SOURCE: "Phormio: Citizen Disorder" in Roman Comedy, Cornell, 1983, pp. 115-29.

In the following essay, Konstan probes the tension between private emotion and public social codes in Phormio, observing that this dual subject constitutes one of the main themes of the play.

Terence particularly favored such plots as the frame story in [Plautus's] Cistellaria, based on the elementary triangle of stubborn father, enamored son, and maiden apparently ineligible for marriage. Thus R. H. Martin remarks, in the introduction to his excellent school edition of the Phormio [Terence: Phormio, 1959]:

The following elements of plot are found in all Terence's plays except the Hecyra. Two young men, often brothers, are engaged in love affairs. One of them loves a courtesan, the other wishes to marry a young woman, who is either poor but freeborn, or ostensibly a courtesan. The father opposes his son's marriage or even wants him instead to marry...