Understanding Terence

by Sander M. Goldberg

Overview

Instead of seeing Terence primarily as an adapter of Greek New Comedy, Sander Goldberg treats him as an innovative dramatist writing for a specifically Roman audience. His book will interest not only students of classical literature but also those concerned with wider problems of critical theory and the comic tradition.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691610559
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #441
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.60(d)

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Understanding Terence

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By Sander M. Goldberg

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03586-4

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CHAPTER 1

THE CONTEXT

The comedies that entertained Roman crowds at a festival like the ludi Romani bore only superficial resemblance to the Greek plays on which they were modeled. While the authors of Greek New Comedy had put the characters and situations of their own time on a stage and before audiences steeped in an old and respected dramatic tradition, playwrights and producers at Rome were adapting a foreign art form to quite different conditions. Roman theatre people had to be adroit and aggressive professionals, seeking contracts from public officials to perform plays on makeshift stages amid the bustle of large and diverse public shows. To attract the necessary crowds, they turned the fourth-century Greece of their models into a comic fantasy land populated by absurd Greeks who spoke highly stylized Latin and whose broad comic effects and elaborate songs imposed native Italian tastes upon Greek dramatic structures. The resulting form of comedy was extremely successful. Between 240 B.C., when a Greek from Tarentum named Livius Andronicus first presented plays in Latin at the ludi Romani, and Plautus' death in about 184, a Roman theatrical tradition grew rapidly and well. The steady addition of new festivals and the growing tendency to include plays in the public celebration of military victories, temple dedications, and state funerals created more theatrical opportunities for Plautus than the dramatists of fifth-century Athens had known. With this increase in quantity came a corresponding increase in quality. Cicero found the plays of Livius not worth a second reading; Plautus' comedies quickly became objects of admiration, imitation, and study. They reflect a time of great creativity and growing technical skill. As a later producer of Plautus was to claim,

    ea tempestate flos poetarum fuit,
    qui nunc abierunt hinc in communem locum.
    sed tamen apsentes prosunt pro praesentibus.

    That was a time when poets flowered,
    poets now gone to their just reward,
    but though absent they profit us as if present.

    (Casina 18–20)

Yet the development of Roman comedy did not end with Plautus. As Rome learned more about Greece and as the Roman aristocrats who sponsored ludi scaenici learned more about literature, the character of Roman comedy and its performance changed.

Signs of that change show clearly in the six plays of Terence, which date from the 160's. The bold and brilliant style of Plautus and his successor Caecilius has been replaced by something calmer and less fantastic. The plays seem more recognizably Greek, or at least less blatantly Roman. Such a change in style and outlook presents special problems of interpretation, for these plays mark both a departure from the traditional values of Roman comedy and also the end of productive experiments on the comic stage. Neither Plautus nor Menander is exactly comparable, and the fragments of Roman comedy after Terence are too scanty to complete the perspective. Yet his plays are not isolated monuments. The cultural forces that worked upon Roman literature in the second century have left their mark, and the contrast with his predecessors can reveal how Terence modified familiar devices of his genre. A review of this social and literary context, along with some necessary reappraisal of traditional beliefs concerning them, will provide the perspective for forming our own understanding of Terence.

I

Back in 189 B.C., while Plautus still dominated Roman comedy, the development of Latin literature took a new turn. When Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, consul in that year, embarked on a campaign against the Greek city of Ambracia, he included the poet Quintus Ennius in his entourage. Hellenistic kings had long known the value of court poets. Alexander the Great took an epic poet as well as a historian with him to the east. Attalids and Seleucids had poems written in their honor. Nobilior's act, however, was unprecedented at Rome. As a group, the early Roman poets occupied the lower rungs of an increasingly class-conscious society and did not mix with the aristocracy. Their professional association, the so-called Collegium poetarum, was organized as an artisans' guild; Cato likened poets to vagabonds. Livius had in fact come to Rome as a slave and Plautus as an Italian provincial on the make. Caecilius was a Gaul. Naevius, from Campania, perhaps ranked higher on the social scale, but his legendary quarrel with the powerful Metelli is our only example, and that a negative one, of contact between a poet and a public figure. Roman comedy generally avoided specific political references; Naevius' epic on the Punic War is a poem without a patron. What favoritism influenced the award of contracts for the various ludi and the commissioning of public hymns has left no trace.

With Ennius' career we can document an important development. He too was a foreigner, a Calabrian rather than a Roman, but he came to Rome in 204 at Cato's urging. He lived modestly but moved in high circles. Later tradition linked him not only with Cato and Nobilior, but with such other notables as Scipio Nasica and Servius Sulpicius Galba. He gave elegant recompense for the company he kept. The siege of Ambracia occupied a prominent place in Book 15 of Ennius' epic masterpiece, the Annales, and Nobilior's eventual claim to a triumph in the face of strong political opposition at Rome was perhaps aided by a second work entitled Ambracia, which was most likely a play. Ennius also wrote a poem entitled Scipio, in honor of Africanus, and he extended the Annales beyond its original fifteen books in order to include the valiant deeds of more contemporary Romans. Sometime in the 170's, Cato attacked Nobilior for having taken Ennius to Ambracia, but his perception of poetry's political power had come too late.

This patronage of Ennius belongs in the larger context of cultural developments in the second century. As Rome increased its meddling in Greek affairs and as Greeks increasingly found themselves drawn to Rome, cultural contact between them grew rapidly. Roman nobles, often bilingual and always confident travelers to the east, found themselves not simply with the power to appropriate Greek books, Greek art, and Greek tutors for their sons, but with the leisure to appreciate their appeal. Scipio Africanus, while commanding a Roman army at Syracuse in 205, walked about the gymnasium in Greek dress and read Greek books. Fulvius Nobilior used spoils from Ambracia to decorate a temple at Rome to Hercules of the Muses. After the battle of Pydna in 168, Aemilius Paullus put the royal Macedonian library at his sons' disposal. With this growing appreciation of Greek culture came an increased awareness of literature's power to influence public opinion. The first Roman historical writing dates from this period, originally in Greek but soon after in Latin, and the public entertainments expanded in number and scope. The two curule aediles, who had charge of the ludi Romani and the ludi Megalenses (established in 204, drama added by 194), quickly learned the political value of lavish entertainments. The festivals grew longer, which was certainly good for the acting profession, and the aediles grew popular. All of those identified between 217 and 187 went on to higher elected office. Victorious generals adopted the same course. As thanks to Jupiter for the victory at Ambracia, for example, Nobilior celebrated ludi for ten days in 186 and imported actors and athletes from Greece, as well as lions and panthers, for the occasion. The Senate found it necessary to limit the expense. This aristocratic involvement in the sponsorship of literary activity, especially activity of the public sort, is crucial for understanding the next such documented case, the patronage of Terence.

The prologues to Terence's plays suggest a career dogged by hostile rumor and innuendo, and among these is the insinuation that his success owed more to friends than to his own talent ("amicum ingenio fretum, haud natura sua," HT 24). In Adelphoe he deftly turned such an accusation to his advantage.

    nam quod isti dicunt malevoli, homines nobilis
    hunc adiutare adsidueque una scribere,
    quod illi maledictum vehemens esse existimant,
    earn laudem hie ducit maximam quom illis placet
    qui vobis univorsis et populo placent,
    quorum opera in bello, in otio, in negotio,
    suo quisque tempore usust sine superbia.

    Now as to what the spiteful say, that certain
    nobles help him out and always share the writing,
    this charge they think a powerful slander
    he deems an honor, since he pleases men
    who please you all and please the Roman people,
    whose deeds in war, in peace, in politics
    we all enjoy in need and without arrogance.

    (Adelphoe 15–21)

Who were these homines nobilis? Since Adelphoe was performed in 160 at the funeral games of Aemilius Paullus, an association with his son Scipio Aemilianus, the most famous philhellene of the second century, has long provided an easy answer. Suetonius, whose earliest sources date from late Republican times, records this identification as fact, and Cicero mentions a rumor that the comedies had been written by Scipio's close friend Laelius. It is all guesswork, though, and involves an awkward problem of chronology. Though Scipio distinguished himself at Pydna in 168, he was only seventeen at the time. He did not enter the Senate until 152, and his famous career in otio, in negotio can hardly date to the 160's. Laelius was scarcely older. Yet the presumed association with Scipio and Laelius has often colored critical thinking about Terence.

Belief in a philhellenic coterie surrounding the younger Scipio occasionally tempts scholars to see Terence as the first elegant spokesman for the enlightened humanitas with which this "Scipionic Circle" assailed a chauvinistic archaism often identified with Cato the Censor. At the very least, the dramatist's rhetorical polish has been read as the reflection of "Scipionic interests." Others have cast him as a poet with a mission and used that mission to explain certain oddities of his life and work. His break with the traditional comic style, for example, and the quarrel reported in the prologues with such older contemporaries as Luscius Lanuvinus became evidence for his adherence to a consciously philhellenic program. "Thus the hostility of Luscius," wrote one supporter of this view, "was motivated not so much by artistic concerns or by professional jealousy ... as by a more profound social and political motive: the need to obstruct the reevaluation on the stage of that Greek world which Plautus had known so well how to make ridiculous." The plays of Terence are thus read as the first systematic attempt to bring Greek values to rude Latium, and such critics see in him that wrestling with Greek form and content later manifest in the work of authors like Cicero and Horace.

A Scipionic humanitas also appeals to critics who would prefer apparent defects in dramatic technique to be thought virtues. There is, for example, Terence's handling of the specifically Greek references in his originals. He might have left them in place, perhaps with a joke about their oddity (e.g., Plautus' "licet haec Athenis nobis," Stich. 448), or he might have substituted Roman equivalents. Instead, he usually generalizes. A passage from Heauton timorumenos is often cited in this context, for the Greek original survives.

    [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].

    By Athena, you are mad, and at
    your age! You're nearly sixty,
    I would guess. You've bought
    the finest farm in Halai. It ranks
    in the top three, by God, and best of all,
    It's got no mortgage.
    (Menander, fr. 127K–T)

    nam pro deum atque hominum fidem, quid vis tibi aut
    quid quaeris? annos sexaginta natus es
    aut plus eo, ut conicio; agrum in his regionibus
    meliorem neque preti maioris nemo habet.

    For heaven's sake, what do you want?
    What do you seek? You're sixty, maybe
    more, I'd guess. No one hereabout has
    better land, or land worth more.

    (Terence, HT 61–64)

Terence has generalized the oath. He has replaced the pointed [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] with a bland expostulation and the Athenian deme name with the vague in his regionibus, and he has dropped the Attic concern with mortgages. The effect, from the purely dramatic standpoint, is to take the edge off Chremes' inquisitiveness. The details in the speech Terence gives him could all be the result of his own observation; Menander's fragment suggests far more aggressive a busybody. Some might find in such softening of characterization Terence's notorious lack of vis, but for others he has raised his art above the level of petty detail in quest of the universal. "The aim for the universally valid," wrote Karl Büchner, "seems to me to be the chief intention in the alteration of Greek formulations."

Such broad philosophical concerns may also assuage critics convinced that literature, especially drama, must be rooted in and speak to its own time. Readers of Terence might otherwise be stymied, for the plays seem to lack a sense of period. Terence makes no references to living people, Greek or Roman. His language is not rich in the vocabulary of Roman law, nor does he play on the political significance latent in such words as gloria and virtus. Thraso, his one miles gloriosus, is the apparent exception that illustrates the rule. In Eunuchus, Thraso deploys centuries and maniples before the house of Thais. He finds inspiration in Pyrrhus, and his follower Sanga knows well the imperatoris virtutem et vim militum. But Thraso, for all this Roman jargon, is hardly a character drawn from life. He is the product of a purely literary tradition, lifted from Menander's Kolax, and his greatest scene finds its parallel, not in the plays of Plautus, but in the Perikeiromene of Menander when Polemon prepares to assault the house of Glykera. But if Terence has refused to be directly topical, the "Scipionic program" can at least show him to be thematically topical. His comparative fidelity to his Greek models, his sympathetic portrayal of women, his uniquely urbane diction, and his quiet humor have all been taken to prove his role as a conscious popularizer of Greek values. Thus Hecyra has been praised for its refusal to pander to Roman taste. Adelphoe has been read as a philosophical struggle between Paullus and Cato played out by surrogates, and the legalism of Phormio has been called "a kind of Scipionic inside joke." Such readings are very convenient, but we can no longer accept them uncritically.

For one thing, historians have disbanded the "Scipionic Circle." Scipio Aemilianus doubtless formed significant friendships with literary figures like Polybius and Lucilius, but the notion of a salon centered around him has been revealed as little more than a fiction of Cicero's dialogues. We have also lost that useful dichotomy between Scipio and Cato. The complex cultural issue between them can no longer be explained by the old stereotypes. Under scrutiny, the career of Aemilianus has turned out to be something less than uniquely enlightened, and a reappraisal of Cato's attitude toward the Greeks reveals nearly as great an interest in their heritage as a distaste for their contemporary character. It has been a misleading simplification to speak, at least in cultural terms, of phil- and antihellenic factions in second-century Rome. Both Cato and Polybius mocked A. Postumius Albinus for writing history in a Greek poor enough to require its author's apology, while Cato himself, though always writing Latin, admired Demosthenes and was steeped in the work of Xenophon. Finally, we have lost the comforting idea of a new humanitas. Both the word and the concept in Latin date only from Cicero's time, and that widely cited statement of Terentian humanitas, "homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto" (HT 77), is only a busybody's excuse for his prying.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Understanding Terence by Sander M. Goldberg. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• ABBREVIATIONS, pg. ix
• PREFACE, pg. xi
• I THE CONTEXT, pg. 1
• II. THE PROLOGUES, pg. 31
• III. THE WELL-MADE PLAY, pg. 61
• IV. Contaminatio, pg. 91
• V. THE duplex comoedia, pg. 123
• VI. THE PRICE OF SIMPLICITY, pg. 149
• VII. THE purus sermo, pg. 170
• VIII. THE DEATH OF COMEDY, pg. 203
• SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 221
• INDEX, pg. 227