SOURCE: An introduction to The Comedies of Terence, translated by Frank O. Copley, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1967, pp. vii-xxi.

Below, Copley discusses Terence's dramatic method and his treatment of several literary motifs in his comedies.

Like the plays of his predecessor Plautus, all the comedies of Terence are adaptations from the Greek New Comedy, a relatively simple type of play concerned with the problems, personal and circumstantial, into which an affluent and leisured society is likely to fall. The treatment accorded these problems and predicaments ranged from the broadest, coarsest caricature to the gentlest, most sensitive social satire, but in all cases the characters were general and typical in nature rather than individual and specific. With this simple form and content and with these characters, in whom the audience might see many who resembled their neighbors but none who could be positively identified, the New Comedy provided the...