Sitting by the bar at a bygone conference, a colleague of mine once mused, ‘No one knows what to do with Terence’. While Menander and Plautus lend themselves easily to generic definition, a grand unifying theory of Terence is elusive. B.’s meticulously arranged volume, winner of the De Gruyter Trends in Classics Prize 2023, may offer some insights into Ovid, but it is unlikely to lead to a better understanding of Terence.
B. proposes to ‘conduct a thorough and systematic analysis of the reception of the comic playwright Terence in the elegiac works of Ovid’ (p. ix), the first ‘extensive work to conduct such an investigation’ (p. xii). B.’s scope, however, is narrower than the monograph’s title suggests. B. asserts that ‘all of Terence’s six comedies are treated in this book’, but immediately tempers reader expectations by continuing ‘though to various degrees’ (p. x). The book puts Terence’s Eunuchus in conversation with the Ars Amatoria, a few of the Amores and a couple of the Heroides, but there is little sustained analysis of Terence’s other works.
Chapter 1 begins with Tristia 2.359, the only direct mention of Terence in Ovid’s entire corpus. This may be the biggest impediment to readers: that B. spins a network of allusions out of one concrete reference. Ovid argues in Tristia 2 that an author cannot be assumed to have the same morals as his characters: thus Ovid is as much a libertine as Accius was harsh and Terence was a bon vivant. But B. sees another connection to Terence, taking Hecyra’s prologue at face value as evidence that Terence was misunderstood (or at least underappreciated) in his time, just as Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is misunderstood (by Augustus) in his own time (p. 9).
In Chapter 2 B. examines the parallels between Romulus’ rape of the Sabine women in the Ars Amatoria and the rape of Pamphila in Eunuchus. She posits the change in location from the Circus Maximus to the theatre as an interpretative clue. Ovid’s invenies quod ames (Ars Am. 1.91) resembles Parmeno’s promise inveni | modo quod ames (Eun. 308–9), and this creates a connection between the praeceptor amoris, Romulus and the servus callidus, further underscored by the repetition of commoda (Ars Am. 1.131–2) and commodis (Eun. 372). B. then explores the paradox of the Sabine Women as exemplum in the Ars Amatoria. Why is a work purportedly not about wooing marriageable women referring to the first Roman marriage? And why does Ovid allude in this episode to Terence’s Eunuchus, a play that ends in respectable citizen marriage, like the Sabine episode, through violent rape? B. interrogates the tension between the violence in Roman traditional citizen values (in Ovid’s time enforced by the Julian laws) and Ovid’s elegiac ideal. B.’s connections are intriguing, and they deepen the mystery of the Ovidian paradox.
In Chapter 3, ‘Love as Disease’, focusing on Terentian connections in the Remedia Amoris, B. revisits Ovid’s argument that his art is not evidence of his character. Here B. notes an allusion to Eunuchus in the repeated Thaida/Thais (Rem. Am. 383–6) rather than a reference to Menander’s Thais or a generic association with New Comedy. B. sees in Terence (especially in Andria and Eunuchus) ‘a clear and developed, though scattered, notion of love as an illness (morbus) … that has a cure such as … entering into a proper marriage, explicitly expressed by the use of medicari’ (p. 65). Ovid, however, cannot advocate for such a cure in the context of the elegiac genre, but B. rightly asserts that Terence influenced the motif.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine the elegiac topoi of servitium and militia amoris. B. argues that Eunuchus’ Parmeno acts as a proto-praeceptor amoris in his (joking) advice to Chaerea to act the part of the eunuch to gain access to Pamphila. She connects Chaerea’s joke at Eun. 606 to Ovid’s advice to perform slavish duties for the puella as a means of getting close to her (Ars Am. 2.209–32), but observes (p. 96) that, while Chaerea reasserts his citizen status and control through marriage, the praeceptor’s students do not have that option. B.’s work here is more a thought-provoking refinement of preexisting scholarship than new material, as she notes throughout the connections other scholars have already made between Terence and the motif of servitium amoris.
Militia amoris is a significant Ovidian motif, and B. (pp. 113–15, 123) finds its antecedents in the opening scenes of Eunuchus and Hecyra. Not only does Phaedria lament his treatment by Thais in militaristic terms in the opening of Eunuchus (49–55), but Eunuchus also features a miles who plans a mock attack on Thais’ house with pots and pans (Eun. 771–88). Here B. finds a development of the Roman paraclausithyron that later appears in Ovid’s Amores. In Hecyra, the conversation between Syra and Philotis provides a women’s perspective on the battle of the sexes that informs Book 3 of the Ars Amatoria, in which the praeceptor offers advice to women.
B. connects three references to breaking down doors in Adelphoe (lines 88–92, 101–10, 118–21) to the elegiac motif of militia amoris. Young Aeschinus has behaved badly in his door-busting, his father Micio argues, but he will mature through his marriage to the neighbour girl. In Ars Amatoria 3.565–76 Ovid prescribes not marriage, but a veteran/old lover (vetus miles) for the puella weary of youthful violence (and, presumably, shopping for new doors). B. notes that neither comedy nor elegy have a place for white-haired lovers (p. 133), but she makes no mention of old Micio being strong-armed into marriage to Aeschinus’ new mother-in-law Sostrata at the end of Adelphoe (906–45). Micio’s brother Demea even suggests breaking down the wall between their houses. Micio is horrified to become a novos maritus at 65 years old, but agrees. What are we to make of this humorous gender reversal of militia amoris, in which the would-be lover-girl’s allies advocate breaking into the reluctant old beloved’s house?
In Chapter 6 B. reiterates her thesis, that ‘the only mention of Terence by name in the entire Ovidian corpus in Tristia 2 is a gateway to a new world of understanding when it comes to Ovid’s text’ (p. 144). This conclusion reminds readers that the entire monograph hinges upon a single direct author-generated allusion in a large corpus. The rest of the book examines ‘micro allusions’, which ‘involve similarities in wording as well as in literary setting and situations; they are not necessarily verbatim correspondences and might be revealed by small similarities in wording’ (p. xx). These micro allusions, B. explains in a footnote (p. xx n. 49), are generated by B. and, although authorial intentionality is impossible to determine, B. ‘still assume[s] that their meaning can be intended by the author’. The same footnote acknowledges that ‘allusion’ is generally understood to mean ‘author-generated’ while intertextuality is ‘reader-generated’, but B. uses the two terms interchangeably. The result is a collapse of intertext, allusion and intentionality into a series of close readings that may or may not be based on entirely imagined connections. Readers may not find this note convincing enough to conclude, as B. does, that ‘to fully understand the works of Ovid, Terence is crucial reading material’ (p. 139).
B.’s painstaking but tendentious Terentian connections may enrich scholarly readings of Ovid’s elegiac works, but they offer little beyond a philological treat for the already initiated.
