Persa ("The Persian") is a comedic Latin play by the early Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus.
In order to repay the money he has borrowed to buy his girlfriend from the pimp Dordalus who owns her, Toxilus persuades his friend Sagaristio to dress up as a Persian, in order to trick the pimp Dordalus into paying a large sum to buy a girl who is dressed as an Arabian captive, but who is in fact free.
First Toxilus persuades Saturio, a parasitus, who has a pretty and clever daughter, to allow Sagaristio sell this girl to Dordalus, even though she is not a slave.
Immediately afterwards Saturio enters and reclaims his daughter, on the grounds that she is an Athenian citizen, and drags Dordalus off to court.
[7] The character of the cunning slave who rescues a girl from the clutches of a slave-dealer by means of a trick is found in several other Plautus plays.
This is unprecedented in Plautus, although Menander's comedy Heros opened in a similar way with a slave called Daos complaining of being in love.
Dordalus the pimp is another stock character of Plautus's plays, similar to Ballio in Pseudolus or Lycus in Poenulus.
Unlike the pimp Labrax in Rudens, however, he keeps his word, and frees and delivers Toxilus's girlfriend Lemniselenis after being paid the agreed price.
It has been argued for various reasons that the scenes with Paegnium were added by Plautus for humorous effect and were not in the original Greek play.
Moreover, the carrying of two messages in Acts 2.2 and 2.4 seems superfluous to the plot; it is more likely that in the original play only Sophoclidisca delivered a letter and then returned without meeting Paegnium.
[12] The unnamed daughter of Saturio combines the roles of the quick-witted courtesan and the highly moral unmarried girl.
Another humorous element is that she repeatedly refuses to follow the script which Toxilus has told her to say, causing him to become frantic that his trick may fall through.