Cistellaria
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Cistellaria, translated as The Casket, is a comedic Latin play of the late 3rd century BC by the early Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. The story, set in the Greek town of Sicyon, concerns a girl called Selenium who was exposed as a baby and brought up by a courtesan called Melaenis. By a happy chance it is discovered that her birth mother, married to a senator Demipho, lives next door, enabling her to marry the young man Alcesimarchus who loves her.
Key facts
- Play.name
- Cistellaria
- Play.orig_lang
- Latin
- Play.genre
- Roman comedy
- Play.premiere
- late 3rd century BC
- Play.place
- Rome?
- Play.based_on
- Synaristosai
- Play.writer
- Plautus
- Play.setting
- Sicyon
via Wikipedia infobox
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
11 sectionsContents
- Characters
- Metrical structure
- Selenium outlines her problem
- Selenium's birth and parentage are explained
- Alcesimarchus's passion for Selenium
- Alcesimarchus learns about the wedding preparations
- Melaenis finds out about Selenium's parents
- Phanostrata and Demipho find their daughter
- Translations
- References
- External links
Cistellaria, translated as The Casket, is a comedic Latin play of the late 3rd century BC by the early Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. The story, set in the Greek town of Sicyon, concerns a girl called Selenium who was exposed as a baby and brought up by a courtesan called Melaenis. By a happy chance it is discovered that her birth mother, married to a senator Demipho, lives next door, enabling her to marry the young man Alcesimarchus who loves her.
The play was adapted from a lost comedy by Menander called Synaristosai ("The Women Who Lunched Together"). The Cistellaria appears to be one of Plautus's earliest plays. In line 202, the hope is expressed that the war with Carthage will soon end with victory for the Romans (the Second Punic War in fact ended in 202 BC). The same passage mentions "your allies old and new", which may be a reference to the treaty of alliance made with the Aetolian League in 209.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Cistellaria” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.