Rome's slaves rewrote Greek comedy; the copy outlived it (240 BCE)

Before: a city with games and no plays

In 241 BCE the Roman Republic ended twenty-three years of war against Carthage, annexed Sicily as its first overseas province, and became the dominant power in the western Mediterranean. It had a census, a treasury, a road-building programme, a state religion with a fixed calendar of public games, and an army that had taught itself to fight at sea. What it did not have was a literature. There was no Latin book. There was no Latin poem by a named author that a Roman could take down and read. There were laws cut into bronze, priestly annals kept year by year on whitened boards, funeral eulogies stored in aristocratic houses, and a body of ritual song — the Carmen Saliare chanted by the leaping priests of Mars — already so archaic that by the first century CE the priests performing it could no longer explain what the words meant.¹ Rome had writing. It had no written art. And at the Ludi Romani, the games held for Jupiter every September, there was performance of several kinds, and not one of them was a play.

The games without a script

The Roman tradition about its own theatrical prehistory is preserved in Livy, who places the origin in a plague year. In 364 BCE, with the city suffering an epidemic that no ritual expiation had checked, the magistrates instituted ludi scaenici and imported performers from Etruria. Livy's description is precise about what these performers did not do: dancers summoned from Etruria, moving to the measures of the piper, "performed not ungraceful movements in the Etruscan manner" — without singing, and without miming the sense of any song.² From the Etruscan word for such a performer, ister, Livy derives the Latin histrio, the word Rome would use for actor for the next eight centuries.

Livy wrote that chapter three hundred years after the events it describes, and modern scholarship treats it as reconstruction rather than record. Gesine Manuwald's Roman Republican Theatre (2011) sets out the problem plainly: the account is built on a Greek evolutionary template, an antiquarian's attempt to supply Rome with a Poetics-shaped prehistory in which crude beginnings ripen into literary drama.³ But the chapter preserves something the template did not require it to invent. Performance at Rome was ritual before it was art, propitiatory before it was entertaining, and imported before it was native. The state paid for it out of religious obligation. Nobody wrote it down.

Four kinds of performance, none of them literature

What Rome did possess before 240 BCE was a set of unscripted Italian performance traditions, each with its own occasion and none with an author:

• Fescennine verses — improvised, obscene, abusive exchanges in the old Saturnian metre, performed at harvest festivals and at weddings. Two performers traded insults; the form's function was apotropaic as much as comic, the obscenity intended to turn the evil eye away from the fortunate.⁴
• Fabulae Atellanae — masked farce from Oscan-speaking Campania, built on four fixed types: Maccus the fool, Bucco the babbler, Pappus the credulous old man, and Dossennus the hunchbacked trickster. These were improvised around a scenario, in Oscan, and only much later written down in Latin.
• Ludiones and the tibia — the Etruscan dance-to-pipe performance Livy describes, absorbed into the religious games and paid for by the state.
• Triumphal and funeral song — the soldiers' mocking verses at a triumph, and the nenia sung over the dead, both formulaic and both anonymous.

Every one of these forms was oral, improvised, and collective. None had a text, a plot, or an author. A Roman in 250 BCE had no word for the thing a playwright does, because there was no such occupation. The vocabulary Rome would eventually use is itself a record of the borrowing: histrio from Etruscan, and from Greek poeta, comoedia, tragoedia, scaena, scaenicus, chorus, thymele. Latin had to import the noun before it could import the profession.

What Athens already had

Two hundred and fifty miles east, the situation was the reverse. Athenian New Comedy — the domestic, plot-driven, romantic comedy that replaced the political satire of Aristophanes after the loss of Athenian independence in 322 BCE — was by 240 BCE not a living avant-garde but a classic. Menander, its central figure, had been dead for roughly half a century. He had written something on the order of 108 plays.⁵ His texts, and those of his rivals Diphilus of Sinope and Philemon of Syracuse and their successor Apollodorus of Carystus, circulated in book form across the Hellenistic world, from Alexandria to Antioch to the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily.

They were performed by professionals with legal standing. The technitai of Dionysus — the guilds of Artists of Dionysus attested from the early third century BCE — negotiated with cities as corporate bodies, held immunity from military service and taxation, and travelled under diplomatic safe-conduct in wartime.¹⁷ To be a Greek actor was to hold a recognised, protected, honourable trade. That fact is worth holding onto, because within a century Rome would receive the plays and refuse the status: the same profession that carried civic privileges in the Greek world would carry legal disgrace in the Latin one.

The Greek cities Rome had just conquered

The transmission did not require a voyage to Athens. Greek-speaking cities were already inside the Roman orbit and had been for a generation. Tarentum, the largest Greek city in southern Italy, with a theatre, a literary culture, and a population that read Menander, surrendered to Rome in 272 BCE after the withdrawal of Pyrrhus.⁶ Rhegium, Locri, Neapolis, and Cumae were Greek-speaking and Roman-controlled. Syracuse, the intellectual capital of the Greek west, would fall in 212 BCE.

Rome absorbed these cities as a conqueror absorbs: through treaty, garrison, tribute, and captives. The people who carried Greek drama to Rome did not arrive as invited teachers. They arrived, in the first and decisive instance, as property.

The transmission: a war captive with a repertoire

240 BCE, at the Roman Games

In September 240 BCE, at the Ludi Romani held to mark the end of the First Punic War, a man the Romans called Lucius Livius Andronicus staged a tragedy and a comedy in Latin. Both were adaptations of Greek originals. Cicero, writing two centuries later and using the consular year as his anchor, treats that production as the beginning of the whole tradition, and modern scholarship — while contesting details of the date — treats it the same way. It is the first datable event in the history of Latin literature.⁷

The ancient tradition holds that Andronicus was a Greek from Tarentum, taken as a boy when the city fell to Rome, enslaved, brought into the household of a member of the Livian gens, employed as a tutor to the household's children, and manumitted — his Roman name preserving his owner's nomen, Livius, alongside his Greek one, Andronikos.⁸ Elements of this account are late and reconstructed, and the biography may have been built backwards out of the name. What is not contested is the shape of the thing. The first author in Latin was a Greek-speaker who came to Rome as the outcome of a war, and whose command of two literatures was a by-product of his enslavement.

He did not only adapt plays. Andronicus translated the Odyssey into Latin Saturnians — the Odusia, which survives in about forty-six fragments and remained a school text for two centuries. Denis Feeney's Beyond Greek (2016) argues that this is the genuinely strange event, stranger than the plays: in a Mediterranean of many multilingual societies, none of which had produced a text-based literature comparable to the Greek, the systematic literary translation of one language's canon into another was, in Feeney's phrase, "unusual if not unprecedented."⁹ Rome did not merely borrow Greek genres. It invented the practice of literary translation in order to borrow them.

Naevius, and what a Roman joke cost

The generation after Andronicus tested how far the new form could go. Gnaeus Naevius, a Campanian who had served in the First Punic War, wrote tragedies, comedies, and a Latin epic on that war, and he wrote fabulae praetextae — plays on Roman historical subjects, the one genuinely Roman dramatic invention of the period. He also used the stage to attack living Roman nobles, and specifically the Caecilii Metelli. The exchange preserved in the ancient commentaries is a hostile line about the family's luck — that it is by fate that the Metelli become consuls at Rome — answered by the family's own threat of a beating.¹⁰

Naevius was imprisoned. He was released by the tribunes after retracting, and he appears to have died in exile at Utica around 201 BCE. The episode set a boundary that Roman comedy would not cross again for the rest of the Republic. Greek Old Comedy had named and savaged living politicians on a state-funded stage; Roman comedy, from Naevius's imprisonment onward, did not. The satire went underground, into a fictional Greece where nobody had a Roman name.

Plautus: the rewrite, not the translation

Titus Maccius Plautus — whose very name reads like a stage joke, Maccus being the fool of Atellan farce — was active from roughly 205 to 184 BCE. Antiquity attributed about 130 plays to him; the scholar Varro, sifting for authenticity, accepted twenty-one.³ Those twenty-one survive, and they constitute the largest single body of Latin literature to come down to us from the Republic.

What Plautus did to his Greek models was for a long time misread as incompetence. Eduard Fraenkel's Plautinisches im Plautus, published in Berlin in 1922 and untranslated into English until 2007, ended that reading permanently.¹¹ Fraenkel isolated, feature by feature, the elements in the Latin plays that could not have stood in a Greek New Comedy: the extravagant mythological comparisons in which a slave describes himself as Odysseus or Achilles; the "running slave" who bursts on stage with urgent news and then delays delivering it for forty lines; the identification of a character with a god; the wild accumulation of compound coinages. These were not a translator's errors. They were a comic system Plautus built on top of the borrowed plot.

The metrical evidence points the same way. Menander wrote predominantly in spoken iambic trimeter. Plautus converted enormous stretches of his sources into cantica — sung and recitative passages in a repertoire of lyric metres — so that a Plautine comedy is closer in performance texture to a musical than to the conversational Greek play it derives from. Cesare Questa's La metrica di Plauto e di Terenzio (2007) is the modern authority on that transformation and on the manuscript evidence for it.¹² The plot came from Athens. The show did not.

Photograph by Gary Todd. Mosaic signed by Dioskourides of Samos, from the Villa of Cicero, Pompeii. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. · Public Domain

Terence, the African freedman, and the charge of contaminatio

Publius Terentius Afer produced six plays between 166 and 160 BCE and then vanished — he died, according to the ancient tradition, in 159 BCE on a voyage to Greece. The biography attached to his works, written by Suetonius in the second century CE and preserved by the fourth-century commentator Donatus, reports that he was born at Carthage, was the slave at Rome of the senator Terentius Lucanus, and was educated in the liberal arts and freed early by an owner impressed with his talent and his looks.¹³ The cognomen Afer means "the African." How much of this life is inference from the name is debated; the ancient record offers no alternative.

All six of his plays survive, and each carries a prologue in which Terence argues with his critics. This is the transmission documenting itself. His accuser — the older playwright Luscius of Lanuvium — charged him with contaminatio: spoiling Greek plays by splicing them together. In the prologue to Adelphoe, Terence answers by confessing in detail. There is a scene in Diphilus's Synapothnescontes, he says, in which a young man abducts a girl from a pimp; Plautus, adapting the same Greek play, left the scene out; Terence has taken it over into his Adelphoe and translated it word for word. He then invites the audience to judge "whether they think a theft has been committed, or a passage has been restored to notice which had been passed over in neglect."¹⁴

That prologue is the earliest surviving argument in European literature about the ethics of adaptation, and Terence loses it on the terms he sets and wins it on every other. He did commit the theft. The scene survives only because he committed it.

The men who actually staged it

Behind the named authors stood a production system the texts themselves barely name. A Roman play was commissioned by the magistrates responsible for a festival — the curule aediles, or the family financing funeral games — and sold to them outright. The playwright was paid once, and the 8,000 sesterces Terence received for Eunuchus is recorded precisely because it was exceptional. The production was mounted by a grex, a company under a dominus gregis who was manager, producer, and lead actor at once.

The one such figure whose name survives in quantity is Lucius Ambivius Turpio. He had produced the plays of Caecilius Statius — himself an Insubrian Gaul brought to Rome as a war captive and later freed — and he produced most or all of Terence's. In the prologues to Heauton Timorumenos and Hecyra, the speaker steps forward and identifies himself as Turpio, arguing the young playwright's case in his own voice and reminding the audience that he had carried Caecilius through early failures too.¹⁴ Two of the three men in that relationship — the manager's previous author and, on the ancient account, his current one — had entered Rome as property. The third was staging plays performed by companies whose members were, in the main, slaves.

How the books got to Rome

An adaptation requires a copy of the original, and Greek books reached Rome by the same routes as Greek people. The largest single consignment arrived in 168 BCE, when Lucius Aemilius Paullus defeated Perseus at Pydna and ended the Macedonian monarchy. Paullus took the royal library — the accumulated Greek collection of the Antigonid kings — and, alone among the spoils, kept it, giving it to his sons rather than surrendering it to the treasury.¹⁵ One of those sons was adopted into the Cornelii and became Scipio Aemilianus, in whose circle Terence was later said to have moved. The first substantial Greek library in Rome was war plunder, and it entered a household directly connected to the theatre.

Teachers arrived by a similar route. Suetonius records that Crates of Mallos, head of the Pergamene school of grammar, came to Rome as an envoy from Attalus around 168 BCE, fell into an open sewer near the Palatine, broke his leg, and spent his long convalescence giving lectures — the first systematic instruction in Greek literary scholarship the city had heard.¹⁶ Below that level, Greek-speaking household slaves taught the children of the Roman elite as a matter of course, exactly as Livius Andronicus had done a lifetime earlier. The pipeline that delivered the plays was continuous with the pipeline that delivered the tutors, and both ran on conquest.

What changed and what was replaced

A literature that begins in translation

Within two generations of 240 BCE, Latin had acquired an epic, a tragic corpus, a comic corpus, a historical drama, and a metrical apparatus for all of them — and every one of these was built on a Greek template. This is the fact that makes Roman literary history unlike any other in the ancient Mediterranean. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, and Persian literatures grew from their own liturgical and archival roots. Latin literature was founded on the deliberate importation of another culture's forms, by men who in most cases learned Latin as a second language.

Sander Goldberg's Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic (2005) traces how quickly this became invisible to the Romans themselves: within a century the imported apparatus was simply what Latin literature was, and Horace's later line about captive Greece taking her savage captor prisoner reads as a joke about something already finished.⁸ The importation also changed the receiving language. Latin acquired a technical vocabulary for genre, metre, and performance; it acquired the Greek quantitative metres, adapted to Latin's different accentual system; and it acquired, in the palliata, a register of colloquial spoken Latin that survives nowhere else in the ancient record. Plautus is the largest surviving sample of how ordinary Latin was actually spoken in the second century BCE, and it survives because he was writing jokes for a crowd rather than prose for the senate.

The fantasy Greece

Roman comedy on Greek models was called fabula palliata — "the play in the Greek cloak." The convention was rigid: the setting is a Greek city, usually Athens; the characters have Greek names; the money is in minae and drachmae; and the behaviour on display is behaviour no Roman audience would tolerate in a Roman. Young men squander their fathers' estates on courtesans. Slaves outwit, insult, and openly manipulate their masters, and end the play unpunished and often rewarded. Fathers are humiliated. The plots turn on prostitution, kidnapping, rape, and the recovery of children exposed at birth.

None of this could have been staged in Roman dress. There was a genre for that — the fabula togata, comedy in Roman costume — and its loss is one of the most complete in Latin literature: no complete play survives, only fragments and titles. The ancient commentators record that the togata operated under a restriction the palliata did not: a slave could not be shown outsmarting his master.³ The rule marks the boundary exactly. Set the play in Athens and a Roman audience will laugh at a slave running rings around a citizen. Set it in Rome and the same joke is not funny.

The stock company Rome kept forever

What the transmission handed to Rome, and through Rome to Europe, was less a set of plays than a working apparatus — a cast of functional types, a small number of plot engines, and a grammar for combining them. The roster is remarkably stable from Menander through Plautus and Terence:¹⁷

• the senex — the blocking old man: father, miser, or both, standing between the young and what they want
• the adulescens — the young man, in love, out of money, and useless at solving his own problem
• the servus callidus — the clever slave who solves it for him, and who runs the plot from below
• the miles gloriosus — the braggart soldier, rich in campaign stories and empty of courage
• the meretrix — the courtesan, by turns mercenary and, in Terence, the moral centre of the play
• the leno — the pimp, the one figure the genre permits an audience to hate without complication
• the parasitus — the hanger-on trading flattery for dinner

The plot engines are as few: mistaken identity, the long-lost child recognised by tokens, the intrigue against the blocking figure, the misunderstanding sustained by one character's ignorance of what the audience knows. Dramatic irony as a systematic technique — the audience holding information a character lacks, and the comedy generated by the gap — is New Comedy's bequest, and it arrives in Latin fully formed.

What the palliata displaced

The new form did not enter an empty field, and its arrival was not neutral for what was already there. The Atellan farce, the Fescennine exchange, and the improvised Italian traditions did not die, but they were demoted. Over the second century BCE the Atellana was pushed to the position of exodium — the after-piece, the short farce played once the real drama had finished. A form that had been the performance became the thing appended to the performance.

The scale of the change was substantial. Rome's calendar of festival days carrying ludi scaenici expanded steadily across the second century BCE as new games were founded and old ones extended, so that the number of days on which the state paid for scripted drama multiplied several times over within a century of Andronicus's first production.⁴ The theatre became a permanent line item in Roman public religion, staffed by imported personnel, performing imported forms.

Rome's response to its own new theatre was nonetheless ambivalent to the point of hostility, and the ambivalence was expressed architecturally. The city built no permanent theatre for one hundred and eighty-five years after Livius Andronicus's first production. Plays were staged on temporary wooden structures erected for a festival and dismantled after it. In 154 BCE the censors began construction of a stone theatre, and the senate ordered it demolished before completion and banned permanent seating at the games as contrary to public morals.¹⁸ Not until Pompey's stone theatre of 55 BCE — dedicated as an appendage to a temple of Venus Victrix, so the seating could be described as steps up to a shrine — did Rome concede that it had a theatre at all.

The end of the palliata

By around 100 BCE, nobody was writing them any more. Sextus Turpilius, who died at Sinuessa in 103 BCE, is recorded as the last author of fabulae palliatae; after him the genre stops being composed, and the Roman stage passes to mime, to the revived Atellana, and to spectacle.³ What the palliata became instead was a canon. Plautus and Terence were revived in performance through the late Republic, read as literature by Cicero's generation, and installed as school texts for the teaching of Latin style.

This is why the record's anchor date is 100 BCE rather than 240. The transmission that began with a captive's adaptation at a festival ends, a hundred and forty years later, with something more consequential than a living genre: a fixed body of Latin plays, detached from the Greek originals, carrying the entire apparatus of New Comedy in a language that would outlast Greek in western Europe by a millennium. The form died. The texts became curriculum. Curriculum is what survives.

What the cost was

The transmitters were property

The bill for this transmission was not paid in mass death. It was paid in status, in ownership, and in erasure, and it was paid overwhelmingly by the people who did the carrying.

Consider who they were. Livius Andronicus, by the ancient tradition, arrived in Rome as a captive of the war that ended Tarentine independence. Caecilius Statius, the leading comic playwright of the generation between Plautus and Terence, was an Insubrian Gaul enslaved in the Roman conquest of Cisalpine Gaul. Terence, by Suetonius's account, was a Carthaginian-born slave in a senator's house. The three most important figures in the first century of Latin drama after Andronicus were a captive, a captive, and a slave.

The companies were the same. Roman acting troupes were staffed by slaves and freedmen, owned or contracted by the dominus gregis, and a slave actor who performed badly could be beaten. The plays joke about this from inside: the lorarii, the whip-carrying strongmen who drag characters offstage for punishment, are a standing feature of the Plautine stage, played by men for whom the prop was not a fiction. Amy Richlin's Slave Theater in the Roman Republic (2017) reads the whole surviving corpus in that light, setting the palliata in what she describes as "a militarized landscape full of displaced persons and the newly enslaved," and arguing that the jokes about beatings, hunger, sale, and separation from family were written by and for people to whom none of those were hypotheticals.¹⁹ Jean-Christian Dumont's Servus: Rome et l'esclavage sous la République (1987) had already established the density of the evidence: the Roman comic stage is the single richest surviving source for how Roman slavery was actually talked about.²⁰

The supply is not incidental to the story. The decades in which the palliata flourished were the decades of Rome's largest wartime enslavements. In 167 BCE, on the senate's orders, Lucius Aemilius Paullus sacked seventy settlements in Molossian Epirus and, according to Livy and Plutarch, enslaved 150,000 people in a single operation.¹⁵ The figure is probably inflated; the scale is not in doubt. Seven years later, in 160 BCE, Terence's Adelphoe — a play adapted from Menander about how to raise sons well — was staged at the funeral games of that same Aemilius Paullus.

The status Rome invented for them

In the Greek world, actors had guild protection, tax immunity, and safe passage. Rome gave them the opposite. The Roman stage performer was subject to infamia: a formal legal disability that stripped civil standing, barred him from public office and from service in the legions, and removed the ordinary protections a citizen held against corporal punishment.²¹ A Roman citizen who went on stage lost rights by the act of going on stage.

The result is a peculiar asymmetry. Rome adopted the Greek repertoire wholesale and refused the Greek social settlement that had come with it. The plays were prestigious enough to be commissioned by magistrates and financed by the state; the people performing them were legally degraded for performing them. Roscius, the one actor of the Republic to achieve wealth and social access, is famous precisely because he was the exception, and Cicero had to argue his standing in court to defend it.

The audience that walked out

The material conditions of performance shaped what the transmission could carry. Terence's Hecyra — his most formally ambitious play, and the one closest to Menander in tone — failed twice. In the prologue written for the third attempt, Terence sets out what happened, and it is the frankest surviving account of a Roman audience:

"When I first began to perform it, there was talk of a boxing match, and there were also hopes of a tightrope walker too; slaves were arriving, there was a din, women were screaming — these things forced me to leave the stage before I had reached the end."

The second attempt went no better: "The first part went down well; but then word got around that a show of gladiators was going to be given: people flocked together, there was an uproar, they were shouting and fighting for a place."¹⁴

The play succeeded only at its third staging, at Aemilius Paullus's funeral games in 160 BCE. The competition matters: a Roman play was one attraction among several at a festival, on a temporary stage, with no ticketing and no obligation on anyone to stay. The form that survived was the form that could hold a distracted crowd against boxers. That is a large part of why Plautus — loud, musical, unsubtle — was the commercial model, and why the quieter Terence became a school text rather than a popular one.

Anonymous Carolingian illuminator, c. 825 CE. Terence, Comoediae, Vat. lat. 3868, ff. 4v–5r. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. · Public Domain

Menander stops being copied

The most consequential cost is the least visible, because it consists of an absence. Menander wrote something on the order of 108 plays. Not one survived the manuscript tradition. By the end of antiquity copies had ceased to be made; the Byzantine schoolmasters who decided which Greek texts would be recopied kept Aristophanes and left Menander out.²² Everything modern readers have of him has come out of the sand: the Cairo codex of 1907, which returned substantial parts of Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, Samia, and Heros; and the Bodmer papyrus published in 1958, which returned Dyskolos, the only complete Menander play in existence.

For roughly two thousand years, then, the New Comedy of Greece was known to Europe almost entirely through its Latin adaptations. Readers who wanted Menander read Terence, whom Julius Caesar addressed in a surviving epigram as o dimidiate Menander — "O half-Menander" — praising his pure diction and complaining that he lacked the comic force of his model.¹³ Caesar was in a position to make the comparison. Within a few centuries, nobody was.

The adaptations did not cause that loss in any simple way: manuscripts were lost for many reasons, and Greek texts vanished across the board in the same period. But the relationship is not innocent either. The Latin versions travelled with the language of empire and with the Latin school curriculum; they made the Greek originals redundant for a western readership that increasingly could not read Greek; and contaminatio stripped attribution as it went. A scene by Diphilus survives inside a play by Terence with Diphilus's name attached only because Terence, under attack, chose to name him. Most such debts were never itemised at all.

The chain that runs to the sitcom

What Rome received in 240 BCE it then transmitted forward with unusual completeness, and the line is traceable step by step:

1. Fourth century CE — Aelius Donatus, the grammarian who taught Jerome, writes a commentary on Terence. Terence is now a standard text for teaching Latin style, and the commentary is why we know what his Greek models were.²²
2. c. 825 CE — the Vatican Terence (Vat. lat. 3868) is copied in the Carolingian world, with some 150 miniatures — 144 scenes from the plays, plus painted cabinets of comic masks — after a late-antique illustrated exemplar. Terence is being read, taught, and illuminated in a Latin Europe that has largely lost Greek.²³
3. Tenth century — Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, a canoness in Saxony, writes six Latin plays explicitly designed to substitute Christian martyrs for Terence's pagan lovers while keeping his dramatic technique. Her Dulcitius turns a lustful governor's assault on three imprisoned sisters into farce when he embraces sooty kitchen pots in the dark.²⁴ She is the first named woman playwright in European history, and her form is a Roman adaptation of a Greek one.
4. Sixteenth century — the commedia dell'arte professionalises the stock company across Italy: the miser, the braggart captain, the clever servant, the young lovers. The types are the palliata's, transmitted through the school reading of Plautus and Terence.
5. 1592–94 — Shakespeare writes The Comedy of Errors from Plautus's Menaechmi, with the second pair of twins imported from Amphitruo. Falstaff and Parolles are milites gloriosi; his resourceful servants are servi callidi.²⁵
6. 1660s–1670s — Molière adapts Aulularia into L'Avare and Amphitruo into Amphitryon, and builds a career on Roman comic architecture.
7. Twentieth century onward — the situation comedy inherits the entire apparatus: a fixed cast of types, a domestic setting, plots driven by misunderstanding and concealed information, and a resolution that restores the household. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) simply names its source.

The bill

The transmission of Greek New Comedy to Rome destroyed no city and killed no population. Measured against the other entries in this atlas its bill is modest, and it is recorded here at that scale. But it was not free, and the account is specific:

• The founding transmitter was war booty, and the two most important playwrights after him were an enslaved Gaul and an enslaved African.
• The performing companies were staffed by enslaved and freed people whose bodies were legally beatable and whose civil standing Rome removed by statute.
• The Roman wars that filled the Mediterranean slave market in these decades — Tarentum, Syracuse, Cisalpine Gaul, Macedonia, Epirus in 167 BCE — are the same wars that supplied the theatre with its personnel and much of its audience.
• Attribution was destroyed as a matter of ordinary professional practice. Contaminatio was not plagiarism by Roman standards, but its effect was that Greek authorship dissolved into Latin authorship.
• The Greek originals stopped being copied, and the Latin versions are part of the reason a western readership stopped needing them.

There is a version of this story in which Rome is a thief, and a version in which Rome is a preservationist, and the honest reading is that these are one act described from two ends. The Latin plays are the reason the genre survived at all: without the Roman adaptation, New Comedy would have vanished as completely as the togata did, leaving a name and a handful of quotations. The Latin plays are also part of the reason we cannot now read what they adapted. Adaptation carried the form across two thousand years and consumed the original in the carrying — and the men who did the carrying were, for the most part, not free to decline the work.