Plot:  Young Antipho marries Phanium while his father Demipho is abroad. She is penniless with no dowry, which enrages Demipho on his return. Meanwhile Antipho’s cousin Phaedria has fallen in love with Pamphila, a slave girl about to be sold off, but he has no money to rescue and marry her. His father, Chremes (Demipho’s brother) is also abroad on one of his frequent visits to his secret second wife and his daughter but they have disappeared. Phormio , a clever rascal and  friend to Antipho and Phaedria, promises to help them both.

My thoughts:  More enjoyable than the earlier plays, especially as there was no overt violence to women, but it didn’t quite have the sparkle of The Eunuch. The plot is twisty but doesn’t lose the audience (that is, me).

I mentioned in the last post that the stage setup remains quite basic and consistent, with just the two neighbouring houses. I should also mention that, while the courtesans and older women (wives, slaves and nurses) appear on stage, the beautiful young women (in this case, Phanium and Pamphila) never appear but are spoken to as if they are in the houses. I presume that if only male actors were allowed to perform on stage, they could not provide a sufficient illusion of feminine beauty necessary to make the desperation of the male characters believable and lift the comedy above farce.

As mentioned in earlier posts, Terence borrowed content from Greek plays, which was almost standard practice for Latin playwrights at this time, and subsequently both this play and Terence’s next (The Brothers) were used by Moliere as the basis of two of his plays. As Terence said in his prologue to The Eunuch: “Nothing is ever said which has not been said before”

Personal rating:  6/10

Also about this time: Public libraries appear in Rome. Yay!

Next : The final play by Terence, Adelphoe (The Brothers)

Plot:  Chaerea has fallen in love at first sight with the young maiden Pamphila, and disguises himself as a eunuch so he can gain access to her bedroom where he ‘seduces’ her. His older brother Phaedria is in love with the courtesan Thais, but has a rival in the soldier Thraso. The latter has made a present of Pamphila to Thais (who is trying to restore her to her family), but only if Thais will make Thraso her number one suitor.

My thoughts: Paradoxically I enjoyed this play far more than Terence’s other plays, in spite of the fact that at the centre of this ‘comedy’ there is still a young woman sexually assaulted.

The storyline was better structured, and the intentions of all the characters were easy to follow. It also featured the whole host of stock characters – the bragging soldier, his toady companion milking him for meals, the artful courtesan, the obsessed young men and the dottery old father, with much more opportunity for actual comedy – the young man dressing as a eunuch, the braggart and his sycophantic ‘yes-man’.  I can almost be persuaded that everyone has a happy ending, even the young girl, reunited with her family and offered marriage by her love-struck assailant.

I guess I just have to take on board this treatment of women, particularly slaves, was an everyday occurrence, rating only a small amount of sympathy from a Roman audience, and justified due to  the uncontrollable desires of young men ‘boys will be boys’ mentality.

The stage presentation is remarkably static in all the Roman plays so far. Two houses side by side, with the city centre off to the audience’s right, and the countryside off to the left. Terence also uses the same range of characters mentioned above, and even recycles the names of characters across his plays (although they do not represent the same people from play to play)

Personal rating:  A surprising and somewhat guilty 7/10. If you read one Terence play, this is probably the one.

Next :  Staying with Terence, his fifth play, Phormio.

Plot: Young Pamphilus is convinced to break off his affair with the courtesan Bacchis and marry Philumena. But seven months later, Philumena runs back to her parents’ house, and it is generally believed that it must have been some quarrel or  insult from Pamphilus’ mother Sostra that caused her to flee. In reality Philumena is trying to hide a pregnancy resulting from her being raped by an unknown man two months before the arranged wedding.

My copies of the comedies of Terence are all taken from the Penguin Classic The Comedies, translated by Betty Radice (ISBN 014044324X)

My thoughts:   And here was I thinking that the dating of Terence’s plays was straightforward and past dispute. While The Girl from Andros (166 BC) is agreed to be the first, the fate of what I will treat as the second (The Mother-in-Law) is a little chequered. Originally staged in 165 BC, the play was interrupted by a surge of people responding to a rumour that a tight-rope walker was appearing. In its second outing in 160 BC, again a mob interrupted proceedings expecting a gladiatorial battle. Finally in its third outing, again in 160 BC, the cast got through to the end and the play was a success. In the meantime, three of Terence’s other plays had been performed. Anyway as Lucius Ambivius Turpio, lead actor and producer of this third attempt would have undoubtedly said, let’s get on with the show.

By now, prologues are no longer used to set the scene of the play but to beg the audience’s indulgence, or to respond to the attack of critics. Dialogue between two characters in the opening scene is used to explain the background to the situation where the story begins, in this case that Pamphilus has married Philumena and stopped his attentions to the courtesan Bacchis, and that Philumena has gone back to her parents without explanation.

The play itself is  more like a soap opera than the comedies that Plautus wrote, but with the same misunderstandings and coincidences abounding. The women are all treated badly because of the misunderstandings, yet each behaves nobly; even and perhaps especially the courtesan Bacchis who agrees to visit Philumena’s family home and swear that she has not seen Pamphilus since his marriage.

The mother-in law in question is Pamphilus’ mother Sostrata, who is ill used by all. Suspected of having driven Philumena away, and used as an excuse by Pamphilus to abandon his wife, she is also accused by her own husband of causing the problem;  just as Philumena’s father Phidippus blames his wife Myrrina for using the pregnancy to try and break up the young couple. Worst of all, poor Philumena has been raped, forced into marriage with a man known to be obsessed with a prostitute, and now has to somehow hide her pregnancy from her husband and his family.

As I try to never tell readers the entire plot, I will leave off with the obvious spoiler that there is a happy ending so it ranks as a mild domestic comedy, but it has all the potential of a tragedy.

Personal rating: 5/10

Next : Terence’s ‘third’ play,  Heauton Timorumenos  (The Self-Tormentor) (c.163 BC)

PS The excellent pic attached to this post comes from Monica Dorkface at DeviantArt

Plot:  Pamphilus wants to marry disgraced Glycerium, a girl from Andros and sister of a immigrant prostitute, who he has fallen in love with and made pregnant.  But his father Simo has arranged for him to marry instead Philumena, the daughter of his friend Chremes. To further complicate things, Pamphilus’ friend Charinus is in love with Philumena. The slave Davos convinces Pamphilus that the planned wedding is a ruse by Simo, as he knows Chremes has called it off, and convinces Pamphilus to agree to the ‘wedding’ to confuse and delay Simo long enough to allow the real wedding of Pamphilus and Glycerium. But of course things don’t go according to plan. And is Glycerium really the sister of a courtesan from Andros?

My copies of the comedies of Terence are all taken from the Penguin Classic The Comedies, translated by Betty Radice (ISBN 014044324X)

My thoughts: At first glance, this seems like a rather tame Plautine comedy, with a slave trying to fool his master so that the son can marry his true love. And like Plautus, Terence is using plays from the Greek New Comedy corpus as inspiration (in this case, two Menander plays, The Girl from Samos, and The Girl from Perinthos). But as the translator Radice points out in her introduction, Terence treats his characters with more realism and less caricature, resulting in less raucousness. Whether this is an improvement depends on your taste – I  like my comedy both clever and a bit raucous.

What Terence did introduce to drama was the double plot – having two plots intertwine – in this case, two sets of lovers entangled in misunderstandings – very Shakespearean – although the second love affair is given very little stage time.

Terence was a young man, a freed slave of a Roman senator, when he wrote the first of his six plays. He went missing, presumed dead, on a trip to Greece to search for more material, but no more is known on what exactly happened, and a number of theories have arisen over the years.

He was accused of plagiarism, and at the same time ruining Greek plays by cherry-picking parts to form a different whole. His most vociferous critic went by the gloriously villainous name of Luscius Lanuvinus. It was also claimed that his plays were really written or at least heavily influenced by his more illustrious friends, but the fact that new plays did not surface after his disappearance seems to disprove that rumour.

Personal rating:  5/10

Also in that year:  In the twenty odd years since 188 BC, Philip V of Macedonia dies (179 BC) and is succeeded by Perseus who is hostile to Rome, leading to the Third Macedonian War (171-167 BC), ending in Perseus’ imprisonment and death. Roman forces takes some Greek hostages to Italy, including the historian Polybius (167 BC).

The Chinese have discovered porcelain, while the Romans have started making stone bridges and laying pavements.

Next : Terence’s next play, The Mother-in-Law