Roman theatre scene with flute player and actors in goat-skin costumes. Mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.
“Terence, Schmerence? [Γαβρέντιος, Τερέντιος;]—Who’s fit for nothing
but the buffooneries of the Latins,
yet hankers after our Menander’s glory.”—C. P. Cavafy, “Disgruntled Theatregoer”*
Terence Afer, a dark-skinned slave down crushed Carthage way,
in the second century before the "common era" (BC),
a pretty face, it seems, won his freedom and "made it big on [Italic] Broadway" (as they could've used to say)
—his playThe Eunuch earned 8,000 nummi, most ever for a comedy on the Roman stage—
bequeathing us this slavey fiddle-dee-dee:
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto / “I am a man: nothing human is alien to me,”†
quoted ad infinitum the world over by humbugged doofuses
—"and still the world pursues,
‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time"‡
—although manifestly alien demons, with passing human mugs,
glare at us from every TV screen and scrolling servile smart-phone page.
It's not as bad as all that, you oh-so-slyly rage,
in weasel words to save your wretched cage:
"I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air . . . but I'll nip him in the bud."††
Tough luck, amigos! I fear the human name is mud.
Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3868 (2r), a ninth-century image of Terence, flanked by two black players, possible copy of a third-century original
* Cavafy translated from the Greek by Peter Mackridge in Omphalos 1, no. 1 (March 1972), 31. The poem's subtitle, an Athens newspaper headline, reads: "Trump in Interview with Musk."
† Publius Terentius Afer, Heauton Timorumenos / The Self-Tormentor, act 4, scene 2.
‡ T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land.
††Sir Boyle Roche, Bart., in the Anglo-Irish Parliament, early 1800s.
Comments