SOURCE: John Arthur Hanson, "The Glorious Military," in Roman Drama, Basic Books, Inc., 1965, pp. 51-86.

In the following essay, Hanson studies Plautus 's use and development of the stock character the miles gloriosus, or braggart soldier, maintaining that this character was used by Plautus as a commentary on Roman military ideals of his time. Hanson goes on to survey the appearance of this character in the works of later dramatists, including William Shakespeare.

A stock character is a scholar's delight. He may be traced backward and forward in time, across national boundaries from writer to writer, engendering Quellenforschungen and appreciations of our debt to classical culture. With a figure as frequent as the miles gloriosus, the mere tabulation of his occurrences in Western literature might exhaust a learned lifetime. Such a catalogue would have to follow the intrepid soldier through Greek Comedy, Old, Middle, and New, across the...