1.4 Early Latin: Plautus
Plautus (fl. c. 205-184 BCE), Roman Playwright. Latin text of his plays has been modernised in spelling.
Example: nominative plural viri, in Plautus’s day written virei.
Some features of Syntax are different:
Example: Prohibitions. In Plautus it is possible to say ‘Do not do!’ in the following ways: ne + perfect subjunctive: ne feceris (Epidicus 148); ne + present subjunctive: ne facias (Curculio 539); ne + a special verb form which dies out in later Latin: ne faxis (Mostellaria 1115).
In the works of Cicero (106-43 BCE), the most frequent common way to say ‘do not do’ is noli facere.
Audio activity 4
Now listen to the following audio conversation between James Clackson and Geoffrey Horrocks.
Download this audio clip.Audio player: Plautus’ Latin
Transcript: Plautus’ Latin
James Clackson
I know that Plautus is the first Latin author we have a lot of material from and he was certainly earlier than Virgil I think, they were a couple of hundred years BC or around then.
Geoffrey Horrocks
Yeah.
JC
Plautus’ Latin is fairly like Virgil’s Latin, isn’t it? It’s quite straightforward. Doesn’t look as different from French to classical Latin.
GH
Mm. Mm. Well, I mean, clearly the timescale is somewhat shorter but there’s actually a more important reason why Plautus looks relatively straightforward and that’s that the spelling system has been altered from how Plautus himself must have written the texts to the standardised spelling system that was current in Cicero’s day and we know that because we have inscriptions from the period when Plautus was writing these plays and the spelling system there is obviously the current spelling system of the period and it’s really rather different. So, we can be certain that Plautus would’ve spelt quite a lot of words differently and probably pronounced them differently as well. For example, we learn second declension nominative plurals had an ending with a long I. So ‘domini’ from ‘dominus’, masters. Now in Plautus’s day, those very same nominative plurals weren’t written with a long I but were written with a diphthong EI and were probably pronounced in a slightly different way, more like ‘ey’ than ‘ee’. It’s not just things like sounds and spellings though, I mean, Plautus uses quite a few constructions which are actually different from what classical Latin would normally use. I mean, a good example of that would be a prohibition telling somebody not to do something. In Cicero’s Latin, there are quite restricted options there and there’s much more variety available in Plautus’s Latin for doing that, things which were obviously fine in that period but which in Cicero’s period were ruled out as disappeared, perhaps, but certainly ruled out as somehow no longer acceptable.
JC
Mm. Okay. So, the Latin of Plautus was actually more different than classical Latin appears to us.
GH
Yeah.
Plautus’ Latin
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