On the other hand, when he discusses Plautus’ life and work (pp. 24): “ was always a play of pure situation, not of character, and as such is certainly not Menandrian.” Even if G.’s assertions are correct, his boldness gives the impression that we understand ancient comedy and its development better than we do. Just as he tends to want to fit the Greek comedies into predictable molds, so he tends to want to put the Menaechmi itself into a set category (p. seems to believe that we know enough about the style of Menander and the other Hellenistic dramatists to be able to make confident generalizations about their lost plays. 31): “there is much more material and arbitrary variety here than we should expect to find in the prologues of the Greek originals of these plays if we had them all.” G. Yet the conclusion that he draws from this evidence relies on a debatable assumption about Greek New Comedy (p. 38, “Plautus explains Plautus”) when discussing the authenticity of the Menaechmi‘s prologue, for example, he compares its structure with that of every other extant Plautine prologue. to evaluate the Menaechmi in light of Plautus’ other works (as he rightly says on p. 7) and makes valiant-though not always convincing-attempts to distinguish material attributable to Plautus from material likely to have been in the play’s Greek original. emphasizes Plautus’ synthesis of elements from Greek New Comedy and Atellane Farce (see the diagram of “Plautus’ place in the ancient dramatic tradition” on p.
Afterwards come the play’s text with full apparatus, a line-by-line commentary, the four appendixes (“The character of the transmission,” “Metrical conspectus,” “Some points of prosody,” “Statistics for the senarius”), a wide-ranging bibliography (with separate sections for “Ancient witnesses,” “Critical editions and commentaries by date,” and “Other references in the apparatus criticus”), an index to the commentary, and a prosodical index.
attaches to an appreciation of Plautine meter). The Introduction is divided into four parts: “The genre” (15 pages), “This play” (18 pages), “The MSS and the transmission” (6 pages), and “Scanning and reading Plautus’ verse” (24 pages-indicative of the importance G. It provides helpful outlines of the action, good discussions of character development, and insights into everything from etymology to Roman law.
With advanced students, however, teachers ought not to be scared away from using this excellent, up-to-date edition. They should, in fact, do that if their students are not very far along in Latin. One glance at the book’s 63-page introduction and four appendixes may be enough to send their teachers scurrying to order, instead, the school text of Moseley & Hammond or of Lawall & Quinn. Unfortunately, G.’s luggage is-or appears to be-too heavy for many American undergraduates to carry. If this book were a suitcase, it would be about to burst its locks with all that is packed into it.
Professional classicists will be impressed not just by the quantity of information presented on its pages, but by the quality and originality of the author’s scholarship, the amount of painstaking labor that he has invested in every sophisticated analysis, and the graceful precision of his writing. Gratwick’s offspring deserves a warm welcome into the family. The birth of a Cambridge Latin Classic is always a blessed event, and A.