| Summary: | In this note I reexamine one of the few extant scenes of Plautus' Vidularia , the encounter between Dinia and his long-lost son Nicodemus. After examining the dense comic texture of the scene, I focus, in particular, on one joke which, deeply embedded in Roman cultural history, has been consistently misunderstood and consequently replaced by emendations. I thus defend the transmitted reading (aerum) against the commonly proposed emendations (atrum , Afrum). In a brief appendix, I use the Plautine scene to suggest a possible textual arrangement for a fragment of Diphilus that may have belonged to the Greek model of the Vidularia.
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