s in general he is full of excellent
instructions as to education, so the point of the best of his
pieces, the -Adelphi-, turns on finding the right mean between the
too liberal training of the uncle and the too rigid training of the
father. Plautus writes for the great multitude and gives utterance
to profane and sarcastic speeches, so far as the censorship of the
stage at all allowed; Terence on the contrary describes it as his
aim to please the good and, like Menander, to offend nobody.
Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue, and his pieces
require a lively play of gesture in the actors; Terence confines
himself to "quiet conversation." The language of Plautus abounds in
burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations, in comic
coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy
expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence
knows nothing of such caprices; his dialogue moves on with the
purest symmetry, and its points are elegant epigrammatic and
sententious turns. The comedy of Terence is not to be called an
improvement, as compared with that of Plautus, either in a poetical
or in a moral point of view. Originality cannot be affirmed of
either, but, if possible, there is less of it in Terence; and
the dubious praise of more correct copying is at least outweighed
by the circumstance that, while the younger poet reproduced the
agreeableness, he knew not how to reproduce the merriment of
Menander, so that the comedies of Plautus imitated from Menander,
such as the -Stichus-, the -Cistellaria-, the -Bacchides-, probably
preserve far more of the flowing charm of the original than the
comedies of the "-dimidiatus Menander-." And, while the aesthetic
critic cannot recognize an improvement in the transition from the
coarse to the dull, as little can the moralist in the transition
from the obscenity and indifference of Plautus to the accommodating
morality of Terence. But in point of language an improvement
certainly took place. Elegance of language was the pride of the
poet, and it was owing above all to its inimitable charm that the
most refined judges of art in aftertimes, such as Cicero, Caesar,
and Quinctilian, assigned the palm to him among all the Roman poets
of the republican age. In so far it is perhaps justifiable to date
a new era in Roman literature--the real essence of which lay not
in the development of Latin poetry, but in the development of
the Latin