Africanus, who borrowed from Terence a character which he had acted in
private, brought it on the stage in his name." Nepos tells us he found
in some book that C. Laelius, when he was on some occasion at Puteoli, on
the calends [the first] of March, [935] being requested by his wife to
rise early, (534) begged her not to suffer him to be disturbed, as he had
gone to bed late, having been engaged in writing with more than usual
success. On her asking him to tell her what he had been writing, he
repeated the verses which are found in the Heautontimoroumenos:

Satis pol proterve me Syri promessa--Heauton. IV. iv. 1.
I'faith! the rogue Syrus's impudent pretences--

Santra [936] is of opinion that if Terence required any assistance in his
compositions [937], he would not have had recourse to Scipio and Laelius,
who were then very young men, but rather to Sulpicius Gallus [938], an
accomplished scholar, who had been the first to introduce his plays at
the games given by the consuls; or to Q. Fabius Labeo, or Marcus Popilius
[939], both men of consular rank, as well as poets. It was for this
reason that, in alluding to the assistance he had received, he did not
speak of his coadjutors as very young men, but as persons of whose
services the people had full experience in peace, in war, and in the
administration of affairs.

After he had given his comedies to the world, at a time when he had not
passed his thirty-fifth year, in order to avoid suspicion, as he found
others publishing their works under his name, or else to make himself
acquainted with the modes of life and habits of the Greeks, for the
purpose of exhibiting them in his plays, he withdrew from home, to which
he never returned. Volcatius gives this account of his death: