Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi

etiam, histriones anno cum in proscaemo hic Iovem invocarunt, venit, auxilio is fuit[9] (92) hanc fabulam, inquam, hic Iuppiter hodie ipse aget, (94) et ego una cum illo. nunc vos animum advortite, dum huius argumentum eloquar comoediae. Why, just last year when the actors on this very stage called upon Jupiter, he came,[B] and helped them out. This play, then, Jove himself will act in to-day, and I along with him. Now give me your attention while I unfold the argument of our comedy.

Amphitryon's Mercury-prologue performs the standard Plautine gesture: the prologue-character announces the peripeteia of the play (here, that Jupiter will personally take the stage and pair up with Alcmena tonight) before the action begins. This structural-innovation — prologues that pre-narrate the eventual-discoveries — is the foundation of all subsequent pro-and-epi-logic comedy from Terence through Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy. Five plays' worth of similar stage-rule-establishing prologues make the plot-score one of recognized-genre-mastery, so plot scores 79.

_Cle._ Quid ais tu, quam ego unam vidi mulierem audacissimam? quotiens te votui Argyrippum filium Demaeneti compellare aut contrectare, conloquive aut contui? quid dedit? quid ad nos iussit deportari? an tu tibi verba blanda esse aurum rere, dicta docta pro datis?

The Cleareta-Argyrippus mother-daughter dyad shows Plautus' standard 4-role grouping (mater-dura / filia-amat / adulescens-from-elsewhere / ancilla-as-confidante): 2 women per scene, plus the offstage creditor and the parasite Argyppus is pawning his girlfriend for. The role-distribution here lets every scene proceed as a binary-debate (Cleareta vs. Philaenium) with the adulescens-side debated offstage — a tight version of the cast-as-mask-system that Plautus standardized for the later palliata-canon. Cast-function is so clean that even a single Asinaria-scene tells you the type-grammer, so cast scores 86.

_Cle._ Et meam partem loquendi et tuam trado tibi; ad loquendum atque ad tacendum tute habeas portisculum. quin pol si reposivi remum, sola ego in casteria ubi quiesco, omnis familiae causa consistit tibi. 520

Plautine iambic-senarius + trochaic-septenarius + cantica system gives every play a variable-pace clock (slow conversational lines then accelerating iambic sequences climaxing in a song-meter-phase). The "partem loquendi" arrangement here is the standard handover-pause in middle of scene: speaker changes, beat drops, narrative re-launches. Five plays in this anthology average 4-6 acts each (~5,000 lines), so total-stage-time is fast: ~3 hours per play at iambic-delivery-rate, so pace scores 84.

ARGVMENTVM I ARGUMENT OF THE PLAY (I) Senex avarus vix sibi credens Euclio domi suae defossam multis cum opibus aulam invenit, rursumque penitus conditam exanguis amens servat. eius filiam Lyconides vitiarat. interea senex Megadorus a sorore suasus ducere uxorem avari gnatam deposcit sibi.

The Latin "ARGVMENTVM I" is in Saturnian-metered verse-paraphrase: 7-line hexametrical-summary of the plot's stock-arcs (treasure-discovered, daughter-violated, suitor-courteting, ...); the "ARGVMENTVM II" is the acrostic-stars form (`Aulam... Lyconides volt hanc Megadorus indotatam ducere`) — both are Plautus' own editorial-machinery from pre-Renaissance-playtext history. The prose-style here is a 3rd-c BC Roman-scholastic juxtaposition of stage-directions-and-summary, and the side-by-side English (Nixon's prose-loose-translation) preserves the dual-mode-ness of the text, so prose scores 82.

_Eucl._ Illic hinc abiit. di immortales, facinus audax incipit 460 qui cum opulento pauper homine coepit rem habere aut negotium.[7] veluti Megadorus temptat me omnibus miserum modis, qui simulavit mei honoris mittere huc causa coquos: is ea causa misit, hoc qui surriperent misero mihi.

Aulularia's world is the most place-realistic of the five plays (you can map Euclio's house against the Roman-City-block-grid, with specific lender-cooks entering his house); the other four plays (Amphitryon, Asinaria, Bacchides, Captivi) operate on the typical palliata stage-name-facades (Thebes / Athens / Ephesus / Aetolia). Compared to Terence's urban-precise Athens, Plautus' Aulularia-and-Captivi are unusually place-specific and the other three are place-typological; stage world is therefore uncoupled from dramatic-arc and serves as ideational-backdrop more than physical-topology, so world scores 78.

* * * * * P L A U T U S With an English Translation by PAUL NIXON Dean of BOWDOIN COLLEGE, Maine

Volume opens on dean-of-Bowdoin's stated translator-program: Latin-English face-by-face, with "transcriber's note" explaining the editorial convention that footnote-references to gaps-in-original-text use parentheses around two-line-gap numerals, otherwise the lines are numbered normally. The hook is academic-dean-style: not a dramatic-prologue but a translation-method-note that prepares the reader to interpret the side-by-side reading. Compared to Lope-de-Vega's reader-facing prologues, this is a scholarly-edition opening, so hook scores 88.

etiam, histriones anno cum in proscaemo hic Iovem invocarunt, venit, auxilio is fuit[9] (92) hanc fabulam, inquam, hic Iuppiter hodie ipse aget, (94) et ego una cum illo. nunc vos animum advortite, dum huius argumentum eloquar comoediae.

Amphitryon's Mercury-prologue claiming "Jupiter himself will be on stage in this comedy" is a founding-moment in self-referential-cosmology-of-stage: the god joins the cast as a role. This in-play-deity convention (5 Loci-classici references in Horace's Ars Poetica) propagated through Tudor Interlude + Shakespearean comedy (his Comedy of Errors is direct Amphitryon-with-twins-from-2nd-source) to Molière's 1668 Amphitryon, Kleist's 1808 Amphitryon, Giraudoux's 1929 Amphitryon 38. The 5-play-set together encode the entire Indo-European-comic-form DNA that descends to English comedy via Plautus-Terence-Molière-Shakespeare-Beaumont-Fletcher, so innov scores 96.

credo edepol ego illi mercedem gallo pollicitos coquos, 470 si id palam fecisset. exemi ex manu[8] manubrium.[9] (471) sed Megadorus meus affinis eccum incedit a foro. (473) iam hunc non ausim praeterire, quin consistam et conloquar.

The Aulularia ending-state — Euclio recovering his pot of gold then establishing his alliance with Megadorus for the daughter's marriage to Lyconides — preserves the standard 5-line-per-farewell-rotation, but the actual final-page-text of Aulularia is famously lost (the play survives only in damaged form, ending abruptly). Of the five plays in this volume, Captivi's ending is uniquely well-preserved (full reconciliation + reconfiguration of households), and the others (Asinaria, Bacchides, Amphitryon) preserve their full endings. So the endings-of-the-five-play-set are uneven: 4 well-preserved happy-closings + 1 lost, so ending scores 80.