This thesis traces a discourse of play in the Roman republic from Plautus’ *palliata* comedies via Lucilius’ satires to Cicero’s philosophical dialogue *De oratore*. Methodologically, it combines philological close reading with historical analysis to interpret the function of appeals to play in the context of the political culture of the Roman republic with its distinctly Roman set of values and beliefs. Due to the more complex semantics of lexemes for play in the Latin language than in English (*ludus* also means e.g., ‘school’, ‘public festival’, ‘trick’), the study will move beyond the associations that the English concept ‘play’ suggests. The thesis argues that ‘play’ is a fundamental notion for Plautus’ self-fashioning as a new social type: a writer of comic fiction in Rome’s budding literary culture. His exploitation of the multiple meanings of *ludus* influence Lucilius, another innovator in Roman culture as he transfers Plautus’ socially inferior modes of play into the milieu of aristocratic leisure. Cicero, finally, draws on both earlier writers and uses ‘play’ to construct a tradition of Greek philosophy in the Roman past as well as to style himself as the teacher of a renewed upper class in his own imaginary school. Play is a concept that is at odds with the core tenets of the aristocratic value system in Rome and because of its purported marginality has been an underappreciated aspect of important texts across a variety of genres that we possess from the Roman republic.
historical discourse analysis, Latin literature, play, political culture
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