[6] Catapulta was probably not very old in Latin since only the third syllable shows a change, and that a relatively late one. In words like sumbola we doubtless have the Doric pronunciation of u; in the short penult of gynaeceum, balinea, and platea, the cause need not lie wholly in a Latin tendency to shorten one vowel before another but in part perhaps to the similar tendency found in Greek and especially in Sicilian. In Latin latro, barbarus, choragus, and the like we certainly have not standard Greek meanings but such as might have been heard in Sicily during the Punic war. Sturtevant’s interesting discussion “Concerning the Use of Greek in Vulgar Latin,” Trans. Am. Phil. Assoc. (1925), quite misses the heart of the question when it speaks of the “Romans consciously mocking the Greeks of the city.” There were very few Greeks there then, and they were not significant enough to invite mocking.
[7] Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus, chap. III; unfortunately he has failed to comprehend the nature of the Plautine public. Legrand’s Daos makes the more serious mistake of treating the Greek and Roman New Comedy as a single phenomenon.
[8] Sedgwick, Class. Quart. 1927, 88.
[9] Stich. 448, licet haec Athenis nobis: Men. 7-9. At the end of the Bacchides Plautus becomes very apologetic for the immoral last scene.
[10] Selenium in the Cistellaria and Adelphasium in the Poenulus are favorably portrayed so as not to disappoint the audience when they are later to be revealed as freeborn.
[11] A. Gellius, II, 23, 6.
[12] Leo, Plaut. Cantica: Fraenkel, op. cit., chap. X, who, however, draws upon Ennius more than the dates permit. The so-called epitaph of Plautus apparently credited him with special praise for his elaborate songs (numeri innumeri).
[13] There were theaters at least in Syracuse, Tauromenium, Segesta (the seat of a Roman garrison throughout the period of the war), Agyrion, Tyndaris, Akrae, and Catania; see Bieber, Denkmäler d. Theaterwesen, 50. Choragus is a Doric form that might readily have come from Segesta.
[14] Cf. Fraenkel on the “Versus quadratus,” Hermes, 1927, 357.
[15] Ter., Eunuch. 20 and Hecyra, 14.