s it was performed three
times, by which he may probably mean, twice on one day and once on
another.]
[Footnote 20: _Being Consuls_)--M. Valerius Messala and C. Fannius
Strabo were Consuls in the year from the building of the City 591,
or B.C. 162.]
[Footnote 21: _If there is one who thinks_)--Ver. 4. He alludes to
his old enemy, Luscus Lavinius, the Comic Poet, who is alluded to
in the Prologue to the Andria, and has since continued his attacks
upon him.]
[Footnote 22: _By translating literally_)--Ver. 7. "Bene vertendo,
at eosdem scribendo male." This passage has greatly puzzled some
of the Commentators. Bentley has, however, it appears, come to the
most reasonable conclusion; who supposes that Terence means by
"bene vertere," a literal translation, word for word, from the
Greek, by which a servile adherence to the idiom of that language
was preserved to the neglect of the Latin idiom; in consequence of
which the Plays of Luscus Lavinius were, as he remarks, "male
scriptae," written in bad Latin.]
[Footnote 23: _Has published the Phasma_)--Ver. 9. The "+Phasma+,"
or "Apparition," was a play of Menander, so called, in which a
young man looking through a hole in the wall between his father's
house and that next door, sees a young woman of marvelous beauty,
and is struck with awe at the sight, as though by an apparition;
in the Play, the girl's mother is represented as having made this
hole in the wall, and having decked it with garlands and branches
that it may resemble a consecrated place; where she daily performs
her devotions in company with her daughter, who has been privately
brought up, and whose existence is unknown to the neighbors. On
the youth coming by degrees to the knowledge that the object of
his admiration is but a mortal, his passion becomes so violent
that it will admit of no cure but marriage, with the celebration
of which the Play concludes. Bentley gives us the above
information from an ancient Scholiast, whose name is unknown,
unless it is Donatus himself, which is doubtful. It would appear
that Luscus Lavinius had lately made a translation of this Play,
which, from its servile adherence to the language of the original,
had been couched in ungrammatical language, and probably not
approved of by the Audience. Donatus thinks that this is the
meaning of the passage, and that, content with this slight
reference to
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