Authors

Roman

Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus was the most successful Roman comic playwright, whose twenty surviving comedies adapted from Greek New Comedy constitute the largest surviving body of early Latin literature. Characters he created — the cunning slave, the braggart soldier, the miserly father, the young man in love — became the template for Western comedy. Shakespeare drew on his Menaechmi for The Comedy of Errors; Molière adapted Aulularia as The Miser; Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum combines three Plautus plays.