Menander's Comedy Research Articles

A Horse Is a Horse

A Horse Is a Horse

The Divine Comedy at Corinth: Paul, Menander and the Rhetoric of Resurrection

This article asks how the New Comedy of Menander might have influenced Paul's theological rhetoric in 1 Cor 5–15. An intertextual reading of Paul's letter against the backdrop of Menander'sSamiareveals a number of shared topics, ethical concerns and dramatic characteristics. Paul's citation of Menander'sThaisin 1 Cor 15.33 is part of this larger strategy to frame the struggles in Corinth within the ambit of Greek household ‘situation comedy’. Like Menander, Paul hybridises tragic and comic motifs throughout his epistle, inflecting the comedy of the Christ narrative with tragic examples of human misapprehension in this plea for ecclesial reconciliation.

Doctors in a Comic Costume: Medical Language and Mass Audience in the Comedy of Menander

AbstractThis article argues that the medical language in Menander’s Aspis can be understood as both a kind of medical “gibberish” but also as an accurate representation of a professional diagnosis, and that the choice of interpretation is largely dependent on the medical knowledge of the individual audience member. To simply dismiss any instance of comic medical language as nonsensical, assuming that any other alternative would have made it less accessible to the audience and would have compromised the colloquial basis on which popular comedy operates, misses the point entirely; rather, it is better to think that different members in the audience would have been expected to respond to technical jargon in different ways. Seen in this light, medical language is essentially used by Menander as a means of debating the poet’s own linguistic distance from or proximity to different people in the audience: by putting a (fake) doctor on stage—and by making him speak in a strange language which sounds convincing to other characters in the play precisely because it remains elusive, the poet creates an authorial double who tests the linguistic limits of both the internal and the external audience, leaving us to decide how much of his, and Menander’s, (deceptively) nonsensical jargon we are in the position to understand.

Women and the Comic Plot in Menander by Ariana Traill

BOOK REV1EWS/COMPTES RENDUS Women and the Comic Plot in Menander. By Ariana Traill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2008. Pp. 301. Menander's importance in the history of European drama cannot be overestimated, and the discovery in the twentieth century of texts of his plays is a thrilling development. As Balme puts it: "Like a true comic heroine, Comedy herself has finally been reunited with her father after some twelve centuries of separation."1 New translations, commentaries, and studies now appear regularly.2 Yet the fragmentary nature of the primary evidence creates many uncertainties, and locating these dramas in their original context remains a challenge. Its central focus on the importance of women in Menander's mistaken identity plots makes Traill's book an important contribution to studies of this playwright. Arguing that he helped give definitive form to such plots as a comic device, she notes how in his plays mistakes result from human psychology rather than supernatural intervention, allowing the playwright to explore important questions of perception, subjectivity, status, and gender. "Proverbial wisdom may have urged 'Know thyself,' but Menander's comedy had the more utilitarian goal, 'Know other people'" (1). The "central, absorbing problem" discussed in this work is "how do people fail to understand those they supposedly know best?" (13). As these quotations suggest, Traill's focus is more on individual, psychological, and familial issues than on civic, political, and ideological ones, especially as compared to Lape's study. This book will be very helpful for people interested in Menander's women and in his portrayal of heterosexual relationships and marriage. The single best aspect of this study is her detailed discussions of characters' interactions, especially her analyses of female speech, motives, and subjectivity. Her command of detail in even the most difficult fragments is striking. The questions she raises require knowledge of the plays' legal, social, historical, and philosophical contexts, and she discusses these areas thoroughly. This is a deeply learned book, with a really impressive bibliography that includes both older and very recent studies. It is organized in quite long chapters on large topics ("Misperception of Status," "Misperception of Character," "Informing the Audience") that use examples from various plays. Each chapter has a helpful "conclusion" summarizing the author's views; there is also a meaty conclusion to the volume as a whole which opens up interesting possibilities. This organization allows readers interested in particular plays to focus on them while still getting the gist of the author's overall argument. Other strong points are Traill's discussions of the interrelationships between comedy and tragedy at the level of diction, character, plot, and tone, and her thoughtful analysis, following the lead of Scafuro and others, of legal language and trial-like scenes in the comedies. Although this book's most obvious audience is classics scholars and students, its excellent close examination of 1M. Balme (tr.), Menander: The Plays and Fragments (Oxford 2001) ix. 2 Recent examples include D. C. Beroutsos, A Commentary on the "Aspis" ofMenander (Gôttingen 2005); S. Lape, Reproducing Athens: Menander's Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City (Princeton 2004); D. R. Slavitt and P. Bovie (eds.), Menander (Philadelphia 1998); J. M. Walton and P. D. Arnott, Menander and the Making of Comedy (Westport 1996); N. Zagagi, The Comedy of Menander: Convention, Variation, and Originality (Bloomington 1995). Phoenix, Vol. 64 (2010) 3-4. 430 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 431 linguistic and syntactic clues in the dialogue could be very useful to theater practitioners as well. Some more general aspects, however, are less successful. Traill draws connections between Menander's drama and philosophy, arguing that "For actions to seem plausible ... they had to conform to commonly held assumptions that were being investigated and classified by contemporary philosophers" (11). There is potentially circular reasoning here. Philosophical discussions offer a convenient shortcut for identifying commonly held assumptions, but they do not necessarily represent such assumptions, as Traill acknowledges (173, 263). In fact, I would argue that scripts offer a much better guide. In particular, she depends too much on Aristotle, despite the inadequacies of his approach to drama in performance that she recognizes (172, 174). She also invokes Plutarch too often, in my opinion...

The Question of Age in the Construction of Hellenistic Masculinities in Menander

The present article discusses the importance of age in the construction of masculinities during the Hellenistic period. Focusing on the comedies of Menander, it aims to show how not only chronological or physical age, but also mental age, that is, maturity, modifies different concepts of masculinity, especially “ideal masculinity.” Other important factors in the construction of gender such as social and economic standing, class and education are also discussed. The relationship between fathers and sons is of particular interest and importance as it exemplifies how the masculinities represented in Menander were dynamic, not only developing but also changing between groups of different age and social importance.

The Poetics of the Kōmos -Chorus in Menander's Comedy

This article investigates the functions of the kōmos-chorus in Menander"s comedies. It first reviews the evidence for the diminished role of the comic chorus in the fourth century and then considers Menander"s practice of deploying a kōmos instead of a chorus. It argues that the performance contexts of the kōmos allowed it to serve multiple functions. The association of the kōmos with symposia and aristocratic violence rendered it a realistic device for clearing the stage after the first act. In addition, the conclusion of the romantic plot with a wedding or pre-wedding celebration created the occasion for receiving a wedding kōmos, suggesting that the kōmos may have finally been greeted or received at the end of the fifth act.

Reproducing Athens: Menander's Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City

Reproducing Athens: Menander's Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City

Reproducing Athens: Menander's comedy, democratic culture, and the Hellenistic city

Reproducing Athens: Menander's comedy, democratic culture, and the Hellenistic city

Digital Resources for Practice-based Research: The New Comedy Masks Project

The New Comedy Masks project deals with objects - miniature ancient theatre masks - of immense cultural significance, and with texts - the comedies of Menander - that are at the origins of the European comic tradition. By 3D scanning the miniatures and enlarging them to life-size, the project has initiated a programme of practice-based research in the studio, leading to live performances that are the first to use objectively reconstructed ancient masks. The paper describes the considerations that apply at different stages of the process, from the digitization of the artifact to mask-construction and performance experimentation.

The Tragic Mask of Comedy: Metatheatricality in Menander

The plays of Menander have been largely absent from the recent critical attention given the metatheatrical aspects of ancient comedy because they avoid direct reference to performance and maintain dramatic illusion. But as readings of tragic self-reflexivity have shown, even consistently illusionistic drama can make reference to itself as drama so that the audience is encouraged to view the play in double focus, as both a pretense of reality and as an evident dramatic artifice. Metatheatricality in Menander has its basis in the recurring view of the characters that life is like a tragedy. A number of characters state that the events at hand resemble a tragic situation, comment on events by quoting from a tragedy, or ask other characters to view the current situation through the lens of a particular tragic drama. In other instances, reference is made to aspects of dramatic staging or to the constitutive parts of plays. Such comments are realistic, or probable, because it is likely that Greeks of the fourth century regularly interpreted their own lives through the paradigm of myth, best known in dramatized form, and used theatrical metaphors to refer to everyday events. At the same time, however, audience members may experience a character's comparison of the dramatic situation to tragedy as humorously ironic because they know that the plot is destined to fulfill itself in a comic mode. Tragedy is in fact a mask worn by Menander's comedy, and the audience has a metadramatic experience whenever it focuses on the fact of masking. Analysis of passages from the Dyscolos, Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, and Samia, as well as fuller discussion of the Aspis, demonstrates that Menader's plays invite metadramatic readings in which the plot develops through the struggles of characters to impose on themselves and others tragic readings of their comic situation.

The Comedy of Menander: Convention, Variation and Originality (review)

Reviewed by: The Comedy of Menander: Convention, Variation and Originality David Konstan Zagagi, Netta. The Comedy of Menander: Convention, Variation and Originality. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. 210 pp. Cloth, $39.95. In his comedies, Menander exploits a relatively limited range of characters and scenes. His achievement, as Netta Zagagi shows, lies in subtle variations on inherited formulas rather than in radical departures from them. As an example of Menander’s art, Zagagi (32–33) cites the characterization of the young Moschion in Perikeiromene, who is gloriosior than Polemon, the love-sick miles. Again, Chrysis in Samia, because she acts in league with Moschion against his father, “represents a pattern of behaviour traditionally reserved for the character of the mother in comedy” (33). Behind these modifications and mergings of types, Zagagi sees an ethical motivation, best illustrated in Micio’s condemnation of his stepson’s behavior toward the woman he has raped; Terence’s Adelphi, based on Menander’s, is “the only play known to us in which any serious consideration is given to the problematic nature of the story pattern under review” (43). Surely Charisius’ soliloquy in Epitrepontes is another example. Zagagi’s reflections on Menander’s sensitivity to his personae, in contrast to Aristophanes’ delight in caricature (45), are fair enough. It is less clear that Menander differs significantly from the practice of other poets of New Comedy, as Zagagi suggests (32). In the second chapter, Zagagi explains Menander’s method of composition by invoking three principles or techniques that are fundamental to his plays: “polyphony,” “economy,” and “emphasis on human interaction.” These are catch-all terms. “Economy,” for example, refers to Menander’s restraint in the development of scenes that might have “diverted the spectator’s attention from the main subject” of an episode (60). The same term covers Menander’s ability to set out necessary information without undue repetition (62), as well as his thrifty use of devices such as Knemon’s bucket, which first gets dropped in the well and subsequently causes the misanthrope himself to fall in (64). Such dramatic parsimony is the stock-in-trade of well-made plays. Polyphony too, designates three different things. Zagagi ignores Bakhtin’s now classic use of the term to refer to the amalgamation of generic voices characteristic of the novel. Instead, she describes as polyphony the mixture of registers achieved by crossing para-tragic bits of dialogue with the plain style of comedy (54), divine intervention in mortal affairs (57), which is treated in detail in the sixth chapter, and the interweaving of two plot lines in a single play—not contaminatio, precisely, but rather a deft combination of two or more story patterns. [End Page 127] Thus, Dyskolos is analyzed (47) into a “romantic” strand, involving Sostratos’ efforts to win Knemon’s daughter as his bride, and a story line centered on the character of the misanthrope (Zagagi adds for good measure two “minor strands”: the sacrifice to Pan and the Gorgias plot). Zagagi sees as the price of this complexity a loss of dramatic unity: in order to avoid compromising the sketch of Knemon’s grumpiness, Menander does his best to keep the two plots of the comedy separate: “It is precisely from Menander’s constant effort to preserve the credibility of his main hero’s [i.e., Knemon’s] character by shielding him from the romantic action of the play, that the disunity of the Dyskolos stems” (47). This interpretation illustrates a major weakness in Zagagi’s search for elementary units of narrative as the basis of Menandrean composition. Every romantic plot requires not only a lover, but an obstacle or blocking figure (in Northrop Frye’s expression) as well, who, for motives of his own, inhibits the realization of the lover’s passion. In many plays, this function falls to the father of the adulescens, who disapproves of his son’s liaison with a slave-girl or otherwise unsuitable partner. In Dyskolos, the father of the girl (who by the same token is represented as a citizen) plays this role. This is as simple a scheme as one can have, and violates no presumed rule of unity of action. Menander...

(N.) Zagagi The comedy of Menander: convention, variation and originality. London: Duckworth, 1994. Pp. 210. £35.

(N.) Zagagi The comedy of Menander: convention, variation and originality. London: Duckworth, 1994. Pp. 210. £35.

The comedy of Menander: convention, variation and originality

Menander (342 - 293 BC) was the greatest dramatist of Greek New Comedy, which has influenced the course of Western drama both in its realism and romanticism. And yet until a large part of his comedies came to light in papyri discovered in Egypt in 1908, his influence was exercised almost entirely through his Latin adapters, Plautus and Terence. This book offers an appreciation of Menander's work based on his own writings. It explores the many sides of Menander's dramatic art, emphasizing the versatality and originality of his plays, achieved both within and sometimes in the face of a well-established comic tradition and the conservative expectations of his audience. Using detailed analysis of plot, and numerous scenes and passages, the author considers topics such as convention and variation, the function of the chorus, repetition versus surprise, Menander's treatment of human character and emotions, the realistic and divine dimensions of his dramas, as well as his use of the laws and social customs of his age and place. Menander's familiarity with his audiences, their tastes, outlook and their demands from a good comedy, are explored through the study of his versatile, dramatic techniques.

Models and Memory in the Comedy of Menander

A reader today would not know from Frye's confident invocation that, at the time he was writing, very little of Epitrepontes or any other Menandrean play was available to support these generalizations. New Comedy still remained, for the most part, a lost genre. It had indeed been a dramatic form of immense popularity and influence. Plays in its style were performed throughout the Hellenistic world and were read with pleasure until well into the Christian era. Figures sporting its masks and costumes adorned the knick-knack shelves of antiquity; painted scenes from its stage decorated the houses of the rich. Adaptations by the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence and through them by modern writers as diverse as Goldoni and Moliere, Shakespeare and Wilde testified to the enduring appeal of its comic formulations and kept the tradition before us. Authentic Greek New Comedy was nevertheless little more than a memory until texts of Menander, its greatest practitioner, began emerging from the sands of Egypt. Remains of a papyrus anthology of Menandrean plays came to light in the years before World War I; Frye in 1962 had one complete play and only two significant fragments to consider.1 There was then something close to a flood of discoveries in the 1960's, and bits and pieces still turn up from time to time. Literary critics now have ample material to study the Oxford Greek text of Menander, recently revised and augmented, runs to well over three hundred pages and we can now recognize with precision what many of the Menandrine formulas really were. (Frye's sense of the conventions is not, as it turns out, entirely on the mark.) Nevertheless, though the re-

The Virgo Callida of Plautus, Persa

That the theme of trickery and deception plays an important part in the comedies of Plautus is obvious. Although by no means absent from the comedies of Menander and Terence, it is not nearly so prominent in them as in Plautus. One reason for this difference may be Plautus' choice of Greek models, but there are good grounds for believing that changes made by Plautus to his models also served to emphasize the theme. E. Fraenkel showed that Plautus elevated the scheming slave into a comic hero in a manner alien to Menander and Terence. He identified as an important factor in this heroization of the slave certain features of style, notably the recurring use of military metaphors which equate the slave with a victorious general. He also showed that Plautus probably greatly expanded certain slave roles, this expansion being most evident in elaborate polymetric monodies such as Chrysalus' Troy canticum, Bacch. 925ff. These stylistic effects and the increased bulk of the roles give greater emphasis to the Plautine scheming slave and ipso facto to the element of intrigue in the plot. The omissions which naturally went together with Plautus' insertions could also distort the emphasis of the Greek play in favour of the element of intrigue; a probable example is the Casina, in which it is generally agreed that Plautus cut the original anagnorisis ending. Recent writers have stressed another aspect of Plautus' style which helps to give a particular prominence to the theme of intrigue in his plays, his liking for metatheatrical effects, which remind the spectators that they are watching a stage performance not real life; these effects are pervasive but particularly cluster around scenes of deception, emphasizing that the deception is in a special sense a performance, a play within a play.

The Paradox of the Misanthrope

literary historian can best illustrate what is meant by this formula by tracing changes in the presentation and interpretation of moral character types. No matter how timeless these characters may seem in comedy and moral reflection, they have not always been a part of Western tradition. They first appear at a later stage of Greek literature, in the new comedy of Menander, after Theophrastus had drawn up the first characterology based on observation of everyday life.' With the appearance of Theophrastus' work, European comedy acquired a basic repertory of character types that lived on in the oral tradition of socalled mimology (short, crude scenes of popular farce), surviving the interruption of the Christian era in which they were excluded from the canon of the representable. Christian literature in the Middle Ages founded its official canon of characters on the ancient animal fables and

The Making of Menander's Comedy

The Making of Menander's Comedy

The Making of Menander's Comedy

I. From Old Comedy to New II. Mapping the Terrain III. Aspis (The Shield): The Mixture of Modes IV. Perikeiromene (The Shorn Girl): Plot and Situation V. Epitrepontes (The Arbitrants): The Refashioned Recognition VI. Dyskolos (The Grouch): A Play of Combinations VII. Samia (The Samian Woman): A Play of Successful Combinations VIII. Menander and Life Bibliography Notes Index

Notes and Suggestions on Lefebvre's Comedies of Menander (Cairo, 1907)

Notes and Suggestions on Lefebvre's Comedies of Menander (Cairo, 1907)