III New Comedy and Menander

Abstract

After Aristophanes' Wealth (388), our next complete surviving comedy is Menander's Dyskolos from 316: a gap longer than the period spanned by our entire corpus of surviving tragedy. The lost lifetime of ‘Middle Comedy’ is far from a desert; though papyrus texts are scarce, quotations in later Greek texts are very numerous, with Athenaeus' ten-book dialogue Deipnosophistae or ‘Dinner-Party Scholars’ (c. 200 AD) a particularly rich source of snippets concerned with all aspects of food, drink, and the symposium – themes which, even allowing for Athenaeus' specialized interests, seem to have been unusually prominent in the comedy of the era. The relatively abundant fragments and titles fall tantalizingly short of allowing us to trace the evolution of the genre in detail, but it is clear that, by the time Menander began producing in 320 BC, the form and character of comedy had changed, and the long development of Athenian comedy had more or less stabilized. We do not see much further change over the course of Menander's career or in the surviving remains of plays from the following generation, and the plays of New Comedy, even the extant Menander, largely resist attempts at specific dating.