TWO ALLUSIONS TO TERENCE,EUNUCHUS579 IN JEROME

Abstract

During the Late Roman Empire Terence was the most revered and the most quoted classical Latin poet after Virgil. Among authors both pagan and Christian, none (to judge, of course, by the surviving written record) made as frequent or as creative literary use of his comedies as Jerome, one of the most accomplished polymaths in all of Latin antiquity. In his estimation Terence ranked, alongside Homer, Menander and Virgil, as one of the greatest of all poets. Jerome had an encyclopedic knowledge of Terence's dramatic corpus and quoted or appropriated phraseology from all six of his comedies. A significant number of these reminiscences have already been identified, but others await discovery. The purpose of the present study is to make a further contribution to this particular branch of HieronymianQuellenforschungby adducing and analysing two hitherto unrecognized allusions in Jerome's correspondence to Terence'sEunuchus, apparently one of the biggest blockbusters in the history of the Roman stage.