Ancient Greek comedy is often wrongly spoken of as if synonymous with the raucous, boisterous and political humour of Aristophanes. Aristophanes wrote his plays in the fifth century BCE. However, his successor Menander, writing in the fourth century BCE, deserves to be better known. Although famous and admired amongst both the Greeks and the Romans, most of Menander’s plays were mysteriously lost, something of a paradox,1 until recent discoveries on papyrus in the sands of Egypt started to return him to the classical canon. These discoveries continue today and now enough survives of his comedies for him to be examined as an author in his own right.
The lament to Night which opens Menander’s play the Misoumenos, ‘The Man who was Hated’, is delivered by Polemon, a soldier lover, by his own front door. This text was completely lost for centuries.2 Its discovery in the twentieth century helped to overturn certain assumptions that had been made about Menander’s use of so-called ‘Middle Comedy’ stereotypes.3 Substantially more text exists of Menander than does of Middle Comedy, enough to make viable this study of the plays as social comedies and of the characters as, at least partly, the product of his time. Indeed, new discoveries continue to add to our knowledge of Menander’s work.
The story of Menander’s reappearance is a tale worth telling, as scholars struggle to keep pace with new finds. It begins in Egypt, with a fourth-century CE codex4 found in the library at St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai. In 1844 a not altogether reputable adventurer-scholar named Constantin von Tischendorf made an exciting discovery: two parchment leaves glued into the binding, which turned out to contain fragments of Epitrepontes, translated often as ‘The Arbitration’, and Phasma, ‘The Phantom’, by Menander.5
Egypt continues to have a very important role in the survival and recovery of ancient Greek literary texts hitherto lost to us, including Menander, due to its dry climate and sand – ideal conditions for the preservation of papyrus, a writing material made by crushing together fibres from the papyrus plant.6 Large quantities of documentary (as opposed to literary) papyri were found in 1877 and 1887, and in 1895 people started to go to Egypt to look for more.7 Excavations began in the Fayûm area and at the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus, which was discovered by the Oxford scholars Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt.8
In 1905, another manuscript of Menander, on papyrus, turned up stuffing a jar in Aphroditopolis.9 Gustave Lefebvre had been excavating the house (dating to the sixth century CE) of a lawyer called Flavius Dioskoros. These codex sheets, known now as the Cairo codex, preserved more than 1,500 lines of five of Menander’s comedies.
In 1959, thanks to a codex obtained by Martin Bodmer,10 a Swiss private collector and scholar, the first complete play was published: the Dyscolus, ‘The Bad-Tempered Man’. An excited Professor Turner exclaimed in the The Times of London (6 June) that at last all could share the pleasure of ‘direct instead of mediated acquaintance with an exceptionally skilful and elegant playwright’.11
Fragments of varying length from other plays had been discovered in the meantime. Perhaps the most remarkable survival has been the manuscript (belonging to the century in which Menander died) of large parts of Sikyonios, ‘The Man from Sikyon’, which was published in 1965, having been skilfully extracted from the wrappings of a mummy by two papyrologists at the Sorbonne, Alain Blanchard and André Bataille.
Since then, new papyri have come to light not only for the Misoumenos but also, very significantly, for Menander’s Dis Exapaton, ‘The Double Deceiver’, a portion of the Greek text adapted by Plautus for his Bacchides, ‘The Two Bacchises’.12 Discoveries continue to be made and published13 or reported, such as a third-century CE fragment of Perikeiromene, ‘The Shorn Girl’, with three or four different musical settings of the same line (796) written above it each time it is cited (the significance of one of the note-symbols is not known). This could be evidence for later practice in the performance of Menander. The notation may, however, refer to the pitch in spoken delivery, as no other example from comedy is known, and the passage, like others in Menander, imitates tragic style.
Other passages have added significantly to scholars’ knowledge of Epitrepontes, as well as part of Titthe, ‘The Wet-Nurse’, having been found in the remains of a fourth-century parchment codex of Menander, part of a double palimpsest, in the Vatican Library. There was, then, a medieval tradition for Menander.14 Erich Segal had referred already, in the preface to his second edition of Roman Laughter, to the ‘Menandrian Explosion’.15 A third revised Oxford Classical Text is in preparation to take account of continuing finds. What once was a single Loeb edition volume now fills three.
In spite of his considerable status as an author in ancient times, Menander’s work has been dismissed by one scholar as ‘puffball plays’16 and others regularly criticize their conventional plots.17 Some scholars, however,18 have been more open to exploring Menander’s appeal and that is the aim of this book.
Menander used the theatrical masks of his immediate comic predecessors, whose plays are even more fragmentary. But what kind of plays did he write? His comedies seem at first sight to be concerned with the oikos, the ‘family’ rather than the polis or ‘city’, but that may not be the whole story.
In the past some historians have been tempted to cite Menander as evidence. This was sometimes done without considering which character is speaking and what that character might be like. Here a study such as the second half of this book, which investigates his techniques of characterization, may be very useful. Putting the plays in their historical context will also be key here, since social norms need to be established or at least explored in order to determine what stereotypes may have existed in society at the time as well as in earlier comedy.
The first half of the book covers various important topics relevant to the study of Menander: the theatrical artefacts, the conventions surrounding the performance of his plays and Menander’s life and times, together with likely influences on his writing. The opening chapter looks at the terracotta masks and figurines dated to the fourth century BCE found on Lipari, one of the Aeolian islands off the coast of Sicily, miniature versions of those used by Menander and his contemporaries. Masks and costumes would have introduced the characters visually to the audience and suggested to them the various stock types established in earlier comedy, for example, the hetaira, the slave, the young man in love and the soldier.
The masks and figurines lead naturally to an investigation of where and how Menander’s plays were performed, the subject of Chapter 2. Other artefacts of various kinds, such as mosaics and frescoes showing theatrical scenes, provide further evidence for Menander’s continued popularity, both in Roman times and in later antiquity. Theatres became major public buildings all over the Greek world during his lifetime and the acting profession gained significantly in status. Menander was writing for the audiences and the actors of this period.
Chapter 3 attempts to place Menander in a wider context, both from an historical and a literary point of view. The Greek world had expanded and changed since the supremacy of Athens in the fifth century BCE. Most of Menander’s own life, as with many ancient authors, is obscure, but he was apparently acquainted with several key figures of the fourth century BCE, such as the philosophers Theophrastus and Epicurus and the leading politician Demetrius of Phalerum. Menander’s place in the so-called ‘development’ of ancient comedy is also examined. Menander’s stock characters can be traced in the fragments that remain of his comic predecessors, but more survives of his treatment of these types than does of their original models, making any serious attempt to analyse his debt to them difficult.
The people of Menander’s plays can also be recognized, however, as the people of his time: these plays are social comedies. How women, men and slaves of the fourth century BCE actually lived their lives, in so far as such a record can be established, is likely to illuminate Menander’s characterization. The second half of the book will investigate this central theme, focusing on the techniques used in the characterization of the women and the slaves in his plays. Both are, in different ways, in the power of freeborn men.
It is, of course, impossible to study the female characters in isolation from their interaction with the men. The men are masters of the family, and thus (in theory at least) masters of their women, their slaves and, by extension, their city. Menander’s Samia is of particular interest in terms of its concentration on the older lover Demeas, his young, adopted son, Moschion and Chrysis, the pallake (‘girlfriend’ or ‘partner’ are possible translations). The comic soldier Polemon is the young man in love in Menander’s Perikeiromene. The male characters in Menander, including the soldiers, will be the main subject of a further study, a kind of sequel to this one.
However, Menander’s Epitrepontes provides greater scope than these other plays for an exploration of Menander’s women, the subject of Chapter 4. The father of a baby does not know that his treatment of what he thinks was another woman (they met in the darkness at a festival) led to his own wife having a baby five months into their marriage. He leaves his young wife, but she defends him to her father. A courtesan who tries to comfort the husband ends up reuniting him and his wife with both their child and each other.
The slaves in Epitrepontes are the subject of Chapter 5. Some lament their lot and others seek to rise above it. The Epitrepontes presents several different examples of the slave character. One slave finds an abandoned baby and its possessions (recognition tokens) and cannot believe his luck, the other seeks to defend the baby’s rights to the man whom the audience knows will turn out to be its grandfather. Another slave recognizes a ring as the one lost by his master on the night of the baby’s conception. Particularly important for this study, Habrotonon in the Epitrepontes is portrayed as both a woman and a slave and she is perhaps the heroine of this book.
The concluding chapter seeks to draw these various threads together to see how exactly Menander fits into the history of European comedy. A close analysis of the characterization will make clearer what kind of comedy we are dealing with and whether Menander deserved to be so esteemed in antiquity. A central theme will be that Menander does not shy away from serious issues in his plays – the Epitrepontes in particular deals with the power that some people can have over others. How can such serious content be reconciled with the simple aim to entertain or with some modern perceptions of the plays as nothing more than ‘sit-com’ or ‘soap’? But first let us travel to sunny Sicily to the exciting archaeology of the wind-swept shores of the island of Lipari and its connection with Menander and his plays.