He composed about forty plays. Most of them had Greek titles, and a considerable number of these are identical with the titles of comedies by Menander. Two of the longest of his fragments express with more bitterness and less humour the feelings which husbands in Plautus entertain towards their wives. In one of these passages he has adapted his Greek original to the coarser Roman taste with even less fastidiousness than Plautus generally shows[3]. Another passage, from the Synephebi, is more in the spirit of Terence than of Plautus. It is one in which a young lover complains that the 'good nature' (commoditas) of his father made it impossible to cheat him with an easy conscience. Occasionally we find specimens of those short maxims which probably led the Augustan critics to attribute to him the character of gravitas, such as the
Serit arbores quae alteri saeclo prosint,
quoted by Cicero in the Tusculan Questions, and this line—
Saepe est etiam sub palliolo sordido sapientia.
He seems to have had nothing of the creative originality of Plautus, nor ever to have enjoyed the same general popularity. He prepared the way for Terence by a more careful conformity to his Greek models than his predecessor had shown, and, apparently, by introducing a more serious and sentimental vein into his representations of life.
With Terence Roman literature enters on a new stage of its development. When he appeared, a younger generation had grown up, who not only inherited the enthusiasm for Greek art and letters of the older generation,—of men of the stamp of the elder Scipio, Aemilius Paulus, T. Quintius Flamininus,—but who had been carefully educated from their boyhood in Greek accomplishments. The leading representative of this younger generation, Scipio Aemilianus, was about the same age as Terence, and admitted him to his intimacy; thus showing in his early youth the same enlightened and tolerant spirit and the same cultivated aspiration which made him choose Panaetius and Polybius as the associates of his manhood, and induced him to live in relations of frank unreserve with Lucilius during the latter years of his life. Among the members of the Scipionic circle, Laelius and Furius Philo were also closely associated with Terence; and he is said to have enjoyed the favour of older men of distinction and culture, Sulpicius Gallus, Q. Fabius Labeo, and M. Popillius, men of consular rank and of literary and poetic accomplishment[4]. In the interval between Plautus and Terence, the great gap which was never again to be bridged over had been made between the mass of the people and a small educated class. While the former became less capable of intellectual pleasure, and were beginning to prefer the exhibitions of boxers, rope-dancers, and gladiators[5], to the comedies which had delighted their fathers, the latter became more exacting than the men of a former generation, in their demands for correctness and elegance. They had acquired through education the fastidiousness of men of culture, a quality not easily gained and retained without some sacrifice of native force and popular sympathies. Recognising the immense superiority of the Greek originals in literature to the rude Roman copies, they believed that the best way to create a national Latin literature was to deviate as little as possible, in spirit, form, and substance, from the works of Greek genius. But though cosmopolitan, or rather purely Greek, in their literary tastes, they were thoroughly patriotic in devotion to their country's interests. They cherished their native language as the great instrument of social and political life; and they recognised the influence which a cultivated literature might have in rendering that instrument finer and more flexible than natural use had made it. By concentrating attention on form and style, without aiming at originality of invention, Latin literature might become a truer medium of Greek culture, and might, at the same time, impart a finer edge and temper to the rude ore of Latin speech.
The task which awaited Terence was the complete Hellenising of Roman comedy, and the creation of a style which might combine something of Attic flexibility and delicacy with the idiomatic purity of the Latin spoken in the best Roman houses. By birth a Phoenician, by intellectual education a Greek, by the associations of his daily life a foreigner living in Rome, he was more in sympathy with the cosmopolitan mode of thought and feeling which Greek culture was diffusing over the civilised world, than with the traditions of Roman austerity or the homely humours of Italian life. As a dependent and associate of men belonging to the most select society of Rome, he had neither that contact with the many sides of life, nor that familiarity with the animated modes of popular speech, which helped to fashion the style of Plautus: but by assimilating the literary grace of the Athenian comedy and the familiar manner of a high-bred, friendly, and intelligent society, he gave to Latin, what the Greek language in ancient and the French in modern times have had pre-eminently, a style which gives dignity and urbanity to conversation, and freedom and simplicity to literary expression. If the oratorical tastes and training of the Romans make the absence of these last qualities perceptible in much both of their prose and verse, we feel the charm of their presence in the Letters of Cicero, the lighter poems of Catullus, the Epistles of Horace, the Epigrams of Martial: and it was owing to the social and intellectual position of Terence that this secret of combining consummate literary grace with conversational ease and spontaneity was discovered.
Our knowledge of the life of Terence is derived chiefly from a fragment of the lost work of Suetonius, De viris illustribus, preserved in the commentary of Donatus. Confirmation of some of the statements contained in the life is obtained from later writers and speakers, and also from the prologues to the different plays, which throw light on the literary and personal relations of the poet. These prologues were among the original sources of Suetonius: but he quotes or refers to the works of various grammarians and antiquarians—Porcius Licinus, Volcatius Sedigitus, Santra, Nepos, Fenestella, Q. Cosconius—as his authorities. The first two lived within a generation or two after the death of Terence, and the first of them shows a distinct animus against him and his patrons. But notwithstanding the abundance of authorities, there is uncertainty as to both the date of his birth and the place and manner of his death. The doubt as to the former arises from the discrepancy of the MSS. His last play, the Adelphoe, was exhibited in 160 b.c. Shortly after its production he went to Greece, being then, according to the best MSS., in his twenty-fifth ('nondum quintum atque vicesimum egressus[6] annum'), according to inferior MSS., in his thirty-fifth year. This uncertainty is increased by a discrepancy between the authorities quoted by Suetonius. Cornelius Nepos is quoted for the statement that he was about the same age as Scipio (born 185 b.c.) and Laelius, while Fenestella, an antiquarian of the later Augustan period, represented him as older. As the authority of the MSS. coincides with that of the older record, the year 185 b.c. may be taken as the most probable date of his birth. In the case of an author drawing originally from life, it might seem improbable that he should have written six comedies, so true in their apprehension and delineation of various phases of human nature, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. But the case of an imitative artist reproducing impressions derived from literature is different; and the circumstances of Terence's Phoenician origin and early life may well have developed in him a precocity of talent. His acknowledged intimacy with Scipio and Laelius, and the general belief that they assisted him in the composition of his plays, agree better with the statement that he was about their own age than that he was ten years older. The lines at the end of the prologue to the Heauton Timorumenos—
Exemplum statuite in me ut adulescentuli
Vobis placere studeant potius quam sibi,