(b north Africa, c190 bce; d ?159 bce). Roman comic playwright. Only six plays survive, all fabulae palliatae (i.e. with Greek settings; see Plautus, Titus Maccius). Like Plautus, he adapted specimens of Greek New Comedy, but with far less lyric diversity (only 25 lyric lines out of 6000) and a heavy preponderance of spoken dialogue. The musical element was nevertheless more important than appears from the text; a considerable portion of the plays is recitative cantica, lines recited or intoned to an accompaniment on the pipes. (See Beare for a dissenting view.)
The didascalia (prefatory information) to each of Terence's works names a slave or freedman, Flaccus, as composer of the music (modi) and mentions the kinds of double reed pipe used. These are ‘equal’ in length, ‘unequal’, ‘right’, ‘left’ or, for one play, ‘Sarranian’. Commentaries by the 4th-century grammarian Aelius Donatus also specify them for each play, and identify equal pipes as Lydian and unequal as Phrygian, but the connections he suggested between these terms and the ethos or mood of the piece seem arbitrary and should be treated with caution (Wille, 169ff).
According to Donatus, some recitative portions of the plays were marked ‘M.M.C.’ (mutatis modis cantica), cantica with a change of modi. Modi could mean either ‘melodies’ (Weisen: Wille, 164) or ‘measures’ (Duckworth, 362); the metres in these passages do not differ radically from those of other recitative cantica.
References to music in Terence are rare. The adjective musicus occurs in three prologues (Heautontimorumenos, 23; Phormio, 17; Hecyra, 23, 46), referring to poetry and specifically to comic drama. The plural substantive musica denotes ‘music’ as a main part of the Hellenistic curriculum once (Eunuchus, 476–7). Fidicinae and psaltriae, girls skilled in playing the lyre or psaltery, occur as characters in the plays (Eunuchus, 985; Adelphoe, 842, 967); they are little more than concubines.
The single neumed line of Terence's Hecyra (861) in a 10th-century manuscript (Pöhlmann, no.13*) is not an authentic fragment of the original music for this play.
S.G. Ashmore, ed.: P. Terenti Afri comoediae (New York, 1908, 2/1910), esp. 54–5
J. Sargeaunt, ed. and trans.: Terence (London and Cambridge, MA, 1912/R)
R. Kauer and W.M. Lindsay, eds.: P. Terenti Afri comoediae (Oxford, 1926/R; suppl. 1958, by O. Skutsch)
R. Kauer: ‘Die sogenannten Neumen im Codex Victorianus des Terenz’, Wiener Studien, xxvi (1904), 222–7
G. Norwood: The Art of Terence (Oxford, 1923/R)
W. Beare: The Roman Stage (London, 1950, 3/1964), 91ff, 219ff
G.E. Duckworth: The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton, 1952/R1994 with appx by R. Hunter), esp. 361ff
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 158ff, 308ff
E. Pöhlmann, ed.: Denkmäler altgriechischer Musik (Nuremberg, 1970), 41–2
F.H. Sandbach: The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (London, 1977)
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN