Terence: Andria 9781350020634, 9781350020627, 9781350020665, 9781350020658

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Terence: Andria

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BLOOMSBURY ANCIENT COMEDY COMPANIONS Series editors: C.W. Marshall & Niall W. Slater The Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions present accessible introductions to the surviving comedies from Greece and Rome. Each volume provides an overview of the play’s themes and situates it in its historical and literary contexts, recognizing that each play was intended in the first instance for performance. Volumes will be helpful for students and scholars, providing an overview of previous scholarship and offering new interpretations of ancient comedy. Aristophanes: Peace, Ian C. Storey Plautus: Casina, David Christenson Terence: Andria, Sander M. Goldberg

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Terence: Andria Sander M. Goldberg

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC 1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Sander M. Goldberg, 2019 Sander M. Goldberg has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Universal History Archive/Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldberg, Sander M., author. Title: Terence: Andria / Sander Goldberg. Other titles: Bloomsbury ancient comedy companions. Description: London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Series: Bloomsbury ancient comedy companions. Identifiers: LCCN 2018040892| ISBN 9781350020627 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781350020634 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Terence. Andria. | Latin drama (Comedy)—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PA6755.A63 G65 2019 | DDC 872/.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040892 ISBN :

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Dis Manibus Elaine Fantham optimae patronae atque doctissimae

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Titles and Abbreviations Preface Terence: A Biographical Note 1 2 3 4 5

Comedy at Rome Terence: A New Voice? Andria Unfolds Itself From Stage to Page . . . and Back Again The Translators’ Dilemma

Appendix 1: Donatus on Menander Appendix 2: Chronology Notes Guide to Further Reading and Works Cited Index

viii ix x xii 1 13 27 51 79 103 107 111 125 139

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Illustrations 1.1 A second-century Roman stage based on the calculations of Hughes (2012: 71), as reconstructed for the UCLA Humanities Virtual World Consortium 1.2 Comic scene of a running slave. Fresco from the House of Casca Longus at Pompeii 3.1 Andria, Scene One, as illustrated in Vat. Lat. 3868 f4v (c. 825 ce ) 4.1 Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809), Simo and His Former Slave Sosia (1803), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

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6 11 33

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Titles and Abbreviations Ancient comedies generally take their titles from the name of a central character (e.g. Phormio), a description of that character (e.g. Andria, i.e. The Woman from Andros), or, most notably in the case of Plautus, a memorable prop (e.g. Rudens, i.e. The Rope) or an adjective formed from a prop (e.g. Aulularia, i.e. The Small Pot [aulula] Play). Since translators render these titles in various ways, it can be easier and less cumbersome to retain the original form either in full (in the text) or in abbreviation (in references). The plays of Menander and Plautus referred to in this way here are: Menander (Men.) Andria Dis Exapaton Kolax Misoumenos (Mis.) Perikeiromene (Perik.) Perinthia Samia (Sa.)

Plautus (Pl.) Asinaria (As.) Aulularia (Aul.) Bacchides (Bacch.) Captivi (Capt.) Casina (Cas.) Menaechmi (Men.) Mercator (Merc.) Miles Gloriosus (Mil.) Mostellaria (Most.) Poenulus (Poen.) Pseudolus (Pseud.) Rudens (Rud.) Stichus (St.) Trinummus (Trin.) Truculentus (Truc.) Vidularia (Vid.)

For the plays of Terence and their abbreviations, see the Biographical Note. References to other ancient authors and texts will be largely selfevident; a convenient list of authors, titles, and standard abbreviations for them as used by the Oxford Classical Dictionary can be found at: http://classics.oxfordre.com/page/abbreviation-list. ix

Preface The indefatigable Morris Zapp, who represented the American professoriate so memorably in David Lodge’s comic novel Changing Places (1975), once aspired to write the definitive set of commentaries on the novels of Jane Austen, so thoroughly and effectively exploring every possible line of interpretation and every conceivable crux that “after Zapp, the rest would be silence” (35). That project, specifically designed to intimidate in 1975, now seems almost quaint in its innocence, thwarted not just by the indeterminacies of Deconstruction, which Zapp himself came to embrace by the time of Small World (1984), but by our own realization that the lines of critical interpretation are endless and that more of them are running in more different directions today than had ever been dreamt of in Zapp’s philosophy. This is not, as a cynic might say, because academics desperate to publish will inevitably invent things to publish about, but because works of literature are, in fact, endlessly fascinating. The texts themselves may not change (or not change much), but we change, and with that change in us come new perspectives, new insights, new problems and new questions to explore. So it is with Terence, who after two millennia continues to intrigue, inspire, and perplex us. Given the fluidity of critical perspectives, an introduction to one of his plays cannot (and probably should not) hope to “explain” the target text. A more modest, practical, and ultimately more useful goal is to help readers frame their own cogent and productive interpretive questions, while identifying along the way interpretive problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. Although the present work includes things good to know and helpful to think with, its emphasis throughout is therefore on things important to think about. Its five chapters fall into three parts: Chapters 1 and 2 providing x

Preface

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basic background information about Terence and his genre; Chapter 3 offering a detailed look at Andria and the interpretive questions it raises; and Chapters 4 and 5 surveying the related topics of reception and translation, important not just as the record of past opinions but as the foundation for our own. There should be just enough repetition and cross-reference to allow these chapters to be read independently or in any order. Supportive references to ancient sources and secondary literature are tucked away in notes, together with suggestions for further reading on various interpretive points, but that semblance of a scholarly apparatus is designed to be entirely optional. Writers inevitably accrue debts, and mine are in this case a particular pleasure to acknowledge. Toph Marshall and Niall Slater, who have long been supportive but unflinching critics of my work, proved no less so as editors for the Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series, and their suggestions have improved the work at every turn. The energy, acumen, and ferocious honesty of my UCLA colleague Amy Richlin have been a continuous inspiration and, it must be said, a salutary check on my complacency. Special thanks are due to Jim Clauss and his students at the University of Washington for their object lesson in how responses to Terence vary with both time and time of life. The Dedication reflects a still deeper and more personal debt. For most scholars in the early 1980s, understanding Terence still meant understanding his Greek models, and those interested in other questions found few supporters. Elaine Fantham was among those few. She had herself published important articles in the old style and knew the virtues of the old comparative method as well as its limitations, and to have her confess that “I am bored with it” meant the world to me as a youngster still struggling to have his voice heard. “Your book”, she wrote at the time, “will be different, Gott sei Dank!” I think that early one was. I hope this late one is . . . and I would like to think it would not disappoint her.

Terence: A Biographical Note Details of Terence’s life and career are preserved in the fourth-century commentary on his plays by Aelius Donatus, in performance notes (didascaliae) included in the manuscripts of his text, in a brief, gossipladen biography ascribed to the imperial biographer Suetonius Tranquillus, and through autobiographical references in his own prologues. As with so many ancient biographies, the record combines fact, inference, and fantasy in uncertain proportions. Modern authorities generally agree on the following. Publius Terentius Afer, to give him his full Roman name, was born c. 185 bce , quite possibly at Carthage, although ancient sources may simply have inferred this detail from his cognomen, Afer (the “African”). The further information that he came to Rome as the slave of a senator named Terentius Lucanus may be another such inference from what looks like the name of a Roman freedman. Suetonius’ report that he was “of medium height, slender build, swarthy complexion” is congruent with Berber origin, but if so, neither a background in North Africa nor experience as a slave has left any discernible trace in his plays. He was said to have died young, probably in 159 bce , leaving a daughter and a small estate on the Appian Way. Terence produced six plays in the course of the 160s bce , primarily at the spring festival in honor of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods (ludi Megalenses). Four were based on plays by Menander and two (Hecyra and Phormio) on plays by another poet in that same Greek tradition, Apollodorus of Carystos. All of his plays met with success, although the first two attempts to stage Hecyra were disrupted by outside forces. Dates and occasions as reported in the didascaliae are:

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Terence: A Biographical Note

Andria (An.) (The Woman from Andros) Hecyra (Hec.) (The Mother-in-Law) Heauton Timorumenos (HT) (The Self-Tormentor) Eunuchus (Eun.) (The Eunuch) Phormio (Ph.) Adelphoe (Ad.) (The Brothers)

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166

ludi Megalenses

165 160 160 163

ludi Megalenses ? Funeral of Aemilius Paullus ludi Megalenses

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ludi Megalenses

161 160

ludi Romani Funeral of Aemilius Paullus

Terence’s success depended in no small part on the impresario Ambivius Turpio, who took him under his wing, and Turpio may himself have been swayed by the endorsement of Rome’s greatest dramatic poet of the time, Caecilius Statius. Suetonius tells how Terence, then a shabbily dressed non-entity anxious to launch his career with Andria, was instructed to recite his play first to Caecilius at dinner. He began that recitation by the door and after a few verses was invited up to share the meal. (Aulus Gellius 13.2 tells a suspiciously similar story about the tragedian Accius and his own aged predecessor, Pacuvius. Suetonius’ version of the tale may simply be inspired by Ambivius’ claim at Hec. 14–15 that he had previously launched the career of Caecilius.) Terence, whose comic style seems closer to Menander than to Plautus, may also have enjoyed the support of aristocrats associated with Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror of Macedonia, whose philhellenic interests were well known. In Adelphoe, Terence acknowledges the support of anonymous aristocrats (Ad. 15), and the production of Hecyra and Adelphoe at Paullus’ funeral games has long encouraged their identification with Paullus and his son, Scipio Aemilianus. The life of Terence by Suetonius is available as an appendix to Radice (1976: 389–94). For what truths may be gleaned from it, see Fantham (2004).

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Comedy at Rome

Tragedies, comedies, and historical plays were all popular forms of entertainment in Republican Rome. By the time Terence began producing his comedies in the 160s bce , drama had become an established feature of four major state festivals, two in honor of Jupiter (the ludi Romani in September and ludi Plebeii in November), one of Apollo (the ludi Apollinares in July) and one of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods (the ludi Megalenses in April). And, thanks to the Roman willingness to repeat observances if the required rituals were declared imperfect, encore performances were always a possibility. In 200 bce , for example, one day of the multi-day ludi Romani was repeated and not long after that, the entire program of the ludi Plebeii, at which we know Plautus’ Stichus was performed, was repeated three times. Plays might also be added to the festivities on unique occasions. Plautus’ Pseudolus was performed at the dedication of Cybele’s temple in 191 bce , and in 160 bce the lavish funeral arranged for the great general Aemilius Paullus included the performance of two plays by Terence. The triumphs and votive games celebrated by victorious generals might also include plays, although they were not necessarily comedies. All in all, it was a lively theatrical tradition, and Plautus, working at Rome a generation and more before Terence, already seems to have had more opportunities to produce plays in the city than the great dramatists of fifth-century Athens would have known.1 The origins of this practice are shrouded in uncertainty. The tradition most often repeated in modern histories of Latin literature is that plays were first added to the official ludi when the Senate commissioned a Greek from Tarentum named Livius Andronicus to 1

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Terence: Andria

provide a comedy and a tragedy in Latin for production at the ludi Romani of 240 bce . The commission itself may well be a historical fact. The games that year marked the successful outcome of the first war with Carthage and attracted distinguished foreign visitors eager to honor Rome by honoring the occasion with their presence. The Senate may have sought to impress them (as well as their own people) by expanding and enriching the native celebration with the trappings of a Greek festival. A learned Greek from southern Italy, an area with a longstanding theatrical traditional of its own, who had connections to the powerful family of the Livii (his name suggests he was a freedman of the Livian gens) may well have had the special combination of talent and experience required for the job.2 Even if true, however, this account leaves many important questions unanswered: how did Andronicus so quickly adapt the quantitative patterns of Greek dramatic verse, spoken and sung, to the quite different linguistic structures of Latin, and where did he find actors capable of performing his new scripts? Did the plays he created build in any meaningful way on earlier native Italian traditions of performance or did they largely reflect a new wave of Greek cultural influence? Who formed the audience for these performances, and how would that audience have responded to such unprecedented sights and sounds? The Romans themselves came to wonder about such things. Among the investigators was Accius, the most learned dramatist of the later second century, who was a distinguished tragedian and also studied and wrote extensively on the history of Roman theater. A little later, the antiquarian polymath Varro did the same, and Cicero’s friend Atticus was also among those who researched such questions. Their findings did not always agree, and while none of their antiquarian research survives intact, the debates it stimulated and at least some of the facts it recorded left an enduring mark: most of what we know about Rome’s early theater history ultimately derives from these late Republican sources. The twenty-one plays of Plautus familiar today, for example,

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are almost certainly the same twenty-one that Varro judged to be authentic from among the hundred and more that by his time were circulating under Plautus’ name. Varro was probably also the source, though perhaps indirectly, for the Augustan historian Livy when he traced the development of stage performances at Rome back beyond Andronicus to the importation of dancers from Etruria in 364 bce as part of an expiatory ritual. The dates and details of early productions found in the manuscripts of Terence and attached in fragmentary form to Plautus’ Pseudolus and Stichus as the notes we call, after the Greek fashion, didascaliae, probably also entered the literary record in the late Republic as the result of similar antiquarian research. And that record endured. The long tradition of textual exegesis reflected in the commentary on Terence’s plays by the grammarian Aelius Donatus, originally compiled for his students in the fourth century ce , includes information on staging and details of production that may also derive from the work of these early researchers.3 These are not our only sources of knowledge. The surviving plays are themselves important witnesses to the conventions of the genre and the conditions of performance that generated them: stock jokes and stock scenes are easy to recognize by their very repetition from play to play, characters regularly signal the gestures and movements that accompanied their lines, comments spoken aside and speeches directed toward the spectators demonstrate the permeability of the boundary, both physical and conceptual, between actors and audiences, and textual variants in the manuscript tradition sometimes reflect changes made in the course of production to accommodate different actors or different conditions. Since Roman drama was in verse, its metrical patterns signal not just the presence or absence of musical accompaniment but the rhythms and tempos of that music, and thus the pace of the stage action. There is also a rich, if spotty, archaeological record that preserves some evidence for costumes, masks, and sets; and what we know of the venues for the dramatic

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festivals can also tell us at least a little about the conditions of performance. Sometimes, it is also possible to work from analogy with Hellenistic Greek theatrical practice, since the professional troupes that vied for contracts to perform at Rome probably functioned like the much better documented groups of traveling players that from at least the later fourth century brought drama to communities throughout the Greek world. Not all this material, however, is equally relevant to the questions we most want to answer. The evidence from late Republican sources may be very rich, but it was compiled a century and more after the careers of Plautus and Terence, and by that time conditions had changed significantly. The performance venues familiar to Varro and Cicero, for example, were already much more formal. Although the notorious Roman resistance to building a permanent theater in the city persisted until well into the first century (Rome had no permanent venue for plays until Pompey the Great dedicated its first monumental stone theater in 55 bce ), even the temporary theaters of those later days could be large and elaborate. We hear of stages faced with silver and marble and glamorous colonnades as many as three tiers high. Awnings could be provided to shield spectators from the Mediterranean sun. In celebrating funeral games for his father in 53 bce , Gaius Curio especially impressed his contemporaries by arranging for a double stage that could actually pivot to form an amphitheater. And “temporary” was relative: Curio’s pivoting structure was apparently still in use two years later. Audiences grew larger, too, and were more hierarchically arranged, with formal seating areas reserved for particular social classes, and visually spectacular productions became the norm.4 The creative impulse did not keep pace with these technical innovations. New plays became rare in the course of the second century, and revivals eventually became common. Tragedy continued to be popular—Cicero suggests that audiences could be moved to tears by pathetic scenes and were able to recognize famous arias from their

Comedy at Rome

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opening notes—and revivals were sometimes given a contemporary political color, with audiences responding as much to the political sympathies of the sponsor as to the artistic merits of the show. Palliata comedy did not continue to enjoy that level of popularity. The last playwright specifically identified as a writer of palliata comedies, a man named Turpilius, died when Cicero was still in diapers, and in the course of the first century stage performances seem gradually to have lost ground to the more improvisational genre of mime and to other lighter entertainments. That does not mean that palliata comedy was forgotten. The genre was instead becoming a mainstay of the Roman curriculum, with Terence in particular securing his position as a school text and becoming something of a cultural benchmark. To what extent these changing conditions and changing practices colored the historical reconstructions of a source like Varro remains among the great unknowns of Roman theater history.5 Nevertheless, much about the production of plays in the time of Plautus and Terence is clear enough in outline, if not necessarily in detail. Funerals, along with whatever entertainments were arranged to accompany them, were the responsibility of the deceased dignitary’s family, while successful soldiers financed the games they sponsored with spoils of the campaign. As official functions, state festivals were the responsibility of magistrates, in most cases junior officials called aediles, who contracted for the various rituals and entertainments the occasion required. In later times, the sponsorship of such games became a way for ambitious politicians to attract notice at Rome— Caesar as aedile in 65 bce first won popular acclaim by borrowing heavily and spending lavishly on public entertainments—but whether or to what extent officials in Terence’s day also supplemented the state allocation from private funds is uncertain. The lack of permanent theaters, though, surely meant that the costs incurred would have included construction of a stage and preparation of the performance venue as well as the hiring of performers.

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What dramatists faced, then, were essentially ad hoc arrangements in a suitably open area of the forum or before the temple of the god being honored, as in the case of the ludi Megalenses, when a stage would have been erected before Cybele’s temple on the Palatine hill. These structures have of course left no direct record, but temporary wooden stages are often depicted on Greek vases from southern Italy, and their example suggests a platform perhaps some twenty-four feet wide and fifteen feet deep, with entrances from the apron, the wings, and from house doors (three is the canonical number, with only two sometimes put to use) at the rear. The resulting stage, as we see it reconstructed here in Figure 1.1, was always open to the audience, but there must also have been curtains provided along the back to supply shelter for the necessary costume changes, props, and other technical support. How spectators were accommodated remains something of a mystery. There was no room for a dedicated grandstand before

Figure 1.1 A second-century Roman stage based on the calculations of Hughes (2012: 71), as reconstructed for the UCLA Humanities Virtual World Consortium RomeLab Project at the UCLA Experimental Technology Center under the direction of Professor Chris Johanson. The model builder was Marie Saldaña (http://osfoio/5nd7t). Open Access Image.

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Cybele’s temple on the Palatine, and the only evidence for a grandstand in the forum describes an occasion when Gaius Gracchus ordered one torn down because it spoiled the common people’s traditional viewing places, which suggests an aberration rather than a standard practice. Although some seating was surely provided before the stage, it must have been limited, with most of the audience finding places for themselves on or about the surrounding buildings. However we imagine those arrangements, the key fact is that stage structure and seating were separate. No theater enclosure insulated the production from other activities in the area, as later became the norm. Actors and audiences in these early days were left exposed to the many distractions of a festival—Terence mentions trouble with tightrope-walkers and boxers at the Megalenses and gladiators at Paullus’ funeral—and, if performing in the forum, even the ongoing commercial bustle of its markets, where commercial activity never fully stopped.6 Given all of this, one thing is certain: these would have been quite challenging conditions for performance. They required actors routinely to work in acoustically difficult venues, with little or no opportunity to rehearse on the site and to appear before audiences whose dedication to the show could not be taken for granted. This is why Plautine prologues sometimes read like stand-up comic routines as the speaker wins the attention and good will of spectators, who always had multiple options for amusing themselves. Roman performers, however, were well equipped for the task. Those in charge of a festival contracted with the actor-managers of professional companies, who then assumed responsibility for the actual productions. A theatrical community available to vie for such contracts seems to have formed at Rome fairly quickly. As early as 207 bce the Senate authorized the organization of writers and actors into a professional guild in recognition of Andronicus’ continuing service to the state, although the legal status of these professionals was not high. Actors came to be included, along with gladiators and prostitutes, as people

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whose occupations automatically limited their legal rights, although the inability to stand for public office, to cite one such right closed to actors, probably did not matter to them in any meaningful way.7 Nor would these actors have confined themselves to performances at Rome. Since the official performance calendar in the city was too short to support companies year round, these must have been itinerant troupes of players able to travel widely and perform at will. They may have numbered no more than seven in all, with a piper (tibicen) to supply the music and a hamper full of costumes and masks to outfit the traditional cast of characters.Young men in love, their uncooperative fathers and anxious mothers, slaves clever and not so clever, pimps, courtesans, soldiers and parasites would all be immediately recognizable by their costumes and masks, and the stock scenes and formalized exchanges in which they frequently found themselves played to the strengths of small, close-knit companies, whose members knew each other so well that, wherever they were and however impromptu the immediate conditions, the timing and blocking of their movements would come naturally as matters of long practice. The scripts from which they worked were created for them by playwrights whose relationship to each company may have varied. Although the ancient biographical tradition of Plautus preserved by Aulus Gellius (3.3) is largely fictional, it suggests with some plausibility that he was an active participant in the business of stage production, perhaps (like Shakespeare and Molière) an actor and investor in the company for which he also provided scripts. Then again, the very name Titus Maccius Plautus hints at a professional joke, a parody of the grandiloquent tripartite names affected by Roman aristocrats. It seems to mean something like Flatfoot Dick McClown, and when or whether a single, original “Plautus” stood behind that name before a commercially successful cottage industry developed to profit from his reputation remains a subject of speculation. In any case, “Plautus” always meant good box office: the surviving texts of Casina and

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Poenulus show clear marks of post-Plautine revival and reveal an implicit confidence that the name itself would be an effective draw. Terence was more certainly a real person, but perhaps not so deeply enmeshed in the business of theater. His prologues indicate that he entrusted his scripts to the head of a company, a highly successful actor-manager named Ambivius Turpio, who took the young dramatist under his wing and represented his interests in negotiations with the aediles. The later tradition that Terence enjoyed the patronage of powerful aristocrats—he alludes to the support of unidentified homines nobilis in the Adelphoe prologue—may reflect, if nothing else, a certain insularity from the ordinary rough-and-tumble of life in Rome’s theatrical community.8 The kind of play written for these troupes by dramatists like Plautus and Terence cultivated a Greek ambiance and a Greek look, which is why Romans came to call them palliatae, i.e. plays characterized by actors wearing the short Greek cloak that Romans called the pallium. The convention, which emerged from Andronicus’ original commission in 240, was to base the new Latin play on a Greek model, often identified by author and original title in a new Latin prologue. So, Plautus declares quite openly: This play is called Onagos [The Donkey] in Greek. Demophilus wrote it, Maccus turned it barbarian. He wants to call it Asinaria [The Donkey Play] . . . As. 10–12

These Greek originals were primarily plays of fourth-century New Comedy, which had moved from the fantastic, politically charged style familiar to us from Aristophanes to a more quiet domestic drama centered on family relationships and social obligations. How faithful a Latin play would be, or was expected to be, to its model is a matter of debate. Significant changes were built into the very process of adaptation. Where Greek audiences would have seen a semblance of

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Terence: Andria

their own lives and their own values represented on the stage, Roman audiences saw Roman actors speaking idiomatic Latin while dressed in Greek costumes and cavorting, sometimes grotesquely, in Greek settings. Plautus even coined verbs for “playing the Greek” (congraecari at Bacch. 743, pergraecari at Most. 22). In staging these fantasies and burlesques, Roman popular stereotypes about Greeks, never very flattering, were given free rein as a perfectly real Greek city like Athens or Epidaurus became a Roman Neverland.9 Roman plays were also more musical than their models. Greek New Comedy had abandoned the musical richness of its fifth-century predecessor: its chorus was no longer a participant in the action, and while music remained available for special effects, more of the play was spoken than accompanied by the pipe. Roman comedy seems entirely to have lacked choral performances, but (at least to judge from Plautus) much of a play was set to music, and characters could at almost any time break into elaborate, rhythmically complex songs. Plautus was thus, in his way, Rome’s first great lyric poet. These plays were also less focused than their predecessors on telling a coherent story. As the emerging Latin tradition developed a fondness for stock roles and type scenes, it turned minor features of Greek plays into major features of Roman ones. Slave roles, for example, became more prominent and the antics of a running messenger, desperate to find a master standing in plain sight, whom he somehow cannot see, became one of many popular set pieces in the tradition. In its full form (there are numerous variants), the messenger rushes onstage (his entrance often cued by a line like, “I see Parmeno running this way”), looks everywhere but in the right place for his master, delivers a monologue to nobody in particular that stresses the urgency of his mission and the need for any bystanders to get out of his way, is eventually stopped in his tracks by the sound of his master’s voice, and then, when at last he looks in the right direction, often finds himself too excited or too exhausted to deliver a coherent message. Greek precedents for the

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Figure 1.2 Comic scene of a running slave. Fresco from the House of Casca Longus at Pompeii. Photograph by Erich Lessing, reproduced by permission of Art Resource, New York.

scene have been difficult to find, although it is well represented in art and is nicely illustrated in a fresco from Pompeii (Figure  1.2): the slave pauses for breath, weight on one foot, tunic hitched above his knees, pallium flung over his left shoulder, and looking in precisely the wrong direction as the young man and woman behind him wait anxiously to attract his notice.10 The frequent use of stock characters and scenes like these might at first sight suggest a genre too full of clichés for its own good, although

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Terence: Andria

Plautus can sound quite at ease with his recirculating set of characters and settings: This city is Epidamnus while this play is being performed; when another is being performed, it will become some other town, just as families are also accustomed to be switched around: sometimes a pimp lives here, sometimes a young man, sometimes an old man, a pauper, beggar, patron, parasite, seer . . . Men. 72–6

Terence says something similar, though he says it with an edge. How, he asked, could a dramatist not write a running slave scene, create good matrons, wicked courtesans, a greedy parasite, a braggart soldier, a baby substituted, an old man deceived by his slave, loves, hates, suspicions? After all, nothing is said now that wasn’t said before. Eun. 36–41

This may sound on first hearing like a complaint, but the reality behind it is quite different. Both dramatists knew that a foundation in stock forms was the very strength of the genre. The pleasure in watching a Roman comedy was a pleasure of anticipation more than surprise. As with so many later verbal arts that became dear to the Romans, from oratory and declamation to epigram and epic, the true measure of success was not how well an author escaped the conventions of the genre but how brilliantly the new work exploited those conventions. Thus, even Terence, who is often imagined as some sort of rebel against the palliata tradition, builds running slaves, greedy parasites, and all the rest into his plays. To what extent he embraced conventional procedures and in what ways he may seem to have resisted or subverted them are not easily determined and remain subjects of ongoing debate.

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Terence: A New Voice?

The comedy called palliata was already four generations old when Terence began producing plays, and it continued as a living genre for several generations after him. Although only his six plays and some twenty-one by Plautus survive intact, at least twenty poets are known to have written in the palliata style from the time Livius Andronicus launched the genre in 240 bce down to its last known practitioner, a man named Turpilius, who died at an advanced age in 103. How to place Terence in this sequence has long been problematic. Which aspects of his art are unique to him, which are common to the Roman tradition within which he worked, and which were taken by him directly from the Greek tradition of his models can be difficult to determine since neither his Roman nor his Greek predecessors survive in more than fragments. The fact is that while the genre itself thrived, not all those who worked in it became figures of note. Andronicus’ name endured as the genre’s founder, but neither Cicero nor Horace thought his actual plays worth a second reading, with the result that barely six lines, chosen largely for their stylistic oddities, survive from them. Andronicus did not even make the cut when, around the time Cicero was a boy, a self-proclaimed critic named Volcacius Sedigitus (“Sixfinger”) singled out ten palliata dramatists for inclusion in a ranked list. That list is full of surprises: To Caecilius Statius I give the prize for comedy. Plautus in second place easily surpasses the others, then Naevius, who seethes with passion, takes third prize. If a fourth is to be given, it will be given to Licinius, 13

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Terence: Andria

after Licinius I make Atilius to follow. In sixth Terence comes after these, Turpilius seventh, Trabea takes eighth, in ninth place I easily put Luscius. For antiquity’s sake I add Ennius as a tenth.

Caecilius, Plautus, and Naevius were acknowledged heavyweights of the Roman stage, and there is some satisfaction in seeing Luscius, who will claim our attention as Terence’s rival, placed there near the bottom, but what do we make of Terence sitting in sixth place behind the nonentity Licinius and a poet names Atilius, whom Cicero called “extremely clumsy”?1 Volcacius’ reasoning is not recorded, but a core problem with the reception of Terence’s work is not difficult to guess. In the prologue to Phormio, Terence himself reports a contemporary complaint that his plays were thin in diction and light in substance (Ph.1–5, cf. HT 46–7), and an epigram attributed to Julius Caesar puts a better complexion on what, reading between Caesar’s lines, is clearly the same idea a century later: You, too, you will be weighed among the highest, O half a Menander, and deservedly, lover of pure diction. If only comic power were added to your gentle lines, your excellence would be judged with honor equal to the Greeks, and you would not lie faulted in this respect. This alone I lament and regret is lacking in you, Terence.

Although Terence’s diction would eventually be held up as a stylistic model for later generations, it seems that for some Romans, the plays as plays were simply not funny enough. We can still see why they may have thought so.2 The comic appeal of Terence’s plays is easy to underestimate. There is plenty in them to make audiences smile and nod, but not so much to make them hoot and holler. His texts are markedly austere, with

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few of the show-stopping effects typical of Plautine comedy. The clever slaves so dear to Plautus are to be found in his plays, too, but they never seize the limelight as Plautus’ slaves so often do. Young lovers are never quite so absurdly silly or courtesans so coldly mercenary or pimps so outrageously villainous. Although he uses music skillfully to control pace and tone, Terence creates no long, verbally rich and musically complex arias, and his scripts show little of the extravagant word play and double-entendres in which Plautus delights. None of that made Terence a failure. He enjoyed the continuous support of the impresario Ambivius Turpio, whose own livelihood depended on knowing what would sell in the rough-andtumble of the Roman marketplace. And sell they did. Turpio won contracts for all six of Terence’s plays in rapid succession in the course of the 160s. He was able to secure a second and then a third contract for Hecyra when the play faced unexpected difficulties in production, and Eunuchus was such a hit that it was brought back for an immediate encore and earned a record fee. Terence evidently died young, but the ancient Life suggests that he did not die poor. He was said to have left property on the Appian Way and a sufficient dowry for his daughter to marry into the Roman merchant class. These are all and by any measure signs of commercial success. The governing aesthetic of Terentian comedy was, nevertheless, different from that of Plautine comedy. That difference was noticed in antiquity, and even today, audiences and critics seem not to warm to Terence as readily as they do to Plautus.3 Why is that? Terence himself bears some responsibility for this hesitation. The expository banter of a Plautine prologue is relaxed and self-assured; the speaker who tells an audience “I bring you Plautus” acts as if the very statement is sufficient to secure their good will. Terence replaces prologues of that confident sort with more formal, combative presentations focused on questions of aesthetics and dramaturgy, speeches that introduce not the characters and action of the play but

16

Terence: Andria

the playwright and his idea of what a play should be. In doing so, Terence projects the image of a playwright at odds with forces of some kind, which he seems to suggest are arrayed against him. The very first words of Andria (and thus Terence’s first recorded words from a Roman stage) are words of complaint: he cannot go peacefully about his business because a malevolent colleague has accused him of spoiling Greek plays. Donatus identifies the troublemaker as the older poet Luscius of Lanuvium, whose motive might simply have been professional jealousy: his appearance at the bottom of Volcacius’ list suggests a poet of only limited personal success. This Luscius nevertheless claimed, at least to judge by Terence’s defense, that the younger dramatist “contaminated” plays by introducing material from a second Greek play in the course of adapting his primary model. Nor was that the end of it. After this initial skirmish over Andria, what Terence did to his models—always with the idea that something he did to them was wrong—becomes a recurring theme in the prologues and is soon followed by reports of a second complaint, viz. that his career owes more to the influence of powerful patrons than to his own modest talent. The truth behind these accusations is impossible to determine, but they have long shaped critical response to the dramatist and his work.4 What spoiling meant is unclear and has for that very reason become a perennial crux of Terentian scholarship. The prologues give some indications of what he did, if not of how what he did “spoiled” or “contaminated” plays. Andria incorporated material from Menander’s quite similar Perinthia (An. 9–14). For Eunuchus, the addition was a soldier and his parasite from Menander’s Kolax (Eun. 30–3), while the Roman Adelphoe added an encounter with a pimp from a second play by Menander’s contemporary, Diphilus (Ad. 6–11). Since the Kolax had previously been adapted for the Roman stage by both Plautus and Naevius, Luscius considered the addition to Eunuchus something akin to plagiarism: Terence says that Luscius brought a charge of “theft”

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before the aediles and tried (apparently unsuccessfully) to have the contract for its performance canceled. Making sense of all this is not easy, for the only certain things are questions. Was representation of the primary Greek model “contaminated” by additions to its Latin version that ruined its original design, or was the secondary source play “spoiled” because the appropriation of isolated characters or scenes for use elsewhere rendered it unsuitable for independent adaptation? What constituted theft in a genre built of stock elements and performed for a world without copyright? Could there possibly have been rules in place, whether set by the aediles who offered the contracts, by a poets’ guild that tried to police its members, or by some other interested party, that dictated what could legitimately be done and what had to be avoided in adapting a Greek play for the Roman stage? We do not know, although the idea of actual rules in place seems highly unlikely. The one established fact is that Terence, like Plautus before him, felt perfectly free to alter his models, but his emphasis on doing so has long set the terms of his reception by encouraging critics to concentrate on this structural aspect of his dramaturgy and then all too often to measure the extent of his originality by the extent of his perceived alterations to his models. A similar emphasis on the details of adaptation once threatened to dominate the study of Plautus, but it was forestalled by the deliberately glaring incongruity of his many alterations, additions, and distortions to the fabric of his models and, ultimately, by the (sometimes grudging) acknowledgment that “once the play begins, everything becomes ‘Plautus’”.5 He clearly had not the slightest intention of replicating Greek dramatic values on the Roman stage, and once that was acknowledged, it became possible to study—and to admire—Plautine comedy on something like its own terms. Terence has been less fortunate in escaping comparison with his (hypothetical) models, for his apparent fidelity to the spirit of Greek New Comedy can too easily be mistaken for fidelity to its letter. “Terence,” runs the resulting line of

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Terence: Andria

thought, “is essentially a translator, or, if one prefers, an adapter of Greek plays, not a creator. Apart from making his plots more complicated by contaminatio . . . there is no evidence that he contributed anything to their composition.”6 This has not been a particularly fruitful line of investigation, and it is no longer the dominant view. Modern literary and performance-based critics find much more to admire in Terence by bringing new analytic techniques to bear on the plays as we have them and are much less engaged with the might-havebeens of their lost originals. The Plautine corpus nevertheless continues to prove more congenial to contemporary literary study than the plays of Terence, at least in part for another reason that also finds its first expression in the prologues.7 “Contamination” was not the only complaint made against Terence. Luscius also objected that he had aristocratic patrons, who not only helped secure contracts for his plays but collaborated in the writing of them. Terence, somewhat coyly, does not deny the charge: What they so furiously consider a reproach he takes as a great compliment, since he finds favor with those who find favor with all of you and all the people . . . Ad. 17–19

Who were these aristocratic supporters? And what did they do in support of his career? Two of Terence’s plays were performed at the funeral games of Aemilius Paullus, the only documented case of palliata comedy performed at a funeral, and the commission might suggest some connection with Paullus and his family. That is not an unreasonable deduction. Paullus was himself something of a philhellene, as was his younger son, who had been adopted into the family of the Scipios as Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. Since we know that Scipio paid the bills for the funeral, would he not have had a say in the entertainment chosen for it? He certainly cultivated intellectual pursuits. As a young man, Scipio Aemilianus grew close to the Greek historian Polybius,

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then living as a diplomatic hostage in Rome, and he was later associated with the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, while among his friends were several with serious literary interests, including Gaius Laelius and the satirist Lucilius. Whatever interests Aemilianus had and whatever he did as a young man in the 160s, however, were eventually obscured by his very real achievements as an adult. Although Scipio had fought with distinction under his father’s command at Pydna in 168, the decisive battle which brought the kingdom of Macedonia under Roman control, his widespread renown came in the 140s through important military victories of his own in Africa and then in Spain. With the destruction of Carthage in 146, he was able to claim the honorific title “Africanus” in his own right, and the conquest of Numantia in northern Spain in 133 made him “Numantinus,” too. On his return to Rome from Spain, however, Scipio Aemilianus became a prominent champion of aristocratic privilege, and by the time of his death in 129, under what some thought suspicious circumstances, he had become a highly controversial figure. The political struggles that surrounded him in later life grew quite bitter, and whatever truth there may have been about his support of Terence thirty years earlier was subsumed by a later wave of virulent anti-Scipionic propaganda. The earlier suspicions of influence and of ghostwriting were expanded into claims of sexual exploitation and more general moral corruption. The political effects of the slanders may have been ephemeral, but some of the mud stuck. Generations later, Cicero was still shrugging off rumors that Terence’s plays were ghostwritten by Laelius, while a century after that, Quintilian felt it necessary to acknowledge reports that their author was, in fact, Scipio. All the gossip and innuendo then found its way into the biographical tradition that Suetonius records, and from there it entered the later scholarly tradition. Donatus in the fourth century had heard the rumors, and a millennium later, Montaigne was still giving credence, albeit reluctantly, to the claim of ghostwriting by Scipio and Laelius.8

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Terence: Andria

Ancient doubts about the authorship of Terence’s plays have long since been laid to rest, but the concomitant notion that they reflect the philhellenic agenda of a coterie surrounding Scipio Aemilianus has been slower to fade. Although modern scholars increasingly recognize the so-called Scipionic Circle as a dramatic fiction of Cicero’s philosophical dialogues with little historical reality behind it, the palpable change in something between the comedies of Plautus and those of Terence continues to demand explanation. Philhellenism, if not necessarily the specific philhellenism of Scipio and those associated with him, may, in fact, have some bearing on the question. Terence’s plays have a moral center, a focus on what it means to be human and to act as humans should, that seems characteristically Greek, or is at least much easier to find in plays by Menander than in those of, say, Plautus, who will make a line like “it is human to err, but also human to forgive” (Merc. 319) sound more like a platitude than a philosophical truth. A whole line of criticism has over the years made much of Terentian humanitas, even if the most famous expression of that quality, “I’m a human being: I think no human business foreign to me” (HT 77), is, in fact, only a busybody’s excuse for his prying. Quite serious appeals to human sensibility and to the conduct befitting a human being are found throughout his work, and they become major themes in Hecyra and Adelphoe. If, as the fragments of Menander increasingly suggest, Terence found these modes of thought in his models, the decision to carry them over and make them so prominent in his own versions suggests a shift not just of comic focus, but of artistic sensibility. To postulate such a change is entirely reasonable, for all of Rome (not just the extended family of Aemilius Paullus) was undergoing a significant cultural shift in the course of the second century. This was the period when, to borrow Horace’s famous phrase in his “Letter to Augustus” (Ep. 2.1.156), conquered Greece first began in earnest to conquer its savage conqueror. The process began back with the early poets Livius Andronicus and then Ennius, who explicated Greek texts

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to willing listeners. So did the famous Pergamene scholar Crates of Mallos, who found himself convalescing at Rome after the Second Punic War and passed the time lecturing on Homer (in Greek) to eager audiences. By the time Perseus, the last king of Macedonia, surrendered to Paullus after the battle of Pydna in 168 bce , the long stream of Greek cultural and material wealth flowing into Italy was becoming a flood. Agents of the Roman victory like Paullus and Quinctius Flamininus before him moved easily through the Greek world and were themselves effectively bilingual. While serving as a Roman envoy in 191, the more traditional Cato conspicuously refused to address the Athenian Assembly in Greek, a gesture all the more significant because he could have done so. Although he famously warned his son not to take Greek literature too seriously because it was a corrupting influence, that distrust did not prevent Cato from keeping a Greek tutor in his household, and his own writings reflect the influence of Greek literature and a knowledge of Greek traditions. As for Paullus, he took pains to secure a Greek education for his sons, and after Pydna he invited them to take for their own use what books they liked from Perseus’ royal library. Then again, the flow of booty from the East that came as a result of the Roman conquests included far more than books. There was material wealth, of course, vast quantities of Greek art, and also Greek learning of all kinds, which often came in the person of slaves, hostages, ambassadors, and itinerant philosophers. The result was not only a Roman aristocracy increasingly schooled in Greek thought and responsive to Greek sensibilities, but a larger populace whose experience of Greece made it a place far less exotic and less automatically funny than before. The connotations of “playing the Greek” were different by the 160s as Rome, awash in the spoils of success, became a more secure and confident place than it had been two generations before, when Hannibal was devastating Italy and Antiochus the Great was consolidating his power in the East.9

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Terence: Andria

These were the conditions under which the hard edge of Plautine comedy began to soften and the close observation of character and fascination with the complexities of everyday life so characteristic of Menander began to reemerge in the plays of Terence. The measure of that change is not simply to be taken by comparing instances of humanum and its cognates in Plautus and Terence. The plays have many moments like the following one in Andria, when Simo berates his son for committing himself to Glycerium and daring to claim she is an Attic citizen. Pamphilus wilts under the pressure of the assault (“Wretched me!” 881) as Simo pounces (“Hah! Have you only just realized that, Pamphilus?”). Then, he suddenly breaks off in mid-rant: What am I doing? Why torture myself? Why torment myself? Why trouble my old age with his foolishness? Should I suffer the punishment for his misdeeds? No! Let him have her, be gone, live with her. Pa. Father! Si. What ‘father’? As if you need this father! An. 886–90

What is so striking, beside the immediate tension and underlying irony of the situation (Glycerium is, in fact, a citizen) is Simo’s struggle to divorce his son from his feelings by slipping in and out of third person address. The touch of reality here as Simo’s verbal disjunction reveals his inner conflict finds a counterpart in his neighbor Chremes, who eventually responds to Simo’s insistence on the marriage of their children with a moment of brutal honesty: You prevailed on me to hand my daughter over to a young kid engrossed in an affair with someone else, resistant to taking a wife, for squabbling and an unstable marriage just to cure your son by her pain and by her suffering. You won. I agreed while circumstances permitted. Now they don’t bear it out: forbear. An. 828–32

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Comedy will come from this situation, but there is no comedy here yet as Chremes labors to protect his daughter by speaking the truth as he sees it. And he speaks in a designedly old-fashioned way. When he says, “I agreed while circumstances permitted. Now they don’t bear it out: forbear” (incepi dum res tetulit. nunc non ferat: feras) he is employing not just the alliteration of -n and -f sounds but a play on the multiple meanings of the verb fero (tetulit . . . ferat . . . feras, meaning both “to endure” and “to support”) that is typical of older Latin style, and he uses a form of that verb (tetulit, a reduplicated perfect that was replaced in classical Latin by tulit) that was already sounding archaic to Romans of Terence’s generation. The diction is on one level a nod to comic traditionality, but it is also a characterizing quirk of style as a serious, older man speaks in a serious, older way. This stylistic trick is well documented in the plays of Menander and stands as another example of how Terence can embrace the sensibilities of his models by replicating Menander’s effects using native Latin equivalents. The use of archaic diction, however, also reminds us that the quest for Menandrean effects does not lead Terence to turn his back entirely on the style and the devices of his Roman predecessors. Palliata comedy was always an essentially conservative genre. His shifts in emphasis are effective not because of what is different in his plays but for all that he leaves unchanged. Davos of Andria, for example, is never quite the clever slave we seem to be promised (159–64). At his very first appearance, Simo catches him off his guard (183), his actions are never much more than reactions to Simo’s initiatives, and he is saved from a whipping at the end not by a scheme but by a truth he had previously dismissed as a fiction. These may be new twists, but familiar comic patterns lie intact beneath them. Davos has a running entrance (338), although the scene plays out much more straightforwardly than most. He is also on the receiving end of physical abuse of a sort standard in comedy—so familiar that Plautus has his own Simo joke in Pseudolus (1239–41) about not beating his

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Terence: Andria

slave “as in other comedies”—although such abuse is rare in Terence. While his plays include other scenes of slapstick, Andria is the only one of them to introduce a lorarius (lit. “flogger”), a brute summoned specifically to truss Davos like an animal for market and haul him away. Davos will soon be freed, but that, too, follows the familiar comic pattern of acknowledgment and forgiveness.10 At other times, a traditional Roman pattern overtakes a Greek detail. A good example from Andria is the midwife’s instruction for Glycerium in childbirth, “Give her what I ordered to be given to drink and as much as I commanded” (484–5). The passage has attracted special attention because two bits of Menander’s original survive: “give her a bath at once” and “afterwards, dear, the yolks of four eggs” (fr. 36–7 K-T). Much has been made of Terence’s shift from the specifics of the instruction to something much more general, but far more significant is that the Latin pleonasm (the line is structured around two verbs of command for what is really just a single instruction) reverts to a common device of traditional comic diction and that Terence has turned spoken lines in Menander into a Latin song. Roman comedy, like Roman life itself, was irrepressibly musical, and though more restrained in his use of music than Plautus, Terence still knows how to use it to his dramatic advantage. Mysis here is singing in a rhythm created by bacchiacs (๰‒‒), the only bacchiacs in Terence and a metrical pattern often used to suggest unsteadiness: the midwife Lesbia has quite possibly been drinking, as old women in Roman comedy are prone to do.11 Terence thus seems to be presenting a traditional character producing a traditional effect by traditional means. That ability to create new, decidedly Menandrean effects while still working with traditional Roman methods is what can make it so difficult for critics to frame an appropriate range of questions about his dramaturgy and then to articulate an equally appropriate set of answers. Where we look determines what we see, and Terence demands a particularly broad view. To look too fixedly at—or away

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from—Plautus is never entirely satisfactory. Thus, for example, while there is good reason to claim that “in style, structure, characterization, and moral outlook Plautus . . . and Terence are about as different as two poets working in the same genre can be,” it is, perhaps paradoxically, not equally fair to conclude that Terence “writes, by and large, as if the comic tradition at Rome never existed.”12 He neither rejected nor subverted the tradition he knew quite well, but he did ask it to do some new things even as he did some old things in a new way. There is, as we shall see, some of each even in his first play, Andria.

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3

Andria Unfolds Itself

The plots of fourth-century Athenian comedies unfolded in a sequence of five distinct movements, which were designed to function much like modern acts, although without the fall of a curtain to separate them. The necessary breaks in the action were instead filled by unrelated musical interludes performed by a somewhat generic chorus, often identified on its first appearance as a band of tipsy revelers. Dramatists simply arranged their entrances and exits to create empty stages at suitable intervals for the chorus to appear. The pattern is well attested in ancient papyri of Menander, the oldest of which date to the very century of his death. These old books present the text written out in large, continuous columns, leaving significant gaps in those columns only to indicate the places for choral songs, which were not themselves part of the preserved script. This is the practice behind Horace’s famous dictum that a play should have neither more nor fewer than five parts (Ars poetica 189–90), but it was not, in fact, the Roman practice. Roman comedies were not punctuated by choral interludes: their action continued uninterrupted from beginning to end. In adapting Greek scripts, Roman playwrights would reorganize the dramatic action as necessary and write over the four choral breaks they found in their models. Traces of an original act structure are still sometimes discernible in the new Latin scripts, but for Romans, the scene rather than the act was the operational division, which is why ancient copies of Roman plays regularly indicated scene divisions by identifying speakers and their roles but not any larger units. The preference for continuous action is also why Donatus, 27

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Terence: Andria

whose critical tradition preserved memory of the fourth-century Greek practice, felt compelled to acknowledge the difficulty of dividing Latin plays into acts, why his own somewhat belabored attempts to do so are often unsatisfactory, and why the act divisions still found in some modern editions of Terence (and Plautus) remain largely unhelpful.1 What does help when thinking about the structure of a Roman play is to identify the larger units that develop the problem around which its action is built. Ancient critics knew that, too. In other contexts, Donatus writes more generally of a comedy as falling into four parts, which he calls prologus, protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe, and his use of these Greek terms for what we would call introduction, exposition, development, and resolution signals his debt to a style of drama criticism that can be traced back to Aristotle in the fourth century and was developed in greater detail by his pupil Theophrastus. This does not mean that Terence looked to Aristotle or Theophrastus to tell him how to structure a dramatic action. Their theoretical scheme is in any case descriptive, not prescriptive. Nor is it fair to say that Terence simply copied what he found in his models, although ancient tradition claimed Menander as a student of Theophrastus, and his own particular care in plot construction and character development has been linked to Aristotelian principles. Terence is himself responsible for the structure of the Latin Andria, and the decisions he made in shaping its story—what he reveals and what he holds back, which characters dominate and which stand at a distance, when the action accelerates and when it slows down—not only offer insight into his priorities and values as a dramatist but provide us, as we trace the consequences of those decisions, with an opportunity to understand a little better what comes to engage our sympathy and what may repel us, and thus why we respond to his play as we do.

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I. Prologue (1–27) As we have already seen, Terence maintains the convention of a formal prologue to start things off, but he removes its overtly expository function to introduce not the action of the play but the idea of playmaking, acknowledging his sources, defending his method of adaptation, and appealing for the audience’s good will. The tone is distinctly argumentative, and the rhetorical qualities found in all Terence’s prologues are especially apparent here in his first one. The four basic parts of a speech as defined by ancient rhetorical theory—introduction (exordium), statement of facts (narratio), proof (argumentatio), and conclusion (conclusio)—are clearly marked: an exordium (1–8) declaring the need to defend himself, narratio (9–16) explaining his introduction of material from Menander’s Perinthia to his Andria and the critics’ complaint that this was improperly done, argumentatio (17–23) claiming ample precedent for his practice and the superiority of free adaptation over meticulous fidelity, and a conclusio (24–7) asking for the audience’s indulgence, since his future as a dramatist is in their hands. How much that audience would have known (or cared) about these questions before hearing the prologue is unknown. If Terence’s quarrel with the older poet Luscius Lanuvinus is essentially factual, the dispute could conceivably have been a literary cause célèbre and, especially if a significant segment of the audience was well educated, the accusation of somehow spoiling plays (contaminatio) might have been of genuine interest. Literary questions were already engaging Ennius in the 180s and were certainly of interest to Lucilius and his readers in the later first century; it is not unreasonable to imagine similar conversations centering around Terence in the 160s.2 There may also have been a more mundane, practical dimension. Although Luscius may not himself have been an especially successful playwright—he was set near the bottom of Volcacius’ famous list of

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Terence: Andria

comic poets, and Terence later felt free to ridicule his dramaturgy publicly (Eun. 7–14)—he may still have had sufficient clout to make trouble for Terence with his official sponsors. The later claim that Luscius tried to have the aediles revoke their contract for Eunuchus is at least expected to be credible (Eun. 19–24). It is no less possible, however, that the whole dispute as represented in the prologues is a fiction or at best a tempest in a teapot. Especially astute spectators might have heard in the quarrel with the older poet Luscius a thematic echo of palliata comedy’s longstanding interest in the struggle between youth and age, while others may simply have enjoyed being cast as judges and thrust into the middle of a debate that was at least made to sound like something important. That is not to say, however, that the rhetoric keeps Terence from offering any substantive information about his play: Menander created an Andria and a Perinthia. Whoever knows either well knows them both: they are different not so much in plot as they are different in tone and style. What was appropriate to his Andria he admits he transferred from Perinthia and put to his own use. An. 9–14

This claim about Menander’s two plays may actually be true. Our one significant fragment of Perinthia, some twenty-three lines from a scene threatening violence to a slave, who has taken refuge at an altar, is significantly broader in style and cruder in tone than anything in the Latin Andria. And what specifically has Terence “transferred”? Donatus says that while Menander’s Andria opened with the monologue of a father anxious about his son, the first scene of the Latin play is adapted from Perinthia, where the equivalent of Terence’s Simo, a father with similar anxieties, comes onstage in dialogue with his wife. Terence has kept the expository dialogue but substituted a freedman, Sosia, for the wife. Like Sosia, this wife was probably what ancient grammarians

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called a protatic character (lit. a character “to make a point”), created for a single scene to act as a foil for another character, and Terence may have made the change simply because he found the relation of freedman to patron more dramatically interesting than that between husband and wife. Yet the effect is, at least in hindsight, significant. Andria is throughout disconcertingly free of serious female voices, and removal of the wife suggests that this omission is deliberate.3 The change of characters from wife to freedman, however important to us as an indication of focus, nevertheless seems hardly sufficient in itself to justify the apparent howls from Terence’s rivals that he “contaminated” plays. A second change Donatus records, the introduction of a second young man named Charinus and his slave Byrria, is thus also likely to have derived from Perinthia.4 What they add to the play is reasonably clear. Charinus genuinely loves the girl being imposed on Pamphilus, and while his understandable anguish over the situation is never developed into a genuine subplot, his presence further complicates the tangle of conflicting obligations surrounding Pamphilus, and Charinus will in the end then be available to provide a suitable match for this (second) daughter. Integrating Charinus into the action even in this limited way must have required changes in structure and dialogue, and these may well have attracted notice, especially by other theater professionals familiar with the Menandrean corpus. Yet none of this information as provided in the prologue is expository in more than a general way. As becomes typical of Terence, the substance of the exposition is shifted to the body of the play, to be acted out by the characters themselves.

II. Exposition (28–227) Having arranged an advantageous marriage for his son Pamphilus with the daughter of Chremes, his neighbor, old Simo has since

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come to suspect that Pamphilus has already formed an unsuitable attachment to Glycerium, a young girl who came to Athens from the island of Andros in the company of an older woman, Chrysis. This Chrysis has since died, and it was Pamphilus’ concern at her funeral for the grieving Glycerium that first alerted Simo to the possibility of a serious relationship between them. Unwilling either to confront his son directly or to act on his suspicion, Simo devises a plan to discover the truth: he will pretend the marriage to Chremes’ daughter is imminent, forcing Pamphilus either to acquiesce to the arranged match or to renounce it and thus reveal his prior attachment (28–158). Simo knows he must also thwart the machinations of his own slave, Davos, whose main pleasure lies in advancing his young master’s ambitions, while Davos is himself caught between fear of Simo and a desire to help Pamphilus, who is not just infatuated with the girl but is the father of her coming child (159–227). The play as we see it on the page begins with talk, but the very first line of that talk (“You men, take these things inside: off with you!” 28) reminds us that the play as performed begins with action: a line of porters enters carrying provisions for a feast, supervised by Sosia and his patron, Simo. The porters stagger under a variety of burdens—the comic business made possible by a procession like this is a familiar feature of palliata comedy—until they pause at Simo’s house door (thus identifying the house, itself an expository moment) and await his instructions. This lively bit of business may originate with Terence, inspired by turning the wife of Menander’s Perinthia into a freedman. Donatus understands the “art” Sosia claims for himself (31) as the cook’s art, and the scene as illustrated in an important set of manuscripts of Terence preserves that identification. In the best of these (Figure  3.1), the figure labeled “Sosia” holds a ladle in his left hand and wears a mask characteristic of comic cooks, while the two

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Figure 3.1 Andria, Scene One, as illustrated in Vat. Lat. 3868 f4v (c. 825 ce ). Open Access Image.

porters behind him carry a colorful assortment of luxury goods for a feast.5 That may, however, be reading too much into the situation. Sosia lacks the characteristic swagger of the comic cook (he is obsequious rather than boastful) and is more likely Simo’s agent returning with him from a shopping trip, but the undoubted visual richness of their entry is certainly meant to contrast with the earnestness of the prologue and the seriousness of the expository dialogue that immediately follows.6 That dialogue between Simo and his loyal retainer sets out the basic situation of the plot, but expository detail is not its only function. Some twenty lines precede the first of Sosia’s expository questions about the wedding, “Why are you pretending, then?” (48). The initial emphasis is instead on character and social relationships. By beginning with a string of orders, Simo immediately reveals himself as imperious, confident, and perhaps a little vain, generous when he gets his way and prone to anger when he does not. His generosity seems to come with strings attached. He basks in Sosia’s praise, and it soon becomes clear that he expects more deference and gratitude from his son than appears to be coming his way. What he values most in Sosia, loyalty and discretion (fides et taciturnitas, 32–4), is what he values in all of

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those around him, and the claims and counter-claims of these two virtues will become the thematic glue that holds the plot together, not just for him but for his son, whose loyalty toward Glycerium and discretion in exercising his responsibility toward her will take a similar emotional toll (295–8). The economy and subtlety with which the scene fulfills its expository function become increasingly clear on close inspection, but however effective in the Roman context, this opening also creates obstacles for modern readers hoping to understand and accept the play on its own terms. Roman comedy builds on attitudes and actions frequently at odds with modern values, and while the Andria does not fully exploit, as Plautus’ plays so often do, the cruelty and callousness embedded in this comic tradition, there is more than enough here at the beginning of the play to foster a certain discomfort. A modern sensibility may start to wonder, in ascending order of seriousness: 1. Where is the humor? Although the play is called a comedy, it seems to take itself quite seriously. Terence ignores rather than embraces the artificiality of its generic conventions. Once the porters withdraw, the dialogue between Simo and Sosia runs its course uninterrupted by jokes, flights of fantasy or any acknowledgment of the audience’s presence. The various kinds of banter found in Plautus’ expository dialogues, like the good-natured exchange between the worldly slave and his hapless master in Pseudolus or the miser Euclio’s abuse of his housekeeper in Aulularia, is nowhere to be found. Terence’s figures may be masked and dressed in Greek costumes, speaking in verse as characters in palliata comedy regularly do, but he has them converse in a low-key Latin register much closer to the decorum of everyday life than to the verbal extravagance typical of the comic stage. What, we may wonder, is funny about this developing situation? An answer might come with the appearance of Davos, who has already been identified as the clever slave of comedy (159–60); he enters to the first burst of music from the tibicen, a sure sign that the

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mood changes with his presence. Yet, Terence immediately hints that Davos lacks the verve of Plautine predecessors like Palaestrio or Pseudolus and that the balance of power between slave and master will not follow the traditional comic pattern of clever schemer and unwitting dupe. His master takes him by surprise (183). He has no explicit answer to Simo’s explicit threat (196–200, 209), and he dismisses as a silly fiction the truth that will eventually solve the dramatic problem (224). The play has begun, but the only thing we know for sure is that we are not quite in the world familiar from Plautus. 2. What about social class? The play celebrates the antics of the rich. Even when it opens a window on lower-class life, as when it briefly traces Sosia’s rise from slavery to freedom, the description is framed from the rich master’s perspective. The passage is full of Simo’s “I” and “me” and “my,” while Sosia, the beneficiary of his largesse, is grateful to the point of obsequiousness (35–9), and the scene ends with a reminder of the freedman’s eternal duty (officium) to his patron (168–70). Simo’s expectations of his son also reflect values typical of his class. He has to this point in their lives been pleased with Pamphilus precisely because the boy has been unexceptional in his interests and attainments, doing: what practically all young men do, applying themselves to some pursuit or other, raising horses or hounds for hunting or toward philosophy. He pursued no one of these beyond the others, but of all of them in moderation. 55–9

For Simo, mediocrity is a virtue. He even accepts without complaint Pamphilus’ attendance at Chrysis’ dinner parties, so long as dinner is his only objective (85–9). Pamphilus is in this respect the typical son

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of Greek New Comedy, which built its plots around the desires and foibles of the Athenian upper class. So, for example, young Moschion of Menander’s Samia acknowledges his father’s generosity in very similar terms: He kept hounds for me and horses. I led a cavalry troop resplendently. I could give some help to friends in need. Through him I became a man. Sa. 14–17

If the unapologetic marks of wealth do not in themselves put us off, the complacency that seems to come with them very well may. A young man like Pamphilus not only has the means to get himself into trouble (as obviously he does) but assumes he can rely on helpers, on circumstances or on just plain good luck to get him out of it again. As Simo says, as long as he does what is expected of him now, whatever he did in the past is of no enduring consequence (187–8). 3. What about the women? The difficulty that ensnares the young men of New Comedy generally springs from their treatment of women, and in this case, the play’s lack of sympathy for its female characters can be a major stumbling block for modern readers. Pamphilus, unlike Menander’s Moschion, appears to be a genuine lover or at worst a seducer rather than a violent rapist, but that does not make the play’s attitude toward its women characters any more palatable. The dominating perspective is established at the outset with the description of Chrysis, who came to Athens as a stranger from the island of Andros: At first she lived a chaste life, sparing and thrifty, earning a living by spinning wool. 74–5

That is, of course, the ideal. Women were expected to stay at home to spin and to weave, and thrifty living was always a Roman virtue.

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“Sparing and thrifty” is precisely how Micio describes his countrymouse brother in Terence’s most famous play, Adelphoe (45–6). For Chrysis, however, the virtuous life did not last: But after a lover approached her offering money, one and then another, as the nature of all people is to incline from labor to pleasure, she accepted the offer and thereupon took up the occupation. 76–9

She established herself as what Roman comedy calls a meretrix, literally “a hired woman,” with an independent household dedicated to the entertainment of young men, at least three of them in her case (86–7). As such, Chrysis represents the high end of the sex trade. The young men who become her clients would be expected to pay her expenses and also to prove their love by continually showering her with gifts. A liaison with such a woman was thus a notoriously ruinous occupation. As Plautus has a character explain: Nobody will ever be a useful lover unless he’s his own property’s enemy: So long as he has it, he may love; when he has nothing, let him start looking elsewhere. Truc. 231–2

Ruin of this sort is what Sosia fears for Pamphilus and why he greets the news of Chrysis’ death with such callous relief (105–6). So runs the comic stereotype and the conventional moralizing that supports it. The Greek reality from which it derives was rather different: a foreign woman settled alone at Athens would not find it easy to secure a livelihood by spinning wool. A more lucrative option for those with the talent and inclination to pursue it was to set up, like Chrysis, as what Athenians called a hetaira, literally a “companion,” an occupation with an established place and function in a society that severely limited the public activities of citizen women and delayed marriage for citizen men.

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A successful hetaira could enjoy a good living, with an income and a freedom unmatched by citizen women. In fifth-century Athens, a woman named Theodotē kept such a house and held her own in conversation with Socrates, as did Aspasia, who became the mistress of Pericles. Gnathaena, one of the best-known hetairai of the fourth century, was as famous for her dinner parties and her wit as for her beauty; the comic poet Diphilus was among her admirers. Yet this was not in all respects “the good life.” There were always risks. Not long after Theodotē’s time, for example, a Corinthian woman named Neaera had an equally successful career at Athens and was eventually able to retire into a longstanding relationship, something like a common law marriage, with an Athenian citizen named Stephanus. That liaison, however, did not bring security. In old age, Nearea became a pawn in a suit aimed at Stephanus, a prosecution that not only allowed Stephanus’ enemies to paint a particularly lurid picture of her past, but threatened her with enslavement and Stephanus with loss of property and legal rights if the suit was successful. How the case ended is, in fact, unknown, but it stands in all its seamy detail as a vivid reminder of how precarious the life of a noncitizen woman could be in a world controlled by highly competitive and easily offended citizen men.7 Chrysis’ story is also told from outside and by a man, but how she might herself have described her situation is clear from later plays by Terence that do not so thoroughly suppress the female perspective. In those cases, a harsh truth intrudes. The meretrix Bacchis of Heauton timorumenos, for example, is described by her young lover as strongwilled, demanding, arrogant, expensive, and pretentious (227), but her own perspective is significantly different. As she has occasion in the course of the play to tell a far more innocent girl (the one virgo given a speaking part in all of Terence): It’s in your interest to be good; whatever our situation, we cannot. Our lovers cultivate us because they are driven on by our beauty. Once that’s faded, they take their passions elsewhere, and

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unless in the meantime we’ve provided for the future, we live abandoned. HT 388–91

This is the reality behind the meretrix Thais’ straightforward explanation in Eunuchus for why she seeks to curry favor with the father of young Phaedria: I’m alone. I’ve no one here, neither friend nor family. That’s why, Phaedria, I want to cultivate some friends for my protection. Eun. 147–9

She, like Chrysis, has a vulnerable young woman in her charge, and her plan is quite explicitly to cultivate those all-important friends by restoring the girl to her family. Though comic convention keeps that girl out of sight just as Glycerium here in Andria remains no more than an offstage voice (An. 473), Thais does have a voice and a presence and is not reduced, as Chrysis is, to speaking only through another (An. 286–96). All these professional women have a clear mercenary streak, but not without good reason. The perspective of citizen women that is so conspicuously written out of Andria also receives its due in other plays. Dramatic and social conventions limited the opportunities for unmarried girls to express themselves, but the concerns of married women are well represented. Adelphoe dedicates an entire episode to setting out the vulnerability of the widow Sostrata and her pregnant daughter, who are powerless to defend themselves and utterly dependent on the men in their lives (288–354).8 Strong women more than hold their own against their husbands in Heauton timorumenos and Phormio, and the unjust treatment of two wives by their husbands is a major focus of Hecyra. None of this is to be found here in Terence’s first play. Whether Menander’s original was equally insensitive to female concerns or whether Terence at this point in his career was simply incapable of

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representing them or uninterested in doing so remains unknown, but it is important to acknowledge their absence and to recognize their emergence in subsequent plays.

III. Development (228–795) Pamphilus is torn from the outset between obligation to his father, who has always indulged him with unstinting generosity, and loyalty to Glycerium, whom he genuinely loves (228–300). His dilemma is further complicated by the arrival of Charinus and his slave, Byrria. Charinus, in love with Chremes’ daughter and distraught by the prospect of losing her in marriage to Pamphilus, is calmed by Pamphilus’ insistence that he wants only to avoid this union and Davos’ discovery that the wedding now in preparation is a sham (301–74). Schemes and counter-schemes by Davos and Simo either to hide or to discover the truth are complicated by the birth of Glycerium’s child, which Simo convinces himself is a fraud staged to deceive him (459–523), and by the outraged Chremes’ determination to end the engagement (533–94). Since assuaging the fears of one character entails arousing those of another, Pamphilus and Charinus, Simo and Chremes all find themselves at odds and Davos faces the collapse of his schemes. Events appear to be at an impasse. Drama, said Aristotle, is the representation of an action, which is why he claimed in a famous section of his Poetics (50a15–35) that a play can exist without characters but not without action. A similar priority was sometimes imputed to Menander, who was famously said to have remarked that once he had worked out his plot, he needed only set the words to it (Plut. De gloria Ath. 4—Moral. 347e–f). Menander certainly did craft his plays with some care, and the inexorable progress toward crisis and resolution that characterized his plots remains discernible in

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the plays that Terence based upon them. Through Terence, this pattern of action deeply impressed Renaissance readers, who went on to claim ancient authority for the five-act structure that by the sixteenth century became canonical in European drama. Viewed dispassionately, however, it is more accurate to say that a Terentian play actually draws both its momentum and its interest less from its plot than from its characters. That is why Cicero’s contemporary, the antiquarian polymath Varro, singled out character portrayal as Terence’s particular virtue.9 His characters may align with traditional comic types and fulfill traditional dramatic functions—the helpless young lover, the obstructing father, the facilitating slave, etc.—but the fact is that Andria claims our interest not through the convolutions of its plot (who can possibly doubt that Pamphilus will in the end be able to marry Glycerium?) but by the response of its characters to the situations in which they find themselves. The conflicting obligations that torment Pamphilus, the test of wills between Simo and Davos, the anxiety of Chremes to do right by his daughter are the very stuff of Terence’s comedy. When Simo at the outset praises Sosia not for his skill but for his loyalty and discretion (32–4), he is in effect declaring the priority of character over action. This emphasis on character is why Davos is made so ineffective in the role of clever slave. His penchant for trickery is announced at the outset (159–60), and his first appearance recalls, although it leaves undeveloped, the running slave motif so popular in Roman comedy (338–45). His recognition that Simo’s wedding preparations are a sham (352–70) might lead us to expect the sort of thrust and counterthrust between slave and master we find between characters like Plautus’ Pseudolus and his own Simo, but Davos here weaves no elaborate plans in the course of the play, overcomes no obstacles, and seems always to be one step behind the pace of events. The sort of monologue with which a clever slave generally draws the audience into his plans becomes for Davos only a confession of failure (600–6). His one great moment of comic improvisation, the kind of off-the-cuff scheme at which a

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Plautine Epidicus or Pseudolus excels, involves the manipulation of Mysis and fooling of Chremes, hardly two formidable intellects. When Davos succeeds, his weapon (though he does not realize it at the time) is the truth (740–95). It is a richly theatrical scene—in commenting on it, Donatus took pains to clarify how, in his delivery, Davos would distinguish lines meant to be overheard by Chremes from the instructions delivered sotto voce to Mysis—but it is more a reminder of what Davos could have been than of what he actually turns out to be. Pamphilus, as is clear from his first appearance, is poorly equipped to handle himself in adversity or to confront a moral challenge. He complains, as young men in comedy frequently do, that his father runs roughshod over his feelings, but he also at least senses that while Simo’s indulgence provided the rope, the ensuing tangle is of his own making (252–64). That hint of self-awareness would be touching, even endearing, were it not for a certain moral obtuseness. In comparable situations, Moschion of Menander’s Samia confesses to shame (Sa. 47–52) and Aeschinus of Adelphoe is explicitly confronted with his responsibility for Pamphila’s predicament and wilts before the enormity of it (Ad. 637–95). Pamphilus has no such moment. When Mysis, Glycerium’s maid, worries that her mistress may be abandoned, he takes pains to reassure her: What! Could I even think of such a thing? Shall I allow the poor girl to be betrayed on my account, who entrusted her heart and her whole life to me, whom I have held exceptionally dear, as if a wife? Shall I allow a nature so thoroughly and chastely formed and fashioned to be compromised by the demands of poverty? I will not! 270–6

This may sound quite admirable, but Pamphilus blithely forgets that however “chastely formed and fashioned” she may be, Glycerium is now compromised less by her poverty than by the fact that she is

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nine months pregnant. By him. His declaration is on one level simply Terence reminding us that despite being raised in Chrysis’ house, Glycerium is no hetaira (cf. 128) and will thus, by the comic convention, turn out to be a suitable wife, but marriage is at this point little more than an aspiration for anyone. We will soon hear how, on her deathbed, Chrysis entrusted Glycerium to his care as “husband, friend, guardian, father” (295), and in describing the scene, Pamphilus will allude, at least subconsciously, to the Roman language of marriage.10 What, however, does the scene actually represent? Donatus, in his comment on line 186, quite reasonably imagined this embedded monologue delivered with the gasps and pauses of the dying Chrysis, which makes for a distinctly poignant moment, but it is really a record only of how Pamphilus wants to remember the scene. There is no reason to think him to be a particularly reliable narrator, and his description is not entirely in line with the reality of the situation. He is at this point neither married nor empowered by himself to contract a marriage. He is not in a position to be Glycerium’s guardian, and happiness is being defined for her, a young girl whose one independent act was an attempt at self-immolation (129–36), as marriage to her seducer. Pamphilus certainly appears to be well intentioned, but his declarations do not make a modern viewer any more at ease with the conventions of Terentian comedy. Nor is our disquiet allayed by the sudden appearance of Charinus and Byrria. Donatus offered a sentimental, still widely accepted explanation for their introduction: “Terence added these characters to his play—for they are not in Menander—so it would not become pathétique to leave Philumena rejected and without a husband when Pamphilus marries another woman” (on 301.2). Yet Philumena is never more than a name, and Terence at no point shows any particular interest in her. Charinus and Byrria did not enter earlier as part of the exposition, where their appearance might be construed as the promise of a second plot line, but only here simply as a further complication of

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Pamphilus’ dilemma, as one more obligation to entangle him. Charinus’ knowledge comes always at secondhand, from overheard conversations incompletely understood (412–31, 957–74), and Davos casually brushes aside his appeal for help (709–14). His own eventual betrothal will come at the very end and as little more than an afterthought to Pamphilus (977–8). Perhaps surprising in a play written by a young dramatist in his twenties, the characters who emerge with the greatest psychological depth and credibility are the two fathers, Simo and Chremes. They remain on one level, of course, comic types. Simo is sharp and domineering and Chremes a bit of a plodder, a pair rather like the rich Demeas and his poor neighbor Niceratos in Samia, whose on-again, off-again, on-again efforts to arrange a marriage between their children drive the action of that play from beginning to end. Yet, Terence’s fathers, perhaps even more so than Menander’s, are not unreasonable or unsympathetic. Simo may let his suspicions of Davos get out of hand, and he fools himself by assuming Glycerium’s cries in childbirth are only part of a plot against him (459–80), but his concern for Pamphilus is genuine. His desire to see him settled and his difficulty in coping with his son’s prevarications are sincere and reflect not just the demands of comedy but the experience of real life. So too for Chremes, who firmly (and rightly) rejects Simo’s efforts to use his daughter to further his own ends. What it means to be a father, the question that comes to dominate Adelphoe, Terence’s last and most famous play, is already being held up for scrutiny here in his first one.

IV. Resolution (796–981) The unexpected arrival from Andros of Chrysis’ relative Crito promises to put a new complexion on things (796–819). Nevertheless, still suspecting that the birth of Glycerium’s child is a

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charade meant to deceive him, Simo continues to pressure Chremes into agreeing to the marriage (820–70) and to browbeat Pamphilus into undertaking it (871–903), while Davos, the alleged mastermind of the “plot” to fool him, is hauled off for punishment (865). Pamphilus begs his father to hear Crito’s story, and on his reappearance from Glycerium’s house the full (and unexpected) truth is revealed: not only is Glycerium indeed an Attic citizen, but she is the long-lost daughter of Chremes, who promptly agrees to a formal betrothal to Pamphilus (904–56). Charinus is then free to marry Chremes’ other daughter, while Davos is released in the general spirit of forgiveness (957–81). A happy ending is what we expect of the New Comedy formula. This one is not unmotivated: Crito, its agent, has a legitimate reason for coming to Athens to investigate the affairs of his deceased relative. It is nevertheless deliberately, even deliciously artificial in the elegance of both its set-up and its resolution. The revelation of Glycerium’s citizenship was prefigured by Davos’ initial dismissal of this claim as a fiction (221–45), itself as much a sign to informed spectators of Davos’ own limitations as an indication of the action to come, and by his later repetition of that claim for the benefit first of Chremes (778–80) and then of Simo (858–9), by which time its truth is beyond doubt to everyone else (806, cf. 781). Simo has been quick to comment on the artificiality of the plot mechanisms, both the sudden birth of Glycrium’s child (“ridiculous!” 474–5) and Crito’s opportune arrival (“how convenient!” 916–18), and it seems only right that his skepticism remains the last obstacle to be overcome (925–39). The process of recognition that settles the matter is the simplest version of a comic motif with many variants: Crito recalls the name of the Athenian who brought Glycerium to Andros (Phania of Ramnus) and knows she was his niece, not his daughter. Chremes then realizes this Phania was his brother, and once the child’s original name is

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remembered (Pasibula, doubly important since Glycerium “Sweetie” is a hetaira’s name) then—bingo!—she must be his own lost daughter.11 The initial “fiction” dismissed by Davos (and Simo) is the truth after all. The drama that remains lies in why and how Crito should be believed, which is why Terence (as presumably Menander before him) takes such care to create a credible personality for him. Andros is, of course, a real place, the second largest island of the Cyclades, and Crito shows the hard-bitten conservatism to be expected of an islander newly arrived in the big city.12 He is, if anything, still more disapproving of Chrysis’ profession than Simo had been, for what Simo saw as an inevitable surrender to human weakness and thus a universal fault, Crito casts as a calculated pursuit of wealth by this one morally weak woman (796–8, cf. 74–9). As a foreigner, he is also sensitive about his right to claim her property (799) and well aware of the difficulty he would face in trying to do so at Athens through legal action (810–15). That is why he responds with heat to Simo’s namecalling (919–20), and he is at the outset understandably evasive in admitting to Chremes that his appearance is tied to an inheritance (907). This edge to him, however, is nevertheless softened by the sympathy he shows for Glycerium (816), the immediate mark of a fundamental honesty that even Simo is forced to admit (946–7). The recognition scene wraps up the dramatic problem in a traditional and reasonably tidy way, and yet . . . Step back from the action for a moment and a series of lingering moral dilemmas returns to view. The precarious status of Glycerium and her baby, Pamphilus’s mutually exclusive obligations to her and to his father, Simo’s wish to see his son respectably settled, and Chremes’ need to protect his daughter’s interests were represented with considerable care and sensitivity, and they have all at various points in the play aroused our sympathy and concern even as they led characters to say things to each other and to propose actions that take them to the brink of serious estrangement. The shift in circumstances brought about by

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Crito’s arrival resolves all the practical difficulties at a stroke without the need to acknowledge their emotional costs. Some of Menander’s most affecting plays, of which Epitrepontes and Perikeiromene are notable examples, combine external recognitions brought about by such mechanical means as birth tokens with inner recognitions and open acknowledgments of moral responsibility that leave spectators with the sense of something important learned as characters grow and are made better by their experiences in the course of the play. Terence provides no comparable sense of inner development. He resolves the external problem without addressing its moral underpinnings, giving no indication that Pamphilus and Simo have learned anything from their experience or are any different now from how they were at the beginning. In that sense, Andria’s happy ending is not so tidy, nor is the play structurally “well made” in the nineteenth-century sense, where a gun introduced in the first act could be relied upon to go off by the finale. Ancient critics observed, truly enough, that when it came to plot construction, New Comedy was careful in comparison with Old Comedy, and Terence’s plots were more orderly than those of Plautus, but those plots are not themselves entirely without loose ends and structural inconsistencies.13 Some of these are certainly minor. It does not much matter that the provisions for a wedding feast paraded before our eyes in the play’s opening scene have somehow vanished by the time Davos deduces a sham wedding from the lack of food in the house (360–1). Rather more significant is the structural awkwardness created by Terence’s introduction of Charinus and Byrria. Exits and entrances in New Comedy are generally consistent and well-motivated. Characters come and go for reasons: someone sent on an errand to the forum will next be seen returning with the result of that errand; one who exits into a house door will not reappear next on the wing entrance from the harbor or forum. Charinus nevertheless sends Byrria away for no particular purpose and to no

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particular place (337), although the slave later claims that he was sent off to keep an eye on Pamphilus (412). His return is from the forum, where he was, in fact, seen by Davos (357), but it turns out that he was in the forum following not Pamphilus but Simo. It is not an impossible sequence, but neither is it a very elegant one. The mechanism of Byrria’s movements is clearly of much less importance to Terence than the scene his wandering makes possible, a theatrically rich, accidental encounter in which Pamphilus struggles to mislead his father over his willingness to marry Chremes’ daughter, while being coached on one side by Davos and overheard on the other by Byrria (412–31). The scene as written must be original to Terence— the use of four simultaneous speakers precludes a Greek origin in this form, since three speaking parts was the Greek norm—and it shows how adept he can be at exploiting conventions of the comic stage, here the use of double asides and the ability to keep characters within earshot but invisible to others onstage while all remain in full view of the audience. The economy (an unsympathetic critic might say “superficiality”) with which Terence employs Charinus and Byrria to enrich his plot keeps them from developing as characters in their own right. He shows no particular interest in the resolution of Charinus’ situation and his response to Pamphilus’ pattern of prevarication. We see Charinus’ hopes dashed, raised and dashed again before being fully restored at the end, and the unhappy awkwardness of his situation heightens the moral tension surrounding Pamphilus, but Charinus himself is largely ignored until, with Pamphilus’ future secured at last, he can be dispatched almost as an afterthought with a promise made in Chremes’ name (976). The problem is solved. *

*

*

Since the play began by deliberately raising questions of dramaturgy, it is appropriate to wonder now at the end what Terence’s audience

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would have made of it all. An answer will in large part depend on how we imagine that audience, and this is no easy task. The very longevity of the palliata genre suggests a certain consistency of attitude, which led John Wright to conclude that “like a modern opera audience, they were conservative and knew what they wanted . . . and their expectations would have been a major force in shaping the Roman comic tradition.” There must be truth to this, though deducing the conservatism of the audience from the strength of the tradition is a precarious operation, and there is no direct or independent evidence that the same cross section of Rome’s population, much less a single, consistent sample of that population, attended performances at every festival in every year. Nor does the likelihood that the crowds gathered to watch a play were conservative in their taste tell us who, as a matter of class, gender, education and the like, they actually were. Such uncertainties have made the audience’s composition in the time of Plautus a hotly contested question, since the evidence used to support the rival explanations is drawn largely from the particular reading of individual plays and individual passages within those plays. Thus, Michael Fontaine, with one part of the Plautine elephant firmly in hand, imagines “a small and predominately aristocratic audience,” while for Amy Richlin, with an equally firm grip on quite another part of that same elephant, Plautine comedy is “the performance art of urban slaves, displaced persons, and the free poor in central Italy.” 14 That difference of opinion is stark enough. The issue is further confused when we move forward in time and confront those undeniable signs of change, both the differences in tone and technique between Terence’s plays and those of Plautus and the large, rapid shift observable in the cultural climate of Rome itself between the defeat of Hannibal at Zama in 202 bce and of Perseus at Pydna not forty years later. Wright solved the problem of difference by casting Terence as an outlier, beyond the mainstream of the tradition and representing the exception that proves the rule, but as we have seen, there is no reason

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to doubt his popularity in his own time. Ambivius Turpio did not earn his living backing losers. Yet if a Roman audience enjoyed Andria, as the subsequent blossoming of Terence’s career suggests it did, the crowd that gathered to see the performance must have appreciated the elegance of expression, twists of convention, and portrayals of character that we recognize as characteristically Terentian and are so decidedly un-Plautine. For this to be so, the expectations of that crowd must have changed at least a little in the interim, although whether because of the occasion, the times, or their own composition—or all of the above—remains unclear. Yet however problematic we may find the relationship between Terence and his audience, one thing is certain: Andria endured. The beginner’s effort that may very well have impressed the great Caecilius and certainly won over the hard-bitten professional Ambivius Turpio outlived its youthful creator. A detailed production note (didascalia) of the kind transmitted with the other plays of Terence is lacking for Andria, but Donatus’ commentary preserves its gist, together with names in garbled form that hint at revivals in successive generations.15 The play also acquired an alternative ending quite early in its history, almost certainly created for some subsequent production, and it came to be quoted often enough by later authors in antiquity to show that it became, if not necessarily an artistic favorite, at least an established presence in the school curriculum. And that was not all . . . as the record will show.

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One day in March 43 bce , as the triumvirs continued to tighten their control over the Roman Republic, Cicero wrote to his ally Quintus Cornificius, then struggling to keep his African province loyal to the Senate. Cicero was anxious to boost his friend’s morale: “Now this day brings another life, demands another way of acting,” as Terence says. So, my dear Quintus, come on board with us— and up onto the very bridge. It is a single ship now for all good men, which we are working to keep on course. May we have a successful voyage! Cic. Fam. 12.25.5 The line he quotes is Andria 189, although applied here to a situation far more serious than Simo’s hope that Pamphilus will rise to the demands of marriage. Yet even at so grave a moment in state affairs, a Terentian tag springs readily to Cicero’s mind, testament both to the elegance of Terence’s expression and to his success in penetrating the conscious of educated Romans. How he achieved this status by the later first century forms but the first chapter in a long and remarkable history of reception. Of the twenty or so poets who wrote plays in the palliata style, only the six by Terence have remained in constant view since antiquity, studied, admired, adapted, translated, and sometimes even restaged over the centuries. The full story is too long and complex to tell yet again here, but a few high points are worth recalling for their role in shaping the reception of Andria.1

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Stage to Page . . . Terence’s merits as a writer for the Roman stage did not win him immediate, universal acclaim. In his own time, there was, at the very least, that clique around Luscius Lanuvinus nipping at his heels, and when the prologue for a revival of Plautus’ Casina sometime in the second century mocked “the new comedies being produced, which are much less valuable than even the new coinage” (9–10), the target of that jibe may very well have been the plays of Terence. By the end of the century, the critic Volcacius, as we have seen, ranked him well below Caecilius and Plautus, and continued demand for his plays on the stage becomes increasingly hard to document. Although the production record in Donatus’ didascalic note hints at revival productions in the course of the second century, the trail fades out by c. 106 bce , and while we know that Roman “classics” were staged well into the first century—Roscius won fame for his depiction of Plautus’ pimp Ballio in Pseudolus and Varro may at one point allude to productions of plays by Caecilius and Terence—how many palliata plays were revived and how often becomes difficult to trace. The more improvisational, unmasked, and often more raucous genre of mime was in this period beginning to gain popularity at comedy’s expense, performances in Greek multiply and become increasingly difficult to distinguish in the record from performances in Latin, and actors specializing in comedy (comoedoi) were frequently hired both to perform for private entertainments and to serve as coaches demonstrating techniques of delivery for budding orators.2 Those trends only accelerated. Move ahead three centuries and we find in Donatus’ commentary frequent observations about action and delivery, but rhetorical exercises rather than memories of stage performance seem to lie behind most of them. The plays’ interest in character portrayal and their echoes of everyday speech made them especially suitable for training boys in the demands of advocacy, and

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Donatus is well aware of their origin as stage scripts even as he recasts them as practical exercises. So, for example, in Andria’s very first line (“You people take these things inside. Off with you!”), he insists upon a pause between the two commands. The porters have lingered to hear what is coming and need to be shooed off so Simo can have his private word with Sosia: “ ‘Off with you’ should be read [sic] quite energetically, since he is hurrying off those looking back and separating them from Sosia” (on An. 28.5). The one suggestion of something more than the schoolroom comes in a note on Andria 716, where Donatus writes: “Observe that no small part is given in this comedy to Mysis, i.e. to a female character, whether this role is performed by male actors, as among the ancients, or by a woman, as we see nowadays.” Whether the reference is a general one to the appearance of women on the fourthcentury stage or refers specifically to women actors of his day performing Terence is much debated.3 Two other pieces of evidence hint at post-Terentian productions, but these are both even more problematic. The first is an alternative ending for Andria found in several manuscripts, though not in our oldest one, which provides Charinus with the resolution that Terence denied him. It replaces Terence’s text after 976, where Pamphilus tells Charinus, “I haven’t forgotten you” with twenty-one lines dramatizing the business that the original script says will be conducted inside (980). In this new scene, Chremes returns to the stage and at Pamphilus’ urging formally betroths his younger daughter to Charinus. In providing this sense of closure for Charinus’ somewhat awkward situation, the author employs some basic palliata conventions. The scene sets two pairs, Pamphilus and Chremes and Davos and Charinus, opposite each other, with Charinus again momentarily misunderstanding the conversation he overhears—a fairly broad bit of comedy since Chremes’ intention is entirely unambiguous—and it ends with a formal declaration of betrothal that is something of a comic formula: “I promise you my daughter Philumena as a wife and a dowry of six talents” (20–1).4 When

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and why this scene was added to the text remains uncertain. The only sure thing is that it had found its way into texts of Terence by the midfourth century ce , since both Donatus (on An. 978) and Eugraphius (on An. 975) knew of it and believed it to be spurious. Some metrical anomalies in the text contradict best practice for Republican comedy, but whether that marks the scene as a late addition or simply shows that it was written by a clumsy versifier cannot be determined. All we can really say is that someone in the half millennium between Terence’s death c. 159 bce and the time of Donatus found Terence’s resolution inadequate and sought to improve upon it, quite possibly for a contemporary production.5 The second bit of evidence has long represented something of a puzzle. At some point in late antiquity, probably at Rome in c. 400 ce , the scriptorium of a professional editor named Calliopius designed and produced a deluxe edition of Terence that did not just follow standard practice by listing the names of the characters at the head of each scene in which they appeared, but also showed those characters playing out action suggested by the text. That original illustrated book does not survive, but copies do, the best of which preserve wonderfully detailed pictures of Terentian stage action. (The finest of these manuscripts, the ninth-century codex Vat. Lat. 3868, provides the illustration on our cover and in Chapter  3, Figure  3.1.) The question that has long occupied scholars is whether these miniatures preserve, even if at some chronological remove, a memory of actual stage performances or whether they originate in an artistic tradition of book illustration that developed largely independent of theater practice. Over the past generation, that discussion has been further complicated by the discovery of mosaics illustrating scenes from plays by Menander. These mosaics are found in domestic settings—the most famous set decorated the floor of a late third- or possibly fourth-century dining room in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos—and the growing conviction that they are based on standard design copybooks handed down through generations of

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artisans rather than drawn from a tradition of living theater has strengthened the sense that the Terence miniatures, too, are essentially artistic inventions. It looks like the original artist worked from the character lists found in the manuscript he took as his exemplar and depicted them in dramatic poses as implied by the text that followed.6 This hypothesis would explain why the figures wear costumes more closely resembling the dress of later antiquity than that of classical times and why their masks, though differentiating characters by sex, age, and social status, lack sufficient detail and consistency to align them with the known typology of comic masks. With one notable exception. Sosia in that opening scene of Andria is not only cast as a cook, but he also sports the same dark-skinned mask as the cook in the Samia mosaic from Mytilene, the one mask in the whole set of Terentian miniatures with a recognizable theatrical pedigree. Why the details of that mask might have lingered in memory, however, remains an open question. *

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More consistent and relatively unproblematic is the evidence for Terence’s continuing life and growing influence as a text for study, leading to a reception more deeply rooted in the world of books than the world of theater. By the later days of the Republic, the disparaging comments of rivals like Luscius and critics like Volcacius were well behind him, and his work came to be regarded as the very model of stylistic elegance and correct Latinity. Cicero, himself no slouch when it came to niceties of expression, couched this new authority in an epigram: You, too, who alone with precise diction, Terence, brings Menander translated and set out in Latin into our midst, using quiet tones, speaking gracefully and mixing everything with sweetness.

He consistently championed Terence as a model for correct usage (at least once in explicit contrast with his predecessor, Caecilius), and

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cited him in rhetorical contexts as a master of narration and argument. Cicero’s treatises on rhetoric thus often drew examples from Terence. The opening scene of Andria was a particular favorite, in part no doubt for its familiarity to his readers from their own school days. He mines it for examples of credible and orderly narrative, of deductive reasoning, and, as we have seen in the letter to Cornificius, as a source of maxims. So, for example, in setting out the rules for what rhetoricians called “partition,” the statement of topics to be discussed in a speech, the youthful handbook On Invention commends (and quotes) Andria 49–50 for “its brief and neat partition of what the old man in Andria wants his freedman to know . . . and as he laid it out in the partition, so he narrated it.” Some thirty years later, the mature Cicero was still citing that same passage for the graceful, varied, and lively way Terence presents an extended narrative.7 Given the conservatism of rhetorical training in antiquity, it is hardly surprising that when Donatus subjects this same passage to serious analysis, the result is much like what we find in Cicero: “These are the divisions: ‘my son’s life,’ ‘my plan,’ ‘what I want you to do in this situation’ . . . it is a three-part distribution . . . his son’s life is divided in two parts in the narrative: the good done previously and the current bad part” (on An. 49.2–4). Nevertheless, the larger part of Donatus’ commentary preserves observations of a far more basic kind, e.g. a gloss on the Athenian term ephebia (“the prime period of youth”) or an explanation for why Terence says “what” (quod) in the singular rather than “what things” (quae) in the plural. Terence was always a good text for study, but by the fourth century, those who studied it clearly needed significant help to coax out its lessons. Such help could be even more basic at the farther reaches of the Roman world, where Terence continued to serve as a school text for learners of Latin. At Oxyrhynchus, for example, some hundred miles south-west of Cairo in what was then the Roman province of Egypt, the extensive papyrus finds include two (non-consecutive) leaves

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from a book that once contained Terence’s plays. The papyrus is dated to the late fourth or early fifth century ce , i.e. only a few generations after Donatus, and it includes a bit over one hundred lines from the last part of Andria.8 The text is full of marks indicating proper emphasis and punctuation to aid reading as well as frequent corrections and annotations. It was evidently a book created by and for non-native speakers of Latin: some of the annotation is in Greek and offers help of a kind well known to modern students. At Andria 640, for example, where Charinus says, “Someone may say, ‘You won’t get anywhere,’ ” using in a colloquial sense a verb (promoveo) that more literally means “to move forward,” someone wrote over it (in Greek) “you won’t earn anything.” That usage can still cause confusion, and modern editions include a very similar gloss. The Latin text in the papyrus varies a bit from our own, most especially at the end, which breaks off with two illegible lines, at least one of them spoken by Charinus. The traces of his words are consistent with neither our own standard text nor with the attested alternative ending, which suggests the existence in antiquity of yet another ending and thus another attempt to bring Charinus’ affairs to a more explicitly satisfactory conclusion. The text is also noteworthy for its irregular pattern of line divisions, which implies that neither the original scribe nor his corrector knew anything about meter; they may very well have been unaware as they copied from another book that what they were copying was even in verse. That is in itself hardly surprising. Many manuscripts of Terence, including some of our quite elegant, illustrated ones, present the text as prose, and although the fact of Terentian verse was again known by the Renaissance, only in the early eighteenth century did the principles of Roman dramatic meters come to be properly understood.9 *

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Fifth-century Oxyrhynchus was hardly the end of the line for Terence. Unlike Plautus, who lay in relative obscurity until his return to

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prominence in the early fifteenth century, Terence enjoyed a status second only to Vergil and was read and studied continuously throughout late antiquity, into the Middle Ages, and well beyond.10 The plays survive in some 730 medieval manuscripts, with the first printed edition appearing as early as 1470. By 1600, at least 450 printed editions were in circulation. In reading Terence, the emphasis continued to be on style and form, but every so often concerns surface about his content. That was apparently the case at the Abbey of Gandersheim in tenth-century Saxony, where the canoness Hrotsvit lamented that there were Christians “who cling to sacred writings and, although they spurn other works by pagans, nevertheless quite often read the fabrications of Terence and, while they delight in the sweetness of his language, they are soiled by acquaintance with unholy things.” Her solution to the problem was to substitute six plays of her own, all tales of Christian martyrdom, that could be read in their place: “I,” she proclaimed, “the Strong Voice of Gandersheim, have not hesitated to imitate him in my writing. . . . [so that] in the very same kind of speech in which the shameless acts of lascivious women were described, the praiseworthy chastity of sacred virgins is celebrated . . .” How exactly she “imitated” Terence has long been debated. Her world and her values are clearly far removed from his, and her prose shows no significant echoes of Terentian language. It may yet be the case, however, that her very idea of drama, from basic concepts like telling a story through successive scenes of dialogue, to specific techniques like overheard conversations, to the focus on young women subject to the power of overbearing men all have Terentian roots. Marriage may still be the solution to a play’s crisis, but in Hrotsvit’s world it is always a marriage raised to a spiritual plane and the result of the woman’s own choice.11 In Latinizing herself (the “Strong Voice” of her preface is a Latin calque on her name: Clamor Validus—Saxon hruot “voice” + suid “strong”], she Christianizes Terence. Early modern readers were generally less extreme in their response to the plays, though these responses could be no less inventive. In

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Tudor England, the schoolmaster Nicholas Udall (1505–56), singling out Terence as “the most suitable writer of all for informing and instructing the language of boys,” circumvented any potential embarrassment over content by reducing three plays, Andria, Eunuchus, and Heauton timorumenos, to a sequence of phrases useful in spoken Latin (a major objective of sixteenth-century schooling). Students would learn from his handy, pocket-sized Floures for Latine Spekynge that paucis te volo means “I would speak a word or two with you” and that “habere gratiam is properly to thanke in hert, agere gratias, to thanke in wordes.” The florilegium, which went through gradual expansion and multiple editions from its original publication in 1534, also contained cultural notes, e.g. the etymology and use of the mill (pistrinum) as a slave punishment, and it probably also served as something of a crib manqué: how often schoolboy conversation would otherwise require a phrase like gravida est e Pamphilo (“She is with childe by Pamphilus”) may be difficult to imagine. By perfecting the technique of quotation without context, essentially reducing plays to a series of disjointed fragments, Udall largely avoids the more awkward implications of Terence’s plots. In 1598, the complete edition of Terence published by Richard Bernard (1568–1641) could employ no such dodge. This was a work for schools that made Terence accessible not just through commentary and study aids based on the Latin text, but by providing a full translation, which was still at that time regarded as a somewhat dubious enterprise. Bernard justifies it by looking up from matters of style to the claim of a greater moral purpose:12 I offer you here . . . a Latin poet taught to speak English; a comicall Poet, pithie, pleasant, and very profitable: as merrie as Eutrapeles, as grave as Cato, as ethical as Plato: he can play craftily the cousener, and cunningly the clowne: he will tell you the nature of the fraudulent flatterer, the grimme and greedie old Sire . . . that in telling the truth by these figments, men might become wise to

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avoid such vices, and learne to practice vertue: which was Terence purpose in setting of these comedies forth in latin, mine in translating them into english . . .

The rationale evidently succeeded. Bernard’s work became a standard edition, reprinted throughout the seventeenth century. Nobody of independent mind was ever inclined to observe that the one purpose Terence actually claimed for himself was that “the plays he wrote should please the public” (And. 2) or that he never seems to revel in the vivid depiction of vice with anything approaching a Plautine level of enthusiasm. The contrast in style and form between Plautus and Terence is made explicit a little later in the work of Anne Dacier (1647–1720), whose bilingual, annotated edition of Terence (1688) quickly set a new standard well beyond the borders of France. Mme. Dacier was one of the foremost classical scholars of her time, “famous throughout Europe,” as her contemporary, the scholar Gilles Ménage wrote, “for the large number of excellent books she has given the public in Greek, in Latin, and in French.” Her work on Terence, written at the peak of her experience, is full of astute and sensible comments. She had published an edition of Plautus in 1683, and the preface to this new, companion volume launches itself from the difference between the two dramatists. She begins with a basic fact: “I said that Plautus had more spirit than Terence and that he surpassed him in the liveliness of the action and in the complexity of the intrigues; and finally, that he does more with action than talk, where Terence does more with talk than action.” This brings her to Terence’s particular strengths: Terence is refined in his composition and astute in his handling of his subjects. In truth, he does not have that liveliness of action and that variety of incidents, which excite curiosity and which incite an impatience to know how the conclusion will work itself out. But he gives quite frequent and sensible pleasures: if he does not create impatience to await the end of the plot, he conducts it in a way

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which leaves nothing to be desired, because the spirit and the heart are always equally satisfied and because in each scene, or better to say, in each verse one finds things that enchant and that one cannot abandon.

Her commentary, keyed to the Latin text, is especially shrewd when it comes to character. So, for example, on Andria 37, when Simo reminds Sosia that “I arranged that from being a slave you be my freedman,” she is not taken in by his self-proclaimed magnanimity: “This is much in the character of old men, who always want the greatness of their deeds to be recognized.” And on 92–3, where Simo praises Glycerium’s demeanor at the funeral: “One should especially note Terence’s art, which has the man from the outset praise the modesty and noble air of this young person, who is fated to be his daughter-in-law. How appropriate!” This kind of observation, which is presented along with the best of the ancient source material, not only won the praise of contemporaries but to a large degree also shaped the subsequent reception of Terence for European readers. To read or write about the plays without falling into her debt became almost impossible.13 Writing about Terence, however, was not the only dimension to his reception. Nobody forgot that what he wrote was designed as plays for the stage, and the origin of those plays in a tradition of performance also factors into the story of his reception.

. . . and Back Again Terence returned to the stage with Andria. This was the play that inspired the first documented production of any Roman comedy after antiquity, a staged recitation in Latin mounted at Florence in 1476 by students of the humanist Giorgio Antonio Vespucci (uncle of the geographer, Amerigo), first at his school, then by invitation at the Medici palace, and then publicly in the Palazzo della Signoria. An

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Italian production followed at Ferrara in 1491, and productions have continued ever since, albeit intermittently and most often delivered with a distinctly academic accent. Professional, commercial productions are not common; Terence has never generated quite the level of popular interest that Plautus claims. Molière’s protégé Michel Baron (1653– 1729) performed a French adaptation as L’Andrienne in 1703, and in 1777, a version that billed itself as “a modern translation of Terence’s Andria” was recast in German as Die Engländerin in Berlin (The English Girl in Berlin). Goethe became manager of the court theater at Weimar in 1791, and in that capacity he made Terence an important part of his effort to raise by example the quality of German drama. Standards of decency were high at Weimar, and Goethe particularly admired the delicacy with which Terence handled even morally dubious subjects. A translation of Adelphoe by his friend Friedrich Hildebrand von Einsiedel was performed in ancient costumes and half-masks fifteen times between 1801 and 1807, Eunuchus and Heauton timorumenos four times each. Andria, in a version by August Hermann Niemeyer, received five performances in the 1803/4 season. Years later, Goethe would commend the version of Andria sent to him by his young protégé, Felix Mendelssohn, who had translated it into German equivalents of the original meters. That version included stage directions, too, although by then Goethe had left theater management behind him and performance was not Mendelssohn’s objective. This reclamation of Andria for the stage, whether through literal performances, adaptations, or as the inspiration for new work in a living tradition of theater marks a major shift in the history of the reception of the play. The polemical prologue so characteristic of Terence, for example, was taken up with gusto by English playwrights and became a fixture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English stage. Ben Jonson opened Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609) not just with a palpable echo of the Andria prologue, but with a similar assault on the state of contemporary drama:

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Truth says, of old the art of making plays Was to content the people; and their praise Was to the poet money, wine, and bays. But in this age, a sect of writers are, That, only, for particular likings care, And will taste nothing that is popular. With such we mingle neither brains nor breasts; Our wishes, like to those make public feasts, Are not to please the cook’s taste, but the guests’.

Half a century later, when drama returned to London after the enforced hiatus of the Puritan Commonwealth, John Dryden offered his own take on the passage in the prologue to An Evening’s Love (1668), spun out now with the slyly ribald license typical of comedy under the restored monarchy: When first our Poet set himself to write, Like a young Bridegroom on his Wedding-night He laid about him, and did so bestir him, His Muse could never lye in quiet for him: But now his Honey-moon is gone and past, Yet the ungrateful drudgery must last: And he is bound, as civil Husbands do, To strain himself, in complaisance to you: To write in pain, and counterfeit a Bliss, Like the faint smackings of an after-Kiss.

In defending the morality (or lack of it) on the Restoration stage, Dryden argued that it was not comedy’s business to champion virtue at the expense of vice, and he blithely cited by way of proof the example of Terence: Chaerea is made happy in the Eunuch, after having deflour’d a Virgin: and Terence generally does the same through all his Plays, where you perpetually see not only debauch’d young men enjoy

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their Mistresses, but even the Courtezans themselves rewarded and honor’d in the Catastrophe.14

That is all true, of course, but it was not to be the formula for future success, for the new century ushered in a marked and enduring change of attitude. Three manifestations of the change, produced in different times and in quite different forms, all draw on ideas of theater and are particularly striking for what they reveal about Andria’s hold on the creative imagination.

1. Steele: The Conscious Lovers (1722) The aims and methods of comedy that were so hotly debated by the late 1690s eventually shifted and gave rise in the early eighteenth century to what came to be known as sentimental comedy, “in which,” as Oliver Goldsmith described it in hindsight, “the virtues of private life are exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of mankind make our interest in the piece.” To a classicist, this will sound much like the difference between Aristophanes and Menander, and so it comes as no surprise that Terence was a major inspiration for the new style. Among its most enduring exemplars was The Conscious Lovers by Sir Richard Steele (1672–1729), which in its prologue took explicit issue with the bawdy humour of the previous century: No more let lawless farce uncensured go, The lewd dull gleanings of a Smithfield show. ’Tis yours with breeding to refine the age, To chasten wit, and moralize the stage.

Steele’s idea of chastened wit was of a very quiet kind. He had long admired Terentian comedy precisely because it was not, in his view, overtly funny. Back in 1712, an essay in The Spectator had praised Heauton timorumenos precisely for what it did not have: “It is from the Beginning to the End a perfect Picture of human Life, but I did not

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observe in the whole one Passage that could raise a Laugh. How well disposed must that People be, who could be entertained with Satisfaction by so sober and polite Mirth?”15 In setting out to produce such sober mirth himself, he turned to Andria. Steele opens his play with a scene immediately familiar to students of Terence. Sir John Bevil confides to his faithful servant Humphrey that the rich merchant Mr. Sealand has offered Lucinda, his daughter and heiress, in marriage to the seemingly virtuous younger Bevil, his son, but Sealand now hesitates since events at a recent masked ball suggested that the young man is attached to a mysterious orphan, who we later learn is named Indiana and resides with an older woman, Isabella. Sir John intends to test the young man’s loyalty by insisting on an immediate marriage, while Humphrey is charged with watching his son’s scheming servant, his own nephew Tom, and divining his intentions. There will, of course, be the expected complication that young Bevil’s friend, Myrtle, loves Lucinda and also two additional twists: Mrs. Sealand wants Lucinda married instead to her cousin, the rake Cimberton, and Tom is carrying on a flirtation with Lucinda’s maid, Phillis. Steele also adds a complex intrigue to foil Cimberton’s suit and a quarrel between the younger Bevil and Myrtle that nearly leads to a duel. As if by way of compensation, there are also some omissions: the dead Chrysis is replaced by the very much alive Isabella; far from compromising Indiana, young Bevil has been too modest even to confess his love to her; and the eventual recognition is affected not by the timely arrival of a stranger but by Sealand himself, who goes to see the mysterious orphan and, when in distress she discards a bracelet, discovers she is his lost daughter by his first, now deceased, wife and that her protector Isabella is his sister. All ends happily for those who deserve happiness, young Bevil and Indiana, Myrtle and Lucinda. The Conscious Lovers opened at Drury Lane on November 7, 1722, after weeks of artfully orchestrated hype. The play was long in the

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making, and Steele, a prolific essayist and impresario as well as a dramatist, knew very well how to fan the flames of expectation. The sudden appearance, barely five days before the first curtain, of a disapproving pamphlet by the critic John Dennis further stoked the fires. The resulting controversy had the predictable result: the play was an immense commercial success. It ran for eighteen nights, an unusually long run in the early eighteenth century, grossing a record sum of £2,536/3/6. When published in December, it quickly sold a thousand copies and was followed by two more printings and subsequent editions throughout the century, as well as translations into Italian (1724), French (1736, 1778, 1784), and German (1752, 1767), the continuing interest no doubt aided by a second, even stronger, attack by Dennis. Today, the text is a bit of a slog, and modern readers may well agree with Dennis that young Bevil’s behavior is “ridiculously whimsical” and that, taken as a whole, “there is no incident in The Conscious Lovers but what is attended by some great absurdity.” The play remains important, though, as a response to the Latin play behind it and for its ability to do with comedy things that Terence could neither do himself nor even imagine doing. Steele, for example, finds real use for “Charinus.” As we have seen, Terence added Charinus and Byrria to complicate the moral dilemma at the heart of Andria, but he does not allow Charinus’ love for Philumena to grow into a coherent, independent action: doubling the lovers does not produce a true double plot. By the eighteenth century, the creation of distinct but intertwined plotlines was a well-established element of play-construction, and Steele easily creates a truly complex action not just by turning his Charinus-figure into a fully formed character (Myrtle), but by further complicating the situation with the addition of Cimberton and by fleshing out action below stairs through the conversations of Tom, Phillis, and Humphrey. These additions give a social dimension not easily found in Terence. It matters here, as it did to the eighteenth-century world in which the play is set, that

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Sir John Bevil’s roots are in the landed gentry, while the richer Mr. Sealand comes from the rising merchant class, and it matters even more that the servants are no longer mere extensions of their masters. They do not just have lives and opinions of their own but are also given opportunities to express them. While the play does not directly challenge distinctions of class, it does not ignore them.16 Terence was in his way sensitive to poverty’s role in shaping character. So, the easy-going Micio of Adelphoe, in excusing his son’s brutality toward a pimp, tells the censorious Demea, “If neither you nor I did these things, it was because poverty didn’t allow us to do them. Are you now claiming for praise what you did then for lack of means?” (Ad. 103–5). That is one brother talking to another as social equals. In Steele, a similar observation becomes a function of class when Humphrey tells his master, Sir John, “Ah sir, our manners were formed from our different fortunes, not our different age. Wealth gave a loose to your youth, and poverty put a restraint upon mine” (I.i). The obsequious Sosia could hardly say such a thing to Simo. And similarly, when the slave Syrus mocks Demea’s sententious moralizing by pointing out that “it is as much a fault for us, Demea, as it is for you, not to do those things you just mentioned . . . I tell my people to look into their pots as into a mirror” (Ad. 422–9), he is only hinting at the separate lives of slaves, where Tom expands at length on the difference between a drudge like his uncle Humphrey and the boundless opportunities of a manservant like himself: “Why now, sir, that lackeys are the men of pleasure of the age, the top-gamesters and many a laced coat about town have had their education in our parti-colored regiment” (I.i). That freedom is even more marked in Phillis, never hesitant to speak up to her mistress: Lucinda . But I thought I heard him kiss you. Why do you suffer that? Phillis . Why madam, we vulgar take it to be a sign of love. We servants, people that have nothing but our persons to bestow or

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treat for are forced deal and bargain by way of sample. And therefore, as we have no parchments or wax necessary in our agreements, we squeeze with our hands and seal our lips to ratify vows and promises.

This is a dramatic world, where women freely speak their minds, even in small things, as when Isabella comments aside on Sealand’s failure to recognize her: “Twenty years, it seems, have less effect on the alteration of a man of thirty than of a girl of fourteen; he’s almost still the same. But alas! I find, by other men as well as himself, I am not what I was” (V.iii). In Andria, Chrysis speaks only indirectly through the voice of a man, and Glycerium can hardly speak at all. Steele gives even Terence’s silent virgins characters and voices. Lucinda is fully empowered to declare her feelings for the suitors pressed upon her, and Indiana is the agent of her own recognition, acted out before our eyes. Her demure willingness to take responsibility for her own situation wins Sealand to her cause even before he discovers her true identity. Her perspective on young Bevil’s conduct toward her is significant and even moving: “The goodness and gentleness of his demeanor made me misinterpret all. ’Twas my own hope, my own passion, that deluded me. He never made one amorous advance to me. His large heart and bestowing hand have only helped the miserable.” No Glycerium would or could ever say such a thing! Oliver Goldsmith, in the essay quoted earlier, preferred what he called “laughing comedy” to this expression of sentiment, and by the time he was writing, plays of that later sort like his own She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777) had carried the day. The fact that plays by Goldsmith and Sheridan (and, for that matter, the earlier plays of Wycherley and Congreve) are performed more often today than those of Steele may well say something of the relative appeal of sentimental and laughing comedy, but sentiment did live on, and with a distinctly Terentian echo.

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2. Abildgaard: The Andria Series (1803/4) The Danish artist Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809) was a classicizing painter with a longstanding interest in theater: among his works are scenes from Shakespeare and a series of illustrations inspired by Voltaire’s politically charged tragedy on the evils of tyranny, Le triumvirat (1764). An outspoken and somewhat prickly supporter of liberal causes, Abildgaard was forced to trim his sails after the collapse of French revolutionary fervor in the 1790s, but his spirits seem to have revived when new professional opportunities came his way around 1800, followed by a happy second marriage in 1803. As director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, he and his new bride were provided with a private apartment in the Charlottenborg Palace, which he decorated with four large paintings designed for display in something like a Pompeiian Fourth Style setting. For a subject, his interest in theater combined with his new domestic circumstances to lead him, naturally enough, to a play about a marriage. The result was four scenes from Andria: 1.1 (Simo and his former slave Sosia), 2.3 (Pamphilus and his servant Davos), 3.2 (The midwife taking leave of the girl from Andros), and 4.4 (The slave Davos and the maid Mysis). Each painting is of interest for extra-dramatic details he added (including himself and his new family in the background of the final painting), but the first is especially noteworthy for Abildgaard’s combination of sources to construct his image (Figure 4.1).17 The scene as represented is not entirely his own invention. Its ultimate source is the ninth-century miniature (Figure 3.1), which he knew in two versions. Like most educated Europeans of the day, he read Terence primarily from Mme. Dacier’s edition, and that work illustrates the first scene of Andria with a line drawing based on the miniature: the same four characters appear in roughly the same configuration, though not so clearly wearing masks and set now in a recognizable street scene. In the 1790s, Abildgaard also acquired a

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Figure 4.1 Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809), Simo and His Former Slave Sosia (1803), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. Public Domain.

copy of a curious work by the jurist C. H. Berger, a study of masked comic performance and its legal connotations that prefaced its discussion with the first printed reproductions of the Terentian miniatures, which it represented in monochrome drawings that, it must be said, reproduced poses and gestures with less than complete accuracy and failed to distinguish very effectively among the characters’ masks.18 Conceptually, Abildgaard’s architectural settings in all four paintings were clearly inspired by what he found in the

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Dacier edition, though he developed each scene in meticulous detail from his own study of ancient buildings and enlivened these new streets with additional figures. Where Terence’s interest was narrowly focused, Abildgaard takes a broader view: the first picture, for example, restores the female perspective largely suppressed in the play by representing Simo’s wife as a witness to the scene from an upper window. The most remarkable change, though, is in the depiction of Sosia, and not simply because he has lost his ladle. As we have seen, the mask of Sosia in the medieval miniature is distinctly and distinguishingly dark-skinned, but neither the version in Dacier nor in Berger reproduces that detail. Faces in the former are uniformly white, while in the latter they are shaded equally. Abildgaard’s Sosia is not just dark-skinned but strikingly and unambiguously African, the representation taken directly from the obverse of a commemorative bronze medal he had designed in 1792 to celebrate the abolition of the slave trade in the Danish West Indies. In depicting the freedman Sosia as an African, Abildgaard effectively makes Terence, whom the ancient biography identified as a freedman from (African) Carthage, a character in his own drama. This is doubly interesting. First, it reminds us that from early on, the plays of Terence were almost impossible to experience independent of their creator’s biography. The Life attributed to Suetonius was attached to editions of Donatus and then commonly reproduced in editions of Terence. In Mme. Dacier’s edition, for example, it is the first thing readers encounter after her introductory essay but before the text of the first play (Andria), and its opening line came with her poignant observation that as a freedman, Terence’s original name is irretrievably lost: what he made immortal through his work was the name of the man who owned him. The irony of that fact is latent in Abildgaard’s image of the African freedman cook as a stand-in for the African freedman poet.19 Second, though, is the awkward fact, awkward at least for us, that sensitivity to the condition of slavery,

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especially the deracination and heightened physical vulnerability to abuse that came with slave status—the kind of sensibility that often puts an edge on palliata comedy as Plautus wrote it—is largely absent from Terence. His own experience as slave or freedman or whatever his status was left no discernible mark on the plays. In Andria, the girl known as Glycerium never really lost her original Athenian name and identity, which are then easily restored to her (942–7), while Davos, having been trussed and carried off before our eyes by the thug Dromo (860–5), is forgiven after a good-natured, joking exchange between Pamphilus and Simo, a conversation between masters and far removed in tone from the way Tranio is forced to grovel for forgiveness in Mostellaria (1166–80, cf. An. 952–6) or, when the devil claims his due, Pseudolus turns the tables on the master he has so thoroughly bested (Ps. 1285–1331). What the tradition might lead us to expect in Terence is not always what we find there.

3. Wilder: The Woman of Andros (1930) Sir Richard Steele had no need to identify Terence’s play as his source or to excuse his use of it. In the eighteenth century, the debt would have been obvious to anyone with a claim to some education, and so his Preface to the printed version simply refers to Terence as a matter of course. Writing two hundred years later and an ocean away, Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) opens his take on the play with an explicit acknowledgment: “The first part of this novel is based upon the Andria, a comedy of Terence, who in turn based his work upon two Greek plays, now lost to us, by Menander.” The novel, then, will be an adaptation of an adaptation and, like Terence’s play, it identifies its origin to an audience only dimly aware (if aware at all) of what that origin was. But, perhaps also like Terence, the author’s claim is not entirely accurate. The first part of the novel is based not so much on Andria as on Andria’s back story. We are on the fictional island of

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Brynos, not in Athens, and Chrysis, not Glycerium, is the Andrian woman of the title. Although still a courtesan, she is elevated now to a kind of Socratic stature, with an entourage of rich young men hanging on her every wise word and a dependent household of outcasts, misfits, and invalids. She dies as we turn the page from 107 to 108, with only a third of the story still to come. The one explicit point of intersection with Terence’s play comes just there with the narrative of Chrysis’ funeral (pp.  108–12 ~ An. 104–46), after which Pamphilus wrestles with his obligation toward the pregnant Glycerium, Simo (a more humane and worldly version of the Terentian father figure) stresses the serious social consequences of marrying her, and Chremes frets in the background. The one decisive action comes when Simo intervenes to prevent Glycerium and Mysis from being sold into slavery to pay Chrysis’ debts, after which a reconciliation seems at hand. But it is not to be: This flowering of goodness, however, was not to be put to the trial of routine perseverance, nor to know the alternations of selfreproach and renewed courage; for on noon of the third day Glycerium’s pains began and by sunset both mother and child were dead. p. 159

The bleakness of that climax is relieved only by the coming of rain after a period of prolonged drought and a vague promise of a more compassionate world to come: “And in the East the stars shone tranquilly down upon the land that was soon to be called Holy and that even then was preparing its precious burden” (p. 162).20 Wilder had sought to prepare us for this, saying on the first page that “triumph had passed from Greece and wisdom from Egypt” (i.e. this will be a story of a world in decline) and even setting up the eventual echo as “the land that was soon to be called Holy prepared in the dark its wonderful burden.” Even so, this is a heavy dose of

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symbolism, although the readers of 1930 did not seem to mind. Wilder had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 with a runaway bestseller, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and while it was not nearly so popular, The Woman of Andros still sold some 70,000 copies in its first year. Reviewers were not equally enthusiastic. The most strident of them was the Marxist critic Michael Gold, who excoriated Wilder in the pages of The New Republic for ignoring the all-too-real social tensions and inequities of the growing Depression to indulge in this bourgeois fantasy on Brynos. Wilder’s affected elegance and pseudo-philosophy served only to hide “a fundamental silliness and superficiality . . . under a Greek chlamys.”21 The criticism is not entirely fair. Its aphorisms may certainly be a little saccharine (“Happy are the associations that have grown out of a fault and a forgiveness” is one of the better ones), but the novel, in fact, focuses tightly and sympathetically on people at the edge of society. Gold may not have noticed, perhaps because its most vulnerable characters are women, but Wilder makes quite clear the threats and fears that lurk behind Chrysis’ mask of tranquility and then threaten her dependants after her death. Yet something in this mix can indeed leave a modern reader deeply unsatisfied. The problem is not, as Gold implies, purely with the Greek chlamys. Wilder’s interest in classical antiquity was neither an affectation nor an aberration. In one sense, he knew what he was about. He had studied Latin as a Yale undergraduate and then spent eight months studying archaeology at the American Academy in Rome. His first novel, The Cabala (1926), was set in Rome and came replete with classical allusions, and he would later return to explicitly classical material in both a successful (if underappreciated) novel, The Ides of March (1948), and a rather less successful play, The Alcestiad (1955). Nor was his feel for ancient literature superficial. To imagine Cicero writing of Catullus, as Wilder’s Cicero does in The Ides of March, that “these poems are in Latin but they are not Roman” requires knowing a thing or two about Cicero and the poetic cross-currents of the late

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Republic. Perhaps paradoxically, The Woman of Andros might actually be more appealing if Wilder had taken its Greek setting seriously and made Brynos feel like a real place inhabited by real people, but that was not his aim. He cares less for the lives of individuals than for life in general, and ultimately what lets him down is not that interest but the genre in which he pursued it. This is clear from the sequel. One of Chrysis’ lessons to the young men she entertains takes the form of a parable: a dead hero is granted the boon of returning to earth to relive the least eventful day of his life as both participant and onlooker (pp. 33–6). He endures less than an hour of that day, quickly overcome by the discovery that the living are too immersed in the mechanics of life to appreciate the wonder of it. Zeus then releases him from the vision, “but before he left he fell upon the ground and kissed the soil of the world that is too dear to be realized.” That may sound familiar. The lesson Chrysis taught on Brynos is the same lesson learned in the equally mythical Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, after Emily Webb finds her twelfth birthday too painful to relive and hurries back to her grave: “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” Nobody snickers at this moment in the play. Why does the sparse narrative that seems only effete and affected in The Woman of Andros work so agonizingly well on the bare-bones stage of Our Town? The difference, as Wilder himself came to see, lies in the change of genre. “The novel,” he would later write, “is preeminently the vehicle of the unique occasion, the theater of the generalized one. It is through the theater’s power to raise the exhibited individual action into the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to evoke our belief.”22 That is the truth not only behind the success of Our Town, but behind the enduring appeal of New Comedy, which, as developed by Menander and Terence, explored the vagaries of human behavior and the fragility of human relationships within the frame of the tradition’s generalized occasion. The debt to Terence that

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Wilder signals at the outset of The Woman of Andros is not just the acknowledgment of a source but an invitation to read the novel with a Terentian sensibility. It does not work. Not only is a “Terentian sensibility” beyond the conscious experience of too many readers, but the signal itself is too difficult to make out. Building on an earlier work as Wilder does, a creative process that Romans called imitatio, presumes an idea of originality and a strategy for reading texts against earlier texts that are not unparalleled in modern experience—Joyce, Pound, and Eliot are in their deliberately classicizing ways obvious examples of the practice—but not common, either. An allusion to Terence is more likely to mystify or alienate or annoy a modern reader than to point that reader in the right direction and enrich the process of reading. It is less the specifics of the borrowing than the very fact of borrowing that becomes difficult to deal with. It was, however, a creative process to which Wilder was deeply committed, and it continued to arouse controversy. Wilder stayed with the theater’s generalized occasion. After Our Town (1938) came the even more innovative The Skin of Our Teeth, a play set in suburban New Jersey but including in its extensive cast of characters a dinosaur, three maiden ladies named Muse, and the poet Homer. It stretches conventions of time and place and language, and it regularly obscures the boundary between realism and fantasy. The play opened on Broadway with considerable fanfare in November 1942. Within a month Wilder was, like Terence before him, charged publicly with being unoriginal and something of a thief. Under the heading “The Skin of Whose Teeth?” The Saturday Review of Literature published the first of a two-part critique by two professors, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, who identified the play as “not an entirely original creation, but an Americanized re-creation, thinly disguised, of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.”23 Their reasons for saying so were set out in considerable detail, and although Wilder

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shrugged off the criticism for years, in 1957 he did finally add to the play’s published text something like the preamble to The Woman of Andros: “The play is deeply indebted to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I should be very happy if, in the future, some author should feel similarly indebted to any work of mine. Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs.” That is the sort of rejoinder Terence, like Menander before him, would readily understand. As Terence pointed out in the prologue to Eunuchus, “nothing is said which has not been said before” (41). Critics may dispute all they want, but, as the record of reception makes clear, authors continue to pass the torch.

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The Translators’ Dilemma

Plautus is many things: funny, grotesque, pathetic, edgy, outrageous, sometimes in turn and sometimes all at once. His energy, palpable even on the printed page, has for centuries made it easy to respond to his brand of comedy. Terentian comedy is different, the response to it not always so immediate and not always so positive, and that difference can present a particular problem for those meeting him in translation. He is in his own way a very skilled dramatist: deft and even sly in his use of traditional comic diction and devices, masterful in his use of meter and music to regulate emphasis, tone, and pace, sensitive to human foibles and the inevitable gaps between human intentions and human actions. These virtues become clear on close reading of the Latin text, but those seeking to represent those effects through translation into other languages have found only limited success in doing so. The result of their efforts is too often a Terence either dull or, if not dull, sounding too much like Plautus to reveal his particular strengths and unique virtues. The struggle to capture at least some of the qualities that make Terence Terence has a very long history, and Andria again claims a prominent place in that history from its very first chapter. The story begins early in the sixteenth century, when Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) decided to recreate the play in Tuscan prose. The work was not published in his lifetime and only survives because of two autograph manuscripts, a fair copy dated to about 1520 and a somewhat earlier draft that preserves numerous corrections and cancellations. Taken together, the two versions reveal the thought processes of an author wrestling with style and tone and questions of 79

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cultural transfer, matters that all translators eventually face. As might be expected, translation from Latin to Italian can often be quite close. Thus, the alliteration of verum illud verbum est (“that saying is true,” 426) easily becomes Vero è quel proverbio, and the overtones of the colloquial expression quae haec est fabula? (“What’s this silliness?” 747) are preserved directly in Che favola è questa? Sometimes, however, Machiavelli felt the need to add some punch, and in those cases he did not hesitate to do so. When Simo first encounters Davos at 184, for example, the slave sounds simply evasive: SI . Hey, come here a minute. (DA . What does he want?) SI . What do you say? DA . About what?

Machiavelli sharpens the language and in his version builds a joke on what becomes an overheard aside: SI . Come to me! (DA . What does this prick want?) SI . What did you say? DA . About what?

A little later, when he decides the mythical allusion in Davos’ insolent “I am Davos, not Oedipus” (194) is unworkable, Machiavelli is torn between the bland “I am Davos, not a prophet” and the more pointed “not the friar,” which Florentines would immediately recognize as a topical reference to the notorious reformer Savonarola, burned at the stake in 1498. The register changes yet again at 914, where Pamphilus worries that his father’s rudeness will draw a rash response from Crito: “I’m done for! I’m afraid the foreigner won’t stand for this!” The line becomes in Machiavelli’s first draft, “Yeow! I’m afraid this foreigner will shit himself!” only to be moderated, though still not down to a truly Terentian standard of decorum, in the second: “Yeow! I’m afraid this foreigner will piss himself!” In lines like this, Terence’s decorous, occasionally anodyne Latin is being drawn closer to what Machiavelli might himself have heard on the streets of Florence.

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Why he experimented in this way is unclear. There is no record of the script having been performed or even intended for performance, although that remains a possibility. His personal interest in Terence, however, is well established. He had already transcribed Eunuchus for his own use, much as Erasmus around the same time was copying out the plays in his own hand as both a sign of respect and an instrument of study, and it is tempting to see in this Tuscan Andria “a fledging playwright in the process of cutting his dramatic teeth.” The exercise was in any event followed not long after by his own comic classic, Mandragola.1 Nearly contemporary with Machiavelli was a translation project in England that did immediately go public. At some point around 1520, a version of Andria was published in London as an anonymous pamphlet under the title Terens in Englysh. Since Terence in Latin was still a mainstay of the school curriculum, the title is itself something of a provocation, and the edition makes an effort to explain itself. Although it replaced Terence’s prologue with a more conventional speech introducing the plot, that speech was itself introduced by something more distinctly Terentian in style, a lengthy justification for the very act of making a translation. The authors (there seem to be two, generally presumed to be a Latinist and a collaborator) claim the precedent of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate (then still the giants of the English poetic canon) and exult in the flexibility of a vocabulary which these poets had already enriched by borrowings from other languages.2 The somewhat improbable result is an Andria in rhyme royal, the seven line rhymed stanza (ababbcc is the rhyme scheme) of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a version which, to judge from its epilogue, the authors imagined as suitable for the stage: And, for this thing is brought into the English tongue, We pray you all not to be discontent: For the Latin book which hath be used so long Was translate out of Greek: this is evident.

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And sith our English tongue is now sufficient The matter to express, we think it best be may Before Englishmen in English it to play.

The translation is generally accurate, although not without errors, but it does not seem to have been expected to stand on its own. The original Latin, printed as prose, was crowded into its outside margins, perhaps as tacit proof that the goods were genuine. These early experiments with comic idiom show sixteenth-century translators already wrestling with a problem subsequent translators would also face, viz. the challenge of preserving the sense of the original without entirely losing its vitality. How can a translation capture for those without direct experience of his language the qualities that secured Terence’s place in the canon and continue to make the experience of his plays worthwhile . . . without also making them a bore? The issue is especially pressing today, since Terence is now encountered far more often through reading than through performance, and that reading is increasingly through the medium of translation.3 Admittedly, the six plays are not in this sense equally problematic. Adelphoe deals with a topic of perennial interest (child-rearing) in an engaging and enduring way. The callousness and, many will say, moral bankruptcy displayed in Eunuchus and Hecyra easily evoke strong and heated responses, while on the other side of the spectrum, Phormio is a less emotionally charged but also more readily amusing play of intrigue in something closer to the Plautine manner. Andria presents a challenge precisely because it is, perhaps paradoxically, not so fundamentally unsettling or so outwardly amusing. The modes of expression, twists of convention, and subtle insights into character that make it noteworthy are characteristic of Terence and his version of palliata comedy, but these are precisely the virtues that slip most easily through the cracks between original and translation. What is a translator to do? One common response has long been to abandon the struggle before it has properly begun, leaving it to a teacher or to a reader’s

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own imagination to supply what the translation leaves out. “What the text says” should not be quite so difficult to reproduce, which is why so-called service translations that prioritize meaning over art have always dominated the record. For English students, this kind of edition, often with notes and other interpretive aids appended to do what the translation itself cannot do, again goes back to the sixteenth century. Perhaps because Latin Terence was so intensely studied, there was at least tacit acknowledgment that while parsing his Latin sentences was one thing, it was something else again to read those sentences with understanding and that translation could be a useful tool for working to that end. A second, technically improved, English Andria, published in 1588 (the year of the Spanish Armada) by the Welsh soldier-poet Maurice Kyffin (c. 1555–98), explicitly addressed “all young Students OF THE LATIN TONG (for whose onely help and benifit this Comoedie is published).” Its pedagogic aim was prominently displayed on its very title page: “A furtherance for the attainment vnto the right knowledge, & true proprietie, of the Latin tong. And also a commodious meane of help, to such as haue forgotten Latin, for their speedy recouering of habilitie, to vnderstand, write, and speake the same.” Yet it was not conceived only as a crib for translating Latin. Each scene is introduced by a brief “Argument” and includes marginal stage notes, e.g. “Simo speaketh this out of the hearing of Davus,” to set the action in the mind’s eye. This edition of Andria was followed ten years later by a complete Terence, which remained a popular teaching text throughout the next century. The work of the Puritan clergyman Richard Bernard (1568– 1641), it stands as something of a cross between the bilingualism of a modern Loeb edition and Cliff ’s Notes. The Latin text was printed along with a summary, marginal glosses (in Latin), and moral high points, each scene then followed by an English translation and further explication in sections devoted to stylistic nuance (Formulae loquendi) and interpretive possibilities (Sententiae). Thus, for example, Bernard teases out the

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semantic range of Pamphilus’ anguished cry at 236: “Hoccine est humanum factum ? Is this a gentle deed? Is this a touch of an honest man? Is this courteously done?” The technique expands and restores context to the material found in a bilingual phrasebook like Udall’s Floures and facilitates the mode of textual explication initially set out, after the example of Donatus, in Erasmus’ De ratione studii (1511), which came to form the backbone of the grammar school curriculum in Tudor England. Since elegance and fluency in speaking and writing Latin were among the major goals of that curriculum, Terence’s easy colloquialism made excerpts from his plays, along with selected letters of Cicero, ideal material for the sort of exercise described in Roger Ascham’s popular manual, The Scholemaster (1570): First, let him teach the childe, cherefullie and plainlie, the cause, and matter of the letter: then, let him construe it into Englishe, so oft, as the childe may easilie carie awaie the vnderstanding of it: Lastlie, parse it ouer perfitlie. This done thus, let the childe, by and by, both construe and parse it ouer againe: so, that it may appeare, that the childe douteth in nothing, that his master taught him before. After this, the childe must take a paper booke, and sitting in some place, where no man shall prompe him, by himself, let him translate into Englishe his former lesson. Then shewing it to his master, let the master take from him his latin booke, and pausing an houre, at the least, than let the childe translate his owne Englishe into latin againe, in another paper booke.

It all makes a sort of sense, although the inherent pedantry of the method also in due course produced Shakespeare’s memorable tutors Holofernes of Loves Labors Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor’s Sir Hugh Evans, not to mention Lucentio’s subverted Latin lesson in The Taming of the Shrew (3.1).4 The task early translators like Kyffin and Bernard set for themselves was easier to accomplish, of course, when the Latin text remained in view and the one could be read in tandem with the other, much as

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today’s Aris and Phillips Classical Texts series provides bilingual editions with a commentary keyed to the translation. It also helped in the early days that Terence’s place in the curriculum was secure and students had little alternative to taking him up. The burden increases markedly when the question to be answered becomes not how to read Terence but why to read him. The emphasis on sense that continues to inform the stand-alone prose translations in the Bohn, Penguin, and Oxford World Classics series, all of which prioritize accuracy over art, comes at a cost. As Douglass Parker noted in a trenchant review of what was then still a new Penguin Terence: this is a good, lively, sensitive trot, done into unexceptionable if unexceptional prose. It does not sidetrack metaphors. It gets every last word in, at whatever cost. It has a good amount of tact. It essays characterization, though gingerly . . . But take it all in all, it deprives one of the pithiest of dramatic poets of his bite; its language creates no reason for reading Terence.5

An example of what he means can be seen in Simo’s opening threat to Davos (196–201), which reads like this in the Penguin edition: If I catch you up to any of your tricks today to prevent this marriage or trying to show off your cleverness in this matter, I warn you, Davos, I’ll have you beaten senseless and sent to the mill, with my solemn assurance that if I let you out I shall go there and grind in your place. Is that quite clear? Or is there something you still can’t understand?

This is indeed what the Latin says, but for “bite,” compare this seventeenth-century version by Laurence Echard: Look ye Sirrah! If I catch ye in any of your Roguy Legerdemain tricks to hinder this Match, or that ye have a Mind to shew how shrewd you are at Plotting: I’ll ha’ your Skin stript o’re your Ears, and you sent to Bridewel Sirrah! there to lye and rot, upon the Condition, and by this token, that when e’re I take you out, I’ll give

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you leave to put me in.—What, does your Rogueship understand me now? Han’t I spoke plain enough yet?

Echard, writing with all the enthusiasm of the Cambridge undergraduate he then was, explicitly hoped to perk up contemporary theater-writing with a good dose of Terence, and while the enthusiasm of his Simo may today sound more Plautine than Terentian, its delight in verbiage does serve to remind us that for centuries language was the reason for reading Terence. It was, after all, his language and not the dynamics of his actions that inspired the learned Hrotsvit to claim him as a model, and six centuries later those Tudor schoolmasters were still having pupils model their own Latin writing (and speaking) on his. Much of Echard’s preface praises Terence’s diction to the sky, although he thinks Terence’s dramatic values are largely unsuited to modern practice: “Plautus was more lively and vigorous, and so fitter for Action; and Terence more grave and serious, and so fitter for Reading.”6 These values have since been reversed. We read—and admire— Terence now primarily as a dramatist, which means a good deal more than being a deft stylist (which he was) and a re-worker of comic clichés (which he also was). What we see and admire most in Terence today is his ability, like Menander before him, to create characters rather than caricatures, men and women whose attitudes and actions align with our own experience and, in the process of resolving their particular problems, come alive for us. Yet, because that gift of characterization is deeply rooted in the manipulation of language and stage conventions, reproducing those qualities of his text for those reading him in a different language and with a different idea of theatrical convention becomes especially important. As we take fuller measure of the varying responses to the challenge of doing so, it is only fair to recall the practical difficulties translators face. Of these, three stand out. 1. What do the words mean? That first Englysh Terens was prone to slips in vocabulary and syntax, such as rendering the collective

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noun nuptiae (cf. English “nuptials”) as “weddings,” although the reference is never to more than one, or being badly confused by the structure and the sense of Pamphilus’ worried aside at 914, which includes a problematic verb and a negative clause expressing fear.7 Better tools and better knowledge soon reduced that sort of mistake, but even today translators face linguistic challenges that are not so easily resolved simply by consulting a grammar book and a dictionary. Since Terence’s Latin is itself early and modeled on a conversational register for which little other, independent evidence exists, his meaning and tone can be uncertain and firm parallels can be hard to find. How strong is a term of abuse like carnufex (lit. “meat-maker” or perhaps, although sounding less sinister, something like “buzzard-bait”)? Is there a distinction worth making between vivid expressions of despair like crucior (lit. “I am crucified” derived from slave punishment but widely used by anyone, e.g. Simo at 851 and 886, as an expression of mental anguish) and more generic ones like ei mihi (lit. “alas, for me!”), and when is an oath a genuine invocation (e.g. pro Iuppiter!) and when is it simply an emphatic particle (e.g. pol)? It can also be difficult to distinguish common from technical usage and Roman connotations from modern ones. Chrysis’ insistence that Pamphilus be an amicus to Glycerium would clearly suggest to Roman ears not merely “friend” in the casual modern sense but the obligations and alliances entailed by the specifically Roman idea of amicitia, but when she also asks him to be Glycerium’s tutor (295), does she mean simply “protector” or is she appointing him “guardian” in a specifically legal sense?8 Terence’s critical vocabulary can also present difficulties. Even Donatus, for example, apparently struggled to explain the distinction at An. 12, where Terence says that Menander’s Andria and Perinthia differed less in plot (argumentum) than in oratio and stilus. The extant commentary preserves the disjointed remnants of what must originally have been a detailed, quite possibly convoluted discussion of these terms.9

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Dissimili oratione . . . (2) oratio is in the sense, stilus in the words. (3) oratio has to do with the substance, stilus with the words. (4) stilus is not in the intention but in the speech (oratio) offered; speech (oratio) moreover is in the thought and in the offering. (5) They say that oratio is in the sentiments, stilus in the words, argumentum in the substance. Thus a poem too is an oratio.

Translators often resort to clarifying such matters in explanatory notes, but while notes help to establish meaning, they can be an impediment to reading and are largely useless in performance. 2. What happens to Latin’s traditional comic diction? The language of Roman comedy favors assonance and alliteration, along with word play of all kinds, and it indulges in a variety of rhetorical figures. Its linguistic mannerisms were established at the very beginning by Livius Andronicus and remained largely unchanged throughout the history of the palliata genre. Although Terence’s use of such traditional diction is, as we have seen, considerably more restrained than that of Plautus and his fellow dramatists, that diction remained available to him, and his very restraint thus makes his occasional recourse to language-based effects all the more significant. The immediate result is then easier to capture than the wider implications of its presence. For example, the closest English can probably come to Davos’ Di boni, boni quid porto? (An. 338) is something like “Good gods! What good news I bring!” which catches something of the verbal repetition of the Latin (technically, the figures paronomasia and chiasmus), but it cannot on its own signal that Terence here is introducing his variant on the traditional running slave scene with a verbal figure that is itself traditional. The challenge posed is a little different in a line like 964, nam hunc scio mea solide solum gavisurum gaudia (literally, “for this one, I know, alone will completely enjoy my joy”), which manipulates word order to heighten the alliteration of s-sounds and to stress the root common to the noun and verb for “joy” in a pattern, very common in early Latin, called a figura etymologica. But this is, of course, not a line

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in isolation. It comes in a sequence (957–65) built entirely of conventional content (Pamphilus’ eagerness to express his happiness to the world), conventional expression (he is practically equal to the gods in happiness), conventional staging (Charinus is initially unnoticed by Pamphilus and Pamphilus initially unnoticed by Davos), and as befits this collocation of stock elements, the diction is traditional throughout. The challenge for the translator then lies not simply or even primarily in reproducing the immediate stylistic effect, but in capturing the effect of the effect, i.e. the audience’s recognition of age-old devices with a long record of comic associations. 3. What about the meter? And the music? If we could travel back in time to witness a performance in second-century Rome, one thing that would certainly attract and quite possibly surprise us is how much of the play was set to the music of the double-reed pipe, the tibia. There was, to be sure, unaccompanied speech employing the sixfoot iambic line metricians call the iambic senarius. However, much of the play (and much more of a Plautine play) was written in longer iambic and trochaic lines, which were performed to the tibia in what we would hear as recitative, while other sections were performed as actual songs that might add to iambo-trochaic patterns complex combinations of bacchiacs (๰ ‒ ‒), cretics (‒ ๰ ‒), anapests (๰ ๰ ‒) and the like. Plautus was a gifted writer of such songs (cantica), making him by this reckoning Rome’s first great lyric poet, which was why, at his death, the ancient epitaph claimed that “measures immeasurable all wept together.”10 Terence writes fewer, simpler, and shorter songs of this complex type. Charinus’ brief aria, consisting largely of cretics (An. 625–38), is an example, and bursting into song like this is sufficiently rare in a Terentian play that it seems to signal either some kind of emotional upheaval or some particular comic effect, like Mysis’ tipsiness at 481. Iambo-trochaic patterns are far more common, and their varied effects (at least on the page) are more subtle.

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Terence is especially adept at exploiting effects created by variations in rhythm and the alternation between speech and song. Here in Andria, music is heard for the first time to accompany Davos’ initial entry at 175. That in itself signals a change of tone, and his encounter with Simo continues in trochaic recitative until the music abruptly stops and Simo responds to his slave’s continuing insolence with an explicit threat in iambic senarii: If I find you today attempting anything regarding this marriage in the line of trickery to keep it from taking place or to show in this matter how clever you are . . . 196–8

At this point the music resumes, and Simo continues using a longer iambic line that builds on the cadence that precedes it: “I’ll have you beaten with rods, Davos, and off to the mill to the point of death” (199). Donatus notes how every word here “glows with threats” (on 196), an effect heighted not just by the use and suppression of the music but by the deliberately slow pace of the spoken lines, which are full of heavy syllables. All that is, among other things, necessarily lost in the Penguin’s straightforward prose quoted above, and it becomes something rather different when subjected to the energy of a translator like Laurence Echard. Meter is thus not simply an ornament of style but a tool for creating significant dramatic effects, and it is no less important for giving Terence’s Latin its characteristic semblance of ease. Terence was, as we have seen, long valued for the elegance and lucidity of his language, and he regularly used metrical structures in tandem with linguistic structures to produce that lucidity.11 Recasting his sentences in prose, as most translators do, inevitably means eliminating their rhythmic patterns, pauses and accelerations, and may even change the order of their words and clauses. This procedure risks obscuring the very features that give his sentences their distinctive character, and it often

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drains his language of its color. Preserving something of those qualities through the use of English verse, however, is extremely difficult. When those first Tudor translators chose to represent Terence in rhyme royal, the narrative verse form most familiar to them, they knew they were paying a price for it: Wherefore, the translators now require you this: If ought be amiss ye would consider The English almost as short as the Latin is, And still to keep rhyme a difficult matter To make the sentence [i.e. “sense”] openly to appear; Which, if it had a long exposition, Then were it a comment, and no translation.

The experiment proved less than satisfactory over the course of an entire play and was especially ill-suited to reproducing the flow of Terentian dialogue. It was not repeated, nor did the development of iambic free verse in the course of the sixteenth century (the kind of verse familiar from Shakespeare) encourage any immediate experiments in that direction. Maurice Kyffin perhaps made an attempt—his other claim to literary note is a long poem in sesta rima, the same verse form as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, eulogizing Elizabeth, The Blessedness of Brytaine, or a Celebration of the Queenes Holyday—but he eventually confessed his failure at length in a Preface that articulates the difficulties quite clearly: IT is now full 7 yeeres (as you can well remember) since I first attempted the translation of Andria into English verse, being thereto partely incited by your meanes: But afterward perceiuing what difficultie it was, to enforce the pithie and prouerbiall sayings of Terence into Rime, and withall what inconuenience grew, by reason of diuers seuerall Speakers, sometime seuerally happening, within the length of one line or lesse: I playnely saw, that such manner of

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forced translation, must needs be both harsh and vnpleasant to the Reader, and also not halfe seemly befitting the sweete style and eloquence of the Author. So as hauing thus translated the whole Comoedie in verse (sauing the two last leaues) my paines bestowed therein did somuch mislike me, as that euer sithens yt lay by me, vtterly neglected, and neuer fully finished: Tyll that now of late, being by some, much requested to make common the same, for the benefit of such as studie the latin: I haue therevpon somwhat altered my cours, and indeuored to turne it into prose, as a thing of lesse labor in show, and more libertie in substance, seeming withall, most accordant, with this Comicall kinde of writing.

Bernard must have agreed. His translations are also in prose, the version of Andria in his edition appropriated almost verbatim from Kyffin. In addition to whatever pedagogic factors influenced his choice, he, too, claimed prose to be “most accordant, with this Comicall kinde of writing,” and that rationale has endured. Four centuries later, Betty Radice said essentially the same thing in the introduction to her Penguin translation of 1965: “Prose has been used throughout, as the most satisfactory medium for the comic genre, but with the inevitable loss of most of Terence’s delicate word-play and his enjoyment of alliteration, assonance and vivid asyndeton.” Yet the one does not necessarily follow from the other: word-play, sound-play, and asyndeton are by no means impossible to reproduce in prose. What, then, makes a stripped-down prose “the most satisfactory medium” for Terentian comedy? The choices a translator makes become, as one practitioner has observed, “willy-nilly a kind of interpretation, a statement about the nature and meaning of the work.” And so it is in this case. When Parker, in reviewing the Penguin Terence, faulted Radice’s prose as “relentlessly nice,” she made a revealing reply: “My prose is ‘relentlessly nice’ because I see this as a flaw in the poet—the Latin is beautiful but lacks variety, the characters are too lightly sketched . . . I confess I was often tempted to improve on my original, from the dramatic point of view . . .”12 Improve on

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Terence’s dramaturgy? It has long been his fate to suffer the praise of faint damns, and so it is here. A hint of condescension is one inevitable consequence of separating what Terence says from how he says it, a distinction hard to maintain without losing something important when the how of an utterance is conceived as integral to its what. The fact is that translations inevitably reproduce what the translators see and value, and they are apt to lose what the translators have not dug deep enough to see and to value. One frequent casualty of prose translation is concision. The Andria prologue, for example, begins this way in the Penguin edition: When the author first turned his thoughts to writing, he supposed that his sole concern was to write plays which would give pleasure to his audience. He has since learned how different things are in practice; for he now spends his time writing prologues, not to explain the plot of a play but to answer the slanderous attacks of a malevolent old playwright.

It is another example of what Parker meant by “unexceptionable if unexceptional prose,” and more than the look is different if the lines are put into verse. Here is the same passage in what is arguably the first successful verse translation in English, the version in iambic blank verse by George Colman (1732–94), first published in 1765: The Bard, when first he gave his mind to write, Thought it his only business, that his Plays Shou’d please the people: but it now falls out, He finds, much otherwise, and wastes, perforce, His time in writing Prologues; not to tell The argument, but to refute the slanders Broach’d by the malice of an older Bard.

Colman knew a thing or two about plays and playwriting: a partowner and manager of Covent Garden and then the Haymarket Theatre, he adapted plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher for the contemporary stage and wrote plays himself, including

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one classic, The Clandestine Marriage (1766, in collaboration with David Garrick). He was also a well-informed translator and theater historian, and this translation of Terence, complete with an introductory essay and commentary, offered English readers something comparable to (and explicitly indebted to) Mme. Dacier’s edition nearly a century before. In contrast to so many predecessors, he believed the “elegant and magnificent simplicity” of blank verse was the only suitable medium for the job: Menander and Apollodorus wrote in measure; Terence, who copied from their pieces, wrote in measure; and consequently they, who attempt to render his plays into a modern language should follow the same method. . . . how can the translator of Terence hope to catch the smallest part of his beauties by totally abandoning the road of poetry, and deviating entirely into prose?

Parker would agree, at least with the principle. Colman’s iambic cadences could sound too uniform even to a contemporary ear: one anonymous, Oxford-based critic of the day objected pointedly to the way Colman forced comedy “into a stiff and awkward gait on stilts, because the irregular iambicks of Terence move with an air full of grace and familiar ease.” Modern ears certainly tolerate, and even welcome, more flexible patterns than Colman allows himself. For his own translations of Eunuchus and Phormio, Parker employed a simple five-stress line to represent the Terentian senarius and a six-stress line for everything else. “This will,” he grants, “appear too loose to some, a regrettable attempt at pointless rigor to others. For myself, it was the only solution I could devise (prose was unthinkable) for any essay at reproducing the regularized richness of Terentian language.”13 So what do we say? Is a prose Terence “unthinkable” or is prose “the most satisfactory medium” for introducing his plays to readers of English? Is his Latin “beautiful but lacks variety” or is it full of “regularized richness”? We need to take one more, closer look.

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Here is Pamphilus, torn between obligations to Glycerium and to his father, as he struggles to articulate his dilemma in a fairly typical bit of Terentian monologue (An. 260–4). The line-for-line translation that follows the Latin aims to be as literal as possible: tot me inpediunt curae, quae meum animum divorsae trahunt: amor, misericordia huius, nuptiarum sollicitatio, tum patris pudor, qui me tam leni passus est animo usque adhuc quae meo quomque animo lubitumst facere. eine ego ut advorser? ei mihi! incertumst quid agam. So many cares entangle me, which pull my heart in different directions: love, pity for her, anxiety about the wedding, then respect for my father, who with so lenient a heart has allowed me until now to do whatever was pleasing to my heart. Can I oppose him? Ah, me! It’s uncertain what I should do.

Some stylistic features come through even in this deliberately artless translation: the personification of “cares” (curae), the increasing weight of those cares as the syllables pile up, phrase by phrase, in the second line (2+8+10), the desperate exclamation at the end, however lame such exclamations tend to sound in English (ei mihi!). Pamphilus is not very articulate: the cares are said (literally) to wrap around his feet (inpediunt), yet they manage simultaneously to pull apart his heart (divorsae trahunt), and in the space of four lines he uses “heart” (or possibly “mind,” animus) three times in three somewhat different senses: conscience (260), temperament (262), desire (263). He hides any idea of personal agency behind impersonal constructions (“whatever was pleasing to my heart,” i.e. whatever I wanted; “it’s uncertain,” i.e. I don’t know), and what begins with a modest stylistic flourish in the personification collapses at the end with a bathetic thud.

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Other effects may be harder to recognize on the page alone. The entire speech is accompanied by the tibia, but the rhythm changes almost imperceptibly from trochees in 260 to a longer iambic pattern at 261, a change which creates the metrical equivalent of the colon in our printed text. Each line contains a discrete set of semantic units, the number of units alternating between two (lines 260 and 262) and three (lines 261 and 263) until the climax in 264, and the distinctive cadence that ends each verse (‒ ๰| ‒ for the trochaic line; × ‒ |๰ ‒ for the iambic ones) makes the progression of his thought easy to follow from line to line. Grammatically, the economical “then” (tum, 263) introduces an alternative line of thought that creates an implicit dichotomy, “on this side” (Glycerium) and “on the other side” (my father), while the word order of Pamphilus’ repudiating question at 263 sets “him” (ei + interrogative particle -ne) emphatically at the beginning, an effect the demands of English syntax make impossible to render literally. How much of this have translators through the centuries been able to capture? Here are a few representative examples. Terens in Englysh struggled a bit with the Latin and with the structural demands of rhyme royal: So many charges Do let [i.e. hinder] me, which draw my mind diversely, As love, pity, the fear of the marriages, Then, shame of my father, which so tenderly Hath suffered me ever to live pleasantly Till this day: oh, should I now be him again? What shall I do now? I am uncertain.

On the purely verbal level, sollicitatio should suggest “anxiety” rather than “fear,” and the translators are imprecise in rendering what we call a subjective genitive, i.e. “about” rather than “for,” “before” rather than “of.” Turning four-and-a-half lines of Latin into a seven-line, rhymed stanza does not require drawing out the sense since the lines are

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shorter, but it can lead to a certain vagueness of expression (i.e. “to live pleasantly”). This may be why no subsequent translator continued the experiment with verse until, as we have seen, George Colman turned with some success to blank verse: So many cares Entangle me at once, and rend my mind, Pulling it diff ’rent ways. My love, compassion, This urgent match, my rev’rence for my father, Who yet has ever been so gentle to me, And held so slack a rein upon my pleasures. – And I oppose him?—Racking thought!—Ah me! I know not what to do.

English, requiring double the number of lines, breaks the thought into smaller units. Colman admired “the concise purity of Terence” and appreciated: the difficulty of preserving that proprietas verborum [suitability of diction] for which he was so remarkable, the nameless force even of adverbs and particles in his stile, and how dangerous it would be to attempt any additions or flourishes on his dialogue.14

The resulting sparseness here seems to suit Terence, no doubt aided by the fact that Colman, ever the professional man of the theater, knew how to write speakable lines. While he sought to keep close to the Latin (“I mean a direct translation, not a loose imitation”), some of his best touches, e.g. “held so slack a rein upon my pleasures,” are truer to Terence’s spirit than to his letter. Two hundred years later, Palmer Bovie presented a similar set of strengths and weaknesses in a more modern idiom, accepting a fourbeat line with a less rigid iambic rhythm: My worries hem me in And drag my mind in different directions.

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My passion, my concern for this poor girl, This pressing marriage, and the real respect I have for my father. Up to this point He has put up with me indulgently And let me do just what I wanted to. Could I defy him? Blast me! I don’t know What to do.

Although “Blast me!” sounds rather more like something Colman’s Pamphilus might say, the idiom is otherwise reasonably comfortable, but the characterization has been altered. This Pamphilus speaks more personally than his Latin avatar: “so many worries” has become “my worries,” with “my” continuing down the list. Pamphilus no longer sounds so put upon by outside forces, and by changing Terence’s “then” to “and,” the dichotomy tearing him between girl and father is gone. A stricter prose translation, however, runs the risk of becoming colorless, as in Radice’s Penguin edition: So many worries block my path, pull me opposite ways: my love and pity for Glycerium, anxiety over this wedding, respect for my father who has been so indulgent up till now and let me do anything I liked. How can I think of going against him? Oh, it’s terrible. What can I do? I just don’t know.

Back in the seventeenth century, Echard again comes a little closer to the feel of the thing: So many Difficulties cumber and distract my Soul at once: On this side Love, Pity for that dear Creature, and my being urg’d to marry: On that side the Reverence due to my Father, who has hitherto indulg’d me in all that Heart cou’d wish: and, shall I turn Rebel at last?—I’m very unhappy, and which side to take to I know not.

Adding color can mean, though, as we saw with Machiavelli, the addition of something conspicuously (and perhaps deliberately)

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missing from the original. That may be the case with the 2006 Oxford translation by Peter Brown, which seeks a fresh but inconspicuously modern diction: There are so many worries in my way, pulling my mind in different directions: I love her, I feel sorry for her, I’m upset about the wedding—but then there’s my respect for my dad; up till now he’s been really lenient with me and let me do whatever I felt like. Can I disobey him? Help! I can’t decide what to do!

The personified cares are gone, suggesting a more active Pamphilus as Terence’s abstract nouns become verbs (“I love her . . .,” etc.), and he no longer masks his actions behind impersonal or indirect expressions. The disjunction that pulls him between Glycerium and his father, however, is maintained, even strengthened by the punctuation of “– but then . . .” We may also find “Help!” in this context a natural English equivalent to the Latin expression of despair (ei mihi!). But what about “my dad”? Latin had at least one comparable diminutive expression (tata, now the Romanian word for “father”). It is distinctly colloquial, however, and never appears in comedy, where pater is (as here in Terence) the norm.15 Whether the shift in register is effective and appropriate is something readers will need to decide for themselves, and that is a decision dependent in large part on what we want a translation to be and what we expect it to do. We read in translation when and if we cannot read in the original or when we are presenting a foreign work to others who cannot do so for themselves. Can a single effort satisfy both needs? In the days when “high culture” was an honorific label and the self-appointed task of the Humanist was to be its champion, the editors of Arion—in this case, D. S. Carne-Ross—set a very high bar for what might properly call itself a translation: “What a translation does is to turn the original into something else (vertit anglice/in Anglicum sermonem), and the interest of the operation is in the essentially critical comparison which is thereby

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set up between the two objects.”16 That has a familiar ring. Latin vertere (lit. “to turn”) is what Plautus (Plautus vortit barbare, Trin. 19) and Terence (bene vortendo, Eun. 7) claimed to be doing, and the dialogue set up between the “originals” with which they began and the “something else” they created from them has dominated the study of Roman Comedy for the better part of two centuries. The problem is that, despite what the ghost of Luscius of Lanuvium might want us to believe, the Roman prologues repeatedly make clear that Roman audiences went to see not a play by Diphilus or Menander or Apollodorus of Carystos but a play by Plautus or Terence or some other writer of Latin comedies. If they came to the ludi Megalenses of 166 with any expectation at all, it was an expectation of Terence’s Andria, not Menander’s, and if we want to understand their Andria, we will need an English version as close to it as possible and not still another “something.” Carne-Ross dismissed such a thing as “an accurate crib” and “the literate trot,” but that begs the question. To be fully “accurate” or “literate” requires capturing not just what the words mean, but at least something of how they mean, which for a play includes the qualities that made it stage-worthy. All that is a tall order, as the record from Machiavelli’s day down to our own makes all too clear. Getting it right is hard, not least because rightness in such a context is a shifty and a shifting thing.

Translations Discussed in this Chapter * Digital editions available through Early English Books Online (eebo. chadwyck.com). *Terens in englysh. The translacyon out of latin into englysh of the furst comedy of tyrens callyd Andria, (1520[?]), [London: J. Rastell?]. Modernized reprint with annotations by Meg Twycross as Terence in English. That Girl from Andros. Medieval English Theatre ModernSpelling Texts No. 4, Lancaster University, 1987.

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*Bernard, R. (1598), Terence in English. Fabulæ Comici Facetissimi et Elegantissimi Poetae Terentii Omnes Anglicae Factae, Cambridge: John Legat. Bovie, P., C. Carrier and D. Parker (1974), The Complete Comedies of Terence: Modern Verse Translations, New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press. Brown, P. (2006), The Comedies of Terence, Oxford World Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colman, G. (1765), The Comedies of Terence: Translated into Familiar Blank Verse, London: Becker and de Hondt. Available at: https://books.google. com/books?id=CCYJAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions. [Echard, L. et al.] (1694), Terence’s Comedies Made English: With His Life; and Some Remarks at the End, By Several Hands, London: Swall and Childe. *Kyffin, M. (1588), Andria the first comoedie of Terence, in English, London: Thomas Woodcocke. Machiavelli, N. (1763), Opere inedite, in prosa e in versi, Amsterdam, 1st published edn, Standard edition now in Luigi Blasucci, ed. Opere, Vol. 4: Scritti letterari, 55–107, Turin: Unione Tipografico, 1989. English trans. in a bilingual edn by D. Sices and J. B. Atkinson, The Comedies of Machiavelli, 41–151, Hanover, NH : University Press of New England, 1985. Radice, B. (1976 [1965/67]), Terence: The Comedies, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

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APPENDIX 1

Donatus on Menander

Menander created an Andria and a Perinthia. Whoever knows either well knows them both: they are different not so much in plot as they are different in tone and style. What was appropriate to his Andria he admits he transferred from Perinthia and put to his own use. An. 9–14

Terence invites us to think about his sources, but doing so is not easy. Little of Menander’s Perinthia survives and even less of his Andria. How similar the plays were to each other and how Terence used them in fashioning his own Andria remain matters of conjecture. Discussion is generally based on the following comments by Donatus. These are, however, somewhat cryptic and possibly garbled, and their magisterial tone is deceptive: Donatus’ knowledge of Menander came almost certainly at second or third hand, quite possibly originating in a commentary on Terence written back in the second century by a grammarian named Aemilius Asper (Zetzel 2018: 282). 1. On An. 10 (Whoever knows either well ): The first scene of Perinthia was written in almost the exact same words as Andria. The rest is different except for two passages, one of some eleven lines, the other of some twenty, which are found in each play. [The two passages said to be in common cannot be identified either in the Greek fragments or in the Latin play.] 103

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Appendix 1: Donatus on Menander

2. On An. 14 (He admits he transferred from Perinthia): Why does Terence thus burden himself, since he could appear to have transferred from a common stock? This is the solution: since he was aware that the first scene was taken over from Perinthia, where the old man speaks in this way with his wife, as in Terence with his freedman. But in Menander’s Andria the old man is alone. 3. On An. 301 (What do you say, Byrria ): Terence added these characters to his play—for they are not in Menander—so it would not become pathétique to leave Philumena rejected and without a husband when Pamphilus marries another woman. [Donatus does not indicate whether “not in Menander” means not in the Greek Andria (but taken by Terence from his Perinthia) or not in either play by Menander and thus Terence’s independent creation.] 4. On An. 977 (I haven’t time to wait ): He boldly and very ingeniously engineered the double love affairs of the two young men and the double marriages in the one play—this is outside the design of Menander, whose comedy he was adapting. For this reason, one is handled on stage, the other off stage, either so that the play not be made longer than is suitable or so that they not be forced into repetition due to the similarity of subject. Perhaps also relevant . . .: 5. On An. 959 (I think the gods’ life is eternal for this reason, because their pleasures are their own ): He has transferred this entire idea from Menander’s Eunuch. And this is what is meant by “it is not right for plays to be contaminated” (An. 16). [There is no corresponding line in Terence’s Eunuch. The closest we can come, similar in sentiment if not in expression, is Eun. 551–2:

Appendix 1: Donatus on Menander

105

‘Now is surely a time when I could endure being put to death/ rather than have life contaminate [contaminet, i. e. “spoil”] this joy with some anguish.’ The obvious meaning of Donatus’ comment is that Terence appropriated this line for his Andria from a third source, viz. Menander’s Eunouchos, and this sort of carry-over from one play to another is what he means in the Andria prologue by “contaminating” plays (i.e. “to spoil by mixing?”). It is, however, no less possible that Donatus’ note was originally intended simply to explain the sense of contaminet in Eun. 552 and that when the original commentary was reassembled from its scattered pieces, his quotation of An. 16 led to the misallocation of the remark relevant to Eunuchus to the section on Andria.]

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APPENDIX 2

Chronology

Modern scholarship increasingly recognizes that questions central to the literary study of Roman comedy, from relatively small ones like the palpable differences between Plautus and Terence to big ones like the gradual eclipse of the genre itself, are inseparable from larger developments in the cultural history of Rome as the breadth, power, and wealth of the Republic expanded in the course of the third and second centuries bce . The interface between literature and history thus attracts the interest of historians (e.g. Gruen 1990, 1992; Scafuro 1997) and literary scholars (e.g. Leigh 2004; Richlin 2018) alike. The following table sets some key dates in the development of the comoedia palliata beside the larger record of contemporary historical events. Plays of Plautus and Terence are dated by didascaliae in the manuscripts. Other ancient sources are provided in parentheses. Classical authors are available online from the Packard Humanities Institute (open access at: http://latin.packhum.org) and the Loeb Classical Library (subscription: http://loebclassics.com). The Chronicle of Jerome may be found at: http://www.attalus.org/translate/jerome1.html.

History

Year

Literature

364

First ludi scaenici initiated with performers from Etruria (Livy 7.2)

Tarentum surrenders to and then allies itself with Rome

272

First War with Carthage

264–241 107

108

Appendix 2: Chronology

History

Second (Hannibalic) War with Carthage

Year

Literature

240

Livius Andronicus commissioned to produce Greek-style plays for the ludi Romani (Cicero, Brutus 72, On Old Age 50, Tusculan Disputations 1.3; Gellius 17.21.42)

218–201 207

Senate establishes a Collegium poetarum in honor of Livius Andronicus (Festus 446.29– 448.4L)

200

Plautus’ Stichus produced at the ludi Plebeii

Philip V of Macedon defeated at Cynoscephelae

197

Flamininus declares the freedom of Greece at the Isthmian Games

196

191

Antiochus the Great defeated at Magnesia

190

Senate attempts to curb the cult of Dionysus in Italy

186

Aemilius Paullus defeats Perseus at Pydna

168

Aemilius Paullus authorizes the sack of Epirus

167

166

Plautus’ Pseudolus produced at the dedication of the Temple of the Magna Mater

Death of Caecilius Statius (Jerome, Chronicle, year 1838 after Abraham)

Terence’s Andria produced at the ludi Megalenses

Appendix 2: Chronology

109

165

Terence’s Hecyra disrupted at the ludi Megalenses

163

Terence’s Heauton timorumenos produced at the ludi Megalenses

161

Terence’s Enuchus produced at the ludi Megalenses Terence’s Phormio produced at the ludi Romani

Death of Aemilius Paullus

160

Terence’s Hecyra disrupted at the funeral of Aemilius Paullus Terence’s Adelphoe produced at the funeral of Aemilius Paullus Terence’s Hecyra produced successfully (at the ludi Romani?)

159

Sack of Corinth by Lucius Mummius Destruction of Carthage by Scipio Aemilianus

146

Destruction of Numantia by Scipio Aemilianus

133

Death of Scipio Aemilianus

129

Birth of Cicero

106 103

Birth of Caesar

100

Death of Terence? (Jerome, Chronicle, year 1859 after Abraham)

Turpilius, last recorded writer of traditional palliata comedies, dies at an advanced age (Jerome, Chronicle, year 1914 after Abraham)

110

Notes Chapter 1 1

2 3

4

5 6

7

The classic study of the Roman performance calendar is Taylor (1937). See also Duckworth (1952: 76–9) and Marshall (2006: 16–20). For the repetition of a festival, technically called an instauratio, see Duckworth (1952: 77–8). Liv. 31.50 reports such repetitions of both the ludi Romani and ludi Plebeii in 200 bce , but does not mention any plays performed on either occasion. For the ludi Romani of 240 as a cultural turning point, see Gruen (1990: 79–84), and Feeney (2016: 122–51). For the conflicting Roman views of their own theater history, see Oakley (1998: 40–58, on Livy), Welsh (2011, on Accius and Varro), and synoptically, Feeney (2016: 92–114). For the temporary theaters of the late Republic, see Beacham (1992: 67–9), and for the early resistance to building a permanent theater, Gruen (1992: 205–10). The introduction and allocation of seats evolved over time. See Moore (1994), Gruen (1992: 202–5), and Rawson (1987). The evolving status of comedy and tragedy in the course of the first century is traced by Goldberg (2005: 54–62, 122–7). Possible reconstructions of Roman performance venues are provided by Goldberg (1998 for the Palatine hill and 2018 for the Roman forum), with a less speculative discussion in Marshall (2006: 31–48). The role, if any, of the games in advancing political careers is much discussed. See Gruen (1992: 183–97). The organization and status of actors at the time of the Republic is controversial. On actors, see Edwards (1997: 69–76) and Potter (1999: 265–7); for the troupes and the process for contracting their services, see Jory (1970) and Lebek (1996). Good summaries are in Marshall (2006: 83–114), and Richlin (2018: 3–7). For the so-called Collegium poetarum authorized as a professional guild in honour of Andronicus (so Festus 446L), see Gruen (1990: 86–91). 111

112

Notes to pp. 9–17

8

Gratwick (1973) decodes the name “Plautus.” Gellius’ account at 3.3 singles out Varro as the most credible of the many early scholars (he knew at least six others) who had attempted to distinguish authentic from inauthentic plays in the corpus. 9 Plautus also acknowledges his Greek models at Cas. 31–4, Poen. 53–4, Trin. 18–19. See McElduff (2013: 66–72). All six of Terence’s plays identify their Greek sources. 10 Greek models for the running slave scene are so difficult to identify that many critics, e.g. Lowe (2009), believe it to be essentially a Roman invention, but for artistic evidence suggesting a Greek prototype, see Csapo (1993, esp. 50–3) on the fresco at Pompeii.

Chapter 2 1

2

3 4

5

Volcacius’ canon (lines 5–13 are quoted here) is preserved in its entirety by Gellius 15.24. The opinions of Andronicus are found at Cic. Brut. 71, Hor. Ep. 2.1.69–71; of Atilius at Cic. Att. 14.20.3 (durissimus), Fin 1.5 (ferreus). On Roman habits of literary judgment and canon formation, see Goldberg (2005: 75–86). Caesar’s epigram is reported, along with many other (sometimes scurrilous) verdicts in Suetonius’ second-century biography. For the troubled history of Hecyra, see Goldberg (2018: 150–1). Terence’s standing in the theatrical world of his own day is rightly, if overzealously, defended by Parker (1996). The peculiar qualities of these prologues are analyzed with different emphasis (but compatible conclusions) by Goldberg (1986: 157–77), Gowers (2004), Sharrock (2009: 63–93), and with special attention to the Andria prologue, by Papaioannou (2013: 82–93). McElduff (2013: 87–94) and Germany (2016: 157–77) represent the most recent treatments of “contamination.” For the charge of plagiarism, see McGill (2012: 115–45). Little is known of Luscius. The imaginative reconstruction of his career by Garton (1972: 41–72) can be helpful. Thus, Segal (1987: 6). The big breakthrough came with Eduard Fraenkel’s identification of the “Plautine elements” that gave these plays

Notes to pp. 17–24

113

a distinctly Roman color (2007 [1922], e.g. 272–5 on the different approaches to adaptation by Plautus and Terence). For the impact of Fraenkel and Segal on the study of Roman comedy, see Goldberg (2011: 206–10). 6 Shipp (1960: 23). This attitude was enshrined in the magisterial entry on Terence in the Pauly-Wissowa encyclopedia by Gunther Jachmann, who at least acknowledged that “Translation too is an artistic achievement” (1934: 625). So, too, does Ludwig, for whom a Terentian play “was normally not an essentially new creation” (1968: 181). Scholarship has, happily, moved beyond this view, e.g. Halporn (1993) and McElduff (2004) on Terentian “translation.” 7 Even methodologically progressive studies like Marshall (2006) and Sharrock (2009) tend to privilege Plautus over Terence, and while good book-length studies of Plautus are becoming numerous, a modern study of Terence has yet to appear. 8 Suetonius’ Life records a long history of rumor originating in the later second century. Direct reports include Cic. Att. 7.3.10, Quint. 10.1.99, Don. Vit. 8–9. Cf. Montaigne, Essay 1.40 (“A Consideration on Cicero”). For the role played by the anti-Scipionic propaganda of the later second century in spreading these reports, see Umbrico (2010: 11–58). 9 The general course of growing Hellenic influence in the second century is surveyed by Gruen (1984: 255–60), with more detailed analysis in Gruen (1992: 52–83 for the case of Cato, and 84–118 for the influence of Greek art). For the Greek influence on Roman popular culture, see Horsfall (2003: 48–53). On the “Scipionic Circle,” see Gruen (1992: 197–202), and for its putative association with Terence, Hanchey (2013). The concomitant change in the tone of comedy creates difference, but not necessarily improvement. McElduff (2013: 83–5) rightly warns against giving this shift in values a teleological spin. 10 For the threat, punishment, and eventual reprieve of Davos, see An. 196–201, 859–68, 954–6. A lorarius is introduced at Bacch. 799, Capt. 658, Mil. 1394, Most. 1064, Rud. 657, Truc. 838. Parmeno, who beats the slave dealer Sannio at Ad. 168 ff., is also sometimes called a lorarius.

114

Notes to pp. 24–29

The mock punishment with which Davos threatens Mysis (786) is by Plautine standards largely pro forma. For the lorarii of Plautus, see Richlin (2018: 452–9), and for the humor of such scenes, Parker (1989). 11 On the character of bacchiacs, see Moore (2012a: 197–9). Whether the midwife’s instruction is made any more economical, sympathetic or dignified by its generalizing of the original Greek prescription (as various critics have claimed it to be) might be doubted. Ludwig (1968: 178 n. 29) is rightly skeptical of such arguments. The authoritative treatment of music in Roman life is Wille (1967); for a lucid summary discussion see Horsfall (2003: 31–47). 12 Thus, the introduction (127) and conclusion (151) to the chapter on Terence in Wright (1974), a discussion well attuned to his departures from the tradition but less appreciative of his debts to it. Papaioannou (2013: 96–8) finds additional reasons to set Terence outside his tradition.

Chapter 3 1

2

Act divisions may have been observed in late-antique performances of some kinds (Dunbabin 2006), but for palliata comedy they first appear in Renaissance editions, imposed with Horace’s injunction in mind. For the five-act structure of Greek New Comedy, see Hunter (1985: 35–42), and for the Renaissance theory of plot structure, Herrick (1950: 106–29). A papyrus fragment of Menander’s Dis Exapaton (PO xy 4407), the original of Plautus’ Bacchides 494–562, provides an unparalleled opportunity to study Plautus’ technique in working around an act break in his model. For the Greek text, see Arnott (1979: 140–73), and for Plautus’ adaptation, Damen (1992). The relevant sections of Donatus’ commentary that discuss comic structure are reproduced in Sidnell (1991: 78–83). Ennius both in his epic Annals and in his satires touches on literary questions; Breed (2018) discusses the lively book culture reflected in Lucilius’ version of satire. Terence’s place in the record of Roman

Notes to pp. 29–38

3

4

5

115

literary debate merits further attention. (That said, his hint at An. 18–19 that Plautus, too, was guilty of contaminatio has proven to be little more than a red herring. See Fraenkel (2007: 417–19).) Roman freedmen, who enjoyed a legal status lacking any direct Athenian equivalent, are rare in comedy. See Rawson (1993). Sosia is Terence’s only example, while wives become major figures in later plays, notably Heauton timorumenos and Hecyra. Protatic characters are also employed in Phormio and Hecyra. For the device, see Duckworth (1952: 108–9). Aside from the one fragmentary scene of Perinthia (PO xy 855), our knowledge of Terence’s models derives largely from Donatus, who notes the difference in the two opening scenes (on An. 10.1, 14) and reports somewhat cryptically that Charinus and Byrria are Terence’s addition (on 301). See Appendix 1. The extent and significance of these changes have been vigorously, if inconclusively, debated for generations. For the Greek material, see Arnott (1996: 472–9), and for Terence’s contaminatio, Germany (2016: 161–7). Sosia wears the so-called cicada (tettix) mask, which Athen. 14.659a says was worn by foreign cooks. The Athenian rhetorician Pollux, writing in the later second century ce (Onomasticon 4.148), describes it as dark-skinned, with two or three black braids. The figure labeled

“cook” (mageiros) on the fourth-century ce mosaic from Mytilene

6

7

illustrating the expulsion scene of Menander’s Samia also wears this mask. There are no other cooks in Terence. Syrus, who makes a similar entrance after a shopping trip at Ad. 364, is a household slave and not a cook, although his instructions upon entry recall those of Anthrax at Pl. Aul. 398–405, who is, in fact, a hired cook. The stock character of the comic cook, as much a caterer as a chef at Athens, is discussed by Wilkins (2000: 369–414). There was no direct Roman equivalent: Plautine cooks combine Greek and Roman elements. See Fraenkel (2007: 398–401), Lowe (1985), and Gowers (1993: 87–107). For Theodotē, see Xen. Mem. 3.11, for Gnathaena, Athen. 13 579e–81a, for Aspasia, Plut. Per. 24, for Neaera, [Dem.] 59, and more generally for the entrepreneurial hetairai of Athens, Cohen (2015: 59–68). The

116

Notes to pp. 38–46

business of sex in that city is surveyed by Davidson (1997: 109–36) and, in the context of the case against Neaera, Hamel (2003). Marshall 2013 and Richlin (2018: 105–26) look specifically at the representation of the sex trade in Roman comedy. Menander’s Chrysis in Samia has, like Neaera, settled into an established relationship with a citizen partner, and how vulnerable she is to his changes of mood is among the play’s most unsettling features. 8 Cf. the plight of Euclio’s daughter as described at Pl. Aul. 28–33. Athenian practice in such situations favored private remedies, either marriage to the father of the child or a cash payment sufficient to provide a dowry for a cooperative husband. See Scafuro (1997: 193–231 in law, 232–78 in comedy). Discomfort over such resolutions eventually surfaces in the later Roman declamatory tradition, where the wronged woman is permitted to choose between marriage to or death for her attacker, e.g. Sen. Controv. 1.5, [Quint.] Declam. Min. 286. 9 Varro praises Terence for character, Caecilius for plot, and Plautus for diction (ap. Non. 596L = Men. 399B). The projection of Aristotle’s idea of plot onto comedy was first developed in detail by Francesco Robortello (1516–67) as an appendix to his commentary on the Poetics; a translation of his essay is provided by Herrick (1950: 227–39). See now Janko (1984: 168–9), and for Terence’s immense influence on Renaissance ideas of comedy, Herrick (1950: 64–9) and Norland (1995: 65–83). 10 Donatus on 297 understands Pamphilus’ words hanc mi in manum dat (lit. “She gives me her hand”) as a declaration of marriage. So, too, Williams (1958: 20–1), but the phrase probably means little more than “she gives her into my charge.” For mothers and daughters operating an inherited business, see Cohen (2015: 145–53). 11 This is the motif that Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk-Literature identifies as H11.1 “Recognition by tracing ancestry,” requiring nothing as complex as the production of tokens or the revelation of a physical attribute. 12 Andros, a fairly easy sail to the east of Athens, was a reluctant ally in the fifth century and then something of a political football in Menander’s day, while Phania’s deme, Ramnus, was a coastal deme north of

Notes to pp. 46–52

117

Marathon and thus a logical place for an Athenian to make an Andrian connection. At HT 63, Terence substitutes a vague “in these parts” for a deme name in his original (Halae, fr. 127 K-T), but here he preserves the geographic reality behind Menander’s detail. 13 Thus Evanthius calls New Comedy well arranged (concinna) in comparison to Old Comedy (De Comoedia 2.6) and Terence appropriately and coherently constructed (aptum . . . et uno corpore . . . compositum) in comparison to Plautus (ibid. 3.7). In one version of the famous maxim attributed to Chekhov, “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” Russian sources for this idea are gathered at: http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_by_ib.html. For the tradition of the pièce bien faite, an essentially nineteenthcentury creation, and its influence on the study of Roman comedy, see Goldberg (1986: 61–6). 14 The quotations are drawn from, respectively, Wright (1974: 191), Fontaine (2010: 185) and Richlin (2018: 2, cf. 17–20). 15 Don. An. Praef. 1.6 (p. 36). Buried in Wessner’s critical apparatus are traces of what seem to be two aristocratic names, L. Valerius and Q. Minucius Thermus, that may belong to junior magistrates of the later second century. A second impresario, L. Atilius, is also mentioned. On the problematic nature of the didascalic record, see Goldberg (2005: 69–75).

Chapter 4 1

2

For Roman comedy generally, the long survey of “influence” in Duckworth (1952: 396–473) remains useful. The reception of Andria in particular is surveyed in detail by Lefèvre (2008: 15–40) and more rapidly by Brown (2014). Tansey (2001) suspects a reference to the consuls of 106 bce in the garbled didascalia of Phormio. On Roscius’ career, see Garton (1972: 169–88), and Duncan (2006: 173–82). Varro’s reference to Caecilius and Terence is at Rust. 2.11.11. For the difficulty of distinguishing Greek

118

3 4

5

6

7

8

9

Notes to pp. 52–57 from Roman performances and the many roles of the comoedus, see Fantham (1984); for mime, Fantham (1989). Kragelund (2012: 418–20) argues for this second interpretation. The language of betrothal is similar at Pl. Trin. 1158 and is very close to the Athenian formula at Men. Mis. 444–6, Perik. 1013–15. (At An. 950–1, Chremes promised Pamphilus a dowry of ten talents.) For the structure of the scene, cf. An. 412–31. The two detailed studies of the scene reach different conclusions about its date: Skutsch (1957) finds the evidence inconclusive, while Victor (1989), placing great weight on the metrical anomalies, is confident of a date not earlier than the second century ce . The scene is omitted from the translations by Barsby, Bovie, and Brown but included by Radice. The miniatures were first studied as a group by Jones and Morey (1930–1), an edition with particularly fine plates, although its analysis has been superseded. The case for an origin in theater practice is made most strongly by Dodwell (2000) and Dutsch (2013). Wright (2006) reaches the opposite conclusion. Demetriou (2014: 791–4) attempts to reconcile the evidence of the mosaics, Donatus’ comments on delivery, and actual theater practice. Nervegna (2014) provides a good summary of the issues, with helpful attention to the Menandrean material. The corpus of that Greek material continues to grow. See now Gutzwiller and Çelik (2012). Cic. Inv. 1.33 (also 27), De or. 2.326–8. Cf. De or. 2.172 for an example of reasoning. At Att. 6.9.1 and 7.3.10 he cites Terence as a model of Latinity. Amic. 89 quotes An. 68 as a maxim (again with no regard for original context). Cicero’s epigram on Terence survives, together with that by Caesar quoted earlier (Chapter 2) in Suetonius’ Life. For Cicero’s uses of Terence, see Manuwald (2014). PO xy 2401, containing An. 602–68, 925–50, 957–79, with good discussion by Macedo (2018). The papyrus may be found, together with photographs at www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/. The metrical description of Latin dramatic verse grew increasingly precise through the work of nineteenth-century scholars, but the foundation was laid by Richard Bentley in an essay, “De metris

Notes to pp. 57–61

10

11 12

13

119

Terentianis ΣΧΕΔΙΑΣΜΑ,” introducing his edition of 1726. The linguistic underpinnings of Latin metrical practice and its stage effects continue to be explored. See, e.g., Fortson (2008), and Moore (2012a: 171–236). All the patterns of comic verse are available in a searchable database at http://romancomedy.wulib.wustl.edu/. Only eight plays of Plautus were known in Western Europe until 1428, when a manuscript containing fourteen (including twelve previously unknown) surfaced in Germany. The effect was profound for both the study of Roman comedy and the emergence of a revived comic tradition. See Radcliff-Umstead (1969: 59–63), and Miola (1994: 1–18). Thus Newlands (1986). Other useful discussions include Tarr (1987), and Talbot (2004). The quotation is from Hrotsvit’s Preface, widely cited. The quotation is from Bernard’s dedicatory epistle at the front. Most of his supporting text is in Latin. Volumnius Eutrapelus’ reputation as a wit is known from Cicero’s letters to and about him, e.g. Fam. 9.26 describing a remarkable dinner party at his house. Erasmus then made Eutrapeles (lit. “Witty”) an interlocutor in “Puerpera” (“The Woman in Labor”), one of his Colloquia familiares of 1518, which became a model for moral dialogues. For Bernard as a translator, see Chapter 5. In 1534, official displeasure with the Floures’ publication of translated Latin almost derailed Nicholas Udall’s application for an Oxford MA . See Brown (2015: 270–1), and for the design and function of that work, Juhász-Ormsby (2003). Les Comedies de Terence, avec la Traduction et les Remarques, de Madame Dacier, originally published in Paris by Thierry et Carbin in 1688, went through numerous editions thereafter. Mme. Dacier was educated by her father, the distinguished Humanist Tanneguy Le Fèvre. In 1672, she became an editor of the Delphin series and then went on to earn an independent living through her editions of classical authors. The Ménage quotation comes from his “Avertissement” to the second volume of the Abbé d’Aubignac’s La Pratique du théâtre (Paris, 1715, p. 4), where Ménage touts his acquaintance with her. Her own comments are from her Preface, vi and viii, and then the commentary ad loc. On her edition of Terence, see Farnham (1976: 117–21), and for Mme. Dacier and Ménage, Wyles (2016).

120

Notes to pp. 64–75

14 From the preface to An Evening’s Love. Samuel Pepys saw the play on 20 June 1668 and was not amused: “[I] do not like it, it being very smutty.” 15 Steele, The Spectator, No. 502, for Monday, 6 October 1712. Goldsmith’s “Essay on the Theatre” appeared in 1773. On sentimental comedy, see also Novak (1979), and for the success of The Conscious Lovers, Kenny (1968). Steele’s debt to Terence is discussed in detail by Brown (2014: 257–9), and Goth (2014). The play is readily available, together with useful supporting material in the Norton Critical Edition of McMillin (1997). 16 The extent to which Steele used the play to advance social positions is a topic of current debate. See Wilson (2012), and Wolfram (2012). 17 The paintings, now in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, measure 157.5 cm (approx. 5 feet) tall and between 142 cm and 128.5 cm (approx. 4.5 feet) wide, the variations in width determined by the space available on the walls. Images of all four paintings are available through the SMK website at: http://collection.smk.dk. The discussion here is based largely on Kragelund (1987). 18 C. H. Berger, Commentatio de personis vvlgo larvis sev mascheris von der carnavals-lvst, critico, historico, morali atqve ivridico modo diligenter conscripta (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Knoch, 1723). Abildgaard owned both a Latin text of Terence and the Dacier edition, as well as an old Italian translation and the Einsiedel version of Adelphoe. 19 Gowers (1993: 78–87) traces the association of cookery with play-making in Greek and Roman comedy. 20 Page references are to the first edition, New York: Boni, 1930. The Thornton Wilder Society provides a good introduction to the corpus at: www.twildersociety.org. The following discussion owes most to Goldberg (1977), Borgmeier (2001), and Hanses (2013). 21 Gold’s essay, “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ,” appeared in The New Republic, 22 October 1930, pp. 266–7. Wilder was by then a prominent target. The Bridge of San Luis Rey was the bestselling American novel of 1927, with initial sales of some 200,000 copies. 22 Thus Wilder in his preface to Three Plays (New York: Harper, 1957), p. iv.

Notes to pp. 76–84

121

23 The essays, which originally appeared in SRL for 19 December 1942 and 13 February 1943, are conveniently reprinted with useful supporting material in Campbell (1993: 251–61). The co-authors went on to publish A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in 1944. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which would establish Campbell’s reputation as a myth critic, appeared in 1949.

Chapter 5 1

2

3

4

The quotation is from the introduction by Atkinson in Sices and Atkinson (1985: 36). Good discussion of it in relation to the Latin original is provided by Brown (2014: 247–50) and McLaughlin (2015: 124–31), who also explores Mandragola’s significant debt to Andria. It is a defense common among users of the vernacular. The nearly contemporaneous Discourse on Language (Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua) attributed to Machiavelli builds a similar argument on the precedent of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Performance in Latin has a long, if intermittent history; performance in English is much less common. The online database, inevitably incomplete but always revealing, maintained by Oxford University’s Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (www.apgrd.ox. ac.uk), is a practical tool for exploring this record. Bilingual editions of Terence begin to appear in France c. 1500, and in other European languages somewhat later. The history of translating Terence, with emphasis on English, is surveyed by Barsby (2013). Ascham (c. 1515–68) tutored the young Princess Elizabeth in Latin and Greek and eventually served as Latin secretary to both queens, Mary and Elizabeth. His manual as edited by Judy Boss is available online at: www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/ascham1.htm. For Erasmus’ role in setting the curriculum, see Baldwin (1944: 75–117) and Norland (1995: 88–90). The Tudor translations are discussed by Lathrop (1933: 91–3 for Terens in Englysh, 223–6 for Kyffin, and 291–3 for Bernard), by Barsby (2013: 446–51), and by Brown (2015: 267–70), who notes their perceived need for self-justification. Plautus went untranslated until the

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appearance of an English Menaechmi in 1595, for which see Walton (2014: 1044–7). 5 Parker (1968: 440–1). The review was part of an extensive appraisal of the Penguin series by the journal Arion. See, too, the general “Introduction” to that project (Carne-Ross 1968). 6 Echard (c. 1670–1730) eventually became a historian of some note. See Ridley (1996), and for his Terence project, Barsby (2013: 452–4). The quotation from his (unpaginated) Preface owes an obvious debt to the insights of Mme. Dacier. 7 Perii, metuo ut substet hospes becomes “I am lost, for I fear this stranger will be dumb,” where the sense requires “not be dumb,” i.e. not restrain himself in the face of Simo’s abuse. The verb (substo) properly means “to withstand” or “to hold back,” and the clause is negative. Negative clauses of fear are a perennial bugbear for students: even Donatus glosses the construction here (and elsewhere when it occurs) to forestall confusion. 8 So, for example, the meretrix Thais explicitly hopes to cultivate “friends” as protectors (Eun. 149). Plautus plays on the connotations of tutor at Aul. 430, Truc. 859, Vid. 23. When Mysis restates this declaration at 718, she adds amator to the list, a term conspicuously absent from the earlier injunction attributed directly to Chrysis. 9 The passage well illustrates the evolution of the text from continuous commentary to marginalia and then back again to continuous, if not entirely coherent prose. The fact that Donatus knew Menander only at second hand further blurs the discussion. 10 The epitaph is preserved at Gellius 1.24, citing Varro as his source. For the use of the tibia in comedy, see Moore (2008), and for the instrument itself, Moore (2012a: 26–63). 11 The role of meter in shaping Terentian style is discussed by Goldberg (1986: 193–202). For Terence as musical innovator, see Moore (2007), an argument foreshadowed as long ago as Colman (1765: l–lxiv). 12 Radice (1969: 133), responding to Parker (1968: 439). The introduction is quoted from Radice (1976: 28), a reprint combining two earlier issues in 1965 and 1967. For a sympathetic account of Betty Radice’s real achievement in editing the Penguin Classics series, see Fowler (2016). The earlier quotation about translation is from Burian (2000: 301).

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13 From the introduction to Phormio in Bovie et al. (1974: 223). The contemporary critique of Colman is from the anonymous “free Inquiry into Mr Colman’s Arguments,” privately printed in 1777, together with translations of Heauton timorumenos and Adelphoe. 14 Colman (1765: xx, the Preface). Parker (1968: 440) similarly notes how “[Terence’s] lucidity proceeds directly from the employment of verse.” 15 Tata (along with the corresponding term mamma) appear in funerary inscriptions and in Martial 1.100. See Nielsen (1989). 16 Carne-Ross (1962: 27), writing with Christopher Logue’s then controversial version of Iliad XVI in his sights. The distinction he makes is hardly new. A good English predecessor is Frere (1911: xv–xix) on “the Faithful Translator” and “the Spirited Translator,” an essay that first appeared in 1820, but similar categories had been described by, among others, Goethe and Novalis before him.

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Guide to Further Reading and Works Cited The present work is designed for an audience in the English-speaking world. References to secondary literature are therefore deliberately skewed toward Anglophone scholarship, but readers should be aware that the study of Terence, like that of classical literature generally, is truly and profoundly international. Although only a few particularly relevant foreign-language works are included here, references to the full range of international scholarship will be found throughout the works cited below. Footnotes in the preceding chapters include both evidence for points made in the text and more general suggestions for further reading.

Guide to Further Reading 1. General Two of the older guides to Greco-Roman Comedy, Duckworth (1952) and Hunter (1985), remain valuable but should be supplemented by the excellent essays in the Oxford Handbook of Fontaine and Scafuro (2014). Detailed information on Roman drama is available in Manuwald (2010, 2011), with a broader overview in the lavishly illustrated survey by Moore (2012b). Valuable insights into Roman performance are provided by Marshall (2006); and a more purely literary discussion of the palliata genre is Sharrock (2009). A wealth of primary evidence for ancient theater production of all kinds, annotated and translated, is provided by Csapo and Slater (1995).

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2. Terence There has been no broad-based discussion of Terence in English since those of Forehand (1985) and Goldberg (1986). Essays in the dedicated volume of Ramus 33 (2004) “Rethinking Terence,” in the WileyBlackwell Companion of Augoustakis and Traill (2013), and in the collections edited by Kruschwitz et al. (2007) and Papaioannou (2014) help fill the gap. Printed bibliographies can no longer keep pace with the flow of scholarly publication, but Cupaiuolo (1984) remains an indispensable guide to older material, especially the early history of Terentian scholarship. Among the hundreds of manuscripts preserving Terence’s Latin text are two remarkable books, a genuinely ancient codex (fourth-tofifth century ce ), the so-called Codex Bembinus (Vat. Lat. 3226), and a ninth-century edition with exceptionally fine miniature illustrations (Vat. Lat. 3868). Both are available online through the Vatican Library, respectively, at: https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3226 and https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3868. For the significance of these two manuscripts, see Victor (2014).

(a) Translations A wide range of translations, together with full bibliographic references, is discussed in Chapter  5. Among prose translations, contemporary readers are best served by Barsby (2001) and Brown (2006). The verse translations in Bovie et  al. (1974) are all highly readable but uneven in effect and do not recreate the feel of Terentian comedy with equal fidelity.

(b) Andria Commentaries on the Latin text are provided by Shipp (1960) (dated) and in the omnibus volume by Ashmore (1908) (even more dated). A forthcoming edition by P. Brown with commentary keyed to an

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English translation will complete the representation of Terence in the Aris and Philips series. Detailed analysis of the play, emphasizing comparison with its Greek model(s), is provided by Lefèvre (2008) and Büchner (1974: 31–119). Nothing comparable is available in English.

3. Donatus The commentary on Terence compiled for the use of his students by the great fourth-century grammarian Aelius Donatus has shaped the course of Terentian studies for the better part of two millennia. Its most acute insights into language and dramaturgy continue to find their way into modern discussions, and its comments on and quotations from Terence’s Greek models provide much of the evidence for his techniques of adaptation (Appendix 1). For the career of Donatus, see Kaster (1988: 275–8); for his style of exegesis, see Barsby (2000), Victor (2013: 353–8) and Demetriou (2014). The commentary as Donatus wrote it was reduced in late antiquity to a series of marginalia, which came eventually to be recombined into a semblance of the original, producing what is now a Latin text fraught with difficulties. It is generally cited, for want of something better, from the edition of Wessner (1902–8). A new edition of the Andria commentary is provided by Cioffi (2017). Hyperdonat, an online critical edition of the complete commentary with a bilingual text (Latin and French) is under development at the University of Lyon (http://hyperdonat.tgeadonis.fr/). There is no complete edition of Donatus in English, but some of his general discussions of comedy are reproduced in Sidnell (1991). Together with Donatus’ commentary comes a parallel, seemingly derivative work by a grammarian called Eugraphius, about whom hardly anything is known. It can be found as Volume 3 of Wessner’s edition. Its relation to its larger predecessor is discussed by Demetriou

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(2014: 795–7). Zetzel (2018: 253–7) surveys the full range of Terentian exegesis.

4. Menander Menander is by far the more important of Terence’s two Greek sources, and we know much more about him and his work than we do about the second, Apollodorus of Carystos. The fullest text available with English translation is the Loeb edition by Arnott (1979, 1996, 2000); the best popular English edition is that of Balme and Brown (2001). Both publications have in varying degrees been overtaken by more recent papyrus discoveries, well served now by the new Budé edition (with French translation) being published incrementally by Blanchard (2013–). The fragments of Menander preserved in the literary tradition are most commonly cited from the Teubner edition by A. Körte and A. Thierfelder (1959, abbreviated K-T).

Works cited A New Translation of the Heautontimorumenos and Adelphi of Terence: In Prose. Together with a Preface Containing a Free Inquiry into Mr Colman’s Arguments for Translating the Comedies of that Author into English Blank Verse, By a Member of the University of Oxford, (1777), Oxford: Printed for the author. Arnott, W. G. (1979), Menander, Vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Arnott, W. G. (1996), Menander, Vol. 2. Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Arnott, W. G. (2000), Menander, Vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Ashmore, S. G. (1908), The Comedies of Terence, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Augoustakis, A. and A. Traill, eds (2013), A Companion to Terence, Malden, MA : Wiley-Blackwell. Baldwin, T. W. (1944), William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols, Urbana, IL : University of Illinois Press. Balme, M. and P. Brown (2001), Menander: The Plays and Fragments, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barsby, J. (2000), “Donatus on Terence: The Eunuchus Commentary,” in E. Stärk and G. Vogt-Spira (eds), Dramatische Wäldchen. Festschrift für Eckard Lefèvre zum 65. Geburtstag, 491–513, Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Barsby, J. (2001), Terence, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Barsby, J. (2013), “Terence in Translation,” in Augoustakis and Traill (eds), A Companion to Terence, 446–65. Beacham, R. C. (1992), The Roman Theater and Its Audience, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Bentley, R. (1726), Publii Terentii Afri Comoediae, Recensuit, notasque suas et Gabrielis Faerni addidit Richardus Bentleius, Cambridge: Crownfield. Blanchard, A. (2013–), Ménandre. Collection des Universités de France, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Borgmeier, R. (2001), “ ‘The Gods’ Messenger and Secretary’? Thornton Wilder and the Classical Tradition,’’ International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 7 (3): 344–65. Breed, B. W. (2018), “Lucilius’ Books,” in B. W. Breed, E. Keitel, and R. Wallace (eds), Lucilius and Satire in Second-Century bc Rome, 57–78, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, P. (2006), The Comedies of Terence, Oxford World Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, P. (2014), “Interpretations and Adaptations of Terence’s Andria, from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century,” in S. Papaioannou (ed.), Terence and Interpretation, 241–66. Brown, P. (2015), “Plautus and Terence in Tudor England,” in T. F. Earle and C. Fouto, (eds), Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 255–79. Büchner, K. (1974), Das Theater des Terenz, Heidelberg: Winter. Burian, P. (2000), “Translation, the Profession, and the Poets,” American Journal of Philology, 121: 299–307.

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Campbell, J. (1993), Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: On the Art of James Joyce, ed. E. L. Epstein, New York: HarperCollins. Carne-Ross, D. S. (1962), “Structural Translation: Christopher Logue’s Patrocleia,” Arion, 1 (1): 27–38. Carne-Ross, D. S. (1968), “Introduction: Penguin Classics, A Report on Two Decades,” Arion, 7 (3): 395–9. Cioffi, C., ed. (2017), Aeli Donati quod fertur commentum ad Andriam Terenti, Berlin: De Gruyter. Cohen, E. E. (2015), Athenian Prostitution: The Business of Sex, New York: Oxford University Press. Csapo, E. G. (1993), “A Case Study in the Use of Theatre Iconography as Evidence for Ancient Acting,” Antike Kunst, 36: 41–58. Csapo, E. and W. J. Slater (1995), The Context of Ancient Drama, Ann Arbor, MI : University of Michigan Press. Cupaiuolo, G. (1984), Bibliografia Terenziana (1470–1983), Studi e Testi dell’ Antichità 16, Naples: Società Editrice Napoletana. Damen, M. L. (1992), “Translating Scenes: Plautus’ Adaptation of Menander’s Dis Exapaton,” Phoenix, 46: 205–31. Davidson, J. N. (1997), Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Demetriou, C. (2014), “Aelius Donatus and His Commentary on Terence’s Comedies,” in Fontaine and Scafuro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy, 782–99. Dodwell, C. R. (2000), Anglo-Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duckworth, G. (1952), The Nature of Roman Comedy, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Dunbabin, K. M. D. (2006), “A Theatrical Device on the Late Roman Stage: The Relief of Flavius Valerianus,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, 19: 191–212. Duncan, A. (2006), Performance and Identity in the Classical World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dutsch, D. (2013), “Towards a Roman Theory of Theatrical Gesture,” in G. W. M. Harrison and V. Liapis (eds), Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre, 409–31, Leiden: Brill. (Revised and updated version of “Gestures

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in the Manuscripts of Terence and Late Revivals of Literary Drama,” Gesture, 7 (2007): 39–70.) Earle, T. F. and C. Fouto, eds (2015), The Reinvention of Theatre in SixteenthCentury Europe: Traditions, Texts and Performance, London: Modern Humanities Research Association. Edwards, C. (1997), “Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome,” in J. P. Hallett and M. B. Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities, 66–95, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Fantham, E. (1984), “Roman Experience of Menander in the Late Republic and Early Empire,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 114: 299–309. Fantham, E. (1989), “Mime: The Missing Link in Roman Literary History,” Classical World, 82 (3): 153–63. Fantham, E. (2004), “Terence and the Familiarisation of Comedy,” Ramus, 33 (1–2): 20–34. Farnham, F. (1976), Madame Dacier: Scholar and Humanist, Monterey, CA : Angel Press. Feeney, D. (2016), Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Fontaine, M. (2010), Funny Words in Plautine Comedy, New York: Oxford University Press. Fontaine, M. and A. Scafuro, eds (2014) The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forehand, W. E. (1985), Terence, Boston, MA : Twayne Publishers. Fortson, B. W., IV (2008), Language and Rhythm in Plautus, Berlin: De Gruyter. Fowler, R. (2016), “Betty Radice and the Survival of Classics,” in Wyles and Hall (eds), Women Classical Scholars, 345–58. Fraenkel, E. (2007), Plautine Elements in Plautus, tr. T. Drevikovsky and F. Muecke (including both Plautinisches im Plautus, 1922, and Elementi Plautini in Plauto, 1960), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frere, J. H. (1911), “Introduction,” in Aristophanes: The Complete Plays, 2 vols, Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent. (Original publication, The Quarterly Review, 23 [1820]: 474–505.) Garton, C. (1972), Personal Aspects of the Roman Theatre, Toronto: Hakkert.

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Germany, R. (2016), Mimetic Contagion: Art and Artifice in Terence’s Eunuch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, S. M. (1977), “The Woman of Andros: Terence Made Wilder,” Helios, 5: 11–19. Goldberg, S. M. (1986), Understanding Terence, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Goldberg, S. M. (1998), “Plautus on the Palatine,” Journal of Roman Studies, 88: 1–20. Goldberg, S. M. (2005), Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic: Poetry and Its Reception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldberg, S. M. (2011), “Roman Comedy Gets Back to Basics,” Journal of Roman Studies, 101: 206–21. Goldberg, S. M. (2018), “Theater without Theaters: Seeing Plays the Roman Way,” TAPA (formerly Transactions of the American Philological Association), 148: 139–72. Goth, M. (2014), “Exaggerating Terence’s Andria: Steele’s The Conscious Lovers, Bellamy’s The Perjur’d Devotee and Terentian Criticism,” in Olson (ed.), Ancient Comedy and Reception, 503–36. Gowers, E. (1993), The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gowers, E. (2004), “The Plot Thickens: Hidden Outlines in Terence’s Prologues,” Ramus, 33 (1–2): 150–66. Gratwick, A. S. (1973), “Titus Maccius Plautus,” Classical Quarterly, 23 (1): 78–84. Gruen, E. S. (1984), The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Gruen, E. S. (1990), Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy, Leiden: Brill. Gruen, E. S. (1992), Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gutzwiller, K. and Ö. Çelik (2012), “New Menander Mosaics from Antioch,” American Journal of Archaeology, 116 (4): 573–623. Halporn, J. W. (1993), “Roman Comedy and Greek Models,” in Scodel (ed.), Theater and Society in the Classical World, 191–213. Hamel, D. (2003), Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Hanchey, D. P. (2013), “Terence and the Scipionic Grex,” in Augoustakis and Trail (eds), A Companion to Terence, 113–31. Hanses, M. (2013), “Mulier inopia et cognatorum neglegentia coacta: Thornton Wilder’s Tragic Take on The Woman of Andros,” in Augoustakis and Traill (eds), A Companion to Terence, 429–45. Herrick, M. (1950), Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Horsfall, N. (2003), The Culture of the Roman Plebs, London: Duckworth. Hughes, A. (2012), Performing Greek Comedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunter, R. L. (1985), The New Comedy of Greece and Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jachmann, G. (1934), “P. Terentius Afer,” Paulys Realenzyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, 5 (2): 598–650. Janko, R. (1984), Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Jones, L. W. and C. R. Morey (1930–1), The Miniatures of the Manuscripts of Terence Prior to the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Jory, E. J. (1970), “Associations of Actors in Rome,” Hermes, 98: 224–53. Juhász-Ormsby, Á. (2003), “Nicholas Udall’s Floures for Latine Spekynge: An Erasmian Textbook,” Humanistica Lovaniensia, 52: 137–58. Kaster, R. A. (1988), Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Kenny, S. S. (1968), “Eighteenth-Century Editions of Steele’s ‘Conscious Lovers,’” Studies in Bibliography, 21: 253–61. Körte, A. and A. Thierfelder, eds (1959), Menandri quae supersunt: Pars altera. Reliquiae apud veteres scriptores servata, Leipzig: Teubner. (Abbreviated as K-T.) Kragelund, P. (1987), “Abildgaard around 1800: His Tragedy and Comedy,” Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, 16: 137–85. Kragelund, P. (2012), “Evidence for Performances of Republican Comedy in Fourth-Century Rome,” Classical Quarterly, 62 (1): 415–22. Kruschwitz, P., W.-W. Ehlers and F. Felgentreu, eds (2007), Terentius poeta. Zetemata, 127. Munich: C. H. Beck.

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Lathrop, H. B. (1933), Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman 1477–1620, Madison, WI : University of Wisconsin Press. Lebek, W. D. (1996), “Moneymaking on the Roman Stage,” in W. J. Slater (ed.), Roman Theater and Society, 29–48, Ann Arbor, MI : University of Michigan Press. Lefèvre, E. (2008), Terenz’ und Menanders Andria, (Zetemata 132), Munich: Beck. Leigh, M. (2004), Comedy and the Rise of Rome, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowe, J. C. B. (1985), “Cooks in Plautus,” Classical Antiquity, 4 (1): 72–102. Lowe, J. C. B. (2009), “Terence and the Running-Slave Routine,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 152: 225–34. Ludwig, W. (1968), “The Originality of Terence and his Greek Models,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 9 (2): 169–82. Macedo, G. N. (2018), “P Oxy 2401 and the History of Terence’s Text in Antiquity,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, 55: 71–117. Manuwald, G. (2010), Roman Drama: A Reader, London: Bloomsbury Classical Press. Manuwald, G. (2011), Roman Republican Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manuwald, G. (2014) “Cicero, an Interpreter of Terence,” in Papaioannou, Terence and Interpretation, 179–200. Marshall, C. W. (2006), The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, C. W. (2013), “Sex and Slaves in New Comedy,” in B. Akrigg and R. Tordoff (eds), Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Greek Comic Drama, 173–96, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McElduff, S. (2004), “More than Menander’s Acolyte: Terence as Translator,” Ramus, 33 (1–2): 120–9. McElduff, S. (2013), Roman Theories of Translation: Surpassing the Source, New York and London: Routledge. McGill, S. (2012), Plagiarism in Latin Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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McLaughlin, M. (2015), “The Recovery of Terence in Renaissance Italy : From Alberti to Machiavelli,” in Earle and Fouto (eds), Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 115–39. McMillin, S. (1997), Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, 2nd edn, Norton Critical Editions, New York: W. W. Norton. Miola, R. S. (1994), Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Moore, T. J. (1994), “Seats and Social Status in the Plautine Theatre,” Classical Journal, 90: 113–23. Moore, T. J. (2007), “Terence as Musical Innovator,” in Kruschwitz et al. (eds), Terentius poeta, 93–109. Moore, T. J. (2008), “When Did the Tibicen Play? Meter and Musical Accompaniment in Roman Comedy,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 138: 3–46. Moore, T. J. (2012a), Music in Roman Comedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, T. J. (2012b), Roman Theatre: Greece and Rome: Texts and Contexts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nervegna, S. (2014), “Graphic Comedy: Menandrian Mosaics and Terentian Miniatures,” in Fontaine and Scafuro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy, 717–34. Newlands, C. E. (1986), “Hrotsvitha’s Debt to Terence,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 116: 369–91. Nielsen, H. S. (1989), “On the Use of the Terms of Relation ‘Mamma’ and ‘Tata’ in the Epitaphs of CIL VI ,” Classica et Mediaevalia, 40: 191–6. Norland, H. B. (1995), Drama in Early Tudor Britain 1485–1558, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Novak, M. E. (1979), “The Sentimentality of ‘The Conscious Lovers’ Revisited and Reasserted,” Modern Language Studies, 9 (3): 48–59. Oakley, S. P. (1998), A Commentary on Livy, Books VI–X, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Olson, S. D., ed. (2014), Ancient Comedy and Reception: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Henderson, Berlin: De Gruyter. Papaioannou, S. (2013), “The Cultural Poetics of Terence’s Literary Comedy,” Logeion, 3: 81–100.

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Papaioannou, S., ed. (2014), Terence and Interpretation, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Parker, D. S. (1968), “Review : Roman Comedy,” Arion, 7 (3): 434–41. Parker, H. N. (1989), “Crucially Funny, or Tranio on the Couch: The Servus Callidus and Jokes about Torture,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 119: 233–46. Parker, H. N. (1996), “Plautus v. Terence: Audience and Popularity Re-examined,” American Journal of Philology, 117 (4): 585–617. Potter, D. S. (1999), “Entertainers in the Roman Empire,” in D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly (eds), Life, Death and Entertainment in the Roman Empire, 256–325, Ann Arbor, MI : University of Michigan Press. Radcliff-Umstead, D. (1969), The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press. Radice, B. (1969), “The Penguin Classics: A Reply,” Arion, 8 (1): 130–8. Radice, B., trans. (1976 [1965, 1967]), Terence: The Comedies, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rawson, E. (1987), “Discrimina ordinum: The Lex Julia Theatralis,” Papers of the British School at Rome, 55: 83–114. Rawson, E. (1993), “Freedmen in Roman Comedy,” in Scodel (ed.), Theater and Society in the Classical World, 215–33. Richlin, R. (2018), Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ridley, R. T. (1996), “The Forgotten Historian: Laurence Echard and the First History of the Roman Republic,” Ancient Society, 27: 277–315. Scafuro, A. C. (1997), The Forensic Stage: Settling Disputes in Graeco-Roman New Comedy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scodel, R., ed. (1993), Theater and Society in the Classical World, Ann Arbor, MI : University of Michigan Press. Segal, E. (1987), Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharrock, A. (2009), Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shipp, G.P., ed. (1960), P. Terenti Afri. Andria, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sices, D. and J. B. Atkinson, trans. (1985), The Comedies of Machiavelli: The Woman of Andros, The Mandrake, Clizia, Bilingual Edition, Hanover, NH : University Press of New England. Sidnell, M. J. (1991), Sources of Dramatic Theory, Vol. 1: Plato to Congreve, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skutsch, O. (1957), “Der zweite Schluss der Andria,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 100: 53–68. Talbot, R. (2004), “Hrotsvit’s Dramas: Is There a Roman in These Texts?,” in P. R. Brown, L. A. McMillin and K. M. Wilson (eds), Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances, 147–59, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tansey, P. (2001), “New Light on the Roman Stage: A Revival of Terence’s Phormio Rediscovered,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 144: 22–43. Tarr, J. (1987), “Terentian Elements in Hrotsvit,” in K. M. Wilson (ed.), Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. Rara Avis in Saxonia, 55–62, Ann Arbor, MI : Medieval and Renaissance Collegium. Taylor, L. R. (1937), “The Opportunities for Dramatic Performances in the Time of Plautus and Terence,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 68: 284–304. Umbrico, A. (2010), Terenzio e i suoi nobiles: invenzione e realtà di un controverso legame, Pisa: Edizioni ETS . Victor, B. (1989) “The ‘alter exitus Andriae,’ ” Latomus, 48: 63–74. Victor, B. (2013) “History of the Text and Scholia,” in Augoustakis and Traill (eds), A Companion to Terence, 343–62. Victor, B. (2014), “The Transmission of Terence,” in Fontaine and Scafuro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy, 699–716. Walton, J. M. (2014), “Business as Usual: Plautus’ Menaechmi in English Translation,” in Olson (ed.), Ancient Comedy and Reception, 1040–61. Welsh, J. T. (2011), “Accius, Porcius Licinus, and the Beginning of Latin Literature,” Journal of Roman Studies, 101: 31–50. Wessner, P. W., ed. (1902–8), Donatus: Commentum Terenti, 3 vols, Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner. Wilkins, J. (2000), The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Wille, G. (1967), Musica Romana: die Bedeutung der Musik im Leben der Römer, Amsterdam: Schippers. Williams, G. (1958), “Some Aspects of Roman Marriage Ceremonies and Ideals,” Journal of Roman Studies, 48: 16–29. Wilson, B. D. (2012), “Bevil’s Eyes: Or, How Crying at ‘The Conscious Lovers’ Could Save Britain,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45: 497–518. Wolfram, N. (2012), “ ‘I am my master’s servant for hire’: Contract and Identity in Richard Steele’s ‘The Conscious Lovers,’ ” The Eighteenth Century, 53: 455–72. Wright, D. H. (2006), The Lost Late Antique Illustrated Terence, Vatican City : Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana. Wright, J. (1974), Dancing in Chains: The Stylistic Unity of the comoedia palliata, Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome 25. Rome: AAR . Wyles, R. (2016), “Ménage’s Learned Ladies: Anne Dacier (1647–1720) and Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678),” in Wyles and Hall (eds), Women Classical Scholars, 61–77. Wyles, R. and E. Hall, eds (2016), Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zetzel, J. E. G. (2018), Critics, Compilers, and Commentators: An Introduction to Roman Philology, 200 bce–800 ce, New York: Oxford University Press.

Index Abildgaard, Nicolai 69–72 abuse 23–4, 30, 59, 72, 87, 90 act structure 27–8, 40–1 actors guild (Collegium poetarum) 7, 17 speaking roles 48 status of 7–8, 52, 53 troupes 3, 4, 8–9; see also Ambivius Turpio aediles 5, 9, 17, 30 Aemilius Paullus, L. 1, 18, 21 Ambivius Turpio 9, 15, 50 Andros 46 Aristophanes 9, 64 Aristotle 28, 40 audience (Roman) 2, 4, 10, 48–50

Donatus, Aelius 3, 19, 27–8, 32, 50, 54, 87–8 on contaminatio 16 on delivery 42, 43, 52–3, 90 on Greek models 30–1; see also Appendix 1 rhetorical analysis in 56 Dryden, John 63–4

Bernard, Richard 59–60, 83–4, 92 betrothal formula 43, 53–4 Bovie, S. Palmer 97–8 Brown, Peter 99

freedman in comedy 31, 71 Terence as 71–2 funerals, plays at 1, 4, 7, 18

Caecilius Statius 13, 14, 50, 52, 55 Caesar, G. Julius 5, 14 Calliopius, see illustrated manuscripts Cato, M. Porcius 21, 59 childbirth 24, 44, 45 Cicero, M. Tullius 4, 5, 13, 14, 19, 51, 55 Colman, George 93–4, 97 contaminatio 16–18, 29–30 cooks in comedy 33, 55, 71 Crates of Mallos 21

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 62 Goldsmith, Oliver 64, 68

Dacier, Anne 60–1, 69–71, 94 Dennis, John 66 didascaliae 3, 50, 52 Diphilus 16, 38, 100

Kyffin, Maurice 83, 91–2

Echard, Laurence 85–6, 90, 98 education rhetorical 29, 52–3, 56; see also Donatus Tudor 59, 84, 86 Ennius, Q. 20, 29 Erasmus, Desiderius 81, 84

hetaira 38–9, 43, 46; see also meretrix Horace 13, 20, 27 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim 58, 86 humanitas 20, 22 illustrated manuscripts 54–5, 57, 69–71 Jonson, Ben 62–3, 94

Laelius, G. 19 Livius Andronicus 1–2, 7, 13, 20, 88

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lorarius 24; see also abuse Lucilius, G. 19, 29 ludi scaenici 1, 5, 100 Luscius Lavuvinus 16, 29–30, 52, 55, 100 Machiavelli, Niccolò 79–81, 98 Menander 14, 20, 23, 27, 64 importance of plot in 40–1 mosaics 54–5 recognitions in 47 representation of wealth in 35–6 Samia 36, 42, 44 as Terence’s model 16, 24, 30, 31, 39–40, 87 and Theophrastus 28 meretrix 37, 38–9, 46; see also hetaira meter 57, 89–90; see also music, verse bacchiacs 24, 89 senarius 89, 94 mime 52 miniatures; see illustrated manuscripts Molière 8, 62 Montaigne, Michel de 19 music 3, 8, 10, 15, 24, 27, 34, 79, 89–90; see also meter, piper, tibia Naevius, G. 13, 16 Neaera 38 New Comedy 9, 75; see also Menander structure of 27, 45, 47 palliata comedy; see also Roman comedy defined 9, 23–4 popularity of 5, 51 Panaetius 19 Parker, Douglass 85, 92, 93, 94 philhellenism 18, 20–1 piper (tibicen) 8, 34 Plautus 8–9; see also Terence, comparison with Asinaria 10–12: 9 Menaechmi 72–6: 12 prologues 7, 15, 62–4, 81

protatic character 31 Pydna, battle of 19, 21, 49 Radice, Betty 92–3, 98 recognition scenes 45–7, 65, 68 rhyme royal 81, 91, 96 Roman comedy conventions 3, 8 Greek models 9–10 music 3, 8, 10; see also verse occasions 5 origins 1–2 revivals 9, 52, 53 scripts 8 stock elements 3, 8, 10–12, 17, 41, 89 structure 27–28, 41, 47 Roscius 52 running messenger (currens) 10–11, 23, 41, 88 Scipio Aemilianus, P. Cornelius 18–19, 20 Shakespeare, William 8, 69, 84, 91, 94 slapstick, see abuse slaves clever 8, 15, 23–4, 34–5, 41–2 v. free 67–8, 72 prominence in comedy 10 slave trade 71 see also abuse, running messenger stage, see theater structure Steele, Richard 64–8, 72 Terence Andria alternative ending 50, 53–4, 57 Greek models 30–1, 87 passages discussed 9–14: 30 55–9: 35 74–9: 36–7 260–4: 95–9 270–6: 42 886–90: 22 828–32: 22

Index productions of 61–2 subplot in 31, 43–4, 47–8, 66–7 women in 24, 31, 36–40, 68, 71 authorship questioned 19–20 biographical criticism of 71–2 comparison with Plautus 15–16, 20, 24–5, 34–5, 41–2, 47, 49, 60, 72, 79 diction 14–15, 23, 34, 80, 88–9, 90 Euuchus 36–41: 12; 147–9: 39 Heauton timorumenos 388–91: 38–9 lack of humor in 34–5, 64–5 musical effects 15, 24, 34, 89–90 originality of 17–18, 24, 32, 48 patronage of 9, 18–19 popularity of 15–16, 50, 52 representation of women in 36–40 in rhetorical training 56 as school text 55, 58, 86 social comment in 35–6, 67 as stylistic model 14, 55 see also Menander theater structure 4, 6–7 Theophrastus 28 tibia (pipe) 8, 10, 34, 89, 96; see also music tragedy, Roman 2, 4 Turpilius 5, 13, 14 Udall, Nicholas 59, 84, 117 n.1 verse 2, 3, 34; see also meter translation of 91–4, 96 unrecognized 57 Voltaire 69 Varro, M. Terentius 2–3, 5, 41, 52 Vespucci, Giorgio Antonio 61 Volcacius Sedigitus 13, 16, 29, 52, 55 web-based resources Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama

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(http://www.apgrd.ox. ac.uk) 119 n.3 Donatus (http://hyperdonat. tge-adonis.fr/) 125 Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck. com) 100 Jerome Chronicle (http://www. attalus.org/translate/ jerome1.html) 105 Loeb Classical Library (http:// loebclassics.com) 105 Oxford Classical Dictionary, 5 ed. (http://classics.oxfordre. com/page/abbreviationlist) ix PHI Classical Latin Texts (http:// latin.packhum.org/) 105 Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (http://collection. smk.dk) 118 n.17 The Meters of Roman Comedy (http://romancomedy. wulib.wustl.edu/) 117 n.9 UCLA RomeLab stage images (https://osf. io/5nd7t/) 6 VR model (http://hvwc.etc. ucla.edu/movingstage) 6 Vatican Library Bembine codex (https://digi. vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat. lat.3226) 126 Illustrated codex (https://digi. vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat. lat.3868) 126 ‘well-made’ play 47 Wilder, Thornton Our Town 75–6 The Skin of Our Teeth 76–7 The Woman of Andros 72–5

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