Voz Autoral en Prologos de Terencio - Hecyra

Authorial Voice and Theatrical Self-Definition in Terence and beyond: The "Hecyra" Prologues
in Ancient and Modern Contexts

Author(s): Ismene Lada-Richards
Source: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Apr., 2004), pp. 55-82
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
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Greece & Rome, Vol. 51, No. 1, April 2004
AUTHORIAL
VOICE AND THEATRICAL
SELF-DEFINITION
IN TERENCE AND
BEYOND: THE HECYRA PROLOGUES
IN
ANCIENT
AND MODERN CONTEXTS
By
ISMENE
LADA-RICHARDS
One of the greatest puzzles in the history of Roman Republican drama

revolves round the failure of the first and second attempt of actormanager Ambivius Turpio and his troupe to perform Terence's Hecyra.
Despite the large volume of scholarly ink already spilt, we are unlikely
ever to reconstruct with any certainty the exact sequence of events
which jeopardized the performance of Terence's comedy at the 'Ludi
Megalenses' of 165 BC and the funeral games in honour of Lucius
Aemilius Paullus in 160 BC.However, the frustration at what eludes us
has obfuscated the significance of what we hold securely in hand: written
by an author so deeply entrenched in contemporary literary debates'
and put into the mouth of one of the most dynamic actor- managerproducers of the early Roman stage,2 the text of the longer prologue,
affixed to the third production of The Mother in Law, is an underappreciated gem. Even though it cannot illuminate in full the performance history of this particularTerentian play, its significance for Roman
theatre history in general is immense. In fact, as I will argue in this
paper, both prologues have much to tell us about the ways in which the
Theatre of Terence's day understood and defined itself, demarcating its
territory as well as defending and safeguarding its prestige and range of
appeal within the multicoloured entertainment horizon of second-century BC Rome.
Such a theatrically oriented reading of the prologues does not intend

to underplay the importance of personal politics inscribed in these texts.
It is both clear and undeniable that the brunt of Terence's criticism is
1 For an excellent
appreciation of Terence's prologues as poetry about poetry, see N. W. Slater,
'Two Republican Poets on Drama: Terence and Accius', in B. Zimmerman (ed.), Antike
Dramentheorienund ihre Rezeption:Drama I (1992), 85-103.
2
On the role of these early theatrical entrepreneurs, see C. Garton, PersonalAspectsof the Roman
Theatre(Toronto, 1972); P. G. McC. Brown, 'Actors and Actor-managers at Rome in the Time of
Plautus and Terence', in P. E. Easterling and E. Hall (edd.), Greekand RomanActors:Aspectsof an
Ancient Profession(Cambridge, 2002), 225-37.

56
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
borne by his literary antagonists, headed by the ever spiteful and

'malevolent' Luscius Lanuvinus.3 Not only is the claque of his professional opponents prominently singled out as the 'unjust minority' in
whose hands dramatic art of quality is bound to perish,4but we may also
reasonably assume that such claques could have been heavily responsible for the rumours of other entertainments which jeopardized the two
productions of the Hecyra. Nevertheless, rather than aspiring to add yet
another footnote to the threadbare subject of Terentian literary
polemics, I wish to look instead at the relatively neglected theme of
'Theatre' versus 'sub-Theatre', traditional stage-drama, such as is
represented by Terence and his Hecyra, versus its rival counterdiversions and popular attractions.
The Hecyra Prologues and their Rhetorical Strategies

Let us start from the texts themselves. According to the shorter Hecyra
prologue (spoken at the second attempt to produce the play), when the
comedy had first been staged, it had been interrupted by a 'new
inauspicious event (vitium) and disaster (calamitas)' (2), which had
ensured that it 'could neither be viewed nor understood (nequespectari
nequecognoscipotuerit)' (3): 'struck senseless with eagerness, the masses
had fixed their heart upon a tightrope walker (populusstudio stupidusin
funambulo / animum occuparat)' (4-5).5 So fleeting a glimpse into the
play's misfortune does not impart much solid information, but lines
33-6 in the longer prologue, which take us back to that same calamitous
3
Lanuvinus as malevolus:An. 6, Hau. 16; as maledictus:An. 7, Hau. 22, 34, Ph. 3.

See Hec. 46-7: nolite sinere per vos artem musicam / recideread paucos; Hec. 54: ne eum
circumventuminique iniqui inrideant.Cf. Hec. 21-3 on Caecilius persecuted by iniuria advorsarium,
the spite of his opponents. Quotations from the Hecyra follow S. Ireland's edition (Warminster,
1990), with continuous numbering of verses for Prologues I and II. Other passages from Terence
are cited from R. Kauer and W. M. Lindsay's edition (Oxford, 1926; 2nd rev. ed. 0. Skutsch,
1958). Unless indicated otherwise, translations from Greek and Latin in this paper are mine.
5 According to H. N. Parker, 'Plautus vs Terence: Audience and Popularity Re-examined', AJP
117 (1996), 585-617, at 594, 'populusrefers not to the audience, but to a "crowd" that broke in'.
Parker's argument (by no means new) that on both occasions the fatal interruption was caused by
intruders is persuasive, but we cannot exclude the possibility that, upon hearing the rumours, the
populus within the theatre too 'filled its mind' with the prospect of an acrobatic show; nor do we
know for sure when exactly the rumours started floating about. It is perfectly possible that
Terence's very audience had already 'cometo the theatre with their minds full of the prospect' of
an exhibition of funambulism (F. H. Sandbach, 'How Terence's Hecyra Failed', CQ 32 (1982),
134-5, at 135; my italics) and were simply not in the best frame of mind for appreciating a
sophisticated comedy (which made it that much easier for the intruders explicitly mentioned in the
second prologue to create maximum confusion).
4

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
blame for the collapsing of his previous productions to audience ranks

who gave in to the commotion.14 My contention can be corroborated by
the ending of the Phormioprologue, which looks back to the disaster of
the Hecyra:
date operam,adeste aequo animo per silentium,
ne simili utamurfortuna atque usi sumus
quomper tumultumnostergrex motus locost:
quem actori' virtus nobis restituitlocum
bonitasquevostra adiutans atque aequanimitas.
(Phormio30-4)
Pay attention and give us a fair hearing in silence, so that we do not suffer the same fate
as we did when the uproar drove our company from the stage. Now we are here again,
thanks to the courage of our producer and your own sense of fairness and goodwill.15
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).
On the other hand, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that Terence

had been anything but a failure in the Roman world. According to
Suetonius' Life of the poet, preserved by the fourth-century AD
commentator Donatus, his Eunuch 'earned a price such as had never
been earned before by any comedy of any author' (Vita Terenti,3)17 and
all his comedies had been equally well-received by the public.18 Why,
then, this loud broadcasting of his producer's powerlessness to 'hold' his
'ground' (tutari locum, 42) in the face of unexpected competition with
spectacular, yet boorish and inferior, counter-attractions? Terence did
not have to keep reminding the fresh audience of each new production
how disastrous previous performances had been. Surely, this kind of
introduction to a play can hardly be considered an obvious act of
authorial self-promotion!19 The fact that he does harp on his former
misfortune, as opposed to cloaking it, can only mean that, far from being
embarrassed or feeling threatened by it, he is keen to exploit it to the
full.20
As I will argue in this piece, Terence's text amounts to a defiant

declaration of authorialpride, a gesture of identity construction and, last
but not least, a calculated act of theatrical self-definition. Tightrope
walkers, boxers and gladiators serve very conveniently as foils for the
witty, rational and challenging distraction Terence himself has regularly
been feasting his Roman public on: an art which satisfies the intellect is
pitted in these prologues against arts which gratify the senses and the
17
Text in P. Wessner, Aeli Donati, CommentumTerenti,i (Leipzig, 1962), 5: Eunuchusquidembis
die acta est meruitquepretium,quantumnulla antea cuiusquamcomoedia,id est octo milia nummorum.
18
Wessner (n. 17), 5, Vita Terenti 3: et hanc autem [sc. The Woman of Andros] et quinque
reliquas aequaliterpopulo probavit (my underlining).
19 Cf. S. M. Goldberg, 'Terence, Cato, and the Rhetorical Prologue', CP 78 (1983), 198-211, at
202: '. . . any defense of Hecyra cannot help but recall earlier doubts about its quality.'
20 Of course, the reason for such exploitation is the object of debate. See D. Gilula, 'Who's
Afraid of Rope-Walkers and Gladiators? (Ter. Hec. 1-57)', Athenaeum 59 (1981), 29-37, for a
good refutation of the scholarly view that the two prologues serve the function of displacing upon
audience behaviour structural flaws integral to the play's construction, i.e. that the interruption
story was 'a face-saving explanation which the playwright invented as a cover-up of the unpleasant
truth that Hecyra's failure was due to the faults inherent in the play itself' (32). For a more recent
and sophisticated restating of the claim of 'invention' on different grounds see Gruen (n. 8),
213-18.

THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
61
instincts, a mental aesthetic is delineated against one that privileges the

visceral and the corporeal. And, most importantly, a public which can
happily 'fill its mind with' a rope-dancer (4-5) throws into much
sharper relief an urbane assembly of intellectually minded viewers, a
much sought after audience appreciative of cultured, sophisticated
performances. Terence's persistent foregrounding of the havoc wreaked
upon his art by a hodge-podge of lowbrow entertainments and the
crowd's response to them defines by implication his own ideal of genteel
spectatorship and subtle, elevated spectacle.
Going now through the two prologues in greater detail, we find them
underpinned by expert rhetorical strategies.21
Terence and Ambivius know full well that their audience at this third
presentation of the Hecyra cannot be substantially different from the
impressionable public whose flightiness contributed to the two notorious
failures.22Like its uproarious predecessors, the audience they presently
address is nothing but a fickle friend, potentially hooked on the coarse
and sensual pleasures of mute, sub-literary entertainments,23much like
the riff-raff Dio Chrysostom complains about in second-century AD
Alexandria, crowds with their 'souls all but hanging on their lips' (p6ovov
OVK E7 TOtS XEtAEULtTa-s bvXab
Or. 32. 50), insatiable and greedy
'sXOVTaS,
for spectacular attractions, 'indiscriminately aflutter over anything that
is on offer'.24
Yet, rather than launching a head-on attack, such as can be found in

prologues and epilogues of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English
plays, routinely belittling those unruly elements who 'with loud Nonsense drown the Stage's Wit',25 Terence's approach is much more
subtle. The public of the third production is treated as if made of
21
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
superior stuff and more or less as culturally homogeneous: no one

initiates commotion or tumult (nunc turba nulla est, 43) and the
prevailing attitude is one of 'peace and silence' (otium et silentiumst,
43). The theatre's discursive space is mapped in much the same way
that Dryden maps out his terrain in the prologue of his Cleomenes
(1692):
I think or hope, at least, the Coast is clear,
That none but Men of Wit and Sence are here:
That our Bear-Garden Friends are all away,
Who bounce with Hands and Feet, and cry Play, Play.
Who to save Coach-hire, trudge along the Street,
Then print our Matted Seats with dirty Feet;
Who, while we speak make love to Orange-Wenches,
And between Acts stand strutting on the Benches.
(lines 1-8)
Terence constructs the fiction of addressing the kind of spectators

referred to by Dryden as an audience 'of Wit and Sence', viewers
endowed with understanding and perception (intellegentia, 31). The
chaotic world of noise and tumult, which had previously brought down
Ambivius' attempts, has now yielded its place to a haven of discrimination, as if a magic circle had extended to encompass the entire
auditorium.
There is, however, an important sub-text in this language of inclusiveness: the miraculously expanded 'inner circle' of idealized spectators
is implicitly defined by a condemned 'outside' space of vulgarity and
rowdiness, a site of improper and intolerable behaviour. And it is at this
precise point that Terence's and Dryden's rhetoric take different
directions. While Dryden chooses to project the manners of the rabble
onto a territorial'otherness', the provinces or colonies of Britain,
Let 'em go people Ireland, where there's need
Of such new Planters to repair the Breed;
Or to Virginia or Jamaica Steer.
(lines 13-15)
Terence banishes spectatorial unruliness by projecting it backwards

along a diachronicalaxis, that is to say, by confining it to the calamitous
occasions which had dogged the Hecyra production in the past.26
The second Hecyra prologue, then, becomes, as much a gesture of
26
Dryden's prologue is very helpfully discussed in P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression(London, 1986), 84-9.

THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
63
inclusion as it is a programmatic statement of cultural exclusion.While

the undiscerning 'groundlings', appreciative, in Hamlet's words, of
'nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise' (Shakespeare,
Hamlet 3. 2. 10-12), are displaced from Terence's 'ideal' audience,
they are ipsofacto re-incorporated in the elevated community of a 'reallife' regenerated auditorium, where novel functions are bestowed on
them, together with the opportunity of cultural self-definition and
identity construction.27 For not only does it fall on them to reverse the
consequences of the play's unfortunate past ('your capacity to understand will allay that misfortune', earn calamitatem vostra intellegentia/
sedabit, 3 1-2),28 but it is also their responsibility to lend support to the
efforts of the playwright and the acting troupe which brings the play to
life (adiutrix nostrae industriae) (32). Most importantly, rather than
imagined as conniving with the usurpers of the stage to drive serious
drama off the boards, spectators are now invested with the role of
guardians of a precious and noble cultural tradition (nolite sinereper vos
artem musicam / recidere ad paucos, 46-7). Besides, all the while
Terence's tactical flashback lays the emphasis upon the gulf which
dissociates his art from the tastes of the masses, his current address to
those very same groundlings tempts them and coaxes them into the
negotiation of some kind of cultural alliance:29the viewer's authority and
influence is called upon to promote and assist Ambivius' own authority
(facite ut vostra auctoritas/ meae auctoritatifautrix adiutrixquesit, 47-8).
What is offered to them is the opportunity and power (potestas) to
collaborate with the actors in bestowing honour to the ludi scaenici,
through which a stage-poet's work becomes disseminated: 'to you is
granted the occasion to adorn dramatic festivals (vobis datur / potestas
condecorandiludos scaenicos)' (44-5). In such a way, Ambivius Turpio,
the actor-manager-producer, and the rowdy throngs are placed on the
same footing vis-d-vis the master-mind of the spectacle, the dramatist
himself.30
27
In a way, Terence's spectators are forced to make a silent choice: eitherthey belong to the fan
club of gladiators and rope-dancers or they are willing to proclaim their ability to appreciate elevated
art.
28
Cf. Dryden, Cleomenes, 19-20: 'arise true Judges in your own defence, I Controul those
Foplings, and declare for Sence.'
29
In the words of Terence's prologue to his Eunuch: Si quisquamstqui placerese studeat bonis /
quam plurimis et minime multos laedere,/ in is poeta hic nomenprofitetursuom (1-3), that is to say,
Terence hopes to please as many of the boni, the educated, as possible, while offending the multi,
the groundlings, as little as possible - an ambitious as well as precarious compromise. See Gruen
(n. 8), 220.
30
On the parity of interest or 'joint cause' between actors and playwrights see Garton (n. 2), 60.

64
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
The powerful rhetorical strategies of the second Hecyraprologue then

start coming into view. The text culminates in a bid for a collective stand
of differentiation, an act of social placing: Ambivius and Terence beg for
silentium3"and a fair hearing (55), but to partake and to be seen to
partake in the Hecyra experience in rapt silence and critical appreciation
means much more than merely to enjoy oneself. On the one hand, it
signifies to proclaim and perform one's severance from the league of the
brainless with their coarse pastimes and their yielding to momentary
impulses; on the other, it signifies to enact one's conscious inclusion in
the intellectual world shared by Terence and his literary friends.32In a
similar way, in Dio Chrysostom's recriminating oration to the allegedly
unruly Alexandrian mob,33 the spectatorial mode of quiet endurance of
an educated speaker's words is regarded as the passport for admission in
the ranks of 'experts' (empeiroz),men who can be versed not only in
pantomime dancing and instrumental music but also in the rational
appreciation of an elite performer's words of wisdom.34 And just as, in
Dryden's language, a viewer's silence purchases his right to be classed as
a man 'of wit and sence', in the prologue to Terence's Hecyra good
deportment functions as the unifying ground, the virtual melting pot
where the tastes of the 'high' and the 'low' meet, and where vulgar
unruliness is transformed into a quasi-intellectual, sophisticated mode of
viewing. Spectators in this purged Terentian auditorium would cease to
be part of a mindless crowd but would count as individuals with a
sense of separate identity, silent and disciplined, rational and critical
observers.35
31 If we are to believe Horace's well-known overview of theatre-audience behaviour, 'no voice
could make itself heard above the clamour emitted by our theatres. You might think it was the
moaning of the Apulian forests or the Tuscan sea - such is the noise as they watch the show . . .'
(Ep. 2. 1. 200-3, transl. M. Winterbottom, in D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (edd.), Classical
LiteraryCriticism(Oxford, 1972) ). Horace has, of course, his own axe to grind, but, on this point, it
is even possible that he 'may well have underestimatedthe unruly behavior of theater audiences'; see
E. Fantham, Roman LiteraryCulture:From Ciceroto Apuleius (Baltimore and London, 1996), 146
(my italics).
32 Cf. M. Leigh's brief comments on the Hecyra prologues in 'Primitivism and Power: The
Beginnings of Latin Literature',in 0. Taplin (ed.), Literaturein the Greekand Roman Worlds:A New
Perspective(Oxford, 2000), 288-310, at 307: 'The audience which stays with the Mother-in-law
until the very end can identify itself with the culturally refined and against the boorish mob.'
33
However, for the &lite,aristocratic prejudices conditioning Dio's depiction of his Alexandrian
audience in this particular oration see W. D. Barry, 'Aristocrats, Orators, and the "Mob": Dio
Chrysostom and the World of the Alexandrians', Historia 42 (1993), 82-103.
34
Or. 32. 24.
35 Terence's strategy is equivalent to that of the Lucianic speaker in Herodotus8, stating outright
that his audience is not 'a vulgar mob more keen on seeing athletics (ov UcrvpfETos8-7oxAog,aOAqTr&v
,uiAAov
but 'the finestorators,historians,and rhetoricians(pr'qTopv TE Kat cvyypaqtAoOeadtovee)',
See R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greeceand Rome
qEfV, Kat aobtarTWv Ol 80Ktt/kdTarot)'.

THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
65
Finally, far from bringing disrepute to him personally, Terence's

emphatic repetition of his unfortunate expulsion from the stage functions as a dire warning of generalized cultural decadence, by raising the
spectre of a tyranny of the mindless and the corporeal, the prospect of a
not too distant future when language-based performance may eventually
dissolve into a miscellany of physical, unscripted, and aesthetically
spurious entertainments.36This anxiety of cultural predominance, this
pitting of the cerebral and verbal against the bodily and dumb can be
paralleled very instructively in the literary and visual tropes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectuals and graphic satirists, who
revel in depicting England's cultural treasures (in the form of the work
of its greatest playwrights) discarded like rubbish, so as to free the way
for the triumph of masquerades, pantomimes, acrobatics and the full
range of delights attached to a non-textual, corporeal dramaturgy.37In
the words of theatre critic William Popple, writing in the twice-weekly
periodical The Prompter,
The corruption of the stage is now arrived to such a height that unless some stop is put
to it, it must end in its total destruction. Pantomimes are now no longer to be considered
as only harmless or ridiculous entertainments, but as usurpers that will entirely root out
Tragedy and Comedy by rendering both insipid to the Town.38
And in a famous eigtheenth-century engraving by William Hogarth,

entitled Masqueradesand Operas,a cart full of the plays of Shakespeare,
Dryden, and Congreve is wheeled off as 'waste paper' behind the back
of a crowd entirely oblivious to its loss, as it is too preoccupied with
queuing up for mindless entertainments: operas, masquerades and
pantomimes.39
(Cambridge, 1985), 158 n. 25, who notes the contrast between this same Lucianic passage and
Terence's reference to the stupiduspopulus of the first prologue.
36
Horace in his Epistle to Augustus (Ep. 2. 1) claims to be a witness of such a tyranny come true:
in his depiction of theatrical audiences it is a camelopard or a wild elephant, rather than
sophisticated drama, that can attract the gaze of the crowds (vulgi converteretora) (196), together
with spectacular pageants (189-93) and exquisitely adorned actors (204-7).
37
See J. Moody, IllegitimateTheatrein London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge, 2000), 13.
38 Tuesday, January 27, 1736, reproduced in A. Hill and W. Popple, The Prompter:A Theatrical
Paper (1 734-1736), selected and edited by W. W. Appleton and K. A. Burnim (New York, 1966),
148 (all further citations are from this edition); cf. also, Anonymous,A Letterto My Lord ***** on
ThePresentDiversionsof the Town, with The TrueReasonof the Decay of our DramaticEntertainments
(London, 1725; reprinted in A. Freeman (ed.), The English Stage, Attack and Defense 1577-1730;
New York and London, 1974), who bemoans 'the Loss of SHAKESPEAR, OTWAY, and
CONGREVE: Loss I call it, since they [i.e. greedy theatre managers] drive from the House
every Person of Figure and Capacity, by adding their Absurdities(which they call Entertainments)
too low for Men of Sense to see, and since the Crowd, which are diverted with them, cannot enter
into the Beauties of our Authors: Their Excuse for this, is, their Business is to get Money' (14-15).
39 See S. West, 'Audiences, Art and Theatre: The Justification of Leisure and Images of the

66
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
The Hecyra Prologues and Ancient Performative Frames:

The Broader Picture
Looking now further afield, what has eluded scholarly consideration is
the much larger picture offered by the vibrant performance culture of
the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic world. If the Hecyra prologues are
merely approached as isolated snapshots of specific theatrical performances, they are most likely to remain a frustrating crux. If, on the other
hand, they are contextualized more imaginatively as rhetorical constructions, what appears at first as an indissoluble puzzle may prove to
fit perfectly well into broader cultural and performative patterns of the
post-classical world on both sides of the Mediterranean basin. For one
of the chief characteristics of post-classical performance history from
(broadly speaking) the third century BC to the fifth century ADis the
plurality and multiformity of voices in a world where spectacles are
legion. Traditional tragedy and comedy are now sharing the stage with,
and being progressively up-staged by, mimes and pantomimes, while
virtuoso tragic singers/trag6idoi,soloists of the cithara/kitharoidoi,performers of homeric epics/homeristaias well as a multicoloured line of
miracle-workers (thaumatopoioi), conjurers, jugglers, marionetteplayers, acrobats, stuntmen, street-performers and rope dancers, are
always tipped to mesmerize vast audiences at public festivals, communal
events or private occasions.40 And when the more intriguing, lettered
breed of public entertainers are taken into account, such as the itinerant
sophist, whose declaiming habits are just as flamboyant and 'theatrical'
as those of a real actor, or even the philosopher performing in his
lecture-hall to a circle of select admirers and disciples, not only does a
performance culture of the broadest possible variety emerge but also a
dynamical arena for some of the most passionate discourses of selfdefinition and wars for the demarcation of cultural territories in the
ancient world.
Philosopher or dramatist, sophist, poet or orator, the key-holders of
Eighteenth-Century English Stage', in T. Winnifrith and C. Barrett (edd.), Leisure in Art and
Literature(Basingstoke and London, 1992), 84 with plate n. 2.
40
A glimpse of the variety of performances on offer can be gained from, e.g. Athenaeus, 19a20b (jugglers, conjurers, marionette players), 620b-21c (homerists, magodists, lysiodists, hilarodists, kinaedologoi);Plutarch, Mor. 673b, 71 lb-13f; Dio Chrysostom, Or. 8. 9, 27. 5; Statius, Silv.
I. 6. 51-74; Manilius, Astron. 5. 438ff.; Petronius, Sat. 53; Apuleius, Met. 1. 4 (acrobats and street
performers); cf. C. P. Jones, 'Dinner Theater', in W. J. Slater (ed.), Dining in a Classical Context
(Ann Arbor, 1991), 185-98, where some of these passages are discussed.

THE
HECYRA
PROLOGUES
67
up-market performative genres, are all united in their depiction of

popular pastimes and attractions as a dangerous and coarse intruder,
infringing or about to infringe on their territory in ways an urbane,
lettered society cannot but deem repulsive. So, for example, Aelius
Aristides rebuffs the possibility of intellectual parity between the pleasures offered by low-class entertainers and those dispensed by reputable
minstrels of high education:
KOat yap
av KaKeEvo
EAevOeplov
!L!otS,
7ratoetas
ov
Tov avTov TpOTrOV otTLaL, T() p(`ropt

KaLL ()otAO6()o
Kat TOLS avoparroCfEt
0oX/OVS
7rTpo0rKEt TEp7TELVTOVS
?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
while Seneca argues that there should be a difference between the

applause given in the theatre and the applause accorded the philosopher
performing in his school: histrionic outcries befit the arts and artists that
aim to please the crowds; on the side of true philosophy and the
pepaideumenoi,one should expect to find worshipful silence.42
Yet, united though they are in representing what they share in
common as an unfairly challenged and beleaguered domain, members
of the educated elite engage in bitter fighting against each otherin order
to ensure their own profession or even favourite pastime is established as
the exclusive bastion of refinement and culture in a sea of uncultured
and vulgar outcasts/'others'. Anxious to consolidate or extend his own
share of cultural capital, many an intellectual has recourse to rhetoric in
order to urge 'the superior claims of his wares over those of rival
salesmen who compete with him for the same audiences and the same
physical space';43the ultimate goal is to construct an idealized hierarchy
of erudite pursuits in such a way that one's own profession crowns the
top, while a number of inferior realms are ignominiously sprawled out
underneath, berated and befouled for their unwarrantedaffiliationto the
small and petty.
Once this broader cultural perspective is duly taken into account, the
41
In Aelius Aristides, Or. 34. 56 pantomimes are to orators and philosophers what whores are to
decent men.
42
Seneca, Ep. 52. 12: Intersitaliquid inter clamoremtheatriet scholae;52. 13: Relinquanturistae
voces illis artibus, quae propositumhabentpopulo placere;philosophiaadoretur.
43 See M. B.
Trapp, Maximus of Tyre: ThePhilosophicalOrations. Translatedwith an Introduction
and Notes (Oxford, 1997), xlii.

68
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
intriguing rhetoric of the Hecyra prologues stops featuring as a unique

phenomenon, and finds its place in the fiercely competitive atmosphere
of the post-classical world. To restrict discussion to those areas in
which theatrical or theatricalized forms of culture are involved, elite
contenders are all too keen to cast their opponents into the vast,
indiscriminate category of what is base and corporeal, while at the
same time investing themselves with the responsibility of forestalling
cultural decline and reversing the tide of a galloping moral, aesthetic
and intellectual degeneration. Most importantly, faced with the spectre
of aesthetic lowness and suffocated by plebeian attractions, which they
dismiss as trifles and deride as hopeless aspirants to the prestige of high
arts, they are adept at using a distinctly coded language of cultural
differentiation. Flashy and flamboyant, wooing audiences through
appearance and show, costumes, props and histrionic antics, their
rivals are denied all share in either manliness or moral uprightness
and culture. On the side of the pepaideumenoiand their world there is
refinement, taste, educational discourse, and intellectual pleasures
'providing a feast to delight our rational part',44 as opposed to that
portion of our soul which is animalistic and grass-fed and can neither
understand nor respond to reason.45 On the side of the ignorant, the
inferior pretenders to cultural capital,46 reign the sensational and the
electrifying, the cheap and mindless delights of the eye, 'verily
ridiculous things and least befitting a free man', such as flutes, lascivious songs, strummings and trillings and stamping of feet,47 or even
entertainments 'which throw the soul into greater confusion than any
drunkeness' (a rrdaru tdE0rs TrapaXWeorTEpov rTag vXags StaTrAqrtv),
and
so 'full of scurrility and scandal' that they 'ought not to be seen even by
the slaves who fetch our shoes, if their masters are in their right
minds'.48
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
Kat cdyeAatov Kat JlvveTov

,AOyov Kat divsKoov.
46 Cf. Plutarch, Mor. 7 1 c, referring to
such people as avavSpot Kat 8iarTEOpvpVote'voL Tara Ta '

adLovatavKat a7retpoKaAtav,and reckoning they would ban the performance of Platonic dialogues
from their sympotic entertainments.
47
See the Cynic philosopher Crato's disparaging comments on pantomime dancing in Lucian,
Salt. 2.
48 Plutarch, Mor. 712e, on a type of mime called paignion; see J. Davidson, 'Gnesippus
Paigniagraphos:The Comic Poets and the Erotic Mime' in D. Harvey and J. Wilkins (edd.), The
Rivals of Aristophanes:Studies in Athenian Old Comedy (London, 2000), 41-64.

THE HECYRA PROLOGUES
69
of such a characteristic exponent of elite cultural tradition as Dio

Chrysostom, to find the hallmarks of a fully fledged rhetoric of
polarization. Spectacles wherefrom one might gain intelligence or
prudence or a commendable moral disposition are conceived of as
diametrically opposed to those which can only give rise to ignorant
strife, unrestrained passions and senseless emotions,49useless diversions
consisting in noise (thorybos), ribaldry (bomolochia) and scurrilous
jesting (skomma) (Or. 32. 4). Respectable spectators, correspondingly,
are pitted against those addicted to popular pastimes, men uneducated
and foolish (aTrat8evSrotuL OearaLS, vrctadxots, Or. 32. 4), devoid of
seriousness (spoude) and wholeheartedly devoted to childish play
(paidia), sensual pleasure (hedone) and laughter (gelos) (Or. 32. 1). In
the Roman world, Pliny and the speaker of Juvenal's Satire xi make it
clear that their house is closed to buffoons and clowns or attractive girls
dancing immodestly with castanets and wanton songs, for the feasts
which they provide instead are adorned by epic recitations, readers,
musicians or professional actors:
nostra dabunt alios hodie convivia ludos:
conditorIliados cantabituratque Maronis
altisoni dubiamfacientia carminapalmam.
At my feast today we'll have very different entertainment:
we'll hear the Tale of Troy from Homer, and from his rival
for the lofty epic palm, great Virgil.
(179-81)50
And Seneca's frustration vents itself against the boorishness and

immorality of his contemporaries, indulging themselves in cruder pleasures, such as pantomimes, while the halls of professors and philosophers
are left deserted:
Who respects a philosopher or any liberal study except when the games are called off for
a time or there is some rainy day which he is willing to waste? And so the many schools
of philosophy are dying without a successor. The Academy, both the Old and the New,
has no professor left. . . . But how much worry is suffered lest the name of some
pantomime actor be lost for ever! (At quanta cura laboratur,ne cuius pantomimi nomen
49
50
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
The Hecyra prologues correspondingly, are on a par with a multitude

of other voices championing the cultural predominance of traditional
drama, the 'agonistic (enagonia) arts' of Tragedy and Comedy (Lucian,
Salt. 2),52 over an undifferentiated torrent of newer or derivative
dramatic forms and quasi-theatricalattractions uncomfortably elbowing
their way into the sphere of legitimate, 'high' culture.53And, just as in
Terence the conflict pits Drama against rope dancers, boxers and
gladiators, in the eastern part of the Empire one of the fiercest battles
for mastery over the 'performance' world is played out between
traditional drama and the highly sensational attraction of pantomime
dancing. The cry of emancipation and attempt at theatrical selfdefinition reverberatingin the Hecyra prologues can be heard in parallel
with the cry of repudiation uttered by the Greek pepaideumenosof the
second century AD, the man of letters who would consider himself
emasculated and disempowered, degraded, infected, and polluted if,
instead of enjoying the 'noble tragedy and most joyful comedy' (Lucian,
Salt. 2), he were to attend a pantomimic spectacle: 'May I never reach
ripeness of years if I ever endure anything of the kind, as long as my legs
are hairy and my beard unplucked!', declares the cynic philosopher
Crato in Lucian's dialogue On the Dance (Lucian, Salt. 5). Like
Menandrian Comedy, Tragedy is addressed to the intellectually
51
Transl. by T. H. Corcoran (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1972). Cf. Libanius, Or. 35.
17, stressing the incompatibility of pantomimes with the study of rhetoric and Or. 3. 12,
complaining that his students talk about charioteers, mimes, and pantomime dancers while he
declaims. By contrast, see Philostratus, VS 589 on the declaiming sophist as the winner of the
rivarly between orators and dancers: when the herald announces that Hadrian is about to declaim,
everyone abandons pantomimes and similar spectacles and rushes to the Athenaeum where he will
perform.
52
However, it has to be borne in mind that in the later Hellenistic and Roman world
'performance' culture in general had started counting for much less than the 'textual' or 'book'
culture which the elites appropriated for themselves and used to mark themselves off from the
vulgar, 'theatrical'habits of the lower classes; only Menander succeeded in crossing the threshold
from drama to literature and hence became 'fully appropriated into elite literary culture'. See
Hunter (n. 50), 194 and passim.
53 Cf. R. L. Hunter, 'The Politics of Plutarch's Comparisonof Aristophanesand Menander', in
S. G6dde and T. Heinze (edd.), Skenika: Beitrdge zum antiken Theater und seiner Rezeption
(Darmstadt, 2000), 267-76, at 275: 'In particular, parodic and parasitic forms such as "mimes"
and farces which exploited material drawn from "higher"genres such as tragedy and New Comedy
confused the proper orderof things.' Cf. Hunter (n. 50), 200, on the 'context of the &literhetoric of
paideia' which viewed performance forms that subverted 'inherited roles and voices' as lacking
kosmosand disturbing 'proper social and moral hierarchies.'

71
minded,54 while pantomime, a ballet-style form of stage entertainment

negating spoken language as a mode of expression and communicating
instead 'through nod, leg, knee, hand and spin',55i.e. the wordless, and
therefore inferior, language of signs,56 is invariably presented as the
pastime of the brainless, the immoderate, and the effeminate, those
unworthy of the status of free men; within the context of elite paideia, it
is often thought to drag the viewer down the path to insanity and
madness (see, e.g. Lucian, Salt. 3; cf. Salt. 5).57
Terence's twin prologues, then, are less valuable for what they have to
tell us about one single play, the Hecyra, than for the light they shed on
Terence's own conceptualization of the tradition to which he belongs
and within which he earns his livelihood. They have captured snapshots
of a much broader and multifaceted struggle in a world where some of
the most heavily contested issues revolve around the privilege of cultural
leadership, and have recorded a clear, albeit rhetoricallyframed, answer
to the question of 'who holds the right to entertain', 'who controls or
should control the politics of a "performance"culture'.58In other words,
the two texts do not merely, or even predominantly, construct a jinxed
play's defence. Terence's plea to his audience is made on behalf of the
ludi scaenici and the ars musica, the dramatic art itself (44-7). What
Ambivius' pre-play speech amounts to is a defiant proclamation of the
54
On Menander as the most appropriate entertainment for men of letters in theatres, symposia
and intellectual gatherings, see Plutarch's strongly worded Comparison of Aristophanes and
Menander,Mor. 854b and passim. See further Hunter (n. 53).
55 Sidonius Apollinaris, C. 23. 269-70; cf. Nonnus, Dion. 7. 21; Anth. Pal. 9. 505, 17.
56 For the superiority of language over other means of communication, see, e.g. Plutarch, Mor.
713b-c.
57
In reality, however, panto-mania was not the exclusive vice of mindless, impressionable, and
volatile masses, as some of our sources sneeringly imply; base-born and aristocratsalike were wholly
infatuated with star dancers. In so far as they received the sponsorship of rulers and were included
in the agonistic agenda of civic festivals, pantomime performances appeared to exist in tandem with
dominant ideologies, be part and parcel of civic ceremonial and inextricably tangled up with
imperial cult and social identity formation. For a fresh look at pantomime and its elite advocate,
Lycinus, in Lucian's dialogue On the Dance see Lada-Richards, "'A Worthless, Feminine Thing?"
Lucian and the "Optic Intoxication" of Pantomime Dancing', Helios 30.1 (2003), 21-75.
58 Needless to say, the tastes of the pepaideumenoiare just as scornfully rebuffed by the common
people. Even though the voice of hoi polloi is not authentically preserved but filtered through elite
mentality and texts, we can still make out the traces of similar distancing acts performed on their
part. As Pliny, for example, writes to a friend, 'think how many people there are who dislike the
entertainments which you and I find fascinating, and think them either pointless or boring (partim
ut inepta partim ut molestissimaoffendant). How many take their leave at the entry of a reader, a
musician, or an actor, or else lie back in disgust, as you did when you had to endure those
monstrosities as you call them!' (Ep. 9. 17. 3; translationB. Radice, Cambridge, Mass. and London,
1969); cf. Trimalchio's dismissal of all diversions except acrobatics, trumpets, and Atellan farces as
'silly nonsense' (Petronius, Sat. 53) or Dio Chrysostom's depiction of the Alexandrian crowds as
fed up with oratorical performances and impatient for the juggler's act (Or. 32. 7).

72
THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
rights of an entire genre and a loud endorsement of the claims of the

'dramatic games' (ludi saenici) as the pre-eminent, superior form of
entertainment on offer to the Roman public. After all, it is precisely in
this vein that in this same second prologue Terence creates for Ambivius
Turpio the role of the defender of poetic art59 in the person of his
predecessor, the exceedingly popular dramatist Caecilius.
Despite having been driven from the stage time after time or having
been unable to hold his ground (15), Terence's Ambivius implies that
he never bowed to partisan pressure nor did he ever pander to the
rabble. It is in his determination to educate the crowds and thus prevent
the festival's carnivalesque aesthetic from imposing on a poet's art that
Ambivius is most unlike eighteenth-century England's stage-managers
facing similar dilemmas. While the former, averse to tactical concessions, persisted in presenting worthy plays, even when they were
savagely attacked by professional rivals or perceived to cut against the
grain of fashion,60the latter chose to accommodate, instead of 'healing',
their public's low tastes. As David Garrick, star actor/manager of the
eighteenth-century stage, sets the case, although Shakespeare is preferable to pantomime, theatres will have no other option than eventually
give in, to ensure that their clients are offered the full array of
spectacular attractions which their lack of understanding has led them
to demand:
Sacred to SHAKESPEARE, was this spot design'd
To pierce the heart, and humanize the mind.
But if an empty House, the Actor's curse,
Shews us our Lears and Hamlets lose their force;
Unwilling we must change the nobler scene,
And in our turn present you Harlequin;
Quit Poets, and set Carpenters to work,
Shew gaudy scenes, or mount the vaulting Turk:
For, tho'we Actors, one and all, agree
Boldly to struggle for our - vanity,
59 Cf. D. Gilula,'The FirstRealisticRolesin EuropeanTheatre:Terence'sPrologues',QUCC
62 (1989), 95-106, at 104: 'Terencewrotefor Ambiviusa text in whichhe characterized
him as
influentialand decisive... a managerwho is in the positionto turndown scriptsand discourage
playwrights.TerenceupgradesAmbiviusto the rankof connoisseur(48), an arbiterof excellence,
who, in his youthalreadyprovedhis tasteandsoundjudgementby supportingthe as yet unknown
Caecilius.'
60 Ambiviuslays the blamefor the difficultieshe faced with the stagingof Caecilius'plays on
spitefulindividuals(Hec.22). However,the dramatist's
professionalopponentswouldnot havehad
a realisticchanceof hamperingthe playwithoutat leastsomesupportfromsectionsof the audience,
a bodywhichwouldundoubtedlyhavebeenhighlystratifiedanddiversifiedin its literarytastesand
abilityof literaryappreciation.

73
If want comes on, importance must retreat;

Our first, great, ruling passion, is - to eat.61
The second prologue to the Hecyra, conversely, encodes a reluctance

to submit to a possible large-scale conflation between the elevated
'language' of ars musica and the inferior 'languages' en vogue among
the Roman crowds.62 Besides, hand in hand with the dramatist's
intransigence goes that of his lead actor. The persona Terence has
created for his actor-manager-producer in the second extant prologue63
is that of a performer fully conscious of his own standing, above and
ahead of the inferior line of vulgar entertainers. We could well imagine
Ambivius making a stand of differentiation just as defiant as that of
Colley Cibber, the famous actor-manager of the Drury Lane playhouse
who, together with his fellow actors, emphatically 'declin'd acting upon
any Stage, that was brought to so low a Disgrace' as to allow ropedancers treading on its boards.64'Ambivius' has been made of the stuff
of those actors 'hardy enough to hazard their Interest' for the sake of
reforming the stage and mending the public's taste.65
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
Ancient Frames and Modern Parallels

So far in this piece I have drawn liberally on theatrical material from the
English stage and, as I hope to show in this section, such a cross-cultural
perspective can prove to be in several respects illuminating. For, quite
apart from their value for Roman theatre history, the Hecyra prologues
could be studied alongside the English theatrical tradition of those
periods when the time-honoured dramatic forms of Tragedy and
Comedy were rubbing shoulders with a medley of other entertainments,
from the clowns and jugglers of Shakespeare's day to the newer
attractions of the seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
London stage: dancing (even rope-dancing), instrumental and vocal
music, Italian opera, processions or elaborate ceremonial scenes, farcical
pieces and pantomimes. In perfect harmony with Terence's voice,
frustrated and hindered by the wider public's lack of taste, playwrights
of the English stage deplore the minimal attention spectators are willing
to accord to the mainstream performance, i.e. the play itself:
No Audience now can bear the Fatigue of two Hours of good Sense tho' Shakespear or
Otway endeavour to keep 'em awake, without the promis'd Relief of the Stage-Coach or
some such solid afterlude,
declares an eighteenth-century dramatic prologue,66while a journal of

the same period complains that
... the Audience languishes through the whole Representation [i.e. of the play], and
discovers the utmost Impatience till Harlequin enters, to relieve them from the Fatigue
of Sense, Reason, and Method, by his most incomprehensible Dexterities.67
Above all, 'the Receipts of the Play-Houses' are called upon as

'mournful Evidences' for the 'low ebb of Success' to which the only
'rational' entertainments of Tragedy and Comedy have sunk, 'when
they are ventur'd nakedly to the Town'.68 The general tone is very
characteristically given in the polemical epilogue to the Drury Lane
production of The Humour of the Age (March 1701), which encodes the
company's response to a performing monkey presented at the rival
66
From CharlesJohnson's Preface to TheForceof Friendshipand Love in a Chest;quoted in E. L.
Avery (ed.), The LondonStage, 1660-1800, Part 2: 1 700-1 729: A Calendarof Plays, Entertainments,
and Afterpiecestogether with Casts, Box-receipts, and contemporaryComment Compiledfrom the
Playbills, Newspapersand TheatricalDiaries of the Period (Carbondale, 1960), cxx.
67
Pasquin, 4 February 1724; quoted in Avery (n. 66), clxxv.
68 From the Mist's WeeklyJournal, 14 January 1727; quoted in Avery (n. 66), clxxv.

THE HECYRA
PROLOGUES
75
playhouse of the Lincoln's Inn Fields: 'Once Dryden, Otway, Fletcher,

pleas'd the Town; I Now nothing but The Monkey will go down'.69
Needless to say, the overall picture differs from the circumstances
applying to second-century BC Rome in many crucial ways.
In the Republican Roman stage we witnessed Terence's rhetoric of
all-inclusiveness, intriguingly combined with his and Ambivius' determination not to compromise their professional standards, so as to keep
their art as uncontaminated as possible from the demands of the riff-raff.
But, flights of rhetoric aside, in realistic and practical terms both
Ambivius and Terence knew that neither peace nor treaty could exist
between a troupe of stage actors and the motley league of rope-dancers,
boxers, and gladiators rivallingthem for the attention of the public; in no
way could the skills of non-dramatic entertainers be turned into profit
for the actor-manager's or the playwright's pocket.
In the Restoration, Georgian, and Victorian stages, on the other hand,
not only were the minor theatres contentedly deluged by popular forms
of entertainment, largely derived from the ground of the London Fairs,
but even the patent playhouses, privileged, by royal grace, with the
exclusive right to stage Tragedy and Comedy in London, seemed to be
giving way to the overwhelming craze for spectacle, music, and all kinds
of optical extravaganzas and thus surrendering control to illegitimate,
sometimes even immigrant, performative attractions, 'monsters, tumblers, ladder-dancers, Italian shadows, dumb shews, buffoonery, and
nonsense'.70As the epilogue of a late eighteenth-century play puts it,'...
the preference, we know, I Is for pageantry and shew'.71 It seems to be
the case that 'for the Support of the Stage, what is generally shewn there,
must be lower'd to the Taste of common Spectators'72 or, as the
prologue of a production mounted at Lincoln's Inn Fields laments,
The Stage is quite debauch'd, for every Day
Some new-born Monster's shown you for a Play;
Art Magick is for Poetry profest,
Horses, Asses, Monkeys, and each obscener Beast,
(To which Egyptian Monarch once did bow)
Upon our English Stage are worship'd now.73
69
InnFields1695-1708
andtheManagement
ofLincoln's
Quotedin J. Milhous,ThomasBetterton
(Carbondaleand Edwardsville,1979), 137.
70 From ThePrompter(n. 38), 136 (datedTuesday,December23, 1735).
71 G. Colman
(the Younger),from New Hay at the OldMarket(1795); cited in A. Nicoll, A
CenturyDrama1750-1800 (CamHistoryof EnglishDrama1660-1900, vol. III:LateEighteenth
72 Cibber(n. 64), 199.
bridge,1969), 24.
73 Fromthe Prologueto TheUnnatural
Mother(September1607, Lincoln'sInn Fields);quoted
in Milhous(n. 69), 96.

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
Anonymous(n. 38), 17-18.
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
Most importantly, literary critics adopt strategies closely analogous to

those of Terence in order to demarcate and fiercely protect the territory
within which the 'man of taste, wit and sense' must unfailingly operate.
So, for example, not only do they fulminate against low level entertainers as the primary instigators of a feared or already palpable
degradation of taste, morals and intellectual level among audience
ranks; they are also adept at conceptualizing and constructing the
hotchpotch of pantomimists, acrobats, jugglers, puppeteers, singers,
dancers, etc. as the unlawful 'Other',89the crude, coarse and unsophisticated 'Usurper' of the Stage which, if unrestrained, will strangle and
squeeze out, defile and demolish whatever Sense, Erudition, and theatrical Tradition have managed to erect throughout the centuries. As
Aaron Hill replies to a letter defending pantomimes,
The corruption of the stage is now arrived to such a height that unless some stop is put
to it, it must end in its total destruction. Pantomimes are now no longer to be considered
as only harmless or ridiculous entertainments, but as usurpers that will entirely root out
Tragedy and Comedy by rendering both insipid to the Town, whose taste will be
reduced to a merehabit and be formed to relish only what it daily feeds on.90
with a slightlydifferentemphasis,cf. 18ff. whereAmbiviusstateshis beliefthat a poet could be
drivenoff his callingif discouragedby the ill-willof his opponents.
87 See
Appleton'sandBurnim'sintroductionto ThePrompter
(n. 38), pagex; cf. Moody(n. 37),
12-13.
88 From The
Prompter
(n. 38), 19, datedTuesday,December24, 1734;cf. Anonymous(n. 38),
17:'I cannottherefore,I confess,withanypatiencesee a Harlequin,
or Scaramouch
usurpthatStage,
whereI havebeen so oftendelightedwiththe Distressesof OTHELLOandJAFFIER.'In general,
the WeeklyJournal, or Saturday'sPost of January23, 1725 claims that 'Wit and Sense are every Day
in a greaterLikelyhoodof being banished[i.e. from the Playhouses],and theirPlaceusurp'dby

dumbFarceand Absurdity';quotedin Avery(n. 83), 135.
89 See, e.g. a dramatist's
and critic'srankingof rope-dancingfans as 'the Goths and Vandals'
who frequentCoventGarden:the Gray's-Inn
Journal,no. vii. Saturday,December2, 1752,citedin
Nicoll (n. 71), 25.
90
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
See C. Gildon, Life of Mr ThomasBetterton(London, 1710), 143-4.

See the Spectator,August 11, 1711; quoted in Avery (n. 83), 139.
93
Anonymous (n. 38), 20 and 11 respectively.
94
Cibber (n. 64), 184.
95 Gildon (n. 91), 144 and 145 respectively.
96 Cibber
97 Gildon (n. 91), 157.
(n. 64), 199.
98
99 Gildon (n. 91), 162.
Gildon (n. 91), 144.
100 See Luc., Salt. 63: K1VOV1EVOv
8E aAoyovaAAxco
KaLt/daratov,ovSEvot av-r- vov rpoco'vros,
KLVaOLV
embedding the anti-pantomime view of the philosopher Demetrius.
101 See
Pliny, Ep. 9. 17. 2: quia nequaquamme ut inexspectatumfestivumvedelectat,si quid molle a
92

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
behaviour of such a group, 'when the auxiliary shouts, cat-calls, and

horse-laughs enter the field, one hundred of these terrible heroes shall
easily prevail against four or five hundred modest persons, who wou'd
willingly enjoy a rational entertainment in quiet.'104
To conclude, then, what is at stake in the Hecyra prologues is Theatre
in its entirety,both as a literary as well as a performative experience. All
the while Terence sustains the picture of his play as unfairly challenged
by petty, valueless attractions, Theatre carves out for itself a markedly
distinctive space, a non-negotiable terrain of unsurpassable intellectuality. At issue is not just the playwright's defence against the slander or the
sabotage of the evil Lanuvinus but the very ranking of the ludi scaenici
within the miscellany of entertainments on offer. Moreover, rather than
clumsily broadcasting the magnitude of his own failure, Terence seizes a
golden opportunity to belittle the rival delights of the arrestingly
spectacular, the reign of a 'dramaturgy'which is nonsensical as well as
utterly corporeal. The dramatist's outlook is very similar to that of
Horace: coming a century and a half after Terence, the lyric poet too
drives a wedge between his own taste and the whims of the plebecula,
that majority section of the audience (numeroplures) who, 'inferior in
merit and status' (virtute et honore minores), 'uneducated and stupid'
(indocti stolidique), 'clamour for a bear or boxers in the middle of the
play' (media inter carminaposcunt / aut ursum aut pugiles) and 'delight'
(gaudet) in the lowest of pleasures (Horace, Ep. 2. 1. 183-6).105
cinaedo,petulans a scurra, stultum a morioneprofertur,with the brief discussion of Hunter (n. 50),
195.
102
From Act IV of an eighteenth-century play, cited in A. Nicoll, A History of English Drama,
1660-1900, volume II: Early EighteenthCentury Drama (Cambridge, 1969),14.
103
See Nicoll (n. 102), 13-14, with many contemporary sources.
104
The Prompter(n. 38), dated 20 February 1736.
105
Even though Horace is 'embroidering on Terence' at this point, rather than testifying to the
real-life behaviour of Augustan theatre audiences (see N. Rudd, Horace, Epistles book II and

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
irritat, mulcet,falsis terroribusimplet,

ut magus, et modo me Thebis,modoponit Athenis.
(Horace, Ep. 2. 1. 210-13)
The poet who tears my heart with imaginary griefs, provokes it, soothes it, fills it with
unreal fears - such a poet I regard as capable of a tight-rope act. He is like a magician,
who can transport me now to Thebes, now to Athens.108
108
TranslationM. Winterbottom,in Russelland Winterbottom(n. 31), 96.


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Authorial Voice and Theatrical Self-Definition in Terence and beyond: The "Hecyra" Prologues

in Ancient and Modern Contexts

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Greece & Rome, Vol. 51, No. 1, April 2004

One of the greatest puzzles in the history of Roman Republican drama

Such a theatrically oriented reading of the prologues does not intend

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borne by his literary antagonists, headed by the ever spiteful and

The Hecyra Prologues and their Rhetorical Strategies

Lanuvinus as malevolus:An. 6, Hau. 16; as maledictus:An. 7, Hau. 22, 34, Ph. 3.

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blame for the collapsing of his previous productions to audience ranks

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On the other hand, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that Terence

As I will argue in this piece, Terence's text amounts to a defiant

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instincts, a mental aesthetic is delineated against one that privileges the

Yet, rather than launching a head-on attack, such as can be found in

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superior stuff and more or less as culturally homogeneous: no one

Terence constructs the fiction of addressing the kind of spectators

Terence banishes spectatorial unruliness by projecting it backwards

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inclusion as it is a programmatic statement of cultural exclusion.While

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The powerful rhetorical strategies of the second Hecyraprologue then

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Finally, far from bringing disrepute to him personally, Terence's

And in a famous eigtheenth-century engraving by William Hogarth,

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The Hecyra Prologues and Ancient Performative Frames:

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up-market performative genres, are all united in their depiction of

Tov avTov TpOTrOV otTLaL, T() p(`ropt

while Seneca argues that there should be a difference between the

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intriguing rhetoric of the Hecyra prologues stops featuring as a unique

Kat cdyeAatov Kat JlvveTov

such people as avavSpot Kat 8iarTEOpvpVote'voL Tara Ta '

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THE HECYRA PROLOGUES

of such a characteristic exponent of elite cultural tradition as Dio

And Seneca's frustration vents itself against the boorishness and

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The Hecyra prologues correspondingly, are on a par with a multitude

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THE HECYRA PROLOGUES

minded,54 while pantomime, a ballet-style form of stage entertainment

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rights of an entire genre and a loud endorsement of the claims of the

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THE HECYRA PROLOGUES

If want comes on, importance must retreat;

The second prologue to the Hecyra, conversely, encodes a reluctance

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Ancient Frames and Modern Parallels

declares an eighteenth-century dramatic prologue,66while a journal of

Above all, 'the Receipts of the Play-Houses' are called upon as

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playhouse of the Lincoln's Inn Fields: 'Once Dryden, Otway, Fletcher,

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