page_title: Terence
section_title: Cultural legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Terence / Cultural legacy
caption_attribution_description: Terence's Comedies, in Latin, with Romanesque drawings comprising the latest version of the Late Antique cycle of scene-illustrations, St. Albans Abbey, mid 12th century. The first of the four artists (fols. 2v-17v) is identifiable as "The Master of the Apocrypha Drawings" in the Winchester Bible. The illustrations for Andria V.1-2 at fol. 28r-v are missing in the Carolingian witnesses.; 55v
context_page_description: Publius Terentius Afer, better known in English as Terence, was a Roman African playwright during the Roman Republic. His comedies were performed for the first time around 170–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought Terence to Rome as a slave, educated him and later on, impressed by his abilities, freed him. Terence apparently died young, probably in Greece or on his way back to Rome. All of the six plays Terence wrote have survived.
  One famous quotation by Terence reads: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", or "I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me." This appeared in his play Heauton Timorumenos.
context_section_description: Due to his clear and entertaining language, Terence's works were heavily used by monasteries and convents during the Middle Ages and The Renaissance.  Scribes often learned Latin through the meticulous copying of Terence's texts. Priests and nuns often learned to speak Latin through reenactment of Terence's plays, thereby learning both Latin and Gregorian chants. Although Terence's plays often dealt with pagan material, the quality of his language promoted the copying and preserving of his text by the church. The preservation of Terence through the church enabled his work to influence much of later Western drama.
  Pietro Alighieri's Commentary to the Commedia states that his father took the title from Terence's plays and Giovanni Boccaccio copied out in his own hand all of Terence's Comedies and Apuleius' writings in manuscripts that are now in the Laurentian Library. Two of the earliest English comedies, Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle, are thought to parody Terence's plays. Montaigne, Shakespeare and Molière cite and imitate him. 
  Terence's plays were a standard part of the Latin curriculum of the neoclassical period.  President of the United States John Adams once wrote to his son, "Terence is remarkable, for good morals, good taste, and good Latin... His language has simplicity and an elegance that make him proper to be accurately studied as a model." American playwright Thornton Wilder based his novel The Woman of Andros on Terence's Andria.
  Due to his cognomen Afer, Terence has long been identified with Africa and heralded as the first poet of the African diaspora by generations of writers, including Juan Latino, Phyllis Wheatley, Alexandre Dumas, Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. Two of his plays were produced in Denver with Black actors.
  Questions as to whether Terence received assistance in writing or was not the actual author have been debated over the ages, as described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica:
  [In a prologue to one of his plays, Terence] meets the charge of receiving assistance in the composition of his plays by claiming as a great honour the favour which he enjoyed with those who were the favorites of the Roman people. But the gossip, not discouraged by Terence, lived and throve; it crops up in Cicero and Quintilian, and the ascription of the plays to Scipio had the honour to be accepted by Montaigne and rejected by Diderot.
caption: Mid-12th century illustrated Latin manuscript of Terence's Comedies from St Albans Abbey, now held at the Bodleian Library
exif: {}