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 dramatic 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-dancers, 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 popularity, until his death, forty years later. How many
