Publius, a comic poet of great celebrity, was born at Carthage about 195 B.C. Hardly anything is known with certainty regarding him. At an early age he became a captive, and was sold as a slave to Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, to whom he appears to have been indebted for a learned education. His manners and accomplishments recommended him not only to his master, but likewise to other men of rank, whose names have been recorded. Having been manumitted, he attained to great eminence as a writer of Latin comedies. He was honoured with the friendship of Laelius, and of Scipio the son of Paulus Aemilius; and his dramas are even supposed to have derived some of their chief beauties from their patrician pens. Such insinuations have not been uncommon in various eras of literary history; but some doubt may reasonably be entertained whether Scipio or Laelius could have produced even the second-rate scenes of Terence's comedies. They exhibit a uniform vein of elegant simplicity, in which we discover no reason to suspect a divided property. His plots are derived from Greek sources, chiefly from Menander; but the terse Latinity and graceful diction are peculiarly his own. Caesar considered the want of pungent humour, the ris comica, the chief defect of his dramas.

The comedies of Terence appear to have been very successful on the stage, but he did not long continue his prosperous career. According to Eusebius, he died in Arcadia; and Suetonius refers his death to the consulship of Cn. Corn. Dolabella and M. Fulvius Nobilior—that is, to the year 159 B.C. According to this chronology, he must only have attained the age of thirty-three; but the latter writer states that he had not completed his thirty-fifth year. The circumstances of his death are variously related, but the prevailing report was, that when on his voyage home from Greece, his translations of Menander were lost by shipwreck, and the poet himself died of grief at their disappearance. He left an only daughter, who became the wife of a Roman knight, and inherited a garden of 20 acres in the Via Appia. He had a tawny complexion, with a slender frame, and a moderate stature.

Six comedies, all of the class Fabula Palliata, or those in which the characters introduced were Greeks in Grecian costume, are all that have survived the ravages of time of Terence's writings. The following are the titles of his plays, with the order in which they appeared:—The Andria, or Woman of Andros, was first represented at the Megalesian games, on the 4th of April 165 B.C.; the Hecyra, or the Stepmother, was exhibited at the Megalesian games in 165 B.C.; the Headontimoroumenos, or the Self-Tortmentor, was performed at the Megalesian games, B.C. 163; the Eunuchus was received with great acceptance at the Megalesian games, B.C. 162; the Phormio was played at the Roman games for the first time on the 1st October B.C. 162; and finally, the *Adelphi*, or the *Brothers*, the most delightful to a modern reader of all Terence's comedies, was acted at the funeral games of L. Æmilius Paulus, B.C. 160. Of these six comedies, the editions are very numerous, and not a few appeared before the termination of the first half-century of printing. The *editio princeps*, a folio without date, is supposed to have been printed at Strasburg by Mentelin. Seventeen editions, the first in 1517, proceeded from the Aldine press. Of the earlier editions, the most important is that of Gabriel Faérrnus, Florent. 1565, 8vo. Faérrnus was a man of taste as well as learning, and, being himself a very skilful versifier, possessed some eminent qualifications as an editor of Terence. To his text many succeeding editors have chiefly adhered. Another valuable edition was published by Lindenbrog, Paris, 1602, 4to, Francof, 1623, 4to; one by Bishop Hare, Lond. 1724-25, 4to; another by Bentley, Cantab. 1726, 4to, Amst. 1727, 4to; another by Westerhov, Hag. Com. 1726, 2 tom. 4to; another by Stallbaum has been published in 1830, and the last by Volbehr in 1846. One edition was professedly published for men of taste ("in usum elegantiorum hominum editit, F. H. Bethe"), Berolini, 1806, 8vo. Terence has been frequently translated into and imitated in nearly every European language. A good version of him into blank verse was executed by the elder George Colman, Lond., 1765, 4to; and a recent prose version has been executed by Riley, 1853.