Plautus (c.250–184 BCE) was a great Roman comic dramatist. His works, such as Rudens, loosely adapted from Greek New Comedy, established a truly Roman drama in the Latin language.
Born in Sarsina, Umbria, he probably went to Rome while still young and learned his mastery of the most idiomatic Latin. He found work in connection with the stage and then started a business in foreign trade. However, it failed, and he returned to Rome in such poverty that he had to work for a baker, turning a hand mill.
Plautus borrowed his plots mainly from the New Attic Comedy, which dealt with a social life to exclude politics. His plays show close familiarity with seafaring life and adventure and intimate knowledge of all the details of buying and selling and bookkeeping.
About 130 plays were attributed to him in the time of the grammarian Aulus Gellius, who believed most of them to be the work of earlier dramatists revised and improved by Plautus. Scholar Marcus Terentius Varro limited the genuine comedies to 21, and these so-called ‘Varronian comedies’ are now extant, the Vidularia (‘The Rucksack Play’) being fragmentary.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
The day, water, sun, moon, night—I do not have to purchase these things with money.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: Money
No man is wise enough by himself.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: Friendship, Wisdom
Laws are subordinate to custom.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: Custom
Courage easily finds its own eloquence.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: Courage
Courage is to take hard knocks like a man when occasion calls.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: Courage, Difficulty
Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: Heaven, Friendship
In everything the middle course is best:
all things in excess bring trouble to men.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: Best
Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: One liners
I would rather be adorned by beauty of character than jewels. Jewels are the gift of fortune, while character comes from within.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
Topics: Character
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