Page:Comedies of Publius Terentius Afer (1870).djvu/16

x events are less pleasantly told, for it was hissed off the Roman stage. This translation skims the surface, eschewing the depths of the scholiast, and offers to those who will accept it a picture of Rome 150 years before our Christian era, and before the Civil Wars began, which degraded Rome from the peaceful and legal position here portrayed, and which did not reassume the virtues with the vices, which we find deplored, or affected to be deplored, by Horace, Juvenal, and Persius.

Like Æsop, Terence was also a slave. We lose sight of him at the early age of thirty-five. He enjoyed patrician society, and his daughter married a patrician.

The frontispiece is taken from a manuscript in our possession in the British Museum, and is printed in a paper read before the Royal Society of Antiquaries, plate vi., vol. xxiv., p. 144.