Plautus specialized in Greek humor, which gave him great popularity as it was specifically for the Roman audience. Plautus wrote a work of humor in an age when no comedy existed, and Terence, having come later after Plautus was dead, was able to learn from what had been written and develop his work of humor quite deeply from it.
The plots used by Plautus and Terence differ from each other. The work of Terence is plotted better than that of Plautus. Terence had the capability to employ a double plot, which was good as it gave us a better vision of his characters. Plautus never places much emphasis on the plot; he uses the plot as a pathway to create humor in his writings. With that, Plautus only targeted his audience to laugh by not expecting something specific from him.
Both Plautus and Terence never concentrated much on the characters in the work. They mainly used stock characters. Plautus uses character traits to bring an understanding of his characters to the audience. For instance, in one occurrence, he uses flattery on a character to give a picture of his work. To create humor in his work, Plautus places emphasis on some characters more than others. He even goes further by magnifying others so that he can make his audience laugh more. Terence’s way of bringing out characters is different from that of Plautus as he is more concentrated on creating individualistic characters, where there are distinct lines between the character traits in his work.
Plautus and Terence were the greatest writers of humor at the time, though in different ways. The work of Plautus entertained people of his time a lot but was not able to stand the test of time as they were shallow. Terence, on the other hand, wrote work that was deep and can still appeal to present-day people as it portrays a great understanding of people.
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