Chapter VII

Terence and the Comic Poets subsequent to Plautus.

The names of five or six comic dramatists are known, who fill the space of eighteen years between the death of Plautus and the representation of the earliest play of Terence, the 'Andria.' From one of these, Aquilius, some verses are quoted, which Varro did not hesitate to attribute to Plautus, and which Gellius characterises as 'Plautinissimi.' They are the words of a parasite, complaining of the invention of sun-dials as inconveniently retarding the dinner hour. Among these writers the most famous was Caecilius Statius, an Insubrian Gaul, first a slave, and afterwards a freedman of a member of the Caecilian house. He is said to have lived on terms of great intimacy with Ennius. His poetic career very nearly coincides with that of the epic and tragic poet, and he only survived him by one year. Some Roman critics ranked him above even Plautus as a comic poet. The line of Horace—

quoted by Cicero in the Tusculan Questions, and this line—

He seems to have had nothing of the creative originality of Plautus, nor ever to have enjoyed the same general popularity. He prepared the way for Terence by a more careful conformity to his Greek models than his predecessor had shown, and, apparently, by introducing a more serious and sentimental vein into his representations of life.

The task which awaited Terence was the complete Hellenising of Roman comedy, and the creation of a style which might combine something of Attic flexibility and delicacy with the idiomatic purity of the Latin spoken in the best Roman houses. By birth a Phoenician, by intellectual education a Greek, by the associations of his daily life a foreigner living in Rome, he was more in sympathy with the cosmopolitan mode of thought and feeling which Greek culture was diffusing over the civilised world, than with the traditions of Roman austerity or the homely humours of Italian life. As a dependent and associate of men belonging to the most select society of Rome, he had neither that contact with the many sides of life, nor that familiarity with the animated modes of popular speech, which helped to fashion the style of Plautus: but by assimilating the literary grace of the Athenian comedy and the familiar manner of a high-bred, friendly, and intelligent society, he gave to Latin, what the Greek language in ancient and the French in modern times have had pre-eminently, a style which gives dignity and urbanity to conversation, and freedom and simplicity to literary expression. If the oratorical tastes and training of the Romans make the absence of these last qualities perceptible in much both of their prose and verse, we feel the charm of their presence in the Letters of Cicero, the lighter poems of Catullus, the Epistles of Horace, the Epigrams of Martial: and it was owing to the social and intellectual position of Terence that this secret of combining consummate literary grace with conversational ease and spontaneity was discovered.

indicate that he was a very young man when they were written. Thus Terence may, more even than Catullus or Lucan, be ranked among 'the inheritors of unfulfilled renown.'

He is said to have been born at Carthage, brought to Rome as a slave, and carefully educated in the house of M. Terentius Lucanus, by whom he was soon emancipated. A difficulty was felt in ancient times as to how he originally became a slave, as there was no war between Rome and Carthage between the Second and Third Punic Wars, and no commercial relations with Rome and Italy till after the destruction of Carthage. But there was no doubt as to his Phoenician origin. It has been suggested that his Carthaginian origin perhaps explains the interest which the family of the Scipios first took in him. He was of slender figure and dark complexion. He is said to have owed the favour of his great friends as much to his personal gifts and graces as to his literary distinction. In one of his prologues he declares it to be his ambition, while not offending the many, to please the 'boni.'

His earliest play was the 'Andria,' exhibited in 166 b.c., when he could only have been about the age of nineteen. A pretty, but probably apocryphal, story is told of his having read the play, before its exhibition, to Caecilius—who however is said to have died in 168 b.c., the year after the death of Ennius—and of the generous admiration manifested by Caecilius. The story probably owes its origin to the same impulse which gave birth to that of the visit of Accius on his journey to Asia to the veteran Pacuvius. The next play exhibited by Terence was the 'Hecyra,' first produced in 165, but withdrawn in consequence of the bad reception which it met with, and afterwards reproduced in 160. The 'Heauton Timorumenos' appeared in 163, the 'Eunuchus' and 'Phormio' in 161, and the 'Adelphoe' in 160, at the funeral games of L. Aemilius Paulus.

After bringing out these plays Terence sailed for Greece, whether, as it is said, to escape from the suspicion of publishing the works of others as his own, or, as is more probable, from the desire to obtain a more intimate knowledge of that Greek life which had hitherto been known to him only in literature, and which it was his professed aim to reproduce in his comedies. From the voyage to Greece Terence never returned. According to one account he was lost at sea, according to another he died at Stymphalus in Arcadia, and according to a third at Leucadia, from grief at the loss by shipwreck of his baggage, containing a number of new plays which he had translated from Menander. The old grammarian quoted by Suetonius states that he was ruined in fortune through his intimacy with his noble friends. Another account spoke of him as having left behind him property consisting of gardens, to the extent of twenty acres, close to the Appian Way. It is further stated that his daughter was so well provided for that she married a Roman knight.

Terence is, accordingly, in substance and form, a 'dimidiatus Menander,'—a Roman only in his language. The aim of his art was to be as purely Athenian as it was possible for one writing in Latin to be. While his great gift to Roman literature is that he first made it artistic, that he imparted to rude Latium the sense of elegance, consistency, and moderation, his gift to the world is that, through him, it possesses a living image of Greek society in the third century b.c. presented in the purest Latin idiom. The life of Athens after the loss of her religious belief, her great political activity, and speculative and artistic energy,—or, rather, one of the phases of that life, as it was shaped by Menander for dramatic purposes—supplies the material of all his plays. It is the embodiment of the lighter side of the philosophy of Epicurus, without the elevation of the speculative and scientific curiosity which gave serious interest even to that form of the philosophic life. There is a charm of friendliness, urbanity, social enjoyment, superficial kindness of heart, in the picture presented: and it was a necessary stage in the culture of the best Romans that they should learn to appreciate this charm, and assimilate its influence in their intercourse with one another. The Greek comedy of Menander was a lesson to the Romans in manners, in tolerance, in kindly indulgence to equals and inferiors, and in the cultivation of pleasant relations with one another. The often quoted line,—

might be taken as its motto. The idea of 'human nature,' in its weakness and in its sympathy with weakness, may be said to be the new element introduced into Roman life by the comedy of Terence. The qualities of 'humanitas, clementia, facilitas,'—general amiability and good nature,—are the virtues which it exemplifies. The indulgence of the old to the follies or pleasures of the young is often contrasted with the stricter view of the obligations of life, entertained by an earlier generation, and always in favour of the former. The plea of the passionate modern poet—

Love, generally in the form of pathetic sentiment rather than of irregular passion, is the motive of all the pieces. There is generally a double love-story; one, an attachment, which, if not virtuous in the beginning, has become so afterwards, and which ends in marriage and the discovery that the lady is the daughter of a citizen, who has been exposed or carried away in her infancy; the other, an ordinary intrigue, like those which form the subject of most of the comedies of Plautus. In his treatment of love, Terence may be said to be the precursor of Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus. He has the serious sense of its pains and pleasures which they display, though he wants the passionate intensity of the two first of these. The greatest attraction of his love passages arises from his tenderness of feeling. In this he is like Tibullus. Although the origin of the sentiment, in most of his plays, is nothing deeper than desire, inspired by outward charms and enhanced by compassion, yet we recognise in him, or in the model which he followed, much more than in Plautus, a belief in and appreciation of constancy and fidelity. In his treatment of his 'amantes ephebi' he shows sympathy with, rather than the humorous superiority to, their weaknesses which we find in Plautus. But though there is more grossness in the older poet, yet there is occasionally more real indelicacy in Terence; as in the subject of the 'Eunuchus' and in the acceptance by Phaedria, at the end of that play, of the suggestion of Gnatho, which, in its union of mercenary with sentimental motives, is almost more repugnant to natural feeling than the conclusion of the 'Asinaria' and 'Bacchides.'

The characters in Terence, although more consistent and more true to ordinary life, are more faintly drawn than those of Plautus. None of them stand out in our memory with the distinctness and individuality of Euclio, Pseudolus, Ballio, or Tyndarus. The want of definite personality which they had to the poet himself is implied in the frequent recurrence of the same names in his different pieces. They are products of analysis and reflexion, not of bold invention and creative sympathy. They are embodiments of the good sense which keeps a conventional society together, or of the tamer impulses by which the surface of that society is temporarily ruffled. The predominant tone in their intercourse with one another is one of urbanity. We find none of the rollicking vituperation and execration in which Plautus revels. Delicate irony and pointed epigram take the place of broad humour. The encounter of wits between slaves and fathers is conducted with the weapons of polished repartee and mutual deference to one another. Davus, Parmeno, Syrus, Geta, speak in the terse and epigrammatic language of gentlemen and men of the world.

While the 'Andria' has more pathetic situations, and the 'Adelphoe' is on the whole more true to human nature, the 'Eunuchus' presents the greatest number of interesting personages. The Thais of that play is the most favourable delineation of the Athenian 'Hetaera' in ancient literature. She has grace and dignity, a consciousness of her charms combined with a proud humility, and not only kindliness of nature, but real goodness of heart. The natural dignity of her nature, tempered by the sense of her position, appears in her rebuke to Chaerea,—

Non te dignum, Chaerea,

Fecisti: nam si ego digna hac contumelia

and her kindness is equally manifest in her ready admission of his excuse,

Non adeo inhumano ingenio sum, Chaerea,

Gnatho is a new and more subtly conceived type of the parasite, and in Thraso the 'Miles Gloriosus' does not transcend the limits of credibility. Parmeno and Phaedria are natural embodiments of the confidential slave and the weak lover. Their relations to one another are brought out with more delicate irony and finer psychological analysis, though with less vigour than those of Pseudolus and Calidorus, or of Ludus and Pistoclerus in the Pseudolus and Bacchides of Plautus. The Davus, Geta, and Syrus of the other plays are tamer and less humorous than the slaves of Plautus; but they play their part with wit and liveliness, and the rôle which they have to perform is not felt to be incompatible with the ordinary conditions of life. Aeschinus, in the Adelphoe, shows a higher spirit and more energy of character than most of the other lovers in Plautus or Terence. The contrast between the genial, indulgent, selfish man of the world, and the harder type of character produced by exclusive devotion to business, is well brought out in the Micio and Demea of the Adelphoe, and in the Chremes and Menedemus of the Heauton Timorumenos. The two brothers in the 'Phormio,' Demipho and Chremes, are also happily characterised and distinguished from one another; and Phormio is himself a type of the parasite, as distinct from Gnatho, as he is from the Gelasimus or Curculio of Plautus. The character-painting in Terence is altogether free from the tendency to exaggeration and caricature which is the besetting fault of some of the greatest humourists. Yet with all his truth of detail, his careful avoidance of the extreme forms of villainy, roguery, and inhuman hardness, it may be doubted whether the life represented by Terence is not on the whole more purely conventional than that represented by Plautus. His personages seem to move about in a kind of 'Fools' paradise' without the knowledge of good or evil. All the sentimental virtues seem to flourish spontaneously, even in the hearts of his courtesans: and though he holds up a true ideal of fidelity in love and loyalty in friendship, yet the chief practical lesson that seems to be suggested is the necessity of overcoming the restraints imposed by prudence and conscience on the indulgence of natural inclination.

De. Denique

Inspicere tamquam in speculum in vitas omnium

Iubeo atque ex aliis sumere exemplum sibi.

'Hoc facito.' Sy. Recte sane. De. 'Hoc fugito.' Sy. Callide.

Again, the remonstrance of Micio to Demea,

expresses the philosophy of many of his love poems and his drinking songs. The Epicurean sentiment and reflexion borrowed from Menander were congenial to one side of Horace's nature, as the manly independence and serious spirit of Lucilius were to another: and in his own style he has incorporated the conversational urbanity of the one writer no less than the intellectual vigour of the other. But Horace was much richer and more varied in the subjects of his art, as he was larger and more penetrating in his knowledge of the world, and more manly and serious in his view of life, than the comic poet who died so early in his career.

His works were studied and learned by heart by the great Latin writers of the Renaissance, such as Erasmus and Melanchthon: and Casaubon, in his anxiety that his son should write a pure style, inculcates on him the constant study of Terence. Montaigne applies to him the phrase of Horace,—

After the death of Terence the only writer of palliatae of any name was Sextus Turpilius, who died about the end of the second century b.c. No new element seems to have been contributed by him to the Roman Stage. After the decline of the Comoedia palliata, the Comoedia togata, which professed to represent the Roman and Italian life of the middle classes, first obtained popular favour. The principal writers of this branch of comedy were T. Quintius Atta and L. Afranius. The latter was regarded as the Roman Menander:—