'Menander and Life! Which of you imitated which?' Aristophanes of Byzantium

The third-century scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, one of Alexandria's greatest figures, certainly knew Greek literature and how to read it, but his oft-quoted epigram has not been especially helpful to Menander's reputation. Finding in the conventional (some have said 'hackneyed') plots and characters of Menandrean comedy, where citizen boy will get citizen girl even if he is a rapist or she a foundling, an adequate reflection of 'life' as commonly lived on this planet, requires powers of generalization that not every critic is willing to apply. His genre may itself be partly to blame: New Comedy's canvas is said to be too small, its vision too narrow, its artificiality too apparent. When comedy lost its active engagement in the loud and vigorous life of the fifth-century polis, the assumption goes, it embraced all too thoroughly an effete and superficial, perhaps even decadent, dream of bourgeois life in the backwater that was post-classical Athens.

Literary critics had little incentive to question this view. New Comedy's limitation was also seen as its salvation. Aristophanes may have been brilliant, but Old Comedy's persistent focus on the political, social and cultural concerns of fifth-century Athens rooted the genre so deeply in its own society that any appeal beyond Attica was decidedly limited. A play like Women at the Thesmophoria (Thesmophoriazousae), spun from the peculiarities of an Attic festival and the mannerisms of an Athenian playwright, could hardly interest audiences beyond the boundaries of its time and place. Comedy became exportable only in the course of the fourth century as it gradually unmoored from the specific preoccupations of Athenian society and generalized its themes.