Daily Inspiration Quote by Terence

A Roman playwright slipping a cosmopolitan manifesto into a comedy is its own kind of provocation. Terence, an African-born former slave turned literary star, puts radical moral universality into plain speech: I am a man; therefore I claim jurisdiction over the whole messy inventory of human life. The line works because it sounds modest while it’s actually expansive, even imperial. It’s not “I’m virtuous,” it’s “I refuse the comfort of distance.”

The intent is partly ethical and partly theatrical. Comedy runs on recognition: audiences laugh because they see themselves in other people’s bad decisions. Terence turns that mechanism into an argument about empathy. “Nothing human is alien” doesn’t mean endorsement; it means attention. It’s a refusal to treat other people’s shame, poverty, desire, or error as someone else’s species. The subtext is an attack on the Roman habit of drawing hard borders: citizen versus foreigner, free versus enslaved, respectable household versus the disreputable street. If you accept the premise, those categories start to look like excuses for not caring.

Context sharpens the edge. Terence is adapting Greek New Comedy for Roman elites who liked to think of themselves as the measure of civilization. Coming from the margins of that world, he smuggles in a humanist stance that flatters the audience’s self-image (we are broad-minded) while quietly indicting their cruelty (why did you need reminding?). The line’s staying power comes from that double action: it invites solidarity, then exposes how selective our solidarity usually is.