Terence: Phormio

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9780856686061.001.0001 ◽

2012 ◽

Keyword(s):

Young Men ◽

Latin Text ◽

Central Importance ◽

Mistaken Identity ◽

New Comedy

Terence's Phormio, based on a Greek original by Apollodorus of Carystus, was produced towards the end of his short dramatic career in 161 BC. With its lively action, based on the traditional elements of love, deception and mistaken identity, the play provides an ideal introduction to the genre of New Comedy. What makes the Phormio unique amongst Terence's works is the central importance of the witty and scheming parasite who gives his name to the play and directs and controls its action throughout, even when absent from the stage. The use of the 'double' plot with its two young men in love and two contrasting fathers provides ample scope for depth and variety of characterisation. The aim of the present edition is to bring out to the full, Terence's skill in plot development and character portrayal which was to make the Phormio one of his most entertaining plays. The book consists of ludes Latin text with facing-page translation, introduction and commentary.

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From Aristophanes to Menander

Greece and Rome ◽

10.1017/s0017383500016727 ◽

1972 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 65-80 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

W. Geoffrey Arnott

Keyword(s):

Subject Matter ◽

Young Men ◽

Peloponnesian War ◽

Old Comedy ◽

The City ◽

New Comedy

At the beginning of 405 b.c., fourteen or fifteen months before the final catastrophe overtook Athens in the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes produced the Frogs. It is the last extant play of Old Comedy proper. Its plot is at times discursive, its subject-matter is passionately tied to the city in which the play was conceived, and its structure is largely controlled by such traditional and formal Old Comedy elements as the agon and parabasis. The Frogs won first prize. In 316 b.c., just eighty-nine years later, if we accept a plausible emendation in the Bodmer papyrus, Menander in his turn won the first prize at the same festival with his Dyskolos. The Dyskolos is the first extant play of the New Comedy to which we can give a firm date. Its plot is tightly knit, its subject-matter is universal, and its structure is largely governed by a new set of formal elements. Aristophanes' Frogs had a chorus of initiates, who charmed the audience by their nostalgic evocation of the old annual procession to Eleusis, suspended at the time because of the Spartan occupation of Decelea. This chorus of initiates sang and danced between the dialogue scenes a series of specially composed, memorable lyrics which were relevant to the plot, to the city, and to the period; they and their leader also delivered the parabasis. This vivid, lively, functional chorus is replaced in Menander by only a dim shadow: a κ⋯μος of tipsy young men who have no function whatever in the plot, who serve merely to entertain the audience in the intervals between the five acts with a song-and-dance routine whose words are not preserved and possibly were not even specially composed for the play by its author.

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Terenz' Hecyra—Spiel der Voreiligkeiten

Opuscula Annual of the Swedish Institutes at Athens and Rome ◽

10.30549/opathrom-08-08 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 8 ◽

pp. 181-187

Author(s):

Gregor Maurach

Keyword(s):

Young Men ◽

Peloponnesian War ◽

New Comedy

Rashness was one of the most urgent themes and most poignant reproaches in Greek experience and reasoning from the 5th century BC onwards: Thucydides complained of rash actions during the Peloponnesian War that led to disaster; Sophocles showed Deianeira rashly sending the lethal garment to her husband on his return with Iole, and Plato made his Socrates expose the rashness of his interlocutors’ assertions again and again. Small wonder, then that Comedy, especially the New Comedy, seized upon this all-pervading deficiency, as can be seen for example in Menander’s Perikeiromene and Epitrepontes, where impulsive young men nearly destroy their lives by acting and judging precipitately. Roman Comedy naturally followed suit, for example Terence in Heautontimorumenos as well as in his Hecyra, where he followed Apollodorus: time and again his characters assert what they do not know for certain and time and again they act according to unwarranted assumptions, a pivotal theme that hitherto seems to have been underrated.

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