Arbitrants

Abstract

Abstract As the preceding chapters have indicated, the dramatic tension in Menandrean comedy characteristically takes the form of a conflict between a young man’s erotic passion, which binds him to a woman irrespective of barriers of class or status, and the exclusive codes and institutions of the Greek city-state. The opposition between the transgressive movement of desire and the ideological constructions of difference generates a complex narrative situation, with a double impulse toward utopian inclusiveness and the reassertion of conventional social boundaries. The motivations of the characters in the dramas are correspondingly overdetermined, answering simultaneously to the multiple possibilities projected by the contradictions in social values. These ideological stresses leave their traces in lapses in the logic of the plot and in consistency of characterization.