Terence has now joined Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, Sophocles, Persius and Juvenal in having his own substantial volume as part of the expensive series, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Rightly so, for — along with Cicero, Sallust and Virgil — Terence was popular with schoolteachers, playwrights and non-dramatic authors from the late Republic through to Late Antiquity and beyond. Nowadays, his plays feature in courses on drama, Roman literary culture, Republican social history and ancient sexual morality. The volume's intended readership, then, includes students and scholars of various disciplines, and care has been taken to have all Latin translated (for a note on the translations used, see xiii).
Readers already familiar with the plots of Terence's comedies, and interested in an analysis of select issues presented in each of them, should start from Part III (‘The Plays’), which contains not summaries of the plays' story-lines, but well-informed and thoughtful discussions of Terence's complex dramaturgy, approached by different scholars (R. Germany (And.), E. Lefèvre (HT), D. Christenson (Eun.), S. Frangoulidis (Ph.), O. Knorr (Hec.) and A. Traill (Ad.)) and from distinct viewpoints (literary poetics, structural sub-plots, metatheatrical rôle-playing, slapstick farce, gender issues and the process of adapting Greek plays for Roman audiences).
In this volume, the editors have aimed to offer ‘a wide-ranging guide to studying Terence's plays within the historical and socio-political context in which they were produced’ (15). Their goal has been realized — but neither fully nor without problems; and, although there is a wealth of information contextualizing the playwright and his work, the notion that his plays were primarily comic scripts designed for live performance should have been represented more strongly in the volume. There is, for example, no essay wholly dedicated to Terence's stagecraft or visual (as opposed to verbal) entertainment, and how this is achieved, although some contributors partly address the issue (most notably H. Vincent in ‘Language and Humor in Terence’ and Knorr in his chapter on Hec.).
Augoustakis and Traill open the volume with an overview of the extant information on Terence's biography and the development of Terentian scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (their list is already slightly outdated: add R. Maltby, Terence: Phormio (2012) and S. Goldberg, Terence: Hecyra (2013)). The volume's main body is sensibly divided into four thematic parts of approximately equal length, and features contributions from twenty-five scholars. Particularly valuable in Part I, ‘Terence and Ancient Comedy’, are the excellent contributions of P. Brown on ‘Terence and Greek New Comedy’ (packed with cautiously assessed information, especially on Donatus' commentary), A. Sharrock on ‘Terence and Non-Comic Intertexts’ (but to what extent does his intertextuality differ from that of Plautus?) and T. Moore on ‘Meter and Music’ (brilliant observations on the practical function of musical accompaniment — or lack of it — for characterization purposes. But is there evidence that Terence's audiences appreciated the subtleties of his prosodic distribution?).
Chs 6–11, comprising Part II, ‘Contexts and Themes’, ‘examine the socio-political background that shapes the themes, characters, structures, and political concerns in Terence's comedies’ (10). D. Hanchey's chapter on ‘Terence and the Scipionic Grex’ is admirable for its sound scepticism concerning the existence of the ghostlike group of upper-class Romans allegedly supporting Terence. (Confusingly enough, however, not all contributors share Hanchey's distrust of the sources: see 221 and 365.) J. Starks, Jr. (‘Terence and Rome in the 160s BCE’) makes insightful remarks on the function of Roman cultural references and jokes targeting non-Romans in the plays; his point (142) that Terentian matronae ensure with their behaviour that male patriarchy is always maintained is crucial for our understanding of the social and sexual dynamics of the plays. Z. Packman's essay on ‘Family and Household in the Comedies of Terence’ is an interesting overview of sociological, economic and legal issues relating to the families whose life is depicted in the plays. Equally rewarding is E. Karakasis' chapter on ‘Masters and Slaves’, which includes stimulating observations on Plautine linguistic echoes in Terence. But both his and Packman's approach seem to be more appropriate to a quiet study-room than to a noisy theatre: how many of the Romans who saw all six of Terence's plays would remember how frequently Plautus had used pleonastic double indirect questions, constructions such as numquid uis and potin ut, and words such as mastigia and abigere (= expellere) (220–1)? This is not how live theatre works. I remain unconvinced by T. Gellar-Goad's views on ‘Religious Ritual and Family Dynamics in Terence’ (156–74). He argues that Terence deliberately suppressed the ritual of sacrifice in his plays so as to show how dysfunctional the families portrayed in the plays were. But such a view assumes that there were sacrifice-scenes in the Greek originals Terence adapted, and that families which perform sacrifices are never dysfunctional. S. James in ‘Gender and Sexuality in Terence’ explores topics such as geriatric desire, patria potestas and the sexual control of people other than free citizen males. D. Christenson's excellent chapter on Eunuchus (262–80) usefully compliments James' analysis.
The final Part of the volume (343–481) is devoted to the long reception of Terence from antiquity: covering the complex transmission of Terence's text and the scholia (B. Victor), the revivals of his plays, his influence on the literature and education of the Empire, Late Antiquity, and Hrotsvit's era (R. Müller, A. Cain, Augoustakis), and his impact on modern culture through different media (stage adaptations, performances, English literature, Anglophone translations from 1534 to 2006) (M. van Elk, M. Hanses, J. Barsby, M.-K. Gamel). This section is stimulating (especially the contributions of Victor, Cain, Augoustakis and Barsby) and full of interesting information and ideas for further research. I missed a discussion of Terence and love-elegy in Müller's account of Terence's impact on classical Latin literature; and it is a pity that Gamel discusses only her own staging of The Eunuch along with Hrotsvit's The Conversion of Thais (2003). I would have welcomed her assessment of the 348 performances of Terence from 1476 to the present.
Cross-referencing is good, and has been facilitated by two detailed indexes (515–41). But it could have been better: there are, for example, no cross-references on the topics of surprise and dramatic irony (28 and 40), deceitful characters (41 and Karakasis' chapter) and the three-actor rule (26 and 47). More importantly, the volume has been poorly proof-read and inadequately checked for errors. Space constraints prevent me from giving a full list here, but I should at least point out the inaccurate statement regarding humanus (42) and the inconsistent information given on trochaic septenarii (see 76 and 101), the metatheatrical dimension of Terence's characters (see 42 and 82–4) and the fictionality of what Terence's prologues report (see 169, 228 and 242).
