Our knowledge of the life of the celebrated Latin playwright, Publius Terentius Afer, is derived chiefly from a fragment of the lost work of Suetonius, De viris illustribus, preserved in the commentary of Donatus, who adds a few words of his own.
At Rome he was educated like a free man in the house of Terentius Lucanus, a senator, by whom he was soon emancipated; whereupon he took his master's nomen Terentius, and thenceforward his name was Publius Terentius Afer, of which the last member seems to imply that he was not a Phoenician (Poenus) by blood.
Varro and Dionysius Afer proposed to identify the Iberians of Spain with the Iberians of the Caucasus, the one regarding the eastern, and other the western, settlements as the earlier.
The one complete survival of the generation after the death of Ennius, the comedy of P. Terentius Afer or Terence (c. 185-159), exemplifies the gain in literary accomplishment and the loss in literary freedom.