Terence Popular Books

Terence Biography & Facts

Publius Terentius Afer (; c. 195/185 – c. 159? BC), better known in English as Terence (), was a playwright during the Roman Republic. He was the author of six comedies based on Greek originals by Menander or Apollodorus of Carystus. Terence's plays were originally staged around 166–160 BC. According to ancient authors, Terence was born in Carthage and was brought to Rome as a slave, where he gained an education and his freedom; around the age of 25, Terence is said to have made a voyage to the east in search of inspiration for his plays, where he died either of disease in Greece, or by shipwreck on the return voyage. However, Terence's traditional biography is often thought to consist of speculation by ancient scholars who lived too long after Terence to have access to reliable facts about his life. Terence's plays quickly became standard school texts. He ultimately secured a place as one of the four authors taught to all grammar pupils in the Western Roman Empire, and retained a central place in the European school curriculum until the 19th Century, exercising a formative influence on authors such as William Shakespeare and Molière. Life and career The manuscripts of Terence's plays contain didascaliae, or production notices, recording the dates, occasions, and personnel of early productions of the plays, and identifying the author of the Greek original. Other traditional information about the life of Terence derives from the Vita Terenti, a biography preserved in Aelius Donatus' commentary, and attributed by him to Suetonius. However, it is not likely that Terence's contemporaries would have considered a dramatist important enough to write down his biography for posterity, and the narrative given by Suetonius' sources is often construed as conjecture based on the play texts and didascaliae. Conditions of performance In the 2nd Century BC, plays were regular features of four annual Roman festivals: the Ludi Romani (September), the Ludi Plebeii (November), the Ludi Apollinares (July), and the Ludi Megalenses (April); plays would also be staged at votive games, triumphs, and the more elaborate aristocratic funerals. Because the Roman calendar ran some two and a half months ahead of the Sun in the 160s, Terence's plays that premiered at the Megalensia, though officially scheduled in April, would actually have premiered in late January. There was no permanent theatre in Rome until the construction of the Theatre of Pompey in 55 BC, and Terence's plays would have been performed on temporary wooden stages constructed for the occasion. The limited space available would probably have accommodated an audience of less than 2,000 persons at a given performance. Admission was free to the entire population, seemingly on a first-come-first-served basis, except for the reservation of seats for members of the Senate after 194 BC; descriptions of 2nd Century theatre audiences refer to the presence of women, children, slaves, and the urban poor. In Greek New Comedy, from which the Roman comic tradition derived, actors wore masks which were conventionally associated with stock character types. Ancient authors make conflicting statements on whether Roman actors also wore masks in the time of Terence. For a time, Christian Hoffer's 1877 dissertation On the Use of Masks in Publius Terentius' Comedies won universal acceptance for the view that masks were not worn at the original performances of the plays of Terence. However, most more recent authorities consider it highly likely that Roman actors of Terence's time did wear masks when performing this kind of play, and "hard to believe" or even "inconceivable" that they did not. Donatus states that the actors wore masks in the original productions of the Eunuchus and the Adelphoe. The didascaliae According to the didascaliae, each of Terence's plays was originally produced by the acting company of Lucius Ambivius Turpio, and musical accompaniment for each of the plays was provided by a tibicen named Flaccus, a slave in the service of a certain Claudius. The traditional and generally accepted chronology of the plays established according to the didascaliae is as follows: 166 BC: Andria at the Ludi Megalenses 165 BC: abortive production of Hecyra at the Ludi Megalenses 163 BC: Heauton timorumenos at the Ludi Megalenses 161 BC: Eunuchus at the Ludi Megalenses; Phormio at the Ludi Romani 160 BC: Adelphoe, and second abortive production of Hecyra, at the funeral games of Aemilius Paullus; third (and successful) production of Hecyra at the Ludi Romani The didascalia for each play also identifies its position in the corpus by chronological order. The didascaliae state that Eunuchus was the second play (facta II), and Heauton timorumenos was the third (facta III), testimony seemingly contradicted by the dates of production, as well as by Donatus' statement that the Eunuchus was "published third" (edita tertium). Some scholars have explained the discrepancy by positing an unsuccessful production of Eunuchus in 165 or 164 BC, or by interpreting the numbering in reference to the order of composition rather than the order of production. The didascalic numbering, seemingly discounting the unsuccessful productions of Hecyra, reckons it the fifth play. The didascaliae also appear to record some information about revival performances at least as late as the 140s. Patrick Tansey has argued that the didascalia to Phormio in the codex Bembinus contains garbled names of the consuls in 106 BC, which would be the last attested production of Terence before the Renaissance, though the consuls of 141 BC had similar names. The prologues The Greek plays which provided the Roman comedians with their material typically had a prologue which either preceded the play, or interrupted the first act after one or two scenes. In the plays of Plautus, the prologue usually, but not invariably, provides exposition of the plot; Terence abandons the traditional expository function of the prologue entirely and uses it to provide a different kind of entertainment centring on replies to criticism of his work. Terence particularly refers the "slanders" he has suffered to a certain "old" and "spiteful" poet. Because Terence says this man was the translator of Menander's Phasma and Thesaurus (Eu. 9–10), Donatus (or an earlier commentator from whom Donatus gleaned this information) was able to identify him as Luscius Lanuvinus, although no names are used in the prologues. Nothing survives of Luscius' work save two lines of the Thesaurus quoted by Donatus, nor is anything known about Luscius independently of Terence's prologues except that Volcacius Sedigitus rated Luscius the ninth-best Latin comic poet (and Terence the sixth-best). Terence's description of Luscius as "old" may refer to a style of play-writing that Terence considered old-fashioned rather than to advanced age. Terence's judgement of Luscius' work is that "by translating them well and writing them badly, he has mad.... Discover the Terence popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Terence books.