Introduction

Publius Terentius Afer, or Terence, was one of the most popular classical Latin authors of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Some 741 Latin manuscripts of his six plays are now known,1 and of these 122 or so can be dated to the period 800-1200 CE.2 By the end of Late Antiquity he had taken his place alongside Cicero, Vergil, and Sallust as one of the four standard Latin authors to be studied in schools, the so-called quadriga of Arusianus Messius. His popularity as a teaching text persisted throughout the next 1000 years, and in 1486 his play Eunuchus became one of the earliest classical Latin works to be translated into a contemporary German dialect, and diffused to mass audiences by means of the newly invented printing press. The wider dissemination of his plays in fact determined his return to the stage, first of all in Italy during the last decades of the fifteenth century.