Terence: Andria

Sander M. Goldberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350020641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

Launching a much-needed new series discussing each comedy that survives from the ancient world, this volume is a vital companion to Terence's earliest comedy, Andria, highlighting its context, themes, staging and legacy. Ideal for students it assumes no knowledge of Latin, but is helpful also for scholars wanting a quick introduction. This will be the first port of call for anyone studying or researching the play. Though Andria launched Terence's career as a dramatist at Rome, it has attracted comparatively little attention from modern critics. It is nevertheless a play of great interest, not least for the sensitivity with which it portrays family relationships and for its influence on later dramatists. It also presents students of Roman comedy with all the features that came to characterize Terence's particular version of traditional comedy, and it raises all the interpretive questions that have dogged the study of Terence for generations. This volume will use a close reading of the play to explore the central issues in understanding Terence's style of play-making and its legacy.

1

Comedy at Rome

Tragedies, comedies, and historical plays were all popular forms of entertainment in Republican Rome. By the time Terence began producing his comedies in the 160s BCE, drama had become an established feature of four major state festivals, two in honor of Jupiter (the ludi Romani in September and ludi Plebeii in November), one of Apollo (the ludi Apollinares in July) and one of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods (the ludi Megalenses in April). And, thanks to the Roman willingness to repeat observances if the required rituals were declared imperfect, encore performances were always a possibility. In 200 BCE, for example, one day of the multi-day ludi Romani was repeated and not long after that, the entire program of the ludi Plebeii, at which we know Plautus’ Stichus was performed, was repeated three times. Plays might also be added to the festivities on unique occasions. Plautus’ Pseudolus was performed at the dedication of Cybele’s temple in 191 BCE, and in 160 BCE the lavish funeral arranged for the great general Aemilius Paullus included the performance of two plays by Terence. The triumphs and votive games celebrated by victorious generals might also include plays, although they were not necessarily comedies. All in all, it was a lively theatrical tradition, and Plautus, working at Rome a generation and more before Terence, already seems to have had more opportunities to produce plays in the city than the great dramatists of fifth-century Athens would have known.¹

The origins of this practice are shrouded in uncertainty. The tradition most often repeated in modern histories of Latin literature is that plays were first added to the official ludi when the Senate commissioned a Greek from Tarentum named Livius Andronicus to provide a comedy and a tragedy in Latin for production at the ludi Romani of 240 BCE. The commission itself may well be a historical fact. The games that year marked the successful outcome of the first war with Carthage and attracted distinguished foreign visitors eager to honor Rome by honoring the occasion with their presence. The Senate may have sought to impress them (as well as their own people) by expanding and enriching the native celebration with the trappings of a Greek festival. A learned Greek from southern Italy, an area with a longstanding theatrical traditional of its own, who had connections to the powerful family of the Livii (his name suggests he was a freedman of the Livian gens) may well have had the special combination of talent and experience required for the job.² Even if true, however, this account leaves many important questions unanswered: how did Andronicus so quickly adapt the quantitative patterns of Greek dramatic verse, spoken and sung, to the quite different linguistic structures of Latin, and where did he find actors capable of performing his new scripts? Did the plays he created build in any meaningful way on earlier native Italian traditions of performance or did they largely reflect a new wave of Greek cultural influence? Who formed the audience for these performances, and how would that audience have responded to such unprecedented sights and sounds?

The Romans themselves came to wonder about such things. Among the investigators was Accius, the most learned dramatist of the later second century, who was a distinguished tragedian and also studied and wrote extensively on the history of Roman theater. A little later, the antiquarian polymath Varro did the same, and Cicero’s friend Atticus was also among those who researched such questions. Their findings did not always agree, and while none of their antiquarian research survives intact, the debates it stimulated and at least some of the facts it recorded left an enduring mark: most of what we know about Rome’s early theater history ultimately derives from these late Republican sources. The twenty-one plays of Plautus familiar today, for example, are almost certainly the same twenty-one that Varro judged to be authentic from among the hundred and more that by his time were circulating under Plautus’ name. Varro was probably also the source, though perhaps indirectly, for the Augustan historian Livy when he traced the development of stage performances at Rome back beyond Andronicus to the importation of dancers from Etruria in 364 BCE as part of an expiatory ritual. The dates and details of early productions found in the manuscripts of Terence and attached in fragmentary form to Plautus’ Pseudolus and Stichus as the notes we call, after the Greek fashion, didascaliae, probably also entered the literary record in the late Republic as the result of similar antiquarian research. And that record endured. The long tradition of textual exegesis reflected in the commentary on Terence’s plays by the grammarian Aelius Donatus, originally compiled for his students in the fourth century CE, includes information on staging and details of production that may also derive from the work of these early researchers.³

These are not our only sources of knowledge. The surviving plays are themselves important witnesses to the conventions of the genre and the conditions of performance that generated them: stock jokes and stock scenes are easy to recognize by their very repetition from play to play, characters regularly signal the gestures and movements that accompanied their lines, comments spoken aside and speeches directed toward the spectators demonstrate the permeability of the boundary, both physical and conceptual, between actors and audiences, and textual variants in the manuscript tradition sometimes reflect changes made in the course of production to accommodate different actors or different conditions. Since Roman drama was in verse, its metrical patterns signal not just the presence or absence of musical accompaniment but the rhythms and tempos of that music, and thus the pace of the stage action. There is also a rich, if spotty, archaeological record that preserves some evidence for costumes, masks, and sets; and what we know of the venues for the dramatic festivals can also tell us at least a little about the conditions of performance. Sometimes, it is also possible to work from analogy with Hellenistic Greek theatrical practice, since the professional troupes that vied for contracts to perform at Rome probably functioned like the much better documented groups of traveling players that from at least the later fourth century brought drama to communities throughout the Greek world.

Not all this material, however, is equally relevant to the questions we most want to answer. The evidence from late Republican sources may be very rich, but it was compiled a century and more after the careers of Plautus and Terence, and by that time conditions had changed significantly. The performance venues familiar to Varro and Cicero, for example, were already much more formal. Although the notorious Roman resistance to building a permanent theater in the city persisted until well into the first century (Rome had no permanent venue for plays until Pompey the Great dedicated its first monumental stone theater in 55 BCE), even the temporary theaters of those later days could be large and elaborate. We hear of stages faced with silver and marble and glamorous colonnades as many as three tiers high. Awnings could be provided to shield spectators from the Mediterranean sun. In celebrating funeral games for his father in 53 BCE, Gaius Curio especially impressed his contemporaries by arranging for a double stage that could actually pivot to form an amphitheater. And “temporary” was relative: Curio’s pivoting structure was apparently still in use two years later. Audiences grew larger, too, and were more hierarchically arranged, with formal seating areas reserved for particular social classes, and visually spectacular productions became the norm.⁴

The creative impulse did not keep pace with these technical innovations. New plays became rare in the course of the second century, and revivals eventually became common. Tragedy continued to be popular—Cicero suggests that audiences could be moved to tears by pathetic scenes and were able to recognize famous arias from their opening notes—and revivals were sometimes given a contemporary political color, with audiences responding as much to the political sympathies of the sponsor as to the artistic merits of the show. Palliata comedy did not continue to enjoy that level of popularity. The last playwright specifically identified as a writer of palliata comedies, a man named Turpilius, died when Cicero was still in diapers, and in the course of the first century stage performances seem gradually to have lost ground to the more improvisational genre of mime and to other lighter entertainments. That does not mean that palliata comedy was forgotten. The genre was instead becoming a mainstay of the Roman curriculum, with Terence in particular securing his position as a school text and becoming something of a cultural benchmark. To what extent these changing conditions and changing practices colored the historical reconstructions of a source like Varro remains among the great unknowns of Roman theater history.⁵

Nevertheless, much about the production of plays in the time of Plautus and Terence is clear enough in outline, if not necessarily in detail. Funerals, along with whatever entertainments were arranged to accompany them, were the responsibility of the deceased dignitary’s family, while successful soldiers financed the games they sponsored with spoils of the campaign. As official functions, state festivals were the responsibility of magistrates, in most cases junior officials called aediles, who contracted for the various rituals and entertainments the occasion required. In later times, the sponsorship of such games became a way for ambitious politicians to attract notice at Rome—Caesar as aedile in 65 BCE first won popular acclaim by borrowing heavily and spending lavishly on public entertainments—but whether or to what extent officials in Terence’s day also supplemented the state allocation from private funds is uncertain. The lack of permanent theaters, though, surely meant that the costs incurred would have included construction of a stage and preparation of the performance venue as well as the hiring of performers.

What dramatists faced, then, were essentially ad hoc arrangements in a suitably open area of the forum or before the temple of the god being honored, as in the case of the ludi Megalenses, when a stage would have been erected before Cybele’s temple on...