That we possess, in a fairly complete form, the works of two of the most
celebrated of these playwrights, and of their many contemporaries and
successors nothing but trifling fragments, is due to a chance or a series
of chances which we cannot follow, and from which we must not draw too
precise conclusions. Plautus was the earliest, and apparently the most
voluminous, of the writers who devoted themselves wholly to comedy.
Between him and Terence a generation intervenes, filled by another
comedian, Caecilius, whose works were said to unite much of the special
excellences of both; while after the death of Terence his work was
continued on the same lines by Turpilius and others, and dwindled away
little by little into the early Empire. But there can be no doubt that
Plautus and Terence fully represent the strength and weakness of the
Latin _palliata_. Together with the eleven plays of Aristophanes, they
have been in fact, since the beginning of the Middle Ages, the sole
representatives of ancient, and the sole models for modern comedy.

Titus Maccius Plautus was born of poor parents, in the little Umbrian
town of Sarsina, in the year 254 B.C., thus falling midway in age between
Naevius and Ennius. Somehow or other he drifted to the capital, to find
employment as a stage-carpenter. He alternated his playwriting with the
hardest manual drudgery; and though the inexhaustible animal spirits
which show themselves in his writing explain how he was able to combine
extraordinary literary fertility with a life of difficulty and poverty,
it must remain a mystery how and when he picked up his education, and his
surprising mastery of the Latin language both in metre and diction. Of
the one hundred and thirty comedies attributed to him, two-thirds were
rejected as spurious by Varro, and only twenty-one ranked as certainly
genuine. These last are extant, with the exception of one, called
_Vidularia_, or _The Carpet-Bag_, which was lost in the Middle Ages; some