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Menander, the dominant figure in New Comedy, wrote over 100 plays. By the Middle Ages they had all been lost. Happily papyrus finds in Egypt during the past century have recovered one complete play, substantial portions of six others, and smaller but still interesting fragments. Menander was highly regarded in antiquity and his plots, set in Greece, were adapted for the Roman world by Plautus and Terence. Geoffrey Arnott's new Loeb edition is in three volumes. Volume I contains six plays, including the only complete one extant, Dyskolos (The Peevish Fellow), which won first prize in Athens in 317 B.C., and Dis Expaton (Twice a Swindler), the original of Plautus' Two Bacchises. Volume II contains the surviving portions of ten Menander plays. Among these are the recently published fragments of Misoumenos ("The Man She Hated"), which sympathetically presents the flawed relationship of a soldier and a captive girl; and the surviving half of Perikeiromene ("The Girl with Her Hair Cut Short"), a comedy of mistaken identity and lovers' quarrel. Volume III begins with Samia (The Woman from Samos), which has come down to us nearly complete. Here too are the very substantial extant portions of Sikyonioi (The Sicyonians) and Phasma (The Apparition) as well as Synaristosai (Women Lunching Together), on which Plautus's Cistellaria was based. Arnott's edition of the great Hellenistic playwright has been garnering wide praise for making these fragmentary texts more accesible, elucidating their dramatic movement.
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.
These comedies by Greek dramatist Menander reveal that the oft-employed theme of mistaken identity is as old as the great Dionysus. The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of classical Greek drama. The aim of the series is to make both the works and their interpretations accessible to the reading public.
From the fifth to the second century BC, innovative comedy drama flourished in Greece and Rome. This collection brings together the greatest works of Classical comedy, with two early Greek plays: Aristophanes' bold, imaginative Birds, and Menander's The Girl from Samos, which explores popular contemporary themes of mistaken identity and sexual misbehaviour; and two later Roman comic plays: Plautus' The Brothers Menaechmus - the original comedy of errors - and Terence's bawdy yet sophisticated double love-plot, The Eunuch. Together, these four plays demonstrate the development of Classical comedy, celebrating its richness, variety and extraordinary legacy to modern drama.
This is the first of a three-volume analysis of the internationally renowned archaeological site called the Insula of the Menander, a major city block in ancient Pompeii. Volume one deals with the architecture within the block, especially with the House of Menander, the grand villa for which the site was named. Subsequent volumes will consider the decorations and household objects found during excavation.
The instructional treatises of Menander Rhetor and the Ars Rhetorica, deriving from the schools of rhetoric that flourished in the Greek East from the 2nd through 4th centuries AD, provide a window into the literary culture, educational practices, and social concerns of these Greeks under Roman rule, in both public and private life.
This book shows how both verbal and visual allusion position the plays of New Comedy within the context of contemporary polis culture.
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.
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 the founding father of European comedy. From Ralph Roister Doister to What the Butler Saw, from Henry Fielding to P. G. Wodehouse, the stock motifs and characters can be traced back to him. The greatest writer of Greek New Comedy, Menander (c.341-290 BC) wrote over one hundred plays but until the twentieth century he was known to us only by short quotations in ancient authors. Since 1907 papyri found in the sand of Egypt have brought to light more and more fragments, many substantial, and in 1958 the papyrus text of a complete play was published, The Bad-Tempered Man (Dyskolos) . His romantic comedies deal with the lives of ordinary Athenian families, and they are the direct ancestors not only of Roman comedy but also of English comedy from the Renaissance to the present day. This new verse translation is accurate and highly readable, providing a consecutive text with supplements based on the dramatic situation and surviving words in the damaged papyri. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.