Rome and the Mysterious Orient

Still funny after two thousand years, the Roman playwright Plautus wrote around 200 B.C.E., a period when Rome was fighting neighbors on all fronts, including North Africa and the Near East. These three plays—originally written for a wartime audience of refugees, POWs, soldiers and veterans, exiles, immigrants, people newly enslaved in the wars, and citizens—tap into the mix of fear, loathing, and curiosity with which cultures, particularly Western and Eastern cultures, often view each other, al