Comedies of Publius Terentius Afer (1870)/Preface

by Publius Terentius Afer

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PREFACE.

"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto."

It is in accordance with that sentence that I offer Terence in another English garb.

Reader, you have reflected here the manners of the Roman Republic some 150 years before our Saviour. There are startling laws and manners shown forth in slavery and infanticide, but most strange of all the manner in which Roman youth wooed and won their wives. It may have derived from the recorded story of Romulus and the Sabines; but modes of marriage are nothing more than forms and fashions with different nations and people, and varied by circumstances and laws.

We plainly perceive the fact of a paucity of females compared with the males, brought about by the prevailing exposure of the female children, and indisposition of the Greeks and Romans to rear girls. Hence the boys snatched a wife, and there is no sign of repentance or of having made a foolish and hasty match ever expressed through the plays; on the contrary, with a power of divorce, it appears ever to be as joyful a conquest as our own hardly-won assents of free maidens.

Marriage customs and manners differ at times and places even with us; nor need we refer to Fleet marriages or Gretna Green, now both amidst the past; but our maidens of the sister Isle in this century found charms in an elopement beyond any other form of ceremony. The Calmuck damsel prefers to be mounted on horseback, and give her lover a glorious chase and capture of herself, if she so choose. The present Belgravian mode is an untimely breakfast, probably the worst mode of all. Let these, then, excuse the Roman youth for seizing their brides, following their time-honoured god Quirinus, and also the contemporary practice of the Spartans, who preferred to win their brides in darkness and by raid, although palpably connived at by the bride, than by the wearisome tedium of the hymeneal.

Neither must we confound the class of Hetairæ of the ancients with the proscribed class of the present time; for they were educated women, whilst the wife was uneducated; they were brilliant in society, whilst the wife was immured at home. We find a Thais accompanying Alexander and chief instrument in burning Persepolis; Rhodope is mentioned mythically as the builder of the third pyramid of Gheeza; Phryne who rebuilt the walls of Thebes, for the sole guerdon of her name being engraved on the walls as "Phryne the Hetaira." Pericles wedded Aspasia, and Socrates sat at her feet to learn eloquence. Plato bad his Archianassa, and Aristotle his Hepyllis.

We here tread on Athenian soil, where Terence lays the scene of his dramas, and where the lost Comedies of Menander, from whence he drew his own, had their origin. They had also a religious halo, for the girls were offered in early youth or saved by dedication to Aphrodite at Corinth and elsewhere, where there were colleges or institutions where they were instructed, and where some chosen few were rich enough to visit them to their ruin. So we find Antiphila saved (Heaut. iii. 5) by the Corinthian crone. We find Simo, in the Andria, grace unbidden the funeral rite of his neighbour Chrysis. Chremes entertains Bacchis and her train in his house, whilst with an hypocrisy past endurance he will not pronounce the word meretrix before his wife in his son's presence, poor unhappy Sostrata, whom he has rated like a slave in Act III. scene 5, and treated with utter indignity and cruelty.

Neither does there appear to have been any poverty, or want, or disease in their order, but, like good Samaritans, they appear to be rife of charitable deeds. It may be remarked, that however Homer may vituberate his Samaritan deities, Calypso and Circe, he has drawn them more honest, true, and beneficent than his Pallas Athene and Here; in like manner, Sostrata is nobody before Thais; and whilst Bacchis can call up the contents of the cellar and fastidiously condemn them, the wife is not permitted to taste wine. These anomalies could be cited at great length, but enough has been said to show that there is no reflex of the Hetaira class with us. That which approaches it is our opera singers and actresses, who, although proscribed as servants by the aristocracy supporting them, live in luxury, and ever and anon carry off a noble scion in matrimony. It is therefore I have left the terms meretrix and amica, as also those of psaltria, citharistria, tibicina, &c, in their original tongue—they might be termed actresses, minstrels, harpists, vocalists, &c, but the original words are better. Also I refrain to translate edepol and mecastor, and other interjections. We have exploded oaths ourselves, and the swearing which was in vogue a century ago is now offensive to our ears, which pol and papæ are not; besides, they tend to draw us back to the scene, and to remind us we are in ancient Rome, with Davus and Parmeno and Bacchis; whilst to call the Forum, the market-place, is to blunder exceedingly: we translate far too much.

We as plainly trace Molière drawn from Terence as Terence was traced from the Grecian Menander, the loss of whose dramas appears to be a real loss.

Molière has an enormous advantage over Terence in having educated heroines to grace his wit. The age, too, of Louis Quatorze furnished materials for polished pleasantry, which the granitic age of the Roman Commonwealth did not supply. But the bare fact that Terence portrays the true manners of an age of which we know very little, whilst Molière has travestied the absurdities of his own, gives to Terence a value and an interest far above that which Molière wins from the exquisite fooling of his renaissance age.

Terence has no Lucile to reply to Eraste in a "Dépit Amoureux," nor a Marinette to make love to Gros René. Although the same play, which gives us Thais, gives us also the clever Pythias, who pegs into Parmeno, not by love, but jeering him. This is an exception in Terence, whilst female wit is the charm and the rule with Molière.

Neither does Terence ever descend to anything not possible, such as the statue of the warrior supping with Don Juan. His facts are all such as were probable, and find their main plot in infanticide; and the recognition by means of the token appended to obtain their funeral rites; and in the paucity of women, which affords a sufficient cause for a forcible abduction of the wife.

The Hecyra, or Stepmother, is not included, mainly because it does not contain any new point which is not to be found in the others; secondly, because the events are less pleasantly told, for it was hissed off the Roman stage. This translation skims the surface, eschewing the depths of the scholiast, and offers to those who will accept it a picture of Rome 150 years before our Christian era, and before the Civil Wars began, which degraded Rome from the peaceful and legal position here portrayed, and which did not reassume the virtues with the vices, which we find deplored, or affected to be deplored, by Horace, Juvenal, and Persius.

Like Æsop, Terence was also a slave. We lose sight of him at the early age of thirty-five. He enjoyed patrician society, and his daughter married a patrician.

The frontispiece is taken from a manuscript in our possession in the British Museum, and is printed in a paper read before the Royal Society of Antiquaries, plate vi., vol. xxiv., p. 144.

Samian Juno.