Launching a much-needed new series discussing each comedy that survives from the ancient world, this volume is a vital companion to Terence's earliest comedy, Andria, highlighting its context, themes, staging and legacy. Ideal for students it assumes no knowledge of Latin, but is helpful also for scholars wanting a quick introduction. This will be the first port of call for anyone studying or researching the play. Though Andria launched Terence's career as a dramatist at Rome, it has attracted comparatively little attention from modern critics. It is nevertheless a play of great interest, not least for the sensitivity with which it portrays family relationships and for its influence on later dramatists. It also presents students of Roman comedy with all the features that came to characterize Terence's particular version of traditional comedy, and it raises all the interpretive questions that have dogged the study of Terence for generations. This volume will use a close reading of the play to explore the central issues in understanding Terence's style of play-making and its legacy.

The discovery on papyrus of plays by Menander, the greatest writer of Greek New Comedy, at last makes possible an evaluation on his own terms of an ancient author who, through the adaptations of Plautus and Terence, profoundly influenced the course of western drama. The present study establishes a critical perspective for understanding the kind of comedy Menander wrote, his roots, the theatrical effects he sought, and the extent of his achievement. Chapters on the major plays analyse their techniques of construction and characterisation, suggesting both the strengths and the limitations of Menander's comic tradition. This study is based on the Oxford Greek text but cites all ancient authors in translation to open the discussion to a wider audience. An introductory chapter places the tradition of New Comedy in the history of drama, and modern parallels are drawn wherever helpful. It will therefore be of value to students of drama as well as to classicists.

As the first play of the Terentian corpus, Andria has always attracted a special level of attention. It was the first Roman comedy produced after antiquity (at Florence in 1476) and the first translated into English, and it has inspired writers from Jonson and Dryden to Thornton Wilder. It provides an excellent introduction to Terence 's particular style of comedy, noteworthy for its ambivalence in representing the perspectives of woman and slaves and its experiments with a secondary plot line. The commentary is designed both to help students with the basic linguistic and technical problems confronting inexperienced readers of Roman comedy and to open discussion of essential interpretive questions involving the play and its relation to the wider comic corpus, as well as the utility of comedy for furthering our understanding of the Roman world and its values.

Quintus Ennius (239-169 BC), widely regarded as the father of Roman literature, was instrumental in creating a new Roman literary identity and inspired major developments in Roman religion, social organization, and popular culture. Brought in 204 to Rome in the entourage of Cato, Ennius took up residence on the Aventine and, fluent in his native Oscan as well as Greek and Latin, became one of the first teachers to introduce Greek learning to Romans through public readings of Greek and Latin texts. Best known for domesticating Greek epic and drama, Ennius also pursued a wide range of literary endeavors and found success in almost all of them. His tragedies were long regarded as classics of the genre, and his Annals gave Roman epic its canonical shape and pioneered many of its most characteristic features. Other works included philosophical works in prose and verse, epigrams, didactic poems, dramas on Roman themes (praetextae), and occasional poetry that informed the later development of satire. This two-volume edition of Ennius, which inaugurates the Loeb series Fragmentary Republican Latin, replaces that of Warmington in Remains of Old Latin, Volume I and offers fresh texts, translations, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.

As the first play of the Terentian corpus, Andria has always attracted a special level of attention. It was the first Roman comedy produced after antiquity (at Florence in 1476) and the first translated into English, and it has inspired writers from Jonson and Dryden to Thornton Wilder. It provides an excellent introduction to Terence 's particular style of comedy, noteworthy for its ambivalence in representing the perspectives of woman and slaves and its experiments with a secondary plot line. The commentary is designed both to help students with the basic linguistic and technical problems confronting inexperienced readers of Roman comedy and to open discussion of essential interpretive questions involving the play and its relation to the wider comic corpus, as well as the utility of comedy for furthering our understanding of the Roman world and its values.

Terence's Hecyra raises social, literary and theatrical issues of great interest to modern students of Roman comedy and, indeed, of Roman culture more broadly. The play pays strikingly close attention to the domestic problems of women and experiments boldly with traditional comic forms, not only in its creation of anticipatory suspense, but through its variations on traditional situations and roles and its metatheatrical qualities. In addition, Terence's response in his prologues to the play's two putative failures is important, if tendentious, evidence for the mechanics of theatrical performance in the second century, especially the conjunction of theatrical and gladiatorial shows. This edition opens the play's many interpretive challenges to wider scrutiny while remaining attentive to the linguistic needs of students at all levels.

Terence's Hecyra raises social, literary and theatrical issues of great interest to modern students of Roman comedy and, indeed, of Roman culture more broadly. The play pays strikingly close attention to the domestic problems of women and experiments boldly with traditional comic forms, not only in its creation of anticipatory suspense, but through its variations on traditional situations and roles and its metatheatrical qualities. In addition, Terence's response in his prologues to the play's two putative failures is important, if tendentious, evidence for the mechanics of theatrical performance in the second century, especially the conjunction of theatrical and gladiatorial shows. This edition opens the play's many interpretive challenges to wider scrutiny while remaining attentive to the linguistic needs of students at all levels.

This book examines how the Romans came to have a literature, how that literature reflected native and foreign impulses, and how it formed a legacy for subsequent generations have become central questions in the cultural history of the Republic. It examines the problem of Rome's literary development by shifting attention from Rome's writers to its readers. The literature we traditionally call 'early' is seen to be a product less of the mid-Republic, when poetic texts began to circulate, than of the late Republic, when they were systematically collected, canonized, and put to new social and artistic uses. Imposing on texts the name and function of literature was often a retrospective activity. This book explores the development of this literary sensibility from the Romans' early interest in epic and drama, through the invention of satire and the eventual enshrining of books in the public collections important to Horace and Ovid.

How the Romans came to have a literature, how that literature reflected native and foreign impulses, and how it formed a legacy for subsequent generations have become central questions in the cultural history of the Republic. Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic examines the problem of Rome's literary development by shifting attention from Rome's writers to its readers. The literature we traditionally call 'early' is seen to be a product less of the mid-Republic, when poetic texts began to circulate, than of the late Republic, when they were systematically collected, canonized, and put to new social and artistic uses. Imposing on texts the name and function of literature was often a retrospective activity. This book explores the development of this literary sensibility from the Romans' early interest in epic and drama, through the invention of satire and the eventual enshrining of books in the public collections that became important to Horace and Ovid.

Epic in Republican Rome discusses authors of now-fragmentary epic poetry not simply as predecessors of Vergil, but as pioneers and poets in their own rights. Behind the early literary experiments of Andronicus and Naevius, Ennius and Cicero, lie issues of poetry and patronage, and of cultural assimilation and national ideology, that not only come to characterize Roman literature of all periods, but continue to shape modern responses to that literature.

Quintus Ennius (239-169 BC), widely regarded as the father of Roman literature, was instrumental in creating a new Roman literary identity and inspired major developments in Roman religion, social organization, and popular culture. Brought in 204 to Rome in the entourage of Cato, Ennius took up residence on the Aventine and, fluent in his native Oscan as well as Greek and Latin, became one of the first teachers to introduce Greek learning to Romans through public readings of Greek and Latin texts. Best known for domesticating Greek epic and drama, Ennius also pursued a wide range of literary endeavors and found success in almost all of them. His tragedies were long regarded as classics of the genre, and his Annals gave Roman epic its canonical shape and pioneered many of its most characteristic features. Other works included philosophical works in prose and verse, epigrams, didactic poems, dramas on Roman themes (praetextae), and occasional poetry that informed the later development of satire. This two-volume edition of Ennius, which inaugurates the Loeb series Fragmentary Republican Latin, replaces that of Warmington in Remains of Old Latin, Volume I and offers fresh texts, translations, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.

Instead of seeing Terence primarily as an adapter of Greek New Comedy, Sander Goldberg treats him as an innovative dramatist writing for a specifically Roman audience. His book will interest not only students of classical literature but also those concerned with wider problems of critical theory and the comic tradition.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Instead of seeing Terence primarily as an adapter of Greek New Comedy, Sander Goldberg treats him as an innovative dramatist writing for a specifically Roman audience. His book will interest not only students of classical literature but also those concerned with wider problems of critical theory and the comic tradition. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.