The 'meretrix blanda' of Menander was probably more refined, but not essentially different from the 'libertina' of Rome. Among the rare glimpses into social life which Livy affords behind the stately but somewhat monotonous pageant of consuls and imperators, armies in the field, senators in council, and political assemblies of the people, none is more interesting than that given in the inquiries into the horrors of the Bacchanalia at Rome[41]. The relations between P. Aebutius and the freedwoman Hispala Fecenia bring to mind those existing between the Philematiums, the Phileniums, or Planesiums of comedy and their lovers. The 'leno insidiosus' and the 'improba lena' are probably much the same in all times and countries; but there is a vigorous brutality and inhuman hardness about Ballio and Cleaereta which seem more true to Roman than to Greek life. The kind of life which comedy represents must have had great attractions for a race of vigorous organisation like the Romans, after continued success and prosperity had broken down the old restraints on conduct and desire, and the accumulated wealth of the world had become the prize of their energy. Yet their inherited instincts for industry and frugality must have made it difficult for them to realise gracefully the hollow life of light-hearted enjoyment which came easily to a Greek in the third century b.c. The average Roman learned to exaggerate the profligacy without acquiring the refinement of his teachers.
It might perhaps have been expected that a writer of such prodigal invention and so popular and national a fibre as Plautus would have chosen rather to set before his countrymen a humorous image of themselves, than to transport them in imagination to Athens and to exhibit to them those well-used conventional types of Greek life and manners. But, in the first place, the mere fact that it was more easy for him to adapt than to create would have been a sufficient motive to so careless and unconscious an artist. Again, the state-censorship exercised by the magistrates who exhibited the games would naturally deter a poet, who did not wish to encounter the fate of Naevius, from any direct dealing with the delicate subject of Roman social and family life. The later writers of the fabulae togatae seem for the most part to have reproduced the life and personages of the provincial towns in Italy. The position not only of the magistrate but even of the citizen at Rome was invested with a kind of dignity and even sanctity, which it would have been dangerous to violate in a public spectacle. Further, the very novelty and unfamiliarity of the ways of Greek life would be more stimulating to the rude imagination of that age than a reproduction of the everyday life of Rome. It requires a more cultivated fancy to recognise incidents, situations and characters suited for art in actual experience, than to appreciate the conventional types of older dramatists. It is a noticeable fact that Shakspeare places the scene of only one of his comedies in England, and that he too introduces the English names and characteristics of Bottom, Snug, Peter Quince, etc., as Plautus does those of Saturio or Curculio into an imaginary representation of Athenian life. But whatever were his motives for doing so, Plautus professes to introduce his hearers to a representation of Greek manners and morals. His frequent use of the word barbarus in reference to Italian or Roman ways, his use of Latinised Greek words and actual Greek phrases, the Greek names of his personages, the dress in which they appeared, the invariable reference to Greek money, perhaps the actual scene presented to the eye, the frequent mention of ships unexpectedly arriving in harbour, the names of the foreign towns visited, etc., would all tend to remind the audience that they were listening to an action and witnessing a spectacle of Greek life.
But while the outward conditions of his dramas are professedly taken from Greek originals, much of the manner and spirit of his personages is certainly Roman. The language in which they express themselves in the first place is thoroughly their own. This is shown by the large number of his puns and plays on words. These by their spontaneity, sometimes by their grotesqueness, sometimes by a Latin play on a Greek word—such as Archidemides[42] or Epidamnus,—show their native origin. No writer, again, abounds so much in alliterations, assonances, asyndeta[43], which are characteristic of all early Roman poetry down even to Lucretius, and which have no parallel in the more refined and natural diction of the Greek dramatists. Further, we constantly meet with Roman formulae[44], Roman proverbs[45], expressions of courtesy[46], and the like. The very fluency, copiousness, and verve of his language are impossible to a translator, at least in the early stages of a literature. Nothing can be more spontaneous and natural than the dialogue in Plautus. There is, on the other hand, considerable appearance of effort in the reflective passages of the 'cantica'; and this is exactly what we should expect in a Roman writer of originality. Reflexion on life was altogether strange to a Roman in the age of Plautus; to a Greek it was easy and hackneyed. In the prolixity and slow beating out of the thought in some of the 'cantica' we note the beginning of a process unfamiliar to the Roman mind, for which the forms of the Latin language were not yet adapted. The facility of expressing reflexion appears much more developed in Terence. If Plautus were reproducing a Greek original in such passages as Mostell. 85-145, Trinummus 186-273, the thought and the illustration would have lost much in freshness and naïveté but they would have been expressed with much more point and conciseness.
But it is not only in his language and manner that Plautus shows his independence of his originals. The poems taken from Greek life are in a large measure filled up with matter taken from the life around him. The Greek personages of his play, without apparently any sense of artistic incongruity, speak as Romans would do of the places familiar to Romans—town in Italy[47], streets, markets, gates, in Rome[48]; of Roman magistrates and other officials, Quaestors, Aediles, Praetors, Tresviri, Publicani; they allude to the public business of the senate, comitia, and law-courts,—to colonies[49], praefecturae, and the provincia of a magistrate,—to public games in honour of the dead,—to the distinctive dress worn by matrons,—to the forms of bargaining and purchasing, of summoning an antagonist into court, of pleading a case at law,—to the times of vacation from business[50],—to the emancipation of slaves,—peculiar to the Romans. The special characteristics of Roman religion appear in the number of abstract deities referred to, such as Salus, Opportunitas, Libentia, etc. A new divinity is invented in the interests of lovers, under the name of Suavisuaviatio[51]. Other better-known objects of Roman worship, such as Jupiter Capitolinus, Laverna, the Lar Familiaris, are also introduced. We find also references to recent events in Roman history—such as the subjugation of the Boii[52], the treatment inflicted on the Campanians after the Second Punic War, the importation of Syrian slaves after the war with Antiochus[53], the introduction of foreign luxuries at the same time[54], the extreme frequency with which triumphs were granted in the first twenty years of the second century b.c.[55] Allusion is made to particular Roman laws, such as the lex alearia[56], probably passed about this time to resist the progress of Greek demoralisation. The state of feeling aroused, on both sides, by the repeal of the Oppian law, and the state of society which led to the original enactment of that law, are reflected in many passages of the plays of Plautus. A remark of one of the better class of matrons—
Non matronarum officium est, sed meretricium,
Viris alienis, mi vir, subblandirier[57]—
may serve as a comment on the arguments with which Cato opposed the repeal of the law: 'Qui hic mos est in publicum procurrendi, et obsidendi vias, et viros alienos appellandi?... An blandiores in publico quam in privato, et alienis quam vestris estis[58]?' The imperiousness of a 'dotata uxor,' and the spirit of rebellion thereby aroused in the mind of her husband, are themes treated with grim humour in many of the dramas. The stale jokes against the happiness of married life were as applicable to Greek as to Roman life; and Greek husbands may have stood in as much dread of their wives' extravagance in dress, and in as great awe of their surveillance, as were experienced by the elderly husbands of Latin comedy. But the fact that similar criticisms appear in the satirical and oratorical fragments of the second century b.c. indicates that such jokes, whether or not originally due to the Greek writer, came equally home to a Roman audience.
Again, the great fertility of Plautus and his many-sided contact with life are apparent in the number and variety of his metaphors and illustrations from, and other references to, many varieties of human occupation. These have, for the most part, both a national and a popular origin. The number of those taken from military operations, and from legal and business transactions, is a clear indication that they were of fresh Roman coinage. There is no character which a slave, who has to conduct some intrigue to a successful issue, is so fond of assuming as that of the general of an army. In one passage one of his confederates addresses him as 'Imperator.' He takes the auspices, he brings his engines to bear on the citadel of the enemy, he brings up his supports, he lays his ambush and avoids that laid for him, he leads his army round by some unknown pass, cuts off the enemy's communications, keeps open his own, invests and takes the hostile position, and divides the booty among his allies. The following passage for instance is freshly coloured with all the recent experience of the Hannibalian war:—
Viden hostis tibi adesse, tuoque tergo obsidium? Consule,
Arripe opem auxiliumque ad hanc rem, propere hoc non placide decet.