Menander: Ancient Greek Poet, and the representative of New Comedy

Menander (Gr. Μένανδρος Menandros, 342–291 BC) was an ancient Greek poet, the principal representative of New Comedy and comedy of characters. He hailed from a family that provided him with a careful upbringing and education. He was a student of Theophrastus and a friend of Epicurus, with whom he likely served in the military. His interest in theater was greatly influenced by the renowned playwright Alexis. He admired the theatrical works of Euripides, whom he sought to emulate in his own way. Menander is believed to have been susceptible to the charms of women. His lover was likely the courtesan Glycera, the mistress of Harpalus. Menander met a tragic end in Piraeus, drowning at the age of 51 or 52 while bathing. He authored 108 comedies, which were lost by the end of antiquity but rediscovered in recent centuries among Egyptian papyri. The content of four of them has been reconstructed.

Life

Menander was the son of Diopheithes and Hegestrata. He hailed from the Athenian deme of Kephisia. He was born during the archonship of Sosigenes, around 342/341 BC. He received a thorough education, with the philosopher Theophrastus as his teacher. At Theophrastus’ school, he befriended Demetrius of Phaleron (c. 354–283), a philosopher and later ruler of Athens under the Macedonian ruler Cassander. During his military training (ephebeia), he encountered the young Epicurus (341–270). He also personally knew another writer of New Comedy, Alexis (c. 372–c. 270), from whom he seems to have learned the secrets of comedic craftsmanship. As a young writer, he admired the works of Euripides, which he likely experienced on stage, and which he attempted to emulate in a different manner, according to Quintilian. He began writing and staging comedies at a very young age. He made his debut at the age of twenty, during the archonship of Philocles in 322/321 BC. He first achieved victory in a theatrical competition, seven years after his debut, with the play “The Anger,” presumed to be a character study of an irascible person. Throughout his career as a playwright, he achieved seven more victories.

Despite invitations to the courts of the Ptolemies, rulers of Egypt, and closer philhellene Macedonian rulers, he remained in Athens. After the fall and exile of Demetrius of Phaleron, he narrowly escaped punishment by a court sentence, from which he was saved by an individual named Telesphorus, a spokesman for the victorious Demetrius Poliorcetes. An ancient rumor suggests that he was extremely sensitive to the charms of women. Two prominent courtesans of the time, Thais (a friend of Alexander the Great) and Glycera (the lover of Harpalus, a figure in one of the era’s biggest scandals), are considered his partners. This speculation is based on the fact that he titled two of his comedies with their names.

He was a handsome man, as confirmed by his surviving portraits, with regular features. However, he had a squint, but, as an ancient note states, he had a sharp mind. An anecdote illustrating his sharp wit tells us that upon encountering his rival, Philemon, who repeatedly bested him in theatrical competitions by pandering to the audience, he supposedly said, “Philemon, tell me, do you not blush when you win over me?” He had an extraordinary ease of writing. When asked shortly before a competition by someone close to him, “Dionysia is near, Menander, and yet you haven’t created a comedy yet?” he reportedly replied, “By the gods, I have already created one, the plot is set, I just need to add the verses.”

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He died at the age of 52 (291/290 BC) in Piraeus, drowning while bathing. His tomb, located on the road from Piraeus to Athens, was still shown five hundred years later to Pausanias, who traveled through Greece. A bronze statue of him was erected in the theater after the poet’s death.

Theatrical Works

Menander wrote a total of about 100 plays over 32 years (the number 108 is often cited). Scholars debate whether all of them were staged during competitions in Athens or if some were performed elsewhere, and they also consider the possibility that some works were meant only for reading. It is known that Menander won 8 times at the Lenaea competitions, that in 312 BC he ranked fifth in the Great Dionysia with “The Wagoner,” and that in 302/301 BC he staged “The Imbrians” as his seventieth play. There is no certain information about the staging of other plays. The chronological order of Menander’s works is also difficult to establish. Besides “The Wagoner,” “The Imbrians,” and the debut play “The Anger,” only “The Recluse,” written in 317/316 BC, can be dated with certainty. Of the 108 plays attributed to the writer, 97 titles are known, with some titles referring to the same play, such as “The Recluse” or “The Misanthrope” and “The Woman from Samos” or “The Relatives.”

Titles of Selected Works by Menander

Comedies with Likely Family Themes

• Brothers (two comedies with this title)
• Twins
• Cousins
• The Bride
• The Foundling

Comedies with Likely Themes Related to Professions and Occupations

• The Farmer
• The Fisherman
• The Lyre Player
• The Flute Player
• The Wagoner
• The Doorkeeper
• The Helmsmen

Comedies Whose Titles Indicate the Origin of Characters

• The Carthaginian
• The Cariwoman (possibly The Mourner from Caria)
• The Woman from Samos
• The Boeotian Woman
• The Thessalian Woman (possibly The Witch from Thessaly)
• The Cretan
• The Ephesian Man
• The Achaeans

Comedies Whose Titles Indicate an Important Scene in the Work

• Arbitration
• The Cut Braid (strictly speaking: The Girl with the Cut Braid)
• Haunted by a Deity
• Set on Fire

Comedies Whose Titles Indicate a Significant Prop

• The Shield
• The Ring
• The Dagger
• The Hair Net

Comedies Whose Titles Indicate a Character’s Flaw or Personality

• Anger
• Drunkenness
• The Recluse
• The Flatterer
• Self-Tormentor
• Superstitious
• Fearmonger
• Woman Hater

Surviving Legacy

From the rich repertoire of the playwright, one complete comedy and three whose actions can be completely reconstructed have survived. They are:

• The Woman from Samos (sometimes called The Samian Woman; Σαμία ἢ Κηδεία Samia e Kedeia) – one of Menander’s earliest plays, written between 321 and 319 BC, lacking the beginning.
• The Recluse or The Misanthrope (Δύσκολος ἢ Μισάνθρωπος Dyskolos e Misanthropos) – which won first place at the Lenaea in 317 BC.
• The Shield (Ἀσπίς Aspis) – written after 314 BC, of which only Acts IV and V have survived fragmentarily.
• Arbitration (Arbitration; Ἐπιτρέποντες Epitrepontes) – written towards the end of the author’s life, before 292 BC, preserved in 2/3.

With a high degree of certainty, the content of twelve other works can be reconstructed:

• the first Brothers – preserved in a Latin adaptation by Plautus titled “Stichus”;
• the second Brothers – preserved in an adaptation by Terence also titled Brothers (Adelphoe);
• The Woman from Andros – adapted by Terence into “Andria,” contaminated with Menander’s Woman from Perinthos;
• The Unbeliever (Apistos) – serving as the model for Plautus’ “The Pot of Gold” (Aulularia);
• The Twice-Deceived (Dis exapatòn) – adapted into Plautus’ “The Sisters” (Bacchides), from which 150 verses of the original were found;
• The Eunuch – staged in Latin by Terence under the same title, enriched with fragments from Menander’s Flatterer;
• The Self-Tormentor (Heautontimorùmenos) – adapted for the Roman stage by Terence;
• The Flatterer (Kolax) – reconstructed from several papyri and Terence’s Eunuch mentioned above;
• The Hated Man (Misùmenos) – from which papyri brought over 400 verses, partly heavily damaged;
• The Cut Braid (Perikejromène) – reconstructed from papyri, preserving nearly 40% of the work;
• The Sicyonian Woman (Skyonios) – reconstructed from large papyrus fragments containing over 400 verses;
• and The Women at Breakfast (Synaristosaj) – adapted by Plautus into “The Casket Comedy” (Cistellaria).

Larger portions of text, ranging from one to several scenes, have also been found from The Farmer (Georgòs), The Hero, The Woman Possessed by a Deity (Theophorumene), The Ring (Daktylios), The Lyre Player (Kitharistes), and The Specter (Phasma).

Characteristics of Menander’s Works

General Overview

The action of most of Menander’s plays takes place in the city, while The Recluse, set in rural Attica, also features Athenian citizens as characters. While The Recluse is still a comedy with a single, dominant character, centered around a feast and a barely sketched love intrigue, The Woman from Samos stands out with its well-constructed plot, and The Shield is a showcase of complex and symmetrical dramatic construction. Menander often surprises his audience with unexpected twists in his plays. All of his works feature favorite themes of New Comedy: the seduction of a free girl, childbirth (in The Woman from Samos before marriage, in Arbitration already during the marriage), and recognition, unusual in The Woman from Samos, double (false and true) in The Shield, and in Arbitration, the most classic – the recognition of an abandoned child. Financial matters play a significant role in all of Menander’s plays, portrayed in various contexts. The Woman from Samos involves the merger of two bourgeois households; in The Recluse, overcoming financial differences; in The Shield, exploitation of family and inheritance law by a greedy individual; and in Arbitration, the squandering of a dowry by a husband.

Character Gallery

Menander expertly portrays even the episodic characters in his plays. He employs traditional types from old comedy, such as the wise cook or pseudo-doctor (in The Shield), but also develops a wide range of characters typical of New Comedy. Among the older men are the indulgent father spoiling his son and unable to get angry, Demeas, and the impetuous, easily led by women Nikeratos. There is also the sarcastic, antisocial Knemon, and the indulgently ironic sybarite Kallipides. The young characters are not as clearly defined, with more similarities among them. They are mostly idealistic, like Sostratos or Chaereas, but there are also those firmly grounded in reality and experienced in life, like Gorgias, who are not very resourceful, sometimes quite passive, and fundamentally noble. There are no outright villains among them, and even if they, like Charisios, seduce a girl, they are capable of admitting it and making amends. Citizen daughters in Menander’s comedies are often nameless characters and often silent as well.

Only Pamphile in Arbitration has a name and a more distinct personality as an elegant, proud wife suffering from the abandonment of her child and defending her abusive husband. Mothers are also silent characters. Menander episodically deals with nursemaids. However, he vividly portrays courtesans Chrysis and Habrotonon as cunning, resourceful, and often bold, dreaming of changing their social status. Perhaps the richest gallery of characters in Menander’s plays is the group of slaves. In the four surviving plays, there are as many as nine of them. Among them are the fleeing and beaten Pyrrias, the pensive shepherd Daos, and the scolded charcoal burner Syriskos; the distrustful and suspicious Getas; the country and urban slaves, knowing the weaknesses of their masters; the seasoned, averse to effort Getas. Crafty but frustrated by failures Onesimos, close to his master but fearing for his own skin, Parmenon, and finally Daos, the main character of The Shield, playing a difficult game with his master’s brother Smikrines, the villain of the play.

Aristophanes and Menander

Compared to Aristophanes’ comedy, Menander’s comedy uses different comedic devices. He abandoned the old Attic obscenity, vulgarity, and profanity. It lacks the typical word games and linguistic experiments of Aristophanes, the “comic neologisms.” Menander’s characters speak everyday language, “cultured Attic.” His character comedy leans towards psychology and the “caricatural portrayal” of characters. Menander often employs the Quid pro quo technique (something for something), creating misunderstandings between characters and resulting situations.

The Philosophy of the Poet

Menander, in line with the classical Greek view of literature, educates through entertainment. Although human fate is governed inexorably by the goddess Tyche (Latin: Fortuna), the embodiment of Destiny-Fate-Chance, according to the beliefs of the time, man must act, work, and fulfill his role in society. For this, he has character, about which Onesimus from The Recluse vividly speaks, a character that shapes him and that he himself should shape. Man always appears against the backdrop of society in Menander’s works. Therefore, the poet always condemns antisocial traits such as greed, stinginess, misanthropy, and violence. However, the form of condemnation itself is not drastic.

By ridiculing his characters, the author realizes that people are not perfect and must be taken as they are. Hence, even his negative characters combine both good and bad traits. The main virtue of Menander’s characters is philanthropy, understood in its original Greek sense of “love for people,” manifested in loyalty, decency, and tactful behavior. Menander’s characters are not driven by violent passions; they are moderate individuals, and their main principle of life and behavior is moderation; they avoid extremes. Menander’s most quoted phrase is: “Man – I erred, and what of it,” known from the more scholarly version: “To err is human.” The poet himself adds in the form of a confession: “We live not as we wish, but as we can.”

Menander in the Eyes of Posterity

Imitators

Menander found direct imitators of his art among Roman comic playwrights. The oldest and most independent of Roman comic playwrights, Plautus (c. 251-184 BC), owes the least to Menander. Of his 21 extant comedies, three (Cistellaria, Stichus, and Bacchides) are certainly based on Menander, and with a high probability, he drew from the Greek playwright for his Aulularia and possibly also The Braggart Soldier. Of the 42 titles of Caecilius Statius (d. after 168 BC), 16 works almost certainly indicate Menander’s influence. The last great Roman comic playwright, Publius Terentius Afer (c. 195-159 BC), adapted four out of six extant plays from Menander, often combining plots from different comedies, although Julius Caesar called Terence merely a “half Menander.” Even lesser authors adopted Menander’s style. Among the last prominent creators of this genre, Turpilius, out of 13 known titles, six are derived from Menander. Even the creators of the typically Roman fabula togata were inspired by Menander. The most prominent among them, Lucius Afranius, admits in one of his plays that he took what he needed from the Greek writer.

Commentators and Readers

Shortly after Menander’s death, grammarians became interested in his works. The first of them was the relatively unknown Lynceus of Samos, a contemporary of the poet; the most famous was the librarian and publisher from Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium (257-180 BC). The title of his work, Plagiarisms of Menander and Their Sources, indicates how Aristophanes understood the title of his work, as evidenced by an anecdote. Aristophanes once exclaimed: “Menander! The fate of man! Which of you imitates whom?” Numerous critical studies and commentaries on the poet’s entire works or on one of his plays were produced, such as Timachidas of Rhodes’s commentary on Flatterers. Menander was also studied by the famous Didymus Chalcenterus (with bronze intestines). Sellios or Sillios, also known as Homer, probably published, in the 1st century AD, periochae—summaries—of Menander’s dramas. During the reign of Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD), Soteridas of Epidaurus wrote a commentary on Menander’s works. Plutarch of Chaeronea’s Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander is considered the most important work in Menander’s oeuvre and has survived in excerpt form.

At the end of the 2nd century, Athenaeus of Naucratis wrote the original work The Learned Banquet in 30 Books, in which the participants of the banquet indulged in quotations from ancient authors on various aspects of banqueting. An analysis of the quotes from Menander indicates that Athenaeus knew at least 46 of his plays. The popularity of the writer in this period is evidenced by numerous preserved sculptures, busts, and mosaics. Scenes from Menander’s most famous comedies became a favorite subject of wall paintings and mosaics (in Mytilene on Lesbos, mosaics from The Necklace, The Woman from Samos, Women at Breakfast, Woman Possessed by a Deity, Dagger, Mesenka, Helmsmen, Leucadia, The Hated Man, Arbitration, and The Specter were discovered in a private house). Menander was read profitably for their own work by Lucian of Samosata (c. 115-c. 180), letter writers Alciphron (2nd century) and Aelian (170-235), and the last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate (332-363). Among Romans, he was admired by Ovid (43 BC-17 AD), poet Manilius (1st century AD), praised for clarity, grace, and tact by Quintilian (c. 30/40-c. 100). Ausonius (died in the late 4th century) recommended him, alongside Homer, as the first and most basic reading. The last known reader of Menander in antiquity is the learned bishop of Gaul, Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 430-c. 479).

Excerpts

The precision and didactic nature of Menander’s characters’ speeches predestined his texts, like those of Euripides, for school needs. Very early on, individual sentences were extracted from Menander’s comedies, called gnomes in Greek, and collections of them were created – gnome collections. In a short time, quotes from other authors, including Euripides, began to find their way into them. The greatest career was made by a collection of sayings created in the 1st century AD in the form of a single verse (monostich) or arranged alphabetically according to the initial letters of the verse, which gradually supplanted other anthologies. Its numerous traces are found on papyri and ostraca from the Roman and Byzantine periods of Egypt. The collection consists of 877 verses (approximately the number of lines in one of the playwright’s comedies). It quickly exceeded the boundaries of Greek culture. It was translated into Arabic, Persian, and Old Church Slavonic. Its Slavic version, known as the Wisdom of Menander, wisely, was the first Slavic translation of a Greek secular work.

Menander’s apt sayings made a career as proverbs. Many of them are still quoted to this day, such as the one quoted by Caesar: The die is cast, or the formulation about necessary evil from Menander’s works: To marry, taking things as they are, is indeed evil, but a necessary evil. The popular phrase The chosen of the gods die young comes from, through Plautus, from The Double Deceiver (Whom the gods love dies young). Also from Menander comes the famous saying of Terence: I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.

Oblivion

In the 2nd century AD, some grammarians began to advocate a return to the literary language of the Attic V/IV century BC. Their activity primarily influenced the school. Texts by authors who did not write in the classical Attic began to be gradually pushed out of it; they were less often transcribed and read until they disappeared from the school curriculum. Menander wrote in Attic Greek, but already in the post-classical period, when Hellenistic culture began to spread throughout the contemporary world, not with Koine, against which Atticists opposed, but with a dialect saturated with newer vocabulary and abandoning some archaic grammatical forms. He gradually began to disappear from schools and from the mainstream of literature. He was still read by lovers of ancient authors, conservative in taste, and also read in the provinces, where newer trends arrived with a delay—in Egypt, in Gaul. Based on the finds, it is difficult to speak about the scale of readership, but it must have been considerable since fragments of five papyri from the 3rd/4th century, four from the 4th, and five from the 5th/6th were found.

In the Middle Ages and modern times

The last known readers of Menander at the beginning of the 6th century were the epistolographer Aristagoras, author of two books of Love Letters, and the sophist Choricius of Gaza. The last trace of the existence of Menander’s texts in the Middle Ages is a catalog entry stating the existence of a copy of Menander in the library of the patriarch of Constantinople still in the 10th century. In the Middle Ages, Menander was mainly known thanks to collections of excerpts, which also enjoyed great interest among Renaissance philologists. Some of them entered Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Adagia. They were translated into Latin and, in the 18th century, into French. Thanks to this translation, Goethe probably knew and admired Menander. A separate issue is the influence of Menander, through Plautus and Terence, on the development of modern European comedy.

Discovery

The first find containing fragments of two unidentified comedies by Menander was the Papyrus Didot, found in Egypt in 1820 and published only in 1879. Much more important was the discovery in the second half of the 19th century by Konstantin von Tischendorf in the monastery on Sinai, pasted into the covers of another manuscript, three sheets of the manuscript of Specters and Arbitration. These sheets were retrieved and transported to St. Petersburg after 11 years by Porfiry Uspensky, and published in 1876 by C.G. Cobet and in 1891 by Jernstedt.

The real breakthrough in recovering Menander’s plays occurred before the end of the 19th century, with the beginning of the systematic search for papyri and the birth of papyrology as a science. In 1898, J. Nicole published fragments of Georgos from the Geneva papyrus; in 1899, B. Grenfell and J. Hunt published the great finds from Oxyrhynchus—fragments of Cut Hair, and two years later, part of Colax. The discovery by G. Lefebvre in Kom Ishkau, ancient Aphroditopolis, in Upper Egypt, of the so-called Cairo codex in the basement of a Roman house, where they served as waste paper covering a barrel with documents and works of a notary and graphomaniac, Flavius Dioscorus, living in the 6th century. The publication two years later allowed for the reconstruction of about 2/3 of Arbitration and about 40% of Cut Hair, as well as fragments of Heros and Woman from Samos.

In the seven years before World War II, 15 new texts with fragments of subsequent works were published. Another breakthrough came in 1959 when Victor Martin announced the first full text of Menander’s recovered play, The Recluse, from the Bodmer papyrus 4. The details of Bodmer’s acquisition of the papyrus are unknown. Ten years later, from the same codex, marked as Bodmer 25 and 26, he published The Samian Woman and The Shield. In 1965, Alain Blanchard and André Bataille published extensive fragments of Misoumenos from a text written in the 3rd century and used in antiquity as waste paper for mummy cartonnage. This cartonnage, found in 1901-1902, was unglued 60 years later at the Institute of Papyrology at the Sorbonne. The second significant achievement of this period was the publication in the same year by Eric G. Turner of a larger part of Dyskolos from the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, one of the most famous comedies of the author in antiquity.