As we have said, the Romans, like all the peoples who followed the Greeks, had to take cognizance of what had been done before. Livius and Naevius were the first to adapt Greek comedies for the Roman stage, as they had been the first to adapt Greek tragedies. Of their work, however, we have again only fragments, saved usually by late grammarians to illustrate archaic grammar. Of Naevius we know the titles of thirty-four comedies, an average of one a year during his period of activity—but since many of these have come to us by the merest coincidence we should not assume that we know all the names of his comedies by any means. Most of these thirty-four plays were adapted from the Greek, but not all. The man who wrote the first Roman epic and the first Roman chronicle play (praetexta) was probably never a slavish copyist. We have noticed how he came to grief for his daring in attacking the powerful Metelli during a critical period of the war. Such criticism would presumably appear in Roman plays. The fragments of his comedies also show many local references that are best explained as coming from plays purely Roman, and such titles as Hariolus, Tunicularia, and Agitatoria suggest independent work. However, so long as we have only about a hundred complete lines rescued from all the plays we can hardly speak with certainty on this point.
In discussing tragedy we suggested that Livius and Naevius were probably the men who shaped the “operatic” form of Roman tragedy, and it is likely that they too were the men who carried this form into comedy, though its final development seems to be due to Plautus. The distinctly lyric lines are rare, to be sure, but the fragments are too few to permit us to expect many. The majority are iambic, the Roman equivalent of the Greek originals, and they have of course the free Latin form. One line is anapaestic; the old Roman trochaic septenarius, well suited to song, is frequent and so is the iambic octonarius, which Naevius seems to treat like a septenarius with anacrusis. Indeed Cicero[1] calls it a septenarius and indicates that it was sung to the accompaniment of the flute.
These were the comedies which entertained the Romans at their festivals during the gloomy years of the Punic war, those years that are so vividly pictured for us by Livy. If we could recover these plays and interpolate them between the harrowing scenes of Livy’s history we should know more than we do of Roman society during that most critical epoch of the nation’s history.
Plautus, from whom we have twenty plays, had staged a few of them before Naevius went into exile, in fact in the Miles Gloriosus he refers to the imprisonment of his fellow-poet. In his plots Plautus kept rather close to the Greek plays, translating, paraphrasing, and adapting as suited his mood. We shall presently discuss his reasons for doing so. What these themes were we need not repeat. The Greeks of Menander’s day had shaped the comedies of intrigue and of romance fairly well on the lines these have followed ever since. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is very close to Plautus’ Menaechmi, and though it departs from its original in its search for further entanglements, the construction, the type of humor, and the dramatic devices are the same. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff illustrates the Menandrian use of self-deception, from his first boasting to his leap into the basket. The Wives are more in evidence than they would have been in Menander but there is little else to distinguish the play from the standard New Comedy. From the Greek, via Plautus and Terence, came practically all the types and all the tricks in which Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy delighted.
Here it is my task not to discuss Roman comedy as such, but rather to indicate what in Rome’s life and experiences made itself felt through these plays. In the Plautine adaptations of Greek comedies we find two seemingly inconsistent purposes, one to rewrite in such a way as to make the exotic comprehensible, the other to keep a Greek atmosphere in order not to offend Roman taste by permitting the inference that the author approved of the behavior which he presented. The first purpose required simplification, the second avoided it. It is necessary to dwell upon this distinction for a moment since historians frequently fall into error by assuming either that Plautus reproduced a Greek milieu without alteration or on the contrary that he represented Roman life as he found it. In point of fact he did both or either, as best suited his purpose.
In technicalities of law, to take a simple illustration, Plautus’ procedure was to simplify with little regard for consistency. At times when it did not matter he substituted Roman officials or institutions for Greek ones without concern as to whether they were exact equivalents. If in presenting the details of a lawsuit a literal translation of the Greek would seem obscure to a Roman audience, Plautus substituted some comprehensible point and reshaped the whole passage to conform to his illustration. In short, he used mere common sense in adapting foreign plays for stage production. Had Plautus been translating for a reading public he might have given a literal rendering and inserted a note of explanation. But plays written for a single presentation have no occasion for employing explanatory notes.
Scholars have also been troubled by the fact that the plays of Plautus bristle with Greek words. There is an average of about ninety occurrences a play, counting repetitions of the same word. How would our comedies fare on the stage if foreign words were used with equal lavishness? Not a few of these words—like amphora, ancora, epistula—had of course been acclimated through commerce, and would cause no trouble. A few technical names that could not be translated—of Greek magistrates, for instance—were illumined by the context. In a few instances Plautus literally dumps in Greek words for amusement, as when an irate husband reels off the items of the bill he has received from the modiste, or reads the menu that will cost him more than he is able to pay. Such words the audience were hardly expected to know. The very outlandish extravagance of the list is intentional. But after we have made these subtractions, the bulk remains.[2] Are we to assume that Plautus addressed his plays to the score of cultured gentlemen who had had Greek tutors? If he had, the aediles would hardly have gone to the expense of buying the plays and presenting them, for the purpose of the games was to attract and amuse the holiday masses. Can it be that Plautus indolently neglected to invent Latin jokes in place of the Greek ones of his models? That is hardly a satisfactory solution in the case of a writer who inundates his scenes with rollicking fun. Another common explanation—too frequently hazarded—that the streets were already overrun with Greek captives who had spread a knowledge of Greek, will hardly serve. In neither of the Punic wars had many Greek captives been taken—the captives had been chiefly Carthaginian, and their Spanish, Gallic, and Ligurian mercenaries—and these are not noticed in the Plautine plays.[3]
The simple explanation is that most of the Roman populace had served in many campaigns in Greek cities and with Greek contingents and had become familiar with a great number of colloquial Greek expressions, in the same way that American boys acquired not a few French phrases some years ago in their one brief campaign overseas. The older generation had served in Sicily in the First Punic War and had been billeted in Greek towns for periods of from six to twelve years. The younger men had all served in the Greek districts of southern Italy before Hannibal was finally driven out in 203 B.C. Both of these wars strained Rome’s man power to the very limit so that practically every adult male saw service in Greek-speaking communities. And finally, during the last years of Plautus’ activity, a dozen legions were sent across the Adriatic for the campaigns against Philip and Antiochus. Plautus could probably assume therefore that at least ninety per cent of the able-bodied men of his audience had served in campaigns among and with Greeks. Those retired soldiers were happy to be complimented with reminders of their services to the state, and Plautus did it by frequent references to the language they had acquired in the wars.[4]
The liberal use of military terms like machaera,[5] ballista, catapulta, phylaca, techina, machina, even in all kinds of figurative senses; of exclamations and terms of abuse that the soldiers would hear when out prowling for extra rations: barbarus, harpago, dierecte, latro, morus, plaga, colapus, mastigia, ganeum gerrae, apage, pax, papae, babae, eia, eugepae, and the rest; of canteen phrases convenient on pay-days in Sicily: drachuma, danista, trapezita, opsonium, cyathisso, crapula, oenopolium, macellum, comissatum eo (and shall we add gynaeceum?), this tells an unmistakable story. A large number of these expressions were little used at Rome after the period of general campaigning among the Greeks. Many point directly to Sicily. The word lautumiae, for example, reminds us of the convict quarries of Syracuse, basilike (“right royally”) seems to betray the soldiers’ respect for the lavish court of King Hiero, as Siculi logi reflects their impression of a talkative people. A large number of the words are Doric in formation, deriving apparently from Sicily or Tarentum: choragus (used in an un-Attic sense and sound), plaga, machina, zamia, catapulta,[6] colapus, ganeum, gerrae, sumbola, and many others. Not a few words were demonstrably adopted by speakers rather than by writers, as phylaca, gerrae, balineum, lanterna, etc.
This is but a brief indication of the linguistic evidence that the soldiers returned home with a convenient Greek vocabulary of no small scope. How freely Plautus could assume its ready use is revealed by his lavishness in compounding such Greek words with Latin termination as in athletice, dulice, euscheme, inanilogista, morologus, pultiphagus, pancratice, opsonari, plagipatidae, elleborosus, ulmitriba, and even in the use of Greek oaths (μὰ τὸν Ἀπόλλων) of semi-Greek puns (opus est chryso Chrysalo, etc.), and Greek slang (argentum οἴχεται). But we may be sure that Plautus knew very well the precise limits of this camp language. He does not venture to employ the common colloquialisms of the literary Greek of Menander if they are not a part of the military store of his day. For those he finds Latin substitutes. Very likely Plautus had himself served as a soldier in southern Italy during the Hannibalic war and had there acquired an accurate knowledge of the diction that could be intelligible to his audience of soldier folk.