One of the first three volumes in a new series designed to provide each comedy surviving from the ancient world with an accessible introduction, G.’s volume on Terence's earliest play, the Andria, offers an exemplary survey of previous scholarship paired with new interpretations that should interest anyone studying ancient Roman comedy.
The bulk of the book, after a brief note on the little we know about Terence's biography, consists of five chapters and two brief appendices. Chapter 1, ‘Comedy at Rome’, charts the conditions under which Roman comedies were performed, down to the final demise of the palliata and Terence's transformation to a school author. Interestingly, G. notes that Terence's predecessor Plautus already enjoyed more opportunities to produce his plays than any playwright in that hotbed of theatrical activity, fifth-century Athens.
Chapter 2, ‘Terence – a New Voice?’, addresses Terence's specific place in the Roman theatrical tradition. As the chapter title's question mark indicates, G. feels somewhat ambivalent about Terence. On the one hand, he acknowledges that Terence enjoyed great success during his lifetime. In the 160s bce all of Terence's plays were produced ‘in rapid succession’ by the famous impresario Ambivius Turpio (p. 15). They also made the former slave Terence wealthy. The sizable dowry, including property on the Appian Way, that Terence left his daughter allowed her to marry a well-off merchant (p. 15). And yet, G. notes, Terence also had his critics. Two generations after Terence's death, Volcacius Sedigitus (Gel. 15.24) ranked him only sixth out of ten comic poets, far behind Plautus, his number two (p. 14). Caesar, in turn, faulted Terence for a lack of vis comica (Donat. Vita Ter. 7 Wessner). G. concludes that Terence's ‘plays as plays were simply not funny enough’ (p. 14), and he observes that ‘even today, audiences and critics seem not to warm to Terence as easily as they do to Plautus’ (p. 15). G. explains this with the fact that Terence's ‘clever slaves … never seize the limelight’, his ‘young lovers are never quite so absurdly silly or courtesans so coldly mercenary or pimps so outrageously villainous’ (p. 15) as in Plautus. Worst of all, Terence's plays ‘have a moral center’ and contain ‘[q]uite serious appeals to human sensibility’ (p. 20). There is, of course, nothing that prevents a comedy from being funny and offering a serious critique of society at the same time. Moreover, G. seems to underestimate both the amount of slapstick in Terence's comedies and the comic appeal of their many clever inversions of comedic conventions.
This becomes particularly obvious in G's third chapter, ‘Andria Unfolds Itself’. Here G., after the fashion of the late antique commentator Donatus, divides the plot of Terence's Andria into four parts, Prologue (1–27), Exposition (28–227), Development (228–795) and Resolution (796–981). G. rightly points out that the play did not begin with talk, but with action, that is, with a comic procession of porters carrying provisions for a wedding feast who are led by old Simo and his freedman Sosia (p. 32). G. rejects Donatus’ suggestion, however, that Sosia is a cook (pp. 32–3), despite the fact that Sosia refers to mea ars (31) and the correct preparation of the food he and his crew have just brought (30). Thus, G. fails to appreciate much of the visual comedy of the spectacular cook parade, accompanied by music and dance, that opens the Andria (see my discussion in Gymnasium 115 [2008]). Instead, G.’s emphasis on the ‘seriousness of the expository dialogue’ (p. 33), which is ‘uninterrupted by jokes’ (p. 34), blinds him to the rich comedy of the scene. Old Simo, with his constant ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ (p. 35), is, of course, a funny, self-important fool who has been stalking his son rather than talking to him. Similarly, G. appears to consider the fact that the slave Davos turns out to be singularly inept at playing the traditional Clever Slave role a flaw of Terence's script (pp. 41–2) when it is actually quite funny that the Andria’s self-appointed Clever Slave ‘weaves no elaborate plans …, overcomes no obstacles, and seems always to be one step behind the pace of events’ (p. 41). That said, G.’s readers will find his comparison between the comic stereotype of hetaeras and the harsh reality these women faced in ancient Athens very informative (pp. 36–9). They will probably also share G.’s disquiet at the way Terence achieves his happy ending without dwelling on the emotional costs especially for Glycerium (p. 47). At the same time, it bears mentioning that Terence's ancient audience probably did not trouble itself about this issue, just as Plautus’ audience likely did not worry about the fate of Menaechmus I's wife at the end of Menaechmi.
Chapter 4, ‘From Stage to Page … and Back Again’, offers a useful survey of the Andria’s reception over the centuries, from antiquity to modern times. Three works inspired by the Andria are treated to a more detailed analysis, John Steele's sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722), a cycle of four paintings by the Danish artist Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809) and Thornton Wilder's novel The Woman of Andros (1930). Ironically, Terence's plays could serve both as a justification for the bawdiness of Restoration comedy (although it is telling that John Dryden quotes not the Andria, but Terence's Eunuch in his defence) and as the inspiration for the more ‘sober mirth’ of Steele's The Conscious Lovers two generations later (pp. 63–8).
The final chapter, ‘The Translator's Dilemma’, outlines what, for me at least, seems to be the real reason why modern audiences do not warm as easily to Terence as to Plautus, the lack of a modern English translation that is accurate without sounding lifeless and dull. G. does a good job of communicating the challenge of translating Terence's elegant Latin without losing the vividness of its metaphors, the intricacies of its word order, the word plays, assonances, alliterations, rhetorical figures and all the other features that give it meaning and beauty, not to mention the effects achieved by music and metre. Translating Terence is an impossible task and, at the same time, a task that becomes more and more urgent as fewer and fewer readers are able to encounter and appreciate Terence in the original Latin.
Two brief appendices conclude the book. One provides an annotated translation of all the passages in which Donatus discusses the Andria’s debt to Menander (pp. 103–5); the other presents a timeline that shows the cultural and historical context in which the Andria was written (pp. 107–9).
Overall the book succeeds in providing a highly readable, up-to-date companion to an important, yet relatively neglected play by Terence. Attractively designed and written in a lively style, it offers even Latinless undergraduate readers an accessible introduction to Roman comedy. At the same time, more advanced scholars of Roman comedy will also find much that should interest them.
