and the sadly harassed not at all refined country-landlord—form
a masterly contrast. The springs of action and
the language of Plautus are drawn from the tavern,
those of Terence from the household of the good citizen.
The lazy Plautine hostelry, the very unconstrained
but very charming damsels with the hosts duly corresponding,
the sabre-rattling troopers, the menial world painted
with an altogether peculiar humour, whose heaven is
the cellar, and whose fate is the lash, have disappeared
in Terence or at any rate undergone improvement.
In Plautus we find ourselves, on the whole, among
incipient or thorough rogues, in Terence again, as
a rule, among none but honest men; if occasionally
a -leno- is plundered or a young man taken to the
brothel, it is done with a moral intent, possibly
out of brotherly love or to deter the boy from frequenting
improper haunts. The Plautine pieces are pervaded
by the significant antagonism of the tavern to the
house; everywhere wives are visited with abuse, to
the delight of all husbands temporarily emancipated
and not quite sure of an amiable salutation at home.
The comedies of Terence are pervaded by a conception
not more moral, but doubtless more becoming, of the
feminine nature and of married life. As a rule,
they end with a virtuous marriage, or, if possible,
with two—just as it was the glory of Menander
that he compensated for every seduction by a marriage.
The eulogies of a bachelor life, which are so frequent
in Menander, are repeated by his Roman remodeller
only with characteristic shyness,(4) whereas the lover
in his agony, the tender husband at the -accouchement-,
the loving sister by the death-bed in the -Eunuchus-
and the -Andria- are very gracefully delineated; in
the -Hecyra- there even appears at the close as a
delivering angel a virtuous courtesan, likewise a
genuine Menandrian figure, which the Roman public,
it is true, very properly hissed. In Plautus
the fathers throughout only exist for the purpose
of being jeered and swindled by their sons; with Terence
in the -Heauton Timorumenos- the lost son is reformed
by his father’s wisdom, and, as in general he
is full of excellent instructions as to education,
so the point of the best of his pieces, the -Adelphi-,
turns on finding the right mean between the too liberal
training of the uncle and the too rigid training of
the father. Plautus writes for the great multitude
and gives utterance to profane and sarcastic speeches,
so far as the censorship of the stage at all allowed;
Terence on the contrary describes it as his aim to
please the good and, like Menander, to offend nobody.
Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue,
and his pieces require a lively play of gesture in
the actors; Terence confines himself to “quiet
conversation.” The language of Plautus abounds
in burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations,
in comic coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations
of words, pithy expressions of the day jestingly borrowed