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Introduction
- University of Texas Press
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ACCORDING to the ancient Roman biographer Suetonius, Publius Terentius Afer was born in Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia in North Africa. If Suetonius’ sources can be trusted (they are not always reliable), Terence may himself have been a Carthaginian, and therefore Semitic. Given his cognomen Afer (“African”), however, he also may have been of an ethnicity native to Africa: probably a relative of modern North Africans, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he is the world’s first extant black author. Suetonius also tells us that Terence was later a slave at Rome—whether he was born a slave or became a slave is not certain—but was freed by his master, the Roman senator Terentius Lucanus. He died, according to the biographical tradition, a young man, while on a trip to Greece in 159 b.c. In the decade before his death he wrote six plays, all of which survive : The Girl from Andros (produced in 166 b.c.), The Mother-in-Law (produced unsuccessfully in 165 and 160, successfully at a third attempt in 160), The SelfTormentor (163), The Eunuch (161), Phormio (161), and The Brothers (160). Terence and His Contemporaries Two features of Terence’s life are especially interesting, and especially controversial : his alleged association with Publius Scipio Aemilianus and other Roman aristocrats, and his relationship with his audience and fellow playwrights. Both controversies derive ultimately from the prologues of Terence’s six plays, the earliest extended passages of literary criticism in Latin. In two of his prologues, Terence responds to charges allegedly made by his 243 INTRODUCTION Terence’s Life 04A-T1535-P4 2/20/01 5:35 PM Page 243 244 Terence and Roman New Comedy 1.ComparethemanyattemptstoattributeShakespeare’splaystomorewell-bred authors. 2. See S. M. Goldberg, Understanding Terence (Princeton, 1986), 31–60. critics that “he relies on the genius of his friends, rather than his own talent” (The Self-Tormentor), and that “aristocrats help him and are continually writing together with him” (The Brothers). In neither prologue does Terence explicitly rebut these charges. In The Self-Tormentor he merely has his prologue-speaker say to the spectators, “You be the judges.” In The Brothers, the speaker says: “What they think is a powerful charge, he (Terence) considers the highest praise, that he pleases those who please all of you and the people, and whose talents each of us has used when the opportunity has arisen.” The supposed charges, and Terence’s refusal to rebut them, have led many since antiquity to assume that Terence had help in writing his plays from members of the Roman upper class.1 The most common candidates for Terence’s high-born helpers are Publius Scipio Aemilianus, arguably the leading Roman statesman of the mid-second century b.c., and his best friend, Gaius Laelius. Although ancient biographies of Terence preserve anecdotes about the two aristocrats helping the young playwright , the entire tradition about aristocratic helpers is without any firm evidence and may well be apocryphal. Nevertheless, it is quite likely that Scipio had some association with Terence, as a friend and/or as a patron. Terence’s The Brothers and The Mother-in-Law were offered at funeral games held by Scipio and his brother for their father. Scipio and many of his friends were known for their attachment to Greek culture. Any connection must remain speculative, but the philhellenism of his aristocratic friends may have helped inspire Terence to be more faithful to his Greek originals than his predecessor Plautus had been. If we are to believe Terence’s prologues, he was persecuted throughout his career by critics, especially Luscius Lanuvinus, a fellow playwright. In addition to the charges that others helped write his plays, Terence claims that Luscius and others censured him for mixing two Greek plays together while creating one Roman play (contaminatio), for adapting Greek plays that other Latin playwrights had already adapted, and for writing plays “weak in diction, anemic in style.” Terence’s presentation of competitors trying to ruin his career is probably rhetorical exaggeration.2 Nevertheless, the polemics of the prologues suggest that the mid-second century b.c. was a time of lively controversy regarding how Greek comedies could best be adapted to the Roman stage. How those controversies, and Terence’s reactions to them, affected Terence ’s audience as a whole is not certain. Terence himself reports that one of his plays, The Mother-in-Law, faced great difficulties: its first performance was 04A-T1535...