In connection with the beginnings of the Andria, there have been anecdotes and scholarly theories ever since the time of Suetonius and his sources for the Life of Terence, and they intrigued Donatus in his commentary. Naturally, then, they have developed their own influence in the scholarly tradition. An anecdote recounted by Suetonius, who does not name his source, reports that when Terence delivered his play to the aediles of 166 BCE (who would be producing the comedy at the Megalensian Games), he was ordered (or invited, iussus) to read it first to Caecilius Statius (the current grand old man of Latin Comedy). It happened that Caecilius was dining when Terence appeared, dressed with no distinction and therefore earning the coolness of Caecilius. The old man treated him like a servant and had him seat himself on a stool next to his couch and start reading, so as to disturb his dining as little as possible. However, once Terence began reading his play, after only a few verses, he was invited up to Caecilius' couch and proceeded to read through the remainder of the play to the considerable admiration of his host. Now, scholars have had several things to say about this story. First and most commonly, they have pointed out that good evidence fixes the death of Caecilius in 168, roughly two years before the performance of the Andria; and accordingly this story has no factual substance. Good, there is no reason to try to combat facts: this interesting meeting of Caecilius and Terence never happened. However, we do not need to throw away the Suetonian story as useless trivia. The reason someone devised the story was evidently to bring the older generation of comic poetry into contact with the new and to voice its strong approval of its successor's first product, the Andria. Although Caecilius himself may never have known Terence, the plays of the two were linked by a common impresario, Lucius Ambivius Turpio. The didascaliae to all six plays of Terence credit him with being the producer, and in the so-called second prologue of the Hecyra Ambivius reports that he had troubles producing the plays of Caecilius, as he had recently had with Terence's.

Let me start by quoting a paragraph from a century old edition of Terence, which will serve as a reminder of changes in our background knowledge of both comedy and this particular comic playwright:

There is plenty here to question, if not correct. What does it mean to call Adelphoe more true to human nature? What defines an ‘interesting character’? And do present day readers still find Hecyra the play of least merit? As for the art with which Terence’s plots are unfolded, we still cannot guess how much of this is his own contribution rather than derived from Menander (whose plays were still unknown when this edition was written). However, scholars have used both the evidence given by Terence in the prologues and his commentator Donatus to identify where he has himself innovated in his plots—removing the expository prologues to replace irony with suspense, introducing a second lover and slave into Andria, working a braggart soldier and his parasite into Eunuchus and inserting an abduction scene into the second act of Adelphoe. And yet it was Terence’s immediate predecessor Caecilius whom Varro, most learned of ancient critics, praised for his superior plots. Certainly Terence does not indulge in the extravagance of Plautus, but is this because he is ‘essentially an imitative artist’? On the other hand I would not challenge the editor’s evaluation of his scripts as ‘smooth, consistent and moderate’ or his praise for the playwright’s ‘artistic finish’. Instead I would ask if this is what we want, or ought to want from comedy.

In this study, I examine what it means to be a father, a son, and the father-son relationship in three Terentian comedies, the Andria, Self-Tormentor, and Adelphoe. Like the Menandrian originals on which they are based, these plays all employ a marriage plot centring on a young man's efforts to win and or retain his beloved in marriage or a temporary union. In each case, the story (or stories) about the romantic union of a young man and woman takes a back seat to a story about the negotiations between men needed to forge that union. As in Menander's plays, this homosocial orientation invests Terence's marriage plot with a dense network of cultural and ideological concerns. These concerns surface most clearly in the characterisation of the obstacle to the young man's relationship. In the plays under consideration here, the primary obstacle to the marriage or love relationship is the young man's father. In most cases, the fathers only object to their sons having relationships with non-marriageable women when they (the fathers) decide that it is time for their sons to marry. Significantly, the perceived status discrepancy does not operate as an absolute barrier to the young man's romantic relationship in the father's eyes (as in Menander's extant plays and fragments). Rather, the problem arises when the son's desire to remain in the relationship conflicts with his father's desire that he marry a respectable woman. Because the obstacle is framed in this way—as a direct confrontation between the discordant desires of fathers and sons—Terence's marriage plots provide an important window on the ideology of the Roman family and its kinship structure.

There is no such thing as society.
Thatch

Friends and neighbours, that's where it's at
friends and neighbours, that's a fact.
Ornette Coleman (1970)

All Terence's ½-doz. plays come complete with instructions on how to read them. They give you a fair idea, for a start, of what you're going to get yourself involved in. They always did, delivering audiences to the exponentially expanding Roman culture of the 160s BCE, delivering drama, and theatre culture, from that critical world-beating juncture in the history of the West to a constantly self-renewing, and ultimately perpetual, Graeco-Roman education, through language + learning: Prologue (§1).

Before all, this is the play with the unpronounceable Greek handle. Just about its only Hellenism to survive processing into Terence's expertly screened Latinity. A word-and-a-half set to catch any lover of language—it made Baudelaire write a poem, just so he could list Hautontimoroumenos as a title in Fleurs du Mal: Je te frapperai sans colèrelet sans haine comme un boucher.… (For us, his line-and-a-half must be: Je suis de mon coeur le vampire.) The word-title is a paradigmatic slogan that roars—fortissimo—that complex internal relations between the person and the self feature as the semiotic-cum-problematic of this play. L'innommable—beyond Latinity to put into words, hence the compulsion to dramatise: Title (§2).

…mihi prospiciam et Phaedriae.
Phormio 1036

…I'd better look ahead for my own interest, and Phaedria's.

If the anecdotal material from Terence's biography can be trusted, 161 BCE was the playwright's breakthrough year in which he secured his position in Rome as the premier comedian of his generation. At the Ludi Megalenses in April Terence's Eunuch was such a popular success it earned a same-day repeat performance and the unprecedented payment of 8,000 sesterces for its author. In September of that same year Terence was hired by the curule aediles once again to bring another play, the fifth he would compose, to the stage at the Ludi Romani. On that occasion, far from opening his prologue with the vaunting self-promotion of a poet who had recently pleased his audience so thoroughly, Terence returned for the fourth time to his customary complaints against some unnamed old poet who had yet again levelled criticism at his young rival. And while it appears that Terence was simply sticking with a proven, successful formula, in other regards the young poet was in fact showing signs of a new confidence of privileged position by varying from another of his regular compositional practices: he had, he tells his audience, changed the name of the original Greek play by Apollodorus to one of his own choosing:

nunc quid uelim animum attendite: adporto nouam
Epidicazomenon quam uocant comoediam
Graeci, Latini Phormionem nominant
quia primas partis qui aget is erit Phormio
parasitus, per quem res geretur maxume,
uoluntas uostra si ad poetam accesserit.
(Phorm. 24-29)

Now pay attention to what I want: I bring a
new comedy which the Greeks call Epidikazomenos,
and Latin speakers entitle Phormio
because the man who’ll play the chief part will be
the parasite Phormio, on whom the plot will mostly depend
if you’ll throw your favour to the poet.

Boiled down to its essentials, domestic comedy is about the business of getting and begetting, about economics and reproduction. True, it might be more fair to say that it is about the sense individuals have about their own roles and actions in these enterprises—about love and fear and regret, for example—but the twin concerns of household wealth and the status of future generations provide the structure within which these emotions take on meaning. To be more precise, these concerns are not just twinned, but are part of a single process which we might call ‘familial reproduction’, i.e. the process of using material, cultural and biological resources to stabilise the family's identity and status in the present and to extend the family's identity and status into the future. One important resource that Roman families drew on was the rich and manifold resource of the slave members of the familia.

Michael Cronin once described translation as ‘what saves us from having to read the original’. To cite this statement at the start of any discussion of Terence is a little ironic given that critics have not infrequently used his comedies as an opaque glass through which, if only one squints hard enough, one can read the original Greek New Comedy. Noticeably, these lost originals usually live their imagined existences free from the dramatic flaws of Terence's adaptations. For example, Grant writes on the seeming abruptness of Micio's challenge to Demea at Adelphoe 829-31, that in the Greek original ‘the challenge would not have been as abrupt as it is in the Terentian adaptation. The probable reason for the abruptness is that Terence did not realize the difference between Attic and Roman law [on inheritance] in this respect.’ It is certainly possible that he is right, and that Terence omitted something in Menander which caused problems for the flow of his play. It is, however, also entirely possible that the original was similarly abrupt or that there was some other reason for the scene's choppiness than Terence's lamentable ignorance of the inheritance laws of Athens or his poor skills in translation.

The traditional ordering of Terence's plays in editions and translations obscures an important fact: the Hecyra was Terence's second play, not the fifth. It has fifth place in the collection because, as the second prologue narrates in some detail, the first two productions were failures, and the order is based on the date of the first successful production rather than on the order of composition. And there is no evidence that the author made any changes to the script; indeed, the prologues suggest quite the opposite. The first deliberately plays on the idea of ‘newness’: when it was given as a nouafabula (‘new play’, If.) it encountered a nouom uitium (‘new/novel disaster’, 2) and is now presented pro noua (‘as if new’, 5). When it was really new it met with a correspondingly new disaster: the tight-rope walker distracted everyone's attention so that no-one saw enough to make any sense of it (neque spectari neque cognosci potuerit, 3), and so we can reasonably assert that it is still new even though technically it isn't. The parallel with Turpio's account in the second prologue of what he did in the case of unsuccessful productions of Caecilius makes this clear: when he first put on new plays by this author he was sometimes driven out of the theatre and at others could scarcely hold his ground (15-17). But as he says he persevered: easdem agere coepi…perfeci ut spectarentur: ubi sunt cognitae,/placitae sunt (‘I undertook to put the same plays on again; I managed to get people to see them, and when they had worked out what was going on, they were a success’, 18, 20f.). The purpose was not to get Caecilius to rewrite the flops but to encourage him to write other new plays; by making successes of what had been flops in the original performance, the producer demonstrates to his scriptwriter that he really has talent after all. It worked for Caecilius and it has worked for Terence, too; now that he has forged a reputation with three more successes in the interim (alias cognostis eius, ‘you’ve understood his other stuff, 8), it is time to give this play the hearing and the appreciation that it has always deserved. (The emphasis on the intelligence required to be an audience member—cognosci, 3; cognostis, 8; cognitae, 20; uostra intelligentia, 31—is of course highly pertinent; this is not a play for populus stupidus, ‘stupid yobs’, 4.)

The Vita Terenti, Suetonius' biography, presents Terence as the classic Republican self-made man. Born in Carthage on the margins of the empire, he is said to have been brought to Italy as part of the spoils of conquest (the very word for ‘spoils’, praeda, is used to describe him in the epigram or epitaph devoted to his memory in the Latin Anthology). Here is a rags to riches to rags again story: the Cinderella figure reading out his first play on a humble bench, then invited to join Caecilius, the comic toast of the town, at his high table; the pretty boy-slave who mingled suspiciously closely with Scipio and Laelius. Six perfect plays later, and varying degrees of success, at the age of twenty-five Terence was pitched into decline: he withdrew, he retired, he went into voluntary exile to Asia or to darkest Greece, he drowned at sea, in the middle of a valiant last attempt to bring a suitcase of Menander's plays to Italy, or else he died of grief at the loss of his baggage. The details vary, but the stories always return him to the margins he emerged from, leaving behind his exemplary dramatic products and his solid influence on the school curriculum for centuries to come. Of course this narrative has its improbable side (Suetonius himself is sceptical about the various reports): the name Afer does not necessarily mean that Terence was African; Caecilius had died two years before Terence's first play was performed; the rumours about men in high places ghost-writing for him have been lifted straight from one of the prologues. But take it on its own terms and it is a tale based on the fluid opportunities of the expanding Roman world, a tale of suspicion, integration and then rejection. Terence begins and ends as part of the flotsam of empire.