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Plautus

Plautus

c. 254 BCE–c. 184 BCE · Rome

Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BCE) was a Roman comic playwright whose works are the earliest surviving complete Latin literary texts. Active in Rome during the late third and early second centuries BCE, he adapted Greek New Comedy—chiefly the work of Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon—into Latin verse comedies known as the fabula palliata. Twenty complete plays survive (plus the fragmentary Vidularia) from the twenty-one-play canon assembled by the scholar Varro, among them Miles Gloriosus, Pseudolus, Menaechmi, Aulularia, and Trinummus. His comedies are marked by farcical plots, stock characters such as the scheming slave and the braggart soldier, metrical inventiveness, and song-like cantica. According to ancient tradition he was born at Sarsina in Umbria; his plays later influenced Renaissance and early modern European drama.

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Stop 1 of 1254 BCE–184 BCELived

RomeרומאItaly

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Comic playwright active in Rome.

About Rome

# Rome In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, Rome lay within the Papal States, the territorial domain of the Catholic Church, though its temporal glory as an empire had long faded. The city sprawled across its famous hills along the Tiber River, a landscape of crumbling ancient monuments, medieval fortifications, and Romanesque churches that dominated the skyline. The Jewish community of Rome was among Europe's most ancient, tracing roots to the second century BCE, and it flourished in a precarious but resilient position under papal authority; while confined to restricted quarters and subject to discriminatory laws, Roman Jews maintained a sophisticated intellectual and commercial life, with Hebrew scholarship and biblical commentary flourishing despite—or perhaps because of—the community's isolation. The Jewish quarter itself, densely packed and vibrant, became a center of learning where skilled scribes copied manuscripts and rabbinical discussions drew on centuries of local tradition. What made Rome extraordinary for Torah study was not merely its learned scholars but the tangible presence of antiquity itself: the community lived amid the ruins of pagan temples and Roman law, giving their interpretations of Jewish law a unique resonance, as if they were rebuilding Jewish civilization in the very streets where Roman power had once reigned supreme.

In Rome at the same time

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In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Plautus’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

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The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Plautus’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(20)