Preface

Summary

Terence's Eunuchus was his most successful play in his lifetime; it has been surprisingly neglected by modern commentators. For a commentary in English one has to go back to Sidney Ashmore's 1908 one-volume edition of the whole Terentian corpus and before that to the similar volumes of Wilhelm Wagner (1869), Edward Parry (1857), and J. A. Phillips (1846). Until very recently the only full-scale edition of Eunuchus in any language was Philippe Fabia's in French (1895); to this can now be added Leonidas Tromaras' German edition of 1994 (first published in Greek in 1991). Fabia's commentary is still very valuable on matters of language and interpretation, and I have made constant use of it; I have benefited also from Tromaras' edition, which appeared when my own was already in progress.

The text of Terence is relatively well established, and I have not thought it worthwhile to do a detailed re-examination of the manuscripts, though one of the incidental pleasures of preparing this edition has been the opportunity to examine the Bembinus and the beautifully illustrated Vat. Lat. 3868 (G) in the Vatican Library. In the few places where there is serious doubt about the reading I have used my own judgement, but in the end the text offered here differs in only a few places from that of Kauer–Lindsay's OCT (1926) or Marouzeau's Budé edition (1947).