Talk:Plautus

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Plautus was nominated as a good article, but it did not meet the good article criteria at the time (April 16, 2007). There are suggestions below for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.

I changed the bit saying that plautus undermines our conceptions of master-slave relationships in the roman world. Comedies which reverse the social order are not rare things. Today or in the past. look at the Lysistrata. And, I think, by reversing the social order so completely, it's an affirmation of it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be strange or funny. This is why I think the original intepretation was misleading.

A lot of this sounds more like an essay on Plautus than an article. For example, "Plautus was known for the use of Greek style in his plays. This has been a point of contention among modern scholars. One argument states that Plautus writes with originality and creativity—the other, that Plautus is a copycat of Greek New Comedy and that he makes no original contribution to playwriting. The reality lies in the middle of these two arguments." That's not *entirely* neutral, and it certainly isn't something an encyclopedia would say. --Nathan

Should the article mention Varrus and his Varronian canon? The fact that Plautus was very popular and had a lot of counterfeit plays with his namesake floating around is pretty important in my opinion. Varrus was an Augustan scholar who studied Plautus' plays and made the Varronian Canon which was 3 lists.

1. Everyone agrees it's by Plautus -> 21 plays

2. Other scholars say it's not by Plautus, Varrus says it is

3. Other scholars say it is by Plautus, Varrus says it is not

First of all, it is not "Varrus", it is "Varro", and he wasn't an Augustan scholar. You seem to have mixed up M. Terentius Varro, a Republican scholar, and his canon of 21 Plautus' plays, with M. Verrius Flaccus, a known scholar of Augustan period. Please verify this in your sources. 82.210.159.30 16:09, 9 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This notorious aspect of Plautus needs to be covered in the article.--BMF81 16:07, 7 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

some sources:

• George Fredric Franko Imagery and Names in Plautus' "Casina" The Classical Journal, Vol. 95, No. 1 (Oct. - Nov., 1999), pp. 1-17
• Catherine Connors Scents and Sensibility in Plautus' Casina The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 47, No. 1 (1997), pp. 305-309
• [1] [2]

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   a (fair representation): b (all significant views):

5. It is stable.

   

6. It contains images, where possible, to illustrate the topic.

   a (tagged and captioned): b lack of images (does not in itself exclude GA): c (non-free images have fair use rationales):

7. Overall:

   a Pass/Fail:

This is going to contain some criticisms, so I'd better start by saying that this is a fine article in many ways; the attention given to modern scholarship is probably the best I've seen in Wikipedia's treatment of any ancient author. I feel I've learnt things by reading it. But I think there are significant problems, which I set out below using the Good Article criteria.

• 1a. The prose is generally comprehensible, and I think the article is probably passable on this criterion. However, there are some patches of ambiguity. When "many of [Plautus' characters] seem to crop up in quite a few of his plays", is it individual characters who recur, or types? (In the same sentence, "seem to" and "quite a few" are vague.) Also, some topics receive introductions that add no content. These should be cut; e.g., "William S. Anderson discusses the believability of Menander versus the believability of Plautus and, in essence, says that Plautus’ plays are much less believable than those plays of Menander", "There are certain ways in which Plautus expressed himself in his plays, and these individual means of expression give a certain flair to his style of writing. The means of expression are not always specific to the writer, i.e., idiosyncratic, yet they are characteristic of the writer. The two examples of these Two characteristic means of expression in the plays of Plautus are the use of proverbs and the use of Greek language in the plays of Plautus." Similarly, there are too many "it is important to note"-type statements, and there's no need to name scholarly articles in the text as well as the footnotes.
• 1b. The lead section should summarise the article per Wikipedia:Lead section. Some topics are treated in inappropriate sections; e.g., the first sentence of "Father-Son Relationships", and the treatment of puns under "Prologues".
• 1c. Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style, punctuation belongs outside quotations of which it isn't part. There's an unclosed quotation at the end of "Understanding of Greek". In headings, capitalise only the first word and avoid restating the article title. The "Footnotes" and "Works Cited" sections are misnamed per WP:HEAD. First-person statements like "I compiled this short list" should be avoided.
• 1d. Jargon is not too bad a problem, but the average reader might not know what a medicus is or understand the significance of one being found in the forum. Actually, I'm not sure I understand the latter. A Latin term like servus callidus requires introduction.
• 2b. Citations are generally good, the reference to "a number of word studies and syntactic texts listed in the works cited section" is basically useless given the length of the section in question. The dual use of "Footnotes" and "Works Cited" is confusing; I recommending listing all cited works in a single "Notes and references" section using inline citations, and placing items from "Works Cited" that the article doesn't specifically mention under "Further reading".
• 2d. At times it's unclear whether a statement is OR or covered by a preceding citation, e.g., "he does seem to push the message..." If the latter, add or repeat a footnote.
• 3b. There are too many digressions onto tangentially related topics. We don't need to know how Naevius' date of birth is calculated, nor do we need a quotation from West to establish that the Second Punic War "engrossed the Romans"; it's sufficient to state his view that the Miles Gloriosus commented on the war. The paragraph on "Greek Old Comedy" can be reduced to a single sentence along the lines of "Social and political commentary played a major role in the Greek Old Comedy represented by the plays of Aristophanes." Follow this with a sentence or two in the same paragraph to explain how New Comedy differs. Alternatively, since it's New Comedy that actually influenced Plautus, keep the focus on New Comedy and include a brief "unlike Old Comedy" statement. The section on the Greek theatre at the start of "Stagecraft" similarly devotes a bit too much space to setting up a contrast." "The Importance of the Ludi" doesn't seem to bear directly on Plautus and would be better suited to an article on Roman theatre. The section on "Father-Son Relationships" can probably be abridged to a sentence or two. I would drop the comparison with Horace from "Contaminatio". Parts of "The Language and Style of Plautus" read like guidelines for Latin students and don't belong in an encyclopedia article (e.g., "their notation should make initial readings a bit easier", "archaic forms present the reader with a richer understanding...").
• 4a. As Nathan points out above, a statement like "The reality lies in the middle of these two arguments" violates WP:NPOV.
• 6a. The image at the top lacks a caption.

Thank you to the contributors for your work on the article so far, and I hope it'll be renominated after these issues have been addressed. EALacey 20:23, 16 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the deep review! --BMF81 02:46, 22 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Four sentences? Add more! RedRabbit 16:38, 8 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• At the same time, the Roman Republic was expanding in influence and power.—this is begging for elaboration.
• Plautus and the Gods of Roman Society goes into a lengthy digression not of any encyclopedic relevance.
• The three sentences in the beginning of Historical context are only loosely connected.
• The Gnaeus Naevius subsection seems entirely irrelevant. How did Gnaeus influence Plautus? Why mention him at all?
• The historical narrative in The Second Punic War, The Macedonian War and their Infuence on Plautus’ Plays is unnecessary. This is about Plautus, not Roman history; therefore, content must either be linked to Plautus or removed.

RedRabbit 17:35, 8 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well this ia quite an interesting and enthusiastic article. I give you a B for your interest. However it seems clear you are not a Latinist or a scholar. That is all right, that is fine. I'd rather have an enthusiast. I will enjoy going through this article making fixes. The first thing I would like to fix is the concept that he wrote musicals in any way; that is, that any of the lines were sung in songs that have melody. The line I removed is:

He is also one of the earliest pioneers of musical theater.

I saw a "funny thing" myself a few times when it came out. You can't confuse time periods and genres here; as far as I know, there is no evidence of any kind that the Romans had the musical theater, or opera either. Evidence on Roman music is pretty much in short supply, which is really quite surprising considering the high quality of Italian music and their obvious love of it. What instruments the ancient Romans did have were not of high quality by our standards and there is no tradition of famous singers. Song - forget it. We'd dearly like to know what the national anthem was. All that music in modern cinema - pure fiction. We know they had some martial music; we see representation of the drum and the horns. Most people do not know, however, that those horns were not even able to control pitch. They had the lyre. There probably was some singing at Rome, but personalized songs mixed in with the dialogue? Not as far as I know. The choruses of tragedy may have had some chanting that approached song and the recitation of epic poetry may have been very sing-song but those things are out-of-genre with comedy. Comedy is low. Aristophanes' "The Frogs" imitates the singing of frogs, which it makes sound like farting. New comedy is on a higher level but not very much. So, you let yourself get carried away by wishful thinking. A statement such as that needs not only references but a whole linked article on the Roman musical theater (but there is none as far I know).Dave (talk) 18:01, 17 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The names Philocleon and Bdelycleon are stronger than "pro-Cleon" and "anti-Cleon". Literally they mean Love-Cleon and Loathe-Cleon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.73.31.50 (talk) 20:18, 23 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Plautus had written his comedies before Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus was written. I wonder why his language is so modern compared to the latter. It contains merely isolated archaisms. jn --147.251.80.34 (talk) 13:25, 26 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Well, his language was closer to the vernacular, while the SCB is an official inscription in legal language; it's not rare to find modern forms earlier in the spoken variants of a language than in its highly codified official form. - Toothswung (talk) 14:58, 27 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder why the scholars are certain that the works by Plautus are intact as written by him and not later modernizations. -- jn 147.251.80.34 (talk) 14:04, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]