Jul 24, 2022
5 min read
Between Barbarism And Decadence
Across the centuries, culture wars fit a familiar pattern
The Roman playwright Plautus often opened his plays with some version of the following line: “Demophilus wrote this; Plautus barbarized it.”
Most of Plautus’ plays were set in Greece, so he was attributing the stories to Demophilus. The word “barbarized” referred to the fact that, in the…
