(b Sarsina, Umbria, c254 bce; d c184 bce). Roman comic playwright. 20 of his comedies and a portion of another have survived, all fabulae palliatae (i.e. plays with Greek settings and costumes). They are free adaptations of Greek originals by Menander and other leading authors of the Athenian New Comedy (c330–270 bce), although none of Plautus's prototypes survives.
The abbreviations DV and C in the manuscripts of Plautus indicate the division of scenes into the two main categories of diverbium, spoken dialogue, and canticum, lines accompanied by a tibia player (tibicen). On average, nearly two-thirds of the play is occupied by canticum. There were apparently two varieties of canticum: the first was recitative, written in iambic, trochaic or anapaestic septenarii or octonarii (seven- or eight-feet lines); the second was lyric song in more intricate and variable metres, chiefly cretics, bacchics and ionics. Although a canticum was usually a solo aria, there were sometimes two, three or even four singers, as in the Mostellaria, and sometimes the singer danced as well. Like its Greek prototype, Roman comedy dispensed with the chorus as an integral part of the play. Sometimes the tibia player would provide a musical interlude as in the Pseudolus (573a).
According to the prefatory remarks, didascalia, to Plautus's Stichus, a slave musician named Marcipor composed the accompaniment and used tibiae sarranae throughout. This is the only direct reference to Plautus’s use of the double pipes, although there is some information about his contemporary Terence (see Wille, 1977, pp.86–7). However, the diversity and brilliance of his lyric metres show how important was the musical element; his virtuosity, which translations can hardly begin to suggest, rivals that of Aristophanes. In six of his plays lyrics take up about a quarter of the total text, and the entire corpus has slightly more recitative than regular spoken dialogue. The cantica of Plautus are often highpoints; in several of his plays they are combined with dancing to provide a joyful concluding scene. The tibia accompaniment must have had extraordinary rhythmic variety, if, as is probable, it corresponded to the intricate variety of the lyric metres. Nothing definite is known about the melodic nature of these settings and the difference between speech and song in performance has itself been questioned (Beare, 1950, pp.219ff), although such scepticism is a minority view. Cicero's remark (Academica priora, ii.7.20; cf ii.27.86) that connoisseurs of theatre music could tell from the first notes (primo inflatu) of the tibia prelude what work was to be performed might be evidence for fixed musical settings, but this would seem to be inconsistent with what is otherwise known about secular music in antiquity. Possibly the tibicen regularly stated and then improvised on a familiar theme.
Within the imagined world of the plays, supposedly Greek but reflecting many Roman characteristics, the female musician, tibicina or fidicina (from fides, ‘lyre’), lacks any status, being regularly bought and sold and a butt of jesting. Plautus seldom made technical allusions to music. In Pseudolus (1275), he refers to ionica, a kind of lascivious dance (cf Aristophanes, Frogs, 130) and in Stichus (760), to cantionem … cinaedicam (from cinaedus, ‘sodomite’).
See also Rome, §I.
W.M. Lindsay, ed.: T. Macci Plauti comoediae (Oxford, 1904–5/R)
P. Nixon, ed. and trans.: Plautus (London and Cambridge, MA, 1916–38/R)
E. Fraenkel: Plautinisches im Plautus (Berlin, 1922; It. trans., enlarged, 1960)
W. Beare: ‘The Delivery of Cantica on the Roman Stage’, Classical Review, liv (1940), 70–79
W. Beare: The Roman Stage (London, 1950, 3/1964), 45ff, 219ff
G.E. Duckworth: The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, NJ, 1952, enlarged 2/1994 by R. Hunter), esp. 361ff
E. Paratore: ‘Il flautista nel Duskolos e nello Pseudolus’, Revista di cultura classica e medioevale, i (1959), 310–25
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 158ff, 308ff
E. Paratore: ‘Plaute et la musique’, Maske und Kothurn, xv (1969), 131–60
F.H. Sandbach: The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (London, 1977)
G. Wille: Einführung in das römische Musikleben (Darmstadt, 1977), 80–82
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN