Some appropriations

[wolfinthewood]

There is a quotation that’s been haunting me over the last few days. It is one that has stuck in my mind ever since I first stumbled across it, in the autumn of 1976. It is a line from the comic dramatist Terence:

homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.

I am a human being; I regard nothing human as alien to my concern.

Until I had occasion, all those years ago, to make a study of his work, I had always assumed that Terence was a Roman. ‘Roman playwright’; ‘Roman dramatist’: those were and still are the explicatory tags most commonly attached to his name. But as I found out, the truth is not so simple.

The name ‘Terence’ is an Anglicised form of Latin ‘Terentius’. In his own time Terence was known as Publius Terentius Afer. ‘Afer’ means African. He was born in Carthage, on the Tunisian coast, and he was dark-skinned [‘colore fusco’]. He may have been a Berber, or a Phoenician, or of mixed ancestry.

The chief source for his life is an account by Suetonius (c. 70–c. 160 CE) [Latin here]. At the time it was written, Terence had been dead for well over two centuries.

Terence arrived in Rome as a young slave. His master was a Roman senator, Publius Terentius Lucanus. Finding the boy to be intelligent and good-looking, Terentius Lucanus gave him the kind of education that was suited to a free man, and freed him when he reached adulthood. [In the context of ancient Roman culture it is a plausible conjecture that Terence’s master made sexual use of his handsome young favourite.]

Like all Roman freedmen, Terence took his master’s forename and family name: ‘Publius Terentius’. We do not know his birth-name.

The kind of education that was considered to be suited to a free man was primarily an education in Greek literature. Greek was the language of learning and letters. Terence wrote his plays in Latin, for a Roman audience, but he made very heavy use of material appropriated from the work of the Greek comic dramatists.

As a young man, Terence moved socially in a circle that included many well-born Romans. He was a close associate and protegé of Scipio Aemilianus (c. 185–129 BCE; also called Scipio Africanus the younger), a noted patron of letters, and his close friend Gaius Laelius. He was probably much the same age as these two men, which would mean he was born in about 185 BCE.

His first play, Andria (‘The Girl from Andros’), was performed in 166 BCE. He based it on two earlier plays by the Greek comic dramatist Menander (c. 342–292 BCE).

Two years before the performance of Terence’s Andria, in 168 BCE, the Roman general Paullus had defeated King Perseus of Macedon at Pydna. As a result of this victory, Rome became the supreme power throughout the Greek world. Paullus’s personal share of the loot from the fall of Macedon was Perseus’s library of books in Greek.

Terence’s friend and patron, Scipio Aemilianus, was the second son of Paullus, and fought under him at Pydna. He was the adopted son of Scipio Africanus the elder, who, before any of these young men were born, had beaten the Carthaginian general Hannibal and asserted Roman supremacy over North Africa.

Suetonius notes that according to some sources, Terence owed his success with his two upper-class friends, Scipio and Laelius, to his good looks; it was very strongly hinted that he made himself sexually available to them.

In the prologues to two of his plays, Terence mentions that there were rumours that he was helped in the writing of his plays by his aristocratic friends. Suetonius notes that Terence’s denials of this are rather half-hearted; interestingly, he infers, not that the rumours were true, but that Terence allowed them to be thought so, because he knew that it flattered his patrons.

Six comedies by Terence survive. All of them are based on earlier plays by Greek authors. They are not straightforward translations, but adaptations. Several of his comedies combine elements from more than one source. In the prologues to some of his plays, he defends himself against criticisms that his free treatment of the Greek originals amounted to ‘polluting’ them.

In 159 BCE, when the dramatist was in his mid-twenties, he left Rome to travel into Greece. He never came back. In Suetonius’ time, there were various contradictory rumours about his death: that he drowned at sea, or that he died somewhere in Greece as a result of an illness.

Suetonius speculates that he may have planned the trip to Greece with the intention of researching Greek customs and institutions, so as to portray them more accurately in his plays.

***

The line ‘I am a human being; I regard nothing human as alien to my concern’ comes from Terence’s play Heauton Timorumenos. The title is a Greek phrase usually translated as ‘The Self-Tormentor’ or ‘The Self-Tormenting Man’. The play is based on a lost original by the Greek dramatist Menander. It is not known whether or not this particular line is a direct translation of a passage by Menander, or whether it originated with Terence.

At quite an early point, this line was detached from its context in the play and became an aphorism. Cicero quotes it in De Legibus [‘Concerning the Laws’] (c. 51 BCE): ‘But if men would follow their true natures, and, using their judgement, “regard nothing human as alien to their concern”, as the poet says, justice would be equally upheld by all.’ [I.xii (33); Latin here, and the Internet Archive has an English translation. Cicero also quotes this line in De Officiis (‘On Duties’; Book 1 cap. 9)]

In the middle of the first century CE Seneca quotes it: ‘Nature brought us forth related to each other … she instilled in us mutual love and made us sociable creatures. She established fairness and justice; in accordance with the way she has arranged things, it is more deplorable to inflict harm than to be injured; in accordance with her command, let our hands be ready to give aid where it is needed. Let this line be in your heart and in your mouth: “I am a human being; I regard nothing human as alien to my concern.” ’ [Epistulae XCV.53; Latin here; an English translation here.]

Cicero and Seneca had appropriated Terence’s line of dialogue and turned it into an axiom of Stoic philosophy. The Stoic school of philosophy was founded at Athens in the fourth century BC. The Stoics taught that all men are brothers, without distinction of conquered or conqueror, slave or free. This did not prevent wealthy Stoics from keeping slaves. Both Cicero and Seneca were slave owners.

More than five centuries after Terence’s death, St Augustine of Hippo recorded the story that when this line was spoken, ‘the whole theatre, full of foolish and uneducated people, broke into applause’. St. Augustine continues: ‘This shows that the idea of the fellowship of all human souls naturally touched their sympathies: not one of the people present failed to perceive themselves as the neighbour of all other human beings.’ Is this story true? Who knows. It sounds suspiciously like an exemplum or anecdote made up by some orator or writer to lend force to his point. [St. Augustine, Epistulae (‘Letters’) no. 155; Latin text in this volume. St Augustine also cited the same quotation from Terence in his work Contra Julianum (‘Against Julian’; English translation here; see p. 240).]

St. Augustine, who was influenced by Stoic philosophy, has appropriated the quotation from Terence to support his case that the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ was a universally recognised law.

[For ‘love thy neighbour as thyself&rsquo see: Leviticus ch. 19 v.18; Matthew ch. 19 vv. 17–19; ch. 22 vv. 37–40; Mark ch. 12 vv. 28–34; Luke ch. 10 vv. 25–37; Romans ch. 13 vv. 8–10; Galatians ch. 5 v. 14; James ch. 2 v. 8. I do not ignore the fact that this opens up a whole new topic. It is disturbing that many people who call themselves Christians seem not to realise that when Jesus spoke the words ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ he was quoting from the third book of Moses.]

In 1788 a young Oxford undergraduate from Jersey called John Lemprière wrote a classical dictionary under the title Bibliotheca classica. As Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary it was to be reprinted many, many times. In his article on Terence, Lemprière included the story from St. Augustine, with certain additions. He stated: ‘when the words of Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto, were repeated, … the audience, though composed of foreigners, conquered nations, allies, and citizens of Rome, were unanimous in applauding the poet, who spoke with such elegance and simplicity, the language of nature, and supported the native independence of man.’

The ‘foolish and uneducated people’ of the anecdote recorded by St. Augustine now becomes a theatre full of people very disparate in origins and status, but united under the rule of the Roman Empire. Terence, the educated African freedman, is implicitly co-opted as a case of a barbarian civilized by exposure to Graeco-Roman culture, at the same time as he is appropriated as an example of ‘the native independence of man’: the idea that something in the human spirit will always rise above slavery and oppression, and claim a place in a universal brotherhood which everyone, conquerors and conquered alike, recognises as decreed by the law of nature.

At the time Lemprière was writing, Britain had lost North America (apart from Canada), but it was strongly established in the Caribbean, and well on the way to controlling India. It was still up to its neck in the slave trade, though as a society it was beginning to have scruples about this: in 1788 over one hundred petitions for the abolition of slavery were presented to Parliament.

***

The context in which the original quotation occurs is a dialogue between two old men, Menedemus and Chremes. Menedemus, the ‘Self-Tormentor’, insists on doing a lot of the heavy work on his farm himself, although he has plenty of slave labourers. Chremes, his neighbour, bluntly asks him why, and suggests that he should give himself a break. The following exchange occurs:

Menedemus. Chremes, do you really have so much time to take from your own affairs that you can pay attention to things that are alien to your concern and of no consequence to you?
Chremes. I am a human being; I regard nothing human as alien to my concern. You may think of me either as giving you advice, or as being inquisitive. If you are doing the right thing, I may do the same; if you are not, I may be able to deter you.

In 1753, in his essay ‘Dissertation on the Provinces of the Drama’, the critic and classical scholar Richard Hurd quoted the line homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto and commented:

‘We are not to take this, as hath constantly been done, for a sentiment of pure humanity and the natural ebullition of benevolence. We may observe in it a designed stroke of satirical resentment. The Self-tormentor, as we saw, had ridiculed Chremes’ curiosity by a severe reproof. Chremes, to be even with him, reflects upon the inhumanity of his temper. “You,” says he, “seem such a foe to humanity, that you spare it not in yourself; I, on the other hand, am affected, when I see it suffer in another.” ’ [5th edition, pp. 200–201; text here.]

It’s hard to disagree.

It may also be added that during the course of the play Chremes shows himself to be a bumbling busybody. His claim to feel concern for the sufferings of a fellow human being is an empty remark by a self-satisfied fool. [Also, it turns out that he had ordered that his daughter should be exposed at birth; though this may be more disturbing to a modern audience than a Roman one.]

Terence’s patron Scipio Aemilianus was interested in Stoic ideas.

Perhaps Terence, the freedman, the barbarian from Africa, the accommodating social climber, is using Chremes to send up pompous Stoics whose avowed belief in the fellowship of human souls is strictly theoretical.

Or perhaps that is just how I’d like to see him.


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Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this light on a familiar line.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the very interesting context.

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

This is brilliant. Thank you!