Terence

Publius Terentius Afer, known in English as Terence, was a Roman comic playwright of the second century BC. According to the ancient biographical tradition he was born in or near Carthage, came to Rome as a slave in the household of a senator, and was educated and set free. His six comedies, all adapted from Greek New Comedy, were staged at Rome between 166 and 160 BC.

Terence took most of his plots from Menander and other Greek authors, and he is admired for his polished, conversational Latin and for the humane, carefully drawn characters of his fathers, sons, slaves and courtesans. According to the tradition he left Rome for Greece in about 160 BC and died there not long afterwards. All six of his plays survive, and they remained standard school texts from antiquity through the Renaissance. Here they appear in the nineteenth-century English prose translation of Henry Thomas Riley.