[In the essay below, Sutton discusses Terence's use of realism in The Brothers, concluding that his plays were unpopular because "at their very heart is a philosophy of life that is incompatible with the innate outlook of ancient comedy."]

Terence is a comic poet rather neglected in our times. The amount of criticism and scholarship devoted to him is not especially great or penetrating. Even more symptomatic is the fact much modern criticism regards Plautus and Roman Comedy as nearly synonymous, with Terence shoved firmly into the background on the occasions when he is considered at all. Reasons for this lukewarm attitude are not difficult to discem. Plautus fits in very well indeed with modern ideas of what comedy is and ought to be, but Terence does not. His plays are not especially funny, and they are certainly not uproariously joyous and life-affirming. Nor are they pugnaciously antinomian in the manner of Aristophanes and Plautus. There is nothing hilariously cathartic about them. Thus they are difficult to accommodate to modern critical theories, or readers' expectations, about the nature of ancient comedy or of comedy in general.

Terence was willing to reproduce the quieter and more thoughtful tone of his Greek New Comedy models. Most of the specific adaptive and Romanizing touches we find in Plautus are missing. To the extent that Plautus borrowed an outlook and specific features from Italian farce-forms, Plautine comedy is firmly anchored in native Roman soil. Terence's plays are unrelentingly Hellenistic.

Plautus' audience was the holidaymaking Roman people gathered in the Forum. Terence also ostensibly wrote for the kind of theatergoers described in the prologues of some of his plays, but in reality he enjoyed the patronage of progressive, enlightened, and thoroughly Hellenized patricians, Scipio Africanus (the conqueror of Carthage) and his circle. He was not so dependent on popular reception of his work, and he had good reason to concentrate more on catering to the tastes of his patrons. Insofar as he wrote for their consumption, in presenting works reflecting Hellenistic values he was therefore in the position of a man preaching to the converted, and his plays are shaped to appeal to a sophisticated intellectual elite whose idea of comedy may well have been shaped by firsthand contact with the kind of Greek originals from which Terence was working.

If much in Plautine comedy invites a specifically Freudian interpretation, the same is scarcely true of Terence, particularly as he does not invite the spectator to side with sons in their contentions against their fathers in the same straightforward way. One might be tempted to explain this difference between the two playwrights in terms of their personal psychic dispositions, but such an explanation would probably be both superficial and impertinent. For Plautus the especial interest of the Oedipal situation was that it could be co-opted as a powerful sociopolitical metaphor. Terence was not, and was not obliged to be, so concemed with the conflict of Hellenistic and traditional Roman values, and so had no similar use for the Oedipal metaphor.

Instead, he took a wholly different (and much more sophisticated) tack. In some of his tragedies Euripides employed the trick of placing ordinary characters in traditional heroic situations that are highly stressful, where their consequent behavior can be studied. Naturally, they cannot conduct themselves in heroic ways, and so they act out of their weaknesses and foibles rather than out of their strengths, and their motivations are those of recognizable men and women. Critics both admiring and hostile (beginning with Aristophanes, especially in The Frogs) have observed that the veneer of mythology-based tragedy often wears very thin in his plays and that he was groping toward a new kind of realistic melodrama.

Terence adopts the comic equivalent of Euripides' strategy. The world of pure comedy is usually populated with simply conceived and one-dimensional characters. He, on the other hand, places three-dimensional human beings in traditional comic situations, and so his plays may be called "psychological" in a very different sense than those of Plautus. They are concerned with the exploration of realistically depicted character. Pure comedy portrays its characters in blacks and whites. This is why I have repeatedly talked about a comedy's dramatis personae being divided into two camps. We find a hero, whose enterprise we cheer, and his friends and supporters ranged against his opponents, whose defeat we hope for and applaud. Each character can readily and unambiguously be assigned to one of these sides. And the hero's ultimate victory is decisive and uncomplicated, with the result that the spectator feels unmixed pleasure and relief at the happy outcome.

There is little room for shades of nuanced gray in this formula, nor is there any tolerance for the message that ostensibly happy resolutions may not be as uncomplicated as they first seem. There is, in short, something eternally cartoonlike about pure comedy's simplistic representations of life, just as there is about its pasteboard characters. Terentian comedy defies this tradition. Here too, his strategy is to reproduce traditional comic situations, but in the more complex and nuanced terms of realistic representation.

It does not matter whether you choose to resent Terentian realism as a betrayal of the proper business of comedy or applaud it as a step in the direction of urbane sophistication. The result in either case is the same: he devised a new kind of drama at Rome featuring a transvaluation of traditional comic values, a dissolution of the barrier between comedy and reality. In this transformed world, characters who are neither wholly admirable or totally ridiculous can act out of complex and sometimes self-contradictory motives. They can change and grow over the course of a play. The meaning of a play's events can be equally complex and ambiguous, no less so than the meaning of the events of real life. Terence's very different aims and methods are fully illustrated by Adelphoe (140 B.C.—all of Terence's plays were produced between 146 and 140 B.C.). In this play, traditional stock New Comedy characters and situations are readily visible, and the reader will immediately see analogues to elements from plays already studied here. Nevertheless, each of these appears in transmuted form so that they simultaneously strike us as familiar and as startlingly new.

Adelphoe (The brothers) is based on a like-named play by Menander. The premise of the play is that a gentleman named Demea has two sons, Aeschines and Ctesipho. He also has a brother, Micio, who is a childless bachelor. Therefore he has allowed Micio to adopt Aeschines, keeping Ctesipho for himself. As Micio explains in his address to the audience at the beginning of the play, he and Demea have been very different kinds of men since boyhood. Demea has always been frugal and hard-working, and lives in the country. He himself, on the other hand, is an easygoing city dweller who has always devoted himself to a life of ease. He is very devoted to Aeschines, and since his primary concern is that the boy love him in return (49f.) he has brought him up very permissively: "I do not regard it is necessary that he do everything in obedience to my paternal authority" (51f.). Rather, he has encouraged the boy to hide nothing from his father, as his theory is that if a son gets in the habit of lying to his father, he will behave dishonorably toward everyone else: "I believe it is preferable to rear sons with tact and liberality, rather than govern them by intimidation" (58).

But, he tells us, Demea is disturbed by this policy. He rebukes his brother for letting the son carouse, chase women, run up bills. But Micio persists in his theory that:

[Demea] is unreasonably harsh. In my opinion, he is badly mistaken to think that paternal authority is weightier or more enduring than a father's control based on friendship. This is my feeling and what I have persuaded myself: a man who is only forced to do his duty by impending evil, is only afraid as long as the threat hangs over him. If he thinks he can get away with it, he goes back to his natural-born ways. But he whom you join to yourself out of friendship is eager to repay you and will be the same when he's in your presence and when he's not. It's a father's job to accustom his son to doing right voluntarily rather than out of fear. This is the difference between a father and a master, and the man who doesn't know how to do this must confess that he's incompetent at child rearing. (64ff.)

Demea enters and chides Micio for Aeschines' wild behavior. Smugly, he contrasts him with the thrifty and sober Ctesipho who remains down on the farm (94ff.). Micio retorts (98ff.) that there's no crime in the sowing of adolescent wild oats. If Demea were a human being, he'd let Ctesipho do the same. For there's only one alternative: for the boy to await Demea's hoped-for demise and then behave similarly when he is a man (109f.). He himself subsidizes Aeschines' behavior. It's his own money, and Demea has no right to complain about how he chooses to spend it.

Demea reiterates that he is troubled about Aeschines. Micio maintains each father must stick to the rearing of his own boy, for to do otherwise would be to rescind Aeschines' adoption. Demea grudgingly agrees, and leaves. His departure creates an abrupt change of attitude in Micio. He confesses to the audience that there is much in what Demea says. He was too proud to confess as much in his presence, but in fact he too is disturbed by Aeschines' profligate behavior. Recently Aeschines announced that he was tired of whoring and desired to marry. But now, it seems, he is up to his old tricks. He himself must go and find out what is really happening.

In the next scene Aeschines enters, accompanied by a girl named Bacchis. He has forcibly taken her away from a pimping slave-dealer named Sannio, and although this gentleman pursues them expostulating he refuses to give her back. He is sure the girl is actually freeborn and has made up his mind to rescue her.

He takes her in the house leaving Sannio to fulminate. Syrus, Micio's slave, manages to calm him down. Then Ctesipho reenters, and greets Aeschines in the most friendly and grateful way. As the scene progresses it is gradually revealed to the audience that Bacchis is actually Ctesipho's girlfriend and that Aeschines has rescued her on his brother's behalf. At the end of the scene, Ctesipho goes into the house to join her.

In the next scene the plot grows more complex. Micio has for a next-door neighbor a widow named Sostrata. It seems that her daughter Pamphila is about to give birth. Aeschines, the father, has promised to marry her, but now her slave Geta bursts in and with high indignation informs her how Aeschines has liberated a slave-girl. Geta of course thinks that the boy has done this for his own benefit and his moral sensibilities are outraged. Although most of his imprecations are directed against Aeschines, he has a choice remark left over for Micio (314): "I'd kill that old man for producing such a rascal!" Sostrata is thrown into despair at this development. The girl's reputation is ruined, she has no dowry, and so she will be destitute. There's only one ray of hope. Aeschines gave her a ring, which she can produce as evidence if he denies his responsibility. Geta is to go tell the whole story to Hegio, a friend of her late husband who has always served as her protector.

The next scene begins with the entrance of a wrathful Demea. He has learned about Aeschines' abduction of the girl and, even worse, has gotten wind of the fact that Ctesipho had a hand in the escapade. Syrus comes along and, although he knows the truth, does not disabuse the old man (392ff.):

SYR. There's a world of difference between you and Micio (and I'm not just saying this because you're here). You're nothing but wisdom, he's just a bunch of dreams. Would you allow your boy to carry on like this?

DEM. Let him? Wouldn't I smell it out six months before he started anything?

Syrus goes on to tell him a cock-and-bull story about how upset Ctesipho became with Aeschines because of the escapade, how he hit him with a steady barrage of moral maxims. Demea hears all this reassuring stuff about his boy with great self-satisfaction.

Demea is about to go off to his farm, where he imagines Ctesipho awaits him, when Hegio comes in. Hegio is understandably upset about Aeschines' supposed abandonment of Pamphila, and taxes Demea about it as the girl's birth-shrieks can be heard offstage. All Demea can do is promise to refer the matter to Micio's attention.

After they leave Ctesipho and Syrus reenter. Ctesipho is disturbed because he is supposed to be at home on the farm but he wants to spend the night with Bacchis. Syrus tells him not to worry. He can invent some lie to explain his absence to Demea, and all he has to do to pacify the old man's anger is feed him some more lies about what a paragon of virtue Ctesipho is. Shortly thereafter, Ctesipho departs and Demea enters. Syrus is as good as his word. He pretends that Ctesipho has just administered a beating both to himself and to Bacchis because Aeschines' malfeasances had put him into a towering rage. Demea is naturally delighted to hear this and is not too careful about investigating the lies Syrus makes up to explain Ctesipho's absence.

They exit and Micio and Hegio enter. Micio has learned the truth about Aeschines' abduction of Bacchis and pacifies Hegio by relating the actual story. When they leave the stage a highly distraught Aeschines enters. He has gone to Sostrata's house to visit Pamphila and has been rudely turned away because they think he has acquired Bacchis for himself and is in the process of breaking his promises. He is shattered. He wants to tell the women the truth.

As he is summoning the nerve to knock at Sostrata's door Micio arrives. Although he knows the truth, he informs the audience in an aside that he'll have a little fun with Aeschines as a means of repaying him for not confiding in him about the whole situation. So he innocently asks the boy why he is standing at Sostrata's door. He is overjoyed to observe that Aeschines is capable of blushing (643), but to continue his deception he makes up a story that, since her father is dead, Pamphila is about to be married off to her nearest male kin. To be sure, her mother has some make-believe story about the girl having a baby by some unknown man, and so she is opposed to such a marriage. Nevertheless, this appointed husband is right now on his way to Athens in order to claim the girl.

Aeschines is of course upset yet again. He expostulates that this arrangement is downright dishonorable: think how the nameless young father of Pamphila's child will feel when she is taken away from it! Micio replies that no unfairness has been committed: after all, there was no wedding. Aeschines cannot take any more of this, and so he breaks down in tears. This causes Micio to drop his pretenses: he reveals that he knows the whole story. Father and son profess their deep love for each other, and Aeschines admits to feelings of shame over his behavior during this episode.

After this touching interview between father and son, Aeschines exits to prepare for his wedding and Demea enters. He starts to take Micio to task for Aeschines' behavior: in the past he has merely debauched girls like Bacchis; now he seems to be taking after honest freeborn Athenian girls. Micio receives this news with irritating equanimity. He professes not to be at all disturbed by the impending marriage of Aeschines to Pamphila. No point in getting upset over things you can't change; you just have to reconcile yourself to the throw of the dice.

This response has no calming effect on Demea. What, he asks, will happen to Bacchis? With equal blandness Micio announces that she will remain in the house. This horrifies his brother, who broadly hints at the arrangement's sexual implications (750ff.):

DEM. I presume that you will arrange things so
as to have a singing partner.
MIC. Why not?
DEM. And I suppose you will go a-dancing with
these women.
MIC. Fine.
DEM. Fine?
MIC. And you can dance along with us, if the
need arises.

And so Micio (who of course knows the truth about Ctesipho and Bacchis) goes on teasing Demea, much as he has already teased Aeschines. Demea gives up in exasperation: the whole household is ruined by its excessive prosperity, and Micio is off his head.

Micio leaves and a drunken Syrus comes out. Demea takes this as further evidence of how Micio has let his household go to rack and ruin. He tries to talk to Syrus, but they are interrupted by another slave calling to Ctesipho within. So Demea learns that his son is not at the farm, but in Micio's house drinking. When Micio appears, he tries to remonstrate, but Micio gives him a lecture (896ff.). Demea can stick to his frugal habits, but his own money is a kind of bonus for the boys to enjoy. There's no need for worry; they can be trusted. He sees in them the qualities one wants. They are wise and intelligent; they display deference, mutual affection, and generosity. Even though they may be sowing their wild oats, they can easily be brought back to probity. Demea might think that they are spendthrifts, but the great fault of old age is an overconcern with money.

This produces a remarkable change of heart in Demea. As soon as Micio departs, he enters into a long soliloquy, worth quoting in full:

No man can have a plan for his life so well worked out that reality, age, and experience cannot modify by teaching you. You are ignorant of that you imagine you know, and what at first you hold to be true is disproved by experience. This has now happened to me. For now that my life has nearly run its course I'm abandoning the austere life style I have always followed. Why? By experience I have discovered that nothing is better for a man than tolerance and kindness. The truth of this can easily be ascertained by looking at the situation of me and my brother. He is mild, tranquil, never offends anybody, has a smile for one and all. He has lived for himself at his own expense. Everybody greets him affectionately. But I, a harsh farmer, severe, stingy, and truculent, took a wife. Plenty of trouble there! Fathered two sons—more trouble. When I worked hard to provide for them, I wore out my life in striving. Now that I've reached old age, here's the reward they give me for my hard work—their dislike. This brother of mine reaps the rewards of fatherhood without any effort. They adore him but shun me. They confide all their plans to him; they love him. They both stay with him, while I'm deserted. They pray for his long life, but I suppose they're hoping for my death. Thus he makes them both his own sons cheaply, although they have been brought up by me at great expense. I get all the bother; he gets the pleasure. So come now, let us take the opposite track. Since he's issuing me a challenge, let's see if I can talk pleasantly and act kindly. I also want to be loved and be well thought of by my boys. If this requires generosity and tolerance, I'll not be behindhand. The money will run out, but at my advanced age that scarcely matters. (855ff.)

And, so it appears that Demea has undergone a change of heart, a veritable transformation of the personality such as that experienced by Cnemon in Dyscolus. But the sequel shows that matters are not so simple. At first sight it seems that such will be the case, as Demea greets first Syrus, and then another slave named Geta, with unwonted affability, treating them virtually as equals. After he has done so, he says in a self-satisfied aside, "I am gradually winning the lower classes over to my side" (898). Then he meets Aeschines, and with an uncharacteristic display of emotions announces that he is his son's father both by birth and by nature, and that he loves him more than his own eyes (902f.).

But matters quickly swerve in a different direction. Demea is increasingly generous. When Aeschines complains that the wedding is being delayed, Demea airily responds that there is no problem—just break down the wall separating Micio's house from Sostrata's and combine the families into one. In an aside to the audience Demea reveals his real thinking (911): of course he can be as generous as he wants, for he is purchasing his own new popularity with Micio's money.

Micio, finding out that the wall is being demolished, breaks out of the house in fury, but Demea in his newly benign way convinces him that he should indeed support Sostrata's family. Indeed, with Aeschines breathlessly seconding him, he proposes all sorts of ways in which Micio can be generous: an estate for Hegio, freedom for Syrus, his wife, and Geta. Come to think of it, Micio ought to settle down and marry Sostrata.

Micio is of course appalled, both by seeing his money evanesce and at the prospect of losing his bachelor freedom to marry a woman he frankly regards as "a decrepit hag" (938). Finally, when he has finished rubbing Micio's and Aeschines' noses in this outburst of extravagant generosity, he brings home the lesson in a speech at 985ff.:

I'll tell you why I acted thus. In order to show to you that the reason these boys think you are liberal and affable, Micio, does not come from the way you live your life or for any good and reasonable reason, but because of your permissiveness, your indulgence, and your open purse. And now, Aeschines, if my life style is hateful to you because I do not give in to you completely on every matter, just and unjust alike, I'm done with the subject. Spend, squander, do what you like. But because of your youth you are heedless in your desires and excessively eager, and you may wish me to reprove and correct you on occasion as well as support you. If so, here I am at your service.

Aeschines can only say that henceforth he will defer to Demea. Demea says that he will allow Ctesipho to keep Bacchis—but that this must be his last fling. Micio chimes in this is right, and the play thus ends.

The issue explored in Adelphoe, the proposition that upbringing shapes character and that differing forms of upbringing create different products, is distinctly reminiscent of the theme of The Clouds, although one of the play's special jokes is that Adelphoe suggests that the products of different upbringings needn't be so very different after all. Since we are shown two allegedly contrasting products of conservative and liberal, old-fashioned and modern upbringings, Adelphoe even more sharply recalls The Banqueteers. Perhaps this is no accident. In a more general sense, the play very certainly is a commentary on a host of comedies of the Mostellaria type that favorably contrast liberality and hedonism, located in the city, with repressive conservatism, situated in the countryside.

To the extent that Adelphoe is conceived as a commentary on these two Aristophanic plays and perhaps other comedies treating the same theme, its message is that things are not so simple as comedy traditionally represents them.

This is true regarding both the play's central issue and its characters. Given the history of ancient comedy, one would predict both that it would show that different methods of child rearing would produce different kinds of young men, and that the more tolerant method would be represented as unquestionably superior. In that sense, the spectator expecting to see yet another rehearsal of comedy's standard lesson about the superiority of the young at heart and the fun-loving has lit up an exploding cigar. The play explores the limitations and deficiencies of tolerant liberality and strongly suggests that a hedonistic approach to life is not without its own shortcomings. The play's critical attitude toward liberalism and hedonism is startlingly new and different.

In Adelpboe we are shown a familiar cast of characters. Many of its major characters have generic equivalents in Mostellaria. In accordance with comedy's usual antiauthoritarian and fun-loving outlook, the position represented by Micio would normally be characterized as entirely in the right, and that represented by Demea would be given some manner of unsympathetic representation. Demea himself, in the tradition of such characters as Theopropides in Mostellaria, would be portrayed as an agelast and would be assigned some such unpleasant traits as dourness, excessive austerity, or obtuseness, and Micio, a fun-loving older man of the Simo type, would be presented as a decidedly more attractive human being. The play would conclude with the decisive and uncomplicated triumph of the fun-loving characters and the values they represent.

But in accordance with Terence's program of heightened realism, representing life in something resembling its full complexity, things do not work out this way. There is plenty to be said in favor of Demea's conservative approach and his philosophy of child rearing. In agreement with this revised way of regarding the situation, Demea is given a sympathetic characterization. There is nothing pathological about him, and for a "repressive" comic father he is, very uncharacteristically, not shown as either stupid or insensitive. Indeed, by the end of the play we appreciate that he is its most intelligent character. He conceives and executes a plan for turning the tables on Micio and teaching him and the two boys a valuable lesson about hedonism's limitations. Although Micio already seems to have some doubts about the wisdom of keeping such a loose rein on adolescent men, he keeps his reservations to himself. Demea pushes the issue to extremes to make Micio confront the issue squarely. But it is the mark of Demea's tact and intelligence that he manages to do so in such a way that Micio is not subject to undue humiliation and so that no attempt is made to alienate the boy's affections or interfere with their love lives. Adelphoe is not a comedy that ends with a typical reconciliation of its characters, because no such reconciliation is needed. Demea has engineered a solution in which everybody (even plenty of secondary characters) wins.

Adelphoe is populated with a set of characters quite unlike any we have previously encountered. They are equipped with a remarkable repertoire of emotions. They blush; they cry; they are capable of feeling and of expressing deep affection. The need to be loved is recognized as a necessary human desire. There is no room here for Oedipus. This is the only comedy we have read in which the relation of a son (or at least an adopted son) and his father is portrayed as loving rather than antagonistic, so that we are shown the possibility that a familia can be held together by bonds of affection rather than by upward-directed loyalty and downward-directed authoritarianism. His characters are moved by genuine feelings (although Terence is no mawkish sentimentalist). They are capable of learning and growing, and an important part of Terence's interest in psychological analysis is the representation of human character evolving in response to changing circumstance. In Dyscolus this can be said of the central character, but in Adelphoe the observation holds good not just for Demea but also for those who are educated by his trick.

There is, in short, an unusual degree of sophistication in Adelphoe. Neither its issues nor its characters are represented in a simplistic or one-sided way. Terence has converted comedy into an instrument for a more serious and realistic exploration of life's problems and of human nature. Comedy perennially pokes fun at sacred cows, but it turns out that ancient comedy has a certain sacred cow of its own. In Adelphoe Terence calls into question a view that constitutes the central feature of ancient comedy's characteristic world-view: uncritical and reflexive endorsement of hedonism. "Yes, but life does not really work like that" is not a message characteristic of comedy, and when this comment is made about hedonism the result is rather devastating. If comedy is a subversive literary form, Terence turns the tables and writes a kind of drama meant to subvert comedy itself. And so there is a fine symbolism in the fact that Adelphoe (together with the Hecyra, produced in the same year, just prior to Terence's death) happens to be the last ancient comedy to be written surviving from antiquity.

In his recent book on Terence [Understanding Terence, 1986], Sander M. Goldberg observes that the death of Terence meant, for all intents and purposes, the death of comedy at Rome. This presents the literary historian with a puzzle. Why did Roman comedy cease to flourish at a time when Roman literature as a whole was, if not still quite in its infancy, at least in its early and rather ungainly adolescence? Probably any number of causes might be discovered for comedy's early demise, but surely part of the responsibility (or should one say the blame?) falls on Terence himself. Goldberg plausibly suggests that Terence's innovations had the effect of alienating comedy from itself. Thus an argument might be constructed parallel to that of Aristophanes in The Frogs (revived by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy) that Euripides' innovations had the effect of killing Greek tragedy. Some of the innovations in question were rather similar to those introduced by Terence: use of drama as a subtle tool for the critical examination of issues and exploration of character, coupled with a new toleration of moral ambiguities. Probably the motivation was also somewhat similar for both playwrights. Although they were still ostensibly writing for production in the popular theater, they were (much more than their respective predecessors) writing plays to be seen and read by a rising class of educated intellectuals; in Terence's case this was the Scipionic circle.

Goldberg's essential complaint is that Terence's ironical probing of character and social relationships took the fun out of comedy. He could have added that, since the quest for fun and freedom is the great ground-theme of ancient comedy, adoption of a detached and critical attitude toward hedonism, coupled with the insight that those who would put the brakes on fun-seeking are not necessarily in the wrong, is not only uncomic but down-right anticomic. The construction of a critique of hedonism may well be a sign of deeper wisdom and increased moral and intellectual sophistication. But it is fatal to the spirit of comedy. Thus the difficulty with Terence is not just that his plays are insufficiently hilarious or lacking in comic energy, as modem critics often complain. The real problem is that at their very heart is a philosophy of life that is incompatible with the innate outlook of ancient comedy. After Terence, there really was nowhere for comedy to go.