Customer Reviews

Plautus: Casina (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics) (English and Latin Edition)

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This is a review of MacCary's and Willcock's edition of Plautus' Casina for the Cambridge green and yellow series. I had occasion to use this commentary as I was preparing for an exam and found it a more than adequate aid for reading through the play in a few days. M&W generally do a superior job of anticipating the reader's difficulties with contorted or colloquial vocabulary and syntax, and there were only a few occasions where I found myself completely left to my own resources to puzzle out a difficult line. The commentary proper is mainly a tool for helping the reader construe the meaning of the text, and issues of staging, characterization, and the play's relationship to other Greek and Plautine comedies are really only lightly treated.

There are several other notable things about this edition. A relatively detailed apparatus criticus has been included with the text. There are extensive discussions and diagrams of the metrical properties and anomalies of the play's verse in the commentary proper as well as a very detailed 20 page appendix on the scansion of Plautine meter. The editors' introduction is a wonderfully clear and straightforward essay that provides all the basic, general background one needs to understand what ancient comedy is and what Plautus' place in it was. The commentary on the whole is very light on literary analysis, and the bibliography provided is quite short and now out-of-date, given that this book was first published about 35 years ago.

The play itself is just over a 1000 lines long, but unfortunately the last 100 lines are a bit lacunose in places. The plot is simple and engaging and offers an interesting and often entertaining picture, however contrived and farcical, of how a husband and wife might be expected to feel about and interact with one another in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. If one must read Plautus, this is a very good play and edition to choose.