Authors

Roman

Terence

Terence was a Roman comic playwright, a freed slave from Carthage (now Tunisia) whose six plays — all surviving — adapt Greek New Comedy with a refinement and psychological subtlety that distinguished him from the more boisterous Plautus. His famous line 'Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto' ('I am human, and nothing human is foreign to me') became one of the most quoted sentences in Western literary history. Cicero, Caesar, and the Church Fathers all admired him; his plays were used as Latin textbooks throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods.