Satis pol proterve me Syri promessa—Heauton. IV. iv. 1.
I'faith! the rogue Syrus's impudent pretences—
Santra [936] is of opinion that if Terence required any assistance in his compositions [937], he would not have had recourse to Scipio and Laelius, who were then very young men, but rather to Sulpicius Gallus [938], an accomplished scholar, who had been the first to introduce his plays at the games given by the consuls; or to Q. Fabius Labeo, or Marcus Popilius [939], both men of consular rank, as well as poets. It was for this reason that, in alluding to the assistance he had received, he did not speak of his coadjutors as very young men, but as persons of whose services the people had full experience in peace, in war, and in the administration of affairs.
After he had given his comedies to the world, at a time when he had not passed his thirty-fifth year, in order to avoid suspicion, as he found others publishing their works under his name, or else to make himself acquainted with the modes of life and habits of the Greeks, for the purpose of exhibiting them in his plays, he withdrew from home, to which he never returned. Volcatius gives this account of his death:
Sed ut Afer sei populo dedit comoedias,
Iter hic in Asiam fecit. Navem cum semel
Conscendit, visus nunquam est. Sic vita vacat.
(535) When Afer had produced six plays for the entertainment of the
people,
He embarked for Asia; but from the time he went on board ship
He was never seen again. Thus he ended his life.
Q. Consentius reports that he perished at sea on his voyage back from Greece, and that one hundred and eight plays, of which he had made a version from Menander [940], were lost with him. Others say that he died at Stymphalos, in Arcadia, or in Leucadia, during the consulship of Cn. Cornelius Dolabella and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior [941], worn out with a severe illness, and with grief and regret for the loss of his baggage, which he had sent forward in a ship that was wrecked, and contained the last new plays he had written.
In person, Terence is reported to have been rather short and slender, with a dark complexion. He had an only daughter, who was afterwards married to a Roman knight; and he left also twenty acres of garden ground [942], on the Appian Way, at the Villa of Mars. I, therefore, wonder the more how Porcius could have written the verses,
————nihil Publius
Scipio profuit, nihil et Laelius, nihil Furius,
Tres per idem tempus qui agitabant nobiles facillime.
Eorum ille opera ne domum quidem habuit conductitiam
Saltem ut esset, quo referret obitum domini servulus. [943]
Afranius places him at the head of all the comic writers, declaring, in his Compitalia,
Terentio non similem dices quempiam.
Terence's equal cannot soon be found.