Terence and the Death of Comedy

Abstract

and nearly a whole century before Latin literature reached maturity in the time of Augustus. The golden age of Roman comedy is thus quite clearly divorced from the golden age of Roman literature itself, but something more than a minor literary genre died with Turpilius. The very interest in stage comedy that had survived the change in conditions from Aristophanes to Menander and the change in culture from Greece to Rome died with a whimper late in the second century B.C. No further comedy of literary stature was written in antiquity, and the ancient tradition lay dormant until revived by the Italian humanists of our own fourteenth century. 1 What happened? Why did the Romans lose interest in stage comedy? The death of a genre is as common an occurrence in the history of literature as it is complex, and there can be no simple answer to such a question. Yet some of the responsibility must lie with Terence, the author who brought to Roman comedy both a peak of sophistication and an end of creative vitality. What was it about his achievement that brought the development of ancient comedy to a halt? Since all Roman drama, both tragic and comic, evolved from Greek forms, it may prove helpful to begin with the place of drama in Athenian culture. The constant, creative re-working of old myths that gave fifth-century tragedy its intellectual tension and vitality established drama as a legitimate medium for serious thought, and tragedy's profound appeal enriched the substance of Athenian comedy even as the comic poets parodied