The Slave Who Became Rome's Favorite Playwright
Terence arrived in Rome as an enslaved African boy and died before thirty, yet his six comedies were copied for a thousand years and taught to medieval schoolchildren as models of pure Latin. This is the story of how a captive won his freedom with his wit, and why rivals accused him of being too good to have written his own plays. It's a life about the strange durability of a voice that almost no one expected to survive.
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Terence rose from a Carthaginian captive to a freedman and celebrated Roman literary voice.
The cognomen Afer identifies Terence as a North African writer with a dark complexion.
Terence introduced a refined conversational Latin style known as urbanitas to the Roman stage.
Critics accused Terence of ruining scripts by blending multiple Greek sources into single plays.
Rivals claimed Terence was merely a front for elite aristocratic patrons like Scipio Aemilianus.
Medieval monks used Terence's six surviving comedies as the primary model for elegant Latin speech.
- 01Intro1 min
- 02From Carthage to the Roman Stage2 min
- 03The Six Comedies of Manners2 min
- 04The Plagiarism War3 min
- 05A Voice for the Ages2 min
- 06Outro1 min
- Terence - Wikipedia
- Introduction - Terence: Eunuchus
- Terence: A Guide to Selected Sources - Living Poets
- Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898), Terentius Afer, Publius
- The Transmission of Terence
- contaminatio
- JUDICIAL RHETORIC AND THEATRICAL PROGRAM
- Chapter 14: Roman Comedy, Part 2 (Terence)
- [PDF] The Originality of Terence and his Greek Models
- The Terentian Reformation: From Menander to Alexandria
- [PDF] The Life of Terence, Revisited - CrossWorks
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