VI Terence

Extract

Publius Terentius Afer is a remarkably well-documented figure about whom we nevertheless know next to nothing with any certainty. We have a reasonably secure documentary core in the didascaliae, the production notices attached to the plays in the manuscript tradition, whose information on original performances has survived the occasional sceptical attempts at unpicking; these give not only date, festival, producer, and aediles or other commissioning magistrates, but Greek source, and even the name and owner of the slave who composed the music and which type of reed-pipes it was played on. There is also Donatus' commentary, though frustratingly shredded and reconstituted in the form in which we have it, which also preserves invaluable, if sometimes puzzling, information about the Greek source plays and their adaptation. But Terence himself remains an enigma. Suetonius' biography of Terence, one of only four survivors from his Lives of the Poets, is a rich and still underinvestigated document, but it tells us less about Terence's life than it does about the biographical tradition that grew up around him a century after his death.