PLAUTUS 



PLEBISCITE 



233 





his life. It is not certain whether Plautus ever 

 obtained the Roman franchise. He was the con- 

 temporary of N.evius and of Ennius. 



His plays appear not to have been published 

 during his lifetime, but to have been left in the 

 hands of the actors, who probably lx>th interpolated 

 and omitted passages to suit them for the stage. 

 Almost all the prologues were written after his 

 death. About 130 plays were attributed to him in 

 the time of Gellius, who held most of them to be 

 the work of earlier dramatists, revised and im- 

 proved by Plautus. Roman critics considered most 

 of them to be spurious. Varro in his treatise 

 Qutestiones Plautiiue limited the genuine come- 

 dies to twenty-one ; and these so-called ' Varronian 

 comedies ' are the same which we now possess, 

 only one, the Vidularia, being lost. Plautus' 

 plays were immensely popular on tbe stage, not 

 only with the people, but with the educated 

 classes, and were acted, as Amobius tells us, in 

 the time of Diocletian, five centuries later. Plautus 

 borrowed his plots to a large extent from the New 

 Attic Comedy, which dealt witli social life to the 

 exclusion of politics ; he doubtless imitated its 

 general types of character, but he ' adapted ' very 

 freely, and infused into his liorrowed framework a 

 new and minister life, which was Roman to the 

 very core. His perfect spontaneity, vivacity, and 

 vigour of language, and the comic power of his 

 dialogues, show tliat these are the genuine fruit of 

 his own genius. The scenes of his comedies are 

 always laid in Athens or in some Greek town. 

 Had he depicted the family life of Romans as so 

 corrupt, the magistrates would no doubt have 

 interfered ; but the Greek personages of his plays 

 speak and act in every respect like Romans ; they 

 refer familiarly to places in Italy, to streets, magis- 

 trates, and customs at Rome. Not even Shake- 

 speare is more careless about inconsistency of this 

 kind. It is probable that Plautus wrote with great 

 rapidity ; some of his finest comedies are spoilt 

 through the action l>eing too hurried towards the 

 close. Roman comedy expressed ' a rebound from 

 the severer duties of life ; Plautus' audience were 

 in holiday mood, and (lid not expect to be admon- 

 ished as to duty or entertained with serious reflec- 

 tion. His leading characters possess boundless 

 animal spirit -, infinite resource in difficulty, and but 

 small conscience. His heroines show that, as Sellar 

 says, Plautus was more familiar with the ways of 

 ' hbertinre ' than of Roman ladies. His favourite 

 subject is a plot by which a slave, on behalf of his 

 young master and the mistress of the latter, cheats 

 a father or some one else. Plautus shows no feel- 

 ing for nature, though he is fond of describing the 

 MM in calm and storm ; his lack of any sense of 

 natural beauty and of high imagination makes a 

 deep gulf between him and Aristophanes. Yet he 

 shows distinct creative power, as in the character of 

 Kuclio the miser in the Aitlularia, who, though 

 entirely possessed by his one idea, is still honest and 

 UdepOOMBt and not contemptible. Fine touches 

 are not wanting. In the Captivi the slave Tyn- 

 ilanis, cheerfully willing to sacrifice all for his young 

 master, shows that Plautus hail the power to con- 

 ceive a really noble character. The charm of 

 Plautus, lying in his genuine humour and powerful 

 grasp of character, goes deep down to the roots of 

 human nature ; he delights his readers to-day as 

 truly as when he made Roman theatres ring with 

 applause, or when St Jerome solaced himself in his 

 cell by reading the well-loved comedies. His joyous 

 sense in all circumstances of the gladness of life is 

 the sign of a strong and manly nature ; he makes 

 his reader look involuntarily at the bright side of 

 things. According to Sellar, the five best plays are 

 A ulularia, Captim, Menrzchmi, Pieudolns, Rudens. 

 Shakespeare has imitated the plot of the Mencechmi, 



entirely recasting it, in his Comedy of Errors. 

 Moliere's L'Avare is borrowed from the Aulularia. 

 English translations are by Thornton and Warner 

 (1767-74), and H. T. Riley (1880). Ritschl has shown 

 great acuteness in restoring Plautus' text, which is very 

 corrupt (2d ed. 1871). The complete edition which he 

 contemplated was continued by his pupils, G. Goetz and 

 others ( 1878 el seq.). See also Sellar, Roman Poets of the 

 Republic. 



Playfair, JOHN, mathematician and natural 

 philosopher, was born at Benvie manse, near Dundee, 

 March 10, 1748, and studied at St Andrews. In 1773 

 he succeeded his father as minister of Lift' and 

 Benvie. During his leisure hours he still pro- 

 secuted his favourite mathematical and geological 

 studies, and communicated to the Royal Society of 

 London two memoirs, On the Arithmetic of Impos- 

 sible Quantities and Account of the Lithological 

 Survey of Schiehallion. In 1785 he became joint- 



Erofessor of Mathematics in Edinburgh University, 

 lit exchanged his chair for that of Natural Philo- 

 sophy in 1805. He became a strenuous supporter 

 of the ' Huttonian theory ' in geology, and, after 

 publishing in 1802 his Illustrations of the Hut- 

 tonian Theory of the Earth (see GEOLOGY, Vol. 

 V. p. 148), he made many journeys for the sake 

 of more extensive observations, particularly in 

 1815, when he visited France, Switzerland, and 

 Italy. He died at Edinburgh, 19th July 1819. 

 Playfair was during the later part of his life 

 secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

 From 1804 he was a contributor to the Edinburgh 

 Review and to the Transactions of the Royal 

 Society of Edinburgh, and wrote many important 

 articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica. His 

 separate works are the Elements of Geometry ( 1795 ) 

 and Outlines of Natural Philosophy (1812-16). 



Plays. See DRAMA, THEATRE. A relic of the 

 censorship of the press survives in Britain in the 

 licensing of stage plays. By an Act of 1843 no 

 plays may be acted for hire till they have been 

 submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, who may 

 refuse to license them in whole or in parts ; the 

 official who reads them for this purpose being the 

 'examiner of stage plays.' A penalty of 50 

 attaches to the offence of acting an unlicensed or 

 prohibited play ; and the theatre in which it is 

 represented forfeits its license. In the United 

 States there is no general censor, but local 

 authorities have power to forbid the representa- 

 tion of plays which they consider to be hurtful to 

 morality. 



Plea, the answer of the defendant to the 

 plaintiffs demand or charge. Pleas were divided 

 formerly into pleas dilatory ( where the party seeks 

 to break down the conclusion of the action without 

 entering into the merits of the case) and peremptory, 

 Demurrers (q.v.), in Abatement (q.v.), special In 

 bar, &c. ; now the plea is usually Guilty or Not 

 Guilty (see CRIMINAL LAW). In Scots law, plea 

 means also a written statement by counsel of the 

 legal grounds on which the party bases his case. 

 In English civil procedure this is called Pleading : 

 a term applied in criminal law to the accusation 

 of the prosecutor or the answer of the accused. 

 Pleadings have been much simplified by the 

 Judicature Acts (1873-76). In the United States 

 the New York legislature established a uniform 

 procedure which has been adopted by most of the 

 states. ' Pleas of the Crown ' is an old term for 

 criminal cases. In the Houses of Parliament plead- 

 ing, as in the superior courts of law, must be con- 

 ducted at the Bar (q.v.). 



Plebeians. See ROME, TRIBUNE. 



Plebiscite, the name given, in the political 

 phraseology of modern France, to a decree of the 



