The first century b.c. had one hundred and thirty comic scripts with the name of Plautus attached. Scholars disputed about which of the scripts really came from the hand of the Umbrian playwright. The authenticity of twenty-one was never challenged and there is no reasonable doubt that these are the twenty-one which survive to the present day in the Ambrosian palimpsest and the so-called “Palatine” codices. The organisation of the lexicon of the third-century grammarian Nonius Marcellus reveals that Nonius used a corporate edition of the same twenty-one. Somewhere in the ancestry of our witnesses lies one or more editions of the individual scripts made according to the method established at Alexandria for the scripts of the classical Athenian tragic and comic poets. The first such scientific edition could hardly have been made before 168 b.c., the year in which the Pergamene philologist Crates visited Rome and gave lectures, that is some sixteen years after Plautus' death. The claim made by Terence in 161, that he did not know Plautus to have adapted the Κόλαξ of Menander, implies that no edition of this play was then available to the public. Even in Plautus' lifetime his scripts were employed by actors without his supervision and doubtlessly suffered alteration at the hands of those who preferred their own to the author's ideas of what was dramatically appropriate.