The not unfrequently coarse, but always effective laying on of Roman local tints over the Greek ground-work, which Plautus was fond of, is completely and designedly banished from Terence; not an allusion puts one in mind of Rome, not a proverb, hardly a reminiscence[2]; even the Latin titles are replaced by Greek. The same distinction shows itself in the artistic treatment. First of all the players receive back their appropriate masks, and greater care is observed as to the scenic arrangements, so that it is no longer the case, as with Plautus, that everything needs to take place on the street, whether belonging to it or not. Plautus ties and unties the dramatic knot carelessly and loosely, but his plot is droll and often striking; Terence, far less effective, keeps everywhere account of probability, not unfrequently at the cost of suspense, and wages emphatic war against the certainly somewhat flat and insipid standing expedients of his predecessors, e. g. against allegoric dreams[3]. Plautus paints his characters with broad strokes, often after a stock-model, always with a view to the gross effect from a distance and on the whole; Terence handles the psychological development with a careful and often excellent miniature-painting, as in the Adelphi for instance, where the two old men - the easy bachelor enjoying life in town, and the sadly harassed not at all refined country-landlord - form a masterly contrast. The springs of action and the language of Plautus are drawn from the tavern, those of Terence from the household of the good citizen. The lazy Plautine hostelry, the very unconstrained but very charming damsels with the hosts duly corresponding, the sabre-rattling troopers, the menial world painted with an altogether peculiar humour, whose heaven is the cellar, and whose fate is the lash, have disappeared in Terence or at any rate undergone improvement. In Plautus we find ourselves, on the whole, among incipient or thorough rogues, in Terence again, as a rule, among none but honest men; if occasionally a -leno- is plundered or a young man taken to the brothel, it is done with a moral intent, possibly out of brotherly love or to deter the boy from frequenting improper haunts. The Plautine pieces are pervaded by the significant antagonism of the tavern to the house; everywhere wives are visited with abuse, to the delight of all husbands temporarily emancipated and not quite sure of an amiable salutation at home.
The comedies of Terence are pervaded by a conception not more moral, but doubtless more becoming, of the feminine nature and of married life. As a rule, they end with a virtuous marriage, or, if possible, with two - just as it was the glory of Menander that he compensated for every seduction by a marriage. The eulogies of a bachelor life, which are so frequent in Menander, are repeated by his Roman remodeller only with characteristic shyness[4], whereas the lover in his agony, the tender husband at the accouchement, the loving sister by the death-bed in the Eunuchus and the Andria are very gracefully delineated; in the Hecyra there even appears at the close as a delivering angel a virtuous courtesan, likewise a genuine Menandrian figure, which the Roman public, it is true, very properly hissed. In Plautus the fathers throughout only exist for the purpose of being jeered and swindled by their sons; with Terence in the Heauton Timorumenos the lost son is reformed by his father's wisdom, and, as in general he is full of excellent instructions as to education, so the point of the best of his pieces, the Adelphi, turns on finding the right mean between the too liberal training of the uncle and the too rigid training of the father. Plautus writes for the great multitude and gives utterance to profane and sarcastic speeches, so far as the censorship of the stage at all allowed; Terence on the contrary describes it as his aim to please the good and, like Menander, to offend nobody.
Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue, and his pieces require a lively play of gesture in the actors; Terence confines himself to "quiet conversation". The language of Plautus abounds in burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations, in comic coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence knows nothing of such caprices; his dialogue moves on with the purest symmetry, and its points are elegant epigrammatic and sententious turns. The comedy of Terence is not to be called an improvement, as compared with that of Plautus, either in a poetical or in a moral point of view. Originality cannot be affirmed of either, but, if possible, there is less of it in Terence; and the dubious praise of more correct copying is at least outweighed by the circumstance that, while the younger poet reproduced the agreeableness, he knew not how to reproduce the merriment of Menander, so that the comedies of Plautus imitated from Menander, such as the Stichus, the Cistellaria, the Bacchides, probably preserve far more of the flowing charm of the original than the comedies of the "dimidiatus Menander". And, while the aesthetic critic cannot recognize an improvement in the transition from the coarse to the dull, as little can the moralist in the transition from the obscenity and indifference of Plautus to the accommodating morality of Terence. But in point of language an improvement certainly took place. Elegance of language was the pride of the poet, and it was owing above all to its inimitable charm that the most refined judges of art in aftertimes, such as Cicero, Caesar, and Quinctilian, assigned the palm to him among all the Roman poets of the republican age. In so far it is perhaps justifiable to date a new era in Roman literature - the real essence of which lay not in the development of Latin poetry, but in the development of the Latin language - from the comedies of Terence as the first artistically pure imitation of Hellenic works of art. The modern comedy made its way amidst the most determined literary warfare. The Plautine style of composing had taken root among the Roman bourgeoisie; the comedies of Terence encountered the liveliest opposition from the public, which found their "insipid language", their "feeble style", intolerable. The, apparently, pretty sensitive poet replied in his prologues - which properly were not intended for any such purpose - with counter-criticisms full of defensive and offensive polemics; and appealed from the multitude, which had twice run off from his Hecyra to witness a band of gladiators and rope-dancers, to the cultivated circles of the genteel world. He declared that he only aspired to the approval of the "good"; in which doubtless there was not wanting a hint, that it was not at all seemly to undervalue works of art which had obtained the approval of the "few". He acquiesced in or even favoured the report, that persons of quality aided him in composing with their counsel or even with their cooperation[5]. In reality he carried his point; even in literature the oligarchy prevailed, and the artistic comedy of the exclusives supplanted the comedy of the people: we find that about 620 the pieces of Plautus disappeared from the set of stock plays. This is the more significant, because after the early death of Terence no man of conspicuous talent at all further occupied this field. Respecting the comedies of Turpilius (651 at an advanced age) and other stop-gaps wholly or almost wholly forgotten, a connoisseur already at the close of this period gave it as his opinion, that the new comedies were even much worse than the bad new pennies[6].
We have formerly shown[7] that in all probability already in the course of the sixth century a national Roman comedy (togata) was added to the Graeco-Roman (palliata), as a portraiture not of the distinctive life of the capital, but of the ways and doings of the Latin land. Of course the Terentian school rapidly took possession of this species of comedy also; it was quite in accordance with its spirit to naturalise Greek comedy in Italy on the one hand by faithful translation, and on the other hand by pure Roman imitation. The chief representative of this school was Lucius Afranius (who flourished about 66). The fragments of his comedies remaining give no distinct impression, but they are not inconsistent with what the Roman critics of art remark regarding him. His numerous national comedies were in their construction thoroughly formed on the model of the Greek intrigue-piece; only, as was natural in imitation, they were simpler and shorter. In the details also he borrowed what pleased him partly from Menander, partly from the older national literature. But of the Latin local tints, which are so distinctly marked in Titinius the creator of this species of art, we find not much in Afranius[8]; his subjects retain a very general character, and may well have been throughout imitations of particular Greek comedies with merely an alteration of costume. A polished eclecticism and adroitness in composition - literary allusions not unfrequently occur - are characteristic of him as of Terence: the moral tendency too, in which his pieces approximated to the drama, their inoffensive tenor in a police point of view, their purity of language are common to him with the latter. Afranius is sufficiently indicated as of a kindred spirit with Menander and Terence by the judgment of posterity that he wore the toga as Menander would have worn it had he been an Italian, and by his own expression that to his mind Terence surpassed all other poets.
2. Perhaps the only exception is in the
in allusion to the line of Caecilius, which is, indeed, also imitated from a Greek proverb:
The comedy is the oldest of Terence's, and was exhibited by the theatrical authorities on the recommendation of Caecilius. The gentle expression of gratitude is characteristic.
3. A counterpart to the hind chased by dogs and with tears calling on a young man for help, which Terence ridicules (Phorm. prol. 4), may be recognized in the far from ingenious Plautine allegory of the goat and the ape (Merc, ii. 1). Such excrescences are ultimately traceable to the rhetoric of Euripides (e. g. Eurip. Hec. 90).
4. Micio in the
5. In the prologue of the
And in the later prologue (594) to the
As early as the time of Cicero it was the general supposition that Laelius and Scipio Aemilianus were here meant: the scenes were designated which were alleged to proceed from them; stories were told of the journeys of the poor poet with his genteel patrons to their estates near Rome; and it was reckoned unpardonable that they should have done nothing at all for the improvement of his financial circumstances. But the power which creates legend is, as is well known, nowhere more potent than in the history of literature. It is clear, and even judicious Roman critics acknowledged, that these lines could not possibly apply to Scipio who was then twenty-five years of age, and to his friend Laelius who was not much older. Others with at least more judgment thought of the poets of quality Quintus Labeo (consul in 571) and Marcus Popillius (consul in 581), and of the learned patron of art and mathematician, Lucius Sulpicius Gallus (consul in 588); but this too is evidently mere conjecture. That Terence was in close relations with the Scipionic house cannot, however, be doubted: it is a significant fact, that the first exhibition of the
6. IV. XI. Token-Money.
7. III. XIV. National Comedy.
8. External circumstances also, it may be presumed, co-operated in bringing about this change. After all the Italian communities had obtained the Roman franchise in consequence of the Social war, it was no longer allowable to transfer the scene of a comedy to any such community, and the poet had either to keep to general ground or to choose places that had fallen into ruin or were situated abroad. Certainly this circumstance, which was taken into account even in the production of the older comedies, exercised an unfavourable effect on the national comedy.