He is the moment when Roman theater stops bowing to Greek prestige and starts laughing in its own accent. Plautus does not give Rome philosophy in verse; he gives it appetite with timing. He takes Greek New Comedy—neat plots about young men, strict fathers, clever slaves, prostitutes, pimps, soldiers—and translates it not only into Latin but into a Roman public’s nervous system. The scene is a festival, the performers are a troupe, the stage is a wooden platform thrown up before the temple with drums and reed-pipes warming the air, the audience is a swarm of citizens, freedmen, slaves, boys, sellers, gawkers, magistrates who paid for the show, and opportunists who have brought their arguments as well as their children. Farce is not beneath them. Farce is the civic oxygen that helps a republic breathe when law and war and debt have made the chest  ...