"widely appreciated than it had been by Plautus' less cultured audience. But there is a danger of exaggerating this
difference. Some of the changes which Terence made to his Greek originals suggest that he was still aiming to appeal
to a fairly unsophisticated kind of Roman. In adapting Menander's Eunuchus Terence has added from another play
by Menander the characters of the boastful soldier and his fawning parasite, who bring with them some broad comic
effects; and to Menander's Adelphoe ('The Brothers') he has added from a play by a different Greek author a scene of
movement and violence in which a slave-dealer fails to prevent a young man from abducting one of the prostitutes he
owns. Terence tells us of these additions in the prologues which he wrote to be delivered before the start of the plays
themselves; and one of his prologues tells us something of the conditions in which his plays were performed. This is
the prologue he wrote for the third performance of Hecyra, describing how two previous attempts to stage it had been
failures:
The first time I began to perform this play, there was talk of a boxing match, and there were also rumours that a tight-
rope walker was going to perform. Slaves were arriving, there was a din, women were shouting; and the result was
that I had to give up before the end. ... I put it on again: the first act went down well, but then word got around that a
gladiatorial show was going to be given. People flew together, there was an uproar, they were shouting and fighting
for somewhere to sit. It was impossible for me to hold my own against that.
Hecyra is the only play of Terence which we know to have had difficulties with the public. His more boisterous
Eunuchus was an unprecedented success.
Terences's prologues are quite unlike anything we know of in New Comedy or in Plautus. He uses them to conduct
feuds with his literary rivals and defend himself against criticisms which they have made of him. They give us an
exceptional glimpse of the literary world in which he worked, though they do only give his side of the arguments. If
we can trust them, he was criticized (among other things) for feebleness of style, for plagiarism, and for combining
more than one Greek original to construct a single Latin play ('contamination', as his critics called it). Although more
faithful than Plautus to his originals, he seems not to have been faithful enough for some of his contemporaries. We
learn of other innovations made by Terence from a commentary on his plays written in the fourth century A.D. by
the famous grammarian Donatus. We can deduce, for instance, from what Donatus tells us, that Terence has spun the
first twenty lines of his first play, Andria, entirely out of his own head. And one major change which he has made to
the openings of his plays is that his prologues do not give the background to the plot (as those of Menander and
Plautus do). Perhaps he regarded that as an artificial device, preferring to convey -what information he could more
naturalistically in the mouths of his characters in the course of the play. The result is that some opportunities for
irony are missed, since the audience do not always learn all that there is to learn until a late stage of the play.
Terence is thus a more enigmatic figure than Plautus. He chose to adapt Greek plays whose appreciation often
demands some moral and emotional involvement, and he was faithful most of the time in reproducing their essential
qualities; but he did not do so slavishly, and he added some scenes with a cruder comic effect. It was no doubt the
liveliness of his Eunuchus that ensured its success in his lifetime; but it is the quieter elements in Terence's plays that
have most impressed his readers in subsequent generations: his sympathetic portrayal of the problems and
predicaments of individuals, and his concern for the serious issues underlying the comedy of his plays. These
elements ensure that his plays repay thoughtful study more than those of Plautus can ever do. But they are probably
reproduced from the original Greek plays; and there is room to doubt whether Terence himself always cared about
the refinements he has reproduced, as we shall see in the case of Adelphoe.
One thing which was undoubtedly Terence's own achievement was the creation of a Latin literary style quite unlike
that of Plautus or of any other previous writer. Although criticized for its feebleness in Terence's own life, it has
since then been more generally admired for its elegance and clarity. Terence was the first Latin writer to reproduce
the elliptical style of natural conversation. It is not a low colloquial style, but its clipped constructions have a realistic