Lysidamus also has a proxy: his slave Olympio, who is a somewhat crude overseer on the family’s country estate. As Cleostrata, the wife of Lysidamus, has. Plautus is a truly popular dramatist, whose comic effect springs from exaggeration, burlesque and often coarse humour, rapid action, and a deliberately upside-down portrayal of life, in which slaves give orders to their masters, parents are hoodwinked to the advantage of sons who need money for girls, and the procurer or braggart soldier is outwitted and fails to secure the seduction or possession of the desired.
Plot Summary 1A soldier carries off a prostitute from Athens to Ephesus. Whilea slave wants to report this to his lovesick master, who is abroadon an embassy, he himself is captured at sea and given to thatsame soldier as a present. He summons his previous master5from Athens and secretly pierces through the wall shared by thetwo houses so that the lovers may have the opportunity to meet.From the roof tiles, a guard sees them embracing, but is trickedand hoaxed into believing that the girl is someone else. In the10same way Palaestrio induces the soldier to let his concubine go,on the grounds that his old neighbor’s wife is keen to marry him.He asks his mistress of his own accord to go away and gives hermany presents. He himself, caught in the old man’s house, receivespunishment as if he were an adulterer.
Plot Summary 2A young Athenian was madly in love with a freeborn1 prostitute,and she with him. Sent as an ambassador, he left home for
Pseudolus And Rudens By Plautus Summary
- 1Whether she is freeborn or not is unclear; the writer of the summaryseems to have inferred this from l. 490, where Periplectomenus,however, is speaking of her invented twin sister. If she is indeed freeborn,she is free to marry Pleusicles.