Library › Latin: Comedy › Argumenta Aululariae
Two verse summaries of Plautus’ Aulularia (‘The Pot of Gold’), one of them an acrostic spelling the title. They tell how the miserly old Euclio finds a pot full of treasure buried in his house and guards it in terror; his daughter has been seduced by Lyconides, while the rich neighbour Megadorus asks for her hand without a dowry. The pot is stolen by Lyconides’ slave, and in the end Lyconides confesses and marries the girl.
The Aulularia, whose ending is lost, is the model of Molière’s L’Avare, and the arguments are among the evidence for how the play concluded. They were added to the text in antiquity, probably in the second century AD, as concise guides for readers.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: W. M. Lindsay, 1904), licensed CC BY-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.