In Rudens and Persa, the slave-owners are summoned to court in highly dramatized fashion: in the former, the pimp Lab rax has been held at bay by lorarii (floggers) for the greater part of Act in before Plesidippus appears on-stage and hales him, plaintively calling for assistance, to court; in Persa, the court summons in iv 9 is the climax of the “legal plot” scripted and rehearsed by Toxilus and his friends. In each play, the alleged criminal reappears on-stage in the last act of the play. What happened in the interim – between the march to the courtroom and the reappearance of the accused on-stage? Are we to imagine, via the brachiology of dramatic time, that the praetor heard the claims and assigned the case (in iure) and that a hearing took place at which a verdict was given (apud iudicem)? That imagined sequence, however, is fraught with problems: do the procedures and penalties match the offense in each play? and are we to imagine the same sequence in the Greek originals – or is it possible, or even necessary, that different resolutions appeared in them?