THE PLOT THICKENS:

HIDDEN OUTLINES IN TERENCE'S PROLOGUES

Emily Gowers

The Vita Terenti, Suetonius' biography, presents Terence as the classic Re-
publican self-made man.1 Born in Carthage on the margins of the empire, he is
said to have been brought to Italy as part of the spoils of conquest (the very
word for 'spoils', praeda, is used to describe him in the epigram or epitaph de-
voted to his memory in the Latin Anthology).2 Here is a rags to riches to rags
again story: the Cinderella figure reading out his first play on a humble bench,
then invited to join Caecilius, the comic toast of the town, at his high table;
the pretty boy-slave who mingled suspiciously closely with Scipio and Laelius.
Six perfect plays later, and varying degrees of success, at the age of twenty-five
Terence was pitched into decline: he withdrew, he retired, he went into volun-
tary exile to Asia or to darkest Greece, he drowned at sea, in the middle of a
valiant last attempt to bring a suitcase of Menander's plays to Italy, or else he
died of grief at the loss of his baggage. The details vary, but the stories always
return him to the margins he emerged from, leaving behind his exemplary dra-
matic products and his solid influence on the school curriculum for centuries to
come. Of course this narrative has its improbable side (Suetonius himself is
sceptical about the various reports): the name Afer does not necessarily mean
that Terence was African; Caecilius had died two years before Terence's first
play was performed; the rumours about men in high places ghost-writing for
him have been lifted straight from one of the prologues. But take it on its own
terms and it is a tale based on the fluid opportunities of the expanding Roman
world, a tale of suspicion, integration and then rejection. Terence begins and
ends as part of the flotsam of empire.
The prologues to Terence's plays offer us an important and for Rome un-
precedented account of what happened in the meantime, a story of the play-
wright's working life: details about his critics, his enemies, his patrons, and the
chequered reception of his plays—what Sander Goldberg has labelled 'arcane lit-
erary polemics'. 3 It is a commonplace that Terence rejected the plot-telling
function of the comic prologue and replaced it instead with a self-centred, self-
promoting charter of his own failures and successes. By contrast with Plautus,
who had pictured himself as a bumbling clown and in his own way had run
roughshod over the prologue's usual aims, Terence structured his prologues ac-
cording to the newly-ordered forms of forensic rhetoric and infused them with a
new sense of the dignity of the dramatic poet's art.4 Pressing tasks such as hav-
ing to defend himself against his critics and rivals, having to apologise for his
lack of purism in splicing different Greek stories together, and having to appeal
to his present audience for a fair hearing: all these, Terence tells us himself, dis-
tract him from simply summing up the action of the play. Whether the straight
plot-telling prologue ever existed is in fact a matter of doubt. As far back as Eu-

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 THE PLOT THICKENS

ripides, and certainly as far back as Menander, dramatic poets seem to have used
various devices to side-step the potential tedium of straight exposition.5 And
yet Terence's evasive prologues are still accepted as the most extreme develop-
ment in this direction.6
This paper does not set out to discuss the details of 'arcane literary pole-
mics' . Instead, it has two related aims. First, to challenge the central orthodoxy
that has always surrounded the prologues, that they are completely detachable
from the plays they announce and actively avoid telling the plot. Secondly, to
read the plays themselves as an alternative history of Terence's literary career,
one that feeds on and feeds off the Suetonian Vita. My conclusion will be that
the plays can be read in sequence as constructing a particular image of Terence
the playwright, while conversely the prologues can be read between the lines as
mirroring the plays they present but apparently sideline.
Of course much depends on whether one accepts the conventional chronolog-
ical order of the plays. I am not qualified to tamper with that order and I will
certainly not be trying to regroup the plays to suit some logical progression.
Taking them as they usually come, then, one is admittedly left with a rather
zigzagging impression of Terence's advertised career, from success to failure and
back again, from debut to premature retirement to unpredicted resurgence. But
this is still a story that makes some sense in the context of a typically precari-
ous dramatic life. I will suggest that there are strong parallels to be seen in all
six cases between the alleged fortunes of the playwright, as presented in the pro-
logues and the Vita, and those of the play's central characters, usually the title-
character. Beneath the surface of what looks like abstract discussion of his own
literary experiences, Terence is in fact still 'telling the plot' of the play in ques-
tion. Meanwhile, the events of the play as they unfold reflect back an image of
the experience the author offers us as preface to the play. We will see how Ter-
ence's aggrieved rhetorical persona—misunderstood, unacknowledged, confused
with other people, the victim of ignorant stereotyping—finds soulmates in the
aggrieved personalities he puts on stage. If all Terence's prologues are ag-
grieved, each one is aggrieved in its own way.
Terence's first play, Andria, 'The Woman of Andros', the play that took this
young foreigner to the top, is itself about a low-class debutante who makes it
in a new country. It is in this first prologue that Terence explicitly tells us he
has no time for prologues: he is too busy dealing with a malevolent rival to
have time to tell us the plot. Here he gives us the cue for reading every subse-
quent prologue too:

nam in prologis scribundis operam abutitur,

non qui argumentum narret sed qui maleuoli
ueteris poetae maledictis respondeat.
(And. 5-7)

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 EMILY GOWERS

For in writing his prologues he is wasting his efforts not in relating the
plot but in answering the slanders of the spiteful old poet.

Goldberg dubs the Andria prologue 'the oldest example of Roman rhetorical ar-
gument to survive intact', and this is indeed the example that best fits Gel-
haus's schematic analysis of Terentian prologues into the standard divisions of
forensic oratory: exordium, narratio, argumentatio and conclusio? The narratio
section is where a plot-summary might logically have appeared, in imitation of
a lawyer's precis of events; on the surface at least, Terence replaces this with a
'narrative' of his own decisions as a playwright and the history of the play.
However, this new narratio, together with the justifications and appeals pro-
vided in the later sections, can, I suggest, be read on two levels at once. It ap-
plies in the first instance to the author's experience, but it also obliquely
sketches out the outline of the play that follows.
In his narratio section, Terence informs us that his play is a conflation of
two plays by Menander with girl titles: Andria and Perinthia. 'Know one and
you know them both,' he says cryptically. 'It's not the plot that's different but
the language and style.' Whatever suited him in Perinthia he has transferred to
Andria: 8

Menander fecit Andriam et Perinthiam.

qui utramuis recte norit ambas nouerit
non ita dissimili sunt argumento, et tamen
dissimili oratione sunt factae ac stilo.
quae conuenere in Andriam ex Perinthia
fatetur transtulisse atque usum pro suis.
{And. 9-14)

Menander was the author of Andria and Perinthia. Know one and you
know them both: it's not the plot that's different but the language and
style. He [the present author] admits that whatever suited him in
Perinthia he has transferred to Andria and used for his own purposes.

In the next section, which Gelhaus labels as argumentatio (17-23), he tells us

that the critics think this is cheek, but that Naevius, Ennius and Plautus did the
same thing (18f.) and Terence would rather, paradoxically, be accused of their
free-and-easiness (neglegentia, 20) than of the obscure pedantry (diligentia, 21)
of his rivals.9 In the conclusio (24-27) he tells the audience they must judge
this for themselves: whether future plays are worth watching (spectandae, 27) or
driving off the stage (exigendae, 27).
We have here a set of pointed rhetorical contrasts, in which the author seems
entirely wrapped up in self-justification. But the words I have isolated also offer
a schematised outline of the play, hidden in the plot of Terence's dramatics and
their reception. There are two girls in this play: Glycerium ('Sugar'), an or-

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 THE PLOT THICKENS

phaned refugee and trainee prostitute, the 'Andrian girl' of the title, and the free-
born Philumena. Know one and you know them both: that is the central discov-
ery of the play, that Glycerium is Philumena's long-lost sister. But their style
is very different, at least as far as the young hero Pamphilus is concerned, in
love with one and betrothed to the other. Philumena is take it or leave it (e.g.
324, 349); Glycerium irresistibly beautiful and the object of constant scrutiny
from the moment she is first spotted: SI. interea inter mulieres/quae ibi aderant
forte unam aspicio adulescentulamjforma—SO. bona fortasse. SI.—et uoltu,
Sosiajadeo modesto, adeo uenusto ut nil supra ('Simo: Meanwhile I spotted
among the women gathered there one young girl, whose looks were— Sosia:
Not bad, maybe? Simo: —and her face, Sosia, was more modest, more gor-
geous, than any I'd seen', 117-20); huiusformam atque aetatem uides ('you can
see her youth and beauty', 286); uirginem forma bonalmemini uideri ('I re-
member she seemed a beautiful young girl', 428f.). Many attempts are made to
get rid of the heroine, but she is finally acknowledged by her freeborn father
{nam illam me credo haud nosse, 'I think she hardly knows me', 952) and trans-
ferred into his house (quor non illam hue transferri iubes? 'Why don't you have
her moved to our house?', 952), and there is a happy ending with a double wed-
ding, first predicted at 674: ex unis geminas mihi conficias nuptias ('instead of
one wedding you'll arrange two for me').
In fact the lost story-line is at large all through the play, looking for a home.
The first scene contains a thumbnail history of another Andrian girl, Glyceri-
um's spurious older sister, the experienced prostitute Chrysis, who was driven
away from Andros by poverty and neglectful relatives (inopia et cognatorum
neglegentia/coacta, 71f.)10 despite her exceptional beauty and youth (egregia
forma atque aetate Integra, 12). Both Andrian girls are dogged by suspicion from
the moment they are mentioned: ei, uereor nequid Andria adportet mali ('that
Andrian girl means trouble', 74); hinc illae lacrimae ('now I know the reason
for his tears', 126). In addition there is a premature rumour that Glycerium is in
fact freeborn, abandoned (eiectam, 223) as a baby before being rescued by a
foster-family:

et fingunt quandam inter se nunc fallaciam

ciuem Atticam esse hanc. 'fuit olim quidam senex
mercator; nauim is fregit apud Andrum insulam.
is obiit mortem.' ibi turn hanc eiectam Chrysidis
patrem recepisse orbam paruam. fabulae!
(And. 220-24)

Between them they've invented a tissue of lies, pretending that the girl's
an Athenian citizen: 'Once there was an old merchant; he was ship-
wrecked on the island of Andros; he died; the girl was cast ashore; Chry-
sis' father took the poor little orphan in.' What a load of nonsense!

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 EMILY GOWERS

Delivered in a parodically basic and humdrum style, this narrative asks to be

read as pat and implausible.11 The prefatory fingunt labels it a fiction, the knee-
jerk response—fabulae!—a pack of lies. But fabulae also means 'plot', a hint
that this is indeed the lost story-line, one whose veracity Terence will withhold
till the end of the play.12 In the final stages, the true denouement emerges, that
Glycerium is the daughter of a shipwrecked Athenian citizen who washed up
(again, the word is eiectus) in Chrysis' father's house:

nam ego quae dico uera an falsa audierim iam sciri potest.
Atticus quidam olim naui fracta ad Andrum eiectus est
et istaec una parua uirgo. turn ille egens forte applicat
primum ad Chrysidis patrem se.
{And. 922-25)

It won't take long to tell if my tale is true or false. There was once a
man of Athens who was shipwrecked and cast ashore on Andros together
with this girl, a child at the time. Being destitute, he happened to appeal
first to Chrysis' father.

Again the narrator's preamble is interrupted by a listener: fabulam inceptat

('Now he's launching into his rigmarole!', 925). Again this response screens an
alternative cue, 'Now he's introducing the plot', that's to say, here again is the
very narratio that was missing from the prologue.13
All these various inserted narratives—of youth, beauty, suspicion, neglect,
rejection, confusion, followed by integration and a joint marriage—work as par-
allels for the plot of Terence's new, beautifully made drama, with its double
splicing, which he fights to make critically acceptable and regarded as fresh, not
contaminated. In the prologue old age, in the shape of the spiteful incumbent
laureate (maleuolilueteris poetae, 6f.), is associated with hostility and incom-
prehension; appeals for legitimacy are made to more authoritative literary ances-
tors (Naeuium Plautum Enniuml...quos hie noster auctores habet, 'Naevius,
Plautus and Ennius, whom our playwright has as his authorities', 18f.).14 In
the play the repeated account of an unknown person cast ashore and then given a
kind welcome (e.g. hanc eiectam.../'...recepisse, 223f.) offers an inviting model
for Terence's own charitable reception. The choice at the end of the prologue—
drive the plays away or go on watching them (spectandae an exigendae sint,
27)—is the crux of the Andrian girl's fortunes too; the final decision to embrace
her is a displaced focus for the aesthetic appreciation of Andria the play.15
The notion of a beautiful young person vulnerable to acceptance or rejection
according to society's whim is of course also rehearsed in Terence's ancient bi-
ography: Suetonius' story of an attractive foreign slave accepted into exclusive
circles (when reading Andria aloud, the story goes), who suddenly, after deliver-
ing his six textbook plays and being entertained at the highest tables, either fell
on hard times or took voluntary retirement, withdrawing from the public gaze (e

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 THE PLOT THICKENS

conspectu omnium abit Graeciam in terram ultimam, 'he disappeared from pub-
lic view and went off to farthest Greece', Vita Terenti 1; egressus estneque am-
plius rediit...uisus numquam est...sic uita uacat, 'he went away and never came
back...he was never seen again...so he departed this life', ibid. 4). We will never
know to what extent Terence's life-story was, as so often in antiquity, simply
constructed out of the fabric of his plays, but there is an especially striking
similarity between his own precarious fortunes and those so narrowly avoided
by his first play and its beautiful eponymous heroine.
Terence's next play, Heauton Timoroumenos, puts on a very different front.
The 'self-tormentor' of the title, a man of sixty-plus, is a masochist who drives
himself to work the soil on his farm as penance for his cruel treatment of his
son.16 Labor, meaning both 'distress' and 'hard work', is a defining word in this
opening scene.17 How is this anticipated in the prologue? Terence hands over
the presenter's role to a surrogate, his actor-manager L. Ambivius Turpio, who
plays a defensive geriatric. He speaks on behalf of the author, who, he claims,
has been torn apart by vicious rumour (rumores distulerunt maleuoli, 16—the
metaphorical alternative to self-laceration), and appeals for him not to have to
be lumbered with the kind of commissions that involve writing plays with a lot
of physical exertion (laboriosast, 44) and loud shouting (clamore summo, 40):

adeste aequo animo, date potestatem mihi

statariam agere ut liceat per silentium,
ne semper seruos currens, iratus senex,
edax parasitus, sycophanta autem impudens,
auarus leno adsidue agendi sint seni
clamore summo, cum labore maxumo.
mea causa causam hanc iustam esse animum inducite,
ut aliqua pars laboris minuatur mihi.
nam nunc nouas qui scribunt nil parcunt seni.
si quae laboriosa est, ad me curritur;
si lenis est, ad alium defertur gregem.
(#735-45)

Watch this play with open minds, and allow me to put on a slow-mov-
ing play in the peace and quiet it requires, so that I won't always have to
play the bustling slave, the angry old man, the greedy sponger, the
pushy spiv and the mercenary pimp, with maximum shouting and phys-
ical exertion. For my sake decide that I have a fair case, and let me give
up some of the hard work. Nowadays writers of new plays have no
mercy on old men: if there's some exhausting role, they run to me; if
it's easy they give it to another company.

To stress this, the words labor and laboriosus come three times in five lines:
cum labore maxumo ('with maximum physical exertion', 40); ut aliqua pars la-

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 EMILY GOWERS

bori' minuatur mihi ('and let me give up some of the hard work', 42); si quae
laboriosast ('if there's some exhausting role', 44). Terence is specifically link-
ing the idea of the fabula stataria (the sedentary play) with the old age of its
producer, and even before the play begins presents us with an appeal for patria
potestas {date potestatem mihi, 'give me the power', 35), senior citizens' rights
(nil parcunt seni, 'they have no mercy on old men', 43), the exemplarity of old
age (exemplum statuite in me, 'make me set a predecent', 51), and the theme of
fathers managing their sons or deputising for them (the stereotype of the iratus
senex, angry old man, is listed at 37, asking to be busted in the course of the
play). 18 The language of pedagogy is pervasive: exemplum ('predecent', 20,
51), didicerim ('I have learned', 10), ad studium hunc se applicasse musicum
('that he has devoted himself to an artistic cause', 23), ingenium ('talent', 24,
47), natura ('natural ability', 24), crescendi copiam ('the chance to develop',
28), sine uitiis ('without faults', 30), peccatis ('faults', 33), animum inducite
('apply your minds', 41), experimini ('test', 46), studeant ('try hard', 52).
If we accept the traditional order of the plays, here is an apparent problem.
The prologue looks like a bid for early retirement on Terence's part, prema-
turely grey hairs. But Terence has another part to play. We are told that the
young playwright is waiting in the wings, cast as an unrepentant (neque se
pigere, 19) adolescent, a likely lad who cannot find his own voice and who
needs to be trained to please the audience rather than himself, youth's natural
tendency (ut adulescentuliluobis placere studeantpotius quam sibi, 51f.). Boys
will be boys. The mauled but self-indulgent playwright will find his inversion
in the self-mauler of the title, whose play is designed to please others. Inside
the play, his equivalent, the young hero Clitipho, kicks against the pricks of
these generational generalisations: quam iniqui suntpatres in omnis adulescen-
tis iudicesllqui aequom esse censent nos a pueris ilico nasci senesjneque il-
larum adfinis esse rerum quasfert adulescentia ('Fathers criticise us young peo-
ple so unfairly. They think we ought to be old men from birth and distance our-
selves from anything to do with adolescence', 213-15). The prologue casts the
audience as potential enemies of fragile promise, and so Terence makes a differ-
ent kind of bid for acceptance—one in keeping with the father-son conflict of
the play—early in his career.
Even so, this middle-aged preference for the sedentary play got Terence a bad
press with Julius Caesar, who famously criticised him for lacking the quality of
uis, essential comic vigour, and cast himself as an angst-ridden Terentian char-
acter wringing his hands over this crippling deficiency:

lenibus atque utinam scriptis adiuncta foret uis

comica ut aequato uirtus polleret honore
cum Graecis neue hac despectus parte iaceres.
unum hoc maceror ac doleo tibi desse, Terenti.
(Suet. Vita Terenti 5)

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 THE PLOT THICKENS

I wish you had added a bit of oomph to your low-key writing. That way
your comic talent would be regarded as equal to the Greeks' and you
wouldn't be written off as a failure in that department. It's this one thing
that worries me and makes me sad that you don't have it, Terence.

Terence certainly invited this kind of criticism with the title of his next play,
the Eunuch, and yet the legend goes that the play was hugely popular, staged all
over again the very same day, and an unexpected money-spinner.19 This time
the prologue obsesses over comic stereotypes and the grafting on from another
play of a notorious scene involving a boastful soldier and a parasite, who lay
violent siege to a house containing a young girl. These seedy characters, who
later manage to insinuate their pleasing selves into aristocratic circles at the end
of the play, appear to caricature Terence's own bid in the prologue to enlist
himself as an ingratiating personality: si quisquamst qui placere se studeat bo-
nislquam plurumis et minume multos laederejin his poeta hie nomen profitetur
suom ('if there's a type of person who tries to please as many people as possi-
ble and hurt as few as possible, the playwright admits he has signed up to that
party', 1-3).20 But could they be said to have anything conspicuous to do with
eunuchs? In a revolutionary article on the language of the play, Cynthia Dessen
has argued that the eunuch (or rather two eunuchs, one, the genuine article, a
wizened weasel-like creature, and the other the full-blooded young man who im-
personates him) is the 'controlling metaphor' of the play, concentrating in one
iconic figure all the issues of ambiguous gender, subservience, sexual innuendo,
self-injury, recognition of true identity, and so on, bandied about in the course
of the dramatic action.21 She has also seen a parallel between the charges Ter-
ence rebuts in the prologue and the most violent and dubious scene in the play,
which involves the rape of a young girl: 'Given the rape scene in the play,' she
writes, 'Terence's discussion offurtum and contaminatio—theft and violation—
in the prologue seems.peculiarly apt.' 22 She also notices a significant focus in
the prologue on injuring words like lacessere and laedere (laedere, 2; laesit, 6;
lacessere, 16; laedere, 18).23
But that still does not go quite far enough to explain why Terence's prologue
concentrates on these two additional characters. Perhaps we can go back to the
quality of uis—'violence', 'virility', 'oomph'—that Terence apparently lacked.
It is a little-known statistic that 40% of Terence's uses of the word occur in this
play alone.24 Of course the Eunuch is a peculiarly inappropriate play in which
to find a heavy dose of machismo. But that might be exactly the point. Could
we regard the soldier and the parasite, who stage a mock-siege with an 'army' of
cooks and slaves to win back the raped girl, as a calculated injection of the brute
force that the emasculated title-character always needed, the same uis Caesar
thought missing in Terence too?25 If we go back to the prologue we find that a
freak of grammar allows Terence to describe his contaminatio of two plays al-
most in these terms: in east parasitus Colax/et miles gloriosus: eas se non
negatlpersonas transtulisse in Eunuchum suamlex Graeca ('The Sponger fea-

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 EMILY GOWERS

tured a parasite and a boastful soldier: he won't deny that he lifted these charac-
ters for his Eunuch', 30-32). As die word for 'play', fabula, is feminine, we are
presented with the strange collocation Eunuchum suam and the idea of an en-
forced act of grafting (transtulisse) on to a feminised male character (an act
symbolised within the play by the virile imposter Chaerea who poses as a eu-
nuch). Moreover, Terence ends the prologue with the advice: If you listen care-
fully you'll find out quid sibi Eunuchus uelit: 'what the Eunuch has to say for
itself, 'what the Eunuch means'; or perhaps, simply, 'what the eunuch
needs'. 26 This might well be more than just an appeal for reflection on dramatic
meaning. It looks in fact like another example of crude innuendo: Terence has
put the balls back into this play.
In Phormio the title character is a parasite, normally a sidekick, now trans-
ferred to centre stage. In a world seen from his perspective, the play is filled
with eating metaphors (e.g. tute hoc intristi: tibi omnest exedendum, 'you got
us into this pickle: you've got to eat it', 318; on which Donatus comments:
apta parasito, quia de cibo est, 'apt for a parasite, because it is about food'),27
and it seems apt that in this prologue alone Terence complains that he is ac-
cused of giving meagre rations (tenui...oratione et scriptura leui, 'thin dialogue
and lightweight writing', 5), and that his unnamed enemy the 'old poet' needs
to be stopped from letting poor Terence starve (adfamem hunc a studio studuit
reicere, 18). Terence also gives full credit to the role of an actor-manager in a
play's success (actoris opera mage stetisse quam sua, 'that the play succeeded
more because of the producer's efforts than his own', 10) and this too looks like
a parallel with Phormio, who, as he says, becomes chief fixer and unexpected
protagonist inside the play (per quern res geretur maxume, 'by whom most of
the business is done', 28).28 There is also an unusual focus on reciprocity be-
tween author and audience, or between author and critics: hie respondere uoluit,
non lacessere./benedictis si certasset, audisset bene./quod ab Mo allatumst, sibi
esse rellatum putet ('His intention was to respond, not to provoke. If he [his
enemy] had entered the fray in a kind spirit, he would have been greeted with
kind words. As it is, he must reckon he got the treatment he asked for', 19-21).
Terence speaks of mutual bonitas ('kindness', 34) and uoluntas ('good will', 29)
and assistance (adiutans, 34) as though he himself were playing client or para-
site to his viewers. Similarly the first scene of the play deals with the discharg-
ing of a debt: no one is kind enough (beniuolus, 97) to help (adiutaret, 99) with
a poor woman's funeral; and later Phormio himself discourses eloquently on the
matter of quid pro quos between parasite and patron: alere nolunt hominem
edacem et sapiunt mea sententiajpro maleficio si beneficium summum nolunt
reddere ('They don't want to feed a greedy person, and they are wise, in my
view, not to want to repay an injury with a huge favour', 335f.); immo enim
nemo satis pro merito gratiam regi refert ('No, in fact no one can ever repay his
patron', 338). We remember the primal scene from Terence's biography: a para-
site invited to join his host at table.

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 THE PLOT THICKENS

The next play was Hecyra, 'The Mother-In-Law', a play that chose, riskily in
Sander Goldberg's view, to emphasise its own unappealing sedateness.29 It was
as unpopular as the Eunuch was popular, but only if we believe the press no-
tices, the prologues for the second and third stagings, which paint such a doleful
picture of the play's previous failures. Again an old man, L. Ambivius Turpio,
does the talking—and again that is significant. On its first performance, he tells
us, the play was interrupted by noise and prematurely shouted off stage (mihi
per silentiumlnumquam agere licitumst, 'I never got the chance to perform in
silence', 29f.; strepitus, clamor mulierum/fecere ut ante tempus exiremforas,
'noise and women shouting made me withdraw before time', 35); noise inter-
vened again when it was revived, after a more promising beginning (primo actu
placeo. quom interea rumor uenit/datum iri gladiatores, populus conuo-
lat.ltumultuantur, clamant, pugnant de loco, "They liked the first act; then there
was a rumour that a gladiatorial show was going to happen; the crowd flocked
in, and there was an uproar, shouting and jostling for seats', 39-41). Now, on
the third attempt, he expresses his confidence that he has found an undisturbed
hearing (nunc turba nulla est: otium et silentiumst, 'now there is no mob; there
is peace and quiet', 43) and a sympathetic audience (mea causa causam accipite
et date silentiumjut lubeat scribere aliis mihique ut discerelnouas expediat
posthac pretio emptas meo ('for my sake, take up my cause, and give me si-
lence, to encourage other authors to write, and to make it worth my while to
put on new plays bought at my own expense', 55-57). In this way he pays his
audience the compliment of deeming them capable of watching a 'grown-up'
play (uostra intelligentia, 'your intelligence', 31; uostra auctoritas, 'your au-
thority', 47) and so of cutting loose from crowd culture in a way that is often
cited as a desideratum by many of Terence's characters.30 There are repeated con-
trasts between silence and commotion, youth and old age, bad and good judg-
ments. The speaker redeems old age by telling us he has the experience to re-
vive old condemned plays (nouas [fabulas] qui exactasfeci ut inueterascerent,
12) and to restore Terence's reputation after his virtual withdrawal from the
dramatic scene as a result of his enemies' wrongdoings (ita poetam restitui in
locumlprope iam remotum iniuria aduorsarium, 21f.).31
How is this parallelled within the plot? The much-maligned elderly heroine,
Sostrata, might be seen as the polar opposite of Glycerium in Andria (the pretty
young girl who finds acceptance) and therefore as a symbol of the ultimate chal-
lenge for playwright and audience. People in the play, old and young, harp un-
ceasingly on the themes of rejection, injustice and injury: e.g. te mi iniuriam
facere arbitror ('I think you're doing me an injustice', 256), turn matrem ex ea
re me aut uxorem in culpa inuenturum arbitror ('I think either my mother or
my wife is going to bear the blame for this', 299), nam matris ferre iniurias
me...pietas iubet ('filial duty obliges me to bear with wrongs from my mother',
301), meas iniurias ('wrongs done to me', 303), quom ilia, quae nunc in me in-
iquast, aequa de me dixerit ('since she will speak up for me though she is now
at odds with me', 475),/am iniuriam ('you are causing her harm', 692). Above

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 EMILY GOWERS

all, the mother-in-law herself, the pantomime figure we love to hate, is the
classic Terentian victim of social prejudice, a prejudice that is voiced for us by
her husband Laches:

itaque adeo uno animo omnes socrus oderunt nurus.

uiris esse aduorsas aeque studiumst, similis pertinaciast,
in eodemque omnes mini uidentur ludo doctae ad malitiam. et
ei ludo, si ullus, est, magistram hanc esse satis certo scio.
(Hec. 201-04)

That's why all mothers-in-law universally hate their daughters-in-law.

They're equally keen and obstinate in opposing their husbands, and it
looks to me as though they've all been at the same school taking
lessons in mischief; if such a school exists, I'm quite certain this wife
of mine is the headmistress there.

And yet Sostrata's unexpected achievement in this play is to win us over with
her sweetness and forbearance.32 As she says:

sed non facile est expurgatu, ita animum induxerunt socrus

omnis esse iniquas.
(Hec. 2111)

It's no easy matter to clear myself when people have got it into their
heads that all mothers-in-law are unkind.

Hecyra hinges on a tussle between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law for in-

clusion in the family, and the plot is a flurry of exits and entrances. The daugh-
ter-in-law takes an instant dislike to Sostrata and runs away from her (fugere e
conspectu ilicojuidere nolle, 'she ran away at once, she'd refuse to see her',
182f.), as a result of which Sostrata herself proposes retreating to the country
(ego rus abituram hinc esse...decreui, 'I'm determined to disappear to the coun-
try', 586; ex urbe tu rus habitatum migres?, 'do you want to flee the city for
the country?', 589). She also says, significantly, that she is getting too old for
festivals (festos dies, 592)—the setting, of course, for Terence's comedies—and
that maybe she should make way for the next generation: hie uideo me esse
inuisam inmerito: tempust me concedere ('I can see that I'm disliked here,
through no fault of mine, so it's time to go', 597). Her husband echoes this:
odiosa haec est aetas adulescentulis.le medio aequom est excederest ('The young
hate us; we're pass6 and we should move on', 619f.). This vocabulary of accep-
tance and rejection is something very familiar to us from Terence's prologues,
where plays are repeatedly brought on stage and hustled off again.33 It looks as
though two threatened events—the playwright's enforced retirement and the
permanent retreat of his heroine—are working as parallels for the initial rejec-

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 THE PLOT THICKENS

tion of the play, while their joint reinstatement is offering a model for its reha-
bilitation.
This link between unpopular character and unpopular play seems so obvious
that it is astonishing that for the most part the historical account of the play's
failure continues to be taken literally. It is refreshing to see that Holt Parker has
recently stuck his neck out and suggested that the idea of Hecyra as warmed-up
turkey is complete fiction.34 Hecyra was after all staged at least three times in
Terence's career, which would normally suggest that it was a runaway success.
Yet the question remains: why did the play promote itself as a failure? Surely
above all else as a long-running joke in line with the sense of injury that sur-
rounds the mother-in-law herself. Halfway through the play, Laches imagines
the much-loved figures he and his wife will become if they withdraw gracefully:
postremo nos iam fabulaelsumus, Pamphile, 'senex atque anus' ('one day we
will be folklore, Pamphilus: "the cosy old couple'", 620f.). Those words fabu-
lae sumus again suggest self-conscious identification of the play and its protag-
onists). But for the moment this is too rosy a picture. Once again the title-
character is emblematic of the play's character and reception; in this case, super-
annuated, sedate, shunned, and prone to slander and calamity. And yet the sen-
tentia Terence applies to his plays in the prologue works equally well for its
heroine: ubi sunt cognitaejplacitae sunt ('Once they got a fair hearing, they
went down a treat', 20f.).35
Terence's last play, Adelphoe, has been linked to a specific patron, Scipio
Aemilianus, as the play is said in the didascalia to have been performed at the
funeral games of his father, L. Aemilius Paullus. The Brothers is a tale of rival
methods of bringing up children, one natural, one adopted, appropriate when
Aemilianus himself was adopted out into the Scipio family. The prologue be-
gins by involving the audience as critics and arbiters. Terence focuses on a
scene he has lifted from Diphilus' play Synapothnescontes and grafted on to
Menander's Adelphoe. 'You can decide for yourselves,' he says, 'whether this
act of contaminatio is theft or a justifiable rescue from obscure neglect'
(pernoscite/furtumne factum existumetis an locum/reprehensum qui praeteritus
neglegentiast, 12-14). As it happens, the scene in question (155-96) shows one
of the guinea-pig adolescents, Aeschinus, violently abducting a prostitute for
his younger brother's sake and beating up her pimp. It looks as though Terence,
while flattering his audience's discretion, is simultaneously priming them to
notice this scene when it comes.36 Not only do we have to make a literary deci-
sion about whether the scene was worth pinching: we also have to make a
moral decision about whether the abduction itself counts as 'theft' or well-de-
served 'rescue'. More than any of the others, this prologue stresses the impor-
tance of aequanimitas, impartiality (facite aequanimitaslpoetae ad scribendum
augeat industriam ('make sure your impartiality increases the poet's ability to
write', 24f.). However, Terence in fact makes this very difficult for us to
achieve. For example, the prologue ends with the comic cliche" that you can
leave it all to the old men who are about to come on stage to tell you the

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 EMILY GOWERS

story.37 But crucially it's the younger of the two father-figures, Micio, who
emerges first to give us his sympathetic version of affairs and his liberal views
on education—and so prejudice us in advance against his gruff older brother
Demea, who has to fight to recover precedence.38
The 'classic tales of patriarchy and patrimony and patriotism and paternity',
in John Henderson's words, that generate this drama also define Terence's
rhetorical position with regard to his patrons.39 These figure very conspicu-
ously in the prologue, where he puts in a plug for them as aristocratic paternal-
ists, the 'big brothers' behind the play: quorum opera in bello, in otio, in nego-
tiolsuo quique tempore usust sine superbia ("They make their services available
to all of you to call on in all spheres of life, in war, in peace, in business,
whenever you need them', 20f.). The Suetonian Vita records the murky rumours
about collaboration and parasitism that Terence is trying to whitewash here into
an above-board example of patron-client amicitia. He commemorates finding his
own niche as a respectable cliens just as he is due to bow out of the theatre. It
could be argued that the prologue's audience is also put in a quasi-aristocratic
role when asked by Terence to exercise impartial judgment (24f.), and that Ter-
ence himself disclaims a corresponding superbia ('hauteur', 21) by graciously
accepting the role of subordinate. Aristocratic ideology is similarly emblazoned
at the moral centre of the play, in the short scene involving the respected
neighbour Hegio, who, despite being an ordinary Greek, speaks in the manner
of a socially responsible Roman nobilis {homo antiqua uirtute ac fide, 'a man
of old-fashioned staunchness and virtue', 442; te solum habemus, tu's patronus,
tu pater, 'we rely on you, as protector, as father', 456) and delivers a manifesto
for Roman noblesse oblige: 40

quam uos facillume agitis, quam estis maxume

potentes, dites, fortunati, nobiles,
tam maxume uos aequo animo aequa noscere
oportet, si uos uoltis perhiberi probos.
(Ad. 501-04)

The easier your life is, the greater your influence, your wealth, your
good fortune and your status, the greater your obligation to make sound
judgments with sound minds, if you want to be considered upright peo-
ple.

By grafting on the abduction scene, which shows Micio's charge Aeschinus

to be an out-of-control thug, Terence does something to swing the balance back
in favour of Demea's patriarchal style of parenting. Demea briefly plays over-
the-top sugar daddy and Father Christmas (pater...festiuissime, 983) before
restoring a regime of kindly discipline and telling his sons that he is there for
them if they ever need guidance and support:

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 THE PLOT THICKENS

sed si uoltis potius, quae uos propter adulescentiam

minus uidetis, magis impense cupitis, consulitis parum,
haec reprehendere et corrigere me et secundare in loco,
ecce me qui id faciam uobis.
(Ad. 992-95)

But if you would rather I chastised and corrected and supported you,
when appropriate, in all the areas where you are short-sighted or too
greedy or too unthinking, here I am to take on that role for you.

This again is typical aristocratic self-justification: more 'paternal' responsibility

shouldered in proportion to one's status. Meanwhile, the notorious interpolated
scene represents the opposite end of the political spectrum, with Aeschinus cast
in the role of a demagogic hooligan (his first appeal is to his fellow-citizens,
populares, 155), while the battered pimp Sannio appeals for his citizen rights as
a victim of street violence: hicin Ubertatem aiunt esse aequam omnibus? ('Is
this meant to be a free state?', 183) This is not a friendly view of democracy or
youth rule: social dialogue is described as conuicium (180), the freedom of the
streets as tyranny (regnumne, Aeschine, hie tupossides?, 'Do you lord it around
here, Aeschinus?', 175) or anarchy (debacchatus es, 'you've run riot', 184; cf.
185).
To sum up: we have seen that Terence's literary career as projected through
the sequence of his plays does not follow any consistent trajectory. Beginner's
luck is succeeded by doyen's failure, premature middle age by youthful
machismo, in a way that confounds any attempt to stereotype his progress. Of
course Terence's complaints in his prologues are for the most part tongue-in-
cheek. A bit of pre-emptive bad-mouthing of his own artistic intentions—theft,
contamination, failure—screens a confident programme for inventive new
treatments within an old tradition. But I would maintain that the particular type
of bad-mouthing in each prologue is always inspired by the play in question. It
is as though Terence presents us with a contrived personal or professional
predicament that the plays then take up, thrash out and solve with their own
disentanglements, recognition-scenes and fairy-tale endings. The role of each
prologue is to emphasise the continued precariousness of this dramatist's liter-
ary career, with each play offered as a different kind of hostage to fortune.
There might indeed be much more scope for recognising how tight the fit is
between the different elements of Terence's plays. For example, the didascaliae
tell us how each play used a variation of unequal, equal or equal and unequal
flutes as accompaniment. Given how much Terence dwells on the issues of
what is equal and unequal, fair and not fair, in the prologues and in the plays,
could there be some significance in his choice of instrument each time? All the
plays were commissioned for particular festivals, half of them for the Ludi
Megalenses, festival of Cybele. Matthew Leigh writes in a recent survey of
early republican drama that he can see why the Eunuch might have been ap-

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 EMILY GOWERS

propriate as a subject, but not Andria, Heauton Timoroumenos, or Hecyra.41

But isn't Andria the perfect androgynous name, isn't self-laceration the mental
equivalent of self-mutilation, and isn't the horrible mother-in-law the comic
equivalent of the Magna Mater?42

St John's College, Cambridge

NOTES

1. On the Vita see Frank (1933); Beare (1942). For citations from Terence I have used the
Loeb edition of Barsby (2001); translations are my own.
2. Epitaflum Terenti, Anth. Lat. 487,.2: bellica praeda ('the spoils of war').
3. Goldberg (1986), 32.
4. E.g. Goldberg (1986), 31: 'Terence thrusts his quarrel to the front and abandons entirely the
expository prologue so common in Greek New Comedy.' On the prologues, see also Leo (1960
[1898]); Ronconi (1927); Klose (1966); Duckworth (1952), 61-65, 211-18; Gelhaus (1972).
5. Goldberg (1986), 33.
6. Goldberg (1986), 32.
7. Goldberg (1986), 48; Gelhaus (1972); Leftvre (1976). See also Focardi (1978). Eu-
graphius' introduction to Andria (p.3.8W) lists three functions of a prologue: omnis prologus trip-
lid inducitur causa, uel ut argumentum exhibere uel poetam populo commendare uel ut a populo
audientiam postulet ('all prologues are put on for three purposes: either to reveal the plot, or to
recommend the poet to the public, or to demand an audience from the public').
8. See Richardson (1997) for a hypothesis about the differences between original and new
versions.
9. See Goldberg (1986), 51, on the reversed values of the terms used here.
10.Cf./>torm.571.
11. Goldberg (1986), 45. This type of stilted narrative is condemned in invented comic verses
at Rhet. Her. 1.9.14: Athenis Megaram uesperi aduenit Simo;lubi aduenit Megaram, insidias fecit
uirgini; I insidias postquam fecit, uim in loco adtulit ('Simo came to Megara from Athens in the
evening; when he got to Megara, he lay in wait for a girl; when he had lain in wait for her, he
raped her on the spot').
12. Cf. Pamphilus' paranoid response at And. 248f.: quot modis contemptus, spretus! facta
transacta omnia, emjrepudiatus repetor. quam ob rem? nisi si id est quod suspicor ('Scorned and
despised at every turn! Everything signed and sealed, and then they reject me, and then they call
me back! Why? I don't know, unless what I suspect is true...').
13. Cf. And. 970: narras probe ('good news!').
14. Cited by name (unlike the old poet), just as the authentication of Glycerium depends on the
naming of Chrysis' father (And. 928); cf. Glycerium mea suos parentis repperit ('my Glycerium
has found her parents', 969).
15. Anderson (2003-04) observes that Terence does supply an alternative argumentum miss-
ing from the prologue in the shape of Simo's speech about his son to his freedman Sosia in the
first scene, a speech that came to serve as a model for narratio in Cic. de Inv. (1.33) and de Or.
(2.326). Of the prologue itself he writes (2): 'Lines 1-27 are taken up with a Terentian
"prologue" that functions as a critical defense of Terence and has no part in the comedy or its
exposition.'
16. Henderson in this volume meditates on the play on reflextvity in the prologue, where the
last word is sibi ('for himself, 52).
17. si quid laborist nollem (82), ne labora (89), laborans (139), ad laborem (165).
18. Much more on this in Henderson in this volume.
19. Vita Terenti 2.
20. Nomen profited is a metaphor from military enrolment. Cf. Eun. 1092 where the miles
Thraso says: numquam etiam fui usquam quin me omnes amarent plurumum ('I've never been
anywhere where they didn't all love me to bits').
21. Dessen (1995), 128. At 123 she cites Ps.-Servius 53R: principalis materia in hac comoedia:

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 THE PLOT THICKENS

si aliae personae inducantur eunucho subseruiuntur: & omnes partes fabulae aliquo modo ad eu-
nuchum tendunt ('this is the main theme of the comedy: if other characters get involved with the
eunuch, they are subordinate to him; and every part of the plot in some way leads to the eunuch').
22. Dessen (1995), 137. See also Goldberg (1986), 94f., on the defiling metaphor in contam-
inare.
23. Dessen (1995), 137.
24. 10 out of 23 uses, to be precise. See Gilmartin (1975) on this and on the concentration of
violence in the interpolated scene.
25. Ludwig (1968) argues persuasively that Terence tended to pep up his Greek originals with
farce, rather than tone them down.
26. A question echoed in the play by challenges to other characters' virility: sentiet qui uir
siem ('she'll realise what sort of a man I am', 66); nunc, Parmeno, ostendes te qui uir sies ('now,
Parmeno, you will prove your manhood', 307). And cf. the parasite Gnatho's joke at 244: omnia
habeo nee quicquam habeo; nil quoin est, nil defit tamen ('I have everything and I have nothing. I
have nothing, but nothing's missing'). Gilmartin (1975), 263, in passing calls Terence's words a
'slangy double-entendre'. John Henderson suggests to me a parallel with Calvus' epigram on
Pompey (fr. 18 Courtney): Magnus, quern metuunt omnes, digito caput uno/scalpit; quid credos
nunc sibi uelle? uirum ('Magnus, the man everyone fears, scratches his head with one finger.
What do you think he needs? A man').
27. Arnott (1970) = Segal (2001), 257-72.
28. 'Fixer': Konstan (1983), 129.
29. Goldberg (1986), 169.
30. E.g. HT 385-87 (Bacchis to Antiphila): et quom egomet nunc mecum in animo uitam tuam
considerolomniumque adeo uostrarum uolgus quae ab se segregantjet uos esse istius modi et nos
non esse haud mirabilest ('when I consider your life and the lives of all of you who shun the
crowd, I don't wonder that you are they way you are and we aren't'); Eun. 937-40 (again, on the
gutter life of prostitutes): harum uidere inluuiem sordes inopiamjquam inhonestae solae sint domi
atque auidae cibi.lquo pacto ex iure hesterno panem atrum uorent.lnosse omnia haec salutist ad-
ulescentulis ('to look at their filth, squalor and impecuniousness, how unladylike they are when
alone at home, how greedy, how they eat black bread dunked in yesterday's gravy—to know all
this is the salvation of young men'). Henderson (1988), 216, refers to 'a path in comedy "up"
from the vulgar carnival farcicalities of Plautus to the purged refinement of Terentian literari-
ness'. Cf. Leigh (2000), 23 ('The audience which stays with the Mother-in-law until the very end
can identify itself with the culturally refined and against the boorish'); Lada-Richards (2004);
Gilula (1981). For a more literal approach to the play's failure, see Sandbach (1982).
31. A withdrawal that no doubt inspired the various withdrawals recorded in the Suetonian
Vita: see above.
32. Cf. Don. ad Hec. 198 (conatur Terentius aduersus famam socrum bonam reperire,
'Terence tries to find a good mother-in-law who bucks the stereotype') and 774 (nam et socrus
bonus et meretrices honesti cupidas praeter quam peruulgatum estfacit, 'for he makes mothers-
in-law good and gives tarts hearts of gold contrary to popular opinion').
33. The words placita and exigunt we recognise from the vocabulary of dramatic success and
failure: And. 3, Eun. I, Ad. 18; And. 27. See below for parallels with Hecyra itself.
34. Parker (1996).
35. Cf. the didascalia's report of the plays' reception (presumably deduced from the pro-
logues themselves): on the second performance: non est placita ('it was a failure'); on the third:
placuit ('it was a success').
36. Henderson (1988), 198: '...in obedience to the author to the order that we don't pass negli-
gently by the scene which has been rescued from negligent by-passing.'
37. Cf. Plaut. Trin. 16f.
38. Cf. Demea's anagnorisis speech at 880f.: non posteriores feram...qui sum natu maxumus
('I shan't play second fiddle...when I'm the eldest').
39. Henderson (1988), 203.
40. Callier (1982). Henderson (1988), 215: 'It seems clear that Hegio stands as the cast's own
yardstick of behaviour so far as it affects the community.'
41. Leigh (2000), 15: 'It would be satisfying to detect such a relationship between the Eunuch
of Terence and its performance at the Ludi Megalenses of 161...but the Girl from Andros, the
Self-Tormentor, and the Mother-in-law were also put on at the same festival in 166, 165, and 163,
and none of these overtly thematises the problem of castration.'

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 EMILY GOWERS

42. There must be a good case for seeing a programmatic joke in the detail at Hec. 184 that
the daughter-in-law pretends she has been summoned by her mother to & festival: simulat se ad
matrem accersi ad rem diuinam, obit ('she pretended her mother had sent for her to take part in
some festival, and off she went'). The play's setting, the Ludi Megalenses, becomes a charac-
ter's alibi.

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