Before the other twelve turned up: an eight-play Plautus opens at the Vatican

Folio 1r of Vat.lat.11569 opens in red. A title line, then an incipit announcing the first comedy of Plautus, then three lines of verse that start under a red initial P, four lines tall. Someone has labelled them in the left margin: Epitaphium Plauti. 1

Postquam est morte captus Plautus, comedia luget. Now that death has taken Plautus, Comedy is in mourning. The second line says the stage stands deserted; the third says Laughter and Jest and all the countless measures wept together. 2

The book is a copy of eight comedies of Plautus, written between 1401 and 1425, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana has put it online in full. 3

An independent tracker that follows new Vatican digitizations dates its record 18 October 2026. It is one of fifteen manuscripts in the batch that tracker files as the forty-second week of 2026. 4

The plays run in one sequence over 110 numbered leaves: Amphitruo, Asinaria, Captivi, Curculio, Casina, Cistellaria, Epidicus, Aulularia. 5

Cistellaria gets eight leaves. Amphitruo gets twenty. A reader closing one comedy simply turns the page and finds the next.

Plautus had his plays staged in Rome around 200 BC, and his comedies are the earliest Latin literature to survive complete. Twenty of them come down to us, with fragments of a twenty-first. 2

For most of the Middle Ages, western Europe read a smaller Plautus. The Vatican's own research portal on the transmission of Latin classics gives the number and the date: until 1429, the known comedies were only eight. 6

In 1429 Cardinal Giordano Orsini turned up a manuscript now shelved as Vat. lat. 3870, copied in Germany in the tenth century. That codex carried all twenty, including the twelve that had dropped out of circulation, and nearly every later copy of Plautus descends from it. 7

A book written between 1401 and 1425 falls on the earlier side of that year, and it holds exactly the eight plays that were there to be copied. 3

Vat. lat. 3870 is online as well, from the same library. 8

Amphitruo opens the volume and is the odd one of the eight. Jupiter takes the shape of a general away at war and sleeps with the general's wife, while Mercury doubles for the general's slave and guards the door. Molière's Amphitryon is a reworking of the same plot. 9

Captivi turns on a prisoner exchange between Aetolia and Elis, and on two men who have quietly swapped identities to survive it. The play ends with a slave's confession and a family put back together.

Aulularia, which closes the book, is the pot of gold. A miser called Euclio finds treasure in his house and spends five acts shifting it from one hiding place to another. The text breaks off before the final scene, so the ending survives only in an ancient summary of the plot. 2

Molière's The Miser is partly modelled on it. 2

Speaker names sit in red in the left margin, marking each change of voice — AR., CLE., MER. — so a reader running a finger down the edge knows who is talking.

Above the lines, in a much smaller hand, single words of Latin gloss the hard ones. Longer notes run down the outer margin, keyed back to the passage with a paragraph mark. The same treatment continues across all 110 leaves. This copy was made to be worked in.

Each play is introduced by an argumentum, a short verse synopsis. On folio 1r, where the argumentum of the Amphitruo runs down the page, the opening letters are enlarged into a column of capitals in the left margin.

DigiVatLib has published 235 images: the flyleaves at each end, the 110 numbered leaves, and at the back the pastedown, the spine, the page edges, a colour checker and a millimetre scale. 5

The viewer zooms to the ink. The catalogue record lists the shelfmark and a short bibliography of Plautine scholarship. The IIIF manifest opens the same files in any image viewer.

Start at folio 1r for the epitaph and the red P. Turn to folio 20r to watch one comedy hand over to the next. Folio 21r begins the Asinaria proper; folio 96r opens the Aulularia, with two argumenta stacked above the prologue and the household god announcing himself in the first line.

The scans carry the Vatican Library's watermark across the page and a copyright line along the bottom edge.