Andria

Andria is a comedy by Terence, written probably when he was around nineteen, and it is the first of his plays to survive. Terence adapted it from two plays by the Greek dramatist Menander, Andria and Perinthia, taking the main plot from the first and some passages from the second. It was first staged in Rome around 166 BC during the Ludi Megalenses. About a century later Cicero quoted one of its lines in a speech, a sign that the play was well known, and Horace could allude to one of its phrases confident that his audience would recognise it.

The plot centres on Pamphilus, son of the Athenian Simo, who has a secret relationship with Glycerium, a young woman everyone believes to be the sister of the courtesan Chrysis, and who is expecting his child. Simo has arranged his son's marriage to Philumena, daughter of his friend Chremes, but when he discovers the affair at Chrysis's funeral he decides to humiliate Pamphilus in public by announcing an imminent wedding, even though Chremes has already withdrawn his consent. Pamphilus, advised by his cunning slave Davus, accepts the match in order to thwart his father, but the scheme backfires when Simo persuades Chremes to offer his daughter again.

The situation is resolved by the arrival of Crito, a friend of the family from Andros, who reveals that Glycerium is not Chrysis's natural sister but the daughter of a brother of Chremes who was thought lost in a shipwreck off Andros. Chremes acknowledges Glycerium as his niece, gives her hand to Pamphilus and frees Philumena to marry Charinus, Pamphilus's friend who loves her. The play ends with a double wedding and with Davus pardoned.

The comedy is admired for Terence's skill in building misunderstandings, the characterisation of its figures and its refined, elegant language, qualities that earned him great esteem among the humanists. It was the first of his plays performed after antiquity, in Florence in 1476, and Machiavelli later adapted it. Its influence extends into modern literature: Thornton Wilder wrote The Woman of Andros (1930), a novel inspired by the play.