As the first play of the Terentian corpus, Andria has always attracted a
special level of attention. It was the first Roman comedy produced after
antiquity (at Florence in 1476) and the first translated into English,
and it has inspired writers from Jonson and Dryden to Thornton Wilder.
It provides an excellent introduction to Terence 's particular style of
comedy, noteworthy for its ambivalence in representing the perspectives
of woman and slaves and its experiments with a secondary plot line. The
commentary is designed both to help students with the basic linguistic
and technical problems confronting inexperienced readers of Roman comedy
and to open discussion of essential interpretive questions involving the
play and its relation to the wider comic corpus, as well as the utility
of comedy for furthering our understanding of the Roman world and its
values.