I begin with a fragment rendered into English by Google translate:
🏛️ Tam illud est admirandum [Terentio] quod et morem retinuit ut comoedian scriberet et temperauit affectum ne in tragoediam transiliret, quod cum aliis rebus minime obtentum et a Plauto et ab Afranio et Appio et multis fere comicis inuemimus.
🤖 It is so admirable in [Terentius] that he both retained the habit of writing comedy and tempered his passion so as not to leap into tragedy, which, along with other things, we find not achieved at all by Plautus, Afranius, Appius, and many other comedians.
The source of this statement is the ancient author Euanthius (no typo) about whom no Wikipedia article yet exists, admirably. We should all be so lucky as to write influential works of major historical significance and then disappear from this world without polluting it with a Wikipedia article. And so, while Wikipedia maintains its glacial silence, we find a blog entry by Roger Pearce (June 18th, 2011) offering us the following red hot noise:
Evanthius wrote a commentary on Terence which included or was introduced by a discussion of the genre. This is entitled De Fabula, but it is not clear how it became attached to the work of Donatus. […]
Here’s the first couple of lines of De Fabula, which I have converted from the French. It looks like an interesting work.
1. Both tragedy and comedy had their first manifestations in the religious ceremonies with which the ancients consecrated themselves in fulfillment of vows made for benefits received. 2 In fact, when a fire had been lit on the altar and a goat brought, the type of incantations that the sacred choir made in honour of the god Liber was called tragedy. The etymology of this is either from τράγος and ᾠδή, i.e. the word for a goat, the enemy of the vines, and the word for song (of which Virgil gives full details); or it is because the creator of this poem received a goat in return; or because a full cup of grape wine was given in solemn recompense to the singers or because actors smeared their faces with wine lees, before the invention of masks by Aeschylus. Indeed in Greek the lee is called τρύγες. This is why tragedy is so called.
I found the first quotation (marked with a 🏛️ for lack of a better emoji) in a footnote to the introduction to The Tragedies of Ennius by H.D. Jocelyn, 1969 (r. 2008), page 40, where it is cited as evidence that "the language of comedy" in Latin, in this period of the history of Ancient Rome, "moved away from that of tragedy and approached the common language."
The extant comedies of Plautus have inspired a saga of self-deception, with many scholars passionately arguing that his use of language preserves casual speech, as opposed to the artificiality of language used in poetry and legal arguments. That thesis has been bunked and debunked: in fact, the language used as evidence was (irrefutably) written to be performed as song (or at least chanted) and therefore represents a different kind of artificiality, not the contrast to "natural language" modern readers are looking for.
The Encyclopedia Britannica now boldly claims that Terence's "language is a purer version of contemporary colloquial Latin." If you are not already scoffing at this self-evident paradox, allow me to quote the old Encyclopedia of Genocide somewhat further: "His language was accepted as a norm of pure Latin, and his work was studied and discussed throughout antiquity."
Alas, (i) the norm of purity and (ii) evidence of informal, colloquial, casual language are two different things. Perhaps, in the end, we will be left to infer that legal arguments (presented as a kind of theater in a court of law) are closer to natural language than anything written as entertainment --comedy, tragedy or poetry.
Perhaps two thousand years from now (or perhaps just two hundred?) the only evidence of our language will be rap music, and scholars will be left to reconstruct what they imagine to be our casual mode of communication from that mix of comedy and tragedy. Not a single scrap of our ancestors' legal and political reasoning will outlast the millennium: unlike rap music, it is neither useful nor aesthetically durable.
