Comedy and the Rise of Rome

This is an original study of the plays of the two great Roman comic playwrights Plautus and Terence in the context of political and economic change in Rome in the third and second centuries BC. In contrast to the dominant trend of viewing the plays by reference to their largely lost Greek originals, the book adopts a historicist approach that concentrates on their effect on a contemporary audience. Matthew Leigh combines a close reading of individual texts with a theoretically sophisticated approach to Roman self-construction.