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The comedies of the Athenian dramatist Menander (c. 342-291 BC) and his contemporaries were the ultimate source of a Western tradition of light drama that has continued to the present day. Yet for over a millennium, Menander’s own plays were thought to have been completely lost. Thanks to a long and continuing series of papyrus discoveries, Menander has now been able to take his place among the major surviving ancient Greek dramatists alongside Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. In this book, sixteen contributors examine and explore the Menander we know today in light of the various literary, intellectual, and social contexts in which his plays can be viewed. Topics covered include: the society, culture, and politics of his generation; the intellectual currents of the period; the literary precursors who inspired Menander (or whom he expected his audiences to recall); and responses to Menander, from his own time to ours. As the first wide-ranging collective study of Menander in English, this book is essential reading for those interested in ancient comedy the world over.
The comedies of the Athenian dramatist Menander (c. 342-291 BC) and his contemporaries were the ultimate source of a Western tradition of light drama that has continued to the present day. Yet for over a millennium, Menander’s own plays were thought to have been completely lost. Thanks to a long and continuing series of papyrus discoveries, Menander has now been able to take his place among the major surviving ancient Greek dramatists alongside Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. In this book, sixteen contributors examine and explore the Menander we know today in light of the various literary, intellectual, and social contexts in which his plays can be viewed. Topics covered include: the society, culture, and politics of his generation; the intellectual currents of the period; the literary precursors who inspired Menander (or whom he expected his audiences to recall); and responses to Menander, from his own time to ours. As the first wide-ranging collective study of Menander in English, this book is essential reading for those interested in ancient comedy the world over.
The comic playwright Menander was one of the most popular writers throughout antiquity. This book reconstructs his life and the legacy of his work until the end of antiquity employing a broad range of sources such as portraits, illustrations of his plays, papyri preserving their texts and inscriptions recording their public performances. These are placed within the context of the three social and cultural institutions which appropriated his comedy, thereby ensuring its survival: public theatres, dinner parties and schools. Dr Nervegna carefully reconstructs how each context approached Menander's drama and how it contributed to its popularity over the centuries. The resultant, highly illustrated, book will be essential for all scholars and students not just of Menander's comedy but, more broadly, of the history and iconography of the ancient theatre, ancient social history and reception studies.
Menander was renowned—and still is—for his naturalistic representations of character and emotion. However, times change, and our ideas of what is ‘natural’ change with them. To appreciate Menander’s art fully, we need to attune ourselves to the expectations of his time, and for this there is no better guide than Aristotle (along with his successor Theophrastus), who described and analysed notions of character and emotion in brilliant detail. This book examines the relevant observations of Aristotle, and explores two of Menander’s comedies in this light. It also discusses how these comedies, which have only been recovered in the past century, were adapted and performed on the Modern Greek stage, where tastes were different and Menander had been virtually unknown. The book’s comparison of the ancient originals and the modern versions sheds new light on both, as well as on cultural values then and now.
Reproducing Athens examines the role of romantic comedy, particularly the plays of Menander, in defending democratic culture and transnational polis culture against various threats during the initial and most fraught period of the Hellenistic Era. Menander's romantic comedies--which focus on ordinary citizens who marry for love--are most often thought of as entertainments devoid of political content. Against the view, Susan Lape argues that Menander's comedies are explicitly political. His nationalistic comedies regularly conclude by performing the laws of democratic citizen marriage, thereby promising the generation of new citizens. His transnational comedies, on the other hand, defend polis life against the impinging Hellenistic kingdoms, either by transforming their representatives into proper citizen-husbands or by rendering them ridiculous, romantic losers who pose no real threat to citizen or city. In elaborating the political work of romantic comedy, this book also demonstrates the importance of gender, kinship, and sexuality to the making of democratic civic ideology. Paradoxically, by championing democratic culture against various Hellenistic outsiders, comedy often resists the internal status and gender boundaries on which democratic culture was based. Comedy's ability to reproduce democratic culture in scandalous fashion exposes the logic of civic inclusion produced by the contradictions in Athens's desperately politicized gender system. Combining careful textual analysis with an understanding of the context in which Menander wrote, Reproducing Athens profoundly changes the way we read his plays and deepens our understanding of Athenian democratic culture.
This book undertakes a fundamental assessment of Menander of Laodicea ('Menander Rhetor'), and of the nature and functions of rhetoric in later antiquity (second to fifth centuries AD). It examines Menander's fragments, collected here for the first time, in detail, showing that he was primarily an expert on judicial and deliberative oratory; a source-critical analysis of the Demosthenes scholia shows that his influential commentary on Demosthenes can be partially reconstructed. Itexplores the educational practices of the rhetorical schools, and shows that the skills which they taught still had a direct application in the subsequent careers of the rhetoricians' pupils.
The first edition for half a century of any play of Menander designed for English-speaking students reading it in Greek.
The history of European drama began at the festivals of Dionysus in ancient Athens, where tragedy, satyr-drama and comedy were performed. Understanding this background is vital for students of classical, literary and theatrical subjects, and Alan H. Sommerstein's accessible study is the ideal introduction. The book begins by looking at the social and theatrical contexts and different characteristics of the three genres of ancient Greek drama. It then examines the five main dramatists whose works survive - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander - discussing their styles, techniques and ideas, and giving short synopses of all their extant plays. Additional helpful features include succinct coverage of almost sixty other authors, a chronology of significant people and events, and an anthology of translated texts, all of which have been previously inaccessible to students. An up-to-date study bibliography of further reading concludes the volume. Clear, concise and comprehensive, and written by an acknowledged expert in the field, Greek Drama and Dramatists will be a valuable orientation text at both sixth form and undergraduate level.
This book shows how both verbal and visual allusion position the plays of New Comedy within the context of contemporary polis culture.
Originally published in 1956, this is a critical analysis of the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander studied in the context of the history of comedy, of the allied arts, and of contemporary life. Aristophanes and Menander are deservedly the most famous writers of Greek comedy. The extant comedies of Aristophanes are notable for wit, comical action, beautiful poetry, and the dramatization of such problems as health of mind and body, sex, money, government, law, religion, education, and drama, music and poetry. Menander portrays with delicate and sympathetic understanding a world in which the seeming evils of loss and discord eventually lead to the genuine goods of discovery and concord. The art of Aristophanes is critically examined in three chapters and that of Menander in one. For centuries Dionysos had been worshipped in a spirit of ecstasy which manifested itself in song, dance and the wearing of masks and costumes, pantomime, farce, and satire. The processes by which these diverse elements were developed and fused into the complex literary form of Old Comedy are the subject of the first three chapters. Aristophanes was not only pre-eminent as a writer of Old Comedy; he also participated in the transformation of Old Comedy into Middle Comedy, a curious and interesting dramatic form which is fully treated in the seventh chapter. In the last chapter the emergence of New Comedy is traced and the art of Menander criticized. The book ends with a brief indication of the various forms in which the spirit of Greek comedy had survived to the present day.