept a strict secret from his 
 wife Nausistrata, of whom he stands in considerable 
 awe. The secret is partly disclosed in the scene be- 
 tween the two brothers on his return. Chremes had 
 contracted, in his younger and more imprudent days, 
 while visiting Lemnos, a private marriage (under 
 another name) with a person in that island, the issue 
 of which was a daughter. He had broken off this 
 connection for some years ; but the object of this last 
 voyage had been to make some inqiiiries about this 
 duplicate family. He has formed a plan, with his 
 brother's approval, to marry this unacknowledged 
 daughter, now grown up to womanhood, to her cousin 
 Antipho ; and is therefore as anxious as his brother 
 to get this present unfortunate marriagej which they 
 both look upon as contracted under false pretences, 
 
 fin qu'au commencement ; " and in ' M. de Pourceaugnac, 
 act ii. sc. 13, where the "Deux Avocats " chant their opinions.
 
 PHORMIO. 143 
 
 annulled if possible. So when Phormio comes and 
 offers to take the young lady off everybody's hands 
 and marry her himself, if Demipho will give her a 
 dowry of a hundred guineas, Chremes persuades his 
 brother to close with the offer, and even advances 
 great part of the sum : Avhich Phormio hands over 
 to his young friend Phaedria for the ransom of his 
 mistress. 
 
 Chremes has learned that, while he was on his voyage 
 to Lemnos, his deserted wife has meanwhile come over 
 to Athens in search of him, and brought the daughter 
 with her. He is soon further enlightened upon this 
 subject. As he is crossing the street from his own 
 house to his brother's, he sees a woman coming from it. 
 It is Sophrona, the old nurse of this foreign girl whom 
 his nephew has married, and who is now stowed away 
 somewhere in her unwilling father-in-law's house. The 
 nurse has been there to try to discover what turn 
 affairs are likely to take, now that the old gentleman 
 has come home. 
 
 Chremes (looking at her stealthily}. Eh ! bless me ! 
 
 Yes or do my eyes deceive me 1 
 Yes this is certainly my daughter's nurse ! 
 
 Sophrona (to herself, not seeing Chremes). And then, 
 
 to think the father can't be found ! 
 Chr. What shall I do ? Shall I speak first, or wait 
 Till I hear more ? 
 
 Soph. Oh ! if we could but find him, 
 
 All might go well ! 
 
 Chr. (coming forward). Tis she, no doubt ; I'll 
 
 speak. 
 
 Soph, (hearing his voice). Who's that ? I heard a voice 
 there !
 
 144 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 Chr. Sophrona ! 
 
 Soph. He knows my name ! 
 
 Chr. Look at me, Sophrona. 
 
 Soph, (looking close at him). Oh ! gracious heavens ! 
 "What ! are you Stilpho ? 
 
 Chr. (making signs to her to be silent). No. 
 
 Soph. Can you deny it ? 
 
 Chr. Hush-sh ! come further off ! 
 
 A little further from the door, good Sophrona 
 And never call me by that name again. ! 
 
 Soph. Why, by that name we always knew you ! 
 
 Chr. (pointing to the door opposite). Sh ! 
 
 Soph. What makes you afraid of that door ? 
 
 Chr. (coming near her, in a half-whisper). Why, because 
 It's got my wife inside an awful woman ! 
 That's why I took another name, you see. 
 For fear lest you might blab my real one, 
 And she (pointing to the door) should hear it. 
 
 Soph. 'Twas no wonder, then, 
 
 We could hear nothing of you here in Athens. 
 
 Act v. sc. 1. 
 
 He learns from the old nurse that his Lemnian wife 
 is dead, and that his daughter is just married to his 
 nephew Antipho. In the bewilderment of the moment 
 he fails to identify the fair subject of the lawsuit with 
 Ms own daughter : and perhaps only those who have 
 seen this play acted by "Westminster scholars can 
 appreciate the comic earnestness with which the uncle, 
 with his own double relations strong in his mind, and 
 fancying that his young nephew is in the same predica- 
 ment, asks of Sophrona 
 
 " What has he two wives ? " 
 When he finds out that the two wives are one and the
 
 'PHORMIO. 145 
 
 same, and that his Lemnian daughter is really married, 
 by a happy accident, to the very husband he had designed 
 for her, he blesses the gods for his good fortune, and it 
 is plain that all Antipho's difficulties are over. 
 
 But Chremes, unluckily, joins his brother in an 
 attempt to recover from Phormio the gold pieces which 
 he has got from them under pretence of dowry. They 
 don't want him to marry Phanium now, of course ; and 
 they see no reason for his not returning the money. 
 But Phormio, with his usual cleverness, has made 
 himself master of the whole story. He declares his 
 willingness to complete at once his part of the bargain, 
 and protests, with considerable show of justice, that he 
 will not be cheated out of wife and dowry too. He 
 threatens Chremes that unless he holds his tongue 
 about the money, he will tell his wife Nausistrata all 
 about that little establishment at Lemnos. This impu- 
 dence is more than Demipho can stand, and he calls his 
 slaves to carry off the parasite to jail. The noise he 
 makes brings in Nausistrata, and though both the 
 brothers try to stop his mouth, he carries his threat 
 into execution. Nausistrata, of course, is in a con- 
 siderable fury at first : but as her rival is dead, and this 
 unnecessary daughter safely disposed of, she is satisfied 
 with the rod which Phormio has put into her hands to 
 be wielded over her husband in any future connubial 
 disagreement ; and, partly out of gratitude for this 
 acquisition of power, and partly to annoy her husband, 
 invites him at once to supper. The parasite foresees 
 that there will always be a knife and fork ready for 
 him at her table as well as at Phanium's. 
 
 A. c. vol. xvi. K
 
 146 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 VI. THE BROTHERS. 
 
 This comedy, like 'Phormio,' has always been a 
 favourite with the "Westminster actors. It is taken 
 partly from a play of Menander, and partly from one 
 by another Greek dramatist, Diphilus. It was acted 
 lately at "Westminster with great success, and it may 
 be permissible to borrow, as a familiar rendering of the 
 early portion of the story, a few verses from the clever 
 sketch of the " Plot " which was handed round on that 
 occasion for the enlightenment of the less classical 
 among the audience : 
 
 " Two brothers once in Athens dwelt of old, 
 
 Though widely did their dispositions differ ; 
 One loved the country, was a churl and scold, 
 The other bland and gentle as a zephyr. 
 
 Demea, the churl, had once a wife, since dead, 
 And, as it seems, he did not much regret her ; 
 
 Micio, the bland, had not been so miss-led, 
 And never took a wife, for worse or better. 
 
 Now Demea had two sons ; but he did predicate 
 That one was quite enough ; and gave the other 
 
 The elder of the two to rear and educate, 
 In short, to be adopted, by his brother. 
 
 The youngest, Ctesipho, at home was taught, 
 Was duly lectured, disciplined, and scolded ; 
 
 Rose early read walked and, as Demea thought, 
 Into a rural innocent was moulded.
 
 THE BROTHERS. 147 
 
 But Micio loved the city, and, forsooth ! 
 
 Ne'er thought of looking after his adopted ; 
 But if he told the truth, and all the truth, 
 
 Whatever prank was played, he never stopped it." 
 
 Demea has protested from time to time against his 
 brother's very lax system of discipline ; and when he 
 finds that young ^schinus's not very steady course has 
 just culminated in a tremendous and notorious row 
 that he has broken open the house of a slave-dealer, 
 beaten the master, and carried off a young woman 
 he lectures his brother severely on the results of his 
 ill-judged indulgence. 
 
 But Ctesipho, who has been kept in stricter leading- 
 strings by the father, is not quite the pattern youth 
 that the old gentleman thinks him. He is really 
 the person most concerned in the brawl which caused 
 so much scandal; for the girl who has been thus 
 forcibly carried off from her owner is a young music-girl 
 with whom he has fallen in love who claims, however, 
 as usual, to be free-born and entitled to all the rights 
 of citizenship. ^Eschinus, not standing so much in 
 fear of his good-natured guardian as the other does of 
 his father, and having, besides, no great reputation to 
 lose, is content to take upon himself all the blame 
 of the late burglary and abduction ; though Ctesipho 
 has been really the principal in the affair, in which 
 his brother has only aided and abetted out of pure 
 fraternal affection. There is the usual intriguing 
 slave, Syrus, who is of course in the secret ; and who 
 persuades the father that Ctesipho is gone down 
 to the country grange, whither Demea follows him, 
 quite persuaded that he shall find his exemplary son
 
 148 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 deep in farming operations. He is, in fact, at this mo- 
 ment taking care of his prize in ^Eschinus's apartments 
 in his uncle's house, whither she has been conducted. 
 
 Syrus, delighted to have such an opportunity of 
 exercising his wit upon Demea, whose principles of 
 education he altogether dislikes, compliments him 
 highly upon his son Ctesipho's irreproachable conduct. 
 He declares that the good youth has been quite shocked 
 at his elder brother's iniquity, and has reproached him 
 with the discredit he was bringing on the family. 
 
 Syrus. .^Eschinus, quoth he, I am ashamed of you 
 You waste not money only, but your life. 
 
 Demea. Heaven bless him ! he'll be worthy of his fore- 
 fathers. 
 
 Syr. I'm sure he will. 
 
 Dem. Syrus, he's had good teaching. 
 
 Syr. Ah ! he had those at home who understood it. 
 
 Dem. I do take pains ; I omit no single item : 
 I train him well ; in fact, I bid him study, 
 As in a mirror, all the characters 
 He sees around him, and draw from them lessons 
 For his own guidance : copy this, I say 
 
 Syr. Ah ! capital ! 
 
 Dem. This, again, avoid 
 
 Syr. Just so. 
 
 Dem. This act, I say, is praiseworthy 
 
 Syr. Quite right. 
 
 Dem. That was a fault 
 
 Syr. I see. 
 
 Dem. And then, besides 
 
 Syr. I beg your pardon I could listen all day 
 But I'm so busy : there's some splendid fish 
 I must not let them spoil : for this, you see, 
 In my vocation, sir, would be a sin,
 
 THE BROTHERS. 149 
 
 Just as, with gentlefolks, neglect of morals : 
 
 Indeed, in my poor sphere, I train my knaves 
 
 Exactly on your worship's principle. Look here, 
 
 I say, that dish 's too salt ; this roast is burned 
 
 That's not washed clean ; that fricassee is good 
 
 Just the right thing be sure the next is like it. 
 
 The best advice that my poor wit affords 
 
 I strive to give (looking gravely at Demea, and copying 
 
 his manner). In short, I bid them study 
 As in a mirror, every dish I make, 
 Thus to draw lessons for their own instruction. 
 'Tis but a humble school, I feel, I train them in ; 
 But we must do our best man can\do more. 
 (Sowing demurely). Can I oblige you, sir, in any way ? 
 Dem. (angrily). Yes mend your manners.* 
 
 Act iii. sc. 3. 
 
 The elder of the young men has in truth perplexities 
 enough of his own to have justified him, if he had been 
 less good-natured, in declining to involve himself in 
 those of his brother. He has an unacknowledged wife, 
 and just at this time the not very welcome addition 
 of a baby. The news of his having been engaged in 
 this brawl, and having carried off the singing-girl to 
 his uncle's house, soon reaches the ears of Sostrata, 
 his very respectable mother-in-law : who comes to the 
 natural conclusion that ^Eschinus is faithless to his 
 poor wife at this interesting crisis, and intends to re- 
 pudiate her altogether, instead of presenting her to 
 his uncle, as he had promised, and obtaining his sanc- 
 tion to their public union. By the advice of Geta, an 
 old and trusty servant, who has remained with them 
 in their reduced fortunes (for there are faithful slaves, 
 
 * Horace had probably this dialogue in his mind, Sat. I. iv. 103.
 
 150 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 in these comedies, as well as the more common type 
 of dishonest ones), they lay the case before an old 
 friend of the family, the excellent Hegio, who under- 
 takes to represent to Micio the great wrong which is 
 being done by his ward to his unfortunate young rel- 
 ative. On his way to Micio's house he falls in with 
 Demea, who is an old acquaintance, and informs him of 
 this new enormity on the part of young ^Eschinus, at 
 which the father can only lift up his hands and eyes, 
 and lament over this still more convincing proof of the 
 sad results of such a training as the youth has had 
 from his uncle. 
 
 But on his way to his country-house he meets a 
 workman who tells him that his own dear Ctesipho 
 has not been seen there since he left. So he goes back 
 to make inquiry about him at his brother's, inquiry 
 which, under present circumstances, is somewhat awk- 
 ward to meet. Yes, he has been there, Syrus tells 
 him, and points to his own bandaged head as evidence. 
 The good youth was so indignant at his brother's con- 
 duct that he took him to task roundly, and ended by 
 beating the music-wench, and breaking poor Syrus's 
 head. "He ought to be ashamed of himself," says 
 the latter whimpering, " a poor old man like me, that 
 nursed him ! " " Not at all," replies the unsympathetic 
 Demea ; " 'tis you ought to be ashamed of yourself 
 you nursed his brother in wickedness ! " He next in- 
 quires of the slave where his brother Micio is ; for he 
 wants to expostulate with him about this unfortunate 
 business. He is not at home, Syrus assures him ; but 
 he will give him full directions where to find him. 
 He must go through the portico behind the shambles,
 
 THE BROTHERS. 151 
 
 down the next street, then to the right, then up the 
 next, then to the left, past the chapel, through the 
 narrow lane where the wild fig-tree stands, straight on 
 to Diana's temple, then to the right ; then he will see 
 a mill, with a joiner's shop opposite, where his brother 
 is gone to order an oak table : and with these very 
 particular directions, which will give the old gentle- 
 man a good long afternoon's walk through the suburbs, 
 he gets rid of him for the present. The two young 
 men are in the house all the time, having a little 
 dinner in celebration of the successful rescue of Ctesi- 
 pho's fair friend ; and Syrus, having got rid, for some 
 hours at least, of this inconvenient visitor, will take 
 the opportunity of this festive occasion to get royally 
 drunk. 
 
 ^Eschinus soon learns the misconstruction which has 
 been put upon his conduct ; for when he next goes to 
 his lodgings to visit his young wife, he is refused ad- 
 mittance. Neither she nor her mother will have any- 
 thing more to do with such a villain. But in the crisis 
 of his distress he is encountered by his good-natured 
 guardian, to whom Hegio has told the whole story, and 
 who has gone at once to see for himself what kind of 
 people these new connections are : and he after playing 
 for a little while with the young man's anxiety throws 
 him at last into ecstasies of joy and gratitude by magna- 
 nimously promising to recognise his wife, and desiring 
 him to bring her home to his house as soon as he thinks 
 proper. 
 
 Demea returns from his long walk in search of his 
 brother, very hot and very angry. He has not been 
 able to find the "joiner's shop," and half suspects
 
 152 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 that Syrus has been fooling him : for he meets Micio 
 just coming out of his own house. He attacks him 
 with the story of this new escapade of his precious 
 ward -^Eschinus ; but his brother listens with a compo- 
 sure which is exceedingly irritating. 
 
 Demea. He's got a wife ! 
 
 Micio. Well better he than I. 
 
 Dem. She's got a baby ! 
 
 Mic. Doing well, I hope ? 
 
 Dem. The jade's an absolute beggar ! 
 
 Mic. So I hear. 
 
 Dem. You mean you'll take her in without a sixpence I 
 
 Mic. I do. 
 
 Dem. What's to become of them ? 
 
 Mic. Of course 
 
 They must come here. 
 
 Dem. (ironically). Why, you seem quite delighted ! 
 
 Mic. No not if I could alter it. Look ye, brother, 
 Man's life is as it were a game of tables ; 
 If that the throw we want will not turn up, 
 Skill must correct such luck as fortune gives us. 
 
 Act iv. sc. 7. 
 
 It is the better side of the Epicurean philosophy, 
 put into few and terse words ; and we shall probably 
 not be wrong in assuming the lines to be pretty 
 closely translated from Menander, who may not impro- 
 bably have had the idea from Epicurus himself. 
 
 Another precious example of his brother's domestic 
 discipline meets Demea as he comes away from this 
 unsatisfactory interview. It is Syrus, so drunk as to 
 have lost even the semblance of respectful demeanour. 
 
 Syr. (staggering up against Demea). Oho ! you're back 
 again, are you, Mr Wisdom ?
 
 THE BROTHERS. . 153 
 
 Dem. (pushing him away). If you were my slave, 
 sirrah 
 
 Syr. You'd be lucky 
 
 You'd have a (hiccup) treasure save you half your income. 
 
 Dem. (shaking his stick at him). I'd make an example 
 of ye ! 
 
 (Enter Dromo, another slave, running from the house.) 
 
 Dro. Hallo Syrus ! 
 
 Ctesipho wants ye ! 
 ~~\Syr. (aside to him). Hush-sh ! away, you fool ! 
 
 Dem. Ctesipho ! here ? 
 
 Syr. N-no, n-no, sir ! it's not him, 
 
 It's it's another young man a little parasite 
 Of the same name. You know him, don't you, sir ? 
 
 Dem. I very soon will, at any rate (making for the 
 __ house). 
 
 Syr. (trying to hold him back}. Stop, sir, stop ! 
 
 But the father has heard enough to open his eyes. 
 He rushes in, spite of Syrus's drunken efforts to stop 
 him, and makes at last full discovery of how he has 
 been deceived. Micio succeeds in soothing him in 
 some degree, by assuring him that his own fortune is 
 ample enough to supply both the young men's wants ; 
 that he will give a dowry also to Ctesipho with his 
 beloved, and see him married respectably. 
 
 The failure of his own system, and the placid 
 triumph of his easy brother, work an odd transforma- 
 tion in Demea's behaviour. He meets this "irony of 
 events " by a curious irony of his own. Since easy 
 temper is the mode, he will at once adopt it. He 
 begins by shaking hands with Syrus, and thanking 
 him for his admirable conduct he will certainly do 
 something for him. Then he meets Geta, and shakes
 
 154 THE COMEDIES OF TERENCE. 
 
 hands with him (who certainly deserves it better) ; he 
 will do something for him too. He persuades his 
 brother to give Syrus his freedom, with a sum of 
 money to set him up in life, " by way of encourage- 
 ment to honest servants," as he ironically puts it. He 
 will have him make a deed of gift of a snug farm to 
 Hegio, who has acted the part of a good relation so 
 manfully ; and he ends by persuading the old bachelor 
 himself to marry the excellent Sostrata, his ward's 
 mother-in-law a lone woman, much in want of a pro- 
 tector. The good-natured Micio does make some wry 
 faces at this last item in the arrangements, but his 
 brother's arguments as to the great duty of pleasing 
 everybody are too strong for him. If complaisance 
 with other people's fancies, and reckless liberality, are 
 the right thing, Demea is determined to give his 
 brother full opportunity to put in practice this new- 
 fangled virtue. 
 
 In obedience to an ordinance contained in the 
 Charter of Queen Elizabeth, the Westminster Scholars 
 present every year, on three nights just before Christ- 
 mas, a Latin play. The performance, which takes 
 place in the Dormitory of the College, with appro- 
 priate scenery and costume, is perfectly unique of its 
 kind, and is the only relic of an ancient custom once 
 common to all our great schools. Although, as has al- 
 ready been noticed, a comedy of Plautus has occasion- 
 ally been selected, Terence has always been the favourite. 
 Four of his comedies 'The Maid of Andros,' 'The 
 Ethiopian Slave,' ' Phormio,' and ' The Brothers '
 
 THE COMEDIES OF TEREXCE. 155 
 
 are usually taken in rotation ; and a Queen's Scholar 
 who shows any dramatic talent is not unfrequently an 
 actor in two or three of these plays successively. The 
 performance is preceded by a Latin prologue, in which 
 such events of the year as have affected the school are 
 briefly touched upon : and followed by an epilogue in 
 elegiac verse, which of late years has assumed almost 
 the dimensions of a farce, in which the current topics 
 or follies of the day are satirised under an amusing 
 disguise of classical names and associations. 
 
 END OF PLAUTUS AND TERENCE. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
 
 NOW COMPLETE. 
 
 ANCIENT CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS. 
 
 EDITED BY THE 
 
 EEV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A., 
 
 AUTHOR OF ' ETONIANA,' ' THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS," ETC. 
 
 In 20 Vols., crown 8vo, doth, 2s. 6d. each. 
 
 And may also be had in 10 Volumes, neatly bound with calf 
 or vellum back, price 2, 10s. 
 
 CONTENTS OP THE SERIES. 
 
 HOMER : THE ILIAD. By the Editor. 
 HOMER: THE ODYSSEY. By the Edi- 
 tor. 
 HERODOTUS. By George C. Swayne, 
 
 ALA. 
 J5SCHYLUS. By Reginald S. Copleston, 
 
 B.A. 
 XENOPHON. By Sir Alexander Grant, 
 
 Bart., Principal of the University of 
 
 Edinburgh. 
 SOPHOCLES. By Clifton W. Collins, 
 
 M.A. 
 
 EURIPIDES. By W. B. Donna 
 ARISTOPHANES. By the Editor. 
 HESIOD AND THEOGNIS. By the Rev. 
 
 J. Davis, M.A. 
 
 By 
 
 THE COMMENTARIES OF CAESAR. 
 Anthony Trollope. 
 
 VIRGIL. By the Editor. 
 
 HORACE. By Theodore Martin. 
 
 CICERO. By the Editor. 
 
 PLINY'S LETTERS. By the Rev. Alfred 
 Church, M.A., and the Rev. W.- J. 
 Brodribb, M.A. 
 
 JUVENAL. By Edward Walford, M.A. 
 
 TACITUS. By W. B. Donne. 
 
 LUCIAN. By the Editor. 
 
 PLAUTUS AND TERENCE. By the Edi- 
 tor. 
 
 PLATO. By Clifton W. Collins, M.A. 
 
 GREEK ANTHOLOGY. By Lord Neaves. 
 
 IN this series the attempt has been made to give some such 
 introduction to the great writers of Greece and Rome as may 
 open to those who have not received a classical education or 
 in whose case it has been incomplete and fragmentary a fair 
 acquaintance with the contents of their writings, and the lead- 
 ing features of their style. 
 
 The constant allusions in our own literature, and even in our 
 daily press, to the works of the ancient classical authors, and
 
 2, ANCIEXT CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS. 
 
 the familiarity with the whole dramatis persona of ancient 
 history and fable which modern writers on all subjects assume 
 on the part of their readers, make such an acquaintance almost 
 necessary for those who care not only to read but to understand. 
 
 Even in the case of readers who have gone through the re- 
 gular classical course in their day, this acquaintance, if honest 
 confession were made, would be found very imperfect. It is 
 said, of course, that " every English gentleman reads Horace ; " 
 but this is one of those general assertions which rest upon very 
 loose ground. An ordinary observer of the habits of the class 
 might find himself somewhat at a loss for instances. 
 
 In the case of ladies, and of the large body of general readers 
 who have received either no classical education, or a very im- 
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 translations were first published, and took their place for the 
 time on every literary table. 
 
 There appears a strong probability that the study of Greek 
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 If, as some educational reformers suggest, a systematic course 
 of English reading be substituted for Latin and Greek in our 
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 volve the careful study of the masters of English thought and 
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 was formed very much upon the old classical models, and whose 
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 It may be said that we have translations of all the best and 
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 ANCIENT CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS. 3 
 
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 4 ANCIENT CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS. 
 
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