small literary circle of the Roman aristocracy--men too high in rank to
need to be careful what company they kept--admitted young Terence to
their intimate companionship; and soon he was widely known as making a
third in the friendship of Gaius Laelius with the first citizen of the
Republic, the younger Scipio Africanus. This society, an informal academy
of letters, devoted all its energies to the purification and improvement
of the Latin language. The rough drafts of the Terentian comedies were
read out to them, and the language and style criticised in minute detail;
gossip even said that they were largely written by Scipio's own hand, and
Terence himself, as is not surprising, never took pains to deny the
rumour. Six plays had been subjected to this elaborate correction and
produced on the Roman stage, when Terence undertook a prolonged visit to
Greece for the purpose of further study. He died of fever the next year--
by one account, at a village in Arcadia; by another, when on his voyage
home. The six comedies had already taken the place which they have ever
since retained as Latin classics.

The Terentian comedy is in a way the turning-point of Roman literature.
Plautus and Ennius, however largely they drew from Greek originals, threw
into all their work a manner and a spirit which were essentially those of
a new literature in the full tide of growth. The imitation of Greek
models was a means, not an end; in both poets the Greek manner is
continually abandoned for essays into a new manner of their own, and they
relapse upon it when their imperfectly mastered powers of invention or
expression give way under them. In the circle of Terence the fatal
doctrine was originated that the Greek manner was an end in itself, and
that the road to perfection lay, not in developing any original
qualities, but in reproducing with laborious fidelity the accents of
another language and civilisation. Nature took a swift and certain
revenge. Correctness of sentiment and smooth elegance of diction became