Terence: The Brothers

Terence’s Brothers was put on at Rome in 160 BC. when ‘captive Greece was capturing her ruffian conqueror and bringing style to barnyard Latium’, when Cato the Elder, still vigorous at 74, was defending ‘the ways of our Roman ancestors’ with pen and voice, and fourteen years before the destruction of Carthage and Corinth which marked a new epoch in Roman history. It is the latest surviving example of the ‘Greek-style Comedy’ (Comoedia palliata), and for sustained verve, variety, characterization, and substance it is perhaps the most accomplished of the genre as we know it, as well as a document of the blending of Greek and Roman not yet quite complete. The play deals with a perennial domestic problem how fathers should relate to teenage children and raises the wider question of ends and means in education. Menander’s standpoint and Terence’s originality remain controversial. This edition puts the issues for the general reader, and complements commentaries for the student of Latin in the long tradition going back to Donatus by concentrating on the dramatic qualities of the piece and the texture of Terence’s lithe verse-diction in relation to meaning.