Terence on Fatherly Lenience

Publius Terentius Afer, Henry Thomas Riley (T) · Down to Earth Series · 7 pages

From Henry Thomas Riley's translation and edition of The Comedies of Terence — The Brothers, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896, being Adelphoi lines 26–77. The frontispiece is Murillo's Boys eating grapes and melon of 1645–46, in the Alte Pinakothek. A head-note records the play's first performance in 160 BC at the funeral games of Aemilius Paulus, the music composed by Flaccus for Sarranian flutes, and the original taken from the Greek of Menander.

The extract sets up the play's central opposition and then lets one of the two men speak. Micio and Demea are brothers of dissimilar tempers: Demea is married and lives in the country, Micio is single and lives in Athens. Demea has two sons, the elder of whom, Æschinus, has been adopted by Micio, who allows him to gratify his inclinations without restraint — while Demea, the disciplinarian, favours a far less lenient attitude to the son he kept. The scene given is the play's first. Micio, calling to a servant, notes that Æschinus has not returned from the previous night's entertainment, nor any of the servants sent to fetch him, and then talks himself round in a way that shows the temper the title names: that it is better for a man staying out late to have his wife imagine the worst of him than to have a fond parent imagine what parents imagine — a wife supposing he is in love or drinking and taking his pleasure, where a father supposes calamity. The passage is included for the argument between compassion and chastisement that the running head announces, with the comic form doing the arguing.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.7 MB, 7 pages)