2. From the Loeb edition of Plutarch’s, Moralia, Vol. 9 (London and Cambridge MA 1961Google Scholar). A key word in this passage is the adjective ‘good’ (χρησταί) which Plutarch uses for one type of hetaira/prostitute. Its usage seems to indicate that, for Plutarch’s speaker, it was entirely appropriate to distinguish Menander’s characterization of hetairai into two ethical groups: (1) shameless, mercenary, bad; (2) good, loving. Several centuries later, Donatus, commenting on the characterisation of prostitutes in the plays of Terence, including those adapted from Menander, praised the Roman’s skill in defining what he called bona meretrix (‘good prostitute’j. Thus, the Greek Plutarch and Latin Donatus (the one writing of Menander and the other of Terence) both recognised the good whore as a definite character in the best playwrights of New Comedy. Recently, however, Gilula, D., RFIC 108 (1980), 142–65Google Scholar, has challenged the existence of the type in Terence, arguing that Donatus read Terence anachronistically, influenced by the more sentimental, Christianised ethics of the 4th century of our era. For her, an absolutely rigid barrier existed between prostitutes and the word ‘good’ (whether Greek or Latin), for ‘goodness’ depended on social status. Once a woman was tainted by prostitution, she was forever ‘bad’ by definition; regardless of her ethical qualities, she could not be called or considered ‘good’. Although Gilula’s main interest focuses on Terence and she produces brilliant analyses of the different prostitutes of his comedies, she assumes that Menander also had no type that we could call a good prostitute, that accordingly in Greco-Roman New Comedy a single prostitute-type existed: the ‘bad’. She discusses this passage of Plutarch briefly (pp.l46f.) and attempts to explain away the use of ‘good’, without recognising that Plutarch anticipates Donatus by 250 years. More seriously, I believe, she has placed too much emphasis on social categories as absolute and hence she incorrectly assigns to the playwrights a narrow social bias which is not in fact supported by the dramatic texts and runs counter to the ethical developments of fourth and third century philosophy (which to some extent Menander, Philemon, and others popularised). Moralists affirmed that character could be independent of social status, that character determined whether one was ‘good’ or ‘bad’, because ethical traits were all-important. Thus, Menander fr.722.5 features a slave who has a ‘good’ (χρηστóς) character and is wiser than his master. If Menander’s slaves can be ‘good’ (and are—Daos in the Aspis constitutes an excellent example), it follows that Menander’s prostitutes, another group of low social status, would be able to exhibit a good character in spite of their profession. Gilula depends, I think, too much on the social bias of male writers and male characters within the plays and disregards the fact that Menander and Terence devote much of their effort to characterisations that upset social stereotypes and bias. Taking an anecdote told by Athenaeus 13.594d, she distorts it in her favour (p. 146 n.2); whereas, fully and fairly presented, it proves that the ethical attribute ‘good’ was assigned to a prostitute in comedy of Menander’s period. The story runs as follows: Menander loved the hetaira Glykera, but became angry at her. When Philemon in one of his plays called her ‘good’ (χρηστή), Menander angrily wrote in reply—it is only a guess that he did so in another comedy—that ‘not a single one [feminine gender] is good’. Gilula does not mention Philemon nor the amatory anger behind Menander’s assertion (which qualifies its validity), and she assumes that the imprecision of ‘not a single one’ must mean ‘no hetaira’ (her translation). The Loeb editor assumed quite reasonably that, in his anger, Menander chauvinistiGally claimed, as men often do, that ‘no woman is good’. In any case, the context of the anecdote, angry jealousy (which sounds like a situation from New Comedy itself) makes quite incredible Gilula’s further comment, that Menander ‘probably implied that the word χρηστή had a social connotation and that the moral meaning was derivative’. The feminine χρηστή is not used of any woman in the surviving fragments of Menander, but he is supposed to have entitled one of his comedies Chreste (Koerte i.150): we know nothing more of the play and therefore cannot say what kind of good female was meant. Because I disagree with Gilula’s reading of the evidence, in this paper I shall continue to assume that Diogenianus’ categorisation is valid and that Menander and the Romans who adapted him could consciously upset hostile male prejudice and portray a prostitute as ethically ‘good’.

3. This plot bears some resemblance to that (discussed next) in which the ‘good’ hetaira finds her father and then is able to marry her lover. Menander seems to have fused the normal rapeplot with the conventional hetaira-plot, perhaps because of the greater pathos of the latter. Three other plays, Georgos, Kitharistes and Plokion, started from rape, pregnancy, and the birth of the baby. Since none of their endings has been preserved, we cannot declare with confidence that Menander did in fact steer events to a happy marriage between victim and rapist; but there is no evidence to the contrary.

4. The Latin plays derived from Menander, as we shall see, do not disagree on the need to marry the raped girl to her assailant; but their different comic tone tends to undermine or ignore the optimistic prospects of the marriage. In the Cistellaria, from the Synaristosae, it is apparent that sometimes Menander delayed releasing the rapist’s victim from her misery for many years. Demipho raped Phanostrata while visiting Sicyon as a young man. He then returned to his home on Lemnos, married, and had a daughter. Only after that wife has died does he return to Sicyon, locate his well-remembered victim, and marry her. See now Cole, S.G., ‘Greek Sanctions against Sexual Assault’, CP 79 (1984), 97–113Google Scholar.

5. There is a nameless girl owned by a typical pimp in Kolax. But the fragments give us no reason to think that she had been kidnapped as a baby or even that she had any stage part in the comedy to engage the audience’s sympathy. None of the known cast of nine could have been her lost father, and finally she seems to have been presented as a professional hetaira.

6. Despite the efforts of earlier scholars to identify the author as Menander (because he did compose a Karchedonios), the evidence seems to deny this. Not only does the Latin plot by its meandering tactics violate Menandrian methods, but it also seems clear that Menander used an Athenian locale, whereas Plautus sets his comedy in distant Calydon. Cf. Arnott, W.G., ‘The Author of the Greek Original of the Poenulus’, RIM 102 (1959), 252–62Google Scholar, and the recent bibliography on the question in Johnston, P.A., ‘Poenulus 1.2 and Roman Women’, TAPA 110 (1980), 143Google Scholar, n.3. Alexis now is generally believed to have been Plautus’ source.

7. The new lines to the Misoumenos, A 38–40, published by Eric Turner in the Proceedings of the British Academy 63 (1977), 325, prove that Thrasonides had given Krateia her freedom before the comedy opened and installed her as ‘wife’ in his house, from which she then shut him out. Krateia does speak a few lines on stage with her father in the recognition-scene. However, her decision in favor of Thrasonides is only reported.

8. For another way of analysing the changes in Plautus’ ending, see Anderson, W.S., ‘The Ending of the Samia and other Menandrian Comedies’, Studi ciassici in onore di Quintino Cataudella 11 (1972Google Scholar), 169f., and Clark, J.R., ‘Structure and Symmetry in the Bacchides of Plautus’, TAPA 106 (1976), 85–96Google Scholar.

9. No other play of New Comedy that I know of allowed the rape to take place during the action of the play itself. This was a striking innovation of Menander. But his rapist gave his account of the deed to the audience in a monologue. Terence, as Donatus informs us, decided to change the monologue to a dialogue by introducing the character Antipho at 539. As a result, Chaerea’s boasts to his admiring, half-envious buddy, because of the change, should disturb Terence’s audience and earn him no sympathy.

10. Although Plautus Asinaria 913–18 seems to guarantee that there was a comic topos about two men sharing the expenses of one meretrix, nevertheless the different contexts of the Asinaria and Eunuchus demand a very different response to it.

11. Thais does achieve one of her goals by becoming a client of Phaedria’s father (1039).