l before the court of the One Hundred
[923], having lashed the defendant as a man void of natural affection for
his parents, he called upon him by a bold figure of speech, "to swear by
the ashes of his father and mother which lay unburied;" his adversary
taking him up for the suggestion, and the judges frowning upon it, he
lost his cause, and was much blamed. At another time, on a trial for
murder at Milan, before Lucius Piso, the proconsul, having to defend the
culprit, he worked himself up to such a pitch of vehemence, that in a
crowded court, who loudly applauded him, notwithstanding all the efforts
of the lictor to maintain order, he broke out into a lamentation on the
miserable state of Italy [924], then in danger of being again reduced, he
said, into (530) the form of a province, and turning to the statue of
Marcus Brutus, which stood in the Forum, he invoked him as "the founder
and vindicator of the liberties of the people." For this he narrowly
escaped a prosecution. Suffering, at an advanced period of life, from an
ulcerated tumour, he returned to Novara, and calling the people together
in a public assembly, addressed them in a set speech, of considerable
length, explaining the reasons which induced him to put an end to
existence: and this he did by abstaining from food.

END OF THE LIVES OF GRAMMARIANS AND RHETORICIANS.

LIVES OF THE POETS.

(531)

THE LIFE OF TERENCE.

Publius Terentius Afer, a native of Carthage, was a slave, at Rome, of
the senator Terentius Lucanus, who, struck by his abilities and handsome
person, gave him not only a liberal education in his youth, but his
freedom when he arrived at years of maturity. Some say that he was a
captive taken in war, but this, as Fenestella [925] informs us, could by
no means have been the case, since both his birth and death took place in
the interval between the termination of the second Punic war and the
commencement of the third [926]; nor, even supposing that he had been
taken prisoner by the Numidian or Getulian tribes, could he have fallen
into the hands of a Roman general, as there was no commercial intercourse
between the Italians and Africans until after the fall of Carthage [927].
Terence lived in great familiarity with many persons of high station, and
especially with Scipio Africanus, and Caius Delius, whose favour he is
even supposed to have purchased by the foulest means. But Fenestella
reverses the charge, conten