William Young Sellar

“ We learn from these prologues that the best Roman literature was ceasing to be popular, and had come to rely on the patronage of the great. A consequence of this change of circumstances was that comedy was no longer national in character and sentiment, but had become imitative and artistic. The life which Terence represents is that of a well-to-do-citizen class whose interests are commonplace, but whose modes of thought and speech are refined, humane, and intelligent. His characters are finely delineated and discriminated rather than boldly conceived, as they are in Plautus. ”

“ Terence was by birth a Phœnician, and was thus perhaps a fitter medium of connexion between the genius of Greece and that of Italy than if he had been a pure Greek or a pure Italian; just as in modern times the Jewish type of genius is sometimes found more detached from national peculiarities, and thus more capable of reproducing a cosmopolitan type of character than the genius of men belonging to the other races of Europe. ”

“ TERENCE. P. Terentius Afer (185?–159 B.C.) holds a unique position among Roman writers. No writer in any literature has gained so great a reputation who has contented himself with so limited a function. He lays no claim to the position of an original artist painting from life or commenting on the results of his own observation. His art has no relation to his own time or to the country in which he lived. ”

“ The best judges and the greatest masters of style in the best period of Roman literature were his chief admirers in ancient times. Cicero frequently reproduces his expressions, applies passages in his plays to his own circumstances, and refers to his personages as typical representations of character. [2] Julius Cæsar characterizes him as "puri sermonis amator." Horace, so depreciatory in general of the older literature, shows his appreciation of Terence by the frequent reproduction in his Satires and in his Odes of his language and his philosophy of life. ”

“ He recriminates upon his adversary as one who, by his literal adherence to his original, had turned good Greek plays into bad Latin ones. He justifies himself from the charge of plagiarizing from Plautus and Nævius. In another prologue he contrasts his own treatment of his subjects with the sensational extravagance of others. He meets the charge of receiving assistance in the composition of his plays by claiming, as a great honour, the favour which he enjoyed with those who were the favourites of the Roman people. ”

“ Living in the interval between Ennius and Lucilius, whose original force and genius survive only in rude and inartistic fragments, he produced six plays, which have not only reached our time in the form in which they were given to the world, but have been read in the most critical and exacting literary epochs, and still may be read without any feeling of the need of making allowance for the rudeness of a new and undeveloped art. ”

“ 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 at the same time throw light on the literary and personal relations of the poet. ”

“ It is among the French, the great masters of the prose of refined conversation, that his merits have been most appreciated in modern times. Sainte-Beuve, in his Nouveaux Lundis, devotes to him two papers of delicate and admiring criticism. ”