Plautus and Terence lie at the beginning of surviving Latin literature, and, since the style of both is in some degree rhetorical, it is of some interest to determine their place in the development of Roman rhetoric. A reasonable hypothesis might go something like this. It is unlikely that Plautus, if we can trust the traditional biography which includes stage carpentry, mill working and unsuccessful trading as well as acting and play writing (Gell. NA 3.3.14), had any formal rhetorical education. It is true that the language of his plays is highly rhetorical, in the sense that it is constantly heightened by an exuberant choice of words and the employment (whether conscious or not) of what can be recognized as rhetorical figures. But this must largely represent an untutored native Latin rhetoric, which can be shown to derive from the practices of the early Latin language. This native Latin rhetoric may in some respects overlap with standard Greek rhetoric but typically involves features not so common in Greek.
It may well be that Terence, on the other hand, brought up in a senatorial household and traditionally associated with the philhellene Scipio Aemilianus and his so-called circle (Suet. Vita Ter. 1-6), did have some sort of formal rhetorical education. We have no very clear evidence when Greek teachers of rhetoric first operated in Rome: the one fixed date that we have is the expulsion of Greek philosophers and rhetoricians from Rome in 161 bce (a date which falls toward the end of Terence’s life), as recorded by Suetonius (Rhet. 25.1). These were presumably teachers who taught in public to anyone who came along to hear, but there must also have been private tutors in the houses of the wealthier families. Plutarch records that Aemilius Paullus hired a series of tutors for the education of his sons in various subjects, which included rhetoric (Aem. 6.4-5), and Terence may well have received similar tuition in the household of Terentius Lucanus.
But the question is not simply the debt of Plautus or Terence to Greek rhetorical teaching. A further interesting point is the relationship between Roman comedy and
Contemporary Roman oratory. It is clearly possible, since the writing of Roman comedy and the development of Latin oratory were going on at the same time, that each influenced the other, and it may even be that the Roman orators learned more from the comic poets than the comic poets learned from the Roman orators. It has been argued, for example, that the rhythms of Cato’s prose clausulae were influenced by those of Plautus’ cantica (Habinek 1985: 187-200); whatever the validity of this thesis, it does have the merit of directing the attention to the possibility of influence in this direction.
World History
