About the work
Andria was Terence's first play, staged in 166 BC at the Ludi Megalenses. It reworks Menander's comedy of the same name and, according to its own prologue, also drew on Menander's lost Perinthia — a blending of two sources (contaminatio) that Terence defended there against contemporary critics.
Plot
The Athenian Pamphilus has made the supposed foreigner Glycerium of Andros pregnant and promised to marry her, but his father Simo wants him to marry the neighbour Chremes's daughter instead. Only at the end does it emerge that Glycerium is Chremes's own long-lost daughter, clearing the way for her marriage to Pamphilus while his friend Charinus gets the other girl.
Cultural significance
The line 'hinc illae lacrimae' ('hence those tears') was quoted by both Cicero and Horace and survived as a proverbial phrase. As the first Terence play revived after antiquity — in Florence in 1476 — Andria stood at the start of the modern Terence reception and was later reworked by Machiavelli, among others.