Terence (c.195–159 BCE,) properly Publius Terentius Āfer, was a Roman comic playwright. As a translator and adapter of the Greek New Comedy, produced about 336–250 BCE, he gave near-perfect form and expression in Latin to the comedy of manners. He probably wielded a direct influence on Shakespeare.
Born in Carthage, now in Tunisia, Terence became the slave of the Roman senator Terentius Lucanus, who brought Terence to Rome, educated him, and liberated him.
Terence’s first play was the Andria (166 BCE; ‘The Girl from Andros.’) Its success introduced Terence to the most refined society of Rome and gained him the patronage of the statesmen Gaius Laelius and Scipio Aemilianus, the Younger. After spending some years in Rome, Terence went to Greece when he was 35. He never returned from the journey and died young. Of his family life, nothing is understood, except that he left a daughter and an expensive estate on the Appian Way, just outside Rome.
Contemporary scholars have been engrossed with the question of the extent to which Terence was an original writer, as opposed to a mere translator of his Greek models. Some scholars believe that Terence’s plays were not his work but were composed with the help of unidentified nobles.
Six of Terence’s comedies are still surviving: Andria (166 BCE,) Hecyra (165 BCE; ‘Mother-in-Law,’) Heauton Timoroumenos (163 BCE; ‘Sell-Tormentor,’) Eunuchus (161 BCE,) Phormio (161 BCE,) and Adelphi (160 BCE; ‘Brothers.’) They are Greek in origin and scene, and four of them are directly based on Greek dramatist Menander.
The influence of Terence on Roman education and the later European theatre was immense. His language was accepted as a standard of pure Latin, and his work was studied and discussed throughout antiquity. Many of his conventions and plot constructions were later used by Molière, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and other European dramatists.
Several of Terence’s lines have become proverbial: quot homines, tot sententiae (‘as many opinions as there are people’) and fortīs fortuna adiuvat (‘fortune favours the brave,’) both from Phormio, and homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (‘I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.’) from Heauton Timorumenos.
Prominent translations include Betty Radice’s The Brothers and Other Plays (1965) and Phormio and Other Plays (1967,) and Palmer Bovie’s The Complete Comedies of Terence: Modern Verse Translations (1974.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Terence
I take it to be a principal rule of life, not to be too much addicted to any one thing.
—Terence
Topics: Occupation
Nowadays those are rewarded who make right appear wrong.
—Terence
Topics: Appearance
Fortune favors the bold.
—Terence
Topics: Luck, Fortune
We are all of us the worse for too much liberty.
—Terence
Topics: Freedom
They are so knowing, that they know nothing.
—Terence
Topics: Knowledge
It is possible that a man can be so changed by love as hardly to be recognized as the same person.
—Terence
Topics: Love
Many a time from a bad beginning great friendships have sprung up.
—Terence
Topics: Friends and Friendship
How unfair the fate which ordains that those who have the least should be always adding to the treasury of the wealthy.
—Terence
Topics: Justice
I hold this as a rule of life: Too much of anything is bad.
—Terence
Topics: Excess
No man was ever endowed with a judgment so correct and judicious, but that circumstances, time, and experi ence, would teach him something new, and apprise him that of those things with which he thought himself the best acquainted, he knew nothing; and that those ideas which in theory appeared the most advantageous were found, when brought into practice, to be altogether impracticable.
—Terence
Topics: Experience
You believe easily that which you hope for earnestly.
—Terence
Topics: Belief
I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.
—Terence
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
I do not give money for just mere hopes.
—Terence
Topics: Chance
While the mind is in doubt it is driven this way and that by a slight impulse.
—Terence
Topics: Mind, The Mind
How often things occur by mere chance which we dared not even hope for.
—Terence
Topics: Chance
No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
—Terence
Topics: Age, Aging, Experience
What harsh judges fathers are to all young men!
—Terence
Topics: Fathers, Father
When we are well, we all have good advice for those who are ill.
—Terence
Topics: Health
I believe because it is impossible.
—Terence
Topics: Belief
So many men, so many opinions.
—Terence
Topics: Opinions
My advice is to consult the lives of other men, as one would a looking-glass, and from thence fetch examples for imitation.
—Terence
Topics: Biography, Example
Of my friends, I am the only one I have left.
—Terence
Topics: Friendship
Human nature is so constituted, that all see, and judge better, in the affairs of other men, than in their own.
—Terence
Topics: Prejudice, Judgment
How often events, by chance, and unexpectedly, come to pass, which you had not dared even to hope for!
—Terence
Topics: Chance
I am a man, and whatever concerns humanity is of interest to me.
—Terence
Topics: Humanity
As a person is so must you humor them.
—Terence
Topics: Humor
Their silence is praise enough.
—Terence
Topics: Praise
He who cannot do what he wants must make do with what he can.
—Terence
Topics: Realistic Expectations, Acceptance
There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly.
—Terence
Topics: Difficulties, Difficulty, Attitude
To touch a sore is to renew one’s grief.
—Terence
Topics: Pain
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