Daily Inspiration Quote by Plautus

A Roman comedy writer praising free stuff is never just doing gratitude; he is poking a thumb in the eye of a society where nearly everything else has a price tag - including people. Plautus writes in a Republic swollen with war spoils, slavery, and the new status anxiety of a Rome turning imperial. Against that backdrop, this line lands as a sly audit of what can and cannot be commodified.

The list is the trick: day, water, sun, moon, night. It moves from the practical (water) to the cosmic (moon, night), telescoping ordinary survival into the theater of the gods. In Plautus, the divine often functions as a comedic pressure valve: if humans can be bought, bribed, and bossed around, at least the sky is still out of reach. The speaker’s relief carries a sting of cynicism: you may have to pay for bread, rent, protection, favors, even dignity - but you can’t be invoiced for daylight.

Subtext-wise, it’s also a jab at Rome’s emerging consumer mindset. Plautus stages characters who scheme, haggle, and hustle; money is the engine of plot and the measure of power. By naming what money can’t touch, he exposes money’s ugly reach everywhere else. The line flirts with philosophical calm (a proto-Stoic nod to nature’s gifts), then undercuts it with comic realism: the only truly free things are the ones no human institution can enclose.

It works because it’s both comfort and indictment: a momentary sanctuary from the marketplace, delivered by a playwright who knows the marketplace is where the joke - and the violence - usually lives.