Terence
No wonder he was the most popular playwright in Rome. His stories are sexist, no doubt. But what a master of dramatic economy. Almost no single line works other than to drive the action forwards. I think Noel Coward said that you can learn the art of only making jokes relevant to the plot by reading Shakespeare, but he must have learnt that from Terence. And it's all written in a vernacular style. Mostly it reads likely extraordinarily sophisticated Roman sitcom. Think of him as the humorous Alfred Hitchcock of his day. Terence is proof that good writing is nothing more or less than getting your point across. Quality is not measured in high-end units. You don't need to be fancy to be effective. The Oxford World Classics translation is a little clumsy at times. I would like to read translations by a modern playwright to get a more natural idiom, especially for the slang and really casual language, but it is highly readable. For an academic translation it's remarkably fluid and well paced. The sorts of stories Terence tells are out of fashion now, but the situations he uses are timeless and crop up in modern comedies all the time. I wish I had read him when I was at university. I suspect no-one would stage an adaptation now, as the sexual politics are just wrong for modern audiences, but it would be an interesting challenge to get six playwrights each to adapt one of the comedies, no restrictions. Do we as a culture have the capability or appetite to watch something like that anymore?