1. Golden Oddlies (Methuen, 1983), p. 25.
1. Diogenes Laertius, 5, 79.
2. The translation is taken from the Loeb edition of Plutarch, edited by H. N. Fowler, vol. X (Heinemann, 1936).
3. From the Introduction to Sheridan’s Plays, edited by C. Price (Oxford, 1975).
4. The opinions of Aristophanes of Byzantium, Inscriptiones Graecae xiv, 1183c and Syrian, Commentary on Hermogenes II, 23; Plutarch, Table Talk 7, 8, 3; and Quintilian 10, 1, 69.
5. See Charitonides, Kahil and Ginouvès, Les mosaïques de la maison de Ménandre à Mytilène (Antike Kunst 6, Bern, 1970). The mosaics, from the third century A.D., illustrate scenes from eleven of Menander’s plays, and testify both to his continuing popularity, and to the continuing conventions of costume and mask.
6. For example, ‘Whom the gods love dies young’ Stobaeus, Eclogues 4, 5, 27.
1. See Production Notice and note 4.
2. This verse summary is attributed in the papyrus to Aristophanes of Byzantium, the great scholar and librarian of the third century B.C. The uneven style, the faults in metre and the misunderstanding of the plot are against this attribution.
3. This probably is derived from Aristophanes of Byzantium, and based on official records.
4. An almost certain correction of the obvious error in the papyrus. Demogenes was archon (chief magistrate of Athens, elected annually, whose name dated the year) in 317–316 B.C. and the festival of the Lenaia would have been held in January, 316.
5. Otherwise unknown. Skarphe was a town in northern Greece, near Thermopylae.
6. It was neither polite nor politic to pass without greeting the statue or shrine of a god, especially the god Pan. (See 1. 433.)
7. The shrine of Leos, in the Market Place at Athens, was a popular meeting place.
8. It is ‘worth about two talents’, and it was possible to live (frugally) on an estate worth about three quarters of one talent (pseudo-Demosthenes, 42, 22).
9. A district on the east side of Mount Hymettus.
10. This may be her daughter (see Act Five), or a maid.
11. The text is damaged, but the general sense is clear.
12. A fable of Aesop’s (122, Hausrath’s edition) tells of the gardener who climbed down a well to rescue his dog, and was bitten for his pains.
13. The aulos was a wind-instrument, a pipe (single or double), rather like our oboe.
14. Three badly damaged lines follow, in which Sikon starts to describe the party.
1. The text is uncertain, but the point seems to be that Moschion, though adopted, was treated exactly as a son of the house.
2. According to the myth, Adonis was a beautiful boy, loved by Aphrodite, the goddess of love. After his accidental death, he was allowed to spend part of the year on earth, but had to return to the Underworld for the rest. The Athenian festival was held in the spring, and consisted of mourning for death followed by celebration of rebirth. Quick-growing seeds were planted in trays (the ‘gardens’), symbolizing the renewal of life. The festival was an especial favourite of women.
3. The text is uncertain.
4. This contained barley, garland and knife, for the preliminary sacrifice.
5. The general sense of two damaged lines.
6. Amyntor was jealous of his son Phoenix’s attentions to his (Amyntor’s) mistress, and cursed him and sent him into exile. According to Euripides’ Phoenix, he also blinded him.
7. A notorious hanger-on of the generation before Menander.
8. Nothing is known of him.
9. Moschion says he will go to Bactria or Caria, the two areas where a mercenary soldier of the time could most easily find employment. Bactria (on the borders of modern USSR and Afghanistan) was in turmoil after Alexander’s partial conquest, and Caria (now in southwest Turkey) was fighting off Persian claims to sovereignty.
10. There are a few small gaps in the text of the speech, but the general sense is clear.
1. She was, in fact, a ‘harp-girl’. Such girls were high-class courtesans, who provided music (and other amenities) for men’s parties.
2. Not vin ordinaire, but not a really expensive vintage either. Smikrines is very careful with his money.
3. Twin sons of Tyro by the god Poseidon. They were exposed, rescued and finally recognized in time to rescue their mother. Several dramatists, including Sophocles, are known to have treated the story.
4. As, for example, in Menander’s own Rape of the Locks, in Sophocles’ Tyro and in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris.
5. Syros was a slave of Chairestratos, but obviously allowed to live and work on his own, provided that a certain proportion of his earnings was paid to his master. Such an arrangement was not uncommon.
6. Onesimos had told Charisios about his wife’s having a child. See 1. 903.
7. Literally, to ‘carry Athena’s basket’. The girls carrying baskets in the Panathenaic procession had to be virgins.
8. A festival of Artemis, celebrated in a village in Attica.
9. The last two lines are damaged, but the general sense is clear.
10. The verse endings are missing, but the general sense is clear.
11. The quotation comes from a lost play of Euripides, which told the (very apposite) story of how Auge was raped by Heracles during a nocturnal festival, bore a child, and recognized the father later by a ring he had left with her.
1. The Greek title means ‘the girl who gets her hair cropped’. But I like the neatness and allusiveness of the title suggested by G. B. Shaw to Gilbert Murray (The Rape of the Locks, Allen and Unwin, 1942, p. 6).
2. See note 1 on The Arbitration.
3. Sosias.
4. The text of this, and of the next ten lines, is doubtful.
5. This may be a reference to a recent historical occurrence. One Alexander was murdered by his troops in 314–313 B.C.
6. Both the form of the saying, and its exact meaning, are doubtful.
7. The text of this line is uncertain.
8. The text is fragmentary, but the words that survive are significant, and the general sense is clear.
9. The text is damaged, but the general sense is clear.
10. See note 9.
11. Some line endings are damaged, but the sense is clear.
12. See The Girl from Samos, note 4.
1. See A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens (Oxford, 1968), pp. 10–12, 132f.
2. He wanted to win enough to provide for her dowry.
3. A few lines are damaged here, but the sense is clear.
4. Because they had no self-interest to serve. And as their evidence would be accepted only under torture, it was thought to be reliable.
5. Because Daos would also be inherited as part of Kleostratos’s estate.
6. He has not stolen any oil. Cooks were proverbial thieves.
7. An heiress’s inheritance had to be kept in trust for her children.
8. The text is damaged here.
9. An approximation of the sense, based on the words that survive.
10. The great medical schools of the ancient world were in areas where Doric, not Attic (Athenian) Greek was spoken. And doctors were old-established comic figures.
11. The opening line of Euripides’ Stheneboia. See Aristophanes, Frogs 1217.
12. From Chairemon’s Achilles, Killer of Thersites. See Journal of Hellenic Studies 1970, 22f.
13. From Aeschylus’s Niobe. See Plato, Republic 380a.
14. The source is unknown, but the language is tragic.
15. A fourth-century tragedian. See Hermes 1954, 300f.
16. The opening line of Euripides’ Orestes.
17. There is an indication only of a brief reply here.
18. Euripides, Orestes, 232.
19. A short comment of this kind is clearly missing from the text.
20. The exact meaning of the allusion is lost to us. But Smikrines’ suspicious nature is clear.
21. Enough text remains to produce an approximation of the dialogue.
1. Sikyon was (and is) a town on the south side of the Gulf of Corinth. Until the action of the play begins, Stratophanes has thought himself to be a native of this town, and he is the Sikyonian of the title.
2. See Introduction, p. 15 and E. W. Handley in BICS 12 (1965), 38.
3. Literally, a man who eats at someone else’s table. The parasite made a living by attaching himself to a wealthy man and, in return for small services and agreeing with everything his patron said, being fed at his patron’s table.
4. The Prologue is damaged, but it is clearly spoken by a god (no human character could know all these facts) and its general tenor is clear.
5. Now part of Turkey.
6. Probably Stratophanes.
7. Cf. Old Cantankerous 1. 46.
8. Various Greek states had agreed terms for the settlement of disputes between their nationals. Boeotia was the territory immediately north-west of Attica.
9. That is, an Athenian citizen.
10. Because of the gaps in the text, it is not clear which act’s ending is indicated here. However, a numeral in the papyrus makes it clear that the next section begins with Act Four.
11. Resident foreigners in Athens clearly had to guard their tongues in the community that allowed them in.
12. The speech has links of style and content with that in Euripides, Orestes 866 ff. The first few lines are damaged, but the sense is clear.
13. The animal would be sacrificed, its entrails given to the god, and the rest eaten by the male members of the community.
14. ‘The Eleusinian’ distinguishes him from any other Athenian who might have the (relatively common) name of Blepes.
15. Any citizen had the right to arrest a kidnapper caught in the act.
16. The text is damaged from here to the end of the act, and only approximate translation is possible.
17. This was the ‘family’ name of one of the districts of Athens.
18. The text is damaged, but the general sense is clear.
19. The text is damaged here.
1. The latest (so far) of these was first published in 1977, and so does not appear in the Oxford Classical Text. My translation of it is based on the text published by Professor E. G. Turner in Proceedings of the British Academy LXXIII (1977), 315–31.
2. A case can be made for either Thrasonides or Getas to speak these lines. Thrasonides would have been in charge of official spoils, Getas (like Daos in The Shield) in charge of his master’s share. In any event, the recent arrival of that share is what has triggered the dramatic action.
3. This seems to be some sort of ‘test’ of Krateia’s affections.
4. The meaning of this remains obscure.
5. This and the next few lines are damaged, but the general sense is clear.
6. Presumably Thrasonides (he had the sword). This may be why Krateia steadfastly refuses to have anything to do with Thrasonides. The son must later have been found to be alive (is he Kleinias?), in order to produce the dénouement.
7. The text of the next seven lines is badly damaged.
8. The text is damaged, and the translation is approximate.
1. E. W. Handley, Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison (London, Lewis, 1968).
2. That is, she will be wasting her time. A corpse cannot hear.
3. In Plautus, The Two Bacchises, 277 ff., the servant’s story is that the man who owed the money plotted with the crew of a pirate ship in Ephesus harbour to attack the ship in which the young man was sailing, and steal the money back from him.
1. The first edition was by J. Nicole (Basle and Geneva, 1897–8).
2. Parts of the first four lines are missing, and this is an approximation of the sense.
3. Gorgias, the girl’s brother, appears to be the ‘head of the family’, and his consent would be necessary for her marriage.
4. Part of the ritual of a Greek wedding. See The Girl From Samos, Act Three.
5. This was quite legal in ancient Greece, provided the common parent was the father and not the mother.
6. The text of the next few lines is uncertain.
7. The text is damaged, but the general sense is clear.
8. The text is damaged here.
1. A kolax was someone who made himself agreeable and useful to another man, and expected favours in return for services rendered.
2. Terence, Eunuch 30–32.
3. A famous Olympic champion all-in wrestler, of the fourth century B.C.
4. The text is damaged, but the sense is clear.
5. The text is very uncertain here.
1. The kithara was a stringed instrument, played by plucking the strings. It differed from the harp in having its strings of equal length. The harp is, however, our nearest equivalent.
2. Both text and meaning are uncertain, and the situation is far from clear.
3. Note 2 applies here.
4. The ‘statues of Hermes’ were in the market-place of ancient Athens, and seem to have been at this time the haunt of the rich and idle.
5. The text is damaged, but the general sense is clear.
6. A district of Attica, a suburb of Athens.
1. The next seven lines are damaged, but the general sense is clear.
2. The lines that follow are damaged, and the sense can only be approximate.
1. On Terence, Eunuch 9.
2. Text and interpretation are uncertain.
1. The Corybantes were the frenzied followers and priests of the goddess Cybele, the great ‘Mother-goddess’ of Anatolia, whose worship was known in Greece by the fifth century B.C.
1. Perinthos was a town on the Sea of Marmara, some seventy miles from what is now Istanbul.
2. ll.9ff.
3. It was sacrilegious to remove anyone from sanctuary by force, but almost any indirect means could be used to prise the suppliant loose.
4. He is quoting Daos’s words preserved in Fragment 3.
1. This is a selection of some of the passages preserved by quotation in other ancient authors, especially Athenaeus (second century A.D.), Aulus Gellius (from the same period) and Stobaeus (fifth century A.D.). The numbering is that of the Oxford Classical Text. The passages, all ten lines or more in length, help to extend our knowledge of Menander’s use of conventional themes and character-names, and also illustrate the attitudes of the authors quoting them. Their preference for ‘moralizing’ leads them to select passages which, divorced from their dramatic context, sometimes sound banal. Fortunately, we now have a sufficient amount of continuous text to counterbalance this impression of Menander.
2. A white wine from Chalkidike, in northern Greece.
3. A popular wine from the island of Thasos, off the coast of northern Greece. All these things are the normal provisions for a party.
4. The text and the meaning are very uncertain.
5. Or ship-owner.
6. Probably the name of the ship-owner or ship’s captain, who was conveying Straton’s son.
7. An adaptation of Euripides, Trojan Women 1, and deliberately mock-tragic.
8. A town in the ‘toe’ of Italy.
9. Sources give 325–324, 323 and 321 as the date. They also differ about whether it did or did not win first prize.
10. He was the spendthrift son of a general, who sold even his father’s tombstone to pay for his pleasures.
11. A parasite or hanger-on, well-known from references in pre-Menandrean comedy. See The Girl From Samos, 603.
12. A method of reckoning time. See Aristophanes, Women in Assembly, 652.
13. For the sentiment, cf. The Farmer, 79–81.
14. The sign that the meal was over, and drinking and conversation could start.
15. More likely to be a son than a daughter. Daughters in the extant plays seldom express themselves so vigorously.
16. According to tradition, Anacharsis from Scythia (South Russia) travelled in Greece in the sixth century B.C., was a friend of Solon’s and was ultimately accepted as one of the Seven Sages.
1. Some of these passages could well be by Menander, others (in the translator’s opinion) are quite certainly not. But they are all parts of New Comedy, and therefore contribute to our understanding of the context in which Menander was writing and producing. The Greek texts of the fragments are published in the Oxford Classical Text of Menander.
2. He had the legal right to do what he proposed.
3. The tone, vocabulary and metre are para-tragic. The speaker takes himself and his situation seriously.
4. Text and translation are very uncertain.
5. Where the sick would sleep and (perhaps) be healed in a dream or vision.
6. The text is damaged, but the general sense is clear.
7. Parmenon, a servant, has clearly been charged with the task of raising the necessary funds.
8. The text of the last phrase is very uncertain.