Comparative Openings of Speeches

The basis of the invention here is clearly the play on ludi (‘games’); similar ones occur several times in Plautus, for example, Mil. 991: iam est ante aedis circus ubi sunt ludi faciundi mihi (‘Now there is before the house a circus arena where I must put on my games’), in a fragment of Cornicula (fr. 1 Leo): quid cessamus ludos facere? circus noster eccum adest (‘Why do we delay putting on our games? Here is our circus arena ready at hand’) and elsewhere.1 In the lines from Casina the mention of the Nemean and Olympian games is made possible only by this purely Latin play on words, so we must conclude that the games could not have occurred in this passage of the Greek original.2 Fredershausen3 has correctly pointed out the lines4 as a classic piece of evidence that Plautus in some circumstances also adds Greek material of his own.

Art · Literature · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Linguistics and language evolution