<!doctype html public «-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en»> http-equiv=content-type> The farce A Slaves Ball and Pompeii (1937), the comedy developed from it, are the two last dramas completed by Ödön von Horváth. Based on the comedies of Plautus and well received by Horváth’s contemporaries, they were later overshadowed by his major folk plays. For the first time, the edition fully presents the complex text genesis of these two plays and reveals the intertextual traces of Horváth’s reading of Plautus.