He is said to have been born at Carthage, brought to Rome as a slave, and carefully educated in the house of M. Terentius Lucanus, by whom he was soon emancipated. A difficulty was felt in ancient times as to how he originally became a slave, as there was no war between Rome and Carthage between the Second and Third Punic Wars, and no commercial relations with Rome and Italy till after the destruction of Carthage. But there was no doubt as to his Phoenician origin. It has been suggested that his Carthaginian origin perhaps explains the interest which the family of the Scipios first took in him. He was of slender figure and dark complexion. He is said to have owed the favour of his great friends as much to his personal gifts and graces as to his literary distinction. In one of his prologues he declares it to be his ambition, while not offending the many, to please the 'boni.' His earliest play was the 'Andria,' exhibited in 166 B.C., when he could only have been about the age of nineteen. A pretty, but probably apocryphal, story is told of his having read the play, before its exhibition, to Caecilius--who however is said to have died in 168 B.C., the year after the death of Ennius--and of the generous admiration manifested by Caecilius. The story probably owes its origin to the same impulse which gave birth to that of the visit of Accius on his journey to Asia to the veteran Pacuvius. The next play exhibited by Terence was the 'Hecyra,' first produced in 165, but withdrawn in consequence of the bad reception which it met with, and afterwards reproduced in 160. The 'Heauton Timorumenos' appeared in 163, the 'Eunuchus' and 'Phormio' in 161, and the 'Adelphoe' in 160, at the funeral games of L. Aemilius Paulus. After bringing out these plays Terence sailed for Greece, whether, as it is said, to escape from the suspicion of publishing the works of others as his own, or, as is more probable, from the desire to obtain a more intimate knowledge of that Greek life which had hitherto been known to him only in literature, and which it was his professed aim to reproduce in his comedies. From the voyage to Greece Terence never returned. According to one account he was lost at sea, according to another he died at Stymphalus in Arcadia, and according to a third at Leucadia, from grief at the loss by shipwreck of his baggage, containing a number of new plays which he had translated from Menander. The old grammarian quoted by Suetonius states that he was ruined in fortune through his intimacy with his noble friends. Another account spoke of him as having left behind him property consisting of gardens, to the extent of twenty acres, close to the Appian Way. It is further stated that his daughter was so well provided for that she married a Roman knight.