Literature and history dot come. Oh, Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 43, On the Move.

This show is on a play whose Latin title is Rudin's, written by the Roman writer Plautis, a play whose title

is usually translated into English as The Rope, and which was likely staged for the first time in the early 180s, B.C.E.

Long after Plotis' play, The Rope, was first staged, around the time of the Battle of Actium, that battle which ultimately

ended the Roman Republic, and gave rise to the Roman Empire that great fold at the center

of Roman history. The Roman poet Horace was working on a pair of

epistles. These epistles were written to the Emperor Augustus and a prominent

family called the Pisos and among many other things the two epistles attempted to define what

constituted good literature. Horace was at the center of Rome's most enduring period of literary output.

In the late 30s, B.C. E. Horace pinpointed which Latin authors he thought deserved the highest esteem and demonstrated that he, not too surprisingly, fit his own definitions of literary merit.

Horace also had a good deal to say about our author for today, Plottis, a playwright who lived about two centuries before Horace did.

To Horace, old Plottis's use of meter was slovenly, and Plottis's wit was shoddy, and anyone who praised

these qualities in Plottis was being, quote, too tolerant, not to say stupid."

The modern educated Roman of his own time, Horace added, quote,

knows how to distinguish between vulgarity and elegance, close quote.

And Plottis, according to Horis, displayed far more of the former than the latter.

To later Roman Littoradai, Plottis was a roughshod innovator, a prolific yet inelegant writer who conspicuously

lacked the calculated quote, how loosely Horace writes,

Plotis careers over the stage, for he can't wait to put the coins in his cash box.

Not worried after that whether his play falls flat or stands on firm footing close quote

That in essence is Horace's opinion of Plotis that the earlier writer was a bumbler, a mediocre caregiver to the newborn baby

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