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DRAMA
longer passages than any that can be confidently cited from Plautus. Thais'
discovery that Chaerea has raped Pamphila is such a passage. 1 Sometimes he
would implicitly Romanize a detail for the sake of comprehensibility or
immediacy, 2 but never with the gusto of Plautus. Sometimes he remodelled
a passage with a rather pusillanimous eye to Roman decorum : a dialogue between
a respectable wife and a prostitute is reported, not presented; a disappointed
lover contemplates not suicide but flight. 3 Terence avoids themes involving
aged or middle-aged lovers, and none of his Syruses or Parmenos steals even
those two or three minae which Plautus' Chrysalus regarded as such small beer.
From the few brief lines that can be compared directly with their originals and
from general comparison, it is clear that Terence often enfeebled the specific
quality of Menander by generalization, even where this was unnecessary: the
midwife at An. 483—5 gives her instructions in general and rhetorical form,
whereas her Menandrian counterpart spoke with a properly crone-like intimacy
and recommended the new mother to take 'the yolk of four eggs' (Men.
fr. 37 K—Th). At H.T. 64, on the other hand, it was essential to give up the
allusion to the setting of the play in Halai; but it is a weakness of all Terence's
plays that they take place nominally 'in his regionibus'', i.e. an undefined
'Athens'. Terence avoids the means which Plautus used to specify his plays
and actually goes beyond Menander in isolating his cast from contact with the
audience. He never solved the problem which his rejection of the older style
involved: Afranius, who greatly admired Terence (Macrob. 6.1.4), may have
done better here. An epigram of Julius Caesar praises Terence as puri sermonis
amator 'a lover of refined diction', but criticizes him as 'half-Menander' (0
dimidiate Menander) because of his lack of drive (uis, not uis comica).* This is
a fair point. Terence's alterations do not compensate for his failure to focus and
particularize adequately.
It is certainly mistaken, in the present writer's opinion, to interpret any of
the alterations reviewed as having deep spiritual significance, or to credit
Terence with the communication, even the invention, of a new conception of
reason, reasonability, and relationships (humanitas) that differed essentially
from ideas already present in Menander and widely diffused in the post-
Eratosthenic oecumene. 5 Plautus and Ennius do not use homo, humanus in the
1
Eun. 817—922, cf. Men. Dysk. 233—81 for the dramaturgy.
a
Eun. 255ff., an Italian market complete with butchers (cf. p. 109, n. 2); 319, the praetorian
edict.
3
Ter. Hec. 816-40, Ad. 275, Don. ad loc.% Ludwig (1968) 176.
4
Suet. Vita Terentif. The tag vis comica' comic strength'is a mistake deriving from false punctuation:
lenibusatque utinam scriptis adiunctaforet uis, \ comica utaequato uirtuspolleret honore \cum Graecis
neue hoc despecius pane iaceres; as if Caesar meant that Terence failed in uirtus compared with the
Greeks rather than uirtus comica.
5
Too much has been made of this alleged aspect of Terence, especially by Italian writers since
Croce. See Ludwig (1968) i^f., 175, 178.
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