Author Description

As the first play of the Terentian corpus, Andria has always attracted a special level of attention. It was the first Roman comedy produced after antiquity (at Florence in 1476) and the first translated into English, and it has inspired writers from Jonson and Dryden to Thornton Wilder. It provides an excellent introduction to Terence 's particular style of comedy, noteworthy for its ambivalence in representing the perspectives of woman and slaves and its experiments with a secondary plot line. The commentary is designed both to help students with the basic linguistic and technical problems confronting inexperienced readers of Roman comedy and to open discussion of essential interpretive questions involving the play and its relation to the wider comic corpus, as well as the utility of comedy for furthering our understanding of the Roman world and its values.