{{italic title
''Babio'' in Latin is a 12th-century
elegiac comedy Elegiac comedy was a genre of medieval Latin Latin literature, literature—or Medieval theatre, drama—which survives as a collection of about twenty texts written in the 12th and 13th centuries in the liberal arts schools of west central France ( ...
consisting of 484 lines of elegiac distichs, probably composed in
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
. It imitates
Roman comedy
The architectural form of theatre in Rome has been linked to later, more well-known examples from the 1st century BC to the 3rd Century AD. The theatre of ancient Rome referred to as a period of time in which theatrical practice and performance t ...
and is indebted to
Ovid
Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (; 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the th ...
,
Plautus
Titus Maccius Plautus (; c. 254 – 184 BC), commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the gen ...
and
Terence
Publius Terentius Afer (; – ), better known in English as Terence (), was a Roman African playwright during the Roman Republic. His comedies were performed for the first time around 166–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought ...
. It is preserved in five manuscripts, four of them in England and one in Berlin (''Babio'').
Editions
*
Edmond Faral
Edmond Faral (18 March 1882 – 8 February 1958) was an Algerian-born French medievalist. He became in 1924 Professor of Latin literature at the Collège de France.
He wrote his dissertation on the jongleurs, and E. R. Curtius states that he was ...
(1948)
*M. M. Brennan, Charleston (1969).
See also
*
Medieval theatre
Medieval theatre encompasses theatrical performance in the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century and the beginning of the Renaissance in approximately the 15th century. The category of "medieval theatre" is vast, c ...
*
Medieval Latin comedy Elegiac comedy was a genre of medieval Latin literature—or drama—which survives as a collection of about twenty texts written in the 12th and 13th centuries in the liberal arts schools of west central France (roughly the Loire Valley). Though c ...