‘Was Terence a Gentleman?’ Terence, the Human, and Abolition in the Antebellum United States

In the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Terence was widely read and admired for his style and moral authority. Two details from the poet’s Suetonian biography, which was often included in editions of his plays, sparked the early American imagination: Terence was a freedman, and he was an African with dark skin (colore fusco). From the Roman civil war to the American one, one particularly popular line was often cited to establish Terence as an early authority on humanism: ‘I am a human: I think that nothing human can be foreign to me’ (Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto, Heauton Timorumenos 77). Both this line and Terence himself appear as exempla in antebellum discussions of morality, race, slavery, and what it means to be human. Haunted by a tension between the universal and the particular, the early American Terence both challenged and reinforced the fantasy of a Western literary canon by suggesting to readers that it had always already contained at least one Black man—even as Phillis Wheatley Peters wondered why ‘one alone.’