Although Nathaniel Williams makes no mention of Terence in his 1712 description of the curriculum of the Boston Latin Grammar School, there is evidence from other sources that this playwright was read at a very early level of study in early American Latin grammar schools. In England Terence was consistently found among the standard authors of the curriculum of the Latin grammar school in the eighteenth century, and Latin texts of his plays also circulated widely in New England throughout the same century. Williams' omission of Terence among the authors studied at the Boston Latin Grammar School was, most likely, simply an oversight since Pauline Holmes, in her comprehensive book on the Boston Public Latin School, gives ample evidence of the numerous editions and copies of Terence which were purchased by Boston booksellers in the early eighteenth century. She even cites a copy of Terence which was owned by Benjamin Gridley, a student at the Boston Latin School in 1740.¹

        Terence (ca. 190 B.C.-159 B.C.) was born a slave in Carthage, but eventually traveled to Rome where he was befriended by the family of Scipio, under whose encouragement he wrote six comic plays. The drama of Terence consists of, for the most part, innocent and interesting double plot adventures that are heavily laden with moralizing maxims, called sententiae. In addition to this moralistic overtone, Terence’s drama also was considered, especially by Erasmus, to have been written in "pure" and "simple" Latin. His plays were considered excellent models for the young Latin student to imitate.

        The plays began with a short prologue in which one character stepped forward to describe the playwright's source or motivation for writing the play, and what controversy may have surrounded its production. The plays themselves can easily be divided into five acts and frequently involved a shrewd slave outwitting his master or a young man contriving to win in marriage the hand of an attractive young woman, sometimes with, and sometimes without the approval of the young man's father.

        The following selection, from S. Patrick's 1745 London edition of Terence's Comedies, consists of Act I of Terence's "Self Tormentor," or Heauton Timoroumenos. This play was first produced in 163 B.C. and the cast of characters in the first act includes Chremes, an Athenian gentleman; Clitipho, his son; and Menedemus, a neighbor of Chremes. The setting is the countryside near Athens.

                    CLIT. Nihil adhuc est, quod vereare, Clinia: haudquaquam etiam cessant:

                    Et illam simul cum nuntio tibi hic affuturam
 
                    Hodie scio. proin tu sollicitudinem istam falsam, quae te

                    CLIT. Imo ille senex fuit importunus semper: et nunc nihil magis

                    Vereor, quam ne quid in illum iratus plus satis faxit pater.

                    CH. Illene? sed reprimam me: nam, in metu esse hunc, illi est utile.                       25

                    CLIT. Quid tute tecum? CH. dicam. ut ut erat, mansum tamen oportuit.

                    Fortasse aliquanto iniquior erat praeter eius lubidinem:

                    Pateretur. nam quem ferret, si parentem non ferret suum?

                    Hunccine erat aequom ex illius more, an illum ex hujus vivere? Et

                    Quod illum insimulat durum, id non est. nam parentum iniuriae                              30

                    Uniusmodi sunt ferme; paullo qui est homo tolerabilis.

                    Scortari crebro nolunt, nolunt crebro convivarier,

                    Praebent exigue sumtum: atque haec sunt tamen ad virtutem omnia.
 
                    Verum animus ubi semel se cupiditate devinxit mala,

                    Necesse est, Clitipho, consilia consequi consimilia. Hoc                                       35

                    Scitum est, periclum ex aliis facere, tibi quod ex usu siet.

                    CLIT. Ita credo. CH. ego ibo hinc intro, ut videam

Act I. Scene 1:

The scene opens on the farm of Menedemus, somewhere near Athens. Menedemus is a compulsive worker
who is chided for this conduct by his neighbor, Chremes. Menedemus says that he drives himself relentlessly
as self-imposed punishment for the harsh manner in which he had treated his son, Clinia.

                     L.2 inde adeo, "in fact just from the time when."

                     L.3 rei, in the sense of "business."

                     L.5 quod, "a fact (or circumstance) which;" propinqua parte, "next to."

                     L.7 videre = videris.

                     L.9 Deum = deorum.

                     L.11 plus eo, it is unusual to have the singular eo after the plural annos, but the same construction
                                is used elsewhere by Terence.

                     L. 12 precii = pretii, genitive of price denoting indefinite value.

                     L. 13 with servos understand habes; siet is an old form of sit.

                     L. 14 fungere = fungeris + accusative in Terence; in later Latin, fungor takes the ablative case.

                     L. 19 voluptati, dative of reference or purpose.

                      L. 20 with at enim, understand dices; me refers to Menedernus and is direct object of
                                poenitet = paenitet.

                      L. 22 the illis refers to tuis servis.
 
                     L. 27 rectum est... "if what you do is right, (I am inquiring = percontari) that I might do the same
                                if what you are doing is not right, that I might deter you."

                     L. 28 usus est, used in Terence as if opus est; factu is a supine, "to do."

                     L. 29 quoiquam, archaic form of cuiquam.

                     L. 32 lacruma, archaic form of lacrima, an imperative.

                     L. 34 re, "by financial means."
 
                     L. 35 qua, ablative of cause.

                     L.38 sine, imperative of sino; vacivom, old form of vacivum, which agrees with tempus.

                     L. 40 hos (rastros), accusative of exclamation.

                     L. 46 understand fuerunt with haec omnia.

                     L. 50 with tibine understand dicebam.

                     L.54f. tantisper ... dum, "only so far as."

                     L. 54 dici, present passive infinitive, impersonal use.

                     L. 57 "All this proceeds from nothing, but too much idleness."

                     L. 61 "at last it came to this."

                     L. 65 militatum is a supine. The supine in -um after a verb of motion expresses purpose.

                     L.66 clam, preposition with accusative, "without my knowledge."

                     L.73 alios modifies servos understood.

                     L. 74 pro se, "individually."

                     L. 75 quo, "how."

                     L.78 sumtus=sumptus, likewise in L.91.

                     L. 80uti, infinitive, governed by decuit.

                     L. 90f. qui opere rustico faciundo facile sumtum exercerent suum, "who easily pay their own
                            way by doing their farm work."

"Clinia, returning from Asia, is wonderfully solicitous about his Mistress, whom, at his Departure, he had left at
Athens. Clitipho tells his Father Chremes, with great Joy, of Clinia's Return. Chremes takes occasion, from what
had happened to Clinia, to prescribe the Measures of right Behaviour to his Son, and tells him that he ought to
learn, from the Example of others, what may be of greatest Benefit to himself." (Patrick, p. 284).

                     L.2 illam = Antiphila, Clinia's mistress.

                     L. 4 quicum, archaic ablative singular masculine for quocum, "with whom."

                     L. 6 nostin' = novistine.

                     L. 10 nuncias = nuntias.

                     L. 13 faxis, old form of present subjunctive facias; see also line 24.

                     L. 17 with Syrum, understand misi.

                     L. 18 with ille understand dixit; minus + miserum esse: Patrick translates: "How little
                                reason he has to think so."
 
                     L. 22 the antecedent of qui is ei, dative singular; with bona understand sunt.

                     L. 25 hunc = Clinia; illi = Menedemus.

                     L. 26 with quid tute tecum understand dicas. Also with mansum, understand illum (Clinia) and esse.

                     L. 27 erat iniquior, Menedemus; eius, Clinia.

                     L. 28 Clinia is the subject of pateretur.

                     L. 29 hunccine and hujus refer to Clinia; illius and illum refer to Menedemus.

                     L. 31 Some commentators believe that the antecedent of qui is contained in parentum of L.30 and
                            can be translated "of that parent (father) who is a somewhat tolerant person." qui, however, may
                            have its antecedent in an oblique case of filius with the following meaning: "the faults of parents
                            are almost the same for a son who is hardly tolerant."

                     L. 32 convivarier = alternate ending of the present passive infinitive ending -are.

                     L. 36 periclum = periculum.

        During his early education, Thomas Jefferson, as all other students in the eighteenth century, kept a journal of those authors whom he was reading. In this journal, called his "Commonplace Book," Jefferson entered what he considered were memorable passages or noteworthy individual lines, mostly from classical authors. The journal contains several references to Terence's play, the Andria (166 B.C. ).² Jefferson was also familiar with Terence's play, "The Self-Tormentor," and he was particularly fond of line 25 of this play-- homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto--and used the line verbatim on two separate occasions in his early letters. The first occasion was in a letter to his close friend John Page, 21 February 1770, in which he describes the destruction of his family's residence at Shadwell and the personal loss which he experienced because
of this calamity:

^{1. Pauline Holmes, A Tercentenary History of the Boston Public Latin School 1635-1935, p. 330.}

2 See Gilbert Chinard, The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson: His Commonplace Book of Philosophers and Poets (Baltimore, 1928). James Madison also included a somewhat altered line from Terence's Eunuchus in his own Commonplace Book: Dant operam ut cum ratione insaniant. Act I, scene 1, line 16. See William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, eds, The Papers of James Madison 1 (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 10.

3 Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 1 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 34-36.

^{4 Julian P. Boyd, ed., Papers of Thomas Jefferson 1, pp. 49-51; The appeal of this particular verse from Terence's "Self-Tormentor" was reinforced for Jefferson since the same verse was emphatically quoted by Cicero in his de officiis (Bk. 1,9), a text undoubtedly read by Jefferson during his grammar school years and reread as a part of his college curriculum at William and Mary. From London in 1787, John Adams writes to Thomas Jefferson an interesting variant of 1.77 of the "Self Tormentor": "As my Dismission from the Service arrived at the Same time, not a word has been said to me. Nevertheless, Nil Americanum Alienum etc." See Lester Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters 1 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 217-218.}

^{5 See Unit III "The Dialogue: Corderius and Erasmus," pp. 56-61.}

^{6. The play was Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in the original Greek, at Yale University in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This celebrated performance was truly an ironic change of circumstances since in January 1756 the Yale faculty had passed the following judgment on a student performance of an English play: "and whereas this practice is of a very pernicious nature, tending to corrupt the morals of the seminary of religion and learning, and of mankind in general, and to the mispence of precious time and money." See Richard Moody, ed., Dramas from the American Theatre 1762-1909 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), p. 2. Only at great risk would students have dared to present a play of Terence or, for that matter, of any other classical author at Yale or any other northern college in the eighteenth century! (Can this be the reason why Williams omitted Terence from his list of authors studied at the Boston Latin Grammar School?) In the southern and middle Atlantic colonies, however, where attitudes were more tolerant of dramatic performances, the most popular play in the entire eighteenth century was Joseph Addison's 1712 English play, Cato. Although this drama obviously did not date to antiquity, it was based on a classical source, Plutarch's life of Cato the Younger. For an excellent account of Addison's Cato in America, see Frederic M. Litto, "Addison's Cato in the Colonies," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series 23 (1966), PP. 431-449.}

^{7. R. Moody, Dramas from the American Theatre 1762-1909, pp. 1-4, gives evidence for several English plays used for such oratorical practice. Additional research needs to be done on the letters, diaries and commonplace books of eighteenth-century American students to establish with certainty if any classical playwrights were used for such a purpose. It is quite probable, however, that classical playwrights were used for this purpose since the August 1756 description of the Academy, which was part of the College of Philadelphia, stated that in the fourth stage of instruction the following authors would be taught: Horace, Terence, Virgil, Livy, Lucian, Xenophon and Homer. It also stated that the purpose of "this year [was] to make Themes; write Letters; give Descriptions and Characters. To turn Latin into English, with great Regard to Punctuation and Choice of Words. Some English and Latin Orations to be delivered, with proper Grace both of Elocution and Gesture." See Edwin L. Wolf "Classical Languages in Philadelphia," in John W. Eadie, ed., Classical Traditions in Early America (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1976), pp. 68-69. Scenes or dialogues from Terence may have been used for oratorical practice, at least at this Philadelphia Academy.}