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AUTHORIAL
VOICE AND THEATRICAL
SELF-DEFINITION
IN TERENCE AND
BEYOND: THE HECYRA PROLOGUES
IN
ANCIENT
AND MODERN CONTEXTS
By
ISMENE
LADA-RICHARDS
56
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
THE
HECYRA
PROLOGUES
57
production, elaborate further on the day's events. Here the culprits for
the play's interruption are identified as 'much talk about boxers (pugilum
gloria)' combined with the anticipation of a tightrope walker (funambuli
. . . exspectatio):the congregation of their followers, the uproar and the
screaming of women (comitum conventus, strepitus, clamor mulierum)
drove Ambivius' troupe off the stage before the play's end (fecereut ante
tempus exirem foras). And yet, how exactly the particular elements
mentioned conspired to the play's disadvantage we are never told with
any greater clarity. Similar is our frustration with the recounting of the
play's second failure (lines 38-42). Ambivius affirms that he started off
as a success (primo actu placeo), but then a rumour arose that a
gladiatorial show was about to take place (datum iri gladiatores): a
crowd flocked in, in utter confusion, shouting and jostling for places
(populusconvolat, / tumultuantur,clamant, pugnant de loco). As a result,
among the general commotion, Ambivius and his troupe were unable to
preserve their place (ego interea meum non potui tutari locum).
Now, before going any further some clarifications are in order. In a
landmark intervention in the scholarly debate, D. Gilula and
F. Sandbach succeeded, independently of one another, in putting an
end to the widespread fallacy that Terence's audience deserted the
theatre en masse, in mid-performance, in order to attend the loudly
advertised lowbrow attractions.6Since the different diversions put on at
Roman ludi were not scheduled to take place simultaneously, 'as if in a
carnival with sideshows',7 but on consecutive days,8 the audience had
nowhere else to go. The Hecyra spectators then remained rooted in the
auditorium, there to be confronted with the sudden influx of unruly,
disorderly elements, who had been made to believe that pugilists,
acrobats and gladiators were about to perform in that same venue
where Terence's play was still in progress.9
6
D. Gilula, 'Where Did the Audience Go?', Scripta Classica Israelica4 (1978), 45-9; Sandbach
7
See Parker (n. 5), 597, who reviews the relevant literature.
(n. 5).
8
For the non-simultaneous presentation of different competitions at the various Roman festivals
see L. R. Taylor, 'The Opportunities for Dramatic Performances in the Time of Plautus and
Terence', TAPA 68 (1937), 284-304, who nevertheless takes the Hecyra prologues at face value:
'From the prologue of the Hecyra of Terence it is clear that boxers and rope-walkers were
sometimes exhibited on days allotted to ludi scaenici and that at ludi funebresgladiators appeared
on a day when a drama was part of the scheduled entertainment' (ibid. 301). Cf. E. S. Gruen,
Cultureand National Identityin RepublicanRome (Ithaca and London, 1992), 213: 'the conjunction
of plays with other forms of entertainment would normally not even arise.'
9 See Sandbach (n. 5), 134: 'fighting for places does not stop a play unless the places are in the
theatre where it is being performed.' For evidence on gladiatorial combats staged in the same
venues where the ludi scaenici were performed see J. Jory, 'Gladiators in the Theatre', CQ 26
(1986), 537-9. Cf. Garton (n. 2), 52.
58
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
So far so good, but the crux of the matter lies elsewhere. We are never
told explicitly what was the precise reaction of Terence's audience in the
face of the tumultuous invading mob which disrupted both productions.
Parker's article is very effective in drawing attention, once again, to the
critical fallacies which led to gross misunderstanding of the Hecyra
prologues. However, when he insists that the audience, against all odds,
was determined to continuewatching?1but was ultimately 'overwhelmed',
'mobbed by a new crowd of spectators demanding other entertainment',
he simply reads too much into a problematically elliptic text.1' It is just
as likely that the Hecyra spectators too were also swept away by the
excitement of the inrushing crowd: infected by the invaders' frenzy, they
could have been fighting to preserve their seats not out of unswerving
loyalty to Terence or allegiance to the comic genre but, quite the
opposite, out of anxiety lest they would miss the promised alternative
delights."2In other words, although we can safely put to rest the myth
that Terence's audience, fuelled by their aversion to a dramaturgy they
found uncongenial, turned their back on the author and instigated
trouble, there is no solid textual support to justify the claim that
Terence's public did not participate in the pandemonium and the
clamour for alternative attractions, once the turmoil got seriously
under way.
In any case, no matter how standard throughout European stage
history were pleas for silence and fair hearing,13Terence's request for
spectatorial goodwill to be accorded 'here and now', at this third
production of the Hecyra (43-57), would have sounded affected or
melodramatic had it been well-known all along that catastrophe could
only strike from the other side of the theatre enclosure, that is to say, that
no disturbance could be feared from a loyal audience already in attendance. Terence's clearly antithetical juxtaposition of the unruly audience
of the past to the dream-audience of the present, whose impeccable
conduct will salvage the play, honour the ludi scaeniciand safeguard his
own reputation, can only imply that he apportions at least part of the
10 Parker
(n. 5), 595 (on the first production): 'two quite distinct groups are referred to: the
audience, which wanted to see the play ... and a crowd . . .'.
" Parker (n. 5), 599 and 599 n. 60 respectively; cf. Parker,ibid. 601: 'If the audience had indeed
disliked the play, they could have and would have walked out, as Plautus invites those who did not
like his play so far to do . . . Terence's audience did not walk away; rather, they tried to stay,
resulting in a fight for seats.'
12 Such is the line taken by Sandbach (n. 5), 134: 'the spectators remained but demanded other
entertainment', and Gruen (n. 8), 211 n. 126: 'the audience remained to welcome the substitute
shows.'
13 In Terence's prologues, cf. An. 24-7, Hau. 35-40, Ph. 30-2.
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
59
Once again, the power to drive actors off the stage is conceived as
resting with the public already sitting in the auditorium; keeping one's
ground on the stage, correspondingly, is the result of the theatre
audience's bonitas and aequanimitas.But, once again, such talk, especially with its retrospective reference to TheMother-in-Law,would have
been almost meaningless, had Terence deemed his audience's behaviour
entirely disengaged from the fortunes of his jinxed play.
Given the number and complexity of the issues involved, then, there
should be little wonder that the Hecyra prologues gave rise to and
sustained with remarkable consistency the long-lived perception of
Terence as 'the high-brow playwright', Terence the 'aesthetic
snob',16 who never managed to charm the Roman masses in the
same way his predecessor Plautus did. The crowd's double spurning
of the Hecyra has been felt to resonate with the indignant voice of
popular culture, pronouncing a dire verdict on Terence and his
alienating intellectualism. Such a reaction might be seen as comparable
to the rejection Ben Jonson imagines himself suffering in the hands of a
Stage-Keeper so deeply imbued with the fair-ground conventions of
unscripted, improvisatory drama as to accuse his high-minded 'masterpoet'/creator of contriving 'a very conceited scurvy' play (Bartholomew
Fair, Induction, line 8) as well as of snubbing and ignoring the
traditions of the market-place:
14
WhetherTerence's spectatorswould have been able, realisticallyspeaking,to avert the
mayhemis an entirelydifferentmatter.
15 TranslationB. Radice, Terence:
TheComedies(Harmondsworth,
1965).
16
For a robustrefutationof thatmyth see Parker(n. 5).
60
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
He has not hit the humours - he does not know 'em; he has not conversed with the
Bartholomew-birds, as they say; he has ne'ever a sword-and-buckler man in his Fair, nor
a little Davy, to take toll o' the bawds there . . . Nor a juggler . . . None o' these fine
sights! Nor has he the canvas-cut i' the night for a hobby-horse man to creep in to his
she-neighbour and take his leape there! Nothing! . . . these master-poets, they will ha'
their own absurd courses; they will be informed of nothing!
(Bartholomew Fair, Induction, 10-25).
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
61
On the debt of the Terentian prologue to oratory see Goldberg (n. 19).
Cf. Goldberg (n. 19), 202, on the shorter prologue: 'The composition of his new audience was
unlikely to differ much from the one that preferred the tightrope walker.'
23
Even within the sphere of the Roman ludi scaenici,traditionallydefined Tragedy and Comedy
were never fully emancipated from the carnivalesque type of attractionswhich shared the stage with
them (e.g. mime); as Garton (n. 2), 52, puts it, 'serious theatre was probably a minority taste over
which the multitude did not always wholly enthuse'; cf. ibid. 51 on the Roman audience as
presenting us with the picture of 'a majority pressing for more numerous and more uninhibited,
boisterous, or spectacular shows, and an educated minority . . .'
24
Or. 32. 54.
25 From the
Prologue to TheRival Queens(staged in London, 17 March 1676/7), quoted in E. L.
Avery and A. H. Scouten's introduction to William Van Lennep (ed.), The London Stage, 16601800, Part I: 1660-1700: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments,and Afterpiecestogetherwith Casts,
Box-receipts,and contemporaryCommentcompiledfrom the Playbills, Newspapersand theatricalDiaries
of the Period (Carbondale, 1965), clxviii.
22
62
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
63
64
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
65
66
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
THE
HECYRA
PROLOGUES
67
av KaKeEvo
EAevOeplov
!L!otS,
7ratoetas
ov
?TtL T7S
or)
KatU,TdaT ros6
'
(Lro TOTOtS
opXrasg,
cLaviuaToTrotol-.
And this other thing as well, it is not fitting, I think, for the orator and the philosopher
and all those involved in liberal education, to please the masses in the same way that
these servile fellows do, the pantomimes and mimes and jugglers.
(Aelius Aristides, Or. 34. 55)41
68
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
To take just a couple of examples, one need only look in the direction
44 See Plutarch, Mor. 713c,
welcoming the voice of the lyre or flute only when accompanied with
words and song.
45 See Plutarch, Mor. 713b, on wordless entertainment as
feeding agove'veoTartrT vX-^ opf3aSLKov
69
Or. 32. 5.
See Pliny, Ep. 9. 17, discussed briefly by R. L. Hunter,"'ActingDown":The Ideologyof
HellenisticPerformance',in Easterlingand Hall (n. 2), 189-206, at 195-6; Juvenal,Sat. xi. 162-
82; translation P. Green, Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, 3rd ed., Harmondsworth, 1998). Cf. Pliny,
Ep. 1. 15. 2, where a modest dinner with a comic play or a reader or a singer is considered as far
superior to a lavish dinner with Spanish dancing girls, and Pliny, Ep. 3. 1. 9, where the
performance of comedy between dinner courses is said to add to the pleasures of the table 'a
seasoning of letters'.
70
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
intercidat.) The House of Pylades and of Bathyllus continues through a long line of
successors. For their arts there are many students and many teachers.
(Seneca, NQ 7. 32. 1-3)51
71
72
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
73
61
'Occasional' Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the Opening of the Drury-Lane Theatre,
8 September 1750, in The Poetical Worksof David Garrick(London, first published 1785; reprinted
New York and London, 1968), i: 103, lines 25-36.
62 In Horace's
evaluation, Terence would be an example of the 'brave poet' (audacem... poetam)
(Ep. 2. 1. 182), 'ready to face an unappreciative audience' (see C. 0. Brink, Horace on Poetry,
Epistles book II: The Letters to Augustus and Florus (Cambridge, 1982), at 182) by resisting the
whims of spectators not attuned to his intellectual level; but even such a poet can be sometimes
terrified and put to flight by a rowdy public (line 182). As Garton (n. 2), 52-3, puts it, 'Playwrights
had to choose between resisting this trend [i.e. following the tastes of the majority] and meeting it
half way.'
63 The subjective, personal, voice in Ambivius' monologue is, of course, illusory. Although it
goes without saying that Ambivius here plays himself, i.e. relives his own personal experience on the
stage, the piece of text that he recites has been composed as a dramatic part by Terence, whose
prologues constitute what Gilula (n. 59), 106, very aptly calls 'the first examples of realistic roles
written for European theatre'; cf. ead. (n. 59), 105: 'He composed the prologues to fit the
personality of the actors, as well as the situation, and succeeded in creating the illusion that it is
the actor himself who speaks and reasons with the audience . . .', and Garton (n. 2), 60-1: '. . . it
must be supposed that the drafting of Terence's prologues was done at least partly in concert with
him, and it would be only human for him ... to aggrandize somewhat the actor-manager's role as
the kingpin of theatrical enterprises.'
64 See C.
Cibber, An Apologyfor the Life of Colley Cibber, With an Historical View of the Stage
duringhis own Time, Writtenby Himself.Edited with an Introduction by B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor,
1968), 185, on Cibber's act of protest against Christopher Rich, the patentee of Drury Lane, when
the latter had contracted a set of rope-dancers to perform. Such an innovation was, he claims, 'an
Abuse' of the acting 'Profession'.
65
See Cibber (n. 64), 199.
74
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
75
76
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
The play is not the sole but just one element of an entire evening's show,
supplemented or 'supported', as it is, by all kinds of extra features, a
colourful melange of orchestral pieces, song, dance, exhibitions by
instrumentalists and vocalists, farces, processions, acrobatics, jugglers,
rope-dancers, circus performers, animal acts, burlesque, variety shows,
and, of course, the most popular of after-pieces, pantomimes. Faced
with the reality of a fickle audience, setting 'so small a value on good
sense and so great a one on trifles that have no relation to the play',74the
managers of Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields (replaced in 1732 by
the new theatre in Covent Garden), the two rival, patent-holding
London playhouses, put on a double act.
On the one hand, they fulminate against the string of 'monstrous
Medlies, that have so long infested the Stage', the 'absurdities' which
'intoxicate its Auditors, and dishonour their Understanding'.75 Challenged by a watershed of spectacles resembling those which threatened
Ambivius' livelihood and Terence's dramatic reputation, they proclaim,
even more openly and unequivocally than Terence and Ambivius do,
their resistance and determination to stand firm. 'I cannot possibly agree
to such a prostitution upon any account', writes David Garrick, 'and
nothing but downright starving would induce me to bring such defilement and abomination into the house of William Shakespeare'.76In the
same breath, however, unlike Terence and Ambivius, they are quick to
follow each other's lead in welcoming with open arms those very
'Follies' they are keen to exorcize:77unless they outvie one another in
complying 'with the vulgar Taste',78 either the company which lags
behind will quickly find itself bankrupt or the public, so conspicuously
deprived of 'all Taste and Relish for the manly and sublime Pleasures of
the Stage [i.e. old fashioned Tragedy and Comedy]',79will flock en masse
to the non-patent playhouses, whose licence extends only to the lowend, flamboyant range of entertainments. As Colley Cibber, actor74 Letter of 12
September 1699, by the humorist and roving theatrical reporter Tom Brown,
lamenting the lowering of standards at the London theatres; cited in Milhous (n. 69), 135.
75
Cibber (n. 64), 279.
76
Letter dated August 17, 1751, in D. M. Little and G. M. Kahrl (edd.), The Lettersof David
Garrick,i (Letters 1-334) (London, 1963), 172, no. 108.
77
Cf. Milhous (n. 69), 176: 'Both houses claimed to be disgusted with audience tastes, though
both catered to it.' For contemporary criticism of the Drury-Lane management for deciding to beat
the rival house with its own weapons, and on the 'exasperatingly ambivalent' attitude of David
Garrick himself, see L. Hughes, The Drama's Patrons:A Study of the Eighteenth-CenturyLondon
Audience (Austin and London, 1971), 95-6 and 108-12.
78 See
Cibber (n. 64), 281.
79
Pasquin, 4 February 1724, quoted in Avery (n. 66), clxxv.
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
77
manager of the Drury Lane theatre from 1704 onwards, explains his
bowing to the pressure of 'the Giddy, and the Ignorant',80
I have no better Excuse for my Error, than confessing it. I did it against my Conscience!
and had not virtue enough to starve, by opposing a Multitude, that would have been too
hard for me.... I was still in my Heart... on the side of Truth and Sense, but with this
difference, that I had their leave to quit them, when they could not support me: For what
Equivalent could I have found for my falling a Martyr to them?.81
In stark contrast to the realities of the Roman stage, then, the 'senseless
stuff' plaguing the English playhouses became eventually a necessary
and welcome ally of their managers' financial ventures.82Nevertheless,
differences notwithstanding, the English stage is full of voices reverberating with Terence's or Ambivius Turpio's frustration.
Literary magazines and pamphlets accuse the Playhouses of 'servilely
complying with a Depravity of Taste to their own Ruin'83 and inveigh
against theatre managers who, 'govern'd by their Ignorance and Interest,
would rather fill their Houses with Fops, Prentices, and Children, than
Men of the first Distinction and Sense';84the abstention of the latter, the
kind of spectators to whom Ambivius appeals for a smooth running of
the Hecyra, is proof of their refined, educated taste, while those who
pander to the whims of the uncultured mob allow the Stage to
'prostitute' itself 'to Things altogether unbecoming its Dignity and
Institution'.85 Moreover, men of letters fear, as Ambivius does, that
the deplorable condition of the stage will deprive worthy dramatists of
the stimulus to write good plays.
Poetry is so little regarded there [at the playouses] and the Audience is so taken up with
show and sight, that an author need not much Trouble himself about his Thoughts and
Languages, so he is in Fee with the Dancing-Masters, and has but a few luscious Songs
to Lard his dry Composition.86
80 Cibber (n. 64), 281.
81
Cibber (n. 64), 280. Cf. the Roman comic poet's dilemma, caught, as Garton (n. 2), 53, puts
it, in a 'tension between the artistic desire for visible approval from a consensus of the best educated,
and the need to interest, hold and gratify the rest, without whose support a play could not stare,nor
player nor playwright continue in business.'
82 In Cibber'sview
(n. 64), 281, pantomimesas additionalentertainments wereonlybroughtin
to act 'as Crutches to our weakest Plays'; the Drury Lane company, he claims, were not 'so lost to all
Sense of what was valuable, as to dishonour our best Authors, in such bad Company.'
83
WeeklyJournal, or Saturday'sPost, January23, 1725; quoted in E. L. Avery, 'The Defense and
Criticism of Pantomimic Entertainments in the Early Eighteenth Century', Journal of English
LiteraryHistory 5 (1938), 127-45, at 135.
84
85
WeeklyJournal, or Saturday's Post, January 23, 1725; quoted in Avery (n. 83), 135.
Tom Brown, Letter of 12 September 1699, cited in Avery and Scouten (n. 25), cxi; in the
Hecyra, see lines 55-6: mea causa causam accipiteet date silentium, / ut lubeat scriberealiis . . . and,
86
78
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
As for regular theatre critics, like Aaron Hill, or graphic satirists, they
embark on a crusade aimed at saving the Stage from culturalpollution.87
They take it upon themselves to warn the public of an impending
dramatic and cultural decline, and they stand poised to restore Tragedy
to its rightful place, on a Stage untouched by corruption and debasement:
... if Opera and Pantomime once get absolute possession, by too long an absence of
Common Sense, it may then be too late. I shall do all that lies in my power to restore the
rightful monarch to its theatric throne by waging eternal war against the powerful
usurpers that now govern and triumph over the deposed sovereign.88
From The Prompter(n. 38), 148, dated Tuesday, January 27, 1936.
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
79
Consequently, all the while Drama, 'the noblest and most rational
Diversion that the Wit of Man can invent', circumscribes and fences
off its own territoryand proclaims itself superior to the whole melange of
'poor and mean Diversions' which neither instruct nor stimulate the
viewer's soul,91some very interesting polarities emerge, not unlike those
constructed in the battles of self-definition among the Graeco-Roman
lettered elites.
Pitting the body against the mind, the sensual against the intellectual,
the reasonable and edifying against the dumb, the foolish and the
whimsical, pamphlet after pamphlet sets the few 'people of Condition
and Taste'92 against the multitude of 'debauch'd sickly Minds, that have
lost their true Relish for Wit and Sense', are 'delighted with anything
that glitters'93and 'could more easily comprehend any thing they saw,
than the daintiest things that could be said to them'.94 And, as if
replicating the polarities evidenced in antiquity, what the intellectuals
privilege and crave for is the kind of fulfilment that reaches 'farther,than
their Eyes and Ears', the satisfaction which can 'strike the Mind, and
rationally entertain it';95what they like to condemn, conversely, in words
at least, is 'every low and senseless Jollity, in which the Understanding
can have no Share',96sensual pleasures 'acting more on the Body than
the Mind' and 'deriving no part from Reason, nor directing any part to
the Gratification of the rational Soul'.97 In short, in the words of the
eighteenth-century British critic who disparages French Dancers for
their 'brisk and senseless activity', proclaims that he 'can take no
Pleasure worth attending' any spectacle 'in which the Mind has not a
considerable share',98and declares that'. . . 'tis in vain to charm the Ear,
and flatter the Eye, if the Mind remain unsatisfy'd',99we can hear the
echo of the Greek or Roman man of letters, as he now deprecates a
pantomime actor for making meaningless and pointless movements,
with no sense in them whatsoever,100now makes it clear that he derives
no stimulation of any sort from the soft gestures of a dancer, the
impudence of a buffoon or the stupidity of a clown.101
91
80
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
Finally, it would be interesting to note at this point that even the fear
of disaster engineered by small numbers of literary opponents which
seems to be haunting dramatists and actor-managers in Republican
Rome, is very similar to the nightmare of eighteenth-century playwrights, living with the terror of the so-called 'First Nighters', that is,
groups of rowdy young men who, spurred by personal or political
faction or merely for fun, made it their business to ensure, with the aid of
'Cat-calls, Whistles, Hisses, Hoops and Horse-laughs'102that a new play
be 'damn'd' and withdrawn on its very first performance, with 'one
single Word . . . not heard'.103 As The Prompter comments
on the
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
81
In other words, the Hecyra prologues sound the clarion call for the
reinstatement of the boundaries which demarcate the aesthetic spheres
of the 'high' and the 'low' and register their bid for the safeguarding of
those generic hierarchies which are very precariously upheld in the allinclusive and carnivalesque spirit of Roman festival culture. Terence's
plea for silence and fair-hearing, rhetorically addressed to a discerning
audience of uniform complexion, is also an assertion of his conscious
disengagement both from performative articulationswith no pretensions
to literary standing as well as from the artistic principles (or lack of)
which govern the reactions of the mob. Unlike the highly entrepreneurial
patentee of the Drury Lane playhouse, whose 'Sense of every thing to be
shewn there [i.e. on the Stage], was much upon a Level with the taste of
the Multitude, whose Opinion, and whose Mony weigh'd with him full
as much, as that of the best Judges',106the playwright Terence refuses to
be conditioned by the artistic yardstick of the throngs. And yet, while
not ruled by the masses, Terence is not such an alien from the sphere of
popular culture as to be untrained in its idioms - as the Stage-Keeper
imagines Jonson to be in the Induction of BartholomewFair (see above).
His unprecedented brand of comoediapalliata provides its own unique
blend of 'popular' and 'high' entertainment, a blend clearly discernible
in the Hecyraprologues, where the exclusion of the 'low' and the 'vulgar'
is strategically combined with a complementary attempt at unifying the
audience and re-aligning the voices of 'sense' and 'nonsense' into an
homogeneous, elevated aesthetics of theatrical performance.'07 On a
purely metaphorical and theoretical level, such a re-alignment and
fusion we find, once again, in Horace's superb comparison of the
lofty tragic poet's impact on his addressee's emotions to the thrills of
the rope-dancer and the illusionistic power of the magus:
ille per extentumfunem mihi posse videtur
ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit,
Epistleto thePisones(Ars Poetica')(Cambridge,1989), at 186; cf. Brink(n. 62), at 186), the gulf
which separatesthe aestheticsof the 'high' and the 'low' is very much a part of his own,
individualagenda.
106
See Cibber(n. 64), 184, on ChristopherRich,who, in Cibber'sview, 'hadnot purchas'dhis
Shareof the Patent,to mend the Stage,but to makeMony of it'.
107 Cf. Gruen (n. 8), 220, who, even though startingfrom an altogetherdifferentset of
assumptions,concludesthat 'Terencelookedto the standardsset by the boniand endeavoured
to elevatethe tastesof the populus.His repeatedrequestsfor calmness,attention,and reflectionin
the audiencesuggestthat goal. That the effortfell shortof success,perhapsfar short,is another
story.The playwrighthad a culturalmission:to set an aristocratictone in his comediesand to
educatethe publicto an appreciationof thatartformat a higherlevel.'
82