Table Of ContentT E R E N C E
The
Eunuch
Edited with translation and commentary by
A. J. Brothers
TERENCE
THE EUNUCH
EUNUCHUS
THE CHARACTERS OF THE EUNUCH
Woodcut from Terentius Comico Carmine, Johann Griininger, Strasbourg, 1503,
in the Founders’ Library, University of Wales, Lampeter
(The lines indicate the relationships between the characters.)
TERENCE
THE EUNUCH
Edited with translation and commentary by
A. J. Brothers
Aris & Phillips Ltd - Warminster - England
© A.J. Brothers 2000. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying or recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBNs 0 85668 513 5 limp
0 85668 512 7 cloth
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Printed and published in England by Axis & Phillips Ltd, Warminster, Wiltshire
BA12 8PQ______________________________________________________________
FOR JOE AND TIM
Contents
Preface vi
INTRODUCTION:
I. Greek New Comedy 1
II. Comedy at Rome 5
III. The Life and Works of Terence 11
IV. Terence and his Critics 16
V. The Eunuch and its Relationship to Menander 20
VI. The Eunuch as a Roman Comedy 27
VII. The Text 36
Bibliography 42
List of Metres 46
TEXT AND TRANSLATION 49
COMMENTARY 157
211
Index
VI
Preface
When I began work on this edition of Terence’s The Eunuch some years ago, no
new full-scale edition of the play had appeared in Britain for over 100 years. The
publication in 1999 of John Barsby’s Cambridge edition changed that situation, and
it will be apparent - even though this edition is somewhat different in its approach -
how much, particularly in the commentary, I have benefited from the scholarship
and acute judgement of his work. The Eunuch deserves a wide audience; it is to be
hoped that this desideratum has now been achieved.
This is the second of Terence’s plays which 1 have edited for Aris and Phillips,
following on from The Self-Tormentor of 1988. Since I have found it all but
impossible to re-write from scratch the general material I wrote then, Sections I-IV
and Vll of the Introduction to The Eunuch have been updated and adapted from the
earlier work.
I am most grateful to Mr Adrian Phillips of Aris and Phillips Ltd for his stoical
acceptance of the over-long delay in the completion of this edition, and I am greatly
indebted to Aris and Phillips’ Editorial Adviser, Professor Μ. M. Willcock, whose
sharp eyes have removed many imperfections, and whose helpful suggestions and
keen observations have improved the draft in so many ways. 1 record my thanks to
several friends for their assistance over various matters, especially Mr Ian Barton,
Dr Doug Lee, Professor Robert Maltby and Dr Emma Stafford; and I must make
particular mention of Dr Demetrios Beroutsos, whose constant supply of
information from the rich resources of Oxford has helped me immensely when
pressure of work at my home University has kept me in West Wales. I am also
grateful to the authorities of University of Wales, Lampeter for allowing me to
reproduce the illustration which 1 have used as a frontispiece, and for granting me a
term of study leave at an early stage in the preparation of the work. Finally, I could
not have done without the help of Ms Bethan Ifans, who typed the whole work
except the commentary with the greatest care and accuracy.
This book is dedicated to two very special people - to a staunch friend who is
always there in good times and in bad, and to a splendid godson of whom I am so
justly proud.
A. J. Brothers
1
Introduction
I GREEK NEW COMEDY1
Terence’s comedies are adaptations into Latin of Greek plays of the type known as
New Comedy. Greek Comedy is conventionally divided into three periods called
Old, Middle and New, though there was gradual and continuous development of the
genre throughout. Old Comedy (to which most of Aristophanes’ eleven surviving
comedies belong) is the name for the type of comic drama produced at Athens down
to about 400 BC, and Middle Comedy (of which Aristophanes* last two plays are
our only examples) for that produced for about the first 75 years of the fourth
century. New Comedy is “the name we give ... to the Greek plays (other than
tragedies) written in the period following the death of Alexander the Great”2 (323
BC).
By the New Comedy period Athens was no longer great and influential, but a
city of comparatively little independent political importance in the kingdoms of
Alexander's successors, and the old democratic freedom of speech which is such a
feature of much of Aristophanes had gone forever. Accordingly, comedy became
less and less concerned with satirical comment on prominent figures in public life
and criticism of important topics of the moment, and more and more concerned with
the less obviously appealing but much safer problems continually but timelessly
raised in the fictional lives of ordinary people. New Comedy also dispensed with
the scurrility and obscenity which had been features of Old Comedy, and the chorus,
which had also featured prominently, was reduced to a role of virtual insignificance.
Unfortunately, because of the absence of any texts worth speaking of between
Aristophanes’ last play, Wealth (Πλούτος, Ploutos) (388 BC), and our earliest
datable example of New Comedy (317 BC), we know little about the rate of these
changes or about the stages by which they occurred.
Until the beginning of this century our knowledge of New Comedy was almost
exclusively derived from brief quotations preserved out of context by ancient
grammarians and commentators, and from the Latin adaptations made by Plautus
and Terence of lost originals from the period. But this situation began to change
radically with the first substantial discovery of papyrus texts in 1905, and the
discoveries have continued in fits and starts since.3 The result has been one virtually
1 Our knowledge of New Comedy has been revolutionized by the discoveries of the last
thirty or forty years, and older works on the subject are best avoided. The best short
introduction is Sandbach (1977) chs 4 and 5.
2 Sandbach(1977) 55.
3 Gomme and Sandbach 3-4.
2 INTRODUCTION
complete play, Menander’s The Bad-Tempered Man4 (Δύσκολος, Dyskolos),
substantial portions of half a dozen others (particularly Menander’s The Girl from
Samos (Σαμία, Sarnia), where the gaps in our text do not prevent an appreciation of
the play as a whole), and passages of a reasonable length from yet more. We can
now form a first-hand, rather than a second-hand, impression of what New Comedy
was like.
None of the really big discoveries so far made come from comedies which
Plautus and Terence adapted.5 But all of the major ones do at least come from the
pen of the same writer of New Comedy as provided models for four of Terence’s six
plays - Menander. Of over 70 comic dramatists of whom we have evidence in this
period, Menander is by far the most famous. An Athenian who lived from c. 342 to
c. 291 BC, he began his dramatic career in 321, and wrote, according to one account,
108 plays altogether. During his lifetime his reputation did not stand all that high,
with eight first prizes in dramatic competition - a respectable, but not a spectacular,
record. Later in antiquity, however, he was regarded with an admiration which
almost amounted to veneration, being particularly renowned for his excellence in
character-drawing, his good plots and his mastery of language. Thus the learned
scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium could say: “O Menander, o life, which of you
imitated the other?”, while Plutarch asked why any educated man would go to the
theatre except to see Menander.6
Of the other writers of New Comedy we know much less than we do of
Menander, and we possess few substantial passages from their works. Mention need
only be made of one other, if only because he provided the originals for the other
two of Terence’s plays. He is Apollodorus of Carystus, a town on the island of
4 The English titles of Men.’s plays often exist in different versions. For instance, Miller
prefers Old Cantankerous to The Bad-Tempered Man. With that one exception, I have
adopted the English titles found in her Penguin translation.
5 The largest is a fragment of Men.'s The Double Deceiver (ΔΙς Έζαπατών, Dis
Exapaton) corresponding to Plautus' The Two Bacchises (Bacchides) 494-562. It
contains 112 lines, about half of which are too incomplete to be intelligible, and is the
first passage of any length where a real comparison of the Latin adaptation with its
original is possible. It reveals considerable changes made by Plautus in his version, and
serves as a warning of the perils of working back from adaptation to model. Text and
translation, Amott (1979) 140-65, Barsby (1986) 191-5; translation (with Plautus),
Miller 171-81; comparison with Plautus, Sandbach (1977) 128-34, Barsby (1986), 139-
45.
6 Kdrte II 7 (testimonium 32) and 9 (testimonium 41) respectively; the latter = Plutarch,
Moralia 854B. Ter., for all his brilliance, was apostrophized by Caesar as only “half
sized Menander" (dimidiate Menander) (Suetonius, Life of Terence 7).
