Titus Maccius Plautus is the earliest Roman author whose works have survived. His plays, valued especially for their lively stock characters, their exuberant language and meter, and the information they provide on many aspects of Roman culture, have had a profound and wide-ranging influence on modern comedy. Ancient tradition held that Plautus was born in Sarsina, not far from modern San Marino. After making money acting or doing some other business involved with the stage, he allegedly lost his fortune in mercantile misadventures and wrote some plays while working in a mill. He then became quite successful and died an old man in 184 B.C. (hence, the guess of 254 B.C., seventy years earlier, for the year of his birth). Most of the tradition is almost certainly apocryphal. Given Plautus's acute sensitivity to what worked in performance, however, the ancient scholars were probably correct in attributing to him...