Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi / Amphitryon, The Comedy of Asses, The Pot of Gold, The Two / Bacchises, The Captives

A few typographical errors have been corrected. They have been marked in the text with popups . Greek words that may not display correctly in all browsers are similarly transliterated: ὥς . Footnotes are collected at the end of each play. Where a footnote refers to an omitted passage, the verses before and after the omission have been numbered in parentheses: (182) (184) All other line numbers are from the original text.
PLAUTUS WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY PAUL NIXON DEAN OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE, MAINE IN FIVE VOLUMES I
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD
First printed 1916


Very few of his extant comedies can be dated, so far as the year of their production in Rome is concerned, with any great degree of certainty. The Miles Gloriosus appeared about 206, the Cistellaria about 202, Stichus in 200, Pseudolus in 191 B.C.; the Truculentus , like Pseudolus , was composed when Plautus was an old man, not many years before his death in 184 B.C.
Welcome as a full autobiography of Plautus would be, in place of such scant and tasteless biographical morsels as we do have, only less welcome, perhaps, would be his own stage directions for his plays, supposing him to have written stage directions and to have written them with something more than even modern fullness. We should learn how he met the stage conventions and limitations of his day; how successfully he could, by make-up and mannerism, bring on the boards palpably different persons in the Scapins and Bobadils and Doll Tear-sheets that on the printed page often seem so confusingly similar, and most important, we should learn precisely what sort of dramatist he was and wished to be.
If Plautus himself greatly cared or expected his restless, uncultivated, fun-seeking audience to care, about the construction of his plays, one must criticize him and rank him on a very different basis than if his main, and often his sole, object was to amuse the groundlings. If he often took himself and his art with hardly more seriousness than does the writer of the vaudeville skit or musical comedy of to-day, if he often wished primarily to gain the immediate laugh, then much of Langen's long list of the playwright's dramatic delinquencies is somewhat beside its intended point.