Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
John C. Rolfe, Ed.

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[p. 251] Now there are in circulation under the name of Plautus about one hundred and thirty comedies; but that most learned of men Lucius Aelius thought that only twenty-five of them were his. ¹ However, there is no doubt that those which do not appear to have been written by Plautus but are attached to his name, were the work of poets of old but were revised and touched up by him, and that is why they savour of the Plautine style. Now Varro and several others have recorded that the Saturio, the Addictus, and a third comedy, the name of which I do not now recall, were written by Plautus in a bakery, when, after losing in trade all the money which he had earned in employments connected with the stage, he had returned penniless to Rome, and to earn a livelihood had hired himself out to a baker, to turn a mill, of the kind which is called a “push-mill.” ²

So too we are told of Naevius that he wrote two plays in prison, the Soothsayer and the Leon, when by reason of his constant abuse and insults aimed at the leading men of the city, after the manner of the Greek poets, he had been imprisoned at Rome by the triumvirs. ³ And afterwards he was set free by the tribunes of the commons, when he had apologized for his offences and the saucy language with which he had previously assailed many men.