Monosticha menander biography

Menander (Greek: Μένανδρος; 342 BC – 291 BC), Greek dramatist, the chief representative of the New Comedy, was born in Athens. He was the author of more than a hundred comedies, most of which are lost. Only one play, Dyskolos, has survived in its entirety.

Quotes

• We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.
  • Lady of Andros, fragment 50.

• Riches cover a multitude of woes.
  • The Boeotian Girl, fragment 90.

• ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνῄσκει νέος
  • Whom the godslovediesyoung.
  • [Epigramatic] Sentences, 425
  • Variant: ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν, ἀποθνῄσκει νέος.
  • He whom the gods love dies young.
    • The Double Deceiver, frag. 4.
    • Cf. Lord Byron, Don Juan IV, xii, 89.

• At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool.
  • Those Offered for Sale, fragment 421.

• The truth sometimes not sought for comes forth to the light.
  • The Girl Who Gets Flogged, fragment 422.

• ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεὸς [ἡμῖν] ἐπεφάνηϛ
  • You are by your epiphany a veritable "god from the machine."
  • The Woman Possessed with a Divinity, fragment 227, as translated in ‪Menander: The Principal Fragments‬‎ (1921) by Francis Greenleaf Allinson; this is one of the earliest occurrences of the phrase which became famous in its Latin form as "Deus ex machina."

• τὰ σῦκα σῦκα, τὴν σκάφην σκάφην...
  • I call a fig a fig, a spade a spade.
  • Unidentified fragment 545 K (K = T. Kock, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, 3 vols. (Leipzig 1880/8)), as translated in ‪Menander: The Principal Fragments‬‎ (1921) by Francis Greenleaf Allinson.

• Marriage, if one will face the truth, is an evil, but a necessary evil.
  • Unidentified fragment 651.

• It is not white hair that engenders wisdom.
  • Unidentified fragment 639.

• οὐ γὰρ ἔρχεται μόνον

• Health and intellect are the two blessings of life.

• The man who runs may fight again.
  • Variant translation: The man who runs away will fight again.
  • Monosticha.

• Take not

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Figures
Preface
Note on Transliterated Greek Words
1 Menander the Athenian
2 Menander and New Comedy1
3 What We Know About Epitrepontes, and How We Know It
4 What Happens in Epitrepontes
5 Rape, Marriage, Legitimacy, Citizenship and Child Exposure
6 Characters
7 Structural Patterns
8 Literary and Intellectual Background
9 The Next Twenty-three Centuries
Appendix: Texts, Translations and Commentaries
Glossary
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Menander: Epitrepontes

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BLOOMSBURY ANCIENT COMEDY COMPANIONS Series editors: C. W. Marshall & Niall W. Slater The Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions present accessible introductions to the surviving comedies from Greece and Rome. Each volume provides an overview of the play’s themes and situates it in its historical and literary contexts, recognizing that each play was intended in the first instance for performance. Volumes will be helpful for students and scholars, providing an overview of previous scholarship and offering new interpretations of ancient comedy. Aristophanes: Frogs, C. W. Marshall Aristophanes: Peace, Ian C. Storey Menander: Samia, Matthew Wright Plautus: Casina, David Christenson Plautus: Curculio, T. H. M. Gellar-Goad Terence: Andria, Sander M. Goldberg

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Menander: Epitrepontes (The Arbitration)

Alan H. Sommerstein

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 This paperback edition published 2023 Copyright © Alan H. Sommerstein, 2021 Alan H. Sommerstein has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as

Athenian comic playwright (c. 342/41 – c. 290 BC)

For other uses, see Menander (disambiguation).

Menander (; Ancient Greek: ΜένανδροςMenandros; c. 342/41 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek dramatist and the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy. He wrote 108 comedies and took the prize at the Lenaia festival eight times. His record at the City Dionysia is unknown.

He was one of the most popular writers and most highly admired poets in antiquity, but his work was considered lost before the early Middle Ages. It now survives only in Latin-language adaptations by Terence and Plautus and, in the original Greek, in highly fragmentary form, most of which were discovered on papyrus in Egyptian tombs during the early to mid-20th-century. In the 1950s, to the great excitement of Classicists, it was announced that a single play by Menander, Dyskolos, had finally been rediscovered in the Bodmer Papyri intact enough to be performed.

Life and work

Menander was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of DemosthenesDe Chersoneso. He presumably derived his taste for comic drama from his uncle Alexis.

He was the friend, associate, and perhaps pupil of Theophrastus, and was on intimate terms with the Athenian dictator Demetrius of Phalerum. He also enjoyed the patronage of Ptolemy Soter, the son of Lagus, who invited him to his court. But Menander, preferring the independence of his villa in the Piraeus and the company of his mistress Glycera, refused. According to the note of a scholiast on the Ibis of Ovid, he drowned while bathing, and his countrymen honored him with a tomb on the road leading to Athens, where it was seen by Pausanias. Numerous supposed busts of him survive, including a well-known statue in

In the last 40 years, the collection of gnomic wisdom in iambic trimeters known as Menandri Sententiae has seen a new critical text, a comprehensive monograph, at least two important editions with translation and notes in Italian and Spanish, as well as a number of other significant studies of text and content. This handsome volume by Vayos Liapis (L.) is the first attempt to provide a full-fledged commentary on the Sententiae, along with a thorough introduction, an updated text (but not a new critical edition), and a lucid, unforced translation into Modern Greek (of the Sententiae proper and all ancient texts cited in Introduction and Commentary).

A. The introduction:

The introduction (pp.29-107, with five appendices) opens with a semantic examination of the term and the demarcations between such rhetorical genres as , , , , , and or . L. is cautious not to draw too rigid a line between categories, which eventually share the common function of “demonstrating the correctness of a certain mode of action by projecting moral staples of known value” (p.33, my translation).

Sections 2 and 3 of the introduction locate the gnomic genre in the literary context of pagan and Christian literature from Antiquity to late Byzantium. Such wide-ranging exposition is inevitably sketchy, but even so the basic issues are informatively raised and an abundance of bibliographical leads for further research is provided.

Sections 4 and 5 examine in closer detail the two weightier formative platforms of the Sententiae, rhetorical practice and classroom instruction. Rhetoric employed gnomic discourse as a repertory of universal principles used to defend or reject arguments ( quaestiones finitae); as rhetorical embellishment ( ornatus); and, most importantly, in , composition exercises for students and trainees. Gnomic collections such as the , organised in groups of thematic , allow an insight into their classroom usage: such collections afforded student