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The Dating of Plautus' Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

W. B. Sedgwick
W. B. Sedgwick
Affiliation:
Wyggeston Grammar School, Leicester
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Extract

Although much has been written in the attempt to date individual plays of Plautus—too often, unfortunately, an attempt to make bricks without straw—little has hitherto been done to determine the approximate chronological sequence of the plays as a whole. Yet this appears the most obvious necessity if any advance in scientific criticism is to be made. Not till this is done can we see the bearing of the innumerable facts which have accumulated in the extensive Plautine literature of the last fifty years. No one would dream of a scientific criticism of Shakespeare which did not take into account the chronology of the plays. This is equally true (for example) of Tennyson and Browning, though the method has not yet been as systematically applied to literary as to musical criticism. Think of a writer on Bach or Mozart, Beethoven or Schumann, who mixed up indiscriminately early and later work! If we could only arrange Plautus' plays in something like chronological order, a flood of light would be thrown on details of technique which at present escape us; the utility of the Lexicon Plautinum would be doubled.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , April 1930 , pp. 102 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1930

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References

page 103 note 1 The long parasite monologues are not the kind of scenes which Plautus writes in lyrics—in fact, no parasite has lyrics except for a very few lines of Gelasimus in the Stichus (their drab existence would hardly be in keeping). On the contrary, parasites often interrupt lyric flights with prosaic iambics or trochaics.

page 103 note 2 E.g. what is said on p. 2 sq. of the list of Greek cities in the Mercator (11. 646 sqq.), and the imaginary tour through the Greek isles (11. 987 sqq.), may be true, but I fancy they are truly Plautine, and might have occurred in any play. So the longueurs of Act I., Sc. ii., may be in few artistic, but would Plautus have cut down the scene at a later date? I doubt it. Moreover, it would be a mistake to suppose that there is no Roman element in the play. Still, in spite of all this, I agree that the Mercator is lacking in originality, and is probably very early.

page 104 note 1 Add that Arnold, E. V. in C.R., 1925, p. 160Google Scholar, confirms the division into three periods by an examination of Plautus' use of anapaestics.

page 105 note 1 Reference to Scipio presiding as curule aedile?

page 105 note 2 The year of the four triumphs.