The history of Rome

Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue, and his pieces require a lively play of gesture in the actors; Terence confines himself to "quiet conversation". The language of Plautus abounds in burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations, in comic coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence knows nothing of such caprices; his dialogue moves on with the purest symmetry, and its points are elegant epigrammatic and sententious turns. The comedy of Terence is not to be called an improvement, as compared with that of Plautus, either in a poetical or in a moral point of view. Originality cannot be affirmed of either, but, if possible, there is less of it in Terence; and the dubious praise of more correct copying is at least outweighed by the circumstance that, while the younger poet reproduced the agreeableness, he knew not how to reproduce the merriment of Menander, so that the comedies of Plautus imitated from Menander, such as the Stichus, the Cistellaria, the Bacchides, probably preserve far more of the flowing charm of the original than the comedies of the "dimidiatus Menander". And, while the aesthetic critic cannot recognize an improvement in the transition from the coarse to the dull, as little can the moralist in the transition from the obscenity and indifference of Plautus to the accommodating morality of Terence. But in point of language an improvement certainly took place. Elegance of language was the pride of the poet, and it was owing above all to its inimitable charm that the most refined judges of art in aftertimes, such as Cicero, Caesar, and Quinctilian, assigned the palm to him among all the Roman poets of the republican age. In so far it is perhaps justifiable to date a new era in Roman literature - the real essence of which lay not in the development of Latin poetry, but in the development of the Latin language - from the comedies of Terence as the first artistically pure imitation of Hellenic works of art. The modern comedy made its way amidst the most determined literary warfare. The Plautine style of composing had taken root among the Roman bourgeoisie; the comedies of Terence encountered the liveliest opposition from the public, which found their "insipid language", their "feeble style", intolerable. The, apparently, pretty sensitive poet replied in his prologues - which properly were not intended for any such purpose - with counter-criticisms full of defensive and offensive polemics; and appealed from the multitude, which had twice run off from his Hecyra to witness a band of gladiators and rope-dancers, to the cultivated circles of the genteel world. He declared that he only aspired to the approval of the "good"; in which doubtless there was not wanting a hint, that it was not at all seemly to undervalue works of art which had obtained the approval of the "few". He acquiesced in or even favoured the report, that persons of quality aided him in composing with their counsel or even with their cooperation[5]. In reality he carried his point; even in literature the oligarchy prevailed, and the artistic comedy of the exclusives supplanted the comedy of the people: we find that about 620 the pieces of Plautus disappeared from the set of stock plays. This is the more significant, because after the early death of Terence no man of conspicuous talent at all further occupied this field. Respecting the comedies of Turpilius (651 at an advanced age) and other stop-gaps wholly or almost wholly forgotten, a connoisseur already at the close of this period gave it as his opinion, that the new comedies were even much worse than the bad new pennies[6].

National Comedy - Afranius