SOURCE: An introduction to Terence: The Comedies, translated by Betty Radice, Penguin Books, 1976, pp. 11-29.

Radice was an English educator who, as joint editor of the Penguin Classics series, translated such works as Pliny's Letters, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, and Desiderius Erasmus's Praise of Folly. In the following excerpt, she presents an overview of Terence's career.

Comedy is a more intellectual and sophisticated art than tragedy, and on the stage it depends for its effects on verbal exchange. Its characters must be wholly articulate, and if it is to succeed it needs an equally articulate, civilized audience, who can respond not with hilarity so much as with a delighted amusement. Audiences of this kind evidently existed for comedy to flourish in fifth-century Athens, in Hellenistic Greece, in Elizabethan and Restoration England, in the Paris of Louis XIV, eighteenth-century Venice, and in Edwardian London, but Rome of...