rom the tavern, those of Terence from the household of the
good citizen. The lazy Plautine hostelry, the very unconstrained
but very charming damsels with the hosts duly corresponding,
the sabre-rattling troopers, the menial world painted with an
altogether peculiar humour, whose heaven is the cellar, and whose
fate is the lash, have disappeared in Terence or at any rate
undergone improvement. In Plautus we find ourselves, on the whole,
among incipient or thorough rogues, in Terence again, as a rule,
among none but honest men; if occasionally a -leno- is plundered or
a young man taken to the brothel, it is done with a moral intent,
possibly out of brotherly love or to deter the boy from frequenting
improper haunts. The Plautine pieces are pervaded by the significant
antagonism of the tavern to the house; everywhere wives are
visited with abuse, to the delight of all husbands temporarily
emancipated and not quite sure of an amiable salutation at home.
The comedies of Terence are pervaded by a conception not more
moral, but doubtless more becoming, of the feminine nature and of
married life. As a rule, they end with a virtuous marriage, or,
if possible, with two--just as it was the glory of Menander that
he compensated for every seduction by a marriage. The eulogies of
a bachelor life, which are so frequent in Menander, are repeated by
his Roman remodeller only with characteristic shyness,(4) whereas
the lover in his agony, the tender husband at the -accouchement-,
the loving sister by the death-bed in the -Eunuchus- and the
-Andria- are very gracefully delineated; in the -Hecyra- there even
appears at the close as a delivering angel a virtuous courtesan,
likewise a genuine Menandrian figure, which the Roman public, it is
true, very properly hissed. In Plautus the fathers throughout only
exist for the purpose of being jeered and swindled by their sons;
with Terence in the -Heauton Timorumenos- the lost son is reformed
by his father's wisdom, and, as in general he is full of excellent
instructions as to education, so the point of the best of his
pieces, the -Adelphi-, turns on finding the right mean between the
too liberal training of the uncle and the too rigid training of the
father. Plautus writes for the great multitude and gives utterance
to profane and sarcastic speeches, so far as the censorship of the
stage at all allowed; Terence on the contrary describes it as his
aim to please the good and, like Menander,