VIII. The Curculio derives its name from a parasite, who is the hero, and who acts his part in a plot full of fraud and forgery; the only satisfactory point in the comedy being the deserved punishment of an infamous pander.
IX. In the Cistellaria, Demipho, a Lemnian, promises his daughter to Alcesimarchus, who is in love with Silenium. The young lady has fallen into the hands of a courtesan, who endeavours to force her into a vicious course of life; she, however, steadily refuses; and it is at length discovered, by means of a box of toys (cistella,) that she is the illegitimate daughter of Demipho, and had been exposed as an infant. Her virtue is rewarded by her being happily married to her lover.
X. The Epidicus was evidently a favourite play with the author, for he makes one of the characters in another comedy say that he loves it as dearly as himself.[184] The plot turns on the common story of a lost child recognised. The intrigue, which is remarkably clever, is managed by Epidicus, a cunning slave, who gives the name to the play.
XI. The Mostellaria is exceedingly lively and amusing. A young man, in his father’s absence, makes the paternal mansion a scene of noisy and extravagant revelry. In the midst of it the father returns, and in order to prevent discovery, a slave persuades him that the house is haunted. When he discovers the trick he is very angry, but ultimately pardons both his son and the slave. The name is derived from Mostellum, the diminutive of Monstrum, a prodigy, or supernatural visitor.
XII. The Menæchmi is a Comedy of Errors, arising out of the exact likeness between two brothers, one of whom was stolen in infancy, and the other wanders in search of him, and at last finds him in great affluence at Epidamnus. It furnished the plot to Shakspeare’s play, and likewise to the comedy of Regnard, which bears the name of the original.
XIII. The Miles Gloriosus was taken from the Ἀλαζων (Boaster) of the Greek comic drama. Its hero, Pyrgopolinices, is the model of all the blustering, swaggering captains of ancient and modern comedy. The braggadocio carries off the mistress of a young Athenian, who follows him, and takes up his abode in the next house to that in which the girl is concealed. Like Pyramus and Thisbe the lovers have secret interviews through a hole in the party-wall. (The device being borrowed from the “Phantom” of Menander.)[185] When they are discovered, the soldier is induced to resign the lady by being persuaded that another is desperately in love with him, but the only reward which he gets is a good beating for his pains.