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Updated: June 18, 2025
And if this could be, what was the duty of each Roman whose pure desires lay with Poetry and her sisters? Paulus shuddered as he felt the question tearing its way through the peaceful plans he had been making for his life. He remembered the story of Menander refusing to leave the intellectual life of Athens for the luxuries of Ptolemy's court.
The professional figures and those illustrative of character, which were sketched more broadly and farcically, bore the process of transference better than the polished figures of every-day life; but even of those delineations the Roman editor had to lay aside several and these probably the very finest and most original, such as the Thais, the match-maker, the moon-conjuress, and the mendicant priest of Menander and to keep chiefly to those foreign trades, with which the Greek luxury of the table, already very generally diffused in Rome, had made his audience familiar.
Paulus, in the last few hours, was Menander again, but the lonely woman in the cavern the cause of this transformation the wife of Phoebicius, had undergone an even greater change than he. She was still Sirona, and yet not Sirona.
But for a mind like his Carthage had more subtle allurements in reserve. He was taken by her theatres, by the verses of her poets and the melodies of her musicians. He shed tears at the plays of Menander and Terence; he lamented upon the misfortunes of separated lovers; he shared their quarrels, rejoiced and despaired with them.
Yet in the tone of his dialogue we miss all symptoms of deference to the taste of the more polished classes of society. Almost all his comedies were adopted from the new comedy of the Greeks, and though he had studied both the old and the middle comedy, Menander and others of the same school furnished him the originals of his plots.
The influence of the Middle and New Greek comedy, especially, that of Menander, on the Roman comedy of Terence is well defined. Under Ennius and Plautus the Roman comedy was fairly original; but Terence wrote for the fashionable set, like Caecilius and Scipio Africanus, and consequently imitated Greek models very carefully.
But at that time the best master of rhetoric and argument was the best man, and my father, who himself could shine in the senate as an ardent and elegant orator, looked upon me as a half idiotic ne'er-do-weel, until one clay a learned client of our house presented him with a pebble on which was carved an epigram to this effect: 'He who would see the noblest gifts of the Greek race, should visit the house of Herophilus, for there he might admire strength and vigor of body in Menander, and the same qualities of mind in Apollonius. These lines, which were written in the form of a lute, passed from mouth to mouth, and gratified my father's ambition; from that time he had words of praise for me when my quadriga won the race in the Hippodrome, or when I came home crowned from the wrestling-ring, or the singing match.
From him to Menander is in truth but a step; but this step was of such importance that it was the comedian who became the Shakespeare of Greece. Omnem vitae imaginem expressit are the words deliberately used of him by the greatest of Roman critics.
But the condition of honest women in his day did not permit of the freedom of action and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and consequently it is below our mark of pure Comedy. Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the love of me love Terence. Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two, the Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus.
By these words he designed the want of rain that was in the days of Ahab, for at that time it was that Ethbaal also reigned over the Tyrians, as Menander informs us.
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