Marcus Accius Plautus

, a comic poet, born at Sarsina, in Umbria. Fortune proved unkind to him, and, from competence, he was reduced to the meanest poverty, by engaging in a commercial line. To maintain himself, he entered into the family of a baker as a common servant, and while he was employed in grinding corn, he sometimes dedicated a few moments to the comic muse. Some, however, confute this account as false, and support that Plautus was never obliged to the laborious employments of a bakehouse for his maintenance. He wrote 25 comedies, of which only 20 are extant. He died about 184 years before the christian era; and Varro, his learned countryman, wrote this stanza, which deserved to be engraved on his tomb: Postquam morte captus est Plautus, Comœdia luget, scena est desert a; Deinde risus, lud us, jocusque, & numeri Innumeri simul omnes collacrymârunt. The plays of Plautus were ♦ universally esteemed at Rome, and the purity, the energy, and the elegance of his language were, by other writers, considered as objects of imitation; and Varro, whose judgment is great, and generally decisive, declares, that if the Muses were willing to speak Latin, they would speak in the language of Plautus. In the August an age, however, when the Roman language became more pure and refined, the comedies of Plautus did not appear free from inaccuracy. The poet, when compared to the more elegant expre ions of a Terence, was censured for his negligence in versification, his low wit, execrable puns, and disgusting obscenities. Yet, however censured as to language or sentiments, Plautus continued to be a favourite on the stage. If his expre ions were not choice or delicate, it was ♦ universally admitted that he was more happy than other comic writers in his pictures; the incidents of his plays were more varied, the acts more interesting, the characters more truly displayed, and the catastrophe more natural. In the reign of the emperor Diocletian, his comedies were still acted on the public theatres; and no greater compliment can be paid to his abilities as a comic writer, and no greater censure can be pa ed upon his succe ors in dramatic composition, than to observe, that for 500 years, with all the disadvantages of obsolete language and diction, in spite of the change of manners, and the revolutions of government, he commanded and received that applause which no other writer dared to dispute with him. The best editions of Plautus are that of Gronovius, 8vo, Leiden, 1664; that of Barbou, 12mo, in 3  vols. , Paris, 1759; that of Ernesti, 2  vols. , 8vo, Lipscomb, 1760; and that of Glasgow, 3  vols. , 12mo, 1763. Varro on Quintilian , bk. 10 , ch. 1 .— Cicero , de Officiis , bk. 1 , . ; On Oratory , bk. 3 , . — Horace , bk. 2 , ltr. 1 , lis. 58, 170; Art of Poetry , lis. 54 & 270.――Ælianus, a high priest, who consecrated the capitol in the reign of Vespas i an. Tacitus , Histories , bk. 4 , ch. 53 . ♦ ‘univerally’ replaced with ‘universally’