V Plautus

Extract

If Plautus had a real name, it seems never to have been known or inquired after. ‘Titus Maccius Plautus’ means something like ‘Willy McBozo Greasepaint’, and the disquieting proliferation of variants in the manuscripts is the equivalent of indecision over whether ‘McBozo’ should be spelled with a ‘Mac-’ and a small B. Plautus is a variant form of planipes (‘flatfoot’), attested as a nickname for performers in the barefoot Latin mime; Maccius means ‘son of Maccus’, the buffoonish hero of the Oscan fabula Atellana; while even the innocuous-looking praenomen Titus was used as a pet name for the male organ of business. The strong theatrical connections are nevertheless suggestive in the light of the ancient biographical tradition on Plautus, which is a shaky-looking edifice, but on one striking central point, there seems never to have been any doubt in antiquity: unlike other early Roman dramatists, Plautus came to the writing of plays not as a poet but as a professional man of the theatre. In contrast to his contemporaries Naevius and Ennius, he specialized in a single dramatic genre, and it may be his indifference to epic and tragedy in particular that kept him out of the aristocratic patronage and politics in which the careers of others were enmeshed.