Works Cited

Primary Sources

• The twenty surviving comedies of Plautus are the foundation of this episode. The plays discussed directly are the Pseudolus, first produced in 191 BCE and the best-attested date in the corpus, the Miles Gloriosus, the Menaechmi, the Amphitruo, the Aulularia, the Mostellaria, and the Casina. The Loeb Classical Library edition by Wolfgang de Melo, published in five volumes between 2011 and 2013, is the current standard for the Latin text with facing English translation and supersedes the older Nixon Loeb. The prologues are a distinct category of evidence and are the direct source for the remarks in Part Two about audience management, crying babies, and competing entertainments, though it should be noted that some prologues are later additions written for revival performances rather than original Plautine text.
• For the biographical tradition, the surviving testimony is thin and late. Cicero refers to Plautus in the Brutusand elsewhere and is the basis for the conventional death date. Aulus Gellius, in the Attic Nights, preserves the mill story and the imprisonment story, and reports the scholarly disputes of the first century before the common era over which plays were genuine. Varro's classification of the plays is known through Gellius rather than directly. Festus preserves the Sarsina birthplace. The methodological point made in Part One, that these details resemble comic plot situations closely enough to raise suspicion of reconstruction, is standard in current scholarship rather than a novel argument.
• For the absence of a permanent theatre and the senatorial opposition to one, the relevant testimony includes Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Tertullian, whose account of Pompey's temple arrangement is the source of that story and who was writing far later and with his own reasons for disapproving of theatres.

Archaeological Evidence

• No physical remains of the temporary wooden stages survive, which is the expected result of structures designed to be dismantled within weeks. Reconstruction depends on the internal evidence of the plays themselves, on later theatrical wall painting from Rome, Pompeii, and Oplontis, and on the surviving stone theatres of the later Republic and empire read backwards with appropriate caution.
• The terracotta figurines of the comic slave character discussed in Part Three are attested widely across the Roman world in domestic, sanctuary, and funerary contexts. The interpretation of their significance, particularly whether their popularity indicates anything about attitudes toward the enslaved, is contested, and the episode presents the evidence rather than a conclusion.
• The principal manuscript witness is the Ambrosian palimpsest in Milan, a fourth- or fifth-century codex of Plautus overwritten in the seventh century, first read by Angelo Mai in the early nineteenth century. The Palatine manuscript family provides the other main line of transmission.

Secondary Sources

• Moore, Timothy J. The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. University of Texas Press, 1998. The standard treatment of the performance conditions and of how the plays manage a crowd; underlies much of Part Two.
• McCarthy, Kathleen. Slaves, Masters, and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy. Princeton University Press, 2000. Sets out the safety-valve reading and the tension between rebellion and social conservatism that Part Three discusses.
• Stewart, Roberta. Plautus and Roman Slavery. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Reads the plays against the material realities of slaveholding and against the Hannibalic War context, and is the source for the connection between the plays and the recent experience of that war.
• Anderson, William S. Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy. University of Toronto Press, 1993. Argues for Plautine originality against the older view of him as a translator of Greek originals.
• Segal, Erich. Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus. Second edition, Oxford University Press, 1987. A readable account of the festival context and of the inversion argument.
• Beacham, Richard C. The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. Harvard University Press, 1991. The evidence for the performance tradition and the question of masks, which the episode treats as probable rather than certain. Richard F. Hardin's introductory work on Plautus in translation surveys the descent from Plautus through Shakespeare, Molière, and the modern stage.