Library › Latin: Comedy › Palliatae (Fragments)
Trabea was a Roman writer of comedies in Greek dress, the palliata, in the second century BC. Very little is known of his life or plays. His best-known fragment, quoted by Cicero, is the boast of a young lover who imagines that the bawd, softened by money, will await his nod, that the door will open at a touch of his finger, and that Chrysis will run to embrace him, so that he surpasses Fortune herself.
Cicero quotes these lines in his discussion of the passions to illustrate the excessive joy of the lover, and they are the main evidence for Trabea’s lively style. The critic Volcacius Sedigitus listed him among the ten best Roman comic poets. The fragments add to the knowledge of the comic tradition alongside Plautus and Terence.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: O. Ribbeck, CRF, 1898), 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.