Sosia

Sosia is a name that appears in ancient Roman comedy as the designation of a slave character in Plautus's plays. The name became a stock label for a servant figure in Latin farce, associated with social types of loyalty, gullibility, and subordinate status. In Plautine drama, Sosia characters are typically used to catalyze plots through misunderstandings, swaps of identity, and witty dialogue, illustrating the tension between freeborn patrons and their dependents. The name's frequent recurrence across plays led scholars to describe Sosia as a stock character rather than a single, defined person.

Modern scholarly treatment regards Sosia as representative of the slave type in Plautus, and the figure is often discussed in studies of stock characters, performance conventions, and social satire in Roman theatre. The term has also appeared in translations and commentary as a shorthand for the archetypal loyal, talkative, or sometimes trickster servant in Plautine comedies. Outside classical studies, Sosia is rarely used as a personal name, but it occasionally appears in fictional works drawing on Roman comic conventions.