Menander

Menander (342/341–291/290 BCE) is the only writer of New Comedy by whom any substantial work survives. He first competed at the theatrical festivals in Athens in 321 and wrote 108 plays. One of them ( The Bad-Tempered Man) survives complete, and there are substantial fragments of six more comedies, together with shorter fragments and more than 900 citations of words, lines, or short passages quoted by later ancient writers.

Menander was less popular in his lifetime than his contemporary Philemon (he won only eight victories at the festivals), but in the 3rd century BCE he rapidly became the most celebrated comic playwright in Greece. The Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence drew heavily on Menander for plots, situations, and characters, and he was highly regarded by Hellenistic scholars, being lavishly praised by Aristophanes of Byzantium (he is said to have asked: “Menander and life, which of you imitated which?”). But Menander fell into disfavor in the Byzantine era, and his plays were not copied into the medieval manuscript tradition, unlike the Old Comedy of Aristophanes. We are dependent for first-hand knowledge of Menander on his popularity in Egypt during the Hellenistic and Roman periods; Egyptian papyri are the source of the surviving play and fragments.

[Page 503]Relief with Menander and New Comedy Masks (Roman, 40–60 CE), part of the Getty Villa collection in Los Angeles. The masks show three of his canonical New Comedy characters: youth, false maiden, and old man.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Menander lived in an Athens that was subservient to rulers installed by its Macedonian conquerors; as a consequence, unlike Aristophanes, he only rarely referred to contemporary political issues; almost never made jokes that would only be appreciated by one Athenian audience in one particular year; and never (as far as we know) introduced caricatures of real individuals from the audience.

Menander’s plays contain very few laugh-out-loud jokes. Humor is principally derived from misunderstandings and intrigue, and from the foibles of mankind—for example, a cantankerous father in The Bad-Tempered Man, or an over-jealous lover, who wrongly accuses his mistress of cheating on him and cuts off her hair, in The Shorn Girl; toward the end of these plays, both of these characters are forced to recognize their past wrongdoing and make amends. A typical Menander plot, constantly creating new surprises through misunderstandings, is seen at its best in The Girl From Samos, in which Moschion, the adopted son of the wealthy Athenian Demeas, has impregnated his neighbor’s daughter Plangon at a festival. Demeas has been overseas, and his Samian mistress Chrysis has been raising Plangon’s baby as if it were her own. Demeas sees Chrysis nursing the baby, draws the obvious but wrong conclusion, and throws her out of his house. Then he overhears servants' gossip that the child is Moschion's—which is of course correct but only reinforces his anger against Chrysis and Moschion. All is not resolved until the fifth act, when Moschion—after an initial outburst of obstinacy against his father for wrongfully accusing him—is married to Plangon.

Moralizing on the human condition is frequent, as when in The Bad-Tempered Man the farmer Gorgias rebukes the rich playboy Sostratos for despising the poor and committing wrong simply because he is rich enough to do so. Fortunately Sostratos is able to convince this hotheaded critic that his intentions toward the girl he is pursuing (who is actually Gorgias’s half-sister) are honorable.

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