SOURCE: Konstan, David. “Grouch.” In Greek Comedy and Ideology, pp. 93-106. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Konstan analyzes Menander's uses of passionate love in the Dyskolos in order to comment on class conflict.]

Menandrean drama differs from the Old Comedy produced by Aristophanes and his contemporaries in its concentration on the domestic world, and above all on the vicissitudes of youthful passion—the passion, that is, of young men who are blocked by stern fathers, rich rivals, or greedy masters from attaining the women they desire, and must rely on intrigue or luck to gain them.¹ Thus Plutarch observed that erōs played a role in all of Menander's comedies, and the rule holds for the plays of which we have any knowledge, including Duskolos, or Grouch (an alternative title is Misanthrope), which was produced in 316 b.c. when Menander was about twenty-five years old, just over a century after Aristophanes produced Wasps.²Grouch was recovered on papyrus in 1959, and is the only original play by Menander, or indeed by any Greek playwright in the New Comic tradition, that survives complete. In it, Sostratus, a young and elegant city lad who is the son of a well-to-do father (39-40), has fallen in love with the daughter (unnamed) of the title character, a harsh-tempered, antisocial old fellow named Cnemo. The problem for Sostratus is to break down Cnemo's resistance to a marriage for his daughter.

The function of erōs in Grouch, however, is exceptional for New Comedy, since it is rarely the case that a maiden girl known to be a citizen, and thus eligible for a legitimate marriage, is represented as the object of passionate desire.³ Indeed, Menander seems at pains to call attention to the unusual character of Sostratus' infatuation in the opening scene of the play. Sostratus comes on stage accompanied by an officious friend called Chaereas, his hunting partner on the previous day (42, 48), when he first caught sight of Cnemo's daughter as she was placing garlands in a precinct sacred to the Nymphs.⁴ Sostratus has evidently surprised his friend by revealing that he has conceived an erotic desire (erōn, 52) for a free or well-bred girl (eleutheran, 50). Chaereas, who has a reputation as a useful counselor (56), explains, a shade pretentiously:

In these matters, Sostratus, here's how I am: if one of my friends calls on me because he's in love (erōn) with a courtesan, I immediately seize her and carry her off, I get drunk, set fire, brook no argument whatsoever—before even finding out who she is, one must catch her, for delay greatly magnifies love, but with quick action it's possible to end it quickly. If someone mentions marriage, however, and a free girl [eleutheran], here I'm someone else: I inquire about her family, livelihood, character. For all time to come I am leaving a reminder with my friend of how I manage in these things.

(57-68)

Chaereas draws a sharp contrast between two kinds of affair. The passion (erōs) inspired by a courtesan or hetaira calls for quick action in order to keep the infatuation under control. In the case of a free-born maiden, on the contrary, it is assumed that the young man's intention is marriage, which demands good sense and a careful investigation of the girl's background.⁵ Chaereas is appalled to learn that Sostratus has already sent a slave to make contact with her family. His desire has the impetuous urgency characteristic of the passion normally felt for courtesans.

The audience has been prepared for Sostratus' erotic interest in Cnemo's daughter by Pan, who speaks the prologue. The god explains that he is responsible for making Sostratus madly in love with the girl (44).⁶ He has a special concern for her thanks to her diligent care for the Nymphs, who share their shrine with Pan. As Sostratus enters, Pan points him out as “the one in love” (48).⁷ Pan's intervention, and the obvious good will toward Cnemo's daughter that inspires it, softens the picture of an upper-class youth taking an amorous interest in a poor but respectable citizen girl, since it is manifestly part of a divine and benevolent plan.⁸

Later in the play, Sostratus' father, Callipides, grants that there is a place for erotic attraction in the choice of a wife (786-90): “I wish you to take the girl you love, and insist that you should. … By the gods, I do, since I know that a marriage is made stable for a young man if he is moved to undertake it on account of love [erōs].” There is no suggestion of the conflict characteristic of New Comedy between a young man's transgressive passion for a girl of improper status and the practical concerns of the father.⁹ Love is simply acknowledged as an ingredient in marriage. As Gomme and Sandbach remark, Callipides' “sentiment would be more striking to a fourth-century audience than it is today.”¹⁰ As will be seen, however, Callipides is not wholly indifferent to the relative advantages of a conjugal alliance, and this will give rise to a momentary tension between him and Sostratus.

The action of Grouch, then, in conformity with all of Menander's plays, is motivated by passionate desire, but differs from the usual type in that Sostratus is infatuated with a free maiden, and his aim, accordingly, is marriage. Erōs is harnessed to a plot based on a straightforward proposal of wedlock, and Sostratus acts at once to seek out the girl's family in order to ask for her hand. His father raises no objections, and only the misanthropy of Cnemo stands in the way of the intended union. His fierce temperament is thus pivotal to the story.

Cnemo, who wants nothing to do with his neighbors and fellow citizens, lives on a remote rural property which he farms himself, with only his daughter for company and an elderly slave who keeps house for him. He is so shy of people that he has abandoned tilling a portion of his land near the public road in order to avoid encounters with strangers. He is disposed to assault with clods and stones anyone who trespasses on his domain, and he can scarcely endure to be civil to the image of Pan in the shrine that borders on his estate, as the god tells us in the prologue (10-12). Though his property is fairly large and his worth is not negligible, Cnemo is stingy as well as misanthropic, and the prologue explains that his wife has left him in order to move in with her son from a former marriage, whose house is next door to Cnemo's.

Cnemo's fierce isolationism renders him akin to the “humors” of renaissance comedy, like Morose in Ben Jonson's Epicene, who are dominated by a single trait or passion magnified to the degree of absurdity.¹¹ Formally, Cnemo's function in obstructing the desire of a young man for a girl under his authority is analogous to that of other stock types in New Comedy who are in a position of power over the beloved and thereby serve as blocking figures, for example the villainous brothel keeper in Plautus' Pseudolus, or the arrogant mercenary soldier in Plautus' Braggart Soldier (Miles Gloriosus), who own or have contracted for the girl in question.¹² It is comically effective to caricature the foibles or fixations of such characters, in contrast with the wan fecklessness of the protagonist, and the particular quality of the humor occasionally lends the play its title, as in the case of Grouch and Braggart Soldier, which is based on a Greek original called Boaster (Alazōn). Because the hero of Grouch is in love with a citizen girl and, as the conventions of the genre require, has marriage as his object rather than a casual liaison, the blocking figure is not an owner or master but an adult male relative, who is responsible for bestowing the intended bride in wedlock.

The father of the girl in the capacity of a humor seems especially suited to the narrative formula of Grouch, in which an Athenian youth is enamored of an eligible citizen girl. Where the boy's father obstructs his son's affair in New Comedy, he is ordinarily moved by considerations of policy, and seeks to prevent a liaison with an expensive courtesan or with an impoverished woman of dubious citizen credentials, which might damage the family's social standing or constitute an infraction of civic norms. (Personal rivalries or antagonisms between families, of the sort dramatized in Romeo and Juliet, do not seem to have been a motif in New Comedy.) Sostratus' father, Callipides, has no practical reasons for objecting to the match, nor does he, in the event. The wishes of the girl herself, it may be remarked, are not much taken into account on the New Comic stage; wedding arrangements are negotiated between the prospective groom and the male who has responsibility for the intended bride.¹³ Indeed, citizen maidens normally have no speaking role in the genre (the few lines assigned to Cnemo's daughter are the kind of exception that proves the rule). The role of blocking character is thus left to Cnemo, but since he, too, has no reasonable grounds for preventing the match, his resistance is reduced to a pure quirk of character, like that of the miser Euclio in Plautus' Aulularia (possibly based on a Menandrean original), whose stinginess in the matter of a dowry prevents his daughter from finding a suitable husband.¹⁴

The development of the plot in Grouch depends centrally on overcoming the misanthrope's obsession with privacy and hostility to his fellows, and this part of the action proceeds straightforwardly. Sostratus sets out to earn the confidence of the old man in order to gain his consent.¹⁵ To this end, he dresses in country clothing and acquires an outdoor tan as he tries his hand at the hoe, but he fails to encounter Cnemo at his chores and his efforts are thus to no effect. Cnemo's resistance is broken only after he accidentally falls down his own well in pursuit of a bucket that has dropped from a rotten cord, and has to rely on the help of his stepson Gorgias, assisted by Sostratus, to haul him back out. Cnemo discovers the speciousness of his pretended self-sufficiency, realizing belatedly that he must rely on the kindness of neighbors and that not all people are scoundrels. He commits his daughter to the authority of Gorgias, who gladly gives his approval to the intended marriage. In addition, he consigns to Gorgias half his property, leaving it to him to arrange the dowry and the wedding between the girl and Sostratus. Cnemo is now prepared to withdraw into solitude, but his humiliation is completed by the antics of a cook and slave who had suffered earlier from his ill temper: they tease and manhandle him while he is still weak and battered from his fall, oblige him to dance, and, finally, force him, despite his protestations, to join in the festivities that are under way in the shrine of the Nymphs, where Sostratus' parents are offering a sacrifice. The final scene, which is something of a coda to the main action, is performed in a lyrical meter to the accompaniment of a flute (there is a stage direction in the papyrus after verse 879), and the spirit is bright and farcical.¹⁶

The humbling of the ogre-like Cnemo has a fairy-tale quality. As Gomme and Sandbach observe in reference to the finale, “Knemon and his unsocial way of life must be shown as defeated by the normal view that takes man to be a social animal.”¹⁷ To be sure, Cnemo's capitulation in joining the party is grudging and superficial—Gomme and Sandbach charge Menander with a want of strict consistency in suggesting, by means of the exuberant conclusion, a simple happy ending to the play—but the issue of the drama is not, in the first instance, Cnemo's personal transformation. It resides rather in Cnemo's role as head of household and his relationship in this capacity to his fellow citizens.

Marriage in classical Athens was not a wholly personal matter; it was also part of the nexus of social relations that bound into a community the discrete citizen households of which the city-state was constituted.¹⁸ Since the law sponsored by Pericles almost a century and a half earlier (451 b.c.), marriage for Athenians was effectively restricted to those who were descended from citizen parents on both the father's and the mother's side.¹⁹ Because Cnemo obstructs a marriage for his daughter (a stance that reproduces his own estrangement from his wife), his isolation cuts his household off from the network of connubial relations that underwrites membership in the polity. Sostratus' desire to marry the girl thus strikes directly at the social meaning of Cnemo's withdrawal from human interaction.

As a consequence of his misanthropy, Cnemo fails to provide for the future of his daughter and abdicates his responsibility for the continuation of his household. The theme of authority is broached early in the play, when Sostratus informs Chaereas that he has already sent his slave to seek out the girl's father or, he adds, “whoever it may be who is in charge of the household” (73-74). The person in charge is, in Greek, the kurios, who in Attic law is an adult male citizen with authority over his wife, children, and any other dependents, such as an unmarried sister, who are not otherwise in the care of a responsible party. At this point in the action, of course, Sostratus does not know who the girl's kurios happens to be, since he is unfamiliar with her family, but his remark perhaps hints at an ambiguity over who is in fact responsible for the girl.

Soon afterward, Sostratus encounters Cnemo's daughter (it is the only scene in which she appears), as she emerges from her house to fill a jug with water from the shrine of the Nymphs, since Cnemo's bucket has by now fallen into the well. Sostratus offers to fetch some for her, and the two engage in a brief dialogue. Davus, a slave of Gorgias who has overheard the exchange, curses Cnemo for his carelessness in allowing a virtuous young girl to go out by herself, without a woman to serve as chaperone (223).²⁰ He decides to report the matter at once to Gorgias, so that they at least can assume the care of her (226-29). When Gorgias appears, at the beginning of the second act, he reproaches the slave for having stood by like a stranger (238). One may not, he says, run away from relationship, employing here a word (oikeiotēs, 240) whose normal sense, according to an ancient lexicographer, denotes ties by marriage, although Menander used it loosely for blood relations.²¹ Her father, Gorgias continues, wishes to be a stranger toward them, but they must not imitate his churlishness.

In the end, after his tumble into the well, Cnemo himself acknowledges his failure as head of household when he accepts Gorgias as his son and places him in charge of his estate and his daughter, entrusting him with the responsibility of finding a husband for her, since no suitor, he realizes, is likely to find favor with him (729-35; cf. 737-39). Gorgias agrees, and at once gives his consent to his half-sister's marriage to Sostratus, after a dutiful attempt to elicit Cnemo's approval for the match (748-60).

At this point in the play, with the girl formally betrothed by Gorgias to Sostratus (761-63) and Callipides about to bestow his blessing on the union (761, 786-87), the social disorder caused by Cnemo's misanthropy has been resolved.²² Cnemo's household is liberated from the constraints of his irascible nature and is restored to the community of families that make up the city-state. For good measure, Sostratus gains his father's consent to a marriage between his sister and Gorgias (813-20). Cnemo himself, to be sure, remains aloof from the new arrangements, disclaiming any interest in the man his daughter is to marry (752) and demanding for himself and his wife simply provision for their support (739). His intransigence may seem a blemish on the spirit of comic resolution, although a facile conversion of the misanthrope would undercut the representation of his character. “He is not,” as Gomme and Sandbach observe, “an admirable character, and he has no intention of behaving amiably or co-operatively in his retirement” (p. 268). The crucial thing, however, is that the social effects of his crankiness are now undone. The hilarity of the final episode may be taken as a sign of the festive reintegration of Cnemo's family—his daughter and newly adopted son—into the citizen community.

The function of Sostratus' passion for Cnemo's daughter is, on this view, to draw Cnemo's household back into the society constituted as a closed conjugal group in which Athenians marry Athenians and strangers are strictly excluded from connubial relations with citizens. By his opposition to any possible suitor for his daughter, Cnemo had threatened to sever the ties between his house and the citizen community. Sostratus' love is thus a manifestation of the city-state's claim on Cnemo's household: it dissolves the barrier represented by the misanthrope's secession, and in this respect Sostratus' passion in Grouch is akin to erōs in New Comedy generally, where it is typically a transgressive desire across status boundaries. Cnemo's misanthropy and the love interest, then, are associated not only on the level of the plot, where the curmudgeon is, as we have seen, the adversary of choice for a lover who aspires to legitimate wedlock, but also on the level of the theme, where the integrative quality of erōs complements the centrifugal force of Cnemo's withdrawal.

After he has been rescued from the well, largely through the efforts of Gorgias with the distracted assistance of Sostratus, Cnemo, not wholly repentant, delivers, along with his confession that man needs the help of others and cannot be independent of everyone, an explanation and an apologia for his ways.²³ Having observed, he says, the calculating greed of human beings, he had imagined that no one was really considerate of anyone else (718-21). The example of Gorgias, especially in light of Cnemo's former treatment of him, upsets this judgment. But still he ventures in his own defense: “If everyone were like me, there would be no courts, they would not be taking each other off to jail, there would be no war, and each would be content with his fair share” (743-45). The sentiment is a Greek commonplace: trouble starts when people stop minding their own business.²⁴ Nevertheless, it is a fine moment. One critic observes: “It is Menander's considerable achievement that after spending three acts building Knemon into a monster (a comic monster, maybe, but one for whom the audience's sympathy is not invited for a moment), he is able to transform him into a human being whose ill-guided attempt to live without assistance from others, autos autarkēs (714), is not merely touching but has a trace of nobility about it.”²⁵

While Cnemo's bid for a sympathetic understanding of his way of life comes as a surprise, there are several adumbrations of a virtuous side to his fierce temperament. Early in the action, when Sostratus' slave returns breathless from his unfortunate interview with Cnemo, Sostratus himself ventures, if not a defense, at least a more generous interpretation of Cnemo's surliness: “A poor farmer is a bitter sort, not only this one, but practically all of them” (120-31). Sostratus' own courage deserts him when Cnemo arrives in person, but the suggestion that Cnemo represents a general type of tough, hard-working peasant is echoed later when Gorgias observes that Cnemo's vehemence is directed against the idle lives that people lead (355-57). Cnemo himself confirms this ethical interpretation of his solitariness: when Sostratus' mother, inspired by a dream (412-18), leads a party to prepare an elaborate sacrifice to Pan in the shrine of the Nymphs next door to his house, Cnemo mutters that people indulge in lavish displays of piety for their own sakes, not the gods': the god himself would be content with some ritual cake and incense, while the roasted animals cater to moral gluttony (448-53).²⁶ As Gomme and Sandbach remark, Cnemo's speech “introduces a new point: his dislike of his fellow men is rooted in a belief in their selfishness.”²⁷

There are other indications of the virtue of Cnemo's ways. In the prologue, the god Pan describes Cnemo's daughter as “like her breeding, ignorant of pettiness” (35-36). The implied approval of Cnemo's household has seemed anomalous enough that some editors have elected to emend the text (thus reading “unlike her breeding”), but Sostratus himself speaks later of the somehow liberal or decent rearing (eleutherōs, 387) the girl enjoyed in the company of her boorish father, which sheltered her from the corrupting influence of nannies, and when he speaks with her he is struck at once by the liberal style of her rusticity (201-2).²⁸

It has been suggested that the faults of Cnemo are patterned not only on the type of the misanthrope proper but on that of the rude rustic as well, the “unattractive agroikos of Theophrastos or Aristotle,” and that Menander “has used him to portray an excess of rustic harshness.”²⁹ But the image of the rustic cuts both ways, carrying connotations of sturdy independence, straightforwardness, hard work, and honesty alongside those of taciturn or uncouth unsociability. In the words of a scholar who reveres Menander for his ethics and didacticism, “Rusticity is a fault in Theophrastus. In Menander it is coupled with noble independence and innocence.”³⁰

In the view of some critics, the complexity of Cnemo's character, especially as it is evoked in the latter part of the comedy, disrupts the love story proper. Michael Anderson, for example, notes a conflict between “the romantic love interest (involving Sostratos and Knemon's daughter) demanded of New Comedy, and a character-study of the misanthropic Knemon.”³¹ Anderson summarizes the thesis developed by Armin Schäfer in his excellent monograph on the play: “Menander comes near to a solution … but these two elements are basically irreconcilable, and the play consequently fails to achieve complete unity of action.”³² While there is indeed a tension in the development of Grouch, Schäfer has, I think, located it in the wrong place. It is not that the interest in Cnemo's character interrupts the romantic strand of the plot. Rather, the two sides of Cnemo's gruffness—his bogeyman prickliness and the uncompromising self-reliance that has about it air of old-fashioned virtue—answer to two distinct elements in the amatory narrative.

Corresponding to the picture of Cnemo as an honest if hard-bitten farmer is the representation of Sostratus as something of an urban fop. Toward the end of the prologue, when Pan turns from his portrait of Cnemo to Sostratus, he calls him citified in his pursuits (41) and immediately illustrates the point by mentioning that he has been out hunting (42), an occupation characteristic of the idle rich.³³ New Comedy eschewed the representation of young rakes seducing innocent maidens, and Sostratus' intentions have indeed been honorable from the moment he laid eyes on the girl. But Gorgias' slave Davus is instantly suspicious when he finds Sostratus chatting with the girl, and he imagines that the lad has “sneaked in” to try his luck because he knows she is unprotected (224-26). When Gorgias catches sight of him, the first thing he notes is Sostratus' fancy cloak (257); then he adds that he has the look of a scoundrel.³⁴ Gorgias delivers a homily on the dangers of relying on good fortune and cautions Sostratus against contempt for indigent folk like himself (285). The commentators note Gorgias' overearnest manner and a certain want of logic, but his bluster may conceal a real anxiety over confronting a wealthy young man.³⁵ He explicitly denounces Sostratus for intending to corrupt a free maiden (parthenon eleutheran, 290-91), exploiting his own leisure to the harm of those who must labor, and he adds that a beggar wronged is the most churlish of men: the term is duskolōtaton (296), used elsewhere only of Cnemo (as in the title of the play), and while Gomme and Sandbach dismiss the occurrence here as accidental,³⁶ it is plausible that Menander is deliberately associating Gorgias' hostile reaction to Sostratus with the kind of misanthropy that Cnemo shares, as we have seen, with all poor farmers.

Sostratus replies that he is in love with the girl and that he has come to approach not her but her father (305-6), since he is ready to take her as his wife.³⁷ Gorgias insists that it is a hopeless ambition, in view of Cnemo's nature. “You've never been in love with anyone,” says Sostratus (341), and Gorgias replies that he does not have the time: erōs is evidently conceived as the province of the well-to-do. When Sostratus persists, Gorgias advises him that Cnemo will not bear the sight of him at leisure and in luxury (357), and at Davus' suggestion, Sostratus doffs his cloak and takes up a mattock in order to give the impression of a poor farmer (369-70).

Gomme and Sandbach comment: “Here Menander employs the common dramatic device of laying a false trail; the suggested event does not occur, Knemon and Sostratos never meet in the fields, and Knemon never listens to Sostratos. But at a later stage they meet and Gorgias tries to introduce Sostratos as a hard-working farmer; Knemon shows no interest, and it is no longer necessary that he should.”³⁸ Gorgias will then insist that Sostratus is not given to luxury (755) or to spending the day in idleness, and Cnemo concludes from Sostratus' sunburned complexion that he is indeed a farmer (754). While Cnemo appears to take no notice, Sostratus' good will in playing the farmer has gone down well with Gorgias, at all events. Gorgias gets Cnemo's attention briefly when he identifies Sostratus as the one who helped rescue him from the well (753), and the two dramatic devices aimed at softening Cnemo's intransigence momentarily intersect.

Just as Sostratus the lover challenges Cnemo's breach with society, forcing the old man to give up control over his daughter and estate, so Sostratus the upper-class sportsman comes into conflict with Gorgias' persona, and Cnemo's too, as a hardworking tiller of the soil. Cnemo's tumble into the well is the means of resolving the dramatic tension in the first scenario, Sostratus' gesture in playing the farmer points to a resolution in the second. The plan to represent Sostratus as a farmer is not simply an abortive scheme, to be displaced by Cnemo's fall. Rather, it coexists with the latter device and finds its place in a distinct moment in the complex action of the drama, the paradigm of class antagonism between the leisured rich and the toiling poor, just as the scene at the well answers to the issue of isolationism and exaggerated autarky. Cnemo's character is ambiguous because it is overdetermined by the double theme of Grouch and is fitted simultaneously to both narrative paradigms.

A second element in what may be called the paradigm of class conflict in Grouch involves Callipides, Sostratus' father, who is identified in the prologue as “a man who farms possessions in this area worth many talents” (40-41).³⁹ When Gorgias learns that Sostratus is Callipides' son, he is impressed: “he's a wealthy man, by Zeus, and justly so, since he's an incomparable farmer (775). Callipides consents graciously to Sostratus' marriage with Cnemo's daughter, as has been said, but balks momentarily at the demand, raised abruptly at the beginning of act 5, that he give his own daughter in matrimony to Gorgias: “I do not want to accept both a bride and a groom who are paupers: one is enough for me” (795-96). Sostratus caps his plea with a high-minded lecture on the right use of wealth, over which, he says, one is master (806; cf. 800) for a brief span of years; the noble thing is to assist all, and thereby render as many as one may prosperous through one's efforts. Such generosity, he adds, is immortal, and from it benefits will return in time of need (805-10). Sostratus' little sermon is reminiscent of Gorgias' moralizing speech at his first encounter with Sostratus and shows him to have taken Gorgias' lesson to heart. Callipides hears this earnest lecture with respect and kindly amusement and gives in at once, gently reminding his son: “You know me, Sostratus” (813).⁴⁰

Callipides' resistance, perfunctory as it is, to the union of his daughter with Gorgias casts him in the role of blocking figure, and provides a counterweight to the function of Cnemo as an obstacle to the union of the two households. Implicitly, the scene justifies Gorgias' wariness toward the rich and may partially redeem Cnemo's surliness. His rudeness, at all events, is not the only barrier to full and free ties of kinship among all citizens.

Having brought his father round on the union between his sister and Gorgias, Sostratus must next overcome Gorgias' own inhibitions over marrying into a wealthy family (823-34). With both sides reconciled, rich and poor are joined by domestic bonds. As Sostratus says to Gorgias, who is still shy of mixing with the women inside the shrine: “You must now regard all this as family (873).” Sostratus marries for love, but Gorgias accepts Callipides' daughter as wife on the grounds that it is a sensible match and will unite the two households. Personal affection does not enter into his decision. His demeanor testifies to the attitude of a poor farmer toward affairs of the heart, and the contrast with Sostratus' erotic motive is striking.

The complex characterization of Cnemo, who appears both as a caricature of an antisocial boor and as an example of the dour but honest manner of a poor farmer, corresponds to two distinct story lines that enter into the plot of Grouch, the one based on the folk-tale pattern of an individual who withdraws from the group and fails to manage on his own, the other on a class opposition that is resolved by intermarriage between the rich and the poor; the latter theme is largely, but not exclusively, carried by the figure of Gorgias.⁴¹ To these two paradigms there corresponds a complex attitude toward erotic love. Sostratus, contrary to his friend Chaereas' expectations, is passionate for a free citizen girl, although her status requires that he aspire to marriage rather than a short-term sexual liaison. The force of his infatuation induces Sostratus to ignore the obstacle posed by Cnemo's uncompromising temperament, but his behavior in talking privately with the girl rouses the suspicions of Gorgias, who must be induced to believe that Sostratus' intentions are wholly honorable. The boy has something of the jeunnesse dorée in him, and, alongside his role in undermining Cnemo's secession from the world, which victimizes his own daughter and stepson as much as anyone else, he plays his part in the subordinate drama of class antagonisms in which the rich are perceived as potential predators upon the poor.

If Cnemo, then, is one more example of a comic humor, just waiting to be humbled in his monomaniacal obsession, he is also to some degree a typical product of the hard conditions endured by struggling farmers. His wild eccentricity, however, makes it easy to deflate him as a figure for lower-class resentment; besides, he is not in fact all that poor, and Gorgias is in a position to offer a dowry of one talent for his half sister (845), which stands up reasonably well against the three talents that Callipides proposes to give for his daughter (844). By representing Callipides as a generous and hardworking farmer, morally equivalent to Cnemo in his honesty and self-reliance, who in addition is willing to overlook differences of wealth in the choice of conjugal partners for his son and daughter, Menander deftly neutralizes the theme of class conflict, and the bonds of kinship override class divisions.

The Hellenistic epoch was a period of accelerating class differentiation. The Macedonians supported political changes in favor of large landowners, and the ancestral image of a community of citizen-farmers was becoming ever less actual.⁴² In Grouch, Menander endorses a principle of generous regard for others, of philanthrōpia in the large sense which the Greek term possesses, to stand against the disintegrative misanthropy of Cnemo. One writer sums up his argument: “Menander, then, in the Dyskolos has pictured very vividly for us the schism existing between city and country in Athens in the late fourth century b.c. At the same time he has shown us that the seeds of philanthropia which can solve this problem lie in the refinement of the city and the practical experience of the country. He shows us also the great binding influence that this feeling can have.”⁴³

Harmony between rich and poor is indeed a premise of New Comedy. A rich father does not unrelentingly oppose a marriage between his son and a poor girl on economic grounds alone. Correspondingly, the playwrights do not resolve the tension, when it arises, between a father's practical interest in a profitable alliance and his son's spontaneous passion for a beautiful but impecunious citizen girl through the device of a recognition, by which the girl turns out to be the daughter of well-to-do parents after all. A foreign girl, of course, is rendered eligible for marriage in this way; there is no other option for the dramatists, since marriages across status lines, that is, between citizen and noncitizen, were strictly forbidden in Athens. But to exploit the recognition formula in order to overcome a father's objections to a marriage with a citizen girl, however impoverished her family, would suggest a real social barrier between rich and poor, and this would violate the spirit of communal solidarity that is celebrated in New Comedy.

Menander also resolves the class issue in Grouch by displacing it onto the theme of the misanthrope's idiosyncratic unsociability. The blame for the tension in the drama falls squarely on Cnemo, and his humiliation, rather than the good will of Callipides, is represented as the critical condition for the integration of his household into the larger community. Thus the evocation of a real social conflict between classes is conjured away through the humbling of a comic grotesque, whose crankiness is the primary cause of difficulties for the romantic hero. In this, Menander's strategy in Grouch resembles that of Aristophanes in Wealth, where … the problem of unequal distribution of riches gives way to a utopian vision of universal bounty. In each case, a potential story of social inequality and tension is overridden by an alternative narrative that is fanciful or wishful in character: in Wealth, a cure for economic scarcity in the return to the abundance of the golden age; in Grouch, a festive reintegration of the community over a killjoy's refusal to participate in social life. In Aristophanes' Wasps, the complex characterization of Philocleon—as a poor man dependent, like the chorus, on the fees earned as a juror and, at the same time, as a well-to-do householder (his son is on easy terms with the Athenian aristocracy) whose passion for the courts is a pure obsession—enables a slide from issues of class to the problem of one man's peculiar mania. So, too, in Grouch, the displacement of the narrative line based on class antagonism by the issue of Cnemo's individual eccentricity is facilitated by the overdetermined representation of Cnemo as simultaneously a gloomy spoilsport and a grim but sturdy farmer.

Just because Cnemo's misanthropy is represented as an exaggerated version of a poor farmer's native testiness, it is easy to dismiss the fierce independence of the countryman as a curious quirk or lack of refinement. But the vision of an autarkic household estate ran deep in the ideology of the classical city-state. In Aristophanes' Acharnians, produced in 425 b.c., the hero, Dicaeopolis (whose name means “Just City”), in disgust at the corruption of his fellow citizens who will do nothing to secure an honorable peace with Sparta, withdraws to his own farm in the country and signs a private peace treaty with the enemy. The fantasy that follows is based on the notion that an individual household could function like a city, autonomous and self-sufficient. Aristophanes' hero succeeds brilliantly in his bold enterprise and has the Athenians begging for a share in his treaty. Menander's grouch is humbled and withdraws into an isolated retirement. The ideal of universal autarky to which he clings is already, perhaps, more an object of nostalgia than a vital element in the cultural repertoire of Athens. A smallholder could in principle support himself by his own labors, and Menander's picture of Cnemo's property and circumstances is in this respect probably a fair one.⁴⁴ But Cnemo's vision of general self-reliance seems at best quaint and irrelevant; at worst, it is merely a cover for his irrational hostility toward his fellow citizens.

There is something in the figure of the misanthrope that lends itself to a double representation, both as the antisocial recusant of communal life and as the moral critic of society's vices. In the latter function, the misanthrope readily represents an earlier and passé ideal of natural virtue against which to measure the decline of contemporary life; in the former, his indignation appears reduced to mere boorish ranting. Like Cnemo, both the Timon of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Alceste in Molière's Le misanthrope, for example, have this double aspect. Each, for all the violence of his humor, embodies the values of a traditional and passing way of life and earns a measure of respect and even obeisance from the society he abandons.⁴⁵ For the new social forms have about them, it appears, something that is morally lax, fragmented, and disordered, and each society seems to need and to court, in different ways, the authenticity of the misanthrope, for all his absurdity. But the critical force of the misanthrope's denunciations is compromised by his extreme rejection of social life. While Sostratus' and Callipides' behavior conveys a certain upper-class superciliousness, which Sostratus is at pains to disarm, Cnemo's violent spirit must be broken. After his fall in the well, he releases his hold on his daughter and his property. In the slapstick finale, however, when he is forced to join the party in spite of his resistance, the surly misanthrope is ultimately reduced to a ridiculous figure of fun.

Notes

1. For luck as a pervasive feature of Menandrean comedy, see Lefèvre 1979: 320-28.

2. On the date of Grouch, see Handley 1965: 3, 123-24.

3. Another example is Menander's Shield (Aspis), in which Chaereas confesses that he is in love with his stepfather's niece (288-89). She has, however, been betrothed to him from the beginning; the intended marriage is threatened because a greedy uncle of the girl interferes, in the hope of gaining control of her fortune. Chaereas' passion thus adds pathos to the situation, but is not itself the moving force of the action, as it is in Grouch. In Terence's Girl from Andros (Andria), which is based on a comedy of the same name by Menander with elements borrowed from a second Menandrean play called Perinthia, a secondary character named Charinus is in love with the daughter of Chremes, a wealthy Athenian; the ancient commentator Donatus specifies, however, that the subordinate plot is not to be found in Menander (ad 301, 977), and it may well be the invention of Terence.

4. There is a problem with the text at 48, and it is not altogether certain that Chaereas accompanied Sostratus on the previous day's outing. Chaereas is identified as a parasite in the dramatis personae, but even if the description is accurate, it does not disqualify the advice he offers.

5. Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 145 ad 50 note that the girl must be free if Sostratus is to marry her (they wonder how he learned her status: “One can only say that the wish had been father to the thought”); the point, however, is that because she is free, Sostratus must have marriage rather than a casual liaison in mind.

6. The beginning of verse 44 is missing. Sandbach, following Bingen, suggests the supplement erōta as the object of ekhein, in which case Pan specifies that he has induced in Sostratus a passionate desire. The word entheastikōs (divinely possessed) emphasizes the role of the god.

7. The participle is used rather than the noun erastēs (lover), which would suggest a purely amorous liaison.

8. Zagagi 1990 suggests that the gods in Menander lend an aura of significance to conventional patterns of action.

9. Cf. Konstan 1983b: 24-25.

10. Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 254.

11. On the role of the humor, see also pages 16-17 [in Konstan, David. Greek Comedy and Ideology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], discussing Philocleon's jury mania in Aristophanes' Wasps.

12. Cf. Schäfer 1965: 80.

13. Compare the marriage of Glycera in Shorn Girl. Patterson 1991: 55 observes that while pledging (enguē) a woman in marriage was understood as a transaction between her guardian and her husband to be, the ritual unveiling of the bride in the wedding (gamos) perhaps represented a symbolic gesture of assent.

14. For Plautus' Aulularia, see Chapter 11 [in Konstan, David. Greek Comedy and Ideology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995]. Arnott 1988 suggests that the original may have been a comedy by Alexis.

15. On the dramatic coherence of these episodes, see Brown 1992.

16. On the idea that the last act of a Menandrean comedy is a lively and humorous Nachspiel, or coda, see Holzberg 1974: 126, 177; Lowe 1987: 133-34; Lloyd-Jones 1987: 314; Brown 1990a: 39-43.

17. Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 268 ad 880-958.

18. Lowe 1987: 130 observes that Cnemo's solitariness “has estranged him not merely from society but from the universal systems of kinship on which society and law are founded.”

19. For a more detailed discussion, see Chapter 10 [in Konstan, David. Greek Comedy and Ideology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995].

20. The scene perhaps echoes a motif in tragedy, e.g. Euripides' Electra; see Goldberg 1980: 18, 77.

21. See Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 174 ad 240.

22. Handley 1965: 258 remarks that with Cnemo's arrangements on behalf of his family, “the complications of the plot are largely solved”; cf. Dedoussi 1988a: 83.

23. Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 205 ad 442-55 note that Cnemo's earlier speech concerning the selfish purpose of sacrifices “prepares for his apologia.”

24. On an excessive interest in someone else's business (in Greek, polupragmosunē), cf. Ehrenberg 1947; Adkins, 1976.

25. Anderson 1970: 204.

26. Cnemo's view here is undoubtedly extreme in the context of Greek sacrificial practice, but there is perhaps an implicit allusion to the idea that animal sacrifice began after the end of the golden age and was a sign of a decline in natural morality; see Vidal-Naquet 1986: 286-88.

27. Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 205 ad 442-55.

28. On the proposed emendation of 35, see Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 141 ad loc.

29. Ramage 1966: 201.

30. Post 1963: 51. See also Hunter 1985: 111.

31. Anderson 1970: 199.

32. Anderson 1970: 199; cf. Schäfer 1965: 80-82, Holzberg 1974: 21-22. Schäfer 91-95 sees the tension between characterization and plot as a feature of all Menander's comedies.

33. See Handley 1965: 136 ad loc.; on the shift in the prologue from Cnemo to Sostratus, see Holzberg 1974: 19.

34. On the cloak (khlanis) as a sign of wealth, cf. Posidippus frag. 33 (Kassel and Austin 1983-): “Everyone, it seems, used to greet my cloak, not me; now no one talks to me.” For the characterization of Sostratus as “rich and spoiled,” cf. Arnott 1981: 226.

35. See Handley 1965; Gomme and Sandbach 1973 ad loc.

36. Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 182 ad 297.

37. In this earnest protestation there is also a touch of aristocratic bravura, especially in Sostratus' readiness to accept the girl without a dowry (308).

38. Gomme and Sandbach 1973: 190 ad 366ff.

39. Names built on the Greek root hipp (horse), like Phidippides, the son of Strepsiades in Aristophanes' Clouds, suggested wealth or economic pretensions.

40. For the encounter, see Handley 1965: 271. For the reversal of the comic norm in the young man's sententiousness and Callipides' impatience, see Goldberg 1980: 88: “Sostratos' ability to win his father to the marriage, followed by Gorgias' eventual acceptance of the arrangement, resolves the tension between city and country and between rich and poor that has surfaced at intervals through the play.”

41. Cf. Lowe 1987: 129: “The Dyskolos seems to be about two things at once: on the one hand Cnemon's self-delusion of autarky …, and on the other hand the class tensions between rich and poor in rural Attica.” Lowe imaginatively indicates ways in which the stage business may have supported the representation of the themes of the play.

42. See Markle 1976 on the upper-class and self-interested nature of Philip's faction in Athens earlier in the fourth century; also MacKendrick 1969: 66-67 on Menander's aristocratic (but not necessarily plutocratic) connections. Giglioni 1984 argues that Menander's plays are a response to the exclusion from civic rights of a large number of poor Athenians: they give expression to his compassion for the indigent and project an ideal of social harmony across class lines. See also Whitehorne 1987: 7-8 for some sensible words on the politics of the Grouch.

43. Ramage 1966: 211. On philanthrōpia, see also Dover 1974: 201-2; Lefèvre 1979: 334-39.

44. See Giglioni 1982: 59-95, esp. the long concluding section on Menander's Grouch.

45. For a detailed comparison between Cnemo, Timon, and Alceste as misanthropes, see Konstan 1983a.

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