Roman Drama, Rhetoric, and Prose

Roman comedy survives complete only in the plays of Plautus (c. 254-184 BCE) and Terence (c. 195/185-159 BCE), both working in the genre of fabula palliata, comedy in "Greek dress" adapted from lost Greek New Comedy models, chiefly Menander. Plautus, whose twenty surviving plays make him the earliest Latin author whose complete works survive, favored broad farce, verbal exuberance, songs, and stock characters, the clever slave who outwits his master, the braggart soldier, the young man in love, the stern father, delivered in a lively, colloquial Latin closer to popular speech than to later literary norms; plays such as Miles Gloriosus, Pseudolus, and the Menaechmi, a source for Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, exemplify this exuberant comic style. Terence, writing a generation later and associated with the elite cultural circle around Scipio Aemilianus, produced only six plays, more tightly plotted, more restrained in tone, and more interested in psychological nuance and double plots exploring generational conflict than in Plautus's knockabout farce. Together Plautus and Terence transmitted Greek New Comedy's stock character types and plot conventions to the later European comic tradition, decisively shaping Renaissance and early modern comedy from the commedia dell'arte to Moliere and Shakespeare.