Carthaginian slave whose six comedies schooled Europe
Publius Terentius Afer (c. 195/185–c. 159 BC) wrote six Roman comedies adapted from Menander and Apollodorus—all surviving complete. Ancients said he was born in Carthage, enslaved to Rome, educated and freed, then died near twenty-five on an eastern voyage. His plays became imperial school staples through the nineteenth century.
Didascaliae in manuscripts log early production dates and Greek originals. The Vita Terenti tradition, beside Probus, Donatus, and Servius lives, feeds a biography both necessary and shaky.
Suetonius says he came to Rome as a slave of an otherwise unknown senator, Publius Terentius Lucanus, who educated and freed him for his talent and looks, and from whom he took the name Terentius. When he offered his first play, Andria, the aediles told him to read it first to the older poet Caecilius; the shabby young man reportedly won a seat at dinner after a few lines, though historians doubt the meeting happened.
Plays were staged at four annual festivals, the Ludi Romani, Plebeii, Apollinares and Megalenses, and at triumphs, votive games and grand funerals. Rome had no permanent theatre until Pompey's in 55 BC, so his comedies went up on temporary wooden stages before audiences probably under 2,000. The production notices credit every play to the troupe of Lucius Ambivius Turpio, with music by a piper named Flaccus. His Hecyra famously failed twice, in 165 BC and again at the funeral games of Aemilius Paullus in 160, before succeeding later that year.
Eunuchus fetched 8,000 nummi, the highest fee yet paid for a comedy in Rome, and was performed twice in one day. Terence used his prologues not for plot summary, as Plautus usually did, but to answer the slanders of an older rival whom commentators identify as Luscius Lanuvinus. At about twenty-five, or thirty-five in some manuscripts, he sailed to Greece or Asia and never came back; one tradition credits him with 108 adaptations of Menander lost in a shipwreck. His ancient description as slender and dark may simply be inferred from his supposed African birth.
Source: Terence
