Terence

Terence a Roman comic playwright of the second century BC (c. 195-159 BC), born in North Africa and brought to Rome as a slave, who wrote six comedies in Latin verse that adapted the Greek New Comedy of Menander and Apollodorus for a Roman audience. His refined style and sympathetic portrayal of family life made him, with Plautus, one of the two founders of European stage comedy.

Life and Background

Publius Terentius Afer, known in English as Terence, was born at Carthage or in its territory, probably between 195 and 185 BC, and came to Rome as a slave in the household of the senator Terentius Lucanus, who gave him his freedom and his name. The tradition that he was of African birth is supported by his surname Afer, meaning African, and by the ancient notice that he was dark-skinned. He received an education suited to a freedman of letters.

He moved in the cultivated circle of the younger Scipio Africanus and Gaius Laelius, the patricians associated with the philhellenic movement at Rome, and the connection gave rise to the later but doubtful rumour that these noble patrons had written his plays for him. Whatever the truth, his plays show a knowledge of Greek literature and manners that suggests access to the best instruction of his day.

He produced his first comedy, Andria, in 166 BC, and over the following decade brought out five more. In 160 BC he travelled to Greece, whether to study or to gather material, and he died there, probably in 159 BC, without returning. Accounts of his death are confused, and some report that he left Rome in poverty and lost a trunk of new plays on the voyage.

The Six Comedies

The six plays that survive are the Andria (The Girl from Andros), Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law), Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor), Eunuchus (The Eunuch), Phormio and Adelphoe (The Brothers). All are adaptations of Greek originals, chiefly by Menander and Apollodorus of Carystus, and all were performed at the Roman festivals between 166 and 160 BC. Their plots turn on mistaken identity, lost children and the complications of young love.

The Andria, his first play, sets the pattern with its story of a young man divided between an arranged marriage and a woman he loves, and it was admired in antiquity for its economy and its deft management of double plots. The Heauton Timorumenos takes its name from the self-punishing farmer who judges himself too harshly, and its famous line that nothing human is alien to me became a proverb.

The Eunuch was his greatest popular success, a lively comedy of rivalry that won a record fee at its second performance. The Phormio is built around a clever parasite who arranges marriages for two young cousins and is rewarded for his impudence. The Adelphoe, his last play, contrasts two fathers and their opposite methods of raising sons, and it was performed at the funeral games of Lucius Aemilius Paullus in 160 BC.

Style and Technique

Terence differs sharply from his predecessor Plautus. He avoids the boisterous farce, the musical numbers and the direct appeals to the audience that mark the older comic style, and he writes a more even, conversational Latin that is closer to the usage of educated speech. His humour is quiet and sympathetic rather than broad, and it rests on character and situation rather than on slapstick.

He was criticised in his own day for contaminating his Greek originals, that is, for combining scenes from two different Greek plays into a single Latin work, a practice he defends openly in the prologues. He was also accused of plagiarism and of relying on aristocratic collaborators. His prologues answer these charges with dignity and give valuable evidence about the literary life of the Roman republic.

His plots are carefully constructed, and he uses suspense and misunderstanding to keep the audience engaged while allowing his characters a growth in understanding that is rare in ancient comedy. The recognition scene, in which a lost child is identified and social order restored, becomes in his hands a moment of genuine reconciliation rather than a mere mechanical device.

Humanity and Moral Outlook

The quality that has most impressed later readers is Terence's humane treatment of his characters. Even the stern fathers, the boasting soldiers and the scheming slaves are allowed their reasons, and cruelty is more often forgiven than punished. His comedy assumes that human beings act from mixed motives and that understanding them is a mark of maturity as well as a source of laughter.

His plays frequently turn on questions of education, of the relation between fathers and sons, and of the conflict between desire and duty. The self-tormentor who punishes himself for his severity, and the brothers raised in opposite ways, embody a continuing debate about how the young should be formed and how much freedom they should be given. The conclusions are tolerant rather than doctrinaire.

This moral generosity is expressed in the celebrated line, spoken by a character in the Heauton Timorumenos, that he is a man and counts nothing human foreign to him. The sentence has been quoted from antiquity to the present as a summary of humane feeling, and it has come to stand for the spirit of Terentian comedy as a whole.

Influence and Legacy

Terence was read throughout antiquity as a school author, and his clear and elegant Latin made him a model for the study of style and grammar. Commentaries were written on him by grammarians, and copies of his plays, illustrated with scenes, were among the most prized manuscripts of the early Middle Ages. His language was preserved when much of Latin literature was lost.

When the drama of antiquity was revived in the Renaissance, his comedies were imitated across Europe. Italian, French and English playwrights took his plots and his techniques, and the Elizabethan comedy of Jonson and Shakespeare owes something to the Terentian model of the clever servant and the tangled intrigue. Molière drew on him directly, and the tradition of the comedy of manners descends in part from his example.

He is remembered as one of the two great comic poets of republican Rome and as the more refined and thoughtful of the pair. His six surviving plays are the oldest complete Latin comedies and the fountainhead of a European comic tradition that has never since been interrupted. In him the theatre of Menander survived to shape the stages of the modern world.

See also

• Plautus
• Menander
• New Comedy
• Latin literature