A Companion to Terence

Antony Augoustakis, Ariana Traill

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118301999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria antica e classica

A comprehensive collection of essays by leading scholars in the field that address, in a single volume, several key issues in interpreting Terence offering a detailed study of Terence's plays and situating them in their socio-historical context, as well as documenting their reception through to present day

•The first comprehensive collection of essays on Terence in English, by leading scholars in the field
•Covers a range of topics, including both traditional and modern concerns of gender, race, and reception
•Features a wide-ranging but interconnected series of essays that offer new perspectives in interpreting Terence
•Includes an introduction discussing the life of Terence, its impact on subsequent studies of the poet, and the question of his ethnicity

PART I

TERENCE AND ANCIENT COMEDY

CHAPTER ONE

Terence and Greek New Comedy

Peter Brown

From the start to the end of his career Terence is explicit that his plays are based on Greek models, and he chooses to preface them with prologues in which questions about his use of these models are often to the fore. The tone is set by the prologue to Andria, which he claims he was obliged to write in order to “reply to abuse from a malicious old author” (qui malevoli / veteris poetae maledictis respondeat, An. 6–7): he tells us that in adapting Menander’s Andria (“The Girl from Andros”) he has incorporated “what was suitable” (quae convenere, 13) from Menander’s very similar Perinthia (“The Girl from Perinthos”), and that he has been criticized for “spoiling” (contaminari, 15) the Greek plays by doing this (there has been much discussion of contaminatio, but there is no reason to think it meant anything very precise; see also chapter 19, this volume). In reply, he insists that he is maintaining an established Roman tradition and following in the footsteps of Naevius, Plautus, and Ennius: “he’d much rather try to match their carelessness than the undistinguished carefulness of his critics” (quorum aemulari exoptat neglegentiam / potius quam istorum obscuram diligentiam, 20–1). It is taken for granted that the playwright sets about his business by adapting Greek comedies, but he claims some freedom in the way he does so (see Germany’s analysis of the Andria prologue, chapter 12, this volume). Terence returns to this question in a more general way in his prologue to Heauton Timorumenos (Hau. 16–21), not denying that “he has ‘spoiled’ a large number of Greek plays in writing a small number of Latin ones” (multas contaminasse Graecas, dum facit / paucas Latinas, 17–18), and again invoking “the precedent of good writers” (bonorum exemplum, 20). In the case of this play, he says it is “a fresh comedy taken from a fresh Greek play” (ex integra Graeca integram comoediam, 4) but does not specify the name of the Greek author, claiming that most of the audience already know it anyway (7–9); we have other evidence that it was a play by Menander of the same name, and with his remark in line 4 Terence proclaims the Greekness of his play quite clearly—as he does also by keeping the ostentatiously Greek title. As far as we know, Terence had so far attempted to put on two plays, Andria and Hecyra, only the first of which had been based on more than one Greek play. There seems to be some reckless exaggeration in the reference to “a large number of Greek plays,” either on the part of Terence’s critics or on Terence’s part in reporting the criticism, which may well have had no relevance to Heauton Timorumenos itself. It is widely believed that Terence draws attention to his having made a significant change in line 6 of the prologue, duplex quae ex argumento facta est simplici, which is generally interpreted to mean “which has been made double [by Terence] out of a single plot [by Menander],” though what Terence has done to make the play “double” is much disputed. However, facta est need not imply a change: the words could mean “which has been constructed as a double play with a single plot,” perhaps conveying that the plot (both of the Greek play and of its Latin version) forms a unified whole in spite of having two main strands. On either view, it is not clear why Terence makes this comment at this point (see Dunsch 1999 for a full discussion of the line).

In the prologue to Eunuchus Terence tells us that it is based on a play by Menander of the same name (Eu. 19–20), with two characters (the parasite and the soldier) added from another play by Menander, his Kolax (“The Toady”, 30–4). This time the charge against him is not his “spoiling” of Greek plays but the alleged fact that he has stolen the characters from earlier versions of Kolax by Naevius and Plautus (23–6). Similarly, in the case of Adelphoe the charge is that he has stolen a scene from Plautus’ version of Diphilus’ Synapothneskontes (“Comrades in Death”) and added it to his play (Ad. 6–14); the author of the original of Adelphoe is not named, but again we know him to have been Menander. For Kolax Terence claims to have worked directly from Menander’s Greek and to have been unaware of the earlier Latin versions; for Synapothneskontes he claims to have rescued from oblivion a scene which Plautus had carelessly failed to include in his version and to have translated it “word for word” (verbum de verbo, 11)—an unexpected claim, given his insistence on his freedom in other respects in other cases (see chapter 17, this volume). In this case we have no difficulty in identifying the scene in question (lines 155–96) from his description of it in lines 8–9 of the prologue. In the case of Eunuchus it is not so clear what the addition of two characters has involved, since at least one of them (the soldier) is likely to have had a counterpart in Menander’s Eunuchos (see Barsby 1993 for a discussion).

Two plays derive from an original not by Menander but by the less distinguished Apollodorus of Carystus; in their case Terence again does not name the author of the original, and he gives no hint of any alterations that he has made. For Phormio he discusses only its title: “the Greeks call it Epidicazomenos (‘The Claimant at Law’); in Latin they call it Phormio, since the man who plays the leading part will be Phormio the parasite” (Epidicazomenon quam vocant comoediam / Graeci, Latini Phormionem nominant / quia primas partis qui aget is erit Phormio / parasitus, Ph. 25–8; “they call it” is odd, as if Terence himself had not chosen this title, but no doubt he liked the balance with “the Greeks call it” in the same sentence). We do not have a prologue for the first production of Hecyra; those for the two later productions simply give its title and discuss its previous misfortunes.

None of this tells us a great deal about Terence’s treatment of his Greek models. There was already a well-established tradition of adapting Greek comedies for the Roman stage, and of doing so with some freedom, and Terence claims to be upholding this tradition. The characters added to Eunuchus are traditional stock characters, and the scene added to Adelphoe is lively and boisterous; by discussing them in his prologues Terence no doubt aims to whet his audience’s appetite for them. But it is no part of his purpose to draw attention to all the changes he has made, nor to explain his choice of models, his approach to adaptation, or his aims (other than having a successful career) in writing his plays.

Scholars have seen significance in the fact that Terence chose only plays by Menander and Apollodorus to adapt: Menander is regarded as the subtlest and most refined of the authors of Greek New Comedy, and Apollodorus is seen as having followed very closely in his footsteps. However, Terence was not to know that he would write only six plays, and his limitation to these two authors may have been more haphazard than his early death makes it seem. (Admittedly, one account of his death recorded in the fifth chapter of Suetonius’ Vita Terenti has it that he died on his way back from Greece with some plays by Menander that he had translated, which might suggest that he planned to continue concentrating on that author. But we have no way to test the reliability of this account.) In any case, Eunuchos and Kolax were by no means Menander’s most refined plays, and Terence’s combination of them clearly aims at strong comic effects; Adelphoe is more what people think of as characteristically Menandrian, with its contrast between the approaches of two fathers to the upbringing of their adolescent boys, but Terence was happy to add the boisterous scene from Diphilus, and Geta’s “running slave” entry at 299 introduces another lively scene, no doubt considerably expanded from Menander’s original text. Demea’s triumph at the end may also be a considerable surprise introduced by Terence, as noted below. It might be added that the portions of Menander’s plays rediscovered since the start of the twentieth century show him to have written livelier and funnier comedies than you might guess from much of what is written about him even now; both Menander and Terence wrote livelier plays than they are often given credit for. As for Apollodorus, our picture of his plays derives essentially from Terence’s Hecyra and Phormio. Hecyra reproduces the situation of Menander’s Epitrepontes (“The Arbitration”), in which a young man has unknowingly married the very girl he had raped a few months earlier, but the treatment of the situation is very different in the two plays, and Phormio has a different ethos from Hecyra, with more overt entertainment, a more complex plot, and a wider range of traditional comic characters. If it were not for the supposed similarities of Hecyra and Epitrepontes, no one would have regarded the author of the original of Phormio as a close follower of Menander in respect of subtlety and refinement, though he certainly worked within the established traditions of Greek New Comedy.

The prologues of Heauton Timorumenos (31–2), Eunuchus (7–13) and Phormio (6–8) include criticisms of Terence’s rival and critic, whom we know from Donatus (see next paragraph) to have been called Luscius. These criticisms are not easy to pin down but seem to amount to mockery of Luscius for including improbable scenes in his plays. When he says at Eu. 7–8 that Luscius “by translating plays well and at the same time writing them badly has turned good Greek plays into bad Latin ones” (bene vortendo et easdem scribendo male / ex Graecis bonis Latinas fecit non bonas), Terence perhaps implies that he has been too slavish in his translations, displaying the “undistinguished carefulness” that Terence criticized him for at An. 21. If so, the allegedly improbable scenes had been reproduced by Luscius from the Greek plays that he was translating. However, we have only Terence’s side of this debate, and it is probably futile to analyze the composition of the mud that he slings or to hope for serious insights from this quarter into his attitude towards Greek Comedy.

Like Plautus and others before him, Terence modeled his plays on Greek “New Comedies,” plays written from the last quarter of the fourth century onwards which typically deal with personal relationships in fictional well-to-do families, above all with the love-life of boys in their late teens or early twenties and with associated tensions in their relations with their fathers. We have no reason to suppose that Terence expected his audience to know the plays of Menander, Diphilus, and Apollodorus at first hand, and there is no evidence for regular performances of Greek plays at Rome; Latin adaptations may well have been the main channel for the audience’s acquaintance with both Greek tragedies and Greek comedies. Our own knowledge of the original Greek plays used by Terence is pitifully inadequate, since none of them has survived. We learn some details from Donatus’ commentary, written in the fourth century CE, but Donatus’ aim is above all to elucidate the Latin text, and he only occasionally says anything about the Greek models (on Donatus, see chapters 18 and 20, this volume). He tells us, for instance (on line 301), that Terence has added the characters Charinus and Byrria to Andria so that Philumena will not be left unattached at the end of the play when Pamphilus (who had been betrothed to her) marries the girl he loves. The motive for the addition is a matter of interpretation, and we might be more inclined to stress the comedy added by the fact that Charinus is in love with the girl Pamphilus is determined not to marry and by his reactions when it looks at one stage as if Pamphilus is agreeing to marry her after all. Some have thought that Charinus and Byrria were imported into Andria from Perinthia, but what Donatus says is that “they do not come in Menander” (non sunt apud Menandrum), so perhaps Terence added them entirely out of his own head. (It is perhaps telling that on Andria 977, in discussing the fact...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: TERENCE AND ANCIENT COMEDY
• PART II: CONTEXTS AND THEMES
• PART III: THE PLAYS
• PART IV: RECEPTION
• References
• General Index
• Index Locorum