SOURCE: Handley, E. W. “Menander and the Dyskolos.” In The “Dyskolos” of Menander, pp. 3-74. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.

[In the following excerpt, Handley discusses how Menander dealt with the traditions of both comedy and tragedy, Menander's views regarding drama, and the changing popular and critical evaluations of him over the centuries.]

‘Menander, son of Diopeithes, of the Kephisian deme, was born in the archonship of Sosigenes’: that is, in the Athenian year 342/1 b.c. The year 321, in which he produced his first play, the Orge, happens to mark the centenary of Aristophanes' Peace; the Dyskolos, produced in 316, is separated from the Plutus of 388 by nearly three-quarters of a century, or rather more than two generations. These three dates in Menander's life are among those generally accepted, though each is the subject of learned dispute; if we think of him first as a writer of Greek comedy, they are useful to place him in relation to the Greek comic dramatist whose work is most fully preserved and best known.¹

In the interval between the fifth-century plays of Aristophanes and the years in which Menander grew up, the world as seen from Athens changed widely; and in literature, Comedy transformed itself, turning away from the poetic fantasy and satirical attack with which it treated public issues and prominent men towards an interest in the private affairs of fictional ordinary people; in doing so, it ceased to be topical and became universal, the recognizable prototype of much modern light drama. What we know of the development suggests evolution rather than sudden transition: Aristotle could trace its beginnings to Crates, in the generation before Aristophanes (Poetics 1449 b); the drama of everyday life in its most admired ancient form, that of Menander, was still to appear in the thirty years after Aristotle's death, which preceded the production of the Orge by some few months. Menander died in 292/1 or a neighbouring year. Provided we do not make too much of the date-lines (for poets' lives and literary fashions both cross them), 321 is a convenient boundary between the so-called New Comedy of Menander and his contemporaries and successors, and the Middle Comedy whose later developments were ‘modern’ to Aristotle. The name Middle Comedy is perhaps best reserved for plays written before 321 and after the death of Aristophanes in the mid-380's; though often one may wish rather to speak of the fifth century as opposed to the fourth: Aristophanes' later plays look both forward and back.

Alongside changes in subjects and attitude, comedy of the fourth century in general shows changes of style and form. Its language tends to the plainness of simple prose or ordinary conversation, losing much of the stylistic variety and the lively scurrilities which characterize Old Comedy as we know it best, from the fifth-century plays of Aristophanes; lyrics become sparse; the chorus declines to a band of interlude performers taking no part in the dialogue; the formal patterns of agon, parabasis, and scenes alternating with lyric, in strings or in pairs and groups, have all given way by Menander's time to a structure whose essential parts are what we call ‘acts’: that is, sequences of scenes forming more or less coherent units of composition, and marked off from each other by choral interludes which are indicated in copies of the plays by the note XOPOY (as one might write Chorus in English); the Dyskolos has five such ‘acts’, and it is probable that for Menander that number was the rule. In costume, there is little room for decorative elaboration, as with Aristophanes' Wasp-chorus, or his Hoopoe and birds in the Birds; the grossness of Old Comedy modifies towards decency; the range of masks worn by the players develops to include standard types suitable for a comedy of manners.²

One reason for recalling the earlier history of Comedy, however briefly, is to orientate ourselves; another is that Menander and his audiences must themselves have been strongly aware of the past. The aspiring comic poet in Athens wrote in the hope of achieving a production at one of the two major dramatic festivals held in the city, knowing that his own qualities would be measured not only against his contemporary competitors, but by the standards of a long and distinguished tradition. In the fourth century, apart from what they might read or see performed on lesser occasions, Athenians could see five comedies in each year they attended the Lenaea, and five at the City Dionysia; for the year 339 b.c. we have a record of an old play revived at the Dionysia, and it is probable that by 311 such revivals were regular: new and old plays were part of the same great occasion.³ The Dyskolos proves to have many points of contact with our limited knowledge of comedy in the two preceding generations; though not always easily made out, they deserve special emphasis precisely because we are working with a minute fraction of Middle Comedy texts. Although it is unclear what fact lies behind the tradition which associates Menander with Alexis, who was writing in Athens at least as early as the 350's, it can hardly have arisen unless someone who knew something of both recognized a particular affinity in their work, and gave Alexis the credit for inspiring Menander.⁴ Though the picture they give is necessarily far from complete, parallels between Menander and other comic poets can show something of what Athenian audiences expected as familiar or conventional in Comedy, and how far their taste for the familiar was satisfied. In allowing for the considerable force of comic tradition in his work, we must also remember what Menander rejected or modified. For example, the first half of the fourth century saw a major development in plays with plots and characters from myth; the type persists in the latter half of the century, though with a marked decline in popularity, but to Menander it was evidently uncongenial. Again, if we take the mageiros or cook-caterer as a type who is relatively well documented in the remains of later Greek Comedy, Menander's treatment of Sikon in the Dyskolos can be quoted both to show him using a popular stock figure and to provide evidence that he rehandles the motifs associated with it with a carefully calculated choice.⁵

A second important aspect of Menander's comedy appears when we remember that he is also in some sense heir to the traditions of tragic drama. Broadly speaking, the influence of Tragedy came to Menander in three ways: most obviously, perhaps, as part of his inheritance from earlier comic writers, in that Attic Comedy perennially borrowed language, themes and dramatic technique from serious drama, and often what was originally taken over for satirical mockery stayed on and was redeveloped as part of the comic poets' own stock-in-trade (for example, recognition scenes, in which rings or other tokens are found to reveal a character's true parentage): in particular mythological comedy, by translating heroic myth into its own kind of everyday reality, seems to have provided a bridge between serious drama about legendary heroes and light drama about fictional ordinary people. Secondly, literary studies of tragedy, as of comedy, by Aristotle and others presented Menander, his contemporaries, and the more educated members of their audiences, with informed dramatic theory and criticism; thirdly, and not least important, Menander and his audiences experienced Tragedy directly by reading their classics and seeing them restaged alongside modern work: it is perhaps mildly amusing, but certainly not ridiculous, to find a charcoal-burner quoting myth as seen in tragedy as part of his case in an argument with a shepherd (Men., Epitr. 149ff). In general, we have to recognize the influence of tragedy on Menander's plot-construction and character-drawing; in detail, our evidence goes beyond verbal echoes of known plays, and quotations that are simply part of one character's remarks to another; it extends to the subtler form of reminiscence in which a comic scene is given overtones by echoing a famous incident in tragedy, or by following a tragic pattern of structure, language, or metre, which in performance could be emphasized by voice, gesture, and staging. So in the Dyskolos at 690ff, when the stricken Knemon is brought out from his house on a couch or bed, the situation which the comic plot has created gains in depth from the echo in stage spectacle, and perhaps in language, of the situation of a stricken hero in tragedy: the audience is to realize that the major crisis of Knemon's life is at hand, and the comparison which the dramatist suggests helps to bring this realization about.⁶

Menander grew up in an Athens dominated by Macedon: Philip's victory at Chaeronea came in 338, when he was about four years old. In autumn 322 (some few months before Menander made his début with the Orge), the Athenian-inspired revolt which followed on Alexander's death was crushed in battles on land and sea, and a Macedonian garrison occupied the harbour-fort of Munychia at the Peiraeus; Demosthenes, Hyperides and others who had advocated rebellion were condemned as traitors and hunted to their deaths; Aristotle had left Athens for Chalcis, where he died in refuge against the vindictiveness of the anti-Macedonian party. A new revolution following on the death of Antipater in 319 was in turn fought down by his son Cassander, and early in 317 Cassander established Demetrius of Phalerum as governor of Athens. The preceding spring had seen the theatre packed for a notorious treason trial, to which Phocion and some of his associates were brought for condemnation, and soon afterwards they were executed: as the tide of events turned, outright resistance, reasoned compromise, and willing collaboration were alike disastrous to their less fortunate adherents. Demetrius had been both fortunate and skilful; a man of many talents, he brought to the government of Athens a political and social programme informed by the philosophy of the Peripatetic school, at whose head now stood Aristotle's successor, Theophrastus. Theophrastus could count both Demetrius and Menander among his pupils, and if the date we have accepted for the Dyskolos is correct, it was produced during the first winter of the new governor's administration.⁷

Demetrius, born about 350, was perhaps some eight years older than Menander. The two men are linked by education, and perhaps already by the friendship which bade fair to involve Menander in the overthrow of Demetrius ten years later⁸, it is therefore tempting to wonder whether the Dyskolos was in any sense influenced by the ideas of the new regime, or by the context of events in which it was produced. Menander is of course no Aristophanes, and what can be seen of the general trend of comedy in the years which separate them does not encourage us to expect political or personal references to be prominent. Nevertheless, direct satirical allusion in the old tradition is still possible in the later fourth century; there are signs of it in the Orge and in other plays of Menander which are reasonably dated early; the absence of anything immediately comparable in the Dyskolos is therefore striking enough to note, though it may be due to chance or a change in the author's mood rather than to the new political climate. Historical events of the near or remoter past sometimes appear in New Comedy as part of the background of its characters' lives, and may therefore introduce an element of political or social commentary, as when ‘the war and the troubles in Corinth’ are part of Glykera's past in the Perikeiromene (5f, cf. 282ff). But again, whether significantly or not, the Dyskolos gives no occasion for relating its characters' lives to events outside the play. Perhaps the nearest thing to a pointed historical allusion is the passage of Knemon's major speech in which he contrasts his own ideal of life with the way of the world, where the evils of trials, imprisonment and war arise, according to Knemon, because men seek selfish gain and will not be content with a moderate living (743-5). The thought is wide enough to be of general application, but has enough relevance to the events of the immediate past to strike home: some of the audience must have seen Phocion on trial.⁹ But however vividly Menander intended it to do so, his basic point is an ethical and not a political one; and unless we are prepared to account politically for the lack of more direct references to personalities and current events (never, it seems, an important element in Menander's comedy), we have to ask in more general terms whether the thought and moral tone of the play are politically inspired. Here, apart from the difficulty in the terms of the question, there are manifold problems in the evidence which can be brought to bear on it. The study of Menander in relation to Greek philosophy, and especially that of Aristotle and his followers, reveals that the words and actions of the dramatic characters are sometimes strongly coloured by what was the more advanced thought of the age; Menander can be shown to owe to his education not only much of the literary doctrine which helped him to arrive at a particular kind of comedy, but also the keen observation of human qualities and the careful discrimination of ethical values which give the characteristically serious tone beneath the light-hearted surface. But the affiliation of ideas between Theophrastus, Demetrius and Menander (to say nothing of Aristotle in the background) is perhaps rarely to be traced with schematic precision. Apart from the difficulties of disputed chronology and incomplete information (in any event the originator of an idea is not necessarily the first to give it wide currency), it is easier in the nature of the case to establish community of views between contemporaries than to establish influence from A to B; and points made in a drama have not necessarily the same value as when they appear as part of a philosophic treatise or a political programme. Thus, to take an example, Knemon's denunciation of extravagance in sacrifice at Dyskolos 447ff can be claimed to have contemporary point from its kinship with the doctrines of Theophrastus, On Piety and with the moralizing tone of Demetrius' sumptuary laws. But its potential value as philosophic or political propaganda is affected both by the character and situation of the speaker—a disagreeable old recluse disturbed by visitors to the shrine next door—and by the audience's memory of variations on the same theme in other dramatic contexts. Menander gives circulation to the philosophic coinage of his day, and some of it he thought highly valuable, but he is neither a systematic philosopher nor a professional politician. If, as is probable enough, he found much in the ideals of the new regime of which he approved, it is pertinent to note from what reference he makes to Demetrius' legislation, that the activities of the governor do not seem to have earned Menander's unqualified approval.¹⁰ It seems best to accept the serious content of Menander as a function of his attempt to give ordinary human affairs depth and contemporary interest through the medium of light drama; his tone is not that of a purveyor of officially approved attitudes, but rather that of a detached yet sympathetic observer of his fellow men's thoughts and deeds.

If Menander ever expounded his views of drama in detail, we have no record of the fact; but among the stories told of him there is one which at least gives a lead to what he thought important. According to Plutarch (Moralia 347 E), a friend is said to have remarked ‘Well, Menander, the festival's nearly here, and you haven't composed your comedy, have you?’ ‘Composed my comedy?’, replied Menander, ‘I most certainly have: I have my treatment of the theme worked out—I just have to set the lines to it.’ Designing the play was the vital and difficult part; once that was done, the dialogue would follow.¹¹ One should not of course go too far in deducing a literary doctrine from what is after all a neat and possibly half-ironical way out of a friendly social challenge; but there is a recognizable core of truth in the remark, which may well have helped to make it memorable in the first place.

In being virtually complete, the Dyskolos offers an admirable illustration of this concept of comedy: a play planned as a whole, to progress from beginning through dramatic climax to lighthearted conclusion, with its detail taking a place in the main design and contributing to it. By some modern standards of dramaturgy, this is an unpopular quality; when narration or commentary attempts to bring it out in an ancient play, one is apt to feel either that the obvious is being laboured at length, or that the conclusions drawn from the text are too calculatedly academic to be real in terms of the dramatist's own practical intentions: but it is the general fate of commentators to follow with labour where original writers go by genius. A good example of detailed planning in the Dyskolos will present itself later when we consider how Menander brings out the rustic setting of the play through the words of the text … ; here it is perhaps useful to call attention to one striking general feature of the design.

The central feature of the Dyskolos is the character who gives it its title, Knemon, the ‘Angry Old Man’, the misanthrope. We see him on stage for roughly a quarter of the time the play would take to act, over half of this in two scenes which come late on—the predominantly serious scene of Act IV, from 691 to about 760, which brings the climax of dramatic interest, and the scene in Act V from 909 onwards, where a situation from earlier in the play is taken up and refashioned to provide a finale of lively comic revel. For much of the time, Knemon remains in the background, dominating the play through what we hear of him from others, until his long scene in Act IV brings the moment for him to reveal himself, and in revaluing his way of life to resolve most of the dramatic tension which has been built up around and about him; with that, the pattern of the plot is worked out almost to completion.¹² The main line of the action begins from, and follows, the attempts of young Sostratos to approach Knemon for consent to marry his daughter, and it is through the lover's story, complicated and diversified by the presence of unreliable helpers and unexpected allies, that the portrait of Knemon is built up: the audience sees him as he is seen by different characters, whose reactions to Knemon are intended, in different proportions, to reveal both him and them.¹³ This example of a central character portrayed to a high degree by indirect means finds an interesting contrast in a close dramatic relation of Knemon's, the self-centred old miser Euclio of Plautus, Aulularia; to make the point by arithmetic, Euclio is on stage for something over half, and possibly near to three-quarters of the time the play would take to act, calculating approximately from the incomplete Latin text: he and his affairs are largely in the foreground, and the lover's story, analogous to that of Sostratos in the Dyskolos, is correspondingly made to recede. Since the Greek original of the Aulularia was almost undeniably a play by Menander, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the two plays were seen by the author as complementary variations in the study of a similar central character—not of course exclusively, but at least to some extent consciously.¹⁴

From Antiquity onwards, Menander has been much praised for his realism: the unaffected naturalness of his language, the likeness of his characters to real people, the true portrait he gives of life in fourth-century Athens.¹⁵ After what has been said already, it is perhaps not necessary to spend long in remarking that realism is a relative term, and that Menander's realism is not only the product of acute observation, but of a refined art working in a traditional medium. His subjects, while less limited than one might believe from those who listen too closely to Ovid's assertion that ‘there is no play of Menander's without love’, are chosen and treated with a regard for the conventions of civilized high comedy: so far as we know, Menander excluded from his plays a whole range of grave events and permanent misfortunes (such as murder and distressing illness) to which real human beings are unfortunately prone; nor, as a rule, does he indulge in realistic detail purely for realistic detail's sake: his plays are plays and not documentary records.¹⁶ We may judge his characters to be drawn with acute psychological insight, yet he is not, as a modern dramatist might be, concerned to explore the inner depths of their personalities; his analysis of character is ethical rather than psychological, and it is striking in the Dyskolos that Knemon's major speech of self-revelation leaves the old man's emotions almost entirely to the audience's imagination.¹⁷ Menander's Greek can still appeal to modern critics, as it did to ancient ones, by its air of aptness to character and situation, and its range of effects from seriousness and high emotion to easy colloquial familiarity: from it, one seems to hear real people speaking; yet one suspects that Menander would not have dissented strongly from the modern dramatist who argued that ‘it is not the purpose of dialogue to reproduce conversation naturalistically but rather, in the guise of conversation, to supply conversation's deficiencies—to be amusing where conversation is dull, to be economic where conversation is wasteful, to be articulate and lucid where conversation is mumbling or obscure’.¹⁸ The mirror in which Menander is said to reflect life filters, concentrates, and sometimes distorts the impression it receives; often, we may think, it thereby shows more than the superficial truth; but if we expect it to reflect life in too literal a sense, the result will not be gratification.¹⁹

The rediscovery of the Dyskolos in the 1950's adds one more chapter to a story already rich in material for a study in historical paradox. Menander's dramatic career began with successes which rivals must have envied. The Orge, produced in the year of his twentieth birthday, appears to have won first prize at the Lenean festival, where five years later the Dyskolos was also placed first; victory at the Dionysia came in the following year, with a play of unknown title: for such honours others worked longer and in vain. There were less pleasant occasions. In 312, it seems, a play of Menander's came last at the Dionysia, his Heniochos; by 302/1, when he wrote the Imbrioi for a Dionysiac production which had to be cancelled, the number of his plays could be reckoned in the 70's; by the time of his death ten years later, he had written over a hundred; he was awarded first prizes eight times in all—an eminently creditable but not spectacular total.²⁰ If satisfaction depended on winning the first, disappointment must have been frequent in a dramatic career of some 30 years: Aulus Gellius (17.4) has a story of Menander meeting one of his principal rivals, and saying ‘Do tell me, Philemon—don't you blush when you beat me?’²¹ But competitive success, however welcome, was not an infallible test of merit and esteem. Soon after his death, perhaps within his lifetime, Menander was honoured by a statue commissioned from Kephisodotos and Timarchos, the sons of Praxiteles, and set up in the Theatre of Dionysus; only its base now survives.²² A more enduring monument came with the praises of later writers and critics generally, who were to reverse what seemed to some the unjust verdict of Menander's own contemporaries. ‘What is the good of an educated man going to the theatre’ asks Plutarch ‘except to see Menander?’; for Quintilian, Menander's brilliance makes all other writers in the same genre seem dim; and there were others who shared these opinions, both before Quintilian's time and after.²³ For all that, zealots for the purity of Classical Attic could deplore Menander's use of words not found in the most approved authors, and question his value as a model for correct composition.²⁴ Performances still took place well into Roman Imperial times; copies continued to be made in the fifth and sixth centuries a.d.; but if we attempt to trace the survival of the plays through those who show direct knowledge of them, we lose the trail in the sixth century or the early seventh.²⁵ From then until rediscovery begins to transform the situation, in the later nineteenth century, Menander was virtually a lost author. His influence on modern western drama has been considerable, but came almost exclusively though the Latin adaptations of his work by Plautus and Terence, more fortunate in their survival; of Menander in Greek, all that was known directly came from quotations and excerpts preserved by other authors for the sake of their memorable moral sentiments, their antiquarian or linguistic interest, and for a variety of other reasons, few of which have much to do with the qualities of the plays as drama.²⁶ Texts bearing on Menander, quotations, and adaptations in Latin were thus for long the total stock of evidence available to those who wished to study him. The most substantial accession to this material so far was brought by the Cairo Codex, discovered in 1905 and published in 1907 by its discoverer, G. Lefèbvre. This preserves large parts of Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene and Samia, as well as the opening scene of Heros and some lesser items—a bulk of text exceeding that of the Dyskolos, but with many damaged lines and no single play nearly as complete. There followed both increased appreciation, and—perhaps inevitably—disappointment.²⁷ First reactions to the publication of the Dyskolos were somewhat similarly mixed, and it would not be surprising if the same happened again when (as may be expected with confidence), some more substantial new texts become available.²⁸ For many reasons, not least because of the singular and still growing history of the recovery of Menander's works, the study of him is, and is likely to remain, one of some technical complexity, in which broad critical generalizations are not easily made, and once made are prone to prove fragile. The Dyskolos may be commended as an attractive, well-made play, essentially light-hearted, but with a blend of deeper human insight and sympathy. To claim that it is a great play by universal standards would be extravagant; nor, as a single relatively early work, should we expect it to show all of Menander's most admired qualities to their best advantage; it does however offer an opportunity to readers and audiences which has been lacking for centuries, to recognize, and appreciate if they will, a virtually complete work in its original language by the supreme ancient writer, and in some sense the originator, of a highly fruitful form of civilized literature.

Notes

1. Texts bearing on Menander's life and works appear in the second volume of the Teubner edition by Koerte-Thierfelder, to which the reader will be referred: the quotation which opens this section is from IG 14.1184 (Koerte II, Testimonia, 3). For discussion and dating, see especially Jacoby, F Gr Hist, vol. 2 D, pp. 734ff; Koerte, RE ‘Menandros’ 15.1 (1931) 707ff; Webster, SM 103-8; for problems arising from the Athenian archon lists and other chronological evidence for the period, see Meritt, Hesperia 26 (1957) 53-54 and A. E. Samuel, Ptolemaic Chronology 16ff (= Münchener Beiträge, Heft 43, 1962), with references there given ….

2. On the history of Greek Comedy in the period 400-321, see Webster, LGC, 1-97; and on the evidence from vases, terracottas, etc., MOMC, Introd., pp. 1-12. A classic essay on the character of Middle Comedy by Meineke appears in his Frag. Com. Graec. vol. 1 (1839); an admirable encyclopaedic survey by Koerte is in RE ‘Komödie’ 11.1 (1921) 1256-66. On acts and act-divisions there is much debate: since the Dyskolos is still the only fully preserved Menander in Greek, a minimal statement might be that the other remains of him are consistent with the ‘five-act’ pattern of composition and do not warrant the assumption of any other.…

3. IG 2². 2318, col. xii; ib.2323 a: cf. Pickard-Cambridge, Festivals, 125. For evidence of fourth-century productions at the Peiraeus and other Attic theatres outside Athens, see Vitucci, Dioniso 7 (1939) 210ff, and Pickard-Cambridge, op. cit. 40ff.

4. … If Alexis really lived to be 106, he could still have been writing in the early 270's after Menander's death (cf. Alex., Hypobolimaios 244 K), but their lives in any case have a long overlap. For dates of Alexis' plays, often debatable, see Webster, CQ n.s. 2 (1952) 13ff: where chronology is no obstacle, resemblances between the two poets could have arisen from influence in either direction. For ancient research into literary ‘borrowings’ by Menander, cf. Koerte II, Test. 51, and the introductory note to the frgg. of Deisidaimon.

5. Mythological Comedy: see Webster (quoted p. 5, n. 2) p. 23, and LGC 82ff. The alternative title for Menander's Achaioi given by P.Oxy.27.2462 shows that it was not a mythological play, as some have supposed. Sikon: see especially on 393, 489-98, 889, 946-53.

6. See Webster's chapter on ‘Menander and earlier Greek Drama’ in SM, 153-94, and his paper ‘Fourth century Tragedy and the Poetics’ in Hermes 82 (1954) 294ff; for possible tragic reminiscences in the Dyskolos, see e.g. on 189, 269ff, 574ff; for metrical effects, Introd. IV.1, at p. 59.

7. On the events of these years, see especially Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, Ch. 1 (pp. 1-37); on Demetrius of Phalerum and his writings, Ferguson, Chapter 2; F. Wehrli, Schule des Aristoteles iv (1949); and Erich Bayer, Demetrios Phalereus der Athener, Tübinger Beiträge 36, 1941. Menander and Theophrastus: Koerte II, Test. 7.

8. The source is Diog. Laert. 5.79 = Koerte II, Test. 8.

9. …for discussion in relation to the trial of Phocion, F. della Corte, Maia 1960.83ff. The Dyskolos is briefly considered in relation to its historical background by Momigliano, Riv. Storica Italiana 1959.326ff; on contemporary allusions in Menander and other fourth-century comic poets, see Webster, SM 103ff, and LGC 37ff, 100ff.

10. Webster, SM 119f, referring to Kekryphalos, frg. 238 (272 K), with Plautus, Aulularia 475ff and 504 (see p. 12, n. 2), and Bacchides 912; on Menander and philosophy, see SM 195-219 and SM² 234; on Peripatetic ideas and the Dyskolos, see W. Schmid, RhM 1959.157-82 and 263-6; on Dysk. and Theophrastus, P. Steinmetz, RhM 1960.185-91; and, most recently, K. Gaiser's remarks in O. Rieth, Die Kunst Menanders in den ‘Adelphen’ des Terenz (1964), p. 146 and n. …

11. Wilamowitz, Das Schiedsgericht (Epitrepontes), 119, quotes the story to begin his discussion of ‘The Art of Menander’. It could be fictional, as such anecdotes commonly are; but a likely source of personal reminiscences of Menander is his contemporary Lynceus of Samos, who may be the ultimate source here, as Wilamowitz suggests. …

12. For details of Knemon's part, see Introd. II.2 [in Graves, Robert. Food for Centaurs: Stories, Talks, Critical Studies, Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960]; for a view of the ending of the play in relation to the main design, see the Commentary [in Graves, Robert. Food for Centaurs: Stories, Talks, Critical Studies, Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960] under 729-39 (end of note), 867ff (end of note), and 880-958 (iii).

13. For example, in Act I, basic facts about Knemon are given by Pan in the prologue speech; we then see him through the eyes of a badly frightened slave whom he has chased off his land, and can observe the reactions of Sostratos and Chaireas to what they hear of him (81-146); then we have Sostratos confronted with Knemon, and learn more of the old man from seeing and hearing him ourselves (147-88); a little more is added by what we see and hear of his daughter (189-206); the act ends with a portrait of Knemon as he appears to the slave next door (220ff). One aspect of the dramatist's problem is of course to engage dramatic interest and sympathy for a character who is by nature static, withdrawn, and uncongenial: for discussion of the type in Greek and other literature, see Penelope Photiades, Chron. d'Égypte 34 (1959) no. 68, pp. 305ff, and Claire Préaux, ib. 327ff. Comparison and contrast heighten the effect of the portrait: the young countryman Gorgias is in some ways akin to the old countryman Knemon, for instance in his devotion to work and his instinctive dislike of strangers; the lightly-drawn figure of Sostratos' father Kallippides is largely Knemon's opposite.

14. … the far-reaching differences of theme, treatment and emphasis in the two plays should not be allowed to obscure the many common features which emerge from the detailed comparison which the rediscovery of the Dyskolos makes possible. It is credible that the original of Aul. was close to and later than Dysk. in date, but the evidence available does not allow the two productions to be related with chronological precision: if Aul. 504 is accepted as a reference to gynaikonomoi under Demetrius of Phalerum, the limits of date for its original are 317-07; but see Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus, 137ff (= Elem. Plaut. 130ff; cf. 413) and Claude Wehrli, Mus. Helv. 19 (1962) 33-38.

15. See especially two recent papers by Claire Préaux, Ménandre et la société Athénienne, Chron. d'Égypte 32 (1957) no. 63, 84-100; and Les fonctions du droit dans la comédie nouvelle, ib. 35 (1960) no. 69, 222-39. Legrand (tr. Loeb), The New Greek Comedy, Ch. V (206ff), ranges widely round the topic of realism, mixing useful with misleading and outdated information; … on some conventions of language, S. Zini, Il linguaggio dei personaggi nelle commedie di M., Firenze, 1938.

16. Ovid: Tristia 2.369f = Koerte II, Test. 35; his epigrammatic summary of Menander's themes by characters at Amores 1.1.17f (Ib., Test. 34) is similarly misleading when elevated beyond the status its context provides. Conventions of comedy: ‘Comedy treats of private affairs and does not involve danger’ … according to a definition known principally from its quotation by the grammarian Diomedes, and deriving in all probability from Theophrastus: Diom., Gram. Lat. I, p. 488 Keil = Kaibel, CGF I, p. 57, cf. Cantarella, Aristofane I, under B.75 (p. 89), Webster LGC 113f. A good summary introduction to some ancient and modern theories of comedy appears in Duckworth, Nature of Roman Comedy, 305ff.…

17. Dysk. 708-47: Knemon expounds the principles on which he has acted and the decision he has reached: he does not say what are and have been his more personal feelings about himself and those near to him, and what we learn otherwise is probably far less than would have satisfied a modern dramatist with as serious an interest in the character.

18. Charles Morgan, Dialogue in Novels and Plays (Hermon Ould Memorial Lecture, 1953; publ. 1954), p. 7.

19. ‘omnem uitae imaginem expressit’ says Quintilian in recommending the study of Menander to the young orator, Inst. Or. 10.1.69 = Koerte II, Test. 38. This and similar pronouncements by ancient critics and those who echo their views are prone to need qualification in our own age, when drama on the stage and the cinema screen has set different standards of realism.

20. See above, … n. 1; apart from the Dyskolos didascalia, the texts immediately relevant here are Koerte II, Test. 1, 2, 14, 23-24, 27-28.

21. The remark may well be fictional. …

22. This work, which was seen by Pausanias, is probably the ultimate source of many later likenesses, including the well-known relief in Rome of Menander with comic masks (Lateran Museum 487: Bieber HT², figs. 317 a-c; Webster, MNC, no. is io). By the second century a.d., the theatre seems to have abounded in statues of poets ‘mostly of the less distinguished’: Pausanias 1.21.1 = Koerte II, Test. 19.

23. Plutarch, Comp. Ar. et Men., Moralia 854 B; Quintilian, Inst. Or. 10.1.69 (= Koerte II, Test. 41 and 38); for discussion, see RE ‘Menandros’ 714ff; and on some aspects of ancient criticism of Menander, A. Garzya, Riv. Fil. Ist. Class. 1959.237-52, and F. Quadlbauer, Wiener Studien 1960 (= Festschr. J. Mewaldt) 40-82.

24. ‘What Aristophanes gained in the schools, Menander lost’ according to Koerte, RE ‘Menandros’, 717; but see Quadlbauer (quoted n. [22]) pp. 70ff. For criticisms of Menander from Phrynichus and Pollux, see Koerte II, Test. 46-47.

25. Cf. Koerte II, p. 13, and Cantarella, Dioniso 17 (1954) 22-37. The fragments from St Catherine on Sinai now in Leningrad were part of a codex dated to the fourth century a.d. which was apparently dismembered in the eighth century and re-used for writing a Syriac text: Koerte I, p. xvii; Cantarella, p. 23. For evidence of performances (perhaps continuing as late as the sixth century a.d.), see Webster, AJA 1962.333ff; for literary reminiscences of the Dyskolos, see Photiades, quoted n.13 and J.-M. Jacques, Bull. Ass. Budé, 1959.200-15.

26. … The preface to Koerte II, written in 1943, traces the earlier history of the ‘quoted’ fragments, beginning from Hugo Grotius (1616) and Johannes Clericus (1709).

27. The progress of rediscovery from fragments of ancient copies is admirably outlined by K. J. Dover, in M. Platnauer (ed.) Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (1954) 105-8.

    Appreciation: I mention three shorter studies in English, by Gomme, Essays in Greek History and Literature (1937) 249-95; by Murray, Aristophanes (1933) 221-63; and by Post, From Homer to Menander (1951) 214-44. Disappointment: e.g. Angus, in Cambridge Ancient History, vii (1928) 224ff; W. W. Tarn, in his Hellenistic Civilization, expresses still stronger feelings: ‘It is usual to praise (Menander) without stint … But to the writer he and his imitators seem about the dreariest desert in literature.’ (3rd ed., 1952, p. 273).

28. Since the Dyskolos was published, some fragments ascribed to the Misogynes of Menander have appeared in Antinoopolis Papyri, vol. 2, no. 55, and are appended in Mette, Dyskolos²; but reliable report has it that discoveries of new text have considerably outrun publication. A good bibliography of the first spate of work on the Dyskolos by J. T. McDonough, Jr., appeared in Class. World 53 (1960) 277-80, 296-8; if considered opinions of the Cairo plays are any guide, widely different views of the merits of the Dyskolos are likely to be expressed long after the initial impact of the discovery has been forgotten. As this edition went to press, the discovery of some 400 lines of the Sikyonios (? Sikyonioi) was announced at the Académie des Inscriptions in Paris by Professor André Bataille, and their publication is eagerly awaited (‘The Times’, ‘The Guardian’, 22.vi.63). See further A. Dain, ‘La survie de Ménandre’, Maia 1963.278-309 ….

Abbreviations, Etc.

I hope that most of the abbreviations in this book will be clear or familiar; the lists in the revised (1925-40) edition of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (= LSJ) may help readers who are concerned with any which are not. Articles in learned journals are often cited in short form without title (e.g. W. G. Arnott, CQ 1957.188-98), though I have sometimes expanded the form of reference as standard in L'Année Philologique (e.g. ‘Class. World’, not ‘CW’). L'Année Philologique, from vol. 28 onwards, but essentially from vol. 30 (Bibliographie de l'année 1959), 1960, should be consulted for work on the Dyskolos; … a note on some editorial conventions of the present work immediately precedes the text of the play.

For other plays by Menander, I quote as a rule from Koerte (see below); fragments of Greek comic poets other than Menander are quoted where possible from Kock, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta (= K), and where possible with transliterated titles (though the transliterated title does not necessarily reflect my own opinion of the correct original form); papyrus fragments of drama are quoted where possible from D. L. Page, Greek Literary Papyri (1941; 3rd edn. 1950); I have occasionally consulted the recent edition of the fragments of Attic Comedy by J. M. Edmonds. Sometimes, when restorations and doubtful readings in a text were immaterial to the matter in hand, I have discarded the apparatus of brackets and dotted letters provided by my source, as with Menander, Heros 42f … ; on other occasions, it has seemed prudent to call special attention to the state of the text, as with Perikeiromene 424f, quoted on 144.…

The following special abbreviations are used for some frequently quoted works:

Koerte I³: Menandri quae supersunt: pars prior. Ed. A. Koerte, Leipzig, Teubner, 1938; repr. with addenda, 1955.

Koerte II: Menandri quae supersunt: pars altera. Ed. A. Koerte, with revisions and addenda by A. Thierfelder, 1953; repr. with further addenda and corrections, 1959.

Denniston, Particles: The Greek Particles, by J. D. Denniston: Oxford, 1934; 2nd edn., with revisions and addenda by K. J. Dover, 1954.

KG I KG II｝: Ausführliche Grammatik d. griechischen Sprache, von R. Kühner. Zweiter Teil, dritte Auflage, in zwei Bänden. Revised by B. Gerth, Hanover and Leipzig, 1898 (I); 1904 (II).

NT Gramm.: A Greek Grammar of the New Testament, etc., by F. Blass and A. Debrunner: a translation and revision of the ninth-tenth German edition … by Robert W. Funk, Cambridge and Chicago, 1961.

Schwyzer I Schwyzer II｝: Griechische Grammatik, von Eduard Schwyzer, München, C. H. Beck (= Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft II.i.1-2), 1953 (reprint of I); 1950 (II, ed. A. Debrunner).

Webster, SM: Studies in Menander, by T. B. L. Webster, Manchester, 1950; 2nd edn., with an appendix (pp. 220-34), 1960.

Webster, LGC: Studies in Later Greek Comedy, by T. B. L. Webster, Manchester, 1953.

Bieber, HT² Webster, GTP MNC MOMC｝: See Introd. II.3 in Graves, Robert. Food for Centaurs: Stories, Talks, Critical Studies, Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960.