Description
"The historical Plautus remains elusive. The biographical tradition depends on Varro (116-27 bce), who lacked reliable sources. Today as in antiquity any detailed account of P.'s life is an obvious scholarly construct. For example, the tantalizingly vague claim that P. earned money 'in the service of stage-personnel' (Gel. 3.3.14 in operis artificium scaenicorum) plausibly supports competing notions of P. as a person of the theatre who got his start in Atellan farce or as a touring actor with the Artists of Dionysus. The dates given for P.'s life, 254-184 BCE, may not be exactly correct (they yield a neat seventy years), but match a dramatic career agreed to flourish from the last years of the Second Punic War (218-201 bce) to the mid 180s BCE. We can accept the testimony of the production notice, preserved in the Ambrosian palimpsest, that ties Ps. to an important occasion at the Megalenses of 191 BCE. The broader historical context for P.'s work is Rome's ascendancy to Mediterranean 'superpower' status and the social transformations accompanying this early phase of imperialism: increased migration of persons, customs, and ideas to the city-state (especially from Greece), an influx of wealth and property (including a greatly expanded supply of slaves), and inevitable collisions between Roman traditions and external innovations.6 Further facts of P.'s professional life are scarce: he seems to have been the first Roman playwright to specialize in one dramatic genre (after Greek practice), and he worked with the famous actor-manager T. Publius Pellio."--
