TERENCE (PUBLIUS TERENTIUS AFER) (C. 190–C. 159 B.C.), Roman comic poet, was born in Carthage and came to Rome as a slave in the house of Terentius Lucanus, a senator, by whom he was educated and manumitted. The little that is known of his life is almost entirely derived from a fragment of Suetonius, De viris illustribus. At Rome he was on friendly terms with Scipio Afri canus the younger, C. Laelius, and Furius Philus. His six plays were produced 166-16o s.c. After the production of the last he went to Greece, apparently to procure more of Menander's plays. From this voyage he did not return. The place and manner of his death are very variously given.
His first play, the Andria, was produced in 166 B.C. The plot, which may be taken as typical, tells of the adventures of an Athenian girl, Pasibula, who is left in the charge of an uncle while her father goes abroad; how she is shipwrecked off the coast of Andros, where she is brought up, under the name of Glycerium, as the daughter of an Andrian, and returns to Athens; of her love affair with Pamphilus and its threatened frustration; and of her rediscovery of her father and her eventual marriage with Pam philus, whose crafty slave, Davus, is as usual the mainspring of the plot. The play is an adaptation from two plays—a procedure known as contaminatio—of Menander, as we learn from the pro logue 9 seq. "Menander wrote the Andria and the Perinthia; he who knows either, knows both, for the plots are not very different, though they differ in language and style. The poet's enemies ob ject to this and maintain that plays should not be contaminated (contaminari non decere fabulas). Their knowingness shows that they know nothing, for the same criticism applies to Naevius, Plautus and Ennius, whom the poet takes as his models, preferring their 'negligence' to the 'obscure diligence' of his detractors." The opening scene is twice referred to by Cicero, who in De Inventione, i. 23, cites lines 50-53, 157, 168, and in De Oratore 4o, hic parvae consuetudinis—faciet patri (Andy. lio-112).
His second play, Hecyra, or the Mother-in-Law, adapted from a play by Apollodorus, was produced in 165. The third, Heau tontimorumenos, or the Self-Avenger, appeared in 163 ; the fourth, the Eunuchus (Eunuch), a "contamination" (cf., prol. 3o seq.) of
two plays of Menander, the Eunuchus and the Kolax (flatterer), in 161; and in the same year also the Phormio, adapted from the Epidicazomenos of Apollodorus. His last play, the Adelphoe, or the Brothers, a "contamination" of the "Adelphoi" of Menander and the Sunapothneskontes of Diphilus, was produced in i6o.
With regard to the economy of his plays, it is to be noted that Terence uses the prologue no longer to introduce a play by an exposition of the plot, but after the manner of the Aristophanic parabasis, chiefly to reply to his critics—cf. Andria, prolog. 5 "Nam in prologis scribundis operam abutitur Non qui argumentum narret sed qui malevoli V eteris poetae maledictis respondeat ;" i.e., the poet wastes his labour in writing prologues, not to explain the plot, but to reply to abuse of a malevolent old poet (Lavinius Luscus, preferred by Vulcatius Sedigitus to Ennius as a comic poet. Aul. Gell. xv. The comedy of Terence, like that of his exemplars, is a comedy of manners. The reader is conscious of having travelled a long way from the Olympian humour of Aristophanes. His merit— purity of Latinity—and his demerit—lack of comic power (vis comica)—are summed up in the famous epigram of Julius Caesar (Sueton. Vita Terentii): Tu quoque, to in summis, 0 dimidiate Menander, Poneris et merito puri sermonis amator: Lenibus atque utinam scriptis adiuncta foret vis Comica, ut aequato virtus polleret amore Cum Graecis neque in hac despectus parte iaceres. Unum hoc maceror et doleo tibi desse, Terenti.
(Thou too, 0 halved Menander, art placed among the highest and deservedly—lover of pure speech. And I would that to thy mild writings there had been joined comic power, so that thy excellence might have had equal honour with the Greeks and thou be not despised in that part. This one thing, Terence, thou lackest —to my distress and sorrow.) In his own time he appears to have been accused of plagiarism and also of receiving help in writing his plays from his friends—a charge which he several times refers to in his prologues and in that of the Adelphoe apparently admits to be true.