e the ancients
could not have hesitated in the way they did as to the genuineness or
spuriousness of the pieces of Plautus: in the case of no author,
properly so called, of Roman antiquity, do we find anything like a
similar uncertainty as to his literary property. In this respect,
as in so many other external points, there exists the most remarkable
analogy between Plautus and Shakespeare.

33. III. III. The Celts Conquered by Rome, III. VII. Measures Adopted
to Check the Immigration of the Trans-Alpine Gauls

34. III. XIV. Roman Barbarism

35 -Togatus- denotes, in juristic and generally in technical language,
the Italian in contradistinction not merely to the foreigner, but also
to the Roman burgess. Thus especially -formula togatorum- (Corp.
Inscr. Lat., I. n. 200, v. 21, 50) is the list of those Italians bound
to render military serviee, who do not serve in the legions. The
designation also of Cisalpine Gaul as -Gallia togata-, which first
occurs in Hirtius and not long after disappears again from the
ordinary -usus loquendi-, describes this region presumably according
to its legal position, in so far as in the epoch from 665 to 705 the
great majority of its communities possessed Latin rights. Virgil
appears likewise in the -gens togata-, which he mentions along with
the Romans (Aen. i. 282), to have thought of the Latin nation.

According to this view we shall have to recognize in the -fabula
togata-the comedy which laid its plot in Latium, as the -fabula
palliata- had its plot in Greece; the transference of the scene of
action to a foreign land is common to both, and the comic writer is
wholly forbidden to bring on the stage the city or the burgesses of
Rome. That in reality the -togata- could only have its plot laid in
the towns of Latin rights, is shown by the fact that all the towns
in which, to our knowledge, pieces of Titinius and Afranius had their
scene--Setia, Ferentinum, Velitrae, Brundisium,--demonstrably had
Latin or, at any rate, allied rights down to the Social war. By the
extension of the franchise to all Italy the writers of comedy lost
this Latin localisation for their pieces, for Cisalpine Gaul, which
-de jure- took the place of the Latin communities, lay too far off
for the dramatists of the capital, and so the -fabula togata- seems in
fact to have disappeared. But the -de jure- suppressed communities of
Italy, such as Capua and Atella, stepped into this gap (ii. 366, iii.
148), and s