Rome’s great comic dramatist, Titus Maccius Plautus, writes Stichus in 200, when he is about sixty-three.
Writing in the style of Greek New Comedy and borrowing extensively from the Atellan farces of Italy, Plautus’ witty comedies—a unique blend of farce, music, and dance—make inventive use of colloquial Latin and of puns, allusions, and asides to the audience.
Plautus employs such stock characters as the overbearing soldier, clever slave, and miser.
He characteristically bases his plots on mistaken identity or on rivalry between father and son.
Plautus writes Pseudolus in 191, one of two plays that can be assigned definite dates.
(Of the approximately one hundred and thirty plays he wrote after settling in Rome, following a career as a stagehand, the twenty-one plays that survive in whole or part include Mercator, Miles Gloriosus, and Cistellaria, from the early period; Aulularia and Curculio, from the middle; and Captivi and Menaechmi, from the late period.)
