Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The moral problems of Terence's Andria and reconstruction of Menander's Andria and Perinthia Richardson, L Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Summer 1997; 38, 2; ProQuest pg. 173 The Moral Problems of Terence's Andria and Reconstruction of Menander's Andria and Perinthia L. Richardson, jr T HROUGHOUT his brief career Terence seems to have been particularly interested in the moral problems attendant on, or generated by, the situations that were the stock in trade of New Comedy.! Most familiar are those central to the Adelphoe, the question of which is the better way to school an adolescent son for life, the permissiveness of Micio or the old­ fashioned severitas of Demea, and what the effect of doggedly espousing one or the other has on the character of the preceptor. The first can be resolved; clearly neither is right. The permissiveness of Micio goes far too far; it is impossible to condone Aeschinus' lawless misbehavior, and Demea's strict­ ness is too repressive; our sympathies are with Ctesipho and his circumventing of his father, although it leads him into deceit and subterfuge. But the deeper question is only adumbrated and left unresolved; we are not convinced that Demea's con­ version to a more urbane comportment toward the end of the play is sincere or permanent, nor that Micio's willingness to accept a wife is more than expeditious acquiescence for the moment. They have been backed into corners by their sons. Terence has very carefully built our doubt into the final scene of the play and leaves us wondering about the damage that the t Comprehensive bibliographies for Terence have been compiled by F. Cupaiuolo, Bibliografia terenziana (1470-1983) (Naples 1984), reviewed with additions by S. Goldberg, C] 81 (1985-86) 175f, and A. S. Gatwick, CR 40 (1990) 256ff, and idem, ·Supplementum terentianum," RStudLat 22 (1992) 32-57; for recent work on the reconstruction of Menander's Perinthia, which is fragmentary and inconclusive, see A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford 1973) 533-38; W. G. Arnott, Menander II (=LCL 459 [Cambridge (Mass.) 1996]) 472-501. 173 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 174 TERENCE'S ANDRIA AND MENANDER education of the young has worked in their elders, their self­ destructive stubbornness and inability to embrace a more sen­ sible attitude. So also in the E unuchus Chaerea, the young protagonist, could appear to E. K. Rand as "one of the most charming scape­ graces in all comedy,"2 and in a recent paper Louise Smith has shown that Terence has been careful to undermine Chaerea's attractiveness early in the play by making him a casual deserter of his military post for what we learn is no higher purpose than making arrangements for a probably rowdy dinner party (539- 42).3 The ambiguity of character, a surface sparkling with im­ petuosity and good humor that masks a capacity for brutality and ruthless self-indulgence, is then underscored by a series of details, so that at the end of the play we must ask ourselves whether Athenian society was not a sink of corruption, as well as a school for Hellas. The moral problems of the Andria, however, have not been adequately explored in Terentian criticism, perhaps because this was his first play and these issues are less clearly enunciated than those in the other plays.4 But they begin to appear in the first scene. Here Simo confers with his freedman Sosia about the behavior of his son, Pamphilus, and his involvement with a foreign woman, Glycerium, whom he has been treating as his wife. Simo wants Sosia to deceive Pamphilus and his body­ servant, Davus, by pretending that the wedding between Pam­ philus and Chremes' daughter, Philumela, originally set for that day but which Chremes has earlier canceled, has, in fact, not been canceled and will take place. By this deceit Simo expects that Sosia will throw Davus into a panic and then can discover what scheme Davus and Pamphilus may concoct in order to escape this unwelcome wedding, after which he is to report what he has found out back to Simo. As Sosia does not appear 2 "The Art of Terence's Eunuchus, " TAPA 63 (1932) 54-72, esp. 58. 3 "Audience Response to Rape: Chaerea in Terence's Eunuchus," Helios 21 (1994) 21-38, esp. 21£. 4 On the problems of the Andria, see especially A. Mazzarino, Da Men­ andro a Terenzio. Sulfa composizione dell' "Andria" (Messina 1966); K. Biichner, Das Theater des Terenz (Heidelberg 1974) 31-119. Although both discuss the play is great detail and are especially concerned with its relation to the Menandrean originals, neither addresses the moral questions directly. Most recently A. C. Scafuro, "The Failure of Entrapment in the Andria," in her The Forensic Stage (Cambridge 1997) 354-77, examines the morality of Simo in the play, but it is impossible to agree with her interpretation of the text. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LAWRENCE RICHARDSON 175 later in the play and nothing further is made of his deception, it has been presumed that this scene has been copied with only slight changes from Menander's Perinthia, a play that Terence in his prologue to the Andria (9-14) tells us was so similar in plot to Menander's Andria that he has made use of suitable material from it in his adaptation of the Andria. On the question of how much Terence has taken from the Perinthia, Donatus' commentary offers no help; if anything, his evidence is almost more of a hindrance. It is quite clear that he did not have a copy of Menander's Perinthia before him while he was compiling his commentary on the Andria and almost certainly knew the play and its contents only through an inter­ mediate source. He never discusses any scene or character drawn from it, nor cites any specific passage to show how Terence has adapted it for use in his writing. All that he tells us in his note on Terence's admission of borrowing is that the first scene of the Perinthia was almost identical with the first scene of Menander's Andria. In everything else the two plays were different, except for two passages, one of eleven verses and one of twenty, which occurred in both plays. But he does not then identify these passages, if either was used in Terence's play, here in the prologue or later in the play. And only a little later, in his note on line 14 of the prologue, he informs us that the first scene of the Perinthia was cast as a conversation between the father and his wife, while its counterpart in the Andria was a soliloquy. Yet it is hard to imagine that the narrative contained in Terence's initial scene would ever have been cast as a relation by a worried father to his wife, or that the father would not have confided at least some part of what it contains to her earlier. As it stands, it clearly calls for an interlocutor who is essentially an outsider, and Terence provides that in the character of the freedman. And it is hard to believe that in the Andria Menander would have sacrificed dramatic illusion to such an extent that he would have had the troubled father alone on stage confide his distress to the audience for nearly a hundred and fifty lines in order to layout the antecedent action in adequate detail. One can well envisage an initial scene in which the father, perplexed and angry at the breaking off of his son's betrothal to his friend's daughter, would unburden himself to his wife, going over the sequence of events leading up to the contretemps. And one can imagine a play that began with a short soliloquy delivered by a Simo worried about his son's obvious reluctance to accept the marriage that his father Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 176 TERENCE'S ANDRIA AND MENANDER has arranged for him and also about the wiles of a Davus of known proficiency in thwarting his designs (An. 159-63): simul sceleratu' Davo' siquid consili habet, ut consumat nunc quom nil obseint doli; quem ego credo manibu' pedibu'que obnixe omnia !acturum, magis id adeo mihi ut incommodet quam ut obsequatur gnato. But it is impossible to believe that the initial scene of Terence's Andria could be recast as the opening of either Menander's Perinthia or Andria, which Donatus tells us were written Jere isdem verbis (ad prol. 10). The situations leading up to the opening of the two plays might have been so similar as to be almost interchangeable, but the framing of this information for the audience would have demanded significant differences. So Terence must have been somewhat disingenuous in saying that whoever knew one of these plays would ipso facto have known both. What he could have recognized was rather the skeleton of the plot and probably some, at least, of the char­ acters: a father, distraught at discovering that his son, whom he had always thought to be exemplary, was in fact deeply embroiled with a foreign woman living under the roof and protection of a highly successful courtesan, and consequently bent on extricating the son from this unsuitable entanglement by exercise of his parental authority. But the rest of these plays might have been as different as black and white and still fall within the limits of Terence's similarity. In Terence's Andria the initial scene serves especially for expo­ sition of the antecedent action and background, but is also an introduction to Simo's character. Not only is he devious in his dealings with his son, seeking to entrap him into action that will constitute just cause for upbraiding his insubordination to his parental authority, but he also conveys a veiled threat to Sosia by reminding him, just before he explains to him the service that he wants him to perform, that he has the power to revoke his manumission-a threat that Sosia is quick to perceive and comment on rather sourly (35-44). Yet only a little later in a soliloquy Davus remarks on Simo's habitual lenitas (175). So we are seeing a man fraught with contradictions, driven to des­ perate measures by the pressure of circumstances. The root of his worry is his adolescent son's recent behavior, as he explains at length to Sosia. In the company of friends, the son, Pamphilus, has taken to frequenting the house of their neighbor, Chrysis, a hetaira, a young woman of great beauty, a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LAWRENCE RICHARDSON 177 native of Andros who moved to Athens three years earlier and has recently died. Left destitute on the death of her father and abandoned by her other relations, she had at first attempted to support herself by weaving, but then had succumbed to the blandishments and generosity of lovers and become a profes­ sional courtesan (43-52). This information about her past Simo must have elicited from those who frequented her house, or their servants, whom he admits he has been in the habit of watching out for and questioning (83ff). It is unthinkable that Simo would have allowed himself to be compromised by direct contact with this woman, and he would hardly have given himself away by questioning Pamphilus or Davus, for he wanted to appear to be both lenient and trusting (51-60). In any case the ultimate source of this information about her past his­ tory must have been Chrysis herself, for there has been no contact with Andros, as we learn later. Moreover, it is the sort of personal history a woman in her circumstances is apt to em­ bellish or invent for the benefit of sympathetic clients. Her career as a weaver must have been long in the past and confined to Andros, if she already had the wherewithal to set up a house­ hold in Athens on her arrival there, and her transference of activity from Andros to Athens must have been because she saw greater opportunity in the larger and more cosmopolitan city. The name Chrysis seems clearly an assumed name, taken to advertise her profession and to avoid possible embarrass­ ment to her family.s The elements here fit together to make a coherent picture; what is surprising is that the suspicious Simo should not have questioned the accuracy of any part of this story. But then he had no reason to. Although Pamphilus accompanied his friends on visits to Chrysis' house, he did not seek the favors of Chrysis, only taking part in the dinner parties there. But in the course of time he had become enamored of Chrysis' adopted sister, Glycer­ ium, a young girl of remarkable beauty and charm. No one in­ forms us how Pamphilus made her acquaintance, but he has come to love her deeply and to treat her as his wife (135f, 144ff). In fact, as we learn a little later from Davus (215f), she is pregnant by Pamphilus and about to have her child. She has her own story, that she is, in fact, a native of Attica, but shipwreck­ ed as a child on Andros together with a merchant supposed to 5 Athenaeus (13.567c-96F) offers a great range of the names and nicknames borne by hetairae, including Chrysis (567F, 587E) and Glycerium (582D). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 178 TERENCE'S ANDRIA AND MENANDER be her father, at whose death Chrysis' father had taken the little girl in and raised her (220-24). Her motive in coming to Athens together with Chrysis is presumed to have been to trace her parentage and to resume her proper place in society. Although it later emerges that she knew her uncle, the merchant or presumed merchant with whom she was shipwrecked, was a native of Rhamnus in nor­ thern Attica, she has made no visit to that deme in the three years that have elapsed since she came to Athens, nor any concerted effort to identify her kin. And, in fact, she has been living under an assumed name. Her name was originally Pasi­ bula (943££), but she has taken the name Glycerium, which again has all the earmarks of a nom de theatre, as though she had originally intended to follow Chrysis in her profession, but had then had second thoughts on becoming involved with Pam­ philus and decided to reclaim her proper citizenship. One only asks how far she might have advanced in her chosen profession before meeting Pamphilus, for Davus thinks her story is a pre­ posterous fabrication (224f): fabulae! miquidem herde non fit veri simile; atque ipsis commentum placet. How often, one wonders, did a young hetaira, or apprentice hetaira, look on an attractive client as a potential husband? These questions are kept in abeyance through the body of the play. We accept the assertion that Glycerium is actually an Attic citizen and expect her to be vindicated toward the end of the play. In the meantime we are content to watch the maneuver­ ing of Simo, Pamphilus, and Chremes, as on the one side they try to press for, and on the other to avoid, the unwelcome wed­ ding with Chremes' daughter. Some question does re-emerge briefly when Pamphilus in conversation with Mysis, Glyceri­ urn's maid, recalls the pledge of faith that Chrysis extracted from him on her deathbed (282-98). It is a strange scene that he conjures up, and stranger in the charge that Chrysis lays on him, that as she has always esteemed him as a brother and Gly­ cerium will be left vulnerable and solitary at her death, unable to defend her virtue or her property without help, he should accept the role of husband and protector (295): te isti virum do, amicum tutorem patrem. No mention is made of Glycerium's parentage at this point, and the chief concern of Chrysis seems to be that Glycerium should not be cheated out of her inheritance, so she gives this into his safe-keeping (296): bona nostra haec tibi permitto et tuae mando fidei. Almost certainly what was uppermost in her mind was the possible intervention Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LAWRENCE RICHARDSON 179 of a relation from Andros who would claim the inheritance. As a woman and a metic, any will she might make would be open to challenge; at her death her property would therefore devolve on her nearest male blood relation or, failing that, go to the public treasury.6 The only alternative available to her would be by making a gift inter vivos, and Glycerium was too young and helpless to be able to manage property. Thus Chrysis was, in effect, making it Glycerium's dowry. But one would suppose that such a gift inter vivos would require witnesses and possibly documentation, but Pamphilus is specific that they they were alone at the time of this interview (285): accessi; vos semotae: nos soli. Perhaps we should imagine that any necessary for­ malities were observed either a bit earlier or a bit later and could not conveniently be presented on the stage. How much of the legal conditions and questions involved here the Roman audience might be expected to understand, or even be aware of, might be queried.7 But Terence was always at pains to make the Greek atmosphere and institutions in his plays seem authentic, and if the question of kinship rights and the law of inheritance were to arise later, it would be explained at that time. Here it was sufficient to plant the seed that would later burgeon and bear fruit. The question of inheritance does seem destined to arise with a vengeance with the appearance of Crito toward the end of the play (796). He is an Andrian, the cousin of Chrysis, sobrinus Chrysidis (801). With his first words he shatters the fiction of Chrysis' having been abandoned by her Andrian relations; in­ stead she deliberately chose the life of the courtesan as the road to a comfortable prosperity, and according to law her property at her death should pass to him (796-99). He is a man of unq uestioned probity, as Chremes attests a Ii ttIe later (914f), and he had assumed that Glycerium would already long since have discovered her Attic relations and rejoined them (80Mf). This would presumably have dissolved any bond of adoption, leaving the field clear for him. How he has learned of Chrysis' death and wealth is not explained; if that is necessary, one might 6 See C. Cox, Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens (Princeton 1998) 170-94; A. Harrison, the Law of Athens I: The Family and Property (Oxford 1968) 122-62, esp. 151ff. 7 On the Athenian law of marriage, see Cox (supra n.6) xiii-xx; Harrison (supra n.6) 1-60. In both Athens and Rome the emphasis was on the citizenship of the children. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 180 TERENCE'S ANDRIA AND MENANDER assume that the messenger was someone looking to share in the spoils. Crito considers going to court with his case only briefly and rejects the idea in view of the disadvantage under which he would labor as a foreigner and his unwillingness to deprive Glycerium (807-16), but as he does entertain the idea, we must recognize that he has a strong legal case. But had he a claim untainted by a certain ethical question? Chrysis had taken up life as a courtesan deliberately; otherwise she would have been condemned to a life of poverty and priva­ tion when her father's early death left her in straitened circum­ stances. Was it not the responsibility of her relations to see to her support, as far as their means permitted, and to arrange a suitable dowry and marriage ? Yet Crito seems a pillar of society and rectitude. Crito has been very quick to act where there was the prospect of a substantial inheritance, although the wealth of a courtesan was never respectable, as the story of Phryne and the walls of Thebes demonstrates (Ath. 13.591 D). And even if Glycerium had found her place in her Attic family, would she not, as a loyal friend, have superior right to Crito's, if she chose to exercise it? It does appear that Crito has thought that, if Glycerium had found her parentage, there would be no lawsuit, and in that case it would be better for a cousin to claim the inheritance, rather than let it go to the public treasury by default. If Chrysis chose to give it out that she had been abandoned by her Andrian relations, they saw things somewhat differently. Of course one could not expect the truth from an hetaira; she would always put a good face on things (cf e.g. Hor. Carm. 1.35.25f: meretrix ... periura). Simo had let himself be taken in by her version of her story. Had Pamphilus been hoodwinked as well by Glycerium? Davus was supicious of the story of the shipwreck and her claim to Attic citizenship (217-25). Chrysis on her deathbed seems to have been unaware of Glycerium's pregnancy as a claim on Pamphilus' protection; she speaks only of Glycerium's having always esteemed him more than any other and having been compliant to him in every way (293f): sive haec te solum semper fecit maxumi seu tibi morigera fuit in rebus omnibus. It sounds very much as though Chrysis thought of their relationship as that of hetaira and client. This brings us to the difficult question of how we are to account for the apparent disregard for time and its passage in this play. If Glycerium's pregnancy was not yet evident or known to Chrysis at the time of Chrysis' death, we must as- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LAWRENCE RICHARDSON 181 sume that some months have elapsed between Chrysis' death and the opening of the play, possibly even the whole period of gestation. Although he had been spying on his son, Simo was unaware of Glycerium's existence prior to Chrysis' funeral (115-24). Yet Chremes on the day following the funeral came to Simo to break off the betrothal of his daughter to Pamphilus on the ground that he had learned that Pamphilus was treating Glycerium as his wife (144-49). It seems evident that in the Menandrean original of the Andria the shipwrecked girl had been kept cloistered, essentially invisible, while enquiries were made about her parentage, whereas in the Perinthia the young lover, acceding to the wishes of the dying hetaira and loyal to his word once given, had following her death taken up house­ keeping, or as good as housekeeping, with his ward. So also it is hard to believe that the wreck of an Attic ship on Andros would have gone unannounced at Athens, or uninvestigated, unless it had occurred in some very remote part. Traffic between Athens and Andros was very frequent, because Andros lay at no great distance from Athens on one of the main sea-lanes between mainland Greece and Delos, and eventually Asia. Although the appearance of Crito soon after the funeral of Chrysis would be understandable, the appearance of a similar character from Perinthus might be expected to require at least some weeks. The information we are given suggests that although the plots of Menander's two plays may have been similar, significant details and development were different. This is what Terence means when he says in his prologue (12): dissimili oratione sunt /actae ac stilo. In Menander's Andria the hetaira, Chrysis, was probably driven into her professison and emigration by the failure of her relations to come to her assistance, yet she guarded the virtue of her adoptive 'sister' and was intent on re­ storing her to her Attic family, but found them hard to locate. In the Perinthia the balancing character chose her profession deliberately as the surest way to economic security and inde­ pendence, and her young adoptive 'sister' intended to follow in her footsteps and was being groomed for that when she en­ countered, or attracted, the attention of an ideal suitor. This seems borne out by the words of Mysis, Glycerium's maid, in soliloquy in the fourth act (717-20) summum bonum esse erae putabam hunc Pamphilum, amicum, amatorem, virum in quovis loco Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 182 TERENCE'S ANDRIA AND MENANDER paratum; verum ex eo nunc misera quem cepit laborem! facile hie plus malist quam illic boni. In the Andria the protagonist's infatuation, although intense, was still fresh at the time of the funeral, for his companions who frequented the house of the hetaira and dined there in his com­ pany were apparently entirely unaware of it, as appears from Simo's account of his enquiries (88-98): "'eho quid Pamphilus?" "quid? symbolam dedit, cenavit. " gaudebam. item alio die quaerebam: comperibam nil ad Pamphilum quicquam attinere. enimvero spectatum satis putabam et magnum exemplum continentiae; nam qui cum ingeniis conf/ictatur ei(u)s modi neque commovetur animus in ea re tamen, scias posse habere iam ipsum suae vitae modum. quom id mihi place bat tum uno ore omnes omnia bona dicere et laudare fortunas meas, qui gnatum haberem tali ingenio praeditum. Pamphilus might almost have seen his beloved only at a dis­ tance. In the Perinthia, on the other hand, the entrusting of the young 'sister' to the protagonist followed on an extended rela­ tionship between him and the hetaira and was the sort of de­ mand a mistress might well make on her deathbed appealing to an unwritten right (289-95): quod ego per hanc dexteram [oro] et genium tuom, per tuam fidem perque huiu' solitudinem te obtestor ne abs te hanc segreges neu deseras. si te in germani fratri' dilexi loco sive haec te solum semper fecit maxumi seu tibi morigera fuit in rebus omnibus, te isti virum do, amicum tutorem patrem. And following on this the protagonist had taken the 'sister' as his de facto wife and proposed to prove her right to citizenship only incidentally. It is unfortunate that not a single quotation or fragment preserved in a papyrus can be ascribed to Menander's Andria, but we are now in a position to offer a tentative reconstruction of Menander's Perinthia based on discrepancies in Terence's Andria taken together with the comments of Donatus and information scattered in fragments preserved in papyri and in quotations in other sources. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LAWRENCE RICHARDSON 183 The play opened with a conversation between the father, Laches, and his wife; for this we have the authority of Donatus (ad Ter. And. prol. 14). In this conversation the embarrassment that Laches' son has caused him must have been reviewed. His assumption had been that his son's involvement with an hetaira who was their neighbor was no more than the education senti­ mentale normal for any well-born young Athenian able to afford the extravagance, while his betrothal to the daughter of an old friend was an arrangement of long standing and secure, to be invoked when the proper time came. The death of the hetaira, though regrettable, had therefore seemed fortuitous, and after a decent interval to allow his son to mourn her death, he had intended to exert his paternal authority and see the marriage through. But after some months had passed and the son, abetted by his body-slave Daos, had found excuses for postponement of the wedding, he had discovered, or had it re­ vealed to him, that his son was now involved with the young 'sister' of his former mistress, and, in fact, was treating her as his wife so publicly that on the approach of the wedding day it had come to the awareness of the father of his betrothed, who now consequently wished to break off the engagement. The only solution to this quandary, it seemed to Laches, was to force his son into an open act of rebellion in which he could interpose his paternal authority with the threat of disinheritance. Without visible means of support, the son would be brought to heel and forced to give up this unsuitable alliance. Laches sought to engage his wife's support for this scheme by assisting in the deception of the son by going ahead with the preparations for the wedding feast. The chief obstacle to Laches' scheme was the slave Daos, his son's body-slave, a fellow of great inventiveness and daring who had in the past found ruses for postponing the wedding and perhaps also been guilty of extracting from Laches the wherewithal to maintain the young couple at least modestly. Laches' growing awareness of how he had been gulled had fuelled his long-standing wrath against Daos. In fact, it had been Daos who suggested that public demonstration of the situation between the son and his beloved would be the most effective impediment to the wedding arrangements now so far advanced. Up to that point the young couple had hoped unsuccessfully to be able to prove her suitabilty as a wife by tracing the Attic family of the girl, who, in fact, had been shipwrecked as a small child with her father, a merchant, whose death in the ship- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 184 TERENCE'S ANDRIA AND MENANDER wreck, or shortly thereafter due to injuries suffered in the wreck, had left her destitute, and she had then been taken in by the hetaira or her family and brought up with a future as an hetaira in view. But she still remembered vaguely and imper­ fectly her Attic origin. The couple's lack of success in tracing her kin had been due to the lateness of their search, undertaken only after they had embarked on a marital arrangement, and the remoteness of the deme to which she belonged. In the face of Laches' insistence on going forward with the wedding in the conviction that his son was basically dutiful and would not ultimately accept disinheritance, Daos devised a series of schemes, each more outrageous than its predecessor, to thwart him, and these made up the body of the play. As Laches found countermeasures to advance the wedding, Daos grew more and more reckless. There was some maneuvering about the inheritance of a considerable property left by the dead hetaira.s One might, for examfle, imagine that there were debts incurred by the son's style 0 life and Laches threatened to disinherit his son immediately, if he should persist in his loyalty to the girl. Daos would then have countered this by proposing to obtain a loan from a banker on the strength of the prospect of the legacy, which the son could obtain only by subterfuge, as he lacked Laches' consent to the loan, or by Daos' gulling Laches into giving consent unwittingly or against his will. 9 As the word "legacy" appears in the scene preserved in a papyrus in which Daos is threatened with burning, used apparently ironically, this intrigue must have been the straw that broke the camel's back as far as Laches was concerned. But it would have been comrounded by the girl's delivery of a child and the presentation 0 this as proof of his son's commitment to marriage with her and determination to prove his wife's citizen­ ship, which again Laches saw as a further imposture of Daos. It was in response to this that Daos was threatened with savage punishment, and that scene from which one substantial frag­ ment survives was the climax of the play. The situation would then have been resolved by the arrival of a relation of the dead hetaira from Perinthus who had come to Athens to claim her estate as properly devolving on him. He remembered the name of the girl's father and the deme to 8 Men. Perinthia 1 (=P.Oxy. VI 855). 9 On a minor's incapacity to enter into any contract, see Harrison (supra n.6) 73f. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LAWRENCE RICHARDSON 185 which she belonged, information that then electrified Laches' old friend, the father of the bride proposed for his son, for it was the name of his lost brother. Daos would then have been released from his sanctuary on the altar. The major difference between this play and the Andria of Menander would have been in the girl's originally having in­ tended to become an hetaira, in the son's open acceptance of the girl as his wife following the death of her sister hetaira, and in giving major importance to the scheming of Daos in a series of inventions. In the Andria the girl was secluded, and she and her 'sister' were probably fairly recent arrivals in Athens, where they hoped to find a protector for the hetaira by identifying the shipwrecked girl's Attic relations. The son was a seducer, and the girl's pregnancy by him had been kept secret, for he feared that his father would arrange to have her expelled from the city if he discovered it. The birth of her child acted as a catalyst. The father presumed it was supposititious and a ruse to force his hand, and could be persuaded that it was genuine only by the arrival of an Andrian cousin who vouched for the girl's Attic birth and citizenship. Maneuvering with the child and its acceptance or rejection formed the central action of the play. But as Terence has spliced the two plot lines for his Andria, a fresh complication is developed: the suggestion of entrapment, a far more sinister entrapment than that of Simo at the begin­ ning of the play. Pamphilus had remained an outsider among the clients of Chrysis, content merely to share in the dinner parties. His puritanical restraint, which his father saw as a splendid example of virtue and self-control (91-98), was due rather to innocence and lack of experience and made him vulnerable to Chrysis' scheming. He would not refuse to accept her charge made from her deathbed, however heavy or undeserved it might be, nor later repudiate the responsibility, although the skepticism of Mysis with respect to his ability to keep his word shows that she was well aware of his weakness of character (298). The resolution of the dilemma in the denoue­ ment of the final act amounts to waving a magic wand so everyone can be happy. But Terence gives the more thoughful members of his audience and readership much to ponder after the play is over. DUKE UNIVERSITY August, 1998