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Everything up until the Article Evaluation section is what is to be added to the page on Plautus's Mercator. The plot has been rewritten to add more detail. One sentence has been added to the heading section. The Analysis and Criticism section is to be added.

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It is believed to be among Plautus's first plays, possibly written around 206 BC.

Plot

The division of the play into acts does not exist in Plautus’s manuscript but was rather introduced by Renaissance scholars to match the likely division of the Greek original, though these divisions are the source of some controversy.

Prologue

Charinus explains that he had taken after his father’s example and decided to become a merchant. He had much success in Rhodes and there fell in love with a slave woman named Pasicompsa. He purchased Pasicompsa and brought her with him to his home in Athens where he now ponders how to prevent his father from discovering his love.

Act I

Acanthio runs to Charinus from the harbor to deliver news that Demipho has been to the ship and seen Pasicompsa. To cover for Charinus, Acanthio had convinced Demipho that Charinus had purchased Pasicompsa to serve as a maid for Charinus’s mother. He further tells Charinus that Demipho was flirting with Pasicompsa. Charinus decides he must go to the harbor at once.

Act II

Returning from the harbor, Demipho enters and claims that he has had a dream in which he entrusted a prize goat to his monkey friend, but the monkey lost the goat to a younger goat. He admits to his neighbor Lysimachus that he has fallen in love and feels youthful. Lysimachus leaves and Charinus enters, lamenting his predicament. Demipho then tells Charinus that Pasicompsa is too fine to be a maid and instead insists Pasicompsa be sold. The two begin a bidding war, each claiming to represent imaginary clients. Demipho rejects his son’s offers and turns Charinus away from the harbor. When Charinus exits, Demipho reveals his plan to have Lysimachus purchase Pasicompsa on Demipho’s behalf. Separately, Charinus sends Eutychus to purchase Pasicompsa himself.

Act III

Lysimachus has successfully bought Pasicompsa and is bringing her to Lysimachus’s home. He tells her he bought her on behalf of her own master, and Pasicompsa is pleased, believing Lysimachus to mean Charinus. After they exit into Lysimachus’s house, Demipho enters and attempts to justify what he believes he has earned with age. Lysimachus returns to Demipho and tells him he must find Pasicompsa somehwere else to stay before Dorippa returns from the countryside. For the time being, the two exit to find a cook for a feast to be held that night. Shortly after, Eutychus tells Charinus that he was too late and Pasicompsa was sold to an unknown buyer. Heartbroken, Charinus decides he will leave Athens, but Eutychus becomes determined to find Pasicompsa.

Act IV

Dorippa returns home from the countryside earlier than expected, and she and Syra (whose name is meant to imply her Syrain ethnicity) discover Pasicompsa in the house, believing her to be Lysimachus’s mistress. Lysimachus returns home and tries to explain to his wife that he is only looking after Pasicompsa temporarily, but when the cook hired for that night’s feast arrives, Dorippa becomes only more sure of her suspicions and exits into her house crying. Lysimachus dismisses the cook and follows after his wife. Eutychus returns home to find Syra outside, who urges him inside to see his father’s mistress. Syra laments the inequalities between the unfaithfulness of men and women.

Act V

Eutychus finds Charinus just as Charinus is about to leave Athens and tells him that he has found Pasicompsa in Eutychus’s own home. Charinus exits into the home, and Eutychus remains outside to confront Lysimachus and Demipho. He tells them Pasicompsa was really Charinus’s lover and that Demipho should be ashamed for trying to take her for himself. He proposes a law that old men should not interfere in the passionate love of young men, and the three exit into Lysimachus’s house.

Analysis and Criticism

The play makes use of many stock characters, with which theatergoers would have been familiar. Charinus plays the role of the adulescens amator, Demipho is the senex, and Pasicompsa is the meretrix. The plot is relatively straightforward and is most easily compared to that of the Casina, which also revolves around a conflict between the adulescens and senex.

The title of the play may refer to either Charinus or Demipho, as both turn out to be successful merchants. It is possible that this ambiguity was intentional. Their mercantile backgrounds seem to carry over into the rest of their lives; in many lines, Charinus and Demipho speak about Pasicompsa in language characterizing her as a commodity to be traded, rather than as a person.

Pasicompsa, whose name translates to "pretty in every respect," is the central point of contention in the play, though she is only onstage for fewer than 5% of the play’s lines. She has little control over her own fate, which is dictated by men. Even though Charinus appears to be in love with her, Pasicompsa’s non-citizen status means she and Charinus would never be allowed to marry, thus destining Pasicompsa to a life of being passed between owners.

References

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Article Evaluation

This is an evaluation of the article Pseudolus.

This article is good in that it provides a lot of information about the play. However, it requires major work in clarifying what is truly important to know about the subject, as it provides so much information that it is difficult to distinguish what is relevant. Further, from the edit history of the article, one sees that almost the entirety of the synopsis and theme sections of the article were written by a single author. While this is not inherently bad, this fact combined with the lack of cited sources are strong indications that the author may be expressing his or her own ideas on the topic. This article does not meet many of Wikipedia's standards for quality and has much room for improvement.

More detailed observations follow:

This article's "Plot synopsis" section is very long and contains information that simply distracts from an understanding of the play. For example, the fifth to last paragraph of this section discusses a slave boy and a cook, neither of whom are named as characters and whose brief appearances do not seem to contribute to the plot in any way. This section and many others could easily be removed or shortened, clarifying the article.

The "Themes" section is similarly hindered by excessive story details that detract from the point of the article. It also repeats itself greatly, as the first three themes ("The clever slave," "Class does not equal intelligence," and "True love crossing boundaries") are all manifestations of a theme of class struggles. It is unclear where the author even obtained these themes, as this entire section of the article is not cited, aside from the title of a collection of plays, from which the author presumably read this play, as well as naming one person, presumably the author of a criticism of the play without providing any reference to this criticism.

The subsequent "Various interpretations" section seems focused specifically on the theme of "religious skepticism" that arrises in the play, so this section could very well be collapsed into the preceding section.

My final criticism of this article is with respect to the "Quotes" section as well as other quotes given throughout the rest of the article. First of all, the quotes selected seem quite arbitrary and not very relevant, nor is the relevance of any quote explained. In addition, whoever provided these quotes for the article wrote them as if they had been taken directly from Plautus's original work. However, the quotes are translated to English without citing the translator. To improve the article, any quotes that do contribute to the article should either be written in the original Latin or should include a citation of the translation.