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The Plot Thickens: Hidden Outlines in Terence's Prologues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Emily Gowers
Emily Gowers*
Affiliation:
St John's College, Cambridge
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Extract

The Vita Terenti, Suetonius' biography, presents Terence as the classic Republican self-made man. Born in Carthage on the margins of the empire, he is said to have been brought to Italy as part of the spoils of conquest (the very word for ‘spoils’, praeda, is used to describe him in the epigram or epitaph devoted to his memory in the Latin Anthology). Here is a rags to riches to rags again story: the Cinderella figure reading out his first play on a humble bench, then invited to join Caecilius, the comic toast of the town, at his high table; the pretty boy-slave who mingled suspiciously closely with Scipio and Laelius. Six perfect plays later, and varying degrees of success, at the age of twenty-five Terence was pitched into decline: he withdrew, he retired, he went into voluntary exile to Asia or to darkest Greece, he drowned at sea, in the middle of a valiant last attempt to bring a suitcase of Menander's plays to Italy, or else he died of grief at the loss of his baggage. The details vary, but the stories always return him to the margins he emerged from, leaving behind his exemplary dramatic products and his solid influence on the school curriculum for centuries to come. Of course this narrative has its improbable side (Suetonius himself is sceptical about the various reports): the name Afer does not necessarily mean that Terence was African; Caecilius had died two years before Terence's first play was performed; the rumours about men in high places ghost-writing for him have been lifted straight from one of the prologues. But take it on its own terms and it is a tale based on the fluid opportunities of the expanding Roman world, a tale of suspicion, integration and then rejection. Terence begins and ends as part of the flotsam of empire.

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Research Article
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Ramus , Volume 33 , Issue 1-2: Rethinking Terence , 2004 , pp. 150 - 166
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Copyright © Aureal Publications 2004

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References

1. On the Vita see Frank (1933); Beare (1942). For citations from Terence I have used the Loeb edition of Barsby (2001); translations are my own.

2. Epitafium Terenti, Anth. Lat. 487,.2: bellica praeda (‘the spoils of war’).

3. Goldberg (1986), 32.

4. E.g. Goldberg (1986), 31: ‘Terence thrusts his quarrel to the front and abandons entirely the expository prologue so common in Greek New Comedy.’ On the prologues, see also Leo (1960 [1898]); Ronconi (1927); Klose (1966); Duckworth (1952), 61–65, 211–18; Gelhaus (1972).

5. Goldberg (1986), 33.

6. Goldberg (1986), 32.

7. Goldberg (1986), 48; Gelhaus (1972); Lefèvre (1976). See also Focardi (1978). Eugraphius’ introduction to Andria (p.3.8W) lists three functions of a prologue: omnis prologus triplici inducitur causa, uel ut argumentum exhibere uel poetam populo commendare uel ut a populo audientiam postulet (‘all prologues are put on for three purposes: either to reveal the plot, or to recommend the poet to the public, or to demand an audience from the public’).

8. See Richardson (1997) for a hypothesis about the differences between original and new versions.

9. See Goldberg (1986), 51, on the reversed values of the terms used here.

10. Cf.Phorm. 571.

11. Goldberg (1986), 45. This type of stilted narrative is condemned in invented comic verses at Rhet. Her. 1.9.14: Athenis Megaram uesperi aduenit Simo;/ubi aduenit Megaram, insidias fecit uirgini;/insidias postquam fecit, uim in loco adtulit (‘Simo came to Megara from Athens in the evening; when he got to Megara, he lay in wait for a girl; when he had lain in wait for her, he raped her on the spot’).

12. Cf. Pamphilus’ paranoid response at And. 248f.: quot modis contemptus, spretus! facta transacta omnia, em,/repudiatus repetor. quam ob rem? nisi si id est quod suspicor (‘Scorned and despised at every turn! Everything signed and sealed, and then they reject me, and then they call me back! Why? I don’t know, unless what I suspect is true…’).

13. Cf. And. 970: narras probe (‘good news!’).

14. Cited by name (unlike the old poet), just as the authentication of Glycerium depends on the naming of Chrysis’ father (And. 928); cf. Glycerium mea suos parentis repperit (‘my Glycerium has found her parents’, 969).

15. Anderson (2003–04) observes that Terence does supply an alternative argumentum missing from the prologue in the shape of Simo’s speech about his son to his freedman Sosia in the first scene, a speech that came to serve as a model for narratio in Cic. de Inv. (1.33) and de Or. (2.326). Of the prologue itself he writes (2): ‘Lines 1–27 are taken up with a Terentian “prologue” that functions as a critical defense of Terence and has no part in the comedy or its exposition.”

16. Henderson in this volume meditates on the play on reflexivity in the prologue, where the last word is sibi (‘for himself’, 52).

17. si quid laborist nollem (82), ne labora (89), laborans (139), ad laborem (165).

18. Much more on this in Henderson in this volume.

19. Vita Terenti 2.

20. Nomen profiteri is a metaphor from military enrolment. Cf. Eun. 1092 where the miles Thraso says: numquam etiam fui usquam quin me omnes amarent plurumum (‘I’ve never been anywhere where they didn’t all love me to bits’).

21. Dessen (1995), 128. At 123 she cites Ps.-Servius 53R: principalis materia in hac comoedia: si aliae personae inducantur eunucho subseruiuntur: & omnes partes fabulae aliquo modo ad eunuchum tendunt (‘this is the main theme of the comedy: if other characters get involved with the eunuch, they are subordinate to him; and every part of the plot in some way leads to the eunuch’).

22. Dessen (1995), 137. See also Goldberg (1986), 94f., on the defiling metaphor in containinare.

23. Dessen (1995), 137.

24. 10 out of 23 uses, to be precise. See Gilmartin (1975) on this and on the concentration of violence in the interpolated scene.

25. Ludwig (1968) argues persuasively that Terence tended to pep up his Greek originals with farce, rather than tone them down.

26. A question echoed in the play by challenges to other characters’ virility: sentiet qui uir siem (‘she’ll realise what sort of a man I am’, 66); nunc, Parmeno, ostendes te qui uir sies (‘now, Parmeno, you will prove your manhood’, 307). And cf. the parasite Gnatho’s joke at 244: omnia habeo nec quicquam habeo; nil quom est, nil defit tamen (‘I have everything and I have nothing. I have nothing, but nothing’s missing’). Gilmartin (1975), 263, in passing calls Terence’s words a ‘slangy double-entendre’. John Henderson suggests to me a parallel with Calvus’ epigram on Pompey (fr. 18 Courtney): Magnus, quern metuunt omnes, digito caput uno/scalpit; quid credos hunc sibi uelle? uirum (‘Magnus, the man everyone fears, scratches his head with one finger. What do you think he needs? A man’).

27. Arnott (1970) = Segal (2001), 257–72.

28. ‘Fixer’: Konstan (1983), 129.

29. Goldberg (1986), 169.

30. E.g. HT 385–87 (Bacchis to Antiphila): et quom egomet nunc mecum in animo uitam tuam considerolomniumque adeo uostrarum uolgus quae ab se segregant,/et uos esse istius modi et nos non esse baud mirabilest (‘when I consider your life and the lives of all of you who shun the crowd, I don’t wonder that you are they way you are and we aren’t’); Eun. 937–40 (again, on the gutter life of prostitutes): harum uidere inluuiem sordes inopiam,/quam inhonestae solae sint domi atque auidae cibi,/quo pacto ex iure hesterno panem atrum uorent,/nosse omnia haec salutist adulescentulis (‘to look at their filth, squalor and impecuniousness, how unladylike they are when alone at home, how greedy, how they eat black bread dunked in yesterday’s gravy—to know all this is the salvation of young men’). Henderson (1988), 216, refers to ‘a path in comedy “up” from the vulgar carnival farcicalities of Plautus to the purged refinement of Terentian literariness’. Cf. Leigh (2000), 23 (‘The audience which stays with the Mother-in-law until the very end can identify itself with the culturally refined and against the boorish’); Lada-Richards (2004); Gilula (1981). For a more literal approach to the play’s failure, see Sandbach (1982).

31. A withdrawal that no doubt inspired the various withdrawals recorded in the Suetonian Vita: see above.

32. Cf. Don. ad Hec. 198 (conatur Terentius aduersus famam socrum bonam reperire, ‘Terence tries to find a good mother-in-law who bucks the stereotype’) and 774 (nam et socrus bonus et meretrices honesti cupidas praeter quam peruulgatum est facit, ‘for he makes mothers-in-law good and gives tarts hearts of gold contrary to popular opinion’).

33. The words placita and exigunt we recognise from the vocabulary of dramatic success and failure: And. 3, Eun. 1, Ad. 18; And. 27. See below for parallels with Hecyra itself.

34. Parker (1996).

35. Cf. the didascalia’s report of the plays’ reception (presumably deduced from the prologues themselves): on the second performance: non est placita (‘it was a failure’); on the third: placuit (‘it was a success’).

36. Henderson (1988), 198: ‘…in obedience to the author to the order that we don’t pass negligently by the scene which has been rescued from negligent by-passing.’

37. Cf. Plaut. Trin. 16f.

38. Cf. Demea’s anagnorisis speech at 880f.: non posteriores feram…qui sum natu maxumus (‘I shan’t play second fiddle…when I’m the eldest’).

39. Henderson (1988), 203.

40. Callier (1982). Henderson (1988), 215: ‘It seems clear that Hegio stands as the cast’s own yardstick of behaviour so far as it affects the community.’

41. Leigh (2000), 15: ‘It would be satisfying to detect such a relationship between the Eunuch of Terence and its performance at the Ludi Megalenses of 161…but the Girl from Andros, the Self-Tormentor, and the Mother-in-law were also put on at the same festival in 166, 165, and 163, and none of these overtly thematises the problem of castration.’

42. There must be a good case for seeing a programmatic joke in the detail at Hec. 184 that the daughter-in-law pretends she has been summoned by her mother to a festival: simulat se ad matrem accersi ad rem diuinam, obit (‘she pretended her mother had sent for her to take part in some festival, and off she went’). The play’s setting, the Ludi Megalenses, becomes a character’s alibi.