The paper discusses Terence’s interaction with the members of the contemporary political
and cultural elite. Terence was among the early Latin authors who introduced the Callimachean
poetics in Roman literature. Given the restrictions of the comic genre, he advertized
his embrace of this new poetics through the construction of a defense against accusations for
inappropriate playwriting, and by means of a language that would appeal specifically to the
political experience and worldview of the aristocratic members of his audience. This ideology
is inscribed in the use of key vocabulary that recurs systematically in all six Terentian
prologues.
Further, the accusations against Terence, real or inventive, may be attributed to his attempt
to introduce a more disciplined staging of comic plays — an initiative that likely gained
favor among the playwright’s aristocratic patrons, who saw in his scripts evidence of comic
talent similar to that of Menander whom they admired and held second only to Homer.
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