Book 3
3
Now there are in circulation under the name of Plautus about one hundred and thirty comedies; but that most learned of men Lucius Aelius thought that only twenty-five of them were his. p. 58. 4, Fun. However, there is no doubt that those which do not appear to have been written by Plautus but are attached to his name, were the work of poets of old but were revised and touched up by him, and that is why they savour of the Plautine style. Now Varro and several others have recorded that the Saturio, the Addictus, and a third comedy, the name of which I do not now recall, were written by Plautus in a bakery, when, after losing in trade all the money which he had earned in employments connected with the stage, he had returned penniless to Rome, and to earn a livelihood had hired himself out to a baker, to turn a mill, of the kind which is called a push-mill. A large mill with two handles, which two men, ordinarily slaves, pushed (truso, cf. trudo) upon, in order to turn the mill. Contrasted by Cato (Agr. x. 4 and xi. 4) with molae asinariae, which had one handle, to which a horse or an ass was attached and drew the mill around. This whole account is discredited by Leo. Plaut., Forsch., 70ff., but defended by Marx and others. On this, and on Varro's threefold division of the plays, see Klingelhoefer, Phil. Quart. iv., pp. 336 ff.
