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The Modernity of Menander

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Geoffrey Arnott
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Extract

Is Menander, in any sense of the word, ‘modern’?1 And if he is, what relevance does this have to the quality of his plays? Such questions will perhaps be asked more in our present age, when some of our critics appear to idolize modernity in art, literature, or music at the expense of quality; and they are questions capable of a wide variety of positive answers. In one way Menander is modern because a large section of his work—the Dyskolos, several hundred lines complete of the Aspis and the Samia, significant fragments of several other plays—has been discovered in Egypt and printed for the first time during the last sixteen years. Or again, Menander is modern because indirectly at least he has influenced the modern world's comedy of manners down to the time of Oscar Wilde and P. G. Wodehouse. He is modern, too, because he writes about the recurrent problems of families, young and old alike, as they wrestle with love and greed, worry about status and reputation, and flounder in a morass of misconceptions. But the aspect of Menander's modernity that interests me most of all is his apparent concern with certain dramatic and stylistic techniques which living writers deliberately apply in their novels and plays, techniques which our modern critics love to label as undisputedly modern.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , October 1975 , pp. 140 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1975

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References

NOTES

1. This is the text, substantially unaltered, of a lecture given to the spring meeting of the Classical Association on 11 April 1972. The translations from Menander that appear in it are my own.

2. So Professor Max Treu, who was the first to notice the echo, in the Anhang (p. 135)Google Scholar to his edition of Menander's Dyskolos (Tusculum series, Munich, 1960)Google Scholar; cf. also Handley's, E. W. edition of the play (London, 1965)Google Scholar, commentary on line 521, and the same scholar's Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison (London, 1968), 20 n. 8Google Scholar; and my paper in G & R xv (1968), 15.Google Scholar

3. Cf. Sandbach, F. H., in the new commentary on Menander's plays (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar, on Dyskolos 521.Google Scholar

4. Philological Museum ii (1833), 536.Google Scholar

5. This preoccupation with patterns is revealed even through the Roman adaptations of his comedies. Cf., for example, W. Ludwig's studies on Plautus' Aulularia (Philologus cv [1961], 44 ff., 247 ff.Google Scholar) and Cistellaria (Entretiens Hardt, xvi [1970], 43 ff.Google Scholar), and my own paper on the Stichus (BICS xix [1972], 54 ff.).Google Scholar

6. Cf. Fraenkel's, E. edition of Aeschylus' Agamemnon (Oxford, 1950)Google Scholar, commentary on 1196 and 1611; and Garvie, A. F., Aeschylus' Supplices: Play and Trilogy (Cambridge, 1969), 74 ff.Google Scholar, with the literature there cited.

7. For example, in the second stasimon of Aeschylus' Choephori Δίκας (516: the last word of the strophe) is balanced by δίκαν (525: the last word of the corresponding antistrophe); and in the first stasimon of Euripides' Helen, Ἀφροδίτας (1125: the last word of the strophe) is balanced by her antagonist Ἠρας (1136: the last word of the corresponding antistrophe). Cf. also Barrett's, W. S. edition of Euripides' Hippolytus (Oxford, 1964), commentary on 542–4.Google Scholar

8. Cf. Ott, U., Die Kunst des Gegensatzes in Theokrits Hirtengedichten (Spudasmata xxii, Hildesheim and New York, 1969)Google Scholar, where the structural antitheses are subjected to useful, lucid, but occasionally also extravagant, analysis.

9. Cf. e.g. McKay, K. J., The Poet at PlayGoogle Scholar and Erysichthon (Mnemosyne supplements vi and vii, 1962), although these two studies of Callimachus' fifth and sixth Hymns sometimes go too far in ingenuity; Griffiths, A. H., BICS xvii (1970), 32 ff.Google Scholar; and Cahen's, E. still valuable commentary (Paris, 1930), passim.Google Scholar

10. Cf. Gaiser, K., Grazer Beiträge i (1973), 130 ff.Google Scholar

11. With other characters like cooks, more obviously comic in their dramatic function, similar effects may be deployed for purely comic purposes. A good example comes in the speech of Sikon directly preceding Sostratos' account of the rescue. There (661 f.) the cook prays that the old man may be rescued—unsuccessfully, leaving him a cripple. The end of the sentence turns on its head what has gone before, in a delightfully Aristophanic manner.

12. Cf. especially Sandbach, Entretiens Hardt xvi (1970), 121 ff.Google Scholar; and my paper in G & R xvii (1970), 55 ff.Google Scholar

13. Quoted in Grumbach's, DorisThe Company She Kept (New York, 1967), 177.Google Scholar

14. e.g. loc. citt. in n. 12.

15. ἀνόσιος occurs up to now only four times in Menander, all in the Dyskolos. Three times it is in the vocative, spoken by Knemon: 108, to Pyrrhias the trespasser; 469, to Getas the importunate; 595, to his old servant-woman after she has lost the mattock and the bucket in the well. On the fourth occasion the word is used by Pyrrhias (122)— to describe Knemon.

16. Cf. Giannini, A., Acme xiii (1960), 209.Google Scholar

17. Cf. elsewhere in Menander, Dysk. 640Google Scholar, Perikeir. 176Google Scholar, Sam. 678Google Scholar Austin, Epitrep. 615, 632, 706, 742, 764.Google Scholar

18. The quotations come, in order, from a lost tragedy by Euripides (Stheneboia, opening line, fr. 661 Nauck2); Chaeremon's lost Achilles, Slayer of Thersites (fr. 2N.; cf. Collard, C., JHS xc [1970], 22 ff.)Google Scholar; an unknown tragedy (unless Daos is inventing a dictum here: cf. Sandbach's commentary, p. 742); a tragedy by Carcinus (previously unattributed: cf. Nauck2 p. xii, and C. Austin's edition of Aspis and Samia, ii [Berlin 1970] P. 39)Google Scholar; and another unknown tragedy.

19. Cf. my note on Asclepiades, CR xix (1969), 6 ff.Google Scholar

20. In his commentary, ad loc. Cf. Austin's edition, ii. 33.

21. On this see the commentaries of Handley and F. Stoessl, ad loc. There is a curious parallel in Sophocles, , O.T. 895 f.Google Scholar: cf. Dodds, E. R., G & R xiii (1966), 46.Google Scholar

22. Cf. Leavis, Q. D., Dickens the Novelist (with F. R. Leavis: London, 1970), 42, 50 f.Google Scholar

23. Cf. G & R xv (1968), 16.Google Scholar

24. In Leeds University Review xiii (1970), 17 f.Google Scholar Cf. also Dedoussi, Christina B., Dodone ii (1973), 240 f.Google Scholar

25. In GRBS xii (1971), 193.Google Scholar

26. The opening of chapter two. I use here the translation of Athena Gianakas Dallas.

27. The published version of this paper has benefited considerably from the helpful comments of Professor E. W. Handley, to whom for this and for so many other testimonies of friendship thanks are most cordially rendered.