Terence's Plays

chapter 2 Terence’s Plays: Commentary and Illustration from Manuscript to Print 2.1 Terence as an Educational Classic: Text and Commentary from Antiquity to Medieval and Renaissance Europe Publius Terentius Afer, or Terence, was the author of six plays which premiered in Rome between 166 and 160 bc— Andria, Heauton timorumenos, Eunuchus, Phormio, Hecyra, and Adelphoe. Some information on the circumstances of the production of each play can be obtained from the didascaliae,1 while the prologues reveal that they were produced in a vibrant and at times vitriolic literary environment. A biographical tradition concerning Terence only devel- oped much later; in the early second century ad Suetonius wrote a Life, which was subsequently supplemented and attached to the commentary of Aelius Donatus (for which see below), while in Late Antiquity it appears that another very brief Life, known as the Vita Ambrosiana, was composed, which provides a few facts independent of the Life found in Donatus.2 In these traditions, we are told that Terence came originally from Carthage in Northern Africa (hence his cognomen, Afer, or ‘the African’); that he was taken to Rome at a young age as a slave, and was adopted and freed there by a senator, Terentius Lucanus, from whom he took his name, and by whom he was educated; that he subsequently was befriended by some of the leading figures in Roman society associated with Scipio Africanus Aemilianus (185/ 4– 129 bc); and that he died young on a trip to Greece, where he had gone in order to purchase more comedies to translate. Traditionally, his life is dated to either 195 or 185 bc to 159.3 The six comedies are adaptations into Latin of Greek plays of the so- called New Comedy. The Latin comic genre based on the plays of New Comedy, which 1 The didascalia to Andria survived only in the commentary of Donatus, and only made its way back into the manuscript tradition in the fifteenth century. 2 Discussed in Marcus Deufert, “Die Vita Ambrosiana: Datierung, Terenzbild, Rezeption,” in Theater, Theaterpraxis, Theaterkritik im kaiserzeitlichen Rom, ed. Joachim Fugmann et al. (Munich: K.G. Saur, 2004), 83– 102. 3 For further discussion of this biographical tradition, including an edition and translation of Donatus’ Life, see Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill, eds., A Companion to Terence (Chich- ester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013), 1– 6. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004432406_004 Commentary and Illustration from Manuscript to Print 25 dates to roughly a century after the heyday of the original, is usually denoted fabula palliata, or comedy whose characters wear the pallium (a type of Greek cloak), and is the earliest genre in Latin literature for which we have extensive evidence;4 it survives not only in the plays of Terence, but also those of his older contemporary, Titus Maccius Plautus (fl. c. 210– 184 bc), for whom we now have twenty- one plays surviving in full or in part. Menander of Athens (342/ 1– 291/ 0 bc) is the only author of New Come- dy whose production fortuitously survived in more than just fragments, and four of his plays were adapted by Terence (Andria, Heauton timorumenos, Eunuchus, Adelphoe), with some additional material incorporated with- in them,5 while Terence’s other two (Phormio, Hecyra) were adapted from works by Apollodorus of Carystus (fl. 3rd century bc).6 Despite their Latin texts these plays are all set in an idealised Attica, and on the surface have lit- tle to do with the Roman world of the mid- second century bc.7 Rather, their plots deal almost exclusively with domestic matters— generational con- flicts, love stories, forced marriages, and inheritances— and the characters generally fall into stock types, such as truculent old men, young men in love, prostitutes, interfering older women, and resourceful slaves, to the extent that the same names are found for the same characters in different plays.8 They always take place on a street outside of the houses of the main protag- onists, which are conveniently clustered together, and although there are many references to characters going to the countryside, and less frequently to them travelling by sea to other locations in the Aegean, these serve merely as plot devices, enabling characters to be absent and return at unexpected moments. 4 For discussion of the extant works and fragments, see Gesine Manuwald, Roman Republican Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 144– 56. 5 In Eunuchus he included characters from another play by Menander, the Colax (cf. Ter. Eu. 19– 34), and in Adelphoe a scene from Synapothnescontes by Menander’s contemporary play- wright Diphilus (Ad. 6– 11). 6 See Peter Brown, “Terence and Greek New Comedy,” in A Companion to Terence, ed. Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013), 17– 32, for discussion of Terence’s use of his Greek originals. 7 See, however, the discussion of John H. Starks, “opera in bello, in otio, in negotio: Terence and Rome in the 160s BCE,” in A Companion to Terence, ed. Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill (Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013), 132– 55, for the ways in which Roman values of this peri- od (e.g. client/ patron relationships) are projected in Terence’s plays. 8 E.g. Davus for a slave (Andria, Phormio), Pamphilus for a young man in love (Andria, Hecyra), Chremes for an old man (Andria, Heauton timorumenos, Phormio; the name is also used of a young man in Eunuchus), Bacchis for a prostitute (Heauton timorumenos, Hecyra), Sostrata for a matron (Heauton timorumenos, Adelphoe); the examples can be multiplied..

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