Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/1010

998 he had business in hand. When at length he entered the supper-room, he excused his absence by saying he had been writing verses, and had never written any more to his liking. He then recited the opening lines of the 4th scene in the 4th act of the "Self-Tormentor:"

"Satis, pol, proterve me Syri promissa hue induxerunt," &c.

The belief that Terence was aided by his friends in composition, if properly limited, has in it nothing improbable. He was a foreigner, and of a race, to which, whether Libyan or Iberian, the Greek and Latin idioms presented no ordinary difficulties. Of the English, who speak and write French, few attain to precision or purity, and the Punic or Basque dialects diverged more from the languages of Athens and Rome than the speech of London from the speech of Paris. From the purity of Terence's diction we might, without these anecdotes, infer his intimacy with the best society in Rome. Of that society, in that age, the Scipios were the leaders; and the Laelii, both male and female, the models of forensic and conversational eloquence. [, No. 1.] Nor did Terence deny the charge. He gloried in it, as the test of his proficiency as an artist. (Prol. in Adelph.) Our own dramatic literature furnishes parallel cases. Garrick added a scene to the "West Indian," and revised the "Clandestine Marriage." Pope retouched the songs in the "Beggar's Opera," and the "Medea" was submitted to the critics of Leicester House. Yet no one doubts that Cumberland, Colraan, Gay, and Glover, were respectively the authors of those productions. The story of Terence's poverty is less easy to refute, but we disbelieve it equally. He owned an estate of a few acres, contiguous to the Appian road, and, after his decease, his daughter married a man of equestrian rank. Neither of these facts accords with the assertion of Porcius Licinius (Donat.), that he was too poor to hire a house or keep a slave. An eques would scarcely wed a portionless maiden, the daughter of a freedman; and even in that age, land lying near the great highway of Italy must have been valuable as pasture, arable, or building ground. Avarice, on the other hand, was not the vice of the Scipios. (Polyb. xxxii. 14.) If they took freely from kings and tetrarchs (Liv. xxxviii. 50), without scrupulously accounting to the treasury, they gave freely to their favourites and dependents. Ennius, though poor (Hieron. Chron. Ol. 135), did not starve under their roof, and was buried in their tomb; Polybius and Panaetius lightened the privations of exile in their camp and their villas, and Lucilius, who succeeded Terence in the friendship of Scipio and Laelius, could afford to make literature his profession. But, if by poverty be meant indigence, the tenour of Terence's history contradicts the rumour of his poverty. After the representation of his six comedies, for one of which, the Eunuch, he received the unprecedented sum of nearly 60l., he travelled in Greece. Now a journey in Greece could not be performed in those days any more than in our own without cost, even if his patrons lightened his charges by their tesserae hospitales (Plant. Poen. v. 1. 25), to their various clients and friends. And Terence resided, as well as travelled in Greece, since while there he translated 108 of Menander's comedies; nor as an alien could he hold a libera legatio, or commission to live at the public expense while transacting his private business. These facts, gleaned from his biographers themselves, render the neglect of the patrons and the indigence of the client very doubtful. The hostility to Terence was perhaps owing partly to professional causes, and partly to his popularity with the great. Terence was a foreigner, a freedman, and the adherent of a party. Even Horace was taunted with being libertino patre natus; and in Horace's days the long civil wars and the influx of strangers into the senate and the tribes had melted down many of the old Italian prejudices. In Terence's age there were two strongly opposed parties in literature, as well as in politics,—the Latin party, of which Cato and the Fabii were the representatives, and the Greek, or movement-party, of which the Scipios were the leaders and Terence the favourite. Here was plentiful matter for libel. Whether the attacks of Lavinius drove him from Italy, or whether he went to Greece as to a university, is uncertain. Before his departure his detractors had affirmed that from his ignorance of Attic manners and idiom his versions of Menander and Apollodorus were caricatures. (Prol. in Andr. Heautont. Phorm.) He never returned, and the accounts of his death are as various as the records of his life. According to one story, after embarking at Brundisium, he was never heard of more; according to others, he died at Stymphalus, in Arcadia (Auson. Epist. xviii.), in Leucadia, or at Patrae, in Achaia. One of his biographers said he was drowned, with all the fruits of his sojourn in Greece, on his home-passage. But the prevailing report was, that his translations of Menander were lost at sea, and that grief for their loss caused his death. He died in the 36th year of his age, in B. C. 159, or, according to St. Jerome (Chron. Ol. 155, 3), in the year following. He left a daughter, but nothing is known of his family.

Six comedies, all belonging to the Fabula Palliata, are all that remain to us; and since in these we can verify the citations from him in the grammarians, they are probably all that Terence produced. His later versions of Menander were, in all likelihood, from their number and the short time in which they were made, merely studies for future dramas of his own, and therefore are not to be ranked as deperdita. For Terence's exemption from the neglect or ravages of time various causes may be assigned. His works were few in number, and small in bulk. From their purity of diction, they became the text-books of the grammatical and rhetorical schools; they found favour with St. Jerome, and escaped the censures of the church. They were brought forward at the following seasons and under the following circumstances.

1., "the Woman of Andros," so called from the birth-place of Glycerium, its heroine, was first represented at the Megalesian Games, on the 4th of April, B. C. 166. It was, according to Donatus, the first in order of time of Terence's plays. This has been disputed by subsequent critics (Petitus, de Ord. Com. P. Ter.), but seems warranted by the poet's age—27—at his interview with Caecilius (suprà) and by the original title, Andria Terentii. For in the didascalia it was the custom to put the name of the play foremost, if by an author hitherto unknown; whereas Terentii Andria would import that it was a new piece by a known writer. From the anecdote of Caecilius above