Terence — Wellsprings

Terence

c. 195 BCE–c. 159 BCE · Rome

Terence (Publius Terentius Afer, c. 190s - 159 BCE) was a Roman comic playwright who, by tradition, came to Rome as a slave from North Africa and was later freed. Six of his comedies survive, all adaptations of Greek originals, marked by refined Latin, realistic characters, and humane, gentle humor rather than broad farce. His plays were studied as models of pure Latin style throughout antiquity and the later European tradition.

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RomeרומאItaly

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

About Rome

Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.

In Rome at the same time

Plautus, Polybius

See other sages who lived in Rome→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Terence’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

Plautus, Polybius

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Terence’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.