Menander in Contexts (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) [1 ed.] 9780415843713, 9780203754153, 0415843715

Table of contents :
Cover
Original Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
Preface
Introduction
PART I Context: Society (Gender, Slavery, War)
1 Money and Love in Menandrian Comedy
2 Menander and the Pallake
3 Reconsidering Rape in Menander’s Comedy and Athenian Life: Modern Comparative Evidence
4 Relationships among Slaves in Menander
5 Military Culture and Menander
PART II Context: Dramatic Tradition
6 Staging and Constructing the Divine in Menander
7 The Unity of Time in Menander
8 Aspects of Recognition in Perikeiromene and Other Plays
9 Failing Communication in Menander and Others
PART III Context: Philosophy and Medical Thought
10 Menander and the Peripatos: New Insights into an Old Question
11 Menander, Aristotle, Chance and Accidental Ignorance
12 Melancholic Lovers in Menander
PART IV Context: Posterity
13 On the Reception of Menander in the Imperial Period
14 ‘Not even Menander would use this word!’: Perceptions of Menander’s Language in Greek Lexicography
15 An Ideal Reception: Oscar Wilde, Menander’s Comedy and the Context of Victorian Classical Studies
16 Menander’s Epitrepontes in Modern Greek Theatre: The Poetics of Its Reception and Performance
References
Contributors
General Index
Index of passages

Citation preview

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.

www.routledge.com Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats

Edited by Alan H. Sommerstein

Alan H. Sommerstein is Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has published extensively on Greek tragedy and comedy, producing editions and/or translations of complete or fragmentary plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Menander, as well as co-authoring two volumes on the oath in ancient Greece.

Cover image: Bust of Menander. Roman copy of the Imperial era after a Greek original (ca. 343–291 BC). On display at the Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican City.

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.

Menander in Contexts

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Menander in Contexts

Edited by Alan H. Sommerstein ROUTLEDGE MONOGRAPHS IN CLASSICAL STUDIES

Menander in Contexts

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, 16 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. Alan H. Sommerstein is Emeritus Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham. He has published extensively on Greek tragedy and comedy, producing editions and/or translations of complete or fragmentary plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Menander, as well as co-authoring two volumes on the oath in ancient Greece.

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

1 The Roman Garden Katharine T. von Stackelberg

10 Rome in the Pyrenees Simon Esmonde-Cleary

2 The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society Shaun Tougher

11 Virgil’s Homeric Lens Edan Dekel

3 Actors and Audience in the Roman Courtroom Leanne Bablitz 4 Life and Letters in the Ancient Greek World John Muir 5 Utopia Antiqua Rhiannon Evans 6 Greek Magic John Petropoulos 7 Between Rome and Persia Peter Edwell

12 Plato’s Dialectic on Woman Equal, Therefore Inferior Elena Blair 13 Roman Literature, Gender, and Reception Domina Illustris Edited by Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold and Judith Perkins 14 Roman Theories of Translation Surpassing the Source Siobhán McElduff

8 Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought John T. Fitzgerald

15 Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity The Petrified Gaze Johannes Siapkas and Lena Sjögren

9 Dacia Ioana A. Oltean

16 Menander in Contexts Edited by Alan H. Sommerstein

Menander in Contexts Edited by Alan H. Sommerstein

First published 2014 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Menander in contexts / edited by Alan H. Sommerstein. pages cm — (Routledge monographs in classical studies ; 16) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Menander, of Athens—Criticism and interpretation. I. Sommerstein, Alan H. II. Series: Routledge monographs in classical studies ; 16. PA4247.M37 2014 882'.01—dc23 2013029500 ISBN: 978-0-415-84371-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-75415-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures Preface Introduction

vii ix xi

ALAN H. SOMMERSTEIN

PART I Context: Society (Gender, Slavery, War) 1

Money and Love in Menandrian Comedy

3

HORST-DIETER BLUME

2

Menander and the Pallake

11

ALAN H. SOMMERSTEIN

3

Reconsidering Rape in Menander’s Comedy and Athenian Life: Modern Comparative Evidence

24

SHARON L. JAMES

4

Relationships among Slaves in Menander

40

EFTYCHIA BATHRELLOU

5

Military Culture and Menander

58

MARIO LAMAGNA

PART II Context: Dramatic Tradition 6

Staging and Constructing the Divine in Menander

75

SARAH MILES

7

The Unity of Time in Menander ROBERT GERMANY

90

vi

Contents

8 Aspects of Recognition in Perikeiromene and Other Plays

106

WILLIAM D. FURLEY

9 Failing Communication in Menander and Others

116

GUNTHER MARTIN

PART III Context: Philosophy and Medical Thought 10 Menander and the Peripatos: New Insights into an Old Question

137

ANGELO CASANOVA

11 Menander, Aristotle, Chance and Accidental Ignorance

152

VALERIA CINAGLIA

12 Melancholic Lovers in Menander

167

CHRISTOPHE CUSSET

PART IV Context: Posterity 13 On the Reception of Menander in the Imperial Period

183

ORESTIS KARAVAS AND JEAN-LUC VIX

14 ‘Not even Menander would use this word!’: Perceptions of Menander’s Language in Greek Lexicography

199

OLGA TRIBULATO

15 An Ideal Reception: Oscar Wilde, Menander’s Comedy and the Context of Victorian Classical Studies

215

SERENA WITZKE

16 Menander’s Epitrepontes in Modern Greek Theatre: The Poetics of Its Reception and Performance

233

STAVROULA KIRITSI

References Contributors General Index Index of passages

249 265 269 277

Figures

16.1 The five theatrical eras of the Evangelatos production 16.2a/16.2b The programme cover for the Evangelatos production (Greek and English versions) 16.3 The chorus of Evangelatos’ Epitrepontes, led by the late Leda Tassopoulou 16.4 The chorus of Evangelatos’ Epitrepontes

243 244 245 245

Page Intentionally Left Blank

Preface

This book is based on the international conference with the same title held at Lincoln Hall in the University of Nottingham on 23–25 July 2012. Our warmest thanks are due to the staff of Lincoln Hall; to the Faculty of Arts, School of Humanities and Department of Classics of the University of Nottingham, who encouraged the holding of this event and, to the extent they were able in these austere days, subsidized or underwrote its costs; to the staff of the School of Humanities’ Management and Research Office, especially Heather Sowter, for their efficient and patient handling of the conference’s administration; to the Digital Humanities Centre for essential IT assistance; to Nottingham Conferences who arranged the venue and the facilities, not to mention the menus; to Mohammad Almohanna, Georgina Gill and Edmund Stewart, who provided invaluable assistance before and during the conference to help ensure that it ran smoothly, that the needs of participants were seen to, and that the audio-visual facilities worked as they were meant to; and to the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies who funded the bursaries that assisted several younger scholars to attend, three of whom presented papers. There are many scholars whose names do not appear in the table of contents but whose contributions to the conference, and through it to this book, are deserving of record. Emiliano Buis, Johanna Hanink, Stan Ireland, Graham Oliver, Athina Papachrysostomou, Styliani Papastamati, Ariana Traill, and the team of Toni Badnall, Susan Deacy and Fiona McHardy, delivered papers at the conference which for one reason or another could not be included in this volume. Nathalie Lhostis presented Christophe Cusset’s paper when he was unfortunately unable to attend the conference for health reasons; Serena Witzke did likewise on behalf of Sharon James as well as presenting her own paper (both these papers appear in this book). Among participants who did not present papers, special mention is due to Peter Brown for his invaluable contributions to discussion sessions, and it is fitting that his work features more prominently in the bibliography to this volume than that of any other living scholar. All of us were conscious of the debt that we, and Menander studies, owed to those great interpreters who

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Preface

are no longer with us, especially to Geoffrey Arnott and Colin Austin—to whose names must now sadly be added that of Eric Handley. And finally, having made these acknowledgements with, and on behalf of, my fellow contributors, I must express my own thanks to them, both for making the conference such a splendid event and for all the work they have put into making it possible for this book to be ready in less than twelve months from the day it ended. Alan H. Sommerstein Nottingham, 3 July 2013

Introduction Alan H. Sommerstein

It is now more than a century since Menander made his first great step back from the shades with the publication of the Cairo codex, and over half a century since we were first able to read one of his plays virtually complete; since that time our knowledge of his work has been continually enhanced by further papyrus discoveries, and more are eagerly awaited.1 At present, we probably possess almost as great a quantity of text by Menander, in proportion to his total output, as we do of, say, Sophocles. While, however, there is much excellent scholarship about Menander (and notable contributions have been made by many of those whose work appears in this volume or who took part in the conference on which it is based), it continues to be dwarfed by that on the longer-known Greek dramatists, not only in absolute mass but even in terms of current annual increment.2 The present volume is designed to examine and explore the Menander we know today in the light of four important contexts in which it can be viewed. (1) The society of early Hellenistic Athens, and in particular three features of that society which tend to make Menander’s comedies difficult fare for modern audiences: gender relations, slavery, and the assumption that soldiering in a foreign army, fighting for no cause except that of one’s own enrichment,3 was a legitimate way to make a living. Three different aspects of gender relations are discussed in the first three chapters. Blume focuses on the intimate connection nearly always found in Menander between marriage and money. Plot after plot in Menander may be based on love leading to marriage, but a play will often end with one or more additional marriages, in the making of which love has played no part; what is really essential to a Menandrian marriage is a dowry—or at least, if there is no dowry, we must know the reason why (Dysk. 844–7, Sam. 726–84). Sommerstein considers the class of women characters who are living in monogamous relationships but who cannot be wives because they are not citizens (they may in the end be discovered to be of citizen birth after all, in which case the relationship will be converted into a marriage). They fall into several subcategories, but all seem to be portrayed in a favourable light, and regarded as

xii

Introduction

respectable by their citizen neighbours and acquaintances5—they are indeed treated, in the stereotyped phrase of the Roman dramatists, as pro uxore. James explores Menander’s treatment of rape, bringing to bear much modern evidence for comparison, and argues that however appallingly indulgent he may expect the large male majority of his audience to be towards the perpetrator,6 he also enables us to see the crime from the victim’s point of view and her response to it. Bathrellou argues that past studies of slavery in Menander (and in Greek comedy generally) have focused too exclusively on the relationship between slave and master, forgetting that a slave is also a person in his or her own right who will normally interact extensively with other persons besides the master. She discusses in particular Menander’s presentation of relationships, friendly or hostile, between one slave and another. Here again we are invited to see how Menander, even while presupposing and valorizing the established hierarchies of his society, also enables us to see things from the point of view of that society’s underdogs. The mercenary soldier is a familiar figure in New Comedy, and mercenary soldiering features in five of Menander’s seven best-preserved plays.7 Lamagna argues that the accounts of campaigning given in these plays imply that many among the poet’s audience were acquainted with military practices and basic principles of tactics,8 and could understand, for example, the ways in which, in Act I of Aspis, Kleostratos’ commander in Lycia is presented as an incompetent leader. (2) The traditions of dramatic composition. It has long been a familiar notion that Greek New Comedy is heir to a double stream of dramaturgical tradition, stemming on one side from Old and Middle Comedy, on the other from tragedy and especially from Euripides. Four aspects of this inheritance are examined here, features of the genre which all originated wholly or partly in tragedy, and to three of which familiar Aristotelian (or sub-Aristotelian) designations can be applied: the activity of the gods, the unity of time, anagnorisis and hamartia (of a rather special kind). Miles discusses the role of divine characters in Menander’s plays, noting that in contrast with the practice both of tragedy and of earlier comedy, they appear only in prologues, always alone, and never interact with human characters or intervene overtly in the action—and yet they are often understood to be invisibly active, as it were, to bring about the happy ending, as is particularly evident in a case like that of Pan in Dyskolos. By this means, so Miles argues, Menander ‘was aiming to express . . . the nature of the relationship between mortal and divine as naturally and realistically as would seem acceptable to his audience’. Germany’s paper is concerned with the Unity of Time, a principle of tragic origin that Menander, he argues, so far as our evidence goes, strictly observed. He shows that Menander was thoroughly conscious of the tragic associations of this principle, and that allusions to it are often linked to other kinds of tragic reminiscence and in particular to the idea that, in the

Introduction

xiii

words of a Sophoclean goddess, ‘a day lays low and raises up again all things human’. Menander can also play ironically on the convention by having a character speak of taking some important action ‘tomorrow’, unaware that, dramatically speaking, ‘tomorrow will never come’. In his comedies, the cliché comes true that ‘there is no time like the present’—because there is no time but the present (day). Another legacy of tragedy is the recognition scene (anagnorisis), and this is the starting-point for Furley’s paper, whose main concern, however, is recognition in the deeper sense of the revelation of a person’s character. In play after play such ‘inner recognition’ is a central feature: sometimes (as with Smikrines in Aspis) it is other characters, and the audience, who are made to perceive a person’s true nature, but frequently of even greater importance is an individual’s perception of crucial truths about his or her own personality—Knemon in Dyskolos, Charisios in Epitrepontes, Thrasonides in Misoumenos. (Sometimes, one may add, an individual’s failure to ‘recognize’ his—it is usually his—own nature may be almost as significant: Menander’s young lovers, in particular—Sostratos in Dyskolos, Moschion in Samia and his namesake in Perikeiromene—often notably lack the gift of seeing themselves as others see them.) Furley provides a detailed analysis of ‘inner recognition’ in Perikeiromene, stressing especially the self-discovery of Polemon and Glykera. Misapprehension (whether accidental or deliberately induced) is crucial to the plots of most Menandrian plays (though not quite all—there is very little of it in Dyskolos). Martin’s paper, however, is about misapprehension and misunderstanding on a smaller scale, in the to and fro of dialogue, where one character misinterprets the meaning or implications of the words of another. Martin presents a typology of such errors in Menander, analysing them in terms of Grice’s ‘maxims of conversation’, and noting that there is one type—what may be called inconsequentiality—which Menander almost completely avoids, in contrast not only with Old Comedy but, it would seem, with some of his own comic contemporaries such as Diphilus. Martin’s explanation for this is that Menander, in this as in other respects, is seeking ‘to approximate the standard of the tragic genre’, even in a matter such as conversational misunderstanding which is far more of a comic than a tragic phenomenon. (3) The intellectual currents of the period. The papers in this section are concerned with aspects of the much-discussed connection between Menandrian comedy and Aristotelian/Peripatetic philosophy, and of the less-discussed impact on Menander of contemporary and earlier medical thought and theory. Casanova strongly defends the view that Menander was ‘deeply influenced by the Peripatos’ with particular reference to Aristotle’s three-way distinction between atychēma (misfortune), hamartēma (error) and adikēma (wrongdoing), which, as he shows using evidence from the new fragments, is strongly evoked in the Smikrines-Pamphile debate in Epitrepontes. Cinaglia uses Aristotelian texts to throw light on Menander’s

xiv

Introduction

treatment of chance and accidental ignorance, particularly in Aspis and Perikeiromene (where it is personified Chance and Ignorance, respectively, who deliver the prologues), and argues—referring inter alia to the three-way distinction mentioned above—that ‘the way in which Menander presents his characters to his audience corresponds to the analysis that Aristotle would give of their actions’. Cusset shows that Menander repeatedly associates lovesickness with the medical condition of melancholia (excess of black bile); this association is not found in extant medical writings before the imperial period, but ‘erotic passion as a disease’ was a subject of discussion in Peripatetic circles, and Cusset suggests that this may be Menander’s source for the connection with melancholia in particular. (4) Posterity. There is a long break in the direct reception of Menander due to the disappearance of his scripts between the seventh century and the nineteenth; we have two papers on Menander reception before this break, one from after it, and one on a dramatist who successfully channelled Menander despite never having been in a position to read any continuous text of his. The papers on Menander’s reception in antiquity felicitously complement the splendid, many-sided work of Nervegna (2013), which appeared too late for our contributors to be able to take it into account. Karavas and Vix discuss how Menander figures in the work of five leading Greek writers of the late first and second centuries AD—Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, Galen, Lucian and Aelius Aristeides—and also in rhetorical treatises and progymnasmata; among other conclusions, they detect a distinct trend during this period away from the reading of complete plays (still important in the two earliest authors, Dio and Plutarch) towards the study of excerpts and sententiae. Tribulato discusses Menander’s treatment at the hands of lexicographers and particularly of the so-called Antiatticist, who in defiance of Atticist dogma promoted Menander as a source for good Greek usage. Oscar Wilde was a classicist by training and—unfashionably in his day— a great admirer of New Comedy. Witzke examines in detail his exploitation of Menandrian motifs (mostly accessed through Terence), especially in his last play, The Importance of Being Earnest; she sees him as ‘systematically reviving and recreating ancient New Comedy for the modern English-speaking world’. One is left wondering, much as Plutarch wondered about Menander himself (Mor. 853f), what Wilde might have done with Menander had he been granted a normal lifespan and been able to study the texts from the Cairo codex. Menander’s plays have generally had a hard struggle to establish themselves on the modern stage.9 Kiritsi discusses a ground-breaking production of Epitrepontes, first seen at Epidaurus in 1980,10 with the help of interviews with the translator, the director and one of the principal actors. What strikes me most, looking at the contents of this volume as a whole, is how, in addition to the intrinsic virtues of his drama, the idea comes through that Menander is a vital connecting link. He connects the society of

Introduction

xv

classical Athens—unchanged in essentials, except in the political field, from what it was in the time of Demosthenes11—with the era of Hellenistic kings and of mercenary armies; he connects, too, the language of classical Athenians with that of later Greeks; he connects the arguments and theories of medical men and Peripatetic philosophers with the life and love problems of ordinary citizens in extraordinary situations; he connects the traditions of Athenian tragedy and of Athenian comedy, and connects both of these with Rome and, in part through Rome, with the modern world, down to the TV soaps which, as Kiritsi shows, inspired some features of the 1980 Epitrepontes production. We hope that the studies in these pages may help these and other connections to be perceived more sharply. NOTES 1. It is nearly 10 years since the world first heard of the existence in the Vatican Library of a twice-palimpsested codex (see D’Aiuto 2003:266–283) that had originally borne a text of Dyskolos and of another play, probably Titthe (known previously only from two quotations amounting to six and a half lines); the fragments have yet to be published. Meanwhile, to mention only the latest addition to our knowledge, the past few months have seen the publication (Römer 2012a, 2012b; see also W.D. Furley 2013) of small additional fragments of an Epitrepontes papyrus which offer crucial additional information (together with the usual crop of conundrums) about the scene in which Pamphile defies her father’s attempt to end her marriage to Charisios; three papers in this volume have occasion to refer to these fragments, and Casanova discusses them in detail. 2. Thus for 2005–2009, of 2,243 publications on the five major Greek dramatists recorded by L’Année Philologique (http://www.annee-philologique.com) just 99 (4.4%) were on Menander. 3. Or, in some cases, more honourably, that of acquiring resources to benefit one’s dependents (as Kleostratos, in Aspis, went on campaign to earn a dowry for his sister). 4. Here Nikeratos specifies his daughter Plangon’s dowry as “the whole of my property—when I die”, i.e. nothing now. We can easily infer the reasons: (1) he is a poor man who cannot keep his house in repair (592–3) or afford a decent animal for a sacrifice (399–404), whereas Demeas, the father of his new sonin-law, is the sort of man who can keep horses (15) and a houseful of slaves; (2) the bridegroom, Moschion, is in no position to complain because, as the father of Plangon’s child born out of wedlock, he could if necessary have been compelled to marry her by the threat of prosecution. 5. Whose support they may seek, and generally receive, against ill-usage by their partners. This phenomenon—the cultivation of networks of support by persons in vulnerable positions—forms a link between Sommerstein’s paper and Bathrellou’s. 6. The only “punishment” he is ever made to suffer is marriage to the victim (perhaps with a reduced dowry or even none at all, cf. note 4 above). 7. In Misoumenos, Perikeiromene and Sikyonioi, a professional soldier is a major character; Aspis is built around the story of a young man who takes up soldiering temporarily, and in Samia a young man with a grievance against his father pretends to be about to go on campaign in order to give him a fright.

xvi

8.

9.

10. 11.

Introduction Of the seven plays, only Dyskolos and Epitrepontes contain no significant military element. In some cases this acquaintance will have been gained through mercenary service; but it should be remembered that even in the 290s, many Athenians who had served as citizen troops in Athens’ last major conflict (the Lamian War of 323/2) were still only in their fifties; and, as Lamagna notes, Athenian contingents had fought in some campaigns since then also. For the period since 2000, the performance database of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/research-collections/ performance-database/productions; accessed 21 June 2013) records 609 productions of works of Euripides, 459 of Sophocles, 265 of Aeschylus, 191 of Aristophanes, 59 of Plautus, 43 of Seneca, while Menander and Terence tie for last place with just 11 each. There have been seven times as many productions of Euripides in the past 13 years as there have been of Menander (86) in the past 113 years. And, subsequently at five other sites in Greece, and also in Germany, Italy, the USA and Australia. Who took his own life a few months before Menander’s first production.

Part I

Context: Society (Gender, Slavery, War)

Page Intentionally Left Blank

1

Money and Love in Menandrian Comedy Horst-Dieter Blume

Riches and poverty, money-making and money-spending, are matters of everyday life and therefore topics of comedy rather than of mythological tragedy. In tragedy, gold is often associated with the Orient, and Troy is the notorious city of luxury and splendour. The contrast between oriental luxuriance and Greek frugality in myth is aptly illustrated by the encounter of Paris and Helen, and it is still stressed in Aeschylus’ Persae, where Queen Atossa leaves her golden palace to learn from the chorus that the power of the Athenians depends upon a single silver mine (Pers. 237–8). Accordingly, in Herodotus (7.102.1) Xerxes receives a warning from the Spartan king Demaratus: ‘Greece is always familiar with poverty.’ In the decades after the Persian Wars, much money was paid to Athens by the Greek city-states that had become members of the Confederacy of Delos. It was spent for political supremacy and for national greatness: for shipbuilding and the restoration of the destroyed Acropolis. The Peloponnesian War, however, caused the resources of the city to dwindle away, and Attic farmers who had to leave their homes and seek shelter inside the Long Walls were reduced almost to nothing. The evidence of Aristophanes is striking: his leading male characters are rather poor citizens, eager to receive their fee of three obols a day for being a juror or for attending the Assembly. His late comedies present poverty as a social problem; they start with the experience that the wrong people undeservedly get rich, and offer radical redistributions of wealth by a reversal of the existing order. Menander was still a young man when the Macedonian general Antipater abolished democracy in Athens in 322 BC and civic rights were limited to a minority of propertied people. The standard of living had hardly improved since the time of Aristophanes, but Menander’s characters do not suffer serious want: they are more or less prosperous citizens who profit from trade or the produce of their lands. Life in the city may have become less hectic, but the upheaval of the Greek world as a result of the campaigns of Alexander has created a general feeling of being at the mercy of chance (Tyche). This is the reason why the dramatic action concentrates upon the well-being of the family and upon the stability and perpetuation of social status, and the best safeguard for this seems to be a good match for a son or daughter who happens to be just of marriageable age.

4

Horst-Dieter Blume

Money is involved regularly when a dowry is discussed, but it is normally only talked about and seldom presented on stage. In Aspis and Dis Exapaton, considerable sums of money (gold coins, significantly enough) are brought home from Asia Minor—booty captured in Lycia and debts collected in Ephesus—but all riches are quickly stowed away in the house. Love ending in marriage is a subject that was introduced comparatively late in the history of ancient drama. Whereas the tragic poets had been interested in the extremities of passion, and Aristophanes favoured the desire of comic heroes for sex as such, Menander’s New Comedy confronts us with middle-class love stories. Ovid (Tristia 2.369) has aptly said that fabula iucundi nulla est sine amore Menandri (‘there is no play by pleasant Menander that doesn’t have love in it’). A young citizen in love, often a wealthy young man who has raped and impregnated a girl during a night festival,1 has to overcome a series of obstacles until a happy ending is reached with the girl’s kyrios and the young man’s father giving their consent to a marriage. Let us begin with Dyskolos. At first sight, the plot seems far away from the typical middle-class background of Menandrian comedy. The scene of the play is a barren area of northern Attica, a place up in the hills near Phyle, next to a shrine of Pan and the Nymphs. Two farmers have their houses here: the misanthropic old Knemon and his stepson Gorgias. The former lives together with his daughter in self-imposed isolation (leaving part of his land uncultivated purely in order to avoid contact with other people: Dysk. 163–5); the latter, owner of a tiny piece of land that barely allows a frugal living for himself, his mother and a family slave, really is a poor man. When the dramatic action sets in, both men are already out in their fields, breaking the ground with a mattock or collecting wood. Living conditions like these do not allow a love affair—unless by divine intervention. Pan wants to reward the gentle piety of Knemon’s daughter, so he makes Sostratos, a wealthy youth from the city, come to this place for hunting. When he caught sight of her putting garlands on the statues of the Nymphs, he fell in love at once. Menander develops the popular subject of ‘rich boy meets poor girl’ in an unusual way insofar as difficulties do not arise from the lover’s wealthy father, who might normally be expected to object to a poor daughter-inlaw, but from the rigorous moralist Knemon who would not give away his daughter unless to a bridegroom like himself. Only after a fateful sequence of events that made the old man fall into a well and suffer serious injury, so that he entrusts himself and his daughter to the care of his stepson Gorgias, can Sostratos hope for a happy ending. His father Kallippides farms extensive lands (worth many talents: Dysk. 40–41) in the nearby plain. In contrast with the autourgoi of Phyle, he owns a number of slaves to work for him; nevertheless he takes care of his estate personally, so that Gorgias refers to him with great respect (Dysk. 775). Sostratos had led a life of leisure and luxury in Athens, with a fondness for hunting. However, he will quickly prove to be worthy of his father’s

Money and Love in Menandrian Comedy

5

riches. Far from being a pampered boy, he is willing to become an autourgos himself (369–370) and undergo hardships for his love, and so wins the friendship of Gorgias. The two young men, who both suffer from Knemon’s stubbornness, have kept their open minds, neither spoilt by luxury nor hardened by poverty. With Gorgias being made responsible for Knemon’s daughter, Sostratos achieves his aim at the end of the fourth act. ‘Father won’t oppose me,’ he says, urging his friend to pronounce the formula of betrothal (761–2). Moreover, indeed Kallippides gives his consent willingly, without even mentioning a dowry. He wants his son to take the girl he loves, because in his opinion a marriage based on the bridegroom’s love is likely to be strong and stable (788–790). Mutual love may gradually develop, but it is not specifically taken into account; according to normal practice, the bride is not even present on stage for the engagement. Marrying for love does not correspond with everyday life in Athens, but evidently, it was an idea that audiences liked, and so it recurs in most of Menander’s plays. Nevertheless, the familiar and ‘unromantic’ type of marriage arrangement—a businesslike agreement between the bride’s father and the bridegroom—also turns up towards the end of Dyskolos. This happens unexpectedly. Eager to demonstrate his gratitude to Gorgias, Sostratos begs his father to make his friend a member of their family as well, and marry him to his (Sostratos’) sister Plangon. For a moment the prospect of a double alliance with ‘beggars’ (πτωχούς, 795) puts Kallippides’ liberality to a test, but it barely needs a sermon from Sostratos on ‘money, an unstable thing . . . which is easily taken away by Tyche’ (797–804) to make him quickly agree with all his heart. A strange agreement indeed, with a bridegroom not even consulted in advance and neither groom nor bride present! It is not a question of love this time, but of money and family honour. When Sostratos, after much toil and trouble, had gained Knemon’s daughter, he received the girl he had longed for. Gorgias, on the other hand, will be offered a bride whom he had never seen before. Marriage is something he has not even dreamt of. No wonder, therefore, that his first reaction is refusal. His honour would not let him accept things too big for him, nor does he wish to enjoy wealth earned by others (825–831). This is just the young man we had come to know previously. When he first met Sostratos, he argued like this: ‘I have never fallen in love; I cannot afford it; the hardships I have to face leave me no leisure; love is something for the idle and rich’ (341–4). Kallippides is not only a wealthy but also a wise man, and it takes him but few words to persuade Gorgias. The action quickly rushes towards its end, and the only thing left to be done is to pronounce the formula of engagement and to fix the dowry. Kallippides will give three talents with his daughter, whereupon Gorgias offers one talent with his half-sister (845). This is exactly half the amount Knemon’s farmland is worth (327–8) and corresponds with Knemon’s instructions to Gorgias to keep half his property for her dowry and use the rest to maintain their elderly parents (738–9). Kallippides tells Gorgias he should keep the farm intact, and gets no reply.

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We must take the young man’s silence as tacit consent to hand over his sister to his friend without a dowry; the fact is not mentioned expressis verbis, because the poet pays respect to Gorgias’ feelings. The result seems perfectly in accord with the expectations of a New Comedy audience: the rich boy Sostratos gets a wife to live in Athens without a dowry, whereas the poor Gorgias will farm a bigger property than before with a considerable sum at his disposal. Agriculture was still the most important source of income for the majority of Athenians, and Menander alludes to the economic situation of farmers in very diverse ways. The meagre fragments of Georgos present city and country life as more closely connected with each other than they are in Dyskolos. The scene is Athens, but the main character Kleainetos is an elderly unmarried farmer living nearby. He grows wine (probably also olives, Attica’s main products) and works hard himself together with a number of slaves and war captives (Georg. 56), supported by Gorgias, a young hired labourer from the city, son of a poor woman. When by accident one day Kleainetos had gashed his leg, Gorgias looked after him; he tended his wound and helped him recover, whereupon the old man, feeling indebted to him, planned to marry his sister. Such a marriage, though evidently not based upon love, certainly would be a blessing for the poor family, for it would have put an end to their life of privation. However, decisions made at the outset of a comedy are usually overthrown in the course of action, and indeed a plot of a more conventional kind has already been hinted at in the first transmitted lines. Months ago, the girl had been raped by a rich young neighbour who would gladly marry her, if only he had the courage to ask for his father’s consent. The birth of a baby is imminent (87–88) and will have happened in the course of the action (Webster 1974:40). The further development of the plot lies in darkness, but the outcome may be imagined with some certainty: the baby’s parents will marry, while the farmer Kleainetos will discover that he is the father of Gorgias and his sister and will make their mother Myrrhine his wife. Poetic justice (if there really is such a thing) demands a reward for the honest Gorgias as well, because his spontaneous care for his injured employer had started the dramatic action. For him a wealthy young girl may be ready at hand: the young neighbour’s stepsister whom the family had originally intended to marry off to her half-brother (Georg. 7–12), another early intention that comes to nothing. Money and love contribute equally to a happy ending: the two households on the stage—one rich, one poor—will be united by a double wedding of brothers and sisters, a combination similar to that of Dyskolos. Even Kleainetos, whose primary idea had been to sustain an honest family with his money, will have received his personal share of love. Young Athenians who grew up without a father had to take over the responsibility of a kyrios for their unmarried sisters and provide them with a dowry. Concern for his sister had probably been the reason why Gorgias left Athens to work in the country. Kleostratos in Aspis chose a quicker path

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to acquire wealth: he became a mercenary in Asia, where after the death of Alexander his generals were struggling for supremacy. In spite of his significant martial name, he is no professional soldier but a daring young man in search of a fortune (Blume 2001:192–5). He was taken prisoner and stayed away longer than expected, whereupon his rich uncle Chairestratos, who had taken care of Kleostratos’ sister in the meantime, decided to marry her to his stepson Chaireas at his own expense. When the play starts, Kleostratos is reported to have been killed. Only his battered shield is brought home, together with rich booty—more than is required for a dowry. The gold coins and silver vessels at once arouse the greed of Smikrines, Chairestratos’ elder brother: he lives wretchedly by himself, takes no account of obligations of kinship or friendship, and is a downright villain (Aspis 114–121). He soon moves into the centre of the action, for the supposed death of Kleostratos has made his sister an orphan heiress (epikleros), and according to Attic law the nearest willing male relative was entitled to make her his wife to prevent the dead man’s property from leaving the family. Money is considered more important than love, so the wedding that Chairestratos has planned must be stopped immediately. An intrigue is plotted to make Smikrines give up his claim to the bride, and there follows a kind of play within the play: Chairestratos pretends to die, which makes his own daughter another heiress in the family, whereupon Smikrines is tempted to marry her instead, because she is more than ten times wealthier. The intrigue is ended abruptly when Kleostratos returns home (491ff), and a double wedding is arranged by the revived Chairestratos: he gives his daughter to Kleostratos, and his niece to Chaireas. Aspis (as far as can be judged from the fragmentary text) is a strange mixture of tragicomedy and farce. The young people are of secondary interest: the two girls remain invisible throughout, and Chaireas and Kleostratos contribute little to their ultimate success. The avaricious Smikrines moves into the centre instead, and attention is focused on the way he is outwitted by the honest slave Daos, the prime mover of the intrigue. Smikrines is on the point of getting the upper hand over the family, when suddenly he is reduced to nothing again: with no share of either money or love, he ends up isolated as he had been before. In spite of their differences in plot and characters, Dyskolos, Georgos and Aspis all end up with a double wedding according to the strict Athenian laws of marriage and citizenship. In the main strand of the comic action, a poor girl and a rich boy are united by love: • Gorgias’ half-sister and Sostratos (Dysk.) • Gorgias’ sister and the young neighbour (Georg.) • Kleostratos’ sister and Chaireas (Aspis) When, towards the end of the fourth act, this is satisfactorily solved, the virtuous brother, whose primary concern had been to see his sister

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adequately married, is each time rewarded with a wealthy bride himself. Menander does not put a great deal of effort into a solution, obviously feeling obliged to fulfil the expectations of his audience. Thus, almost casually, a second couple is brought together with the help of a generous dowry: • Gorgias and Sostratos’ sister Plangon (Dysk.) • Gorgias and the young neighbour’s stepsister (Georg.) • Kleostratos and the daughter of Chairestratos (Aspis) Both love and money are at the core of Menander’s comedies: in the dramatic action, they depend upon each other, and in combination, they ensure a happy ending. Epitrepontes presents a different aspect. Charisios and Pamphile got married with a very rich dowry of four talents (Epitr. 135) some months ago, but when the play starts, they are separated by Charisios’ discovery that Pamphile had had, and exposed, a baby that he was sure could not be his. Pamphile is put under pressure by her father Smikrines, who wants to take her back home and recover the money he had paid. The young couple, however, never quite lose faith in each other. They both feel miserable in their isolation: the wife left alone at home, and the husband next door in company with friends and a hired harp-girl (whom, however, he never touches). In the end they are reconciled with the help of the baby, once exposed, now rescued and identified as the child of Pamphile—and also of Charisios. Smikrines differs from his namesake in Aspis. He is a rich man, not greedy for money but a nitpicker whenever he suspects that money is being wasted. Hence, he had shown himself generous at his daughter’s wedding, but now shows himself parsimonious and stingy in view of the dissolute life of his son-in-law. There is no question here of talents, only of drachmas and obols: the latter small coin, quite commonly referred to in Aristophanes, is mentioned in Menander only here—when Smikrines complains about the price Charisios is paying for his wine (130–1)—and in two passages concerning soldiers’ pay (Perik. 380–2 and Men. fr. 258). He becomes infuriated at the amount of money the brothel-keeper is receiving for his hetaira: twelve drachmas a day (136–7) are squandered on commercial sex! For sure, this will lead to the complete ruin of the family, when Charisios takes the woman into his house (693) and runs a ménage à trois, paying twice the expense for each woman’s festival (749–750). Such calculations, which occupy Smikrines’ mind continually, are overcome by the reconciliation of the young couple. The play presents a model of mutual love: the amoris integratio of Pamphile and Charisios triumphs over a trying father who is worried more about his property than about the well-being of his daughter. The fragmentary text seems to support the assumption that in Epitrepontes—as in the plays mentioned above—a second couple were brought together in the fifth act, when the main plot had come to a satisfactory end. Habrotonon and Chairestratos, who have been active supporters of

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Charisios and Pamphile and helped them overcome their problems, must not be left unrewarded; however, the wealthy bachelor and the harp-girl owned by a pimp do not form a traditional pair suited for a wedding. Habrotonon does not dream of family life but only of obtaining her liberty (547–8), and Chairestratos who had had his eye on her right from the start but had held back out of respect for the feelings of his friend, in the end probably promised to pay a sum for her liberation and took her into his house as his pallake.2 Money is thus spent mainly for the fulfilment of his desire, but also in a way for love. I have dealt with only a few aspects of a wide-ranging topic, and confined myself to plays whose plots we know with some certainty. Details without their dramatic context can be open to different interpretations, as two final examples may illustrate. The fragments of Dis Exapaton and Plokion focus upon money: the indispensable love story is lost in both plays. What happened in Dis Exapaton with the gold that had been brought from Ephesus to Athens—gold that initially was hidden from the father and, when restored to him by mistake, had to be taken away a second time? Plautus, in his adaptation in Bacchides, made it simply a precious object for the tricks of a deceiving slave—riches to be wasted with prostitutes for pleasure’s sake. Menander must have combined the slave’s intrigue (which gives his comedy its name) with a serious love-affair and therefore had to bring about a recognition of one of the two girls as a free-born Athenian so as to end his play with a wedding, and the bride could only have been the Samian ‘Bacchis’. Whatever her name may have been in Dis Exapaton, it is at any rate certain that the two girls, who were brought up together in Samos, could not be known by the same name, as they are in Plautus (Lefèvre 2011:71–73). The Samian girl must still have been a virgin when she arrived in Athens to meet her sister—or rather the daughter of her foster parents—just before she was supposed to become a hetaira herself and the companion of a soldier. Luckily at the very last moment she was recognized by her Athenian parents; her father most probably was the twice-deceived ‘Nicobulus’, and Sostratos, who had fallen in love with her on his way to Ephesus, turns out to be her half-brother; being children of different mothers, they were allowed to marry according to Athenian law.3 To judge from the pictorial evidence as well as from an extensive chapter of Aulus Gellius, Plokion must have been a popular comedy in antiquity,4 but we have as yet no papyrus that can be attributed to it. An unusual character in this play was Krobyle, a rich heiress worth ten talents (Men. fr. 296.11) who became the wife of Laches. The Mytilene mosaic presents them as an oddly matched couple: a young woman facing an elderly man leaning on a stick. Laches may have been a widower of modest means, when his marriage to an epikleros (perhaps an orphaned niece) made him both wealthy and unlucky. Their union was anything but a love match, as Laches found out on their very first night; and it is unusual in Menander for a couple to differ widely in age.5 Krobyle not only proves herself a tyrant in his

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house but a veritable Lamia (fr. 297), an ugly demon for all of them, particularly Laches’ son and daughter (her stepchildren). The dramatic action in all probability was centred on the love affair of Moschion (the third person on the mosaics). He had raped the daughter of a poor neighbour and wanted to marry her, but Krobyle, it seems, strongly opposed this marriage.6 How in the end love triumphed over money and miserliness and in what way a necklace (πλόκιον) may have contributed to a happy solution, we cannot tell. In view of the fact that both son and daughter have suffered from their stepmother’s ill-treatment, we cannot even exclude the possibility of another double wedding to end this play.7 NOTES 1. This may be an anonymous encounter (Epitrepontes) or a rash act committed by a young neighbour, the starting point of a growing love (Samia, Georgos, Adelphoi B). See Sommerstein 2013, Introduction §5, also James, this volume. 2. Or did Charisios buy her into freedom? The text is still open to contradictory interpretations. Chairestratos is sent on an errand (by Charisios? on behalf of Habrotonon?) at the end of Act III (700–1), and Sommerstein (this volume), with reference inter alia to W.D. Furley 2013:82–3, supports the suggestion of Arnott 2004:274–5 that he then executed the relevant money transaction for his friend off-stage. It would be a turn of irony indeed, if money that Smikrines was so furious to see squandered on prostitutes was finally paid to the brothel-keeper for the release of Habrotonon. 3. Lefèvre 2011:70, referring to Gomme & Sandbach 1973:108 (on Georg. 10). 4. Two mosaics, both dating from the later third century AD, represent a scene from Plokion; one is at Mytilene (Lesbos), the other at Chania (Crete). Among the Mytilene mosaics—there are pictures from eleven plays altogether— Plokion takes a privileged position next to a portrait of Menander himself and the Muse Thaleia; the artist seems to have regarded this comedy as a supreme example of Menandrian art. (For a detailed description, see Stefanou 2006:287–293 with figs. 75, 77.) In early Rome, the comic poet Caecilius had chosen Menander’s play as the model for his own Plocium. Both comedies were eventually lost, but they were still available when Gellius, together with some friends, read the Latin version of Caecilius and afterwards the Greek original and compared a number of passages, much to the disadvantage of the Roman dramatist (Gellius NA 2.23). A more balanced opinion on Caecilius’ achievement in comparison with Menander’s is offered by Riedweg 1993. 5. Lape 2010:57. In Aspis (258–269), the greedy Smikrines is asked in vain to abstain from marrying a young heiress so that she can have a bridegroom of her own age. The problems arising from the legal position of the epikleros were of recurrent interest to Menander: he wrote two plays entitled Epikleros (Men. frr. 129–136), neither of which can be confidently identified with Aspis (Ingrosso 2010:37–41). 6. The wealth that she had brought to her husband probably gave her objections greater force. In Caecilius, she became an uxor dotata (a wife with a large dowry), because the institution of the epikleros was unknown at Rome. 7. I thank Alan Sommerstein for a number of valuable critical comments and for the improvement of the English.

2

Menander and the Pallake Alan H. Sommerstein

There are only three occurrences of the word παλλακή in what survives of the Menandrian corpus, but even without external evidence (which is not lacking) they would be enough to establish, contrary to what is sometimes asserted (e.g. Dedoussi 2006:234–5), that the word was a recognized part of the Attic lexicon of Menander’s time with a fairly well-defined meaning. If it is not used very much, this is not because it is ‘archaic and technical’ (Fantham 1975:65, n.47) but because it is a word that is only suitable for certain contexts. It appears once as the title of a play;1 once in a prologue narrating a past family history (fr. 411);2 and once on the lips of the fiery-tempered Nikeratos in Samia (508), telling Demeas what he would have done with his pallake (sold her as a slave—illegally, by the way) if she had cuckolded him as Chrysis is believed to have cuckolded Demeas. Chrysis is not present at that moment, and even in her absence, the word is not applied directly to her in addressing her partner. Doubtless this is because an important function of the word, in most of its contexts, is to draw attention to the fact that the woman’s position is inferior to that of a wedded wife. In the days when the English word ‘mistress’ was in common use to refer to a woman in a very roughly comparable position, it would likewise not have been used in addressing the woman herself or her partner, unless with the deliberate intention of insulting them. At any rate, Chrysis is the only woman, in any play of Menander from which a significant quantity of text survives, of whom we have positive evidence that she could be described as a pallake. However, that does not mean that she is the only woman who could have been so described by a third party (even a third party more levelheaded and courteous than Nikeratos). From her case, and from other cases of women described as pallakai in other fifth- and fourth-century Athenian sources, we can infer quite a number of what appear to be defining features of the status. 1. In sixth- and fifth-century Athens, a pallake could be either a free woman or a slave. This is evidenced for the archaic period by the law permitting the summary killing of a seducer (moikhos) caught in the act, which covered the seducer of a pallake only if she was ‘kept on

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Alan H. Sommerstein the terms that her children would be free’ (Dem. 23.53), and for the late fifth century by Antiphon’s speech Against the Stepmother (Ant. 1.14–20) which speaks of a pallake whom her partner ‘intended to place in a brothel’ and who later, when suspected of murdering him, was tortured and executed apparently without trial. And even in the middle of the fourth century Plato (Laws 841d) seems to think of pallakai primarily as slaves when, desiring to prohibit (or at least to drive completely underground) all extra-marital liaisons, he speaks of them in the first half of a sentence as ‘sowing without sacrifice the bastard seed of pallakai’ and in the second half as involving women ‘purchased or acquired as possessions (κτηται̃ς) in any other manner’. However, in Menander, as we shall see, women who are in relationships that have the other characteristics of pallakia appear always to be free (as Chrysis is—see Samia 577—despite Nikeratos’ implicit suggestion that Demeas ought to sell her). We cannot tell whether this is mere comic convention, or whether general usage had changed during the fourth century; if the latter is the case, it is quite possible that the language of Plato (who was closer in age to Antiphon than to Menander) would already around 350 have seemed out of date to the average Athenian. 2. In all cases that we hear of, the male partner of a pallake is a person who would have been entitled to make a legitimate marriage. Normally he is a citizen of Athens; in comedies whose dramatic location is elsewhere (Perikeiromene and possibly Misoumenos) and where the woman (Glykera and Krateia, respectively) is arguably in the position of a pallake, the man appears to be a citizen of, and is certainly at home in, the city in which the action is located. 3. But the most crucial feature of pallakia is that it is not a legitimate marriage. Normally this is because the woman is not of citizen status and therefore (at least in Athens, after Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/0) a marriage would be out of the question (one of the earliest cases is that of Aspasia, Cratinus fr. 259). In comedy, however—and probably often enough in real life, though not among families that were wealthy enough for their inheritance disputes to come to court— there could be situations where marriage was impossible for a quite different reason. Unless she was an epikleros, a woman could only be given in marriage by her father, her paternal grandfather, her brother (if they had the same father) or by a (male) guardian designated by her father ([Dem.] 46.18–19); and it is all too credible that some girls coming to marriageable age had fallen, as it were, through the safety net and had no one entitled to give them away.3 In Menander, there appears to be a recurring pattern whereby a girl is brought up ‘like a daughter’ by a woman living independently, and given by her to a man ‘to possess’ (ἔχειν, Perik. 130–1) or, in Latin, pro uxore (Ter. Andr. 145–6, cf. 295). She is certainly not being given in marriage, since a woman had no right to do this, so she must have been given as a pallake. The

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back-story told by Moschion in the first act of Samia gives clear evidence that it was taken for granted that a woman could not be married unless she was given away by a person qualified to do so. Moschion, having raped Plangon who has become pregnant, and being very much in love with her, went straight to Plangon’s mother and promised on oath to marry her—when her father4 came home (Sam. 50–53): until that time, no matter how much marriage was desired by, and in the interests of, all those concerned, there was simply no way it could take place. When Polemon in Perikeiromene (489) tells Pataikos that he had treated Glykera like a wife, Pataikos significantly asks ‘Who gave her to you?’ and Polemon replies ‘She herself did’; the question, and the answer, remind us and Polemon that she is not in fact a wife. 4. While pallakia is thus a different thing from marriage, and a pallake may (though she need not) be a former hetaira, the relationship of pallakia is also fairly clearly distinguishable from an ordinary liaison with a hetaira. A hetaira as such was hired, for a shorter or longer period, for a sum of money, payable to her personally if she was free, to her owner if she was a slave (though a slave hetaira might often also receive gifts to keep for herself, which she might later use to buy her freedom5). Pallakia on the other hand was, or was supposed to be, a lasting relationship and a non-commercial one. We never hear of any time limit upon it: like a marriage, it lasted until one party or the other terminated it—though unlike a marriage, it normally had nothing equivalent to a dowry to give the woman some security in the event of a break-up. At most, she would be entitled to take out of the relationship what she had brought into it (cf. Samia 381 ἔχεις τὰ σαυτη̃ς πάντα ‘you’ve got everything that belongs to you’6), and whereas a divorced wife would normally be able to find shelter and maintenance with her natal family, a repudiated pallake would often have nowhere to go. But while the relationship lasted, the woman was not paid: she was maintained, exactly as a wife would be, and was expected to carry out the normal duties of a wife, including control of the household stores and slaves. Both Thrasonides in Misoumenos (38–39 Arnott) and the slaves of Demeas in Samia (258) treat Krateia and Chrysis, respectively, as the lady of the house, and the wife and daughter of Nikeratos were happy to exchange visits with Chrysis as if she were their equal (Samia 35–38). No wonder that Terence, lacking a Latin word for παλλακή that would clearly distinguish it from ἑταίρα (amica covered the semantic area of both), settled for pro uxore (Andr. 146, 273; HT 98). Such, it seems, was pallakia in fourth-century Athens. And in Menander’s plays, as attested both by the evidence of Greek texts and that of Latin dramas known to have been adapted from Menandrian sources, we can see that there exists a definable class of women, of whom Chrysis is one, who tend

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to have similar personal characteristics and to be treated in similar ways by those around them, whom we might as well call pallakai. In addition, in this paper I will examine five aspects of the Menandrian pallake: how she is to be defined; how she comes to be a pallake; her ultimate destiny at the end of the action; her status and esteem; her rights and duties. I am leaving aside matters such as the personalities, characters, and plot functions of pallakai, because these have been superbly dealt with by Traill 2008. I define a pallake for this purpose as a woman7 cohabiting with a free man in a relationship which is not a marriage but which has no fixed expiry date. The last clause of the definition has to be couched in that form because an expression such as ‘permanent’ might be misunderstood. The relationship could be ended at any time, by either side (cf. Perik. 490–9), without formality and without notice; but if it was not terminated, it continued indefinitely, unlike the fixed-term fidelity contracts that hetairai might make with clients who could afford them (e.g. the one-year contract with the soldier in Plautus, Bacchides 1097). The man himself is always unmarried,8 either a bachelor or a widower (sometimes, as in Samia, we do not know which) and the relationship monogamous (or at any rate no less monogamous than a full marriage was). The triangular relationship with which Smikrines in Epitrepontes (715–800) tries to scare his daughter Pamphile, with Charisios keeping both a wife (herself) and a pallake (Habrotonon), never comes into being, and it looks as though Charisios never intended it to. When he has (over) heard Pamphile’s moving declaration of her loyalty to him,9 Charisios is deeply ashamed, and in his soliloquy one of the things he says to himself (919–922) is, ‘Did she say the same sort of thing to her father as you were then meaning to? On the contrary, she said that she’d come to be your partner in life and that she shouldn’t run away from the misfortune that had occurred.’ That implies that Charisios was ‘then’ (before he heard Pamphile speak) intending to tell Smikrines that the marriage was over: in other words, that he was meaning to divorce Pamphile (returning her dowry) and live only with Habrotonon whom he believed to be the mother of his child. After he has heard Pamphile, to be sure, he changes his mind and decides he must stay with her. He never mentions Habrotonon, and has pretty clearly not given any thought at all to what he is going to do about her and the baby; neither, I think, at this point, will the audience (any more than do W.D. Furley 2009 or Ireland 2010a), since they know the problem will disappear once Charisios learns what Pamphile and Habrotonon already know (858–877), that his baby and Pamphile’s baby are one and the same. In addition to the fixed-term contracts of hetairai, the definition of pallakia, which I have adopted, excludes several other types of non-marital relationship that are found in the plays. It excludes, for example, relationships between slave couples, such as that of Syriskos and his wife in Epitrepontes. It excludes a case like that of Glycerium in Terence’s Andria (apparently reflecting both the Andria and the Perinthia of Menander10), since she and

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her lover Pamphilus had never shared a home (Rosivach 1998:56). It doubly excludes Philoumene in Sikyonioi, since she is not only a slave but a virgin (Sik. 372–3): Stratophanes—before he discovered that he was an Athenian citizen—was very likely intending to make her his pallake (Traill 2008:19–20), but he never actually does so. Of women in Menander who do qualify as pallakai, there are three basic categories. The first, typified by Chrysis in Samia (and in real life by, for example, the Neaera for whose prosecution [Demosthenes] 59 was written), is that of the hetaira whom a man takes as his permanent companion (buying her out of slavery if necessary11). In Epitrepontes, Habrotonon envisages (538–549) that if she successfully deceives Charisios into supposing that she has had a child by him, he will buy her into freedom in order, presumably, to acknowledge and maintain the baby as his bastard son and its ‘mother’ as his pallake—though she also expects and hopes (cf. 544–549) that she will soon be able to identify the baby’s real mother. When the deception does indeed prove successful, Charisios sends his friend Chairestratos on an errand (699–701), from which he returns a full act later apparently telling himself (979–989) that he must not cast eyes on Habrotonon any more; evidently (Arnott 2004:274–275; W.D. Furley 2009:134, 208–209, 241–242) Chairestratos is himself in love with Habrotonon (cf. Men. test. 141 K-A), only to find his prospects ruined when Charisios sends him (presumably to the Agora, with money) to buy her from her owner to set her free.12 During the recognition-scenes in Act IV, Habrotonon is too happy for the reunited family (cf. 873–4) to give any thought to her own future. Then, at the start of Act V, Chairestratos returns, and there follows a scene of which very little survives, but in which Habrotonon was mentioned again (1040). For she is now, as it were, unfinished business. Charisios, having made the purchase through his friend’s agency, has become her owner—but what can he do with her? He cannot possibly keep her in his house; to sell her, after all she has done for him and his wife and their child, would be an act of monstrous ingratitude; he really has no choice except to set her free—and then Chairestratos will be able to make an offer to her, after all, and she will undoubtedly accept it, bringing her as it does at least a medium-term relationship with a man who has shown himself capable of loyal friendship. And it seems that this is what happens. In the last two lines of this scene (1060–1), the only ones to survive complete, someone says ‘He wouldn’t have kept his hands off a girl like that, I’m quite sure—but I will!’ This makes excellent sense in the mouth of Charisios (Arnott 1979:508–9): he means that if he had had Habrotonon as his pallake, he would have had to reckon with Chairestratos as a rival, but that as things now stand, Chairestratos will have nothing to fear from him. Incidentally, this dénouement also has the effect that Charisios ends up spending a very substantial amount (the price of a slave who is both an attractive hetaira and a skilled musician) and getting nothing for his money. Is this maybe to be viewed as the penalty (grossly inadequate, to be sure) that he pays for his original crime of rape?

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Another case of a hetaira becoming a pallake, though with very different kinds of characters involved, seems to appear in a sub-plot of Sikyonioi, involving Theron, a parasite who has attached himself to the soldier Stratophanes, and a woman named Malthake (a name which elsewhere, significantly, is normally that of a hetaira). At Sik. 125–143 Stratophanes comes into possession of evidence that seems to indicate that he is not, as he had always thought, a Sicyonian, but a citizen of Athens; and on learning this Theron utters, aside, an earnest prayer (Sik. 144–5): ‘Lady Athena, make him one of your own, so that he can take the girl [Philoumene] and I can take Malthake!’ That implies that Theron cannot make Malthake his partner unless Stratophanes marries Philoumene; and sure enough, there is other evidence that Malthake has hitherto been living with Stratophanes,13 an arrangement that he must terminate forthwith now that he is to become a married man. Does she indeed now transfer herself to Theron? There is a reference in Pollux (4.119) to a parasite in this play who ‘wears white when he is about to get married’ (Sik. F 9 Sandbach = 12 Arnott), and on the strength of this Arnott 2000:208–9 has suggested that the play ends with the wedding of Theron and Malthake. However, an actual wedding is impossible. There is no trace of the usual betrothal formula, and no evidence that anyone would have been in a position to pronounce it; the only person who can be said to give Malthake to Theron is Malthake herself, who first holds up proceedings by saying that she has not yet agreed to Theron’s request (419), and then declares ‘I will’ (δράσω, 420) after which she is asked by Theron to confirm her consent (κατάνευσον). We shall see later that Menandrian brides who had previously been pallakai typically are asked to confirm that they consent to the marriage—but they are asked by their fathers, not by their bridegrooms. That Theron dresses up as a bridegroom, and leaves the scene with Malthake in what is in appearance a wedding procession, does not prove that he is in fact marrying her. Rather, this pseudo-wedding serves as a surprise substitute for the actual marriage of Stratophanes and Philoumene, which, rather unusually, is performed entirely offstage; and Theron is in reality leading Malthake not into matrimony but into pallakia— unless indeed, as I strongly suspect, Theron is a citizen of Sicyon rather than Athens,14 in which case he and Malthake might well have been quite entitled to call themselves man and wife (so long as they behaved as such), since Athenian law is not known to have concerned itself with specifying conditions for the validity of marriages between non-citizens. There is some evidence that the hetaira who becomes a pallake also figured in two other Menandrian plays. In com. adesp. 1089 (= Men. fab. inc. no. 5 Arnott), a woman gives some clothes and jewelry to Moschion and Parmenon, to be pawned for 1,000 drachmae which can then be used for the benefit of another woman, Dorkion, as a ‘contribution to her σωτηρία’. As Moschion is able to go into Dorkion’s house and talk to her freely, she is probably a hetaira. She can hardly be a slave (else where is her owner?), so perhaps, like Sostratos in Dis Exapaton (Mnesilochus in Plautus’ Bacchides),

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Moschion is trying to buy her out of an existing contract with another man, possibly a soldier. If he needs funding from others to achieve this, as he apparently does, he is presumably not in a position to hire Dorkion himself for any substantial length of time, so probably he is hoping that she will agree to become his pallake. The other possible case is com. adesp. 1147 (= Men. fab. inc. no. 8 Arnott), where a young man speaks of a woman who is ‘a hetaira in her behaviour’ (35) but with whom he wants to spend the rest of his life (37)—which his companion (whether friend or slave) acidly terms ‘whoring’ (πορνοκοπει̃ν). The remaining fragments, though extensive, are too scrappy to give us any clear idea of how things developed, so we cannot tell whether the young man’s aspiration was fulfilled. The second category of pallake is that of the girl who has been brought up by a woman living independently (that is, without a male kyrios), who then ‘gives’ her to a man to be his permanent partner. The regular Latin expression—and several of the relevant plays are Latin—is pro uxore (approximately ‘as a substitute for a wife’);15 in terms of Athenian law, the older woman can have no right to give the girl as an actual wife, and must therefore be giving her as a pallake. The girl is regularly spoken of as having been raised ‘like a daughter’16 or, in the Latin cliché, bene et pudice17 (‘well and chastely’)—even though she has sometimes grown up in a hetaira household—and the partner to whom she is given is always the only man there has ever been in her life. Sometimes, as in Terence’s Andria and probably also in the Clinia-Antiphila relationship in Heauton Timorumenos (see Rosivach 1998:61), the girl continues to live in her original home even after being ‘given’ into the relationship, and the young man, who is himself living with his father, merely visits her there when he can; these are not therefore, by our definition, instances of pallakia (though no doubt those concerned hope they will eventually become so—presumably when the young man can afford to buy or rent a separate residence). In Plautus’ Cistellaria, adapted from Menander’s Synaristosai, Selenium is living with Alcesimarchus (Cist. 85); he has set her up in a house he has rented (Cist. 312–319), where she is the hostess at the lunch party which gave its name to Menander’s play (cf. Cist. 8–11). Melaenis, the hetaira who is believed to be Selenium’s mother, has authorized the relationship, though she later demands that it be terminated on learning that Alcesimarchus is being required by his father to marry another woman after he had sworn to marry Selenium (Cist. 98–105). This oath of his is the most surprising feature of the plot. In the end, he is able to fulfil it, when it is discovered that Selenium is by birth a citizen (in this case a citizen of Sicyon, where the action is set). But at the time when he made this sworn promise, there was only one person, the slave Lampadio, who possessed the information that would ultimately lead to Selenium’s identification, and he did not yet know where she was (cf. Cist. 182–7) nor had Alcesimarchus met him; in other words, Alcesimarchus swore to marry Selenium believing her to be a foreigner, and believing furthermore that she had no male relatives. It is very doubtful whether

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Menander would have let the corresponding character do such a thing, even at Sicyon, just as it is doubtful whether he would have allowed a girl whose ultimate destiny was marriage to declare that she was in love (Cist. 59–95); and indeed in Plautus’ play—as far as we can tell, in its present mutilated state—these two features do not seem essential to the working of the plot. Also in this category is Glykera in Perikeiromene. She has undoubtedly been living with Polemon for some time, and he regards her as having both the status (489) and the duties of a wife—her apparent breach of which is his excuse for inflicting on her the humiliation from which the play takes its name. She was given to him by the old woman (now deceased) who had brought her up; the woman told Polemon that Glykera was her daughter (130–1). Glykera knows that she is a Corinthian citizen, and that Moschion is her brother—but neither Moschion himself nor anyone else now alive knows this, with the exception of Moschion’s foster-mother Myrrhine: Glykera has not revealed their kinship because it might damage Moschion’s reputation and prospects (147–150)18—in other words, she has accepted an inferior and stigmatized status for her brother’s sake. When Glykera is discovered to be the daughter of Polemon’s friend Pataikos, she is formally betrothed to Polemon, agreeing to forgive him in return for a promise that he will control his behaviour in future. Glykera is clearly a very young woman, not much beyond the normal age for a first marriage; likewise Selenium, who is seventeen (Cist. 755). In Kitharistes, it has sometimes been thought that we have a case of a much older woman becoming a pallake. The title character, Phanias, an Athenian citizen (96–99), has just arrived from Ephesus, where he had ‘taken’ (35) a woman who is described as somebody’s daughter (ibid.), who is sole possessor of a great deal of property (36–38), and who ‘was free and belonged to a Greek city’ (39)—an expression which strongly suggests that she was (or thought herself to be) not only not Athenian, but not Ephesian either. At any rate, Phanias is at pains to make it clear that she is no ‘pimp’s brat’ (41). However, whether or not she was regarded as his wife at Ephesus, she cannot be his wife at Athens; she can only be a pallake. Phanias himself is at least of middle age, for he has a daughter of his own (96–100), whom the young Athenian Moschion had seen at Ephesus, fallen in love with, possibly raped (cf. 19–20), and is now seeking permission to marry (79–101); Arnott (1996a:114) thinks that this girl was the issue of a much earlier liaison between Phanias and the same woman—which would certainly explain why the girl was in Ephesus in the first place—but there are difficulties in the way of this supposition (how could Moschion, or any Athenian, suppose for a moment that he could lawfully marry a girl of mixed parentage?) What is more, the fact that Phanias’ partner is referred to as someone’s ‘daughter’ strongly suggests that she was young; if she were a mature mother, she would have been called someone’s wife or widow, since a woman who was ‘free and belonged to a Greek city’—and had some wealth into the bargain— would not have been left in spinsterhood for 15 or 20 years.

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But who was she called the daughter of? Gomme and Sandbach (1973:412) acutely observed that in line 35, if the name of a parent (in the genitive case) was given, it must have been feminine (e.g. Κλεου̃ς—or one might suggest Ῥόδης, cf. Men. frr. 188, 815) because ‘there is no masculine name which will fit’; so there is a good case for believing that Phanias was given this woman by her mother (or by someone he believed to be her mother). This would make it much easier to explain why the parent was content with such a second-class arrangement, and why Phanias is so vague about the woman’s origins: he has been told that she is free, Greek, and wealthy, but does not know who, or of what city, her father is or was. Both she and the mother of Phanias’ daughter (if, as here assumed, they were different persons) most likely proved to be Athenian in the end and perhaps related to each other. So we have one category of pallakai who are ex-hetairai, and another category consisting of girls ‘given for pallakia’ by their mothers or other female caregivers. There is also a third category, represented for us in Menander solely by Krateia in Misoumenos: the girl who has fallen into slavery through some accident, such as capture in war (as in Krateia’s case) or by pirates (compare Sikyonioi 2–6, 354–7), and is bought by a man who sets her free (Mis. 37–38 Arnott)19 and makes her his pallake. Philoumene in Sikyonioi would eventually have become a pallake of this type if she had not been discovered to be of citizen birth. The ultimate fate of a pallake in comedy, so far as we can tell, is entirely determined by her origin—to be precise, by whether her sexual history involves one man or many. If it involves many—if she is an ex-hetaira— she will end up by entering, or remaining in, a quasi-permanent relationship of pallakia. If her partner is an older man, like Demeas in Samia, this relationship may prove to be lifelong; if he is young, like Chairestratos in Epitrepontes, it will normally last only until he decides to marry—but this uncomfortable fact (from the woman’s point of view) is unlikely to be brought to the spectator’s attention. If the pallake is one of those in our categories two and three, she will normally prove to be of citizen status and someone—usually a father or brother—will be found who is entitled to give her to her partner as his lawful wife.20 It is striking, by the way, that in the only two cases in which the transition from pallake to wife actually forms part of a surviving text—Misoumenos and Perikeiromene—the bride-tobe both times explicitly gives her consent to the marriage (Mis. 969–972 Arnott; Perik. 979–990, 1006–9) before the betrothal is effected, something which is never even thought about in other Menandrian plays, where it is taken for granted that a binding betrothal can be made not only without the bride’s consent, but without her even knowing of it. To the rights, duties and status of a pallake while she is one, on the other hand, her origin seems to make little difference. Thrasonides, speaking of Krateia in Misoumenos, says (38–40 Arnott) that after conferring freedom on her, he made her the mistress of the house, gave her maidservants,

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jewellery [and probably clothing21], and treated her as his wife. Polemon in Perikeiromene (489) likewise speaks of having treated Glykera as if she were his wedded wife, and he has provided her with several maidservants (750) and some fine clothing (519–520). Chrysis, who came to Demeas possessing practically nothing (Samia 377–9), is referred to by his slaves as ‘the mistress’ (αὐτή, 258) and by Demeas himself, once he knows she has not after all been unfaithful to him, as ‘my wife’ (561); the Mytilene mosaic, depicting the scene of her expulsion in Act III, shows her sumptuously dressed and bejewelled (with a tiara and possibly a necklace); and before and after the upheavals of Acts III and IV, we find her managing the household’s activities as a wife was expected to do (258, 301–4, 730). Even Malthake—once, it seems, a mere camp follower who fed Stratophanes’ donkeys (Sik. 411)— has a very considerable amount of property to take away with her when he ends their relationship (Sik. 386–9). The pallake also, as the experiences of Chrysis and Glykera testify, had the same duty of absolute sexual fidelity as a wife had. She also, again like a wife, had the duty of sexual submission: Thrasonides may be ‘hated’ (μισούμενος) by Krateia, but he is still entitled to ‘possess his beloved’ (Mis. 9–12 Arnott)—it is only his own feelings that restrain him. The one duty she did not have was the one that defined the status of a wife: the production of children. Indeed, one might almost say she had a duty not to produce them. When Demeas discovers (as he supposes) that Chrysis has had a baby in his absence and is rearing it instead of exposing it, he indignantly exclaims ‘It seems I’ve got married to a hetaira without knowing it!’ (130–1). And strikingly—all the more so when we recall how one-off rapes in comedy are invariably procreative—neither Glykera nor Krateia has had a child, nor does anyone even raise the possibility that they might, until it appears at the end in the standard betrothal formula. There was one other, and a profound, difference between the position of a pallake and that of a wife. The pallake had, in principle, no security whatever. A wife, to be sure, could be dismissed (ἀποπέμπειν) at any time, but the husband had then to repay her dowry; and if he ill-treated her, she could look for support to her own kinsfolk, and with their backing could herself withdraw from the marriage—and in this case, too, compel the return of the dowry. Either way, the husband risked turning former friends into future enemies. The pallake could count on none of this. Demeas can turn Chrysis into the street at a moment’s notice, and gloat (Samia 390–7) over the prospect of her coming to an early grave through undernourishment or overdrinking; Polemon can assault and humiliate Glykera, cropping her hair as if she were a common slave; and neither of the victims can do anything about it. At least not formally, because informally they can do quite a bit. Both have created little networks of support.22 Chrysis, on her expulsion, may be at her wits’ end (Samia 369, 398); but she has good friends in Nikeratos’ wife and daughter, and might well have appealed to them if Nikeratos himself had not opportunely come home, immediately taken her

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side, and soon decided (on his wife’s urging, 421) to tax Demeas on the matter. Glykera is well acquainted with Myrrhine and with Pataikos (Perik. 508–9), and is able to secure the support of both; Polemon’s attempt to take her back by force is an ignominious failure, and his good friend Pataikos rebukes him for it. In both plays, these amicable and more or less equal relations between full-fledged citizens and alien women of dubious status (one of whom had been a hetaira not so long ago) are taken for granted as if perfectly normal. Krateia too may have sought and received external support; when her father Demeas arrives on the scene, he seems to refer to a letter he has received (Mis. 417, 425 Arnott), perhaps from Thrasonides’ neighbour Kleinias and perhaps about his daughter—though this is very uncertain. Menander’s world is one in which cruel behaviour to a free person (slaves are another matter) is likely to be known about and unlikely to be readily tolerated. If one were to seek a single short phrase that best describes the Menandrian pallake, it would be ‘unmarried wife’. As we have seen, her position differs from that of an actual wife only inasmuch as she lacks the security provided by the dowry and by the availability of an alternative source of protection in her natal family (but she is able to compensate for this, to a considerable extent, by building up a network of support among friends and neighbours), and inasmuch as she cannot produce legitimate children and may well not be allowed to keep any children she does bear. In character, as Traill 2008 has shown, she tends to resemble the good wife (like Pamphile in Epitrepontes, or Myrrhine in Georgos) rather than the silent, passive maiden; she vocally resents ill-treatment, acts to put a stop to it, and expects to have a say in determining her future destiny. She is also typically altruistic: Chrysis (and also Habrotonon, not yet a pallake but soon to become one) strive to protect babies who are not theirs, Glykera endangers herself to safeguard the reputation of her brother, Krateia risks the anger of Thrasonides rather than be disloyal to the memory of her (supposedly dead) brother. And in all these respects there is little or no difference between the pallake who has been brought up ‘like a daughter’ and the pallake who had previously been a professional sex-worker—except that the former, when she turns out to be the daughter of a full citizen, will also be able to become a wife, whereas the latter never will. The picture Menander draws, in this as in other areas of life, is no doubt stylized and rose-coloured; but it is nevertheless significant that he did not expect it to offend a male, citizen audience. They were prepared—they probably wanted—to believe that that was what the life of pallakai was, or ought to be, like, whether it actually was or not. NOTES 1. It was also the title of a play by Alexis, and (probably in the form Παλλακίς) of one by Diphilus. None of the surviving fragments of these three plays tells us anything about the title character.

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Alan H. Sommerstein 2. Speaking of two sisters whose mother is dead, and who are being brought up by ‘a pallake of their father’s, who had previously been their mother’s personal maid (habra)’. 3. Isaeus 3.39, speaking of ‘those who give their female dependants (τὰς ἑαυτω̃ν) for pallakia’, is probably referring to girls in one or the other of the two situations described, the ‘givers’ being either women or metics. It is possible in principle that a citizen father who was unable to find a legitimate husband for his daughter might give her to a man as a pallake, but there is no positive evidence that this ever actually happened: Plangon, daughter of the ex-general Pamphilus and mother of the defendant in Demosthenes 39, was almost certainly the wife, not the pallake, of Mantias (see Carey & Reid 1985:160–6). 4. The fathers of Moschion and of Plangon are in fact abroad together on a business voyage, and will return together, but Moschion is certainly here referring to Plangon’s father, not (as e.g. Jacques 1971:5, Lamagna 1998:199) to his own: a man’s father, though he might certainly in practice have great and even decisive influence over his son’s choice of a wife, was not formally a party to the son’s marriage contract, and a binding betrothal could be made without his knowledge. In Dyskolos (759–763), Gorgias at first declines to betroth his sister to Sostratos before Sostratos has consulted his father, but on Sostratos’ unsupported assurance that his father will make no objection (761), Gorgias makes the betrothal at once, though at that moment he does not even know who Sostratos’ father is (cf. 773–4) nor does the latter know anything about his son’s intended marriage. 5. As for example Neaera did ([Dem.] 59.31–32). 6. In Chrysis’ case, this will have amounted to very little (cf. 377–9). 7. In all cases, we know of, the woman is free; but we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that Menander might have portrayed a man who was in a long-term relationship with his own female slave and had not manumitted her. It is not clear whether it should be taken as significant that Hesychius (α176) glosses ἅβρα (which always denotes a slave) as παλλακή, or whether this is merely based on a misunderstanding of Men. fr. 411 (see note 2 above). 8. The Lemnian ‘wife’ of Chremes in Terence’s Phormio is not an exception, since they were never a cohabiting couple; Chremes had raped her, accepted responsibility for her upkeep and that of their daughter, but ‘never touched her again’ (Phorm. 1016–18). Apparently, the woman was a descendant of the Athenian colonists on Lemnos, since her daughter is described as an Athenian citizen (114) and becomes the wife of Chremes’ nephew Antipho. The play is based, not on one of Menander, but on the Epidikazomenos of Apollodorus of Carystus. I am indebted to Ariana Traill for drawing my attention to this case. 9. Our knowledge of this has recently been augmented by a new Michigan fragment (see Römer 2012a; W.D. Furley 2013:86–90). 10. Ter. Andr. 9–14 with Donatus ad loc. (Men. Ἀνδρία test. ii K-A); on the relationship between Menander’s Perinthia and Terence’s play see e.g. Gomme & Sandbach 1973:533–5, Arnott 1996a:472–6. 11. Cf. Ar. Wasps 1351–3. 12. Pace Römer 2012b, the new Michigan fragments of the end of Act III do not disprove this reconstruction (see W.D. Furley 2013:82–83). Blume (this volume) takes a different view. 13. At 385–395, Stratophanes tells his slave Donax to ‘go in’ (sc. to his, Stratophanes’, house) and instruct Malthake to move all her property, and herself, to his mother’s house; evidently, and significantly, he envisages that Malthake will remain on friendly terms with his newfound family. She herself, however, chooses a different course.

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14. I can see no other convincing explanation for the play’s plural title Sikyonioi. This title is attested from a very early date, appearing already in the colophon of the Sorbonne papyrus (third century BC); the first witnesses to the singular title, Aelius Dionysius and Pollux (Sik. F 1, 4, 9 Sandbach = 4, 7, 12 Arnott), belong to the second century AD. It would have been easy for the singular title to displace the plural, in view of the centrality to the play of the issue of Stratophanes’ parentage and citizenship. Belardinelli 1994:58 seems to assume that Theron is a Sicyonian. All other attempts to explain the plural title have to assume that it refers in part to persons who are not characters in the drama. 15. Ter. Andr. 146, 273, HT 98. 16. Perik. 130; Plaut. Cist. 172, 571. 17. Plaut. Cist. 172; Ter. Andr. 274, HT 226. 18. If, that is, he was known to have a sister who was living, or had lived, in a non-marital relationship. 19. That this is the meaning of περιθεὶς ἐλευθερίαν has been doubted, in view of later statements indicating clearly that Demeas came with the objective of ‘ransoming’ her (298/699, 315/716). The best explanation of the apparent contradiction may be that of Borgogno 1988:94–7 (I am indebted to Peter Brown for the reference): we are to understand (and perhaps, I might add, we were told in a lost passage, such as a delayed divine prologue) that Thrasonides had given Krateia her freedom on condition that she continued to live with him as his pallake (for such a conditional manumission cf. [Dem.] 59.32 where Eucrates and Timanoridas give Neaera her freedom on condition that she does not work as a hetaira in Corinth). 20. Usually, it seems, this is represented as happening in a city other than Athens: Athenian citizen girls may be the victims of rape, and may as a result temporarily become unmarried mothers, but they are not in general shown as engaging in ongoing non-marital cohabitation—not even before their citizen origin is discovered. Prima facie, Kitharistes is an exception, but given the state of our evidence, we cannot be certain. It is likely enough, to be sure, that Phanias’ ‘wife’ turned out in the end to be of Athenian birth; but we know that she had sailed from Ephesus for Athens before he himself did (for he is surprised and worried to find, on landing, that she has not yet arrived, and ‘the time is long’, 45), and it is possible that the ‘marriage’ had not been consummated. 21. Restoring [ἱμάτια δο]ύς (Austin/Sandbach/Turner) at the start of 40. 22. Cf. Bathrellou, this volume, on networks of support among slaves.

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Reconsidering Rape in Menander’s Comedy and Athenian Life Modern Comparative Evidence Sharon L. James

Menander’s drama has been much studied for social and legal attitudes toward rape in ancient Athens.1 These studies have typically aimed to identify more or less official attitudes toward rape and sexual violence—what could be said aloud, what was said aloud, what was performed on stage.2 I seek here instead, with Menander’s assistance, evidence for unofficial views, specifically those of rape victims. Even more important to my inquiry is the female experience of rape in Athens, a subject less related than we might expect to the public, social, and legal attitudes. Non-Western modern evidence can help us to find in Menander a consciousness of the way Athenian women actually experienced, and felt about, rape. This material suggests that Menander’s treatment of rape is impossibly sentimental in some respects but remarkably realistic in others. Using these comparanda, I will argue that Menander shows partial recognition of the female experience of rape, and that scholarship should include the perspectives of victims, when attempting to comprehend Athenian attitudes toward rape and in considering how even to denominate the phenomenon of sexual assault in Athens.3 DEFINITIONS, PROBLEMS, APPROACHES The preoccupations of most scholarship on rape and sexual violations in Athens have to do with scales of sexual offense and the perceived relative socio-legal gravity of rape as opposed to seduction. Edward Harris (1990, 2004) has argued strongly that ‘we should stop using the word rape altogether, and looking for “the Athenian attitude toward rape” or “the Greek concept of rape,”’ because rape did not exist in the ancient world ([2004]/2006: see esp. 305–6, 331). By this remark, he means not that sexual assault never took place, but that the ancients did not understand it in our terms, so we should not foist those terms upon them. We should think instead about ‘Greek attitudes toward sexual violence’ ([2004] 2006:306; see also Harris 1997:483–4): We may not like the way that Athenians dealt with the issue of sexual violence, but we will never make progress in our understanding of

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their attitudes if we are not willing to think away our own assumptions about the issue and to approach the Athenians on their terms (Harris [2004] 2006:331). True enough, but as the operating definition of ‘the Athenians’ here appears to be citizen males; such a principle omits the possible attitudes of rape victims in Athens, and particularly of women.4 Not being ready to eliminate women from the category of ‘Athenians,’ I argue to the contrary, namely that we should use the word rape to denote sexual assault in Athens. In addition, modern comparative evidence strongly suggests that Athenian women could well have felt themselves to have been raped in ways that are recognizable to contemporary Western perspectives, even if those feelings were of little concern to Athenian men.5 It is crucial to keep such female feelings and attitudes in mind when we consider the subject of rape in Athens. Patricia Rozée’s broad-scale cross-cultural study of rape (Rozée, 1993) concludes with a concise précis of this point: In every known society, men and women are of different status, with males having authority over females (Rosaldo & Lamphere, 1974). Rape legitimizes male authority, assures the right of sexual access to females, confirms entitlement, and demonstrates male dominance (Rozée-Koker & Polk, 1986). Rape is prevalent because it is so intimately tied to the meaning of gender in all societies, including our own. Occasionally, the desirable goal of avoiding ethnocentrism inadvertently leads to the acceptance of male-defined social norms over femaledefined choice in defining rape cross-culturally. This happens even in cases where ethnographers are clearly aware of the unwilling participation of females in violent social rituals. Thus, it is not uncommon to find reports of an exceedingly violent male practice against women that the ethnographer is reluctant to label as rape simply because it is socially condoned. Thus, although it is important to accurately and respectfully record life in other cultures, it is also important not to embrace androcentrism to avoid ethnocentrism. Mutatis mutandis, this analysis applies to much of the scholarship on rape in Athens. I take Rozée’s warning to heart here, in seeking to include the perspectives of Athenian women on this subject, which they experienced very personally. Even in arguing against the use of the term ‘rape,’ Harris implicitly points to the subject of this study, when he notes that social solutions to rape, from Roman comedy to 1990s Peru, do not give rape victims a choice not to marry the men who have raped them (Harris [2004] 2006:328). Indeed, as he notes, the women are not even asked if they have a preference. In his review of the socio-legal practices of Peru, before the 1997 legislative reform, Harris acknowledges that rape victims actually do have a preference— not to marry the rapists: ‘the victims are often reluctant to accept’ offers of

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marriage from the rapists; family members pressure women into marrying rapists, even to the point of falsely telling the victims that they must do so or be required to drop the legal charges of rape.6 Harris draws on this modern comparative evidence to argue, correctly, that the same practices—widely attested in New Comedy—must have been common in antiquity. He certainly recognizes the trauma to rape victims ([2004] 2006:330), but deduces that the frequent solution of marriage means that the ancient understanding of sexual assault does not resemble our modern view, as women in antiquity did not have full rights of citizenship. Hence his argument that we ought to stop thinking in terms of rape, because for the ancients sexual assault was really an issue of relations among men: ‘[s]exual violence against women was therefore evaluated not so much for its impact on the victim (though poets and artists were not indifferent to their suffering), as for its effects on men’s power and honor’ (Harris [2004] 2006:330). This perspective, as I have noted, focuses on socio-legal attitudes, and limits our definition of ‘the Athenians’ to citizen men. However, Harris’ discussion acknowledges, in drawing on this evidence from 1990s Peru, an evidently widespread reaction by rape victims: personal dissent from the social solution of marriage. It is this gap that I aim to investigate here, as it offers a glimpse into the ways that women in Athens might have felt about rape. Drawing on a wide range of comparative evidence, I will argue that raped women in Athens, like rape victims everywhere, had personal reactions that did not inevitably accord with general social and legal attitudes. If we are interested in the Athenian attitudes toward rape and sexual assault, we should include the perspectives of raped women in our consideration. THE BASIC PATTERNS FOR RAPE IN MENANDER As all scholars point out, the words used to denote rape are remarkably vague and multi-purpose: the Athenians had no word for what we call rape. Forms of βία (force, violence) and ὕβρις (arrogance, arrogant violence) are common euphemisms, as are αἰσχύνη (shame) and φθείρω (ruin).7 A typical schedule of events for rape plots in Menander appears to be as follows: a young man runs into a girl at a nighttime religious festival or returning home from one. He rapes her; at some point, she removes a token from him; at another point, he runs off. She has a baby, but rarely knows who the father is. She may bring up the baby (or babies), as in Georgos and Hiereia; she may expose or give up the baby, and then proceed to marry (Epitrepontes, Heros, Phasma). Ultimately, the two will wind up married, sometimes years later. At some point, they will learn that they are the parents of the baby produced by rape (Heros, Epitrepontes, almost certainly Phasma).8 The circumstances of rape appear to have been presented only rarely: of our extant materials, only Epitrepontes gives a specific description of the aftermath.

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COMPARATIVE MODERN EVIDENCE Athenian sexual values remain common, if not prevalent, upon the planet even now. For considering female sexuality, social status, and rape in Athens, numerous modern parallels offer evidence that can help us to understand, even to denominate, sexual violence in Athens. The specific categories for analysis are: (1) general treatments of women and female sexuality; (2) social responses and resolutions to rape; (3) problems of terminology; (4) initial female responses to the experience of rape; and (5) women’s longterm responses to rape. In studying this evidence, I focused on societies outside what is loosely called the West (the U.S., Canada, the British Isles, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand). I looked for sexual values similar to those of Athens: patriarchal attitudes toward women, including a tendency to consider daughters a burden; severe, punitive control of the female body; and a belief that women exude a powerful sexual allure that overwhelms men. In these societies, the life of a rape victim is at risk, often from her own family, so the great majority of victims never report a rape.9 There is plenty of evidence for both official attitudes toward, and treatment of, rape and female sexuality, and for how women, particularly raped women, feel about those subjects. ANALYSIS CATEGORY 1: GENERAL TREATMENT OF WOMEN AND FEMALE SEXUALITY Patriarchal societies have so strong a preference for sons that women may be physically and socially punished for producing female babies.10 Girls are married off very young; women are subordinated socially and politically. A description for Palestine is representative of patriarchal cultures— polygamy aside, this passage could describe citizen women in ancient Athens: [A woman’s] sexuality (particularly if she is unmarried) is perceived as an obstacle and a constant threat to her family’s reputation and honor. This perception is compounded by the subordinate status of the woman in Arab society. In the private domain, this is affected by her role within a family that is traditional, extended, patriarchal, and hierarchical, encouraging endogamy . . . and allowing for polygamy. . . . The preference of males over females restricts women to the private realm. . . . This subordination has been translated into legal and cultural codes, leading to an emphasis on early marriage and a focus on the woman’s honor as the main issue that directs and influences social reactions toward any behavior by or against her. Arab women are perceived as the property of men (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1997:159).

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More specific similarities exist for female sexuality and the crucial, lifeand-death, importance of chastity, especially virginity: A. Virginity of daughters and family honor reflect a long history of association in China (Gil & Anderson 1999:1163). B. [In Algeria] A girl’s family lives in daily fear that she will lose her virginity before marriage; that is why she is married early, and often without her consent (Heise et al. 1995:15). C. [In Indian court rulings on rape cases] There is . . . a reiteration of the damage done to the ‘family honour and name,’ reinforcing the notion of a woman’s ‘chastity’ as being the property of her husband, father, brother or any other relevant male in her life. In fact, in many cases there is concern shown about the marriage prospects of the girl being ruined (Singh 2004:114).11 D. [In Africa, rape] occurs in the context of a culture in which rape brings shame on both the individual and the family, and crushing guilt, fear, and humiliation on victims (Kalu 2004:189).12 ANALYSIS CATEGORY 2: SOCIAL RESPONSES AND RESOLUTIONS TO RAPE13 Many patriarchal societies show an obsession with female sexual purity, but simultaneously consider rape a part of male sexuality, provoked by the overwhelming power of female sexuality. Socially and legally, rape is a crime against a woman’s father or husband rather than against herself. Often, the woman is seen as the transgressor, and is blamed by all parties for having been raped. So-called ‘honor killings,’ in which a girl or woman is killed by her family because she was raped, occur across the Muslim world, and in Muslim populations in the West.14 The most common solution appears to be marriage, as articulated long ago in Deuteronomy, but still in practice today: A. If a man meets a virgin who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are caught in the act, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman’s father, and she shall become his wife. Because he violated her he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives (Deuteronomy 22:28–29).15 B. It was not until 1997 that the Peruvian government repealed a 1924 law that allowed men who rape women to escape punishment by marrying their victims (Kirby 2006). C. [In India: a father publicly berates his 14-year-old daughter, who had been raped by her father-in-law.] ‘You whore! You will listen to me!’. . . . Nathula lunged toward his daughter. ‘Get back into that room!’ he screamed. ‘Do as I tell you to do! If you don’t kill yourself in five minutes, I will do it for you!’ (Weaver 2000:52).

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Such responses to rape, though far more brutal than anything recorded in our Greek sources, indicate attitudes very like those of the ancient Athenians16: women’s bodies contain male honor, so sexual damage to those bodies harms the men who are supposed to control them. The insult to male honor is greater than the outrage against any woman, which goes unrecognized as a personal assault upon her. ANALYSIS CATEGORY 3: PROBLEMS OF TERMINOLOGY As noted above, the Athenians had no word for rape—a significant conceptual shortcoming in a language with such an extensive vocabulary. However, lack of a word, as Sommerstein 2006:245n.6 and others point out, does not mean that a concept is unknown within a linguistic or cultural system.17 In addition, if the terminology used to denote rape in many countries today is vague or even confusing, the female experience of it is clear: A. Just because a woman doesn’t call it rape doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel violated. She may not have the language, or she may never have been asked (Heise et al. 1995:21–22).18 B. [In Pakistan] . . . few will ever refer to rape by its legal term [zina bil jabr]. Instead, euphemisms such as izzat khona/izzat looti jana (loss of virtue/theft of virtue) or bay-izzat karna (causing one to lose one’s honour) are common allusions to acts of sexual violence (Zia 1994:18).19 C. [In Palestine; the testimony of a 10-year-old girl raped in her home by her 19-year-old neighbor.] Suddenly he wrestled me to the floor and climbed on top of me. . . . He pulled down my skirt and pants and did something very painful to me. He then got up and left me on the floor (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1999:161–2). Rape is often described in terms of its social and cultural meaning, rather than in terms denoting the act itself: such phrases as ‘stole her virtue’ or ‘dishonored her’ focus on a woman’s social and symbolic value to others (usually husband and natal family), rather than on herself.20 Failure to denominate sexual assault may derive from a true linguistic absence (as in Greek), an inclination toward euphemism (often founded in fear and shame), or a genuine lack of understanding about what has been done. Thus the 10-year-old girl’s description, ‘did something very painful to me,’ may represent either ignorance of her own body and its vulnerability to rape or a preference, after the fact, not to name the act of rape. However, her description of the event makes clear her own perceptions, and her awareness of its long-lasting effects on her (articulated with heartbreaking clarity in the rest of her testimony, not cited here). As I will argue, women in Menander’s Athens also had a way of understanding rape that differed from what is found in male-authored texts.21

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ANALYSIS CATEGORY 4: WOMEN’S RESPONSES TO RAPE: SHOCK AND SILENCE Menander does not dwell upon the circumstances or immediate aftermath of rape, not least because the brutality of the act, depicted even semi-realistically, would destroy the sentimental atmosphere of his theater. In some respects, however, he gives a very realistic depiction of how at least young girls react, both immediately, as in the case of Pamphile in Epitrepontes, and in the months or years following. Shock and outrage during the initial attack, frantic struggles during, and near-hysteria immediately after, are all attested in victim accounts of rape, worldwide. The victim’s silence and, often, her conspiracy of silence with female intimates are also widely attested phenomena.22 A. [On the 1996 testimony of a woman in China, called ‘Alice,’ about a rape that took place some 8 years before, when she was 18.] She cannot tell. She cannot share because to do so would be to shame her family, not just herself. The only ‘leak’ is to an extremely trusted friend in the nursing profession, because the possibility of being pregnant would eventually tell of her loss of virginity. . . . [T]he path Alice takes is to conform to the social expectation and cope as best she can, in silence and by herself (Gil & Anderson 1999:1163–4). B. [Mexican and Mexican-American women interviewed about rape.] Keeping silent was a consistent theme. . . . Fear, shame, and selfblame were mentioned as the main motives for silence in these contexts (Ramos Lira et al. 1999:259). C. [Establishing a rape crisis center at the University of Western Cape, in South Africa.] . . . many women choose to be silent about sexual violations in order to avoid being further humiliated or stigmatized by their families (Maboe 1994:33). In Menander, too, the raped girls and women keep silent, having perhaps only a single female confidante (thus Philinna, the nurse in Georgos, knows that her mistress Myrrhine’s two children are the result of rape). The most unrealistic feature here, of course, is the inevitable pregnancy, but Menander’s representation of the victims’ secrecy about their babies seems likely to have been realistic. ANALYSIS CATEGORY 5: WOMEN’S RESPONSE TO RAPE: SILENT OUTRAGE AND DISSENT In modern patriarchies, female rape victims who seek local counseling do so in confidential settings, usually not letting anyone know that they have sought help. Their agonized testimony demonstrates their confusion at the social values that punish and blame them—when, often, they had no idea

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what rape was. Along with their confusion, they record profound dissent against the attitudes and practices that value them only for their chastity. A. [‘Alice,’ in China.] After the rape, I became more and more angry. Inside I blamed my family for not telling me anything about sex, about men, about what can happen to people. They should have told me! They should have! I was enraged that they could be so ignorant . . . these are people with some education; they should have talked to me!’ (Gil & Anderson 1999:1159). B. [Testimony of another rape victim in Palestine.] If someone commits a crime against a man, or against property, everyone will condemn it and direct their anger against the criminal. If someone beats or harms an animal, people will react with anger. But if someone commits a crime against a woman, raping her, taking all she has, the only thing this damned society gave to her to be proud of, the only source of honor, dignity and respect . . . she has no right to say anything. Am I responsible for being raped? [Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1999:170; ellipses and italics original.] C. [The American Bar Association’s Central European & Eurasian Law Initiative, sent an attorney to help set up rape crisis centers in Russia; in 1998 to 2000, she met with women’s groups.] Some of those that she met already had feminist understandings of gender violence, such as rejecting the idea of [rape] provocation, but had had no language or logic to articulate their arguments (J. Johnson 2009:90). These selections show that women in sexually closed, highly patriarchal societies are able to feel and express dissent against the cultural values that treat them as property—as rapable property with no rights over their own bodies or lives. They may have little room to act on their dissent, but they clearly perceive the conceptual faults of their societies, and they recognize both that they suffered a personal violation and that they are being scapegoated for that violation, a treatment they know to be both illogical and unjust. In China, ‘Alice’ protests the social values that kept her educated parents from warning her about what might happen when she took a factory job away from home. Women’s groups had rejected the widespread Russian attitude that rape is the fault of the woman, for having sexually provoked a man. The Palestinian rape victim recognizes, clearly and painfully, that her entire society (including her family) values her only for her chastity and will reject her, to the point of recommending or enforcing her murder, once that chastity has been violently taken from her (in this case, by her sister’s husband, who was also a close friend of her brother).23 There is no reason to think that citizen women raped in Menander’s Athens were incapable of the same critique. Indeed, this modern evidence, of which there is a large body, instructs us to presume that raped Athenian women likewise dissented, if silently and in ways not recorded, from the

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social values that treated their bodies as male property. There is no reason not to take that silent dissent into account when we think about and discuss rape in Athens.24 RETURNING TO MENANDER: DEFINITIONS As this comparative evidence demonstrates, crucial aspects of Athenian attitudes towards sex and rape are still found today. In returning to Athens and Menander, I draw chiefly on one further point, namely that regardless of social, historical, geographical, or cultural circumstance, rape is an embodied event, an event experienced through the body.25 Any violent event, especially an unexpected one—an assault, a car accident, even a near miss or an unpleasant altercation—causes physical reactions such as trembling. These responses are instinctive, not acculturated, and are found even in animals.26 Even a young woman who thoroughly accepted that her body belonged to her father would still have experienced rape as a physical assault, and the experience would have been traumatic in a way not especially focused on her father’s dignity.27 Harris (2004) cites numerous instances of rape from history, myth, and New Comedy, in all of which the rapists and their victims know each other. He rightly points out that marriage is the accepted solution, and he deduces that even the women grant some kind of forgiveness or absolution. However, there are Menandrian victims who do not know their rapists. These young women hide the rapes and pregnancies, from fathers and husbands, though the truth eventually comes out.28 Obviously, they are concerned with preserving their chances of respectable life and marriage, but where a description is offered, the violence of the event is made clear, and that violence is experienced very personally and physically by the victim. Here the matter becomes more complicated, because violence—her struggle and his increasing force—is the proof that she did not consent, that she tried to preserve her virginity. So, for example, with Pamphile’s response: as Habrotonon describes her, she was in tears, shredding her hair; her clothing was in tatters (486–490):29 ἐπλανήθη γὰρ μεθ’ ἡμω̃ν οὐ̃σ’ ἐκει̃, ̃ ἐξαπίνης κλάουσα προστρέχει μόνη, εἰτ’ τίλλουσ’ ἑαυτη̃ς τὰς τρίχας, καλὸν πάνυ καὶ λεπτόν, ὠ̃ θεοί, ταραντι̃νον σφόδρα ἀπολωλεκυι̃’· ὅλον γὰρ ἐγεγόνει ῥάκος. She was with us and then wandered away. Then suddenly she ran up all by herself, sobbing, tearing her hair, and her lovely light Tarentine cloak, oh gods, was destroyed. The whole thing was shredded.

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Of course, such a reaction is generic: Pamphile is a virgin citizen daughter and is expected to fight off sexual advances. She would also be expected to be distraught, and to submit only because of force. On one level, then, her ravaged condition merely signifies her status (citizen virgin) and her sexual propriety (shocked and horrified at rape).30 So does her reaction signal Menander’s recognition of the physical reality of rape, the female experience of it, as I have argued for Terence (James 1998)? Or does it merely show Pamphile as an inexperienced citizen girl, a ‘good girl’? It is significant that she runs not towards home, in silence, but back to the festival, and her friends. We might quibble that her return to her friends is a dramatic necessity, as it allows Habrotonon to identify her later and thus resolve the problem of her marriage. However, such an objection does little justice to Menander, who could easily have found another means of resolution. Habrotonon’s role in this play is not incidental but crucial.31 Pamphile’s traumatized state moves Habrotonon to pity and sympathy, but it is also a relatively realistic response, by a young girl, to rape—especially rape by a stranger in the dark. The shock and trauma of the event, at the moment, are experienced bodily rather than culturally. Upon learning that she is pregnant, Pamphile treats the rape in cultural terms normative to the Athenians: she hides the pregnancy, exposes the baby, and keeps the rape quiet, so as not to face ruin even once her husband has left her.32 However, when the assault takes place, she does not hide it. She lets her friends know. We do not know whether the other rape victims in Menander did likewise, but Pamphile’s complex response suggests that she is hardly focused on her father’s honor and status. In this play, I suggest, Menander allows us to see precisely a citizen girl’s experience of what modern Westerners consider rape—in other words, as a personal violation. The narrative of this experience is displaced onto Habrotonon, who speaks for Pamphile, as Hunter Gardner (2012) has argued.33 Habrotonon’s dramatic narrative in Epitrepontes demonstrates that Pamphile suffered a violent sexual assault, which she experienced as an outrage upon her embodied self: “ὡς ἀναιδὴς ἠ̃σθα καὶ ἰταμός τις . . . κατέβαλες δέ μ’ ὡς σφόδρα· ἱμάτια δ’ οἱ’̃ ἀπώλεσ’ ἡ τάλαιν’ ἐγώ” φήσω. ‘How daring you were, and reckless! . . . How violently you threw me down! Oh me, what a cloak was destroyed!’ That’s what I’ll say (526–530). Both in this planned speech and in her sympathetic description of Pamphile after the rape, Habrotonon emphasizes the rapist’s violence and the victim’s personal experience of it. Pamphile’s long-term concerns must be for her social risk, but we should not assert that she—and other victims in Athens—did not feel raped as we understand the term.34

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To consider why Menander would include Pamphile’s viewpoint is to speculate (but, again, see Gardner 2012). Elsewhere he explores aspects of subjectivity in unexpected characters, such as the slave Daos of Heros, who loves the raped Plangon and is willing to take her and her baby in slavemarriage. Menander also creates impressive, articulate subaltern women, such as Chrysis, Habrotonon, Glykera, and Krateia. Pamphile in particular shows fortitude and focus in resisting her father’s attempts to break up her marriage. The older-generation rape victims also receive attention and are shown as retaining a strong concern for their illegitimate children, whether or not they exposed those children; their lives are permanently affected by rape.35 Given his many rape plots, Menander might well have found it interesting to explore precisely the question of how a rape victim responds to her assault.36 RETHINKING DEFINITIONS: SOME TENTATIVE PROPOSALS Whatever one thinks about the definition of rape in Athens and in Menander, this Athenian playwright’s corpus systematically recognizes the terrible risk it poses to citizen women, whose lives can be destroyed in a matter of minutes. Menander stages some of the anxiety and agony inherent in that risk: he shows how the rape continues to affect the women’s lives, even when they have managed to adopt out the babies and get safely married. If his theater requires every rape to be resolved by marriage, it seems also to allow rapists to acknowledge genuine wrongdoing. I propose, then, that we may cautiously assert that Menander recognized the double-vision (or perhaps cognitive dissonance) of Athenians about sexual violence against women, even if he did not imagine re-ordering that vision to begin recognizing rape as an assault on a person herself, rather than on the man who controlled her body.37 The Athenians do not seem to have fully worked out their attitudes toward sexual violence—and here modern Westerners can hardly point fingers, as we too do not have a widely accepted understanding of rape as a crime against a person who has full rights.38 Modern comparative evidence shows a sharp divide between official legal views and long-standing cultural attitudes, on the one hand, and on the other hand the perspectives of actual rape victims, who see themselves as personally violated and as suffering emotional, psychological, and social damage.39 The same divide seems almost certain to have existed in Athens, and is, I think, on view in Menander even if only in a glimpse. CONCLUSION To summarize: heavily patriarchal societies value reputation of chastity above all else in the daughters of ‘respectable’ families (see Shalhoub-Kevorkian

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1999, 2001; Gil & Anderson 1999; Heise et al. 1995; Singh 2004; Kalu 2004). Rape victims in these cultures risk social ruin, in the form of ostracism—often by their entire families); they further face rejection by their families—indeed, their relatives may well want to murder them; see, e.g., Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1999, Weaver 2000). Hence, rape victims keep silent, often trusting only a single female confidante (Gil & Anderson 1999; Maboe 1994; Ramos Lira et al. 1999). They seek medical help in areas where they are not known, particularly if they become pregnant, and they hope to marry safely. They also experience depression, describing themselves as hopelessly unhappy and angry because they cannot tell anyone (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1999; Gil & Anderson 1999). In some respects, Menander’s rape victims follow this pattern almost exactly: they hide pregnancies and either expose the babies (Epitr.) or give them to another person to bring up (Heros, Hiereia, Phasma; Myrrhine of Georgos, unusually, raises her children). They seek to marry safely—and they never speak of the rape. In this respect, Menander provides a very realistic portrait of how women respond to rape. However, in other respects, he does not, and perhaps cannot: the victims show no long-term emotional or psychic damage, and they always wind up wedded to the men who raped them. To stage their personal trauma would destroy the delicate fabric of this sentimental genre. In Epitrepontes, however, Menander gives a glimpse of that trauma, through Habrotonon. More exploration of definitions, evidence, and boundaries remains to be done, particularly in contemplating the bizarrely high number of rapes in Menander’s theater. In the experience of Pamphile, Menander gives us reason, when attempting to understand the attitudes of the Athenians toward rape and sexual violence, to include the viewpoints of rape victims (both male and female). We should further recognize that they might well have dissented from official views. To do otherwise, to consider rape only from legal and social perspectives, amounts to a double erasure of the experience of rape victims and—because those rape victims, after all, were also Athenians—leaves us with only a partial understanding of rape in Athens, and of Athenian attitudes toward rape. The viewpoints of women make it not merely reasonable, but necessary, to speak precisely of rape in ancient Athens.40 NOTES 1. See, among others, Harris 1990, 1997, 2004; Lape 2001; Leisner-Jensen 2002; Omitowoju 2002; Pierce 1997; Sommerstein 1998. 2. See especially Harris 1990 ( = 2006:283–295), P. Brown 1991, Carey 1995, Roy 1997. 3. See Gardner 2012, a study that intersects significantly with this one. In a larger, ongoing project, I consider the rape of slaves, and the way Menander shows a consciousness of that daily abuse, but space constraints do not permit those considerations here.

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Sharon L. James 4. Of course, all recorded Athenian attitudes are found in texts authored by men, and they are almost always attributed to men. Indeed, the subject of how women in Athens thought about, felt about, and experienced rape or sexual assault is virtually invisible in both ancient and secondary sources. Scafuro 1990 argues sensitively for a consciousness of that subject in Euripides; I will suggest here the same for Menander. See also Bathrellou 2012b. 5. Cf. Rabinowitz 2011:17, on rape in Greek tragedy: ‘How then should we study and teach these texts? Not by saying there wasn’t rape in antiquity because there was no one word for it, or by saying that it is an anachronism to call it rape because women in antiquity didn’t have the possibility of consent.’ If women didn’t have the legal power of choice in the matter of sex, they certainly had the personal capacity to consent or dissent simply by saying ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ (Omitowoju 2002:122 denotes this power as ‘illegitimate consent.’) If this opposition was seen in antiquity chiefly as proof that a woman had been forced rather than seduced, it first communicated refusal to a man bent on sexual violence. That such a man ignored physical resistance, and shouts of ‘No!’, means that he was committing an act of what we understand to be rape, upon an unwilling victim who would not have failed to notice that her consent had been neither sought nor given. 6. Harris [2004] 2006:328, citing Sims 1997. See also [Anonymous] 1997 (cited in James 1998:35 n.22). 7. Lysias 1 puts both seduction (usually denoted as μοιχεία) and rape under ὕβρις, giving no further specifics than finding another man ‘at/on/with’ (ἐπί) one’s wife, sister, daughter, or concubine—an extremely vague designation. Paradiso 1995:97–98 identifies different focal issues in the different terms: βια̃σθαι and βιάζεσθαι belong to the political register and stress physical violence, ‘the psychological consequences’ and shame suffered by the victim, whereas ὕβρις, αἰσχύνειν, and ἀτιμάζειν ‘metaphorically define the diminution inflicted on the violated woman.’ Political ἀτιμία is the loss of civic and political rights, not suffered by female rape victims. 8. Variants are possible: Plangon in Samia certainly knows that her neighbor Moschion is the rapist, and he reports his own eagerness to marry her. 9. See Doblhofer 1994:69 on how rape victims in antiquity do everything possible to hide the event from their families, especially from their fathers. 10. See e.g., Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2001:142; Saadawi 2000:301. 11. These specific court rulings date from the 1990s: State of Rajasthan v. Shri Narayan, AIR 1992 SC 2003 and Gurmit Singh v. State of Punjab (1996) 2 SCC 384. 12. For a brief list of other nations and cultures holding these socio-sexual values, see Parrot & Cummings 2006:95, with citations. 13. The majority of scholarly attention to the problem of rape worldwide focuses on two issues not in point for a study of Menander: war-crime rape and marital rape. But there remains a substantial body of study on international views—personal, socio-cultural, legal—of non-marital rape, the sort that takes place in Menander’s theatre. This material has much to offer for a consideration of rape both in Menander and in the ancient world. The bibliography on these subjects is enormous, and provides a sobering reminder that much of what classicists treat as a historical matter—the physical and sexual subjugation of women in antiquity—remains a live and ongoing horror in much of the world. My readings in this field suggest that things will change only very slowly. 14. This behavior is not exclusively non-Western. In 2006, Giovanni Morabito, a young Italian man, shot his sister—a lawyer—because she had borne a baby

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15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

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out of wedlock. ‘I am proud of what I did,’ he said (http://www.wluml.org/ node/3950). I cite Deuteronomy even though it is hardly modern, because it so concisely exemplifies many of the complexes being considered here. Rome, on the other hand, offers similar episodes: Rhea Silvia, Lucretia, Verginia. Particularly in Livy’s account of the latter, the gender values disturbingly echo some of these contemporary accounts: Verginius feels that he can preserve his daughter’s ‘freedom’ only by killing her (Livy 2.48). His own honor, and that of her fiancé Icilius, are so endangered by the threat to Verginia’s chastity that killing her seems to him the only choice. Sommerstein cites Vermeule (1987:218) on the absence of a word for incest in Greek, and points out that βιασμός ‘almost always’ means ‘forced sex.’ I would add only that this term functions as ‘rape’ does in modern English— that is, it marks a restriction of a single word that in its original meanings has nothing to do with sexual violation, but belongs to a larger category of terms for force. I cite this particular remark not because any classical scholars think that female rape victims in antiquity did not feel violated, but because the second sentence describes circumstances that apply quite well to those of Athens and is thus relevant to an attempt to understand rape in Athens and, hence, in Menander. Zina, ‘illicit sex’ is often described as adultery. Hence even the legal term for rape, zina bil jabr, means ‘sex under false pretences’ at the same time that it denotes rape (definitions taken from Zia 1994:80), under the Hudood Ordinance of 1979, a moral legislation. These definitions meant that any extramarital sex—forcible or not—was considered illicit, and that both parties, rapist and victim, were considered guilty of illicit, adulterous sex; lacking enough male witnesses to her resistance, a woman who made a charge of rape was automatically considered guilty of illicit sex, and could find herself jailed and prosecuted. This terminology allows prosecution of rape victims who bring charges. Since the passage of the Woman Protection Act in 2006, judges may charge rape under Pakistan’s civil code, rather than under the zina charge. The Act at least nominally prevents women from being charged with adultery or fornication if they fail to provide enough witnesses to prove their accusation of rape. See Sharlach 2008:102–3. Ancient texts give similar designations for rape. See, e.g., the rape of Io by Jupiter at Ovid Met. 1.600: tenuitque fugam, rapuitque pudorem. For a different (though not unrelated) syndrome of euphemism, see Radin 1996, on the reluctance of Japanese media to use the term rape in describing the 1996 sexual assault, by three U.S. servicemen, on a 12-year-old schoolgirl in Okinawa. News reports were so vague about the assault that for weeks many in Japan did not know that the schoolgirl had been raped. But again, see Scafuro 1990 on a female view of rape in Euripides. Increasingly, there are rape crisis centers and hotlines available, and victims reach out to them as trusted confidantes—because to tell even a single female relative or friend might be a lethal mistake. See note 39, below. This young woman’s only recourse was to remain silent, as her family’s violent rejection of her was certain. Another of Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s clients had to run away from home at age 17 because her uncle learned that her brother had raped her. This victim’s family was planning to kill her, to remove the stain of her dishonor (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1999: 163). See Bathrellou 2012b:152 n.2 on how the word rape reminds us that Athenian women experienced the event as destructive trauma.

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Sharon L. James 25. For more on rape as an embodied experience, see Cahill 2001:109–142. 26. Anyone who has seen a frightened dog or cat will be familiar with fearresponse in animals. 27. Particularly not in Menander, where the rapists usually do not know whom they have raped (and thus do not know the girls’ fathers) and may not even remember having committed rape (see e.g. Epitrepontes, Georgos, Hiereia, Heros), as noted by Lape 2001:93, with particular reference to Charisios of Epitrepontes. The elderly rapists in Georgos, Hiereia, and Phasma must presumably be reminded of the rape they committed earlier. By contrast, in Roman Comedy, only Pamphilus in Terence’s Hecyra seems to have forgotten that he raped a girl: the senior citizen males not only remember the rapes but take active steps to redress their wrongs to both their victim and their inevitable daughters. Thus, Demeas in Plautus’ Cistellaria seeks out Phanostrata, and on learning of Selenium’s existence, begins to search for her (likewise Periphanes of Epidicus tries to find Philippa and their daughter Telestis). One would like to know if the same is true for the father of Plangon in Menander’s Synaristosai, the source play for Cistellaria. 28. Here Myrrhine in Georgos is an exception, as she has kept her two nothoi babies. We do not know the circumstances of her rape, or how she managed to bring up those children. 29. Translations here are my own. For a fascinating discussion of the Tauropolia and Pamphile’s experience of it, see Bathrellou 2012b. 30. Pierce 1997:166 notes this feature for Pamphile. Violence here does not seem to characterize Charisios. Rather, it is taken for granted as a necessary factor for rape, and it is underscored in Habrotonon’s intended rebuke to him at 526–530. When he berates himself, he lights mostly on his hypocrisy and anger toward his wife after the marriage. Violence in most rapes in New Comedy characterizes the victim rather than the rapist. Terence’s Hecyra and Eunuchus violate this rule; see James 1998. 31. On the role of the Menandrian hetaira and of Habrotonon in particular, see Henry 1986; on Habrotonon at the Tauropolia, see Bathrellou 2012b. Menander might have allowed the slave Onesimos, who hopes to gain his freedom, to be the means of reunion for his master and mistress; cf., in Plautus, Trachalio of Rudens and the eponymous Epidicus, who are manumitted for their help in restoring lost daughters. 32. See, as cited above, Doblhofer 1994:69 on how rape victims keep the rape a secret. 33. Pierce 1997:166 argues that Menander suppresses Pamphile’s ‘feelings and reaction to the rape,’ as well as her reaction to learning that her husband is also her rapist. Lacking much of the play, we cannot know if Menander gave Pamphile a chance to speak her mind. I am inclined to think not, because her narrative of the rape could only disrupt the thin veil drawn over her sexual experience, but I do not agree that Menander hides her feelings. For a thoughtful discussion of Pamphile and how she handles her situation, see Traill 2008. Scafuro 1990 deserves mention again, for her careful uncovering of Kreousa’s similar experience in Euripides’ Ion. 34. Pamphile’s remark, in Epitr. F 8 Sandbach, about how she had been burned up with weeping, could refer to any of several traumatic experiences—rape, exposure of the baby, abandonment by Charisios. 35. See, e.g., the mothers in Phasma, Georgos, and Heros; if Cistellaria reproduces Synaristosai with any accuracy, then Plangon’s citizen mother will have been searching for her, as well. The geriatric wedding of the title character in Hiereia will serve not only to legitimate the son born by rape but also to allow the elderly rapist to atone belatedly to his victim (as is seen in

Reconsidering Rape in Menander’s Comedy and Athenian Life

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

39

Cistellaria). Bathrellou 2012b:176–7 notes that Pamphile suffered both the trauma of the rape and the risks of its aftermath, as do the other rape victims of Menander. Because Epitrepontes lacks trochaic tetrameters, some scholars have proposed that it is a late play (most recently W.D. Furley 2009 [ad 1094] suggests after 295 BCE; Handley 2011 argues on other grounds for 296/5). It is tempting to view this play as a work of Menander’s maturity and to suggest that after writing a number of rape plots, he might have wanted to offer precisely a female perspective on the experience. But as Arnott (1979:384) points out, we are missing a significant amount of this play, so we cannot be certain that the entire play had no tetrameters. Equally important, as he notes, ‘when was full dramatic maturity a perquisite only of middle age?’ The dramatic maturity of the youthful Terence, in this very genre, should remind us to be cautious in making assumptions about Menander’s development. I therefore make none about the dating of his various rape plots: he could just as easily have decided, after Epitrepontes, that descriptions of rape were too disturbing, titillating, or too disruptive for his domestic drama. In any case, too little of Menander’s corpus survives to support speculation one way or the other. Women, both citizen and enslaved, share the lack of ownership over their own bodies: they are all controlled by either a kurios or an owner. If this principle were fully recognized and accepted, at the very least rape would be reported and prosecuted more frequently. Even in the U.S. and other Western nations, rape victims are still suspected of somehow contributing to their own victimization, if only by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or wearing the ‘wrong’ clothing. In some cases, law has outrun traditional attitudes and practices, which remain in place despite official legal policies. Regardless, the feelings of individual rape victims are rarely the focus of legal or social response to incidents of rape. This seems the place to note that my researches into international attitudes about rape revealed that activists and judicial systems, not to mention rape crisis organizations, in non-Western cultures are developing responses and treatments that are specific to their own cultures and thus address the very particular harms done to raped women in ways that are independent of Western treatments and procedures. See, e.g., Agger 1994, Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1999, Weaver 2000. Rape of men is so underreported that it seems to be going unaddressed. It is a pleasure to acknowledge here those who have provided support, assistance, and even the occasional complaint. Thanks are owed first to Alan Sommerstein, for his encouragement and discernment; I am grateful also for his patience with the various circumstances that hindered me in the completion of this paper, which has been improved by his reading. Audiences at the University of South Carolina, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Toronto heard parts of this paper, and provided thoughtful, helpful responses. I regret that a combination of factors kept me from attending the original conference from which this volume arose, and I am thus all the more delighted to express in print my deep gratitude to Serena Witzke, who presented this paper in my stead, braving its often-distressing contents without flinching.

4

Relationships among Slaves in Menander Eftychia Bathrellou

INTRODUCTION Few, if any, scholars today would deny, if asked, that the life experiences and even the identity of slaves in Greece, and, indeed, elsewhere, cannot be reduced merely to the fact that they were their masters’ slaves. Like their masters, who, while being masters, could also see themselves and function as, for example, Athenian citizens, fathers, farmers, soldiers and so on, the slaves too could see themselves and function as, for example, Paphlagonians, miners, eranistai, members of a family.1 Nonetheless, it is only rarely that these other identities and functions of enslaved people become the focus of scholarship on Greek slavery. Instead, the focus has usually been placed on the relationship between master and slave: in particular, on the extremely asymmetrical character of that relationship, which involves the total domination of the slave by the master and an understanding of the slave as property and tool of the master.2 This focus has proved extremely valuable for the study of Greek slavery because it has allowed scholars to gauge the degree of exploitation, oppression and domination enforced upon slaves and to study the function and effects of such exploitation and domination on the individual slave-owners and on the economy and society as a whole. It has also allowed them to examine some of the ways in which slaves reacted to such domination, particularly strategies such as acquiescence and adoption of the master’s values or disobedience and sabotage.3 Much scholarship on the representations of slaves and slavery in Greek drama has adopted this focus and has shown how in this respect the plays in essence ‘mirror’ reality, as they dramatize oppression and domination, as well as some slave reactions to such oppression. Such scholarship has also shown how the plays, although occasionally exposing the contradictions in the ideology which sustained and naturalized slavery, ultimately affirmed that ideology and contributed to the continuous acceptance and justification of slavery.4 Specifically for the plays of Menander, scholars have shown how slaves are represented as wholly dependent on the whims and the wills of

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their masters and as thinking and acting as if their whole existence revolves around that of the masters. Not only are they sometimes beaten, or threatened by severe punishments, by their masters on stage, but they are also presented as fully immersed in the masters’ values and as acting to further not their interests but those of their masters. This is true even for those slaves who are shown as clever and scheming and as tricking or ridiculing their masters or other slave-owners.5 Scholars have also shown how the overall plot of the plays (which is always centred around the fates of citizens, not slaves), the naming conventions of the plays (which clearly demarcate slaves from citizens), and the specific repertory of masks used in performance, served to reinforce not merely the acceptance of slavery, but specifically the idea of slavery as natural, despite the fact that particular slave characters are occasionally presented as morally superior to, and more sympathetic than, some citizen characters.6 The focus on the relationships between masters and slaves, then, has contributed much to our understanding of Greek slavery and its representations in drama. However, there are also limits to and problems with such an approach, which some historians of slavery have recently started to acknowledge and explore.7 I will single out two problems that are most relevant for my purposes. The first relates specifically to representations of slaves and slavery in drama. The focus on the relationships between masters and slaves has encouraged a preoccupation with the ideas about slaves and slavery, which such representations assume and encourage on the part of the poets and the audience. Such an approach is valuable, as it has allowed scholars to explore the attitudes of free people towards slaves and slavery; however, it does not allow us to put the slaves in the centre of our field of vision.8 The second problem has been formulated, although through prioritizing different elements and within a broader agenda, by Kostas Vlassopoulos9; namely, that it is because of such a focus on the relationship between master and slave that the slaves’ other functions and identities tend to fade into the background and be ignored by scholars. Significantly, this includes evidence for contexts and processes in and through which slaves created bonds of support with people other than their masters and formed social and, indeed, political solidarities.10 In other words, such a focus leads us to neglect evidence that could help us to identify and explore the ways in which slaves not only suffered in and resisted slavery, but also, to use the words of the historian Walter Johnson, ‘flourished in slavery, not in the sense of loving their slavery, but in the sense of loving themselves and one another’.11 What is most pernicious and paradoxical about such neglect is that it unwittingly reproduces an understanding of slavery produced, adopted and propagated in the context of arguments not merely for slavery, but specifically for natural slavery; namely, that the whole function of the slave is to be property and a tool of his master and to serve his interests. Or, as the

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most influential of the propagators of natural slavery, namely Aristotle, put it: ‘ . . . the master is merely the slave’s master, but does not belong to him; however the slave is not merely the slave of the master but wholly belongs to the master’ ( . . . ἀλλὰ καὶ ὅλως ἐκείνου).12 We need to try our utmost to avoid this trap and examine the ancient evidence in ways which fully acknowledge that the lives of enslaved people, although powerfully conditioned by their slavery, were not reducible to it—despite the masters’ occasional insistence to the contrary.13 In this chapter, I would like to follow this principle while looking at representations of slavery in the plays of Menander. My main aim is to examine whether the plays portray the slaves as assuming identities and roles which are not directly connected to their capacity as slaves to their masters, and to investigate the degree to which such portrayals can be used by historians in order to imagine and reconstruct possibilities regarding the experience of slavery of real slaves in Menander’s time.14 I will specifically focus on the ways the plays represent slaves as forming relationships with one another, as well as with free persons other than their masters or their masters’ family and circle. I will examine both antagonistic and cooperative relationships, but I will be most interested in assessing whether the slaves are represented as participating in groups, associations or partnerships the members of which share a common identity or common interests and agendas. AN EXAMPLE Let us start with an example, which illustrates both the potential and the limits of this approach. It comes from the end of the first act of Aspis, in the context of a scene, which functions as a light and buffoonish counterpoint to the solemn tone of the first scene of the play.15 Daos, the ‘principal slave’16 in the household of the young citizen Kleostratos, sees two professional caterers, first a cook along with his assistant (216–233), then a waiter (233– 246), leaving the house of Kleostratos’ paternal uncle, Chairestratos. The reason for their departure is that Kleostratos is presumed dead and, hence, the wedding feast for which they had been hired has been cancelled. Daos curtly orders first the cook (220–1), then the waiter (235), to go away. The following two lines are very fragmentary,17 but when we next hear from the waiter, he is cursing and throwing insults at Daos for not having run away after his master’s death on campaign, although he had ample opportunity and a fortune of gold and slaves in his hands (238–241). He then asks him where he is from and, when Daos replies that he is a Phrygian, exclaims: οὐδὲν ἱερόν· ἀνδρόγυνος. ἡμει̃ς μόνοι οἱ Θρα̃ικές ἐσμεν ἄνδρες· οἱ μὲν δὴ Γέται, Ἄπολλον, ἀνδρει̃ον τὸ χρη̃μα· τοιγαρου̃ν γέμουσιν οἱ μυλω̃νες ἡμω̃ν.

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Utterly useless! A man-woman! It’s only us, Thracians, that are men! Oh Apollo, the Getai are manly types—yes! That’s why the mills are full of us.18 It has rightly been observed that the main dramatic function of the waiter here is to act as a foil to Daos, who in turn functions as a foil to the ‘villain’ of the play, Kleostratos’ other paternal uncle, Smikrines. As the waiter voices what a slave who had his own interests at heart would be expected to do if he had Daos’ access to his master’s wealth (namely, to run away), the audience can appreciate better Daos’ loyalty and integrity and, by contrast, the baseness and avarice of Smikrines, who is more interested in laying his hands on Kleostratos’ booty, rather than in his nephew’s death.19 However, it is the waiter’s comments on the supposed typical characteristics of Phrygians and Thracians that have been most discussed from the master-slave viewpoint. By characterizing the Phrygians as effeminate cowards, and the Thracians as manly and not in fear of punishment, the waiter reproduces, it has been argued, typical Greek prejudices against other ethnic groups.20 However, such an argument goes on, by presenting the Phrygian slave Daos as morally superior to the Greek citizen Smikrines, Menander undermines such prejudices, probably because he lives and writes in a world, where, after Alexander’s conquests, the barbarian/slave vs. Greek/free citizen distinction cannot be as strongly held.21 These are valid and important points. It is easy, however, for such an interpretation to almost turn full circle, if pressed harder. What the waiter’s outrage at Daos’ loyalty to his master’s family makes clear is that Daos’ moral superiority to Smikrines is due to the fact that Daos has assumed the values and fully internalized the agenda of the (Greek) slave-owners, while Smikrines is not a ‘typical’ Greek, but is constantly presented as a thoroughly bad Greek citizen, one who ‘has completely beaten all humans in villainy’, according to the divinity who delivers the prologue (116–117). In other words, the play presents Daos as morally superior not to citizens in general, but to one villainous citizen in particular; and, significantly, Daos’ superiority is dependent on his forsaking his own interests, or rather on his seeing his own interests as part and parcel of those of his master.22 The slave/free ~ barbarian/Greek distinction has not actually been undermined—at least, not seriously; it has merely lost its potential bite, because the one pole (the barbarian slave) has fully subsumed itself into the other (the ‘good’ Greek free citizen). However that may be, more can be gained from these words of the waiter, if approached from an angle which does not focus on the free slave-owners and the master-slave relationship. The words of the waiter at 242–5 make it clear that his primary self-identification is not as a slave to a master, but as member of an ethnic group, the Thracians and specifically the Getai, for whose character and practices he feels immense pride.23 In the face of the deracination caused by enslavement and the ‘social death’ imposed by slavery,24 the waiter of our passage has not only kept alive his original, possibly

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pre-doulotic, national identity, but also actively cultivates it further by interpreting his experiences, in this case Daos’ behaviour, in ways that reinforce his ideas about the superiority of his people. Moreover, his identity as a Thracian is clearly not a relic of the past, the product merely of nostalgic reminiscence, but active in the present, as it is in the mills of the ‘here and now’ that he places his brave compatriots. Most importantly, this is not a private, solitary perception of identity; as the use of the first person plural throughout the passage makes clear, the waiter thinks of himself as part of a collectivity. Such representations as this scene between Daos and the waiter, looked at from this angle, can, I propose, help us to imagine and reconstruct the life experiences of real slaves in Athens. For example, this passage can be seen together with other evidence which suggests that some real slaves remembered their ethnic origins and occasionally chose to identify themselves through them.25 The passage can also suggest one possible way through which slaves kept alive and cultivated their ethnic identity: namely, by talking to each other and comparing themselves and their attitudes and practices to those of people of different ethnicities they met and interacted with. In addition, although such comparisons and such attachment to the slaves’ own specific ethnic identity might have ultimately had a reactionary effect, in that they did not encourage them to create broader solidarities and unite against their masters, it might also have sustained them through their slavery.26 The passage can also open up questions such as the following: is it mere coincidence that the ethnically proud slave in Aspis is represented specifically as a Thracian? Thracians in Athens, many of whom were free, were not only numerous but, significantly, organized enough to, for example, claim and acquire land to found a shrine, to organize a significant cult and form religious clubs.27 Can then such a choice on Menander’s part be seen as an indication that the overall presence and organization of Thracians of various statuses in Athens influenced both the perceptions of Athenians about Thracians, and the perceptions of slave Thracians about themselves?28 In this respect, it is interesting to compare the waiter’s (bathetic) boasts to the proud tone of IG ii2 1283, of the mid-third century, which proclaims that ‘To the Thracians alone of all foreign peoples has the Athenian people granted the right to acquire land and found a shrine, in accord with the response from Dodona, and to conduct a procession from the prytaneum-hearth’.29 CONFLICT The waiter’s words at Aspis 242–5 are uttered in the context of a scene of disagreement and conflict with another slave, Daos, and it is on representations in Menander of conflict among slaves that I will now focus. As will be shown below, such representations in Menander tend to follow specific patterns, a fact which complicates and even frustrates attempts to use such scenes to imagine real life possibilities.

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The first such pattern has to do with the dramatic circumstances and the tone of the scenes in which such conflict is acted out or expressed. It is occasionally the case in what has survived of Menander that conflict between slaves is central to the plot or otherwise integrated into the dramatic logic of the plays. The clearest examples of this are the dispute between the slaves Syriskos and Daos in Act II of Epitrepontes, which is indispensable to the plot and has even given the play its name, and the antagonism between Daos and Sosias in Perikeiromene 361–397. This comes from a comical scene, which hardly advances the plot, but has an integral part in the structure and logic of the play. For, as has well been noted by earlier scholarship, the antagonism between the two male protagonists of the play, Moschion and Polemon, over the female protagonist Glykera is not acted out directly, but through their respective slaves, who here function as proxies to their masters.30 However, in the majority of cases, conflict among slaves is acted out or expressed in scenes, which are not dramatically indispensable or closely integrated, but ones whose main purpose is to be amusing or funny, and which often involve stock comic characters, like waiters and cooks.31 We have already seen one such example, the waiter’s criticism and abuse of Daos in Aspis.32 This higher density of antagonistic scenes between slaves in comical, even farcical scenes, should perhaps best be seen as an indication of how steeped Menander is in the comic tradition. Not only are there examples in Aristophanes where conflict between slaves is vital to the play’s structure,33 but also expressions of lack of sympathy and examples of friction among slaves are explicitly presented as a standard comic joke in the parabasis of Peace. καὶ τοὺς δούλους παρέλυσεν τοὺς φεύγοντας κἀξαπατω̃ντας καὶ τυπτομένους, ἐπίτηδες ̃ ἀνέροιτο· ἵν᾿ ὁ σύνδουλος σκώψας αὐτου̃ τὰς πληγὰς εἰτ᾿ “ὠ̃ κακόδαιμον, τί τὸ δέρμ᾿ ἔπαθες; μω̃ν ὑστριχὶς εἰσέβαλέν σοι εἰς τὰς πλευρὰς πολλη̃ι στρατια̃ι κἀδενδροτόμησε τὸ νω̃τον;” τοιαυ̃τ᾿ ἀφελὼν κακὰ καὶ φόρτον καὶ βωμολοχεύματ᾿ ἀγεννη̃ ἐποίησε τέχνην μεγάλην ἡμι̃ν . . .

743 742 745

[Our comic producer] . . . got rid of the slaves who were always running away from someone, or deceiving someone, or getting beaten just in order that a fellow slave might make fun of his bruises and ask him: ‘Poor devil, what have you had done to your skin? It’s not a bristlewhip, is it, that’s invaded your sides in great strength and laid waste your back?’ Such poor stuff, such rubbish, such ignoble buffoonery, he has removed; he has created a great art for us . . .34 Scholars tend to focus on the chorus’s presentation of slave beatings here as a standard comic joke which, the chorus claims, Aristophanes has forsaken.35 However, the chorus specify (note ἐπίτηδες and ἵνα at 742 and 745) that the point is not in the beating itself, but in the opportunity the beating

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offers so that the play can have a slave ‘jeering at’ (σκώψας) the bruises of his fellow slave.36 The second pattern that appears in representations of conflict among slaves in Menander concerns the type of slaves who tend to be represented as antagonistic towards other slaves. In the vast majority of cases, the slaves who are involved in antagonistic scenes, or are shown in friction with (or do not exhibit any solidarity to) other slaves, tend to belong to two categories. The first category includes male slaves who are presented as a household’s ‘principal slaves’.37 The second category includes slaves who are presented as having a specific profession or skill, for example charcoal-burners, waiters and so on, and as working and/or living apart from their masters.38 The prominence of these two types of slaves in such scenes may to a large extent be the result of comic tradition. Antagonism between, for example, a cook and another catering professional, or between a cook and the ‘principal slave’ of the household for which he is hired to work, are attested in many plays, always in the context of light-hearted and often farcical scenes. For example, the cook makes negative comments against waiters both in Aspis and in Dyskolos.39 In Aspis, the cook also abuses and threatens his own assistant (222–232). In Dyskolos, Epitrepontes and Samia, there is friction between the cook and the ‘principal slave’.40 At the same time, however, this prominence of ‘principal slaves’ and of skilled, independently living slaves in representations of inter-slave conflict might also to some extent have been influenced by the fact that real independently-living slaves were indeed likely to have to compete against other labourers of similar skills. In addition, real household slaves were likely to have been commissioned by their master to hire labourers to work for their master’s household, which might have involved bargaining with them and overseeing them. It is perhaps in this light too that we should see comic routines in which cooks antagonize other caterers,41 or boast about their skills to ‘principal slaves’, while the latter in turn accuse them of, for example, not working fast enough (Epitr. 382–4) or talking too much (Sam. 283–295).42 Another pattern that appears in such scenes is related to gender. Misogynistic comments are a recurrent feature of Greek comedy, and are voiced by both male and female characters.43 However, among slaves in extant Menander, it is only the ‘principal slaves’ who make such comments or overtly antagonize female slaves. The accusations commonly made are similar to those in other comic dramatists and, indeed, other writers: namely the women’s supposed propensity for wine and sex, their disloyalty to their fellow slaves, and their inefficiency and ingratitude.44 The patterns we have observed should discourage us from lightheartedly treating representations of conflict among slaves in Menander as mimetic of reality. Nevertheless, it remains the case that in their arguments with and criticisms of each other, slaves are often represented in Menander as identifying themselves and other slaves not in terms of their slavery, but in terms of, for example, their gender or their professional skills.45

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COOPERATION AND NETWORKING Unlike representations of conflict, which tend to follow certain patterns and are largely limited to farcical scenes, representations of cooperation and networking among slaves are ubiquitous in Menander.46 They appear in a variety of different contexts. In Epitrepontes, for example, the cooperation of Habrotonon and Onesimos in order to establish the paternity of a foundling is dramatized in a substantial scene of Act III (464–556) and is a vital part of the plot. In the Dyskolos, it is through a quick exchange between the play’s misanthropic protagonist and his only slave, Simiche, that we learn that she has developed for herself a network of support with her neighbour and fellow slave Daos, in the face of her master’s strict antisocial and selfisolating policy. The exchange takes place in the course of a fast-moving scene, which leads the plot to its climax.47 However, in most cases, networking among slaves is referred to in narratives of past events, which provide the background to the plot. The narrators are usually slaves, who might mention networks in which they are themselves involved or cooperation among third parties, and in one case in extant Menander the narrator is the divinity who delivers the prologue.48 The ubiquity and variety in dramatic function and tone of such representations suggest that relationships among slaves are staple material of Menandrian comedy. This, I propose, should in itself discourage us from resorting by default to readings that emphasize only how such representations ultimately reinforce social hierarchies.49 I hope that some of the limits of such readings and the potential of a different approach will be made clearer through the discussion of specific examples below. Representations of slaves of the same household as forming relationships of cooperation, friendship and support are not rare in Greek comedy. For example, the pairs of slaves who open Aristophanes’ Knights, Wasps and Peace work together (Peace, Wasps), show sympathy to each other for their common plight (Knights, Wasps), and, in the case of Knights, cooperate in order to neutralize their common enemy, a newly bought fellow slave.50 In contrast, in a fragment of the comic poet Theopompus (active c. 410–380), two slaves of the same household, an old female slave and a newly bought, and presumably younger, male slave bond over a glass of wine.51 Casual references to such relationships are common in Menander too,52 but one scene deserves particular attention. It comes from the only surviving scene of Menander’s Perinthia. The papyrus that preserves this scene is severely mutilated, so there can be no certainty about the details. However, it seems that Daos, apparently the ‘principal slave’ of the citizen Laches, has sought sanctuary at an altar, to escape punishment. Laches, probably in order to force Daos to leave the altar so that he can punish him, has ordered his other slaves to light a big bonfire around Daos. The papyrus breaks off shortly after that, so we do not know what exactly happened, but it remains clear that Laches’ other

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slaves bring brushwood on stage and place it around Daos, for Laches to light the bonfire. In this moment of extreme danger, Daos does not address Laches, to beg him to stop. Instead, he turns to his fellow slaves. . . . ὠ̃ Τίβειε καὶ Γέτα, ἔπειτα κατακαύσει μ᾿. ἀφείητ᾿ ἄν, Γέτα, σύν]δουλον ὄντα, καὶ διασώσαα̣ι[τ᾿ ε]ὐ̃ πάνυ; οὐκ] ἄν μ᾿ ἀφείητ᾿, ἀλλὰ περιόψεσθέ με; οὕτ]ω̣ πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἔχομεν; Tibeios and Getas, he will then burn me alive! Please, Getas, would you let me, your [fellow] slave, go and preserve me safe and [well]?—Will you [not] let me go, but turn your back on me? Is [that the way] we treat each other?53 Another surviving fragment from this play suggests that Daos was portrayed in the play as a scheming slave, keen to trick his master.54 In the light of this, one could treat this scene, with Daos about to be put to the flames by his master, as an indication that even the ‘clever slave’ in Menander can ultimately be outwitted by his master: it is the slave-owner, not the slave, who has the last word, and hence the play reassures the slave-owners that they are superior to their slaves. Such a reading is possible and in accordance with the standard scholarly understanding that representations of slaves in comedy ultimately reinforce the ideology of the slave-owners.55 However, what such a reading would miss, because of its focus on the reactions of the free rather than those of the slaves, is at least equally important: namely, that the words of Daos, who expects his fellow slaves to disobey their master and protect him precisely because they are all fellow slaves, express a perception that he and his fellow slaves constitute a group with common interests, which not only excludes but also may stand in opposition to their master. In other words, Daos’ words are a clear expression of group, if not class, consciousness.56 However, close relationships and networking among slaves are by no means restricted to slaves of the same household in Menander. In Epitrepontes, for example, Syriskos is a slave who works as a charcoal burner and works and lives apart from his master.57 He resides in the countryside and, as is to be expected in his profession, works in the woods.58 In addition, it is in the woods that a social network of which he is part has been formed.59 In Act II of the play, Syriskos and another slave, named Daos, ask a passerby to act as arbitrator to a dispute they have and explain the background to him. The dispute is over a baby whom Daos had found abandoned in the woods and decided to raise, but then changed his mind and passed over to Syriskos, who wanted to raise it because his wife had recently lost a child. ἐποίμαινον πάλιν ἕωθεν. ἠ̃λθεν οὑ̃τος—ἐστὶ δ᾿ ἀνθρακεύς—

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εἰς τὸν τόπον τὸν αὐτὸν ἐκπρίσων ἐκει̃ στελέχη· πρότερον δέ μοι συνήθης ἐγεγόνει. ἐλαλου̃μεν ἀλλήλοις. σκυθρωπὸν ὄντα με ἰδών, “τί σύννους”, φησί, “Δα̃ος;” . . . Next morning I was with my sheep again, and this man (i.e. Syriskos) came—he is a charcoal burner—to that same place, to saw some stumps there. I had got to know him earlier. We started to chat together. He saw me looking glum. ‘Why is Daos fraught?’ he asked . . . “ἐμοὶ τὸ παιδίον δός. οὕτως εὐτυχής, οὕτως ἐλεύθερος. γυναι̃κα,” φησί, “γὰρ ἔχω, τεκούσηι δ᾿ ἀπέθανεν τὸ παιδίον” . . . He said ‘Give me the baby, and may you be fortunate and free. I have a wife, you see; she bore a child who died’. ποιμήν τις ἐξήγγειλέ μοι, πρὸς ὃν οὑτοσὶ ἐλάλησε, τω̃ν τούτωι συνέργων, ἅμα τινὰ κόσμον συνευρει̃ν αὐτό[ν]. . . . A shepherd, whom this man (i.e. Daos) had talked to—one of those who work with him—informed me that he (i.e. Daos) had found some jewels with the baby . . .60 It is, then, in the woods, where they both work, Daos as a shepherd, Syriskos as a charcoal-burner, that they meet each other. When Syriskos sees Daos looking glum, he is not indifferent but offers a friendly ear. Daos finds emotional support and is relieved from his anxiety regarding the baby he had found but is now reluctant to raise, because Syriskos offers to raise it himself. In the woods, Syriskos and Daos are not the only ones who are acquainted with each other. We learn that there are other shepherds too, and that Daos has talked about the baby to at least one of them. Syriskos too has spoken to that other shepherd. Daos’ and Syriskos’ references then build for us the picture of a network of co-workers, shepherds and charcoal-burners, in the woods. They greet each other, they exchange information, they share their problems, they help each other. What is of particular interest in the narratives of Syriskos and Daos is that no attention is drawn to the workers’ precise status. The men identify themselves and others through their profession (note: ἐποίμαινον, ἐστὶ δ᾿ ἀνθρακεύς, ποιμήν τις), and are referred to as ‘fellow acquaintances’ (συνήθεις) and as ‘fellow workers’ (σύνεργοι)—not as slaves. At the same time, although wealthy slave-owners are clearly not part of this network, the words of Syriskos and Daos allow for some of the workers in the woods to have been free. In the woods, the common denominator is labour—not status. Such lack of

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interest in always specifying status is also attested in other representations of networks in which slaves participate in Menander.61 It has, then, a part to play in scholarly debates over the precise status of persons bearing foreign names, mentioned in, for example, funerary or dedicatory inscriptions. Some scholars are reluctant to accept that such persons were slaves when these documents were made, unless it is otherwise made explicit in the inscriptions; their reluctance is stronger when family members of these persons are also mentioned in the inscriptions.62 Menander’s representations, which include slaves identifying themselves not primarily as slaves and claiming for themselves family connections in terms similar to those of free people,63 suggest that scholars need to be more open to the possibility that some persons named in such documents might indeed have been slaves.64 Apart from forming networks at their place of work, slaves in Menander are also presented as supporting each other even in extremely restrictive circumstances. In Sikyonioi, the divinity who delivers the prologue explains how Philoumene, the central female character of the play, ended up a slave in Asia Minor, although she was the daughter of an Athenian citizen.65 When Philoumene was only a little girl, pirates captured her and her father’s slave Dromon from the coast of Attica. The pirates took Philoumene and Dromon across the Aegean, to Karia, and put them on the slave market at Mylasa, where they were bought by an army officer. Immediately after this, and while Philoumene and Dromon were still at the slave-dealer’s stall, another slave, who happened to have been placed near them by the slavedealer, reassured Dromon that the man who had just bought them was good, reputable and wealthy. His words are reported in direct speech. ὡς] δ̣᾿ έ̣γκρατει̃ ς ἐγένοντο σωμάτων τρ[ιω̃ν, ̣ τὴν γραυ̃ν μὲν οὐκ ἔδοξε λυσιτελει̃ν ἄ[γειν αὐτοι̃ς, τὸ παιδίον δὲ καὶ τὸν οἰκέτην τη̃ς Καρίας ἀγαγόντες εἰς τὰ Μύλασ᾿, έ̣[κει̃ έ̣χρω̃ντ᾿ ἀγορα̃ι, καθη̃τό τ᾿ ἐπὶ τη̃ς ἀγκ̣[άλης ἔ]χων ὁ θεράπων τὴν τροφίμην. πωλ[ουμένοις π]ροση̃λθεν ἡγεμών τις· ἠρώτα “πόσ̣[ου ταυ̃τ᾿ ἐστίν;” ἤκουσεν· συνεχώρησ᾿· ἐπ[ρίατο. παλίμβολος δὲ τω̃ι θεράποντι πλ̣ησί ̣[ον τ]ω̃ν αὐτόθεν τις ἕτερος ἅμα πωλουμ[ένων “β]έ̣λτιστε, θάρρει,” φησίν, “ὁ Σικυώνιος ἠ]γόρακεν ὑμα̃ς, ἡγεμὼν χρηστὸς σφόδρα κ]αὶ πλούσιος. . . ” . . . When they (i.e. the pirates) had got hold of [three] persons, they thought that it would not be of benefit to [take] the old woman. But they took the child and the slave to Mylasa in Karia, and made use of the market [there]. The slave was sitting holding his young mistress on one arm. [They were] for sale. An officer approached and started to ask questions: ‘How much are they?’ He was informed, agreed, and

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[bought] them. Near the slave another of the men on sale there (it was not the first time he had been put on the market) said ‘My dear man, take courage! The man from Sicyon has bought you—a very fine officer, and wealthy too’.66 The papyrus breaks off roughly at this point, but it is likely that the dramatic point of reporting the words of the other slave was to present the buyer of Dromon and Philoumene, who is either the play’s male protagonist or his foster father, in the best possible light.67 However, we would lose much if we regarded this report of the slave’s words merely as a means of winning the audience’s sympathy for the officer and perhaps of adding vividness to the narrative. For, first, this passage has the rare potential to make the audience look at the buying and selling of men and women on the slave market from a slave’s point of view.68 The slave’s words about the buyer, since they are explicitly said to aim to reassure Dromon (notice θάρρει), involve the audience in making some assumptions as to what a slave who is on sale might find particularly threatening or reassuring: for example, where the new buyer might take the newly bought slave to live; or what sort of life the slave might have to live under the new master. In this case, for example, the information that the buyer is from Sicyon gives Dromon an idea as to where he and Philoumene might end up one day. Alternatively, the information that the buyer is wealthy might have been understood by the audience to aim to make Dromon hopeful that he and Philoumene might not live too harsh a life under him. The passage then is offering a representation of slaves supporting each other while on sale, and indeed one that comes from the authoritative and disinterested mouth of the divinity who narrates the episode. At the same time, the passage also presents the slaves as managing to preserve their humanity, dignity and self-respect in the most dehumanizing circumstances possible, in circumstances that literally turn human beings into commodities. The slave placed next to Dromon at the slave market not only offers information and reassurance to Dromon, but addresses him with utmost respect: βέλτιστε. Some scholars have found this very respectful address incongruous, addressed as it is to a slave.69 In addition, one might argue, the fact that the slave who utters it is specifically presented as παλίμβολος, which is one who ‘has been put to the market before’, might have coloured his words negatively. Menander’s contemporary audience, who might have bought their own slaves at a slave market and have seen, as slave-owners in the American South and elsewhere in the New World did, negative implications in being put to the market again, might have not been able to show much sympathy for this character.70 Nevertheless, the passage, which has slaves supporting and respecting each other in such dehumanizing circumstances, illustrates well what our focus on the relationships between masters and slaves and our subsequent emphasis on the dehumanization and degradation induced by slavery sometimes do not allow us to see: namely that, to use one scholar’s astute if polemical formulation, ‘humanity within slavery is the prerogative of the slave’.71

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Recent scholarship on the slaves’ experience of the slave trade in the New World has thrown light onto how slaves in the hands of slave traders made connections with each other and established networks of support that could sustain them through the trade.72 Comparable ancient material is scarce,73 and the longest Greek fictional account of slaves in the hands of slave traders, from the Life of Aesop, emphasizes the tensions and antagonisms between the slaves, rather than the building of solidarities.74 In the light of such scarcity, this passage from the Sikyonioi is a valuable piece of evidence, which can help us to recapture the ways slaves might have supported each other at the slave trader’s stall.

EPILOGUE ‘To the public mind slaves really existed only in relation to their masters’, wrote Victor Ehrenberg in relation to slave representations in Aristophanes.75 Few scholars today would be reluctant to apply this to Menander too. I hope that the examples I have presented have shown that Menander and his audiences were able to imagine slaves as creating other identities too— and this not in isolation but together with other free and unfree persons. This, as well as the variety and plurality of contexts and tones in which slaves are represented as creating such identities and as forming relationships with persons other than their masters, are suggestive of an interest on the part of Menander in occasionally representing the actions of slaves not merely as foils to those of the free, but for their own sake. In other words, slaves in Menander are interesting not only as ‘other’, but, in some cases at least, as an integral and indispensable part of the society in which the plays are rooted and which they purport to depict. This of course does not mean that Menander’s plays were any less ‘staged performances of hierarchy’.76 What it does mean is that, at least in some cases, such representations in Menander can help us to imagine and reconstruct everyday processes by which real slaves in Athens in Menander’s time organized their lives and formed social solidarities.77 NOTES 1. Paphlagonians, miners: e.g. IG ii2 10051, on which see Bäbler 1998:94–97, 230, with earlier bibliography; eranistai, that is members of a group financed by contributions of its members: e.g. IG ii2 2940, with Lauffer 1979:177–192; family: e.g. Hyp. 3.24. All the examples are dated to the fourth century BC; the inscriptions are from Laureion. 2. On the significance of studying slavery primarily as the relationship between master and slave, and on the unilateral character of that relationship, see, most eloquently, Bradley 1994:4–6. On slavery as property as the dominant scholarly understanding of slavery, and its Aristotelian origins, see Vlassopoulos 2011a.

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3. See, e.g. Cox 2002:36–38; Bradley 1994:1071–31. 4. The bibliography is substantial. On tragedy, see especially Hall 1997, who emphasizes the potential of tragedy to ‘do its thinking in a form which is vastly more politically advanced than the society which produced’ it (125), while showing how tragedy ultimately ‘affirmed in its citizen spectators’ imaginations the social world in which they lived’ (93). See also Synodinou 1977; Rabinowitz 1998; Gregory 2002; Ebbott 2005. On satyr play, see Nikolsky 2011. On comedy, see now the essays in Akrigg & Tordoff 2013, with earlier bibliography. 5. For some indicative recent scholarship, see e.g. Krieter-Spiro 1997; Cox 2002; Hunt 2011:30–33; Konstan 2013. See also following note. 6. This is more or less the general scholarly consensus; see particularly Wiles 1988. Cf., however, Proffitt 2011. She reaches a different conclusion, but her paper is to an extent marred by serious factual inaccuracies: for example, pace Proffitt, it is not certain that Onesimos is manumitted at the end of the Epitrepontes. On masks and names as conveying status, but not character, see P. Brown 1987; for an overview of slave names in Menander, see KrieterSpiro 1997:55–58. On Menander’s slaves as occasionally displaying higher moral standards and being more sympathetic than some citizen characters, see also, e.g. Zimmermann 2005:33. On the methodological difficulties of drawing conclusions about realities and ideologies from comedy, see particularly McKeown 2011, esp. 159–165; also Konstan 2013:144–5. 7. See especially Vlassopoulos 2011a; also Vlassopoulos 2011b. 8. On this, see further Bathrellou 2012a:141–5. On the merits of studying representations of slavery in literature in order to explore what free people thought about slavery, see McKeown 2007:97–123; also McKeown 2011. 9. Vlassopoulos 2011a, 2011b; see also Vlassopoulos 2007:12–15. 10. On evidence for slaves’ forming political solidarities in fifth- and fourthcentury Greece, see Vlassopoulos 2011a:124 on Thuc. 3.73, and McKeown 2011:154. 11. W. Johnson 2003:115. 12. Aristotle, Pol. 1254a11–13, on which see Klees 1975:188–190. On the influence of Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery on subsequent promoters and defenders of slavery, see Millett 2007:179 with n. 3. See also Garnsey 1996. 13. On the necessity of avoiding such reductionism, see W. Johnson 2003:115–6. 14. For ’empathetic imagination’ as a valid and useful tool for reconstructing the past, see Hopkins 1993. 15. See Ireland 2010a:88, with earlier bibliography. 16. See Krieter-Spiro 1997:14–17, who rightly notes that households in Menander are often presented as having one male slave who is portrayed as the ‘principal slave’ (‘Obersklave’): he is the right-hand man of the master and appears to be in charge over other slaves in the house, if there are any. As ‘principal slaves’ in the plays I will be discussing, I consider Daos in Aspis and Georgos, Daos and Getas in Dyskolos, Onesimos in Epitrepontes, Getas in Misoumenos, Daos and Sosias in Perikeiromene, and Parmenon in Samia. At this point, I am not interested in the possible correspondence of slaves with such roles to the type of mask labeled ἡγεμὼν θεράπων by Pollux (4.149). 17. One further line is probably missing. For a plausible suggestion for its content, see Gaiser 1971:194. For a new suggestion for the beginning of 237, see Austin 2010:9. 18. Asp. 242–5. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. For the text of the Aspis, I have used the edition of Ireland (2010a). For a slightly different understanding of μὲν δή, see Gronewald 1995:27.

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Eftychia Bathrellou 19. Krieter-Spiro 1997:88. 20. Jacques 1998a:lvi-lix; also Jacques 1996. One could add to such an interpretation that the waiter’s question at 241, namely ‘where are you from?’, through which he tries to interpret Daos’ behaviour, reproduces the Greek slave owners’ interest in the ethnic origins of the slaves they purchased. On this, see most recently Lewis 2011:94–5. Lewis rejects the view that a slave’s ethnicity had to be declared at purchase in Athens, but the material he presents suggests that, even if this was not a legal requirement or did not affect a slave’s price, Athenian slave owners did think that the quality of slaves was affected by their ethnic origins. 21. See n. 20 and Konstan 2013:157–8, who focuses specifically on the slave/free versions of masculinity in the passage. 22. See Asp. 1–18, particularly 11–12, and note that Daos hopes for a labourfree and restful old age, not necessarily for manumission. 23. On some linguistic indicators of the waiter’s pride, see the comments of Beroutsos 2005:84. 24. For slavery as social death, see Patterson 1982. 25. For example, ethnicity or place of origin is sometimes mentioned on tombstones and other funerary monuments that might have been ordered by slaves for themselves or other slaves: for some examples, see IG ii2 10051, 10575a, 8927, with Lauffer 1979:132–5: all from fourth-century Laureion. Although it cannot be proven beyond doubt that these persons were slaves when these documents were made (see, for example, the observations of Bäbler 1998: 2–3), it is highly likely that at least some were: see Vlassopoulos 2011b:470 n. 28, and below, p. 50 [65–66]. 26. See Cartledge 1985:36. He identifies the ethnic, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of slaves in Athens as one of the reasons why they did not organize large-scale revolts. 27. On the organization and cultic activities of Thracians in Athens, especially in relation to the cult of the goddess Bendis, see R. Parker 1996:170–4, and 337–8, on the orgeônes of Bendis. See also Bäbler 1998:183–98. 28. Cf. Vlassopoulos 2011a:126. 29. Translation from R. Parker 1996:170. 30. See Zagagi 1994:49. Sosias’ argument with Doris in the same play (398– 406), only a part of which survives, might have had a similar function, with Doris expressing Glykera’s viewpoint and Sosias that of Polemon. It is not possible to judge from the little that remains from the Perinthia the character and function in that play of the antagonism between Daos and Sosias (ll. 17–18 and, possibly, 22). 31. I treat cooks together with slaves, despite the assertion in Athenaeus 14.658 e-f that of all comic poets only Posidippus presents cooks as slaves. However, as has been well noted, cooks in comedy bear names similar to those of slaves, wear masks that Pollux classifies as slave masks, interact mainly with slaves and behave in ways similar to the slave characters: see Casson 1974:36–37 n.22. To Casson’s interpretation of the statement in Athenaeus, namely that ‘Athenaeus might have had in mind the cook who was a slave in a household as against a professional hired from outside’, it can be added that the statement’s immediate context suggests that the statement is far from neutral. The assertion that with the exception of one poet, no comic cook is a slave, is made by none other than a cook, who, while being referred to as mastigias by the narrator, boasts about the free and, in fact, heroic pedigree of cooks. For the overall debate on the status of comic cooks, see KrieterSpiro 1997:27–31, with earlier bibliography. 32. For more examples, see below.

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33. The clearest example is the first scene of Knights: the antagonism between the newly-bought Paphlagonian and the rest of Demos’ slaves motivates the plot of the whole play. 34. Peace 742–9. Text and translation: Sommerstein 1985. 35. For example, Hunt 2011:30. 36. On σκώπτω as ‘making hostile jokes, jeering’, see Olson 1998 on 739–740. Men. fr. 665 offers one of the possible explanations for the appeal of such a joke to an audience of slave owners: καὶ του̃το θύων οὐδεπώποτ᾿ ηὐξάμην / ̃ ἐγὼ τὸ σω̃ιζον τὴν †ἐμὴν οἰκίαν† / ἀλλὰ παρέλειπον, οἰκετω̃ν εἰναι στάσιν / ἔνδον παρ᾿ αὑτω̃ι, πρα̃γμα χρησιμώτατον. 37. On ‘principal slaves’ see above, n. 16. 38. On slaves working and living apart from their masters in classical Athens, who often had the obligation to pay to their masters a regular fixed sum, see Perotti 1974; Osborne 1991 (esp. 244–6), Kazakévich 1960/2008. In Menander, Syriskos in Epitrepontes, a charcoal-burner, is explicitly presented as paying such a fixed sum (380); Daos, a shepherd in the same play, is presented as living on his own (250–1). There are no specific references in the plays to the living arrangements of the cooks and waiters, but at least two of them, the cook and the waiter in Aspis (216–220, 233–5), give the impression that they are dependent for their subsistence on hiring themselves out. Finally, Heros 52, ‘for whom I carry wood[’, suggests that Getas, the speaker, might be another such slave, but the text is very damaged and the papyrus breaks at this point. 39. Aspis 232–3, Dysk. 647. See the comments ad loc. of Handley 1965, who rightly stresses that such antagonism is part of the comic cook’s ‘traditional stock-in-trade’. To his examples, add Posidippus fr. 1: cooks rivalling other cooks. 40. Dysk. 487–9, 546–551, Sam. 283–295, Epitr. 382–4. 41. Compare the amusing justification by a comic cook of his practice of abusing his assistants in Posidippus com. fr. 28: if he does not abuse them, he will not inspire respect and might be beaten up by the slaves of the household for which he has been hired. 42. For an example of friction between a ‘principal slave’ and an independently living slave who is not a caterer, see, e.g. Epitr. 391–418 and 442–463 (Onesimos vs. Syriskos); for antagonism between two independently living slaves neither of whom is a caterer, see, e.g. the conflict between Syriskos and Daos in Act II of Epitrepontes. It may be added, for what it is worth, that both these conflicts are fully integrated into the plot. 43. See Arnott 1996b:441–2, 785–6. 44. Propensity for wine and sex: Getas, at Dysk. 456–462, Parmenon, at Sam. 302–3. Disloyalty to fellow slaves: Getas, at Dysk. 463, 568–570. Inefficiency and ingratitude: Onesimos, at Epitr. 563–6. On the misogynistic comments of Getas in the Misoumenos (e.g. 97, 712, 715–716 Arnott), see Traill 2008:113–117, who aptly compares Mis. 97 to Men. fr. 508. 45. See the passages listed in nn. 39–40, 42, 44. 46. For an overview of some relevant scenes, see Bathrellou 2012a; see also Cox 2013:169–172. 47. Dysk. 594–5. For a fuller discussion, see Bathrellou 2012a:143–4. For Simiche’s proposal to ask for the help of Daos as paradigmatic and normal, see also Zagagi 1994:104. 48. Divinity: Sik. 1–19. Slaves involved themselves: Daos at Epitr. 250–275, Syriskos at Epitr. 294–307. Slaves on third parties: Daos at Georg. 56–58, Daos at Heros 21–24. 49. On such readings, see above, pp. 40–42 [51–54].

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Eftychia Bathrellou 50. On all three scenes, see now Olson 2013. 51. Theopompus com. fr. 33. Note 6–7: δευ̃ρο παρ᾿ ἐμέ, Θεολύτη / παρὰ τὸν νέον ξύνδουλον: ‘Here, next to me, Theolyte, beside your new fellow slave’. The ‘bonding’ takes a sexual turn too (see line 8). 52. See especially the report in Georgos 56–8 that the agricultural slaves of a wealthy unmarried old farmer literally let him rot, when he cut his leg while digging in the fields: on this passage, see Bathrellou 2012a:149–150. 53. For the text, see Austin 2013. [σύν]δουλον, or its synonym [ὁμό]δουλον (both were suggested by the first editors of the papyrus which has preserved this scene: POxy 855), is an almost certain supplement. See Gomme & Sandbach 1973:536–7. 54. Fr. 2 Austin; cf. ll. 13–15. 55. See above, pp. 40–42 [52–54]. 56. Whether slaves in classical Athens might be regarded as a class or not is a much disputed issue. For a recent contribution to the debate, see Alston 2011, with earlier bibliography. 57. See above, n.38. 58. Epitr. 257–9; cf. 242. 59. This has been noted also by Cox 2013:169. 60. Epitr. 256–261 (Daos speaking); 266–8 (Daos quoting Syriskos), and 299– 301 (Syriskos speaking). 61. For an example, see Heros 21–24, with Bathrellou 2012a:144–5. 62. For indicative argumentation along such lines, see, for example, Bömer 1961:3.196–7, on IG ii2 4684, 4685, 4697a. 63. See, for example, Epitr. 267–8, cited above. See also Heros 43 and 56, σ[υνοικιει̃ν] and νυμφ[ίωι], both probable editorial supplements. Of the couple in question, the man is certainly a slave; the girl’s status is ambiguous when these lines are uttered. On slaves represented as forming families in Menander, and family building by slaves in Greece in general, see now Schmitz 2012. See also e.g. Klees 1998:155–175; Golden 2011, esp. 143–6. 64. On this, see especially Vlassopoulos 2011b:470, n. 28. See also above, n. 26. 65. Sik. 1–19. For the text, see Blanchard 2009; on the identity of this divinity, see ibid. xlviii–xlix, with earlier bibliography. 66. Sik. 3–15. 67. Belardinelli 1994:116. On the identity of the buyer, see Blanchard 2009:l-lx, with earlier bibliography. 68. With few exceptions (for an important one from ‘real life’, see Hyperides, Against Timandros, lines 27–35 in Horváth 2008), most literary representations of slave sales are from the viewpoint of the sellers and the buyers, not the slaves themselves: e.g. Hermippus fr. 52. In Antiphanes fr. 166, the speaker refers to the act of his being sold (ll. 3–4), but passes quickly over this, to focus on the character of his buyer. The only comparable examples from comedy are Ar. fr. 339 (I owe this reference to David Lewis) and Men. fr. 150. In the Menandrian fragment, the reference is probably part of a nightmare scenario imagined by a free character. A similar viewpoint, that is one focusing on the buyers rather than on the slaves, is the prevalent one in Greek literary representations of the Roman period too: see e.g. Life of Aesop G, 11–28; Lucian, Sale of Lives, with Bradley 1991/92. See also Stewart 2012:21–47, on Plautus’ Mercator and Persa. 69. See Gomme & Sandbach 1973:638; similarly Handley 1965 on Dysk. 497. For βέλτιστε as polite and respectful, see Belardinelli 1994:116; Dickey 1996:139.

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70. On παλίμβολος as meaning ‘put to the market more than once’, see Belardinelli 1994:116. The adjective is often used metaphorically in association with negative and offensive characterizations in Greek texts: see e.g. Aeschines 2.40; Plut. Alc. 14.12, Marius 30.3, Cra. 22.1; Pollux 3.132. The same is true for its synonym παλίμπρατος: Dio Chrys. Or. 31.37. See also Hyp. fr. 139a Jensen: advice probably to a prospective buyer, to buy a slave who has not been παλίμπρατος, but has always had the same master. For New World evidence, see W. Johnson 1999:124. 71. Millett 2007:208. 72. See especially W. Johnson 1999:47 and passim. 73. The clearest example I know of is a tombstone from Rome, in honour of A. Memmius Clarus (CIL VI 22355a = ILS 8432): ‘A. Memmio Claro / A. Memmius Urbanus / conliberto, idem consorti / carissimo sibi. / Inter me et te, sanctissime mi / conliberte, nullum unquam / disiurgium fuisse conscius / sum mihi. Hoc quoque titulo / superos et inferos testor deos / una me tecum congressum / in venalicio, una domo liberos, / esse factos, / neque ullus unquam / nos diunxisset nisi hic tuus / fatalis dies.’ 74. Life of Aesop G, 11–28: see mainly Hopkins 1993, who, however, is not interested in the relationships among the slaves, but in the interaction between Aesop and his prospective buyer. 75. Ehrenberg 1951:170. 76. See above, pp. 40–42 [51–54]. The quotation is from W. Johnson 1999:136. 77. I would like to thank Tania Demetriou, Timothy Duff, David Lewis and Kostas Vlassopoulos for their comments and help. I am also much indebted to the conference participants for their questions and, particularly, to Alan Sommerstein for his advice and patience.

5

Military Culture and Menander Mario Lamagna

It might seem strange to want to investigate the military culture of Menander, an author who is portrayed by the biographical tradition as a mild and gentle man, described by a famous fable of Phaedrus as introducing himself to Demetrius of Phalerum unguento delibutus, vestitu fluens . . . gressu delicato et languido,1 that is, to use the old translation of an English poet, Christopher Smart,2 ‘in flowing robes, bedaub’d with nard, / and saunt’ring tread’, so that Demetrius can definitely call him (line 15) by the epithet cinaedus, which became, in the chaste version of Smart, ‘that fribble’. Even his work does not belie the poet’s reputation: from time to time, war makes its appearance in the plays as a factor of disorder, disruptive of family unity3: it occurs in the Perikeiromene, a comedy in which Moschion and Glykera have been separated when they are still children because ‘the war and the Corinthian troubles grew much worse’,4 and also in Misoumenos, where Demeas, finding his daughter Krateia, comments: ‘War is man’s common enemy. It’s scattered asunder members of my household, that’s apparent’5 (Mis. 634–5). A fierce condemnation of war is expressed in an explicit and general form in Men. fr. 779, where the poet notes: ‘peace nourishes the farmer well even among the rocks, war feeds him badly even in the plains’.6 Our biographical tradition tells us, however, that Menander himself had military experience of a kind. Like every young Athenian man from a good family, he did his youth military service, the ephebeia, and had as a comrade none other than the future philosopher Epicurus.7 It is difficult to determine what influence ephebeia may have exerted on the subsequent activity of our playwright: he did write a play called Synepheboi (The Fellow-Ephebes), but the idea we have of its plot from the Latin translation of Caecilius Statius is that of a typical comic love affair,8 and it is indeed possible that the title could mean merely ‘The boys of ephebic age’. No more encouraging is the story of Eunouchos (The Eunuch), as we can reconstruct it from the Latin readaptation of Terence. Here the eunuch of the title is actually a youth (named Chaereas in Terence’s play) who should be doing his military service in Piraeus, but unexpectedly reappears in the city, much to the astonishment of his servant Parmeno. The reason why Chaereas abandoned the garrison is explained by the ephebe himself: he met a beautiful girl in the

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street, ‘a new style of beauty, her complexion genuine, her flesh firm and full of juiciness’,9 and decided to follow her. To quote perhaps the most famous of all soldiers’ ballads, Lili Marleen: Schon rief der Posten: “Sie blasen Zapfenstreich / es kann drei Tage kosten!” “Kam’rad, ich komm’ ja gleich” . . . Ah yes, how many times have service orders been ignored for a pair of beautiful eyes! I am quite sure any reader who has done military service could tell such a story. At least, I could. However, we are still far from a true interest in the world of soldiers and its professional aspects. Indeed, another of the problems we face in our analysis is that the character of the soldier in Menander relies heavily on a well-established comic tradition, so that its description has more to do with the history of the theatre than with military history.10 Since Epicharmus’ time, comic soldiers have been famous for their boasts of amazing feats of war and of countless female conquests. The type of the character Bramarbas, or Capitan Fracassa, is simply a caricature of a real officer. In Menander, there are some cases in which the influence of such a tradition is particularly evident: a fine example comes from the relating or staging of siege-episodes, one of the most common forms of warfare in the Greek world, which in the theatre of Menander becomes an easy source of humour. Let us take the case of Perik. 482–5, one of the few vulgar, sexual and sexist jokes in Menander. Polemon is besieging the house of Myrrhine, where his concubine Glykera has taken refuge, but the intervention of the neighbour Pataikos induces the soldier to lower his expectations. The only person who is not resigned to the raising of the siege is Polemon’s servant Sosias, who before leaving addresses the female piper Habrotonon in a very vulgar manner: ᾤμην σε ποιήσειν τι. καὶ γάρ, Ἁβρότονον, / ἔχεις τι πρὸς πολιορκίαν σὺ χρήσιμον, / δύνασαί τ᾽ ἀναβαίνειν, περικαθη̃σθαι . . . ‘I thought you’d manage something. Look, Habrotonon—you’re handy in blockades—can climb erections, and squeeze . . . ’ It is evident that here the poet’s interest is directed at mentioning actions that build a sexual double entendre rather than listing the skills that can really be helpful in laying siege. It is particularly the case of the verb περικαθη̃σθαι, which does not indicate a specific siege skill, as does the preceding verb ἀναβαίνειν (knowing how to climb up a ladder is actually a necessary requirement for the soldier who is assaulting the walls of a city), but is an exact synonym for πολιορκειν̃ ,11 it is like saying that if you want to lay siege well you have to know how to . . . besiege. The choice was obviously guided by the need to seek an obscene interpretation, whatever it was.12 Even in fragment 7 of the Kolax13 the type of the comic miles gloriosus predominates over any need for realism. “πω̃ς τὸ τραυ̃μα του̃τ᾽ ἔχεις;” / “μεσαγκύλῳ.” “πω̃ς, πρὸς θεω̃ν;” “ἐπὶ κλίμακα / πρὸς τει̃χος ἀναβαίνων.” ἐγὼ

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μὲν δεικνύω / ἐσπουδακώς, οἱ δὲ πάλιν ἐπεμυκτήρισαν. ‘ “What gave you this wound?” “A javelin.” “How on earth?” “While climbing up a ladder on a wall.” I demonstrate—no joking—but they sneered at it again’. The brief dialogue, which concerns the circumstances in which a soldier has been wounded (ἐπὶ κλίμακι ἀναβαίνων), is realistic: the wounding weapon, a μεσάγκυλον, is considered a typical barbaric javelin by Arrian,14 but the final effect is that of disbelief, since the speaker is evidently a comic braggart soldier. However, there are comedies in which Menander uses more realistic and detailed military descriptions, so that anyone with a little war experience could accept the narration on the stage as quite plausible. One of these is undoubtedly Misoumenos. In a previous paper (Lamagna 2004a), I have shown how useful it can be in this comedy to consult the ancient writers on tactics and strategy: it enables us, for example, to infer that the reason why Getas (as he tells us) remained in the rearguard of the army (Mis. 33–36 Arnott) was that he was a brave soldier, εὔψυχος (34), for fourth-century marching practice required that the most valiant troops marched in the rear for fear of ambushes.15 However, the most accurate description of a war episode in Menander is certainly that of the skirmish between the barbarian Lycians and the company of Kleostratos, which is narrated by Daos in Aspis. Daos, the old paidagogos of Kleostratos, was not an eyewitness to the battle, but the report he is able to make to old Smikrines, although largely based on the testimonies of others, is lively, richly detailed and highly realistic. I relate it here using the text and the translation by Arnott 1979 (Aspis 23–82): Δάος.

ποταμός τίς ἐστι τη̃ς Λυκίας καλούμενος Ξάνθος, πρὸς ᾧ τότ᾽ ἠ̃μεν ἐπιεικω̃ς μάχαις πολλαι̃ς διευτυχου̃ντες, οἵ τε βάρβαροι ἐπεφεύγεσαν τὸ πεδίον ἐκλελοιπότες. ἠ̃ν δ᾽ ὡς ἔοικε καὶ τὸ μὴ πάντ᾽ εὐτυχει̃ν χρήσιμον· ὁ γὰρ πταίσας τι καὶ φυλάττεται. ἡμα̃ς δ᾽ ἀτάκτους πρὸς τὸ μέλλον ἤγαγε τὸ καταφρονει̃ν· πολλοὶ γὰρ ἐκλελοιπότες τὸν χάρακα τὰς κώμας ἐπόρθουν, τοὺς ἀγροὺς ἔκοπτον, αἰχμάλωτ᾽ ἐπώλουν, χρήματα ̃ ἕκαστος ε[ἰ]χε πόλλ᾽ ἀπελθών. Σμικρίνης ὡς καλόν. Δάος αὐτὸς δ᾽] ὁ τρόφιμος συναγαγὼν χρυσου̃ς τινας ἑξακοσί]ους, ποτήρι᾽ ἐπιεικω̃ς συχνά, τω̃ν τ᾽ αἰχ]μαλώτων του̃τον ὃν ὁρᾳ̃ς πλησίον ὄχλον, δια]πέμπει μ᾽ εἰς ῾Ρόδον καί τῳ˜ ξένῳ φράζει κ]αταλιπόντ᾽ αὐτὰ πρὸς ἑαυτὸν πάλιν τάχιστ᾽ ἀ]ναστρέφειν. Σμικρίνης τί οὐ̃ν δὴ γίνεται;

Military Culture and Menander Δάος

Σμικρίνης Δάος Σμικρίνης

Σμικρίνης Δάος

Σμικρίνης Δάος

Σμικρίνης Δάος

ἐγὼ μὲν ἐξώρμων ἕωθεν· ᾑ̃ δ᾽ ἐγὼ ἀπῃ̃ρον ἡμέρᾳ λαθόντες τοὺς σκοποὺς τοὺς ἡμετέρους οἱ βάρβαροι λόφον τινὰ ἐπίπροσθ᾽ ἔχοντες ἔμενον, αὐτομόλων τινω̃ν πεπυσμένοι τὴν δύναμιν ἐσκεδασμένην. ὡς δ᾽ ἐγένεθ᾽ ἑσπέρα κατὰ σκηνάς θ᾽ ἅπαν ἡ̃ν τὸ στρατόπεδον ἔκ τε χώρας ἄφθονα ̃ εἰκὸς γίνεται· ἅπαντ᾽ ἐχούσης, οἱον ἐβρύαζον οἱ πλει̃στοι. πονηρόν γε σφόδρα. ἄφνω γὰρ ἐπιπίπτουσιν αὐτοι̃ς μοι δοκει̃. . .]. . . . .[. . .]. . . . υσ . . φα . . [. .]. [ deest versus unus ]. .[. . . .]. εγω ]τα περὶ μέσας δ᾽ ἴσως νύκτας φυλακ]ὴν τω̃ν χρημάτων ποούμενος τω̃]ν τ᾽ ἀνδραποδίων περιπατ[ω̃]ν ἔμπροσθε τη̃ς σκηνη̃ς ἀκούω θόρυβον οἰμω[γ]ὴν δρόμον ὀδυρμόν, ἀνακαλου̃ντας αὑτοὺς ὀνόματι, ὡ̃ν καὶ τὸ πρα̃γμ᾽ ἤκουον· εὐτυχω̃ς δέ τι λοφίδιον ἠ̃ν ἐνταυ̃θ᾽ ὀχυρόν· πρὸς του̃τ᾽ ἄνω ἠθροιζόμεσθα πάντες, οἱ δ᾽ ἐπέρρεον ἱππεις̃ ὑπασπισταὶ στρατιω̃ται τραύματα ἔχοντες. ὡς ὤνησ᾽ ἀποσταλεὶς τότε. αὐτου̃ δ᾽ ἕωθεν χάρακα βαλόμενοί τινα ἐμένομεν, οἱ δὲ τότε διεσκεδασμένοι ̃ ἐν ται̃ς προνομαι̃ς αἱς̃ εἰπον ἐπεγίνοντ᾽ ἀεὶ ἡμι̃ν· τετάρτῃ δ᾽ ἡμέρᾳ προήγομεν πάλιν, πυθόμενοι τοὺς Λυκίους εἰς τὰς ἄνω κώμας ἄγειν οὓς ἔλαβον. ἐν δὲ τοι̃ς νεκροι̃ς ̃ πεπτωκότ᾽ εἰδες του̃τον; αὐτὸν μὲν σαφω̃ς οὐκ ἠ̃ν ἐπιγνω̃ναι· τετάρτην ἡμέραν ἐρριμμένοι γὰρ ἠ̃σαν ἐξῳδηκότες τὰ πρόσωπα. ̃ ; πω̃ς οὐ̃ν οἰσθ᾽ ἔχων τὴν ἀσπίδα ἔκειτο· συντετριμμένην δέ μοι δοκει̃ οὐκ ἔλαβεν αὐτὴν οὐδὲ εἱς̃ τω̃ν βαρβάρων. ὁ δ᾽ ἡγεμὼν ἡμω̃ν ὁ χρηστὸς καθ᾽ ἕνα μὲν κάειν ἐκώλυσεν, διατριβὴν ἐσομένην ὁρω̃ν ἑκάστοις ὀστολογη̃σαι, συναγαγὼν πάντας δ᾽ ἀθρόους ἔκαυσε· καὶ σπουδῃ̃ πάνυ

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Mario Lamagna θάψας ἀνέζευξ᾽ εὐθύς· ἡμει̃ς τ᾽ εἰς ῾Ρόδων ̃ ἐκει̃ τινας διεπίπτομεν τὸ πρω̃τον, εἰτ᾽ μείναντες ἡμέρας ἐπλέομεν ἐνθάδε. ἀκήκοάς μου πάντα. Daos:

Smikrines: Daos.

Smikrines: Daos:

Smikrines: Daos:

Smikrines: Daos:

Smikrines: Daos: Smikrines:

In Lycia there’s a river called the Xanthos. There we saw some action, quite a lot, and we’d been lucky all the time. The natives had taken to their heels and left the plain. It looks as if not winning everything is an advantage. When you’ve had a fall you take care. Over-confidence led us undisciplined towards the morrow. Many were out of camp, looting the villages, destroying crops, selling their booty. Everyone came back with loads of money. Excellent! My master had himself collected some six hundred gold staters, and quite a number of cups, and all this crowd of slaves you see around you. Well, he sent me over to Rhodes and told me to leave them there with a friend, and hurry back again to him. What happened then? I planned to start at dawn, but on the day when I was setting out, without our scouts spotting a trace of movement, the natives seized a hill above us, and lay low. They’d learnt how scattered our force was from some deserters. When evening fell, and all the troops were back from scouring a land of plenty, and in their tents, what happened next was natural: most of our men were carousing. That’s quite scandalous! Yes. I think there was a surprise attack. [. . .] I suspect it was about midnight, and I was standing guard over the slaves and booty, walking up and down in front of the tent, when I heard noises, cries of grief, men running, wailing, shouting each other’s names. From them I heard the news. Now, luckily there was a knoll, a strong point on the ridge; up to it we all crowded, then in waves our wounded flowed in—cavalry, guards, infantry. How fortunate you’d just been sent away! At dawn we built a palisade, and there we stayed. Those who’d got scattered in the raids I mentioned now came streaming back to join us. Three days later we could move again. The Lycians, so we’d heard, were taking off their prisoners to their highland villages. And did you see him lying there among the dead? His body I couldn’t identify for sure. They’d been out in the sun three days, their faces were bloated. Then how could you be certain?

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There he lay, with his shield. Buckled and bent—that’s why none of the natives took it, I suppose. Our fine commander banned all separate cremations, for he realised how much time would be required for gathering, man by man, the ashes; all the dead were heaped together and burnt, then buried with all speed. Immediately he broke up camp, and we slipped off to Rhodes first, where we stayed some days, and then sailed here. Now you’ve heard all my story.

After the initial mention of the river Xanthos, the tone of which is reminiscent of a tragic rhesis,16 the story becomes at once plain and sententious, and from its very beginning prepares the listener for a dramatic finale awaiting the Greek troops: a long series of victories had made them overconfident, so that they go on to meet their fate undisciplined. Daos says, in quite a paradoxical way, it would have been useful to have lost on some occasion. What for archaic ethics was a matter of fact, that the gods do not allow anyone to win all the time, τὸ πάντ᾽ εὐτυχει̃ν,17 is used here in its tactical implications: defeat makes one more cautious. Such a reflection is quite common, and we can find it even in strategists who had nothing to do with Greek literature. The late Jean-Marie Jacques could cite the witness of a captain of the sixteenth century, Blaise de Monluc, who in his Commentaires said ‘Aussi ay-je ouy dire à de grands capitaines qu’il est besoing d’estre quelque fois battu et d’avoir souffert quelque route, car on se faict sage par sa perte’.18 One might instance also the words of the world chess champion José Raúl Capablanca, who lost very few games in his career, and who once wrote: ‘There have been times in my life when I came very near thinking that I could not lose even a single game. Then I would be beaten, and the lost game would bring me back from dreamland to earth. Nothing is so healthy as a thrashing at the proper time, and from few won games have I learned as much as I have from most of my defeats.’19 However, from the words of Daos we cannot immediately understand why the Greek troops are actually over-confident. They are carrying out raids in Lycian villages and coming back with great treasures, and they receive from Smikrines the admiring exclamation ὡς καλόν, ‘excellent!’ (33).20 But then we know that the barbarians are informed by some escaped prisoners about the chaos that reigns in the camp, and decide to attack the enemy by surprise, coming from behind a hill that was sheltering them and swooping upon mostly drunken soldiers, so that this time Smikrines makes the critical comment (48) πονηρόν γε σφόδρα ‘That’s quite scandalous!’. So the Greeks are overwhelmed, but the survivors manage to improvise a fortified camp on a hill. Later their commander, concerned about a possibly dangerous situation, does not allow mourning for the dead individually, but orders the bodies of the fallen to be burnt on a single pyre. Concerning this circumstance, Daos expresses an opinion on the ability of Kleostratos’ ἡγεμών, who is described (perhaps ironically, see p. 66 [81–82] below) as ‘fine’, χρηστός (75).

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How much of the story that Menander writes for Daos can be considered literature, the result of an existing narrative tradition? Two important contributions have been devoted to Daos’ report by Italian scholars: Giovanni Pascucci and Renato Oniga.21 Both of them attempted to compare this Aspis scene with the account of the battle between Thebans and Teleboi delivered by Sosias in the Amphitruo of Plautus (211–261), to emphasize the genuine Plautine invention in that canticum. More specifically, Pascucci discovers a significant number of echoes of Xenophontine prose in the text of Menander. According to him, these are absolutely intentional, for the poet, who is presenting a clash between Greeks and barbarians, is here adhering to the ideology of war presented by Xenophon in his Anabasis22 and making a conscious imitation of it. The position of Oniga is more nuanced in this regard, but he also agrees in identifying the cultural reference of this scene of Aspis in historiography, for Daos is a cultivated man, a paidagogos, and in his report reality is passed through a literary filter.23 It is obvious enough that the coincidences of vocabulary and sense highlighted by Pascucci and Oniga really exist, but we have to wonder whether, in order to make a credible account of a battle, a poet of the fourth century BC would need to refer to a written literary work or genre.24 After all, even if the use of mercenaries was constantly increasing, war was still a common experience for many of Menander’s spectators. During his career, Athenian troops fought at Crannon in 322 BC, against Cassander to recapture the fortresses of Phyle and Panactum in 305/4 BC, at the battle of Ipsus in 301 BC, to mention only the more relevant war episodes. Stories of feats of arms were certainly frequent in the time of Menander as in any period, and the audience was without doubt able to understand the course of events, and to explain the causes of a victory or a defeat even in strategic terms. If anything, it is questionable whether Xenophon or other historians could really develop a technique of narration of war episodes by avoiding the most common tactical suggestions coming from the tales of qualified witnesses. In my opinion the military culture of Menander was in fact that of the average Athenian man, and derived mainly from the stories of veterans returning from the wars in the Near East: so it might be useful to throw light on it inter alia by considering technical works, such as the Greek and Latin treatises on strategy. Of course, we should be well aware that this attempt presents some methodological risks: among the tacticians, all except Aeneas are much later than Menander: Onasander lived in the first century AD, Polyaenus in the second, Pseudo-Hyginus in the second or third, Vegetius even in the fifth. However, should the strategic precepts of these authors correspond to war narratives that precede Menander or are contemporaneous with him, it will be very likely that they were also known by soldiers in the fourth century BC. Indeed, Ursula Treu succeeded in finding a very similar military action to that described by Daos in the work of Diodorus Siculus25: it is the illfated operation conducted in 312 BC against the Nabataeans by Athenaeus, a relative of Antigonus Monophthalmus. The Nabataeans had no fortified cities, but when they had their national assembly, women, the elderly and

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children were placed on a rock (referring in all probability to their capital Petra). They relied on the fact that the rock was in the middle of the desert, so that no one could reach it from outside without knowing the position of the water tanks that the Nabataeans held secretly hidden. Yet Athenaeus managed to plunder the rock by resorting to forced marches, but he could not get away as quickly because his soldiers were exhausted. Diodorus says (19.95.3–5): διατείναντες δὲ σταδίους διακοσίους κατεστρατοπέδευσαν, ὄντες κατάκοποι καὶ ῥᾳθύμως ἔχοντες τὰ περὶ τὰς φυλακάς, ὡς ἂν νομίζοντες μὴ πρότερον δύνασθαι τοὺς πολεμίους ἐλθειν̃ δυειν̃ ἢ τριω̃ν ἡμερω̃ν. οἱ δ᾽ ῎Αραβες πυθόμενοι παρὰ τω̃ν ἑωρακότων τὸ στρατόπεδον παραχρη̃μα ἠθροίσθησαν καὶ τὴν πανήγυριν ἀπολιπόντες ἡ̃κον ἐπὶ τὴν πέτραν· παρὰ δὲ τω̃ν τραυματιω̃ν μαθόντες τὰ γεγονότα κατὰ σπουδὴν ἐδίωκον τοὺς Ἕλληνας. τω̃ν δὲ περὶ τὸν Ἀθήναιον στρατοπεδευσάντων καταπεφρονηκότως καὶ διὰ τὸν κόπον ἐν ὕπνῳ καθεστώτων ἔλαθόν τινες τω̃ν αἰχμαλώτων διαδράντες, παρ᾽ ὡ̃ν οἱ Ναβαταιο̃ ι μαθόντες τὰ κατὰ τοὺς πολεμίους ἐπέθεντο τῃ̃ στρατοπεδείᾳ περὶ τρίτην φυλακήν, ὄντες οὐκ ἐλάσσω ὀκτακισχιλίων. καὶ τοὺς πλείους μὲν ἐν ται̃ς κοίταις ὄντας ἔτι κατέσφαξαν, τοὺς δὲ διεγειρομένους καὶ χωρου̃ντας εὶς ὅπλα κατηκόντιζον· καὶ πέρας οἱ μὲν πεζοὶ πάντες ἀνῃρέθησαν, τω̃ν δὲ ἱππέων διεσώθησαν εἰς πεντήκοντα καὶ τούτων οἱ πλείους τραυματίαι. ‘When he and his men had marched without pause for two hundred stades, they made camp, being tired and keeping a careless watch as if they believed that the enemy could not come before two or three days. But when the Arabs heard from those who had seen the expedition, they at once gathered together and, leaving the place of assembly, came to the rock; then, being informed by the wounded of what had taken place, they pursued the Greeks at top speed. While the men of Athenaeus were encamped with little thought of the enemy and because of their weariness were deep in sleep, some of their prisoners escaped secretly; and the Nabataeans, learning from them the condition of the enemy, attacked the camp at about the third watch, being no less than eight thousand in number. Most of the hostile troops they slaughtered where they lay; the rest they slew with their javelins as they awoke and sprang to arms. In the end all the foot-soldiers were slain, but of the horsemen about fifty escaped, and of these the larger part were wounded’.26 There are several points of resemblance between the two episodes: the Nabataeans decided on a surprise attack at night, based on information provided by prisoners who had escaped from the camp, with dire consequences for the soldiers caught off guard and unable to fight. Diodorus warns that the Greeks had camped καταπεφρονηκότως, an adverb he frequently uses in his nineteenth book to describe poorly constructed encampments,27 and that is very reminiscent of the καταφρονει̃ν Daos used (Aspis 30) to explain the

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defeat of the comrades of Kleostratos. So, it may be worth going back to the commander of the expedition to Lycia, ὁ δ᾽ ἡγεμὼν ἡμω̃ν ὁ χρηστός, ‘Our fine commander’. What opinion might a spectator have of him according to his own knowledge of war? As early as 1970, Colin Austin28 commented on χρηστός with the Latin word ironice, ‘ironically’, and presented a good number of parallel passages in favour of his interpretation, which is commonly held. In a recent commentary on Aspis, however, Paola Ingrosso (2010:166–7) proposes a rehabilitation of the commander, based on his decision to ban individual mourning for the dead soldiers in favour of a common funeral pyre to quickly cremate all the fallen together. That decision, according to Ingrosso, associates him with the wise Trojan king Priam who, in the seventh book of the Iliad, profits from a short truce offered by Agamemnon to order a summary funeral rite for the bodies of the dead which were no longer recognizable (Iliad 7.427–9). But the reading of the Strategikos of Onasander seems to reveal a heavy culpability of the ἡγεμών in our episode. First, concerning the disorder of the Greek troops engaged in looting: the tactician says it is important to note that the good commander does not allow his troops to plunder randomly, ἀτάκτως. ‘for the greatest misfortunes befall men acting in this way, since it has often happened that the enemy, falling on men scattered and without order in their eager search for booty, on account of this lack of order and the fact that they were loaded with their booty have killed many as they were retreating, unable to give aid to their comrades or to use their arms’.29 Onasander criticizes also the decision not to give funeral honours to the fallen by emphasizing its gravity and impact on the morale of the surviving troops: ‘the general should take thought for the burial of the dead, offering as a pretext for delay neither occasion nor time nor place nor fear, whether he happen to be victorious or defeated. Now this is both a holy act of reverence toward the dead and also a necessary example for the living. For if the dead are not buried, each soldier believes that no care will be taken of his own body, should he chance to fall, observing what happens before his own eyes, and thereby judging of the future, feeling that he, likewise, if he should die, would fail of burial, waxes indignant at the contemptuous neglect of burial’.30 Actually when describing the episode Daos seems to put special emphasis on the lack of agreement between the troops and their commander, who is forced to resort to a formal prohibition on individual burial (78 ἐκώλυσεν).31 However, the most serious fault of Kleostratos’ commander has not been made explicit by Menander, who lets his audience recognise it for themselves. By narrating the episode of the night attack on Athenaeus, Diodorus had highlighted the poor layout of the Greek camp. How much did the location of Kleostratos’ camp answer the requirements of an adequate strategy? We know that Aeneas wrote a section of his work on this subject, titled στρατοπεδευτική, but it has been lost. At 22.1 however, he observes that, when it is feared that the enemy is nearby, it is appropriate

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to establish a service of night watchmen.32 From this viewpoint the Aspis camp is impeccable: the commander had placed observers, σκοποὺς (41), but the enemy managed to evade their guard by hiding behind a hill. Where was it? The question is well explained by Sandbach with his usual clarity: ‘Austin calls my attention to an ambiguity. Did the barbarians remain out of sight of the sentries by keeping a hill in front of them, that is between themselves and the Greek camp? Or did they occupy a hill in front of the camp, and escape the notice of scouts who reconnoitred the lower ground only?’.33 Austin cited a passage from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (3.3.28) to interpret ἐπίπροσθε at 43 as ἐπίπροσθ᾽ αὐτω̃ν, ‘having a hill before themselves’.34 Pascucci even went so far as to consider Cyrus’ stratagem in Xenophon a military precedent of the Lycian strategy. In fact, the parallel is not particularly close to the Aspis adventure: Xenophon compares the camp of the Assyrians, which was, as usual, conspicuous and fortified by a moat running round it, to that of Cyrus, shielded by the presence of villages and hills. However, the military function of the choice of Cyrus was not so much to prepare a surprise attack as to conceal from the enemy the important information that they greatly outnumbered the Median army. The episode allows Cyrus to impart important lessons of strategy to his uncle, the king Cyaxares. At first, as the Assyrians did not leave the camp, Cyaxares wanted to attack them in force, but Cyrus dissuaded him: it is not possible to storm a fortified camp, so that the action of Cyaxares would only result in revealing to the Assyrians their numerical superiority against the Medes (3.3.31). On a second occasion, when the Assyrian troops were finally crossing the moat to draw up in battle order, Cyaxares planned to attack them while they were disorderly and inferior in number, but this time too Cyrus bridles his impulses: a victory from such a clash would be of little significance, because the Assyrian losses would still be modest and the Medes would be forced to face an enemy who would be much more prudent in a second confrontation (3.3.47). When they finally come to battle, the fight, victorious for the Medes, will be a classic pitched battle, not at all like the Lycian ambush in Menander. Not even the clash between the Spartans and Argives in 418, described by Thucydides (5.65) and seen by Ingrosso (2010:155) as a parallel to Aspis, really compares to our text, because on that occasion a steep position is used as a natural defence by the Argives, with such effectiveness that the Spartan king Agis decides to give up the battle and goes to divert the course of a stream, thus forcing the Argives to abandon their fortifications and fight in the plains. The interpretation of Arnott is probably preferable: the hill overlooks the Greek camp. This is, according to the Latin tacticians, a serious flaw when establishing a camp, because enemies can exploit the hills in order to attack it: Pseudo-Hyginus and Vegetius are agreed on this point,35 and Pseudo-Hyginus adds that such places were called novercae, ‘stepmothers’, by Roman soldiers.

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So, a closer comparison with Kleostratos’ unfortunate experience can be offered by the military history of other ages and other countries, where Greek historiography and Xenophon were in all probability unknown. I managed to find two interesting cases I would like to submit for the reader’s consideration. The first is the Okehazama battle, which occurred in Shogunate Japan in June 156036: a brief skirmish, but very important for the future history of the Asian country, because it prompted its reunification after a long feudal era. The role of the Greeks is played here by the army of Yoshimoto Imagawa, an army 25,000 strong marching towards the capital Kyoto. Instead of the Lycians we have the soldiers of Nobunaga Oda, the lord of the region crossed by Imagawa, who is moving from victory to victory, and has already conquered two border fortresses, Washizu and Marune. Made bold by his recent successes, Imagawa camps in an unfavourable place, a gorge full of dense forests, sufficient to hide the presence of an enemy. Oda, encamped near a small temple, is informed by his observers of what is happening and understands that the time is ripe for action: he leaves a small garrison in camp with the task of deploying all the flags and ensigns of war, to give the impression that his army is still there, and runs silently into the gorge, aided by the providential outbreak of a summer storm. Oda faces an enemy oppressed by the heat and intoxicated, not with wine, like the comrades of Kleostratos, but with sake. His men easily enter the opponent’s camp, and when Yoshimoto Imagawa comes out of his tent attracted by the noise, those whom he believes to be his men, but who are, in fact, the vanguard of the enemy, kill him. His army surrenders instantly.37 Another example of how easy it can be to make a successful attack on a badly located camp is provided by the victory of the Native American tribe of the Lakota Sioux, under Sitting Bull, against the Seventh Cavalry under Lieutenant-Colonel Custer38 at Little Bighorn in 1876. It is not easy to reconstruct the course of the battle: as is well known, none of the U.S. Army soldiers survived, while the oral testimonies of the victors are often inconsistent with each other.39 It is highly unlikely that the battle followed the course that Sitting Bull related to a French missionary, Père Genin, but this is irrelevant from our viewpoint: what matters is that the Lakota chief could offer a plausible account of events by using the same important strategic tool mentioned by Menander in Aspis, a camp easily attacked from the surrounding hills. According to the story of Sitting Bull, he had deliberately placed his camp in a valley surrounded by hills, and then he abandoned it with all his men. When Custer attacked the deserted camp, he found himself, against his will, in the uncomfortable position of defending the camp that he thought he was assaulting. However, let us call upon Sitting Bull himself to speak40: ‘I sent my young men to light fires inside and outside the deserted tepees, placing conveniently at the door of each of the front tepees sticks dressed like men, and to put up stakes in the front streets of the village

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to which were tied pieces of blankets, so that when the fires were burning fiercely, and stirring the air, the pieces of cloth and old rags waved to and fro in the breeze and gave the appearance of a densely populated village. Then I marched behind the front row of hills with all my braves, and awaited the opening of the soldiers’ fire upon my camp. ‘Everything worked as I had planned. True to their intentions, the United States soldiers killed my flag men whom I had sent to meet them and demand peace, and proceeding furiously forward opened fire upon my empty camp of old tepees and rag manikins. I then fell upon them from the rear, with all my forces, before they had time to recover from the shock of their furious charge and their surprise at finding the village deserted. My men destroyed the last of them in a very short time’. Alas, Kleostratos’ ἡγεμών was no Sitting Bull. And he was certainly not χρηστός, even if Daos labels him so. He was a mediocre commander, such as are to be found in all wars, unable to keep order among his soldiers and deprived of the necessary sense of danger because he underestimated the possibilities of his enemy. To describe in a highly plausible way the course of an inevitable defeat Menander had no need to go through Xenophon’s work, or to resort to technical manuals: the stories of veterans were probably enough for him. Certainly, during the report of Daos many of them were sitting in the theatre, and nodding in agreement: Menander’s audience did not consist only of ‘jurymen on holiday’, to use a happy expression of Eric Turner.41 It was also an audience of ex-combatants. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

Phaedr. 5.1.12–13 (T 10 K-A). Smart 1765. On the problem of war and its effects in Menander see Katsouris 1980. Men. Perik. 125–6: καὶ τ]ου̃ πολέμου καὶ τω̃ν Κορινθιακω̃ν κακω̃ν / αὐξ] ανομένων. The text used throughout for the fragments contained in papyri is that of Arnott (1979, 1996a, 2000), and translations of Menander’s texts are also his unless otherwise expressly stated. Fragments surviving through indirect tradition are cited after Kassel & Austin 1983–2001 (vol. vi.2 (1998)). Men. Mis. 634–5 καὶ δη̃λον ὡς ἔσπαρκε τω̃ν οἴκοι τινὰς / ὁ κοινὸς ἐχθρὸς πόλεμος ἄλλον ἀλλαχῃ̃. εἰρήνη γεωργὸν κἀν πέτραις / τρέφει καλω̃ς, πόλεμος δὲ κἀν πεδίωι κακω̃ς (translation mine). Without a dramatic context, it is difficult to interpret the meaning of fr. 783 ἐν τοις̃ πολεμίοις ὑπερέχειν τὸν ἄνδρα δει,̃ / τὸ γὰρ γεωργει̃ν ἔργον ἐστὶν οἰκέτου ‘The true man must excel in the business of war: agriculture is an occupation for slaves’ (translation mine), but it sounds somewhat ironic, even if the speaker is himself a professional soldier. Str. 14.1.18 (T 7 K-A). Cf. especially Caec. Stat. 211–212 Guardì: in civitate fiunt facinora capitalia / ab amico amante argentum accipere meretrix noenu volt. Ter. Eun. 317–8 nova figura oris, color verus, corpus solidum et suci plenum. Translation by Riley 1874.

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Mario Lamagna 10. On the soldier as a stock character in comedy see Ribbeck 1882: Wysk 1921; Böhne 1968; MacCary 1972; Hofmann & Wartenberg 1973; Jarkho 1979; Blume 2001; P. Brown 2004. 11. Cf. Hdt. 5.126.2 πόλιν περικατήμενος; [Dem.] 50.22 περικαθημένων κύκλῳ τὸ τειχ̃ ος. 12. The most common interpretation of περικαθη̃σθαι here is ‘to embrace’; so the translations of Arnott (‘squeeze’), Balme 2001, and likewise Rampichini 2002:166 (‘abbracciare’, ‘cingere’). I would expect something stronger after ἀναβαίνειν, and therefore proposed (Lamagna 1994 ad loc.) ‘avviluppare’, ‘to wrap around’, said of sexual intercourse. Cf. περὶ τὴν ψωλὴν περιβαίη in Ar. Lys. 979. Alan Sommerstein suggested to me that ἀναβαίνειν and περικαθη̃σθαι might be two different moments of the same action of squatting on the lap of the male, and cited as examples two vase-paintings (London, British Museum F65 and Berlin, Staatliche Museen F2414), published by Dover 1978 as pictures R954 and R970. 13. For the attribution of this fragment to the Kolax see P. Brown 1992. 14. Cf. Arr. Anab. 7.6.5 δόρατα Μακεδονικὰ ἀντὶ τω̃ν βαρβαρικω̃ν μεσαγκύλων. 15. The claim of Belardinelli 1989, who attempted to refute this possibility by observing that Menander could not use the term λάφυρα to indicate an already divided part from the common spoils of war, can be rebutted, inter alia (see also P. Brown 1990), by the testimony of Polyaenus (4.3.10) concerning a stratagem used by Alexander the Great at the time when he wanted to attack India. The Macedonian king had noticed that his soldiers were reluctant to follow him, because they were dragging with them the rich spoils of the Persian campaign, and they did not see the need to fight against the Indians, so he set fire to his chariots first, and then to those of the others, thus putting the army in the position of having to accumulate booty again. In Polyaenus’ version of the episode it is clear that λάφυρα refers to a divided portion of the spoils of war. 16. See Holzberg 1974:95. 17. Cf. the famous sentence of Croesus in Hdt. 1.207.2 κύκλος τω̃ν ἀνθρωπήιων ἐστὶ πρηγμάτων, περιφερόμενος δὲ οὐκ ἐᾳ̃ αἰεὶ τοὺς αὐτοὺς εὐτυχέειν ‘there is a wheel on which the affairs of men revolve, and [. . .] its movement forbids the same man to be always fortunate’ (translation by Rawlinson 1862). 18. The parallel cited by Jacques is to be found in Beroutsos 2005:29. 19. Capablanca [1920] 1966:xv. The name of Capablanca is closely related to the history of the University of Nottingham, where in 1936 he shared first place with Mikhail Botvinnik in one of the strongest chess tournaments of the twentieth century. 20. On the lightening effect of most of Smikrines’ comments, see Lombard 1971:125, 132; Goldberg 1980:33. 21. Pascucci 1978; Oniga 1985. 22. Pascucci 1978:1074: ‘Il fatto sarebbe meno sorprendente in se stesso, considerato l’argomento essenzialmente tecnico del racconto, se non si accompagnasse a tutto un modo di concepire l’attività militare, a tutta, vorrei dire, un’ideologia della guerra, che trova i suoi naturali e immediati antecedenti nelle spedizioni effettuate dai Greci nell’Asia minore, di cui l’Anabasi ci conserva la testimonianza più significativa e quasi esemplare’. 23. Oniga 1985:143–4: ‘il racconto della sfortunata spedizione [. . .] evita un tono uniforme di tragedia [. . .] e si avvicina piuttosto alla prosa. Una prosa che, come si è visto, somiglia molto a quella di uno storiografo [. . .] Lo stile tragico e quello storiografico non stonano in bocca ad un pedagogo come Davo. La realtà viene passata attraverso un filtro letterario senza che ciò intacchi la naturalezza e la persuasività di un discorso che è certo commosso e penetrante’.

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24. Obviously, I do not want to deny the presence of a literary filter in Daos’ report in general terms, but in my opinion, it is due mainly to versification and to the conventions of the comic genre. 25. See Treu 1976. As it will be become clear, I do not agree with the opinion expressed by Treu that Diodorus’ episode was the model of Menander’s narration. 26. Translation by Geer 1954. 27. Cf. D.S. 19.58.5, 19.92.3, 19.93.2. 28. Austin 1970:11. 29. Onas. 10. 7: αἱ γὰρ μέγισται συμφοραὶ κἂν τοιοι̃σδε γίγνονται· πολλάκις γὰρ ἀτάκτοις καὶ σποράσι περὶ τὴν λείαν σεσοβημένοις ἐπιπεσόντες οἱ πολέμιοι καὶ διὰ τὸ ἀσύντακτον του̃ πλήθους καὶ διὰ τὸ βαρει̃ς εἰ̃ναι τοὺς ἀποχωρου̃ντας ται̃ς ὠφελείαις οὔτε τοι̃ς ὅπλοις χρη̃σθαι δυναμένους οὔτ᾽ ἀλλήλοις ἐπικουρη̃σαι πολλοὺς διέφθειραν. Translation (here and hereafter) by the Illinois Greek Club 1923. 30. Onas. 36. 1–2: προνοείσθω δὲ τη̃ς τω̃ν νεκρω̃ν κηδείας, μήτε καιρὸν μήθ᾽ ὥραν μήτε τόπον μήτε φόβον προφασιζόμενος, ἄν τε τύχῃ νικω̃ν, ἄν τε ἡττώμενος· ὁσία μὲν γὰρ καὶ ἡ πρὸς τοὺς ἀποιχομένους εὐσέβεια, ἀναγκαία δὲ καὶ ἡ πρὸς τοὺς ζω̃ντας ἀπόδειξις. ἕκαστος γὰρ τω̃ν στρατιωτω̃ν ὡς αὐτὸς ἀμελούμενος, εἰ πεσὼν ἔτυχεν, παρ᾽ ὀφθαλμοι̃ς ὁρω̃ν τὴν τύχην καὶ ὑπὲρ του̃ μέλλοντος καταμαντευόμενος, ὡς οὐδ᾽ αὐτός, εἰ τεθναίη, ταφησόμενος ἐπαχθω̃ς φέρει τὴν ἀτύμβευτον ὕβριν. 31. See also Sandbach in Gomme & Sandbach 1973:68: ‘the commander abbreviated the funeral rites unnecessarily: there was no real danger from the Lykians, who had retired to the mountains’. 32. Aen. Tact. 22.1: νυκτοφυλακεισ̃ θαι ἐν μὲν τοι̃ς κινδύνοις καὶ προσκαθημένων ἤδη ἐγγὺς πολεμίων πόλει ἢ στρατοπέδῳ. 33. [Gomme &] Sandbach 1973:66. 34. And Sandbach (loc. cit.) agrees with him: ‘The former seems to me more likely’. 35. Cf. Ps.-Hyginus, munit. castr. 57 iniqua loca, quae a prioribus novercae appellantur, omni modo vitari debent. Ne mons castris immineat, per quam supervenire hostes aut prospicere possint, quid in castris agatur. Veget., Epit. rei milit. 1.22 cavendum etiam, ne mons sit vicinus aut altior locus, qui ab adversariis captus possit officere. 36. Our main source about this episode is The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, by Ō ta Gyūichi (see Elisonas & Lamers 2011:86–90); see also Turnbull 1977:133. 37. As Alan Sommerstein kindly pointed out to me, a quite similar event is to be found in the history of the British Empire, the attack on a camp in the Mamund valley (in present-day Pakistan) in 1897 described by Winston Churchill (1898). A few passages will demonstrate how close it was to the Okehazama battle and to the Aspis episode: ‘the whole position is therefore, from the military point of view, bad and indefensible’ (p. 23). ‘In the attack on the Malakand camp, all the elements of danger and disorder were displayed. The surprise, the darkness, the confused and broken nature of the ground; the unknown numbers of the enemy; their merciless ferocity; every appalling circumstance was present’ (p. 40). However, the British troops managed to maintain their position thanks to the enormous killing power of their new breech-loading weapons. 38. This was Custer’s actual rank at the time, though he had been a temporary General during the Civil War. 39. Many of them have been collected into the famous book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (D. Brown 1970). See also Zucconi 1996:316–341. 40. Sitting Bull 1906. 41. E.G. Turner 1979:119.

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Part II

Context: Dramatic Tradition

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6

Staging and Constructing the Divine in Menander Sarah Miles

INTRODUCTION At an unidentified but critical moment in Menander’s highly fragmentary play Theophoroumene a character pipes up with the following phrase: ἀπὸ μηχανη̃ς θεὸς ἐπεφάνης ‘You’ve turned up like a god upon a crane!’1 The quotation comes from a scholiast on Plato’s Cleitophon 407a(2) who goes on to explain that this remark refers to the unexpected appearance of characters bringing help and rescue, just like the gods in tragedies entering via the mēkhanē (stage-crane). Such an explanation by the scholiast would have been unnecessary for the original audiences of Menander’s comedies, well versed as they were in contemporary and earlier tragedies of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Re-performances of tragedies had been officially included in the City Dionysia at Athens since 386 BCE,2 while beyond the theatre tragedy also provided material at symposia.3 Some of the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and particularly Euripides were well known to Menander’s audience, as indeed they were to Menander, whose extensive borrowings from Euripides and other dramatic predecessors have been well documented.4 The fragment from Menander’s Theophoroumene is another clear indication that Menandrian comedy was aware of, and at home with, the conventions of Attic drama and its gods as they had continued from the fifth century BCE down to Menander’s time in the late fourth to early third centuries. The appearance of gods in earlier drama was now, for Menander’s audience, part of public consciousness; Menandrian characters could call upon the tragic tradition as a way of engaging with their audiences and beefing up the sense of realism in their own plays by emphasising the fictional status of earlier tragedy and appealing to a shared past with the audience.5 It is clear too that gods appearing in tragic drama had a recognisable role, and the fragment from Theophoroumene shows an awareness of this role which fifth- and fourth-century comedians mocked mercilessly with mēkhanē jokes.6 However, when it comes to Menander’s own comedies, where are the gods and what are they doing? Scholarship has noted their curtailed role in Menandrian comedy,7 with the divine presence now limited to a prologue

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speech toward the start of the play or omitted altogether (as in Menander’s Samia8). In Menander’s world no gods on cranes intervene in the human stage-action, in fact no human-divine interaction takes place on- or off-stage at all. This fact is very striking since such interaction could occur in Aristophanic comedy, albeit in a controlled manner.9 What has happened to the stage gods in Menandrian drama? How are we to understand this transition from their role in earlier dramatic tradition? These questions provide the backdrop for the following examination of how Menander constructed divine, non-human characters in his comic dramas. In the first part of the chapter, we shall examine the depiction of human-divine relationships in Menander and consider how this compares to the tradition of presenting divine forces in earlier drama of the fifth century BCE, particularly that of Aristophanes. After all, comic dramatists from Cratinus and Aristophanes down to Menander created comedies whose fictional setting could be the contemporary world of the dramatist, but one in which the dramatist still chose to present divine forces visually in his plays and before his audiences.10 However, the role and identity of the divine characters in Menandrian comedy has changed (dramatically) from that in earlier comedy. Menander’s audiences are, as we noted earlier, experienced viewers of tragic and comic drama and its conventions; there is a continuous tradition of dramatic performances stretching back over 100 years, and it is important to be aware that Menander is writing with these audiences in mind. The needs of such an audience are evident in an intriguing comic fragment, perhaps of New Comedy: com. adesp. 1008. The fragment preserves almost 30 lines of text on papyrus, but only the second half of most of these. Kassel & Austin11 note the various parallels to Menandrian prologues that suggest that it may be a work of Menander or one of his contemporaries. Most significantly, the first line ends with the phrase: μακρολόγος θε[ὸς (‘a long-winded god’) suggesting a parody of divine prologue speeches, from which again we can infer levels of audience knowledge of dramatic conventions and gods, but sadly the precise date and authorship of the fragment are unknown. This tantalising fragment, in addition to that from Theophoroumene, is but the tip of the iceberg when considering the effects that gods in New Comedy had on its audiences. However, who exactly are these audiences and why does Menander reduce the role of the divine to a prologue speech? To approach these questions, the second part of the chapter will consider to what extent changes in Attic and Greek society have an additional role to play here in shaping the role of the divine in Menandrian drama. On this latter point, we will consider the various attitudes presented in scholarship that involve assumptions about Hellenistic religion, divine personifications and the social make-up and intellectual attitude of the audience, all of which have a direct effect on how scholars currently view the role and function of divine characters in Menander. Therefore, this investigation will help to further understanding of the type of drama that Menander was constructing in its early Hellenistic context.

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Overall, it is worth grappling with these issues of divine presence in drama to further evaluate the relationship of Menandrian comedy to earlier comic and tragic drama. Both comedy and tragedy could contain divine forces as on-stage characters influencing and controlling human endeavour, and it is a key point (undervalued by scholars) that Menander makes a conscious decision to continue this tradition but in an adapted form. So this chapter will seek to explore how Menander has shaped the tradition to meet the needs and tastes of his audience, since his plays were originally written with a particular audience, or set of audiences, in mind. Overall, an underlying but more difficult question that we will seek to address is this: what did it mean for Menander’s audiences to be confronted with gods and divine forces live on-stage in dramas set in their own time? In terms of method, this chapter starts from the viewpoint that Greek drama is a valid and important source for the study of aspects of Greek religion, or rather specifically to do with the perception and visualisation of human-divine interaction. Therefore, this chapter sides with the general approach of Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood in dealing with gods in tragic drama.12 As her work indicates, discussing the portrayal and role of gods in Greek drama has long posed interpretative issues. Particularly, in the case of comedy discussion has been avoided altogether.13 Therefore, this study into Menander hopes to level the balance somewhat by devoting space to the portrayal of the divine in comic drama, rather than tragic. Lastly, the approach taken by this chapter can be neatly represented through the words of Simon Price: ‘There is no sharp divide between the gods of drama and the gods of Athens and other states. Rather, drama was one medium for exploring the religious ideas of the polis.’14 Before embarking on this discussion of divinities in drama, it should be noted that this chapter will not deal with the elusive topic of mythological burlesque in fifth- and fourth-century comedies,15 or the category of Gonai (Γοναί) plays dealing with the birth of gods.16 As the titles of these plays indicate, Olympian gods appeared in these plays. The exclusion of these plays from this study is mainly due to their highly fragmentary form, and analysis of these would lead to more supposition than argument. Here is not the place for such a study, but it is one worth pursuing elsewhere. Therefore, this chapter will focus on the more complete evidence, but always with the awareness that Menander’s reuse of fifth-century dramatic forms, plots, characters and conventions has been fed through the early fourthcentury filter before we reach Menandrian comedy. The biographical tradition makes clear Menander’s connection to comic tradition when the Suda cites the comic poet Alexis as Menander’s uncle.17 MENANDER AND THE DRAMATIC TRADITION OF GODS ON-STAGE We begin with a brief survey of the evidence for divine characters in Menander that we can then use to observe the most striking features of these

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characters in comparison with earlier dramatic tradition. First, there are three extant divine prologues from Menandrian comedy and in each one the speaker explains their influence over human events; they can be summarised thus: (1) Pan opens the play Dyskolos and explains that he has made Sostratos fall in love (34–44);18 (2) Tyche (Chance) provides a delayed prologue in Aspis where she emphasises that she controls events (146–8); and (3) Agnoia (Ignorance) gives another delayed prologue in Perikeiromene asserting that she has made the soldier Polemon angry (162–6). In addition, there are five Menandrian plays in which a divine prologue occurred that is now lost: Encheiridion, which probably contained a Corycian god (?);19 Epitrepontes;20 Heros, which includes Ἥρως θεός (a hero god) in its cast-list; Sikyonios, a play set in Eleusis from which parts of a divine prologue survive;21 and the unidentified play referred to by the sources of Menander fr. 507, which indicate that Elenchos (Proof/Refutation) appeared in Menander as a prologue speaker (one of these sources calls Elenchos a god).22 Lastly, there are also four plays in which it is possible and even probable that a divine prologue occurred, but the plays are too fragmentary to be certain: Phasma,23 Georgos,24 Koneiazomenai25 and Misoumenos.26 The majority of these plays involved recognition scenes (Dyskolos is a notable exception, containing instead Knemon’s self-recognition—see Furley, this volume), and it is worth noting Richard Hunter’s observation that a divine prologue is only required when the play contains a recognition scene, unknown to the main protagonists, which the divine speaker can plausibly predict in advance of its occurrence.27 In addition, the three extant divine prologues are each roughly 50 lines in length, and so where there are gaps in the text (e.g. Misoumenos), it is also possible to suggest a prologue with a fair degree of certainty. Overall, this brief survey indicates that divine characters appear in at least seven, possibly ten, of Menander’s plays. It is notable too that divine prologues are detectable in all of Menander’s best-preserved plays, with the exception of Samia. This indicates that the divine prologue speaker was a common device used by Menander at or near the start of his dramas. When a divine prologue-speech does occur in Menandrian comedy, it is structurally comparable to that found in fifth-century tragedy (think of, for example, Euripides’ Ion or Hippolytus where a god lays out the action to come and his/her influence over it28), but in Menander the stage characters are not those of a mythical past, but of an Attic and Greek present. Similarly, Aristophanic comedy used a contemporary Attic setting for its dramas, whereas some fifth- and fourth-century comedies possibly had a wholly mythical backdrop (the so-called mythological burlesque mentioned above). Gone from Menander’s world are the Olympian gods originating in Homer and Hesiod and who feature so regularly in earlier comedy and in tragedy, causing human pain but oblivious to mortal suffering. These gods of a mythical past have been removed and in their place in Menandrian comedy we meet benevolent gods and divine personifications working toward a happy resolution for those characters deemed worthy and pious.

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Tyche (Chance) in Aspis does mention that the villain Smikrines will get his comeuppance, but this contributes to resolving the unhappiness of the play for the rest of the deserving characters (and that always seems to be the focus in Menander’s world).29 This change in attitude of divine characters towards mortals is particularly striking compared with earlier depictions of gods in drama. In the case of extant Greek tragedy, we sometimes find gods working towards the ultimate benefit of human characters (e.g. Apollo and Athena in Aeschylus’ Eumenides), but often the audience is witness to acts of gross human suffering, directly or indirectly the result of divine vengeance (e.g. Aphrodite in Euripides’ Hippolytus or Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae). In comparison, in Aristophanic comedy the comic protagonists make the gods ‘work’ for them. For example, in Ar. Peace Trygaeus personally seeks out the goddess Peace; in Ar. Birds Peisetaerus uses his position as ruler of Nephelococcygia to negotiate terms with an embassy of gods; in Ar. Wealth Chremylus protects and heals blind Wealth. All these comic heroes force the divine to work to human advantage, but this inversion of the norm can only occur in the imaginative realm of Old Comedy.30 The other notable feature of divine presence in Menander, as mentioned earlier, is that there is no human-divine contact on-stage in any Menandrian comedy. This point is particularly significant when compared to Aristophanic comedy, including the examples just mentioned, where fictional Athenian characters could meet with gods and conduct them into a contemporary Athens. This sort of scenario is never the case with Menander, but as we see in Dyskolos and the prologue speech by Pan, gods and mortals do still live alongside one another (the shrine of Pan is very notably the centre of the performance space; and that, no doubt, was where he exited the stage after his prologue speech); divine forces still shape human affairs, but in Menandrian comedy these two spheres of reality no longer interact on-stage. Another notable change from the gods of Aristophanic to those of Menandrian comedy is in their depiction; in Aristophanes, the gods and other divine figures are mockable comic characters (as are all characters in Old Comedy), whether it is Prometheus with his parasol in Birds evading Zeus, or Hermes begging the slave Carion to be allowed to work in his kitchen cleaning offal in Wealth. The gods in Menander, partly due to their separation from the human sphere of action and interaction, are no longer targets for comic attack. Comedy can no longer reach the gods, it seems. This distinction of divine characters separated from the human comedy and drama emphasises the elevated position of the divine characters, which is more reminiscent of tragic divine prologues, and it is from this position that the gods of Menander’s comedies communicate with the audience during the comic prologue speech. As the fragment of Theophoroumene with which we began indicates, Menander is well aware of the dramatic tradition of gods in tragedy and comedy, and he is willing to engage consciously with it, but in constructing his dramas, he has reshaped the role of the divine in his comedies to suit his

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own fictional setting for the plays. We see a fusion of the tragic prologue speech, interwoven with the need for a comic dramatist to explain his nonmythical plots to an audience, just as Antiphanes complained in his play Poiesis (Poetry) fr. 189. Antiphanes adds that comic dramatists cannot get away with the mēkhanē to sort out a complicated plot. Whether Antiphanes is highlighting a point of self-enforced genre division between comedy and tragedy, or merely observing current practice in comic plot making is unclear. Certainly, the comic fragments suggest that comic poets did indeed use the mēkhanē in a paratragic form, as we noted at the start of the chapter. Nonetheless, Menander certainly adheres to this (comic) rule laid down by Antiphanes. In Menander, the bird’s-eye view of the divine prologue speakers and their omniscience allows for the layers of dramatic irony to be prepared.31 The divine characters are therefore a handy dramatic tool for Menander, but it would be foolish to dismiss them as no more than this; we should not forget that plays are still performed as part of civic festivals in honour of gods and that religious activity involving the gods does not diminish in this period, but continues, as argued in recent works by Jon Mikalson and Graham Shipley.32 Most significantly, the brief overview of the tradition of gods in drama indicates that Menander chooses to maintain a divine influence in his plays. This is a fact too often played down by scholarship, to which we shall now turn, and which has had some trouble reconciling ancient comments on Menandrian realism with the appearance of divine prologue speakers at all. MENANDER, REALISM AND DIVINE PROLOGUES Menander’s work has been recognised for its remarkable attempts to create realistic or natural settings, characters and plot actions by scholars from antiquity33 to modernity.34 In terms of Menander’s comedies, gone are the flying dung beetles and Cloud-choruses of Aristophanes, and in their place we have stories of love, loss and reunited families set in Athens and the wider Greek world. We have comic misunderstandings and misapprehensions leading to the point of disaster for the characters, but there is always resolution and a sense of equilibrium at the end of the play. Families reunited, marriage on the cards, citizenship restored, and the villain (if there is one) defeated. Although the setting is clearly one recognisable to Greek audiences as realistic, the idealisation of that reality in these far-fetched plots is not a point missed by scholars, for example, Ariana Traill and her recent work on mistaken identity plots in Menander.35 Nonetheless, Menander’s realism is still considered a key characteristic of his comedies, and yet into this we have to fit the divine prologue speaker. This fact has actually caused modern scholars some degree of unease and difficulty to reconcile gods and realism in Menandrian drama. For example,

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in the case of Dyskolos, Stanley Ireland views the involvement of Pan in Dyskolos as ‘curiously nebulous’36 while Nick Lowe sees Pan’s mischief in Dyskolos as ‘a barely-personal metaphor for the self-conscious theatricality and strongly teleological movement of comic narrative itself’,37 and finally Netta Zagagi excuses Pan’s presence in Dyskolos as ‘not one of the Great Olympians, but a minor god who fits easily into the world of comedy or that of Satyric drama.’38 Zagagi’s work has made acute observations about the functioning of the divine in Menandrian comedy, but I part company with her views when she sees the gods as providing ‘quasi-mythological dimensions’ that are distinct from the ‘natural realism’ of the human setting and action.39 I will try to show rather that the gods are very much a part of the world of Menander, and I will use the history of gods in drama as my own divine aid. One tactic of scholars, as seen above, has been to play down the status of Pan as a god in Menander. However, this cannot be said of Tyche, who has a long history as a θεός (goddess), reaching back to Hesiod, and who explodes in popularity during the Hellenistic period.40 Another approach of scholars is to point to Tyche and Agnoia as abstractions, metaphors, and claim that these are not real gods.41 It is clearly the case that in Menandrian comedy, a divine prologue need not be spoken by an Olympian god (Sikyonios may provide evidence of Demeter/Kore, as noted earlier) but Tyche in particular is a goddess of increasing importance in this period while also being at root an abstraction personified. In addition, recent work by Emma Stafford has explored the divine status of abstract-personifications, noting that many received cult worship and were referred to in literature as θεός (god) from the Archaic period onward, even though the question concerning the divinity of personifications has remained an issue for scholars.42 Nonetheless, Walter Burkert has argued forcefully that ‘abstracts should be considered “gods” ’, noting similar ancient views in Cicero and Pliny.43 In the case of Agnoia in Perikeiromene and Elenchos in an unidentified play, there is certainly evidence of Menander using personifications as prologue speakers, but their status as divine need not be doubted; at least in the case of Agnoia it is clear that she has the same powers of knowing the future and influencing human affairs as the divine prologue speeches of Tyche and Pan. It is, however, notable that Menander chooses non-Olympian gods to speak prologues, and we can contrast this with the practice in fifth-century tragedy. However, divine personifications are at work here too: Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound opens with Kratos and Bia (Might and Force) as stage characters alongside Hephaestus (12); at the start of Euripides’ Alcestis Thanatos (Death) speaks with Apollo; Euripides’ Heracles contains Lyssa (Madness) as does Aeschylus’ Xantriai (fr. 169). The rise in personifications has been in the past linked to fourth-century enlightenment at the hands of philosophers and an educated elite. However, the divine status of personifications is evident in fifth-century drama, including the comedies of Aristophanes. Therefore, this cannot fully explain their use by Menander.

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Next we can turn to the views of Fritz Graf, who is strongly dismissive of the role of the divine in Menander: ‘The “bourgeois” comedy of Menander, Plautus and Terence has no need for them [gods] outside the prologue, with the exception of the Amphitruo: once comedy unfolds the web of ordinary lives, gods disappear in the background.’44 His summary statement is notable for putting together Menander and Roman comedy as if they were a distinct unit. This is far from the case, particularly where the divine is concerned.45 In Plautus, the prologue is often delivered by an unnamed prologus, entirely disconnected from the rest of the play.46 Menander never uses this impersonal prologus but where he uses prologue speakers he gives them identity and, if divine, gives them a wider role in the play; the gods are very much alive in Menander, and this is a conscious decision of the poet to include them. It is notable that Plautus, far removed from the context of Hellenistic Greece, was able to replace the Menandrian divine prologue speaker with the anonymous prologus. Graf’s use of the word ‘bourgeois’ in describing Menandrian comedy is also worthy of comment. It is anachronistic and misleading; there is nothing bourgeois about the comic door-knocking and prop-swapping scenes that we find in Menander’s Aspis and Dyskolos and which of course originate in the comedies of Aristophanes and his contemporaries in the fifth century. Aristophanes is an equally unlikely candidate for the label ‘bourgeois’. Zagagi is another scholar whose attitude to gods in comedy is based on assumptions about the social make-up and intellectual attitudes of the audience. Zagagi considers that gods in Menandrian comedy occur among a ‘highly sophisticated audience, brought up in an atmosphere of growing scepticism towards traditional religious values and beliefs, yet nevertheless constantly searching for substitute concepts and ideas.’47 This mention of a ‘sophisticated audience’ recalls the bourgeois model proposed by Graf and is again an attempt to explain the reduced role of gods in Menandrian comedy compared with earlier drama. This view of Menander’s audience is a long-held one, and also appears in Hunter’s important 1985 work on Menander where he too applies the term bourgeois to Menander’s audience: ‘His [Menander’s] plays deal, for the most part, with the private lives of a small range of characters drawn (except for slaves and cooks and so on) from the relatively prosperous middle- and upper-middle-class bourgeoisie of Athens and other Greek cities.’48 However, Hunter at least admits that this understanding of the composition of the audience is speculative. Recently, the questions over the identities of audience-members has moved in a new direction. Susan Lape’s 2004 book follows the separate work of Vincent Rosivach and Peter Wilson who have questioned the bourgeois model of Menander’s audience.49 They note that the effects on theatregoers of changes to the theoric fund (subsidising entry to festivals, including the City Dionysia and Panathenaea) are uncertain, not necessarily preventing non-elite members of the audience of New Comedy from attending the theatre.50 In addition, Menander’s plays were written and performed at festivals other

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than the City Dionysia (both in Athens and beyond), which makes audiencemodelling an even more complex issue. It should no longer be taken for granted that Menander’s intended audience was essentially bourgeois. Furthermore, views on Hellenistic religion have moved forward in the past few decades and studies of Menander need to take account of the work of Mikalson and Shipley (mentioned earlier). Mikalson suggests that there is no sudden change in religious attitude, behaviour or belief in early Hellenistic Athens and the wider Greek world.51 So one cannot explain away the changing role of gods in Menander as due either to developments in the make-up of the audience or to an alteration in the religious climate at Athens; there was not one. Thinkers and philosophers had been questioning the form and even existence of gods in fifth-century Athens, as Simon Price rightly emphasises;52 there is a continuation of these ideas in Menander’s day rather than a sudden increase in their use. But these views on the divine in Menander reflect a wider problem scholars have had with gods in drama. To return to Graf for a moment, his views on Menander reflect his general ideas on comedy and Greek religion, as can be seen from his remark on Aristophanes’ Birds and the scenes involving multiple gods (Iris, Prometheus, Poseidon, Heracles, a Triballian god). Graf states: ‘This is slapstick, not theology, and should bother no one: it highlights the distance between the seriousness of cult and the playfulness of myth.’53 I would prefer to argue instead that the gods in Birds hint at the playfulness of cult and myth, for cultic activity does involve plenty of play; festival activities and theatrical performances are not as far apart as we like to place them. It does not help that we have our own perceptions of theatre that constantly infringe upon our ability to understand the ancient Greek dramatic performances that occurred at a festival. A view similar to Graf’s is displayed by Martin Nilsson: ‘nobody who believes in gods can treat them as Aristophanes treats them.’54 These views reflect underlying assumptions about divinity in the ancient world that impair our ability to interpret its role in drama. However, by placing Menandrian drama in its contemporary context, we are in a better position to see the problems with current analysis and so can look for greater understanding of the role of gods in Menander. In Menandrian comedy, the power of the gods is not illustrated through evoking their role in myth, instead it is through their direct involvement and impact on human affairs in the play. In constructing his dramas, Menander was heavily indebted to his predecessors in Attic drama, both comic and tragic, and he chooses to integrate gods and divine forces into his dramas by adapting the Euripidean-style divine prologues. Menander introduces the delayed divine prologue, which if anything further involves the divine entity in the play, and appears as a clear adaptation of tragic prologues. Menandrian prologues reveal information necessary for the audience to understand the ensuing events and appreciate the irony and humour at work. The prologue is there in part to enhance the audience’s experience of the drama, in part to absorb the viewers into the fictional-contemporary world on-stage.

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These are clearly adaptations that merge a tragic form into comic space. It is notable that, for example, in these prologues, the divine character can end by appealing to the audience directly for victory in the dramatic contest!55 This is a feature found in Aristophanic comedy, but never tragedy. So, Menander actively chose to keep the divine characters in his comedies, using techniques of earlier comic and tragic drama to shape their presence. Their repeated occurrence suggests that audiences at least accepted their appearance on-stage but in a very different form from that of the fifth century BCE. MENANDRIAN GODS CLOSER TO THE AUDIENCE The fact that the divine prologue is purely for the benefit of the audience is, clearly, a vital factor toward understanding the role of the divine characters in Menandrian comedy. For Stanley Ireland,56 the prologue is the most superficial part of the play partly for its ability to appeal directly to the audience; but, by addressing the audience and sharing this divine, bird’s-eye knowledge, it puts the audience on the same plane as the god, situated above the action as an observer, sitting on the side of the Acropolis. The prologuespeaker appeals to the audience for its collaboration in the drama and the use of a divinity is a perfect way to interact with the inter-world state of the audience; the gods stand between human and divine spheres of existence and the audience sits between the fictional world of the play and the physical world of the theatre.57 We noted earlier that this set-up lends itself naturally to creating dramatic irony within the play (perhaps also a good way to make sure your audience turned up for the whole of your comedy, not just half-way through!). However, the divine prologue also works to separate the audience from all of the stage characters to some degree, in a manner opposite to Aristophanic comedy with its comic protagonist and parabatic chorus, two elements lost to Menander’s comedies. At a Menandrian comedy-performance we, the audience, are not experiencing an individual character’s narrative first hand (as for example happens in Sophocles’ OT), but rather we are following the human action while carrying superior knowledge about the persons involved, their character, prospects, fortunes, and their fate. Of course, this in itself is an illusion of audience omniscience which Menander can then exploit to its full potential by bringing in surprises for the audience; the Menandrian gods are complicit in this dramatic trickery with the audience. The audience-members are still not quite equal to the divine but they are in a closer relationship with it than we find in any earlier Attic drama. MENANDER’S EXPERIENCED AUDIENCES The revelations about the workings of the plot which are made by divine prologue-speakers have in the past caused some difficulty for scholars to interpret. Dworacki comments: ‘In such a situation there is nothing left

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for an ancient onlooker to do but to admire the scenic realisation of that intrigue.’58 In turn, Del Corno sees the release of information in advance as a way of removing any stress from the viewers so that they can enjoy the play,59 but why the audience should be in need of such cotton-wool treatment is not explained. What Dworacki and Del Corno miss is the sense of anticipation that these sorts of revelations create for an audience that already knows all the basic plot patterns and character types. As noted at the start of this chapter, the audience is already knowledgeable about the form and conventions of Greek drama. The audiences of Menander were now as well-versed in Attic drama and its tricks as fans of the 1970s and 1980s U.S. television series Columbo were about American detective series and the general formula for an episode of Columbo.60 Through repetitive viewing, each of these audiences gained a specialised cultural knowledge about the performance of their respective dramas. Therefore, the Menandrian audience was given large amounts of plot-information toward the start of the action and could then enjoy watching the mechanics of the plot action unfurl before its eyes; the focus is not purely on what will happen next (as was clearly a pertinent question amid the fantastical plots of Old Comic plays) but rather: how are they going to resolve the action this time? The realism of Menander’s prologues arises from their conscious theatricality. The divine prologues are among the most metatheatrical elements of the drama. In tragedy of the fifth century BCE the power of the god was often emphasised and its utter dominance over mortal life, death, and destiny. The Olympian gods had a role in controlling the action of the play. Pat Easterling notes this role e.g. in Sophocles’ Ajax or Euripides’ Hippolytus, observing that we see the god acting ‘as didaskalos’.61 This is a role directly associated with Tyche in Aspis whose language evokes her role as overall manager of affairs and is almost metatheatrical.62 We can compare a play by Menander’s contemporary Philemon, where the divine prologue-speaker, Ἀήρ (Air) also claims overall awareness of matters.63 The audience members are then put on the same plane as the divinities; to a degree, they view the play from the divine perspective. The directorial role of a god is particularly clear in Euripides’ Bacchae as Dionysus not only delivers the prologue, but also orchestrates the action throughout, right up to Pentheus’ costume change and his death.64 In Menander, the gods do not have such a hands-on approach throughout the play but they do set in motion the action of the drama, much as the producer of a comic drama had to do. The concept of Tyche and its metaphorical association with dramatic performance also finds mention in the fragments of the Cynic philosopher Teles, a contemporary of Menander, indicating the development of the relationship between drama and Tyche.65 GODS AND REALISM In Menandrian comedy, via these tragic-style prologues, the audience is shown that gods are involved in human affairs, but the audience sees human

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characters in the play separately from the divine. There is never any intermingling of human and divine precisely because this would break the illusion of realism. The gods still form a fundamental part of Athenian life and cultural activity, but their visualisation and role in drama is more restricted than in the fifth century BCE; it is more realistic for a character not to interact directly with a god, but the audience still needs to be aware of a divine role in human affairs. The separate space of the human and divine in comedy, and its relations to tragedy is something that Plautus’ Amphitruo makes explicit in the prologue speaker, Mercury (impersonating Sosia) who says to the audience (58–61): teneo quid animi vostri super hac re siet: / faciam ut commixta sit: sit tragicomoedia. / Nam me perpetuo facere ut sit comoedia, / reges quo veniant et di, non par arbitror. ‘I know what your view is on this matter: I’ll make it a mixed play, a tragicomedy. I don’t think it right to make it a straightforward comedy, when there will be kings and gods on-stage.’ However, it was not due to any awkwardness of having gods in comedy that Menander restricted divine forces to a prologue. Rather, Menander was aiming to express dramatically the nature of the relationship between mortal and divine as naturally and realistically as would seem acceptable to his audience. Menander presents his audience with human-divine interaction in terms of the invisible role that divine figures played in human affairs. The audience in its position alongside the god as didaskalos was in the perfect position to observe this relationship in the course of the play. The divine figures in Menander become more imitative of reality (paradoxically) by their absence from the physical space of the human events. But an unusual consequence of this arrangement sees the audience of Menander’s comedies positioned in a closer connection to the divine. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

Men. Theophoroumene, F 5. Text and translation from Arnott 1996a: 74–6. IG ii2 2318.201. Mastromarco 2006. For general summaries, see Gutzwiller 2007:53; Gutzwiller 2000; for a recent treatment of relationships between Menander’s Samia and Euripides’ Hippolytus see Omitowoju 2010. This thereby implies that the world of Menander’s stage represents a reality not dissimilar to that experienced by Menander’s original audiences. For a comparable view see Fantuzzi & Hunter 2004:429, which discusses Menander’s Samia and views the play’s depiction of the world of tragedy as a fictional and false world set in contrast to the reality of the Menandrian stage. e.g. Strattis, Phoenissae fr. 46; Strattis, Atalantos fr. 4; Aristophanes, Gerytades fr. 160 discussed in Miles 2009:234. The most important work on analysing the divine prologues of Menander is still Zagagi 1994:142–168; Dworacki 1973 provides a survey and brief analysis of divine prologues, but is now somewhat outdated. The play opens with a speech by the young man, Moschion. Bain 1983:113 even argues that Moschion’s speech is a monologue, not a prologue but this distinction is unconvincing.

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9. The patterning of divine behaviour in Aristophanes is discussed by Miles 2011. 10. e.g. Aristophanes’ Peace, Birds, Frogs and Wealth all contain human-divine interactions on-stage in plays set, not in a mythical past, but an Athenian present. 11. PCG viii 301–2. 12. Sourvinou-Inwood 1997, 2003. 13. Sourvinou-Inwood 1997:182 devotes little attention to gods in comedy, but acknowledges them as ‘comic constructs’. 14. Price 1999:44. 15. See most recently the survey chapter on this issue by A.M. Bowie 2010. 16. For important discussions of these plays, see Rosen 1995 and Nesselrath 1995. 17. Suda α1138. 18. Cf. Plautus, Aulularia 23–33, where the prologue speaker Lar outlines her influence in helping the young girl Phaedria to be married. 19. See Encheiridion fr. 2; Corycus is a headland in Pamphylia. 20. A divine prologue is assumed by two recent commentaries on the play: Ireland 2010a:109, 211 and W.D. Furley 2009:8–10. Holzberg 1974:62–63 suggested Eleos (Pity) as the prologue speaker. 21. Suggestions for the prologue-speaker include Persephone (Arnott 2000:204– 213), Demeter (Lloyd-Jones 1966) and even Elenchos from Menander fr. 507 (Webster 1974:182). 22. PCG vi.2.285 provides the various sources, including Lucian, Pseudol. 4: παρακλητέος ἡμιν̃ τω̃ν Μενάνδρου προλόγων εἱς̃ , ὁ Ἔλεγχος, φίλος ἀληθείαι καὶ παρρησίαι θεός, οὐχ ὁ ἀσημότατος τω̃ν ἐπὶ τὴν σκηνὴν ἀναβαινόντων (‘We must call as a witness one of Menander’s prologues, Elenchos, a god dear to truth and plain-speaking who is not the most obscure of those going up on-stage’); Hermogenes of Tarsus (2nd c. CE), Progymnasmata 9.1–7 (Rabe) also mentions Menander’s Elenchos as an example of προσωποποιία (personification). 23. Part of a prologue speech survives that Arnott presumes is spoken by a divinity: Arnott 2000: 382–5. 24. Webster 1974: 142–3. 25. Ludwig 1970: 95. 26. After the initial scene between Thrasonides and Getas, there is a gap of about one hundred lines, which would leave space for a divine prologue to set up the recognition scene, see e.g. Balme 2001: 166–7. 27. Hunter 1985: 28–9. For a detailed discussion of this, see Del Corno 1970, especially 103. 28. Cf. Euripides’ Alcestis and Troades, each of which opens with a dialogue between gods. 29. It is plausible to suggest that even Smikrines joins in the wedding celebrations at the close of the play, thus resolving the conflict between the families. Such an inclusive ending is to be found for Knemon in Dyskolos and for (another) Smikrines at the end of Epitrepontes. 30. For further discussion of the stage behaviour of gods and heroes in Aristophanic comedy see Miles 2011. 31. A point noted by many scholars; see e.g. Del Corno 1970. 32. Mikalson 1998, 2006; Shipley 2000. 33. E.g. ὠ̃ Μένανδρε καὶ βίε, πότερος ἄρ’ ὑμω̃ν πότερον ἀπεμιμήσατο; ‘O Menander and life, which of you was a model for the other?’ (Comm. on Hermogenes, II p. 23 Rabe); Plut. Mor. 853e-f admires Menander’s powers of vivid characterisation, and φράσις (diction) in contrast to Aristophanic comedy.

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Sarah Miles 34. E.g. Hunter 1985: 11: ‘The greater realism of New Comedy is reflected too in the external circumstances of the drama . . . The costume of Greek New Comedy shows a similar shift towards realism.’; ibid. 12: ‘. . . the plots and characters of Greek New Comedy are realistic and believable in a way in which those of Old Comedy are not.’ 35. ‘The fantasy Menandrian comedy offers is a private and individualistic one: romantic fulfillment in a long-term relationship with a partner of choice, with the approval of family and community’: Traill 2008: 265. 36. Ireland 1995:20. 37. N.J. Lowe 1987:138. 38. Zagagi 1994:163. 39. Zagagi 1994:143. 40. Hesiod, Theog. 360 lists Tyche as an Oceanid; Pin. Ol. 12.2 calls her: σώτειρα Τύχα (saviour Tyche) and child of Zeus Eleutherios. For a full survey of Tyche’s recurrence in literary and visual sources, see LIMC viii.1:115–25; Eidinow 2011:45–52. Ireland 2010a:16–17 notes the pervasive role of Tyche in Aspis. See also Vogt-Spira 1992:75–88. 41. Dworacki 1973:38 labels Agnoia ‘a fictional goddess’, a term that asks for further exposition, but indicative of the difficulty faced by scholars attempting to categorise such characters. 42. Stafford 2000:230–1. See also pp. 9–13 for a brief discussion of personifications in drama; pp. 19–27 provide a very useful review of scholarship on personifications. 43. Cic. ND 2.61; Leg. 2.19, 2.28; Pliny, NH 2.14. Burkert 2005:14. Burkert provides a concise summary-definition: ‘Personification is a meeting of linguistics, morality and religion in the house of rhetoric’ (ibid. 3). See also Burkert 1985:185. 44. Graf 2007:66. 45. Ludwig 1970:95 makes acute observations about the development of the role of gods from Menander to Plautus and Terence. 46. Plautus: twenty-one plays in total; thirteen plays have prologues, five contain divine prologues, and one has a human prologue, while seven plays have an unnamed prologus. 47. Zagagi 1994:143. 48. Hunter 1985:10. 49. Lape 2004:10; Rosivach 2000; P.J. Wilson 1997. 50. In contrast to these views see Roselli 2011. Roselli argues for the greater prominence of elite values in early Hellenistic theatre (p. 112), and in so doing he suggests that the theoric fund was abolished, although he acknowledges there is no direct evidence for this (p. 108). Debate concerning the composition of Hellenistic audiences continues, and such arguments should be used with caution as a means for interpreting Menandrian comedy. 51. Mikalson 2006:213: ‘In the old cities, Greeks continued to pray, sacrifice, make dedications, and celebrate festivals for their old deities in much the same manner as they had in the Classical period’; p. 214 comments on new ruler cults which ‘took a variety of forms and did not displace traditional city gods such as Athena and Zeus’. 52. Price 1999:126–142; ‘it is profoundly misleading to talk of “the fifth-century Enlightenment”; it is also quite misleading to treat Hellenistic philosophical schools as populated by crypto-sceptics, responding to an alleged decline in belief in civic gods’. 53. Graf 2007:67. 54. Nilsson 1964.

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55. Men. Perikeiromene 169–171; human characters can address the audience explicitly too, as occurs in Samia, 269 and 447 (Demeas), 683 (Moschion), a play notable for its lack of divine prologue. 56. Ireland 2010b:354. 57. Cf. the Chorus speaking the prologue of Shakespeare’s Henry V, who appeals to audience imaginations and, as Bate and Rasmussen 2010:131 comment, emphasises ‘the importance of the mental collaboration with the audience in production of the play’. 58. Dworacki 1973:47. 59. Del Corno 1970:104. 60. For an enlightening discussion of audiences’ awareness of drama see Revermann 2006. 61. Easterling 1993:80. 62. Men. Aspis 147–8: τίς εἰμι, πάντων κυρία / τούτων βραβευ̃σαι καὶ διοικη̃σαι; Τύχη. ‘Who am I, the lady in charge of it all, directing the whole thing? Chance.’ 63. Philemon, fr. 95 (play-title unknown); Bruzzese 2011:108–127 discusses the similarities between the prologues of Menander and Philemon. 64. Easterling 1993:85 notes the use of the mēkhanē to winch in divine assistance as ‘one of the clearest ways in which a dramatist can indicate to an audience that two different levels of reality are being juxtaposed for their benefit’. 65. Teles fr. II (p. 5 Hense) On Self-Sufficiency (περὶ αὐταρκείας): δει̃ ὥσπερ τὸν ἀγαθὸν ὑποκριτὴν ὅ τι ἂν ὁ ποιητὴς | περιθῃ̃ πρόσωπον του̃το ἀγωνίζεσθαι καλω̃ς, οὑτω καὶ τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα ὅ τι ἄν περιθῃ̃ ἡ τύχη. ‘Just as the good actor must “play to win” in whatever role the dramatist assigns to him, so too must the good man play whatever role Fortune assigns to him.’; Teles fr. VI (p. 52 Hense) On Circumstances (περὶ περιστάσεων): Ἡ τύχη ὥσπερ ποιήτριά τις οὐ̃σα παντοδαπὰ ποιει ̃ πρόσωπα, | ναυαγου̃, πτωχου̃, φυγάδος, ἐνδόξου, ἀδόξου. δει ̃ οὐ̃ν τὸν ἀγαθὸν | ἄνδρα πα̃ν ὅ τι ἂν αὕτη περιθῃ̃ καλω̃ς ἀγωνίζεσθαι. ‘Fortune is like a lady-playwright who designs all sorts of parts— the shipwrecked man, the beggar, the exile, the man of high repute, the man of no repute! And the good man must play well every role which Fortune assigns to him.’ (Greek text: Fuentes González 1998).

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The Unity of Time in Menander Robert Germany

‘[Q]uestionless we are deprived of a great stock of wit in the loss of Menander.’ Thus Dryden in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, who goes on to lament the loss not only of Menander, but also of his ablest Roman adaptors. ‘ ’Tis probable that these, could they be recovered, would decide the controversy.’1 The controversy Dryden has in mind is the question of the necessity of the dramatic Unities. Thus, Menander emerges, for Dryden at least, as the missing linchpin for a full understanding not so much of the history of drama per se, as of the real aesthetic significance of the received rules of dramatic construction. Not only for Dryden, but for his contemporaries more generally, the infamously overapplied passage of Aristotle’s Poetics ̃ , 1449b12–13) was never (ὅτι μάλιστα πειρα̃ται ὑπὸ μίαν περίοδον ἡλίου εἰναι the sole source for thinking about the Unity of Time. Early modern critics were usually keenly interested in moving beyond Aristotle’s nonprescriptive observation to see how Greek and Roman dramatists constructed their plots to fit them into a single day, and they usually regarded the evident selfconsciousness of this practice as a feature, not a flaw, of ancient dramatic ars. So it is especially strange that modern scholarship has paid so little attention to the fact that almost all extant ancient plays do indeed conform to the Unity of Time, and it is hard to explain classicists’ reticence on this topic, unless perhaps they share in the pervasive late modern revulsion at the idea of such unnatural constraint placed on dramatic creativity.2 For classicizing poets and critics from the Italian Renaissance down through Dryden, however, the conventional single-day limit of the play’s erzählte Zeit was not felt to be a negative stumbling block for the ancient playwrights, but rather a positive hurdle against which they could prove their artistry.3 This is both a more historically appropriate and a more interesting way for classicists to approach this feature of ancient drama than regarding it as a quaint superstition or passing over it in embarrassed silence. This paper is not the place for a detailed exploration of the contour of the one-day limit in fifth-century drama, but a brief summary of its most salient features will be helpful for understanding its relevance to Menander. Early on the management of time was fairly loose. The plays of the Oresteia, for example, are quite lax in their shifting of scene and day, but the rest of the

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Aeschylean corpus is more regular in its observance of these Unities, as are, for the most part, the plays of Sophocles and Euripides.4 The trend over time thus seems to be towards greater strictness or awareness of the one-day limit. These tragedians manifestly did whatever they could to compress incident in order to force their plots into the compass of a single day, and when they found themselves unable to do even this, they did what they could to draw the audience’s attention away from the temporal rupture itself.5 The precise origin of this scruple in the plotting of tragedy is, of course, anyone’s guess, but as d’Aubignac and Lessing noted it must have something to do with the uninterrupted presence of the chorus in the orchestra.6 Modern playwrights wanting to indicate the passage of some arbitrarily long lapse of time generally empty the stage.7 When the actors then return to the stage, they usually announce fairly quickly how much time is supposed to have passed, and it may be anything from hours to years, for example in The Winter’s Tale.8 This convention may be traced back to the choral stasima of Greek tragedy, where the passage of time offstage tended to telescope somewhat, but as long as the chorus did not vacate the orchestra, there was never a totally empty play space, and because the chorus itself had a character role in the tragedy, it would have been a gross violation of verisimilitude to have too great a disparity between timescale of performance and story. Thus to portray, for example, a group of bacchants standing continuously before a palace where the few hours of Erzählzeit represent a full day of erzählte Zeit was acceptable, but if the story had stretched out over multiple days, the continuous presence of these remarkably unsleepy women would have been confusing at the very least. It is not too surprising, then, that the chorus would exert a kind of centripetal force on the timescale of the story, and more particularly given the differences in typical daytime and nighttime activities, that it would tend to fence the tragic plot into the compass of a single day. More surprising perhaps is how this limitation feeds so naturally into the aesthetic values of tragedy more broadly. In so many aspects of tragic poetics, one finds a drive for unity, particularly in comparison with comic practice.9 In diction, for instance, where Old Comedy enjoys a vast spectrum, tragedy generally keeps to a consistently elevated register. This is true as well for the themes that come up. In Aristophanic dialogue, characters are allowed to stray playfully off-topic, while in tragedy even the most rambling speech is comparatively chaste in its thematic range. As Evanthius notes (1.5), Homer seems to have laid the aesthetic groundwork for both theatrical genres when he fashioned the one epic poem ad instar tragoediae and the other ad imaginem comoediae. Obviously the plot of the Iliad does not fit into a single day nor its action into a single scene, but of its 51 days the vast bulk of story is focused in only five.10 There are flashbacks, of course, but they are few and short, and the place of action itself, though not as relentlessly confined as, say, Prometheus Bound, is extremely compact in comparison with that of the Odyssey.11

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The Unity of Time, as it develops in tragedy, seems to fit well with the broadly Iliadic contour of the genre, especially in contrast with the polutropos ranginess of comedy. But the sense of a tightly circumscribed time limit did not only contribute to the poetics of tragedy in this general and oblique way, it also suggested one of tragedy’s recurrent themes, namely the ephemerality of human life and the propensity of fortunes to change in a space no longer than a single day. So, for example, Tiresias tells Oedipus ‘This day (ἥδ᾽ ἡμέρα, 438) will give you both birth and destruction’ and in Ajax Athena makes the point more generally: ‘A day lays low and raises up again all things human’ (131–2). Medea needs only ‘this one day’ (μίαν με μειν̃ αι τήνδ᾽ ἔασον ἡμέραν, 340) to work her ill and make her play a tragedy. Even without Aristotle to point it out to them, fifth-century playwrights and audiences will have noticed the nearly universal observance of the one-day limit, so these internal references to the fateful day of tragedy must have a metatheatrical ring to them. A formal feature of the genre is experienced as a predictable boundary by the characters within their artificial world. The tragedians are not unconscious or passive victims of the Unity of Time.12 They are aware of the convention and able to use it as a springboard for remarking on the fragility, in a literal sense the ephemerality, of human happiness.13 Such observations about the importance of a single day, like the urgency of tragic plotting more generally, are a consequence of the conventional Unity of Time, not its cause. Plenty of modern drama, like the Iliad, achieves intensity with a story that, while relatively compact, still runs over several days. The Unity of Time amounts to a more rigorous limit than would be necessary simply for urgent storytelling. It makes far more sense to see the single-day limit as flowing naturally from the ever-present chorus. Once in place, this limit virtually forces an intense method of plotting that overlaps happily with the style of storytelling recognizable from the Iliad, and it suggests certain formulations about the kairos of a single fateful day. If the chorus is key to the genesis and ongoing dramaturgical motivation of the Unity of Time, Menander (and perhaps all New Comedy) presents us with a puzzle. The chorus is no longer the constant presence that it was, is not a role significant to the action, may even be missing entirely as it was in the Roman adaptations, and yet the Unity of Time is at least as consistent a feature of New Comedy as it was of fifth-century tragedy. Why exactly New Comedy embraced the Unity of Time, in spite of its freedom not to do so given the role of its chorus, we may never know. One of the consequences, however, of this narrative self-limitation was a patent affiliation to the storytelling mode of tragedy. New Comedy inherits the compactness and urgent energy of tragic plot structure, but because the Unity of Time is now completely liberated from any natural causality involving the chorus, its function is purely as an arbitrary marker of genre and a clear reminder of the artificiality of comedy’s world.14 So, for example, in Act I of Dyskolos, when Pyrrhias has told Sostratos and Chaireas about his rough reception at Knemon’s, Chaireas suggests that perhaps this is not the right day to approach him (125–134).

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[Χαι.] τυχὸν ἴσως ὀδυνώμενός τι νυ̃ν τετύχηκε· διόπερ ἀναβαλέσθαι μοι δοκει̃ αὐτῳ̃ προσελθει̃ν, Σώστρατ᾽· εὐ̃ του̃τ᾽ ἴσθ᾽ ὅτι πρὸς πάντα πράγματ᾽ ἐστὶ πρακτικώτερον εὐκαιρία. [Πυ.] νου̃ν ἔχετε. [Χαι.] ὑπέρπικρον δέ τι ἐστὶν πένης γεωργός, οὐχ οὑ̃τος μόνος, σχεδὸν δ᾽ ἅπαντες. ἀλλ᾽ ἕωθεν αὔριον ἐγὼ πρόσειμ᾽ αὐτῳ̃ μόνος, τὴν οἰκίαν ̃ . νυ̃ν δ᾽ ἀπελθὼν οἴκαδε ἐπείπερ οἰδα καὶ σὺ διάτριβε· του̃το δ᾽ ἕξει κατὰ τρόπον. [Chai.] Maybe he’s upset about something just now. I think we should put off our visit, Sostratos. Good timing, you know, is the secret to every undertaking. [Py.] Quite sensible. [Chai.] A poor farmer is a hot-tempered thing, Not just this one, but practically all of them. Tomorrow morning I’ll go see him alone. I know the house. For now the plan is go home, Yes, you too, and wait there. This’ll all turn out OK. Sostratos is furious with his friend for abandoning him, and critics have agreed that Chaireas demonstrates shallowness and self-interested cowardice.15 However, his assessment of Knemon’s character is exactly right, and if this were not a play constrained by the Unity of Time, his proposal to wait until tomorrow would be both naturalistic and prudent. As it is, however, his promise comes cheap, for even if Sostratos agreed, it could never be fulfilled.16 Tomorrow will never come; this day is the only one available for action. A few lines later Knemon himself comes out, storms around, and leaves, and Sostratos reflects that the situation, though quite as bad as described, may not be beyond the means of a comic plot to resolve (179–188). οὐ του̃ τυχόντος, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκει̃, πόνου τουτὶ τὸ πρα̃γμά ἀλλὰ συντονωτέρου. πρόδηλόν ἐστιν. ἀ̃ρ᾽ ἐγὼ πορεύσομαι ἐπὶ τὸν Γέταν τὸν του̃ πατρός; νὴ τοὺς θεοὺς ἔγωγ᾽· ἔχει διάπυρον καὶ πραγμάτων ἔμπειρός ἐστιν παντοδαπω̃ν· τὸ δύσκολον ̃ ἐγώ. τὸ του̃δ᾽ ἐκει̃νος < > ἀπώσετ᾽, οἰδ᾽ τὸ μὲν χρόνον γὰρ ἐμποει̃ν τῳ̃ πράγματι ἀποδοκιμάζω. πόλλ᾽ ἐν ἡμέρᾳ μίᾳ γένοιτ᾽ ἄν. ἀλλὰ τὴν θύραν πέπληχέ τις. It seems this affair needs more than the usual effort. It’s clearly a case for something more focused. Shall I go to father’s slave, Getas? By the gods, that’s it!

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Robert Germany He’s got fire in the belly and expertise in all kinds of things. He’ll drive the grouch right out of this guy, I’m sure of it. Losing time is out of the question in this undertaking. A lot can happen in one day. But someone’s rattled the door!

Already in the prologue Pan had identified Knemon as the dyskolos (7), and now it falls to Sostratos as first among mortals to make the metatheatrical connection between the old man’s character and the title of the play. The young lover’s decision to call on a clever slave for help is as formulaic in New Comedy as the observation of a creaking door announcing an entrance. Surrounded by these comic motifs, Sostratos’ comment on the reversals of a single day, sounds nothing like its tragic forebears, and the gnomic quality of this line neatly echoes Chaireas’ earlier praise of eukairia in his proposal to wait until tomorrow. Even in a comedy, though, the many things (πόλλ᾽, 187) that can happen in one day are not all fun and games, and by Act III poor Sostratos is reeling under the burden of his assumed role as hearty farmer. His labor in the fields, real enough in its backbreaking intensity, is also a performance for Knemon, who does not show up when Sostratos expects him. He recounts his conversation in the fields with Gorgias (538–541). “οὐ δοκει̃ μοι νυ̃ν,” ἔφη, “ἥξειν ἐκει̃νος, μειράκιον.” “τί οὐ̃ν,” ἐγὼ εὐθύς, “ποω̃μεν; αὔριον τηρήσομεν αὐτόν, τὸ δὲ νυ̃ν ἐω̃μεν;” ‘Man, I don’t think he’s coming,’ he said. ‘What do we do then?’ I said, ‘Look for him tomorrow? Pack it in for now?’ The frustration of his question is obvious, but the despairing irony can only be fully appreciated if we remember the Act I exchange with Chaireas. By tomorrow, this world will no longer exist; procrastination is ultimate defeat. Luckily, for Sostratos his performance as a hardworking farmer is not entirely lost. In this monologue he mentions the sun scorching him all that time (535), and in Act IV, after he has helped rescue Knemon and is being introduced as a suitor for his daughter, Knemon notices his sunburn and asks, ‘Is he a farmer?’ Gorgias replies, ‘Of course, yes sir, he’s no pampered slug, idling away the day (τὴν ἡμέραν, 755).’ It is precisely the day and the question whether Sostratos should devote it to idleness or activity that has been at issue all along. His attempt to trick Knemon into thinking him an industrious young man has resulted in a sunburn, a visible sign of daylight hours in the fields, but Gorgias interprets this superficial tan as indicative of a settled pattern of life and an austere agrarian character. One wonders

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whether Sostratos’ mask was altered in some way, with rouge perhaps, to indicate his flushed appearance.17 It certainly would not be necessary to do so; masked theater relies heavily on text and imagination for such changes. In any case, Sostratos’ sunburn is effectively brought into play as the mask of his assumed role. The color of his face does indeed indicate how he has spent the day, but not, as Gorgias would have it, how he spends the day more generally. The irony of this distinction is that Sostratos is a creature of a day, just like everyone else in the play, so how he spends today is essential to his character. The daughter is betrothed to Sostratos immediately and thus the day’s principal work is accomplished, but Sostratos has a trick up his sleeve that will expand the resolution’s scope beyond what we have been told to expect. When he presents the situation to his father, Kallippides, he throws in a surprise betrothal of his sister to Gorgias. Kallippides wants to draw the line at one financially unwise marriage, but Sostratos argues that wealth is unstable and passing, while generosity to friends is immortal. Kallippides agrees and he and Gorgias plight their troths and joyfully depart, leaving Sostratos alone to reflect (860–5). οὐδενὸς χρὴ πράγματος τὸν εὐ̃ φρονου̃νθ᾽ ὅλως ἀπογνω̃ναί ποτε. ἁλωτὰ γίνετ᾽ ἐπιμελείᾳ καὶ πόνῳ ἅπαντ᾽. ἐγὼ τούτου παράδειγμα νυ̃ν φέρω· ἐν ἡμέρᾳ μιᾳ̃ κατείργασμαι γάμον οὐδ᾽ ἂν εἱς̃ ποτ᾽ ᾤετ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ὅλως. A smart man need never entirely despair Of any undertaking. With care and work You can have it all. I’m living proof. In one day I’ve arranged a marriage Nobody would ever have expected. From Pan’s synopsis in the prologue and the first scene of Act I we have been prepared to see Sostratos’ betrothal to Knemon’s daughter as the great event towards which the plot is striving, but this second betrothal was not mentioned or even hinted at until Act V, so it is true that no human being would have looked for it. It is not surprising, in fact, that one great thing should happen in a day, especially when it has been looming on the horizon the whole time, but as Sostratos said in Act I ‘many things’ (πόλλ᾽, 187) could happen in a single day. In Sostratos’ argument with his father immediately preceding this final reflection on the compression of incident into one day, when he talks about the ephemerality of wealth (797–812), there is a gravitas and a high sententiousness suggestive of tragedy, and scholars have noted a similar passage in Euripides’ Phoenissae (555–[8]).18 This Euripidean text is also quoted

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and commented on by Demetrius of Phaleron (Plut. Mor. 104a), but even if we conclude that it had some currency in early Hellenistic culture, it may be wrong to assume that Sostratos’ consciousness of the Unity of Time, or even the topos of the surprising reversals of a day, is directly evocative of tragic discourse. More generally it would be a mistake to insist that every Menandrean reference to the single day of the play must be an instance of paratragedy.19 Where this theme shows up in Perikeiromene, however, the tragic color is obvious. The recognition scene between Pataikos and Glykera shows a decisive shift to tragic diction and versification and is littered with Euripidean phrases. As Körte remarked when he published this scene, it is as close as the comic genre will let Menander come to writing tragedy.20 [Πα.] πόλλ’ ἐστὶν ἔργ’ ἄπιστα, παιδίον, τύχης. ἡ μὲν τεκου̃σ’ ὑμα̃ς γὰρ ἐκλείπει βίον εὐθύς, μιᾳ̃ δ’ ἔμπροσθεν ἡμέρᾳ, τ ̣έ̣κ̣ν̣ο̣[ν— [Γλ.] τί γίνεται πόθ̣’; ὡς τρέμω τά̣λιν̣’ [ἐγώ. [Πα.] πένης ἐγενόμην βίον ἔχειν [εἰθισμένος. [Γλ.] ἐν ἡμέρᾳ; πω̃ς; ὠ̃ θεοί, δεινου̃ πό[τμου. (802–7) [Pa.] Many and beyond belief are the works of chance, my child. She who bore you died straightway, and only one day before, O daughter— [Gl.] Whatever happened? Ah, how I tremble! [Pa.] A pauper I became, though accustomed to wealth. [Gl.] In a day? How? O gods, what frightful fate! This passage is less directly relevant to the Unity of Time inasmuch as the single day at issue here is not the day of the Perikeiromene, but one in the distant backstory; but the thematic connection between the reversals of a single day and tragedy could hardly be clearer. And it is certainly true that Glykera will take this tragic path in reverse, from unmarriageable woman abused by her lover to a richly dowered bride all in one day. The best illustration of the tragic register of this motif in Menander is from the Aspis. The clever slave Daos authors an intrigue to fake the funeral of Chairestratos and trick Smikrines into believing his brother dead. Just like a tragic actor with his audience, Daos pretends he does not know Smikrines is watching him, and he launches into a lament on the bitterness of the human condition comprised almost entirely of tragic sententiae. Smikrines is not impressed so Daos must be his own adoring spectator, and he interrupts his tragic pastiche with exclamations like ‘another good one!’ (πάλιν εὐ̃ διαφόρως, 408) and ‘awesome!’ (ὑπέρευγε, 412). Eventually Daos acknowledges Smikrines’ presence, but this does not slow him down (416–419): “τί δ᾽ ἐστ᾽ ἄπιστον τω̃ν ἐν ἀνθρώποις κακω̃ν;” ὁ Καρκίνος φήσ’· “ἐν μιᾳ̃ γὰρ ἡμέρᾳ τὸν εὐτυχη̃ τίθησι δυστυχη̃ θεός.” εὐ̃ πάντα ταυ̃τα, Σμικρίνη.

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‘What, of all the ills among mankind, is not to be believed?’ That’s Karkinos. ‘In one day A god renders the blessèd man cursed.’ This is really good stuff, Smikrines. Throughout this scene Daos is quoting tragedies to lend grandeur to his performance and dupe Smikrines, but these lines are not just true to the paratragic color of his ruse, they are also quite apposite within Aspis, though not in a way Smikrines would understand.21 It is precisely the believability of Daos’ lie that is at stake. Smikrines imagines that the kakon which must somehow be believed is the impending death of Chairestratos, but the audience recognizes the comic trope of the heroic ‘badness’ of the clever slave. With deft ambiguity Daos hints at the almost unbelievable perversity of Smikrines’ determination to contract an unsuitable marriage out of sheer greed, but his own wicked trick is the real kakon, and Smikrines’ gullibility will prove the negative assertion: not even this kakon will be apiston. Likewise, Smikrines construes the happy man brought low in one day to be Chairestratos, but Aspis too, no less than the tragedy from which this line was plundered, is constrained by the Unity of Time, and of course it is Smikrines himself who will fall from powerful blocking figure to helpless loser in the single day of Aspis’ action. The only specimen of later comedy to run over to two days is Terence’s Heauton Timorumenos, which interposes a night between Acts II and III. Heauton Timorumenos is the exception that proves the rule, however, in a couple of ways. For one, as the prologue tells us, in this translation an argumentum simplex has been rendered duplex (6). If, as seems likely, this doubling of plot is Terence’s intervention, this gemination may include the doubled day of action, in which case the temporal rupture may not go back to the Menandrean original at all.22 For another, both before and after this temporal break, characters make pointed comments to indicate that night is approaching and then that morning has come, thus helping the audience over what was clearly felt to be an unusual and possibly confusing narrative move. So even if this feature of Heauton Timorumenos does go back to Menander’s version, the care with which it is handled shows as clearly as all the rest of Roman comedy and Greek New Comedy put together that the one-day limit was understood to be the norm. In the corpus of Menander’s plays only Epitrepontes has been suspected of having a similar silent night between Acts II and III. In a series of cordial but insistent publications over a decade and a half Sandbach and Arnott progressively refine arguments for and against a two-day timescale. Sandbach, in his commentary with Gomme, argues that the characters vacate the stage for lunch at the end of Act II and that when they reemerge in Act III, having just had lunch, we should understand it to be lunch the next day.23 His principal reason for this conjecture is that Onesimos has told Syros in Act II that he would show the ring to Charisios ‘tomorrow’ (αὔριον, 414), and then in Act III he says that he tried several times to screw up the courage to show his master the ring, but could not do so. Arnott has less confidence

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in Onesimos’ word than Sandbach does. Onesimos is talking to Syros after all, and his promise to show Charisios the ring ‘tomorrow’ is nothing more than a vague procrastination intended to put Syros off indefinitely. In two articles Arnott claims, contra Sandbach, that the Epitrepontes (1977) and Menander’s plays more generally (1979b) observe the Unity of Time. In a short note some years later, Sandbach (1986) attacks this reading of the Epitrepontes and insists on the 24-hour break between Acts II and III, at which point Arnott (1987) adduces other internal evidence and poses an answer that has been convincing to most scholars.24 I will not rehearse the arguments of Arnott 1987 here; I believe Epitrepontes, like the rest of extant Menander, conforms to the Unity of Time.25 However we may go beyond this observation and note that the play’s single day is not an inert limitation, but the regular temporal horizon for Menandrean plots and a predictable feature of the generic code, available for semiotic deployment within the play. Epitrepontes makes use of the Unity of Time. The successful characterization of Onesimos and Syros requires the audience to recognize the role played by the one-day limit in their contest of theatrical self-awareness. Syros had argued that the trinkets found with the baby should stay with the baby (i.e. pass to his own safekeeping) on the grounds that this is how it always happens in plays (320–345). βλέψον δὲ κἀκει̃, πάτερ· ἴσως ἔσθ’ οὑτοσὶ ὁ παι̃ς ὑπὲρ ἡμα̃ς καὶ τραφεὶς ἐν ἐργάταις ὑπερόψεται ταυ̃τ’, εἰς δὲ τὴν αὑτου̃ φύσιν ᾄξας ἐλεύθερόν τι τολμήσει πονει̃ν, θηρα̃ν λέοντας, ὅπλα βαστάζειν, τρέχειν ̃ ὅτι, ἐν ἀγω̃σι. τεθέασαι τραγῳδούς, οἰδ’ καὶ ταυ̃τα κατέχεις πάντα. Νηλέα τινὰ Πελίαν τ’ ἐκείνους εὑ̃ρε πρεσβύτης ἀνὴρ αἰπόλος, ἔχων οἵαν ἐγὼ νυ̃ν διφθέραν, ὡς δ’ ᾔσθετ’ αὐτοὺς ὄντας αὑτου̃ κρείττονας, λέγει τὸ πρα̃γμ’, ὡς εὑ̃ρεν, ὡς ἀνείλετο. ἔδωκε δ᾽ αὐτοι̃ς πηρίδιον γνωρισμάτων, ἐξ οὑ̃ μαθόντες πάντα τὰ καθ’ αὑτοὺς σαφω̃ς ἐγένοντο βασιλεις̃ οἱ τότ’ ὄντες αἰπόλοι. εἰ δ’ ἐκλαβὼν ἐκει̃να Δα̃ος ἀπέδοτο, αὐτὸς ἵνα κερδάνειε δραχμὰς δώδεκα, ἀγνω̃τες ἂν τὸν πάντα διετέλουν χρόνον οἱ τηλικου̃τοι καὶ τοιου̃τοι τῳ̃ γένει. οὐ δὴ καλω̃ς ἔχει τὸ μὲν σω̃μ’ ἐκτρέφειν ἐμὲ του̃το, τὴν [δὲ] του̃δε τη̃ς σωτηρίας ἐλπίδα λαβόντα Δα̃ον ἀφανίσαι, πάτερ. γαμω̃ν ἀδελφήν τις διὰ γνωρίσματα ἐπέσχε, μητέρ’ ἐντυχὼν ἐρρύσατο,

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ἔσωσ’ ἀδελφόν. ὄντ’ ἐπισφαλη̃ φύσει τὸν βίον ἁπάντων τῃ̃ προνοίᾳ δει̃, πάτερ, τηρει̃ν, πρὸ πολλου̃ ταυ̃θ’ ὁρω̃ντ’ ἐξ ὡ̃ν ἔνι. And look, sir, suppose this child is better than us, And though raised among workers he comes to despise this stuff. He’ll hew to his own nature and dare some doughty deed— Lion hunting, arms bearing, race running. You’ve seen tragedies, surely. You know the score. Some Neleus and Pelias of yore, found by an agèd goatherd Wearing a leather vest, just like the one I’ve got on now. When he realizes they’re his betters he tells the story: How he found them and picked them up. He gives them a bag with tokens of recognition, and then, Armed with the truth about their real identity, The erstwhile shepherds become kings. But if Daos had plundered the bag And sold its contents for a twelve drachma profit, These great men, so lofty of birth, Would have whiled away all their time in ignorance. It’s not right, sir, I should rear the child’s body, But Daos snatch and ruin his only hope of salvation. Tokens of recognition: because of them A man steered clear of marrying his sister, Another found and rescued his mother, A third his brother. Life, sir, everyone’s life, Is by nature precarious, and we must guard it with foresight, Watching far ahead for the means to ensure it. There is a fancy of theatricality in the rhetorical polish of this speech (improbable in a real coal-burner) and also in the tragic turn of diction (ᾄξας, ἐρρύσατο, etc.), but there is also a fairly clear gesture of metatheatricality.26 Sophocles must have told the story of Neleus and Pelias in his Tyro, as did Carcinus and Astydamas, and there may have been others.27 Whatever play or type of play Syros has in mind, he equates the fictional goatherd’s garment with his own and then, more boldly still, he hypothetically inserts Daos back into the other play. He does not say, ‘If someone like Daos had been there to nab the tokens. . .’ He says, ‘If Daos had nabbed the tokens. . .,’ implying that Daos himself is a dramatic fiction appearing in multiple plays, which of course he is. He starts with tragedy, but as several scholars have noted, we are not aware of any tragedy in which a man is prevented from incest with his sister by tokens of revelation.28 That is however just what happens in Menander’s Perikeiromene and Plautus’ Epidicus, so perhaps Syros is thinking of Menandrean comedy as well as tragedy.

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As usual in comedy the clever slave is the character who comes closest to recognizing that he is a creature of the theater.29 In the real world, surely, such coincidental revelations almost never happen, but Syros seems confident enough of their likelihood, and of course he is right, for his world does not follow the same rules as ours. Similarly when Syros insists on going to arbitration, the first man to come along is randomly appointed arbitrator, but he will turn out to be none other than the baby’s grandfather and the judgment will be to Syros’ advantage. Again, such coincidences rarely befall in the real world, but then after all Syros is one of the eponymous epitrepontes! In fact, he virtually got to name the play in line 219: ἐπιτρεπτέον τινί ἐστι περὶ τούτων. He has reason to hope that his experiences will occupy a charmed centrality in the play’s unfolding. Thus it is no surprise that Syros is the first to introduce the theme of ‘tomorrow,’ when he tells his wife that they will stick around here (ἐνθάδε, 378) for now (νυ̃ν) and set out for work again εἰς αὔριον. The spatial and temporal deixis points to the stage and its fiction, and this plan should keep Syros and his wife onsite for the rest of the action. Immediately, however, Onesimos comes onstage, recognizes the ring, and becomes the new Syros, making the same shrill claims of proper ownership as Syros had used only a few lines before, and using all the cleverness and theatrical self-awareness at his disposal to secure the token. Like Chaireas in the Dyskolos (see above, pp. 92–93 [108–9]), Onesimos tries procrastination by insisting that now is not the right time (νυνὶ . . . οὐκ ἔστιν εὔκαιρον, 412–413), but he promises to show his master the ring tomorrow (αὔριον δέ, 414). But unlike in the Dyskolos, this procrastination is a bid for control of the plot, spoken by one clever slave to another, who only 35 lines before had made his own announcement about ‘tomorrow’. Onesimos is effectively dislodging Syros from his position at the crest of fate’s wave and staking a claim on the role of clever slave who knows how theatrical conventions intersect with his reality and can manipulate this code to his advantage. Syros, for his part, hears in this promise of Charisios’ arbitration another tantalizing hint at the play’s title. Blinded by the chance to take center stage again as one of the epitrepontes, he agrees to wait until tomorrow: καταμενω̃, / αὔριον ὅτῳ βούλεσθ᾽ ἐπιτρέπειν ἑνὶ λόγῳ / ἕτοιμος (414–416). As Arnott has argued, we need not take Onesimos at his word and should not be surprised when he returns to the stage that during the act-break luncheon he has been trying to muster the courage to reveal the ring after all.30 His point in procrastinating was to get rid of Syros, but it was also to beat Syros at his game, precisely because he recognizes what Syros, in his zeal for the eponymous role, has evidently forgotten: that tomorrow will never come. Alas, however, the driver’s seat is not as easy as it looks, and Onesimos is no Pseudolus-like mastermind. Once the onus is on him to move the plot forward, all he can think of is how his earlier revelations to Charisios did not exactly work to his advantage. Blabbing about Pamphile’s untimely pregnancy and cover-up earned him resentment from Charisios,

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not gratitude. What if this ring just stirs things up again? Onesimos does not seem to realize that blabbing is his raison d’être. In the first scene of the play, he had spilled the beans to the cook about the delicate backstory of this family, thereby informing the audience too of much of what they would need to know to follow the play. Now at the beginning of Act III, while Onesimos is stewing over his predicament and praying for insight, Syros bursts onstage interrupting him in the middle of a line, saying he has been running around backstage looking for him. He demands that Onesimos give the ring back or show it to Charisios now. ‘Let’s get a judgment,’ he says, ‘I have to go’ (445). This change of plans is completely unexplained. Has some business just come up unexpectedly? That would account for his behavior, but he does not mention any new circumstance or offer any account for his volte-face. In fact, the alteration in his schedule seems as opaque as Onesimos’ reversals would be if we were not privy to Onesimos’ second thoughts. Perhaps we may infer that during the act break, while Onesimos was hesitating with Charisios, Syros was having second thoughts of his own about his agreement to put off to tomorrow what can only be done today. His insistence gives Onesimos the chance, once again, to tell the backstory, only this time with an internal audience, the hetaira Habrotonon, who has entered unnoticed and waits listening in the wings. Syros runs off for town but says he will be back to find out what must be done. Habrotonon now approaches Onesimos, relates what she remembers about the night of the rape, and admonishes him to tell his master about the baby. Onesimos just cannot do it and begs her for help, so she launches the scheme that will secure her own freedom, unite Charisios with his infant son, and reveal the identity of the baby’s mother.31 Habrotonon obviously surpasses both Syros and Onesimos in initiative and theatrical wits, and if these three goals sound like a lot to hope for, we can rest assured that it will be all in a day’s work for her. She will need the ring for her part, of course, and so, like a scepter of authority in an ascending tricolon of clever slaves, the ring now passes to her. She will pretend, for the moment, to be the rape victim and mother of the child in a ruse that she describes in terms strongly reminiscent of the theater.32 For example, she twice emphasizes how she will avoid messing up her part (διαμαρτει̃ν, 524, 527) by following his lead, like an improvisational player, and by sticking to the usual business (τὰ κοινά, 526). She even gives Onesimos a preview of the sweet nothings she will say: ‘You were so bad, so rough! . . . You just threw me down and spoiled my dress!’ (528–9). Onesimos, in turn, responds to this preview like a delighted theatrical audience: ὑπέρευγε (525) . . . εὐ̃γε (528) . . . Ἡράκλεις (532). Most interestingly, for our purposes, Habrotonon knows how to seize the day, specifically the fact that Charisios has just now been drinking at lunch (μεθύων γε νυ̃ν, 522) and will be buzzed enough to blurt out a confession when he thinks she is the mystery woman from his escapade. Habrotonon will not be waiting around until tomorrow but using the circumstances of today to her advantage, and in response to this judicious sensitivity to the

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kairos of the day, Onesimos cries out in response: ὑπέρευγε, νὴ τὸν Ἥλιον (‘Splendid! By the Sun!’ 525). Onesimos may have passed the torch to Habrotonon, but he has not had the last of his fun with the role of metatheatrically aware clever slave, nor more particularly with the Unity of Time. In the final act when Smikrines returns still thinking his daughter is estranged from Charisios, Onesimos gloats sarcastically over the old man’s ignorance. ‘By the gods and spirits!’ exclaims Smikrines in frustration. ‘Smikrines, do you think the gods have the time to give every man his share of good and ill every day (καθ᾽ ἡμέραν, 1085)?’ He goes on to explain that there must be some 30 million people in the civilized world. Do the gods live a life of unmanageable drudgery? No, they have instituted each man’s character (τρόπον, 1093) as a kind of personal guardian.33 If he avoids stupidity and error, he will thrive, otherwise his character will condemn him. When Onesimos finally gets around to explaining what happened between Charisios and Pamphile he quotes a line from Euripides’ Auge (1123–4), another play that turns on a rape at a nighttime festival resulting in a child whose father would be identified by a ring he left with the mother.34 Poor Smikrines must still look confused, because Onesimos calls him an idiot and offers to recite a whole tragic monologue from the Auge. The implication is that Smikrines’ slowness at recognizing the homology of Euripidean tragedy and Menandrean comedy is just the kind of stupidity that will render him his portion of ill for the day (καθ᾽ ἡμέραν). It would be an overgeneralization to say that the Unity of Time in Menander is always paired with tragedy, but the frequency of this collocation is striking. For Plautus and Terence, as for Jonson and Molière, the one-day limit was not only a fact of construction, but a recognized genre feature available for metatheatrical playfulness, and this mode of play may be traced back to Menander. However, whereas in these later playwrights the single day might make the comedy incidentally like tragedy, in its pacing for example, awareness of the genetic connection to tragedy seems to be lost. Acknowledgment of the Unity does not immediately evoke the tragic trope of the ephemerality of life and fortune as it so often does for Menander. In this regard, as in others, Menander stands between classical tragedy and later comedy. He adapts tragic features so successfully that he effectively naturalizes them and obscures their origins in another genre.35 Thus, when later poets follow suit, they feel themselves to be squarely within the norms of comedy as they have come to understand it. NOTES 1. Dryden 1961 [1668]:42. 2. The only studies devoted specifically to the Unity of Time in ancient drama are Felsch 1907 (Attic tragedy) and Polczyk 1909 (Greek New and Roman comedy). Recent narratological work on the handling of time in tragedy

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4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

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occasionally mentions the Unity of Time (e.g. Lloyd 2007:293) but only on the way to more general observations. A more helpful model can be found in Schwindt 1994 and Dunsch 2005, the former a sensitive treatment of the theme of the day in ancient drama, and the latter a study of temporal deixis specifying a day (heri, hodie, cras) in Greek New and Roman comedy. The terms erzählte Zeit and Erzählzeit, for the narrated time and the time taken by narration, respectively, come from Müller 1968. This dichotomy may be recognized as an aspect of the more general narratological binary, variously denominated as story vs. narrative, histoire vs. récit, фaбулa vs. cюжeт, but these more general ways of dichotomizing plot and telling involve other elements of organization, whereas Müller’s terms are explicitly temporal in their focus. Kamerbeek 1963:148. See, for example, Taplin’s (1977) astute comments on this feature of Agamemnon (290–4) and Eumenides (377–9). Aubignac 1927 [1657]:122: ‘Encore ne pouvons-nous pas oublier une raison particuliere aux Anciens, et qui est essentielle originairement à la Tragedie, sçavoir est que les Chœurs, dont ils se servoient, ne sortoient point regulierement du Theatre depuis qu’ils y estoient entrez; et je ne sçay pas avec quelle vray-semblance on eust pû persuader aux Spectateurs que des gens qu’on n’avoit point perdu de veuë, fussent demeurez vingt-quatre heures en méme lieu; ny comment on eust pû s’imaginer que dans la verité de l’action, ceux qu’ils representoient eussent passé tout ce temps sans satisfaire à mille besoins naturels non plus qu’eux.’ Lessing 1901 [1767]:153: ‘Da nämlich ihre Handlungen eine Menge Volks zum Zeugen haben mußten, und diese Menge immer die nämliche blieb, welche sich weder weiter von ihren Wohnungen entfernen, noch länger aus denselben wegbleiben konnte, als man gewöhnlichermaßen der bloßen Neugierde wegen zu thun pflegt: so konnten sie fast nicht anders, als den Ort auf einen und ebendenselben individuellen Platz, und die Zeit auf einen und ebendenselben Tag einschränken.’ This is also how Aeschylus signals the shift in time and place at Eum. 234, though of course he must empty not just the stage, but presumably the orchestra as well. The Winter’s Tale may be an extreme case, inasmuch as Time himself comes onstage at the beginning of act 4 to explain the 16-year gap and beg the audience’s pardon. On Shakespeare’s relationship to the Unity of Time, see Schanzer 1975. For a survey of the aesthetics of tragedy, see Heath 1987. Heath discusses unity in tragic plots on pp. 98–111, but his treatment of tragic ‘restraint’, in particular tragedy’s dignity vis-à-vis comedy is on pp. 33–35. If counted only from the council of the gods to the resolution with the families of the suitors, the Odyssey’s timescale is even shorter (41 days). See de Jong 2007:18–19. But given the prominent place of extended analepsis in the Odyssey, this minimal version of the fabula is a poor index of the poem’s relationship to time. On these differences between the epics, see Purves 2010:24–96. On the tragedians’ awareness of time and their thematic engagement with it, see de Romilly 1968:5 (et passim). Fränkel 1946 argues that ἐφήμερος in early Greek literature, as applied to the human condition, refers not to the shortness of our lives, but to the mutability of fate, which changes as easily as the day. I do not find his argument for this distinction entirely convincing. Surely, both brevity and instability are united here, both in Pindar (the primary focus of Fränkel’s argument) and even more clearly in tragedy.

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14. My understanding of the valence of tragic features in New Comedy is essentially opposite to that advanced by Hurst (1990), who argues that Menander incorporates motifs from tragedy in a spirit of agonistic irony, to show the superiority of comedy, which is closer to vraie vie. I do not read Menander as a programmatic partisan of comic verisimilitude against tragic artificiality, but if he were, surely his unmotivated adherence to the Unity of Time would count as evidence of his failure to capture ‘real life’. 15. Handley 1965:153: ‘Chaireas covers his retreat with a wise-sounding platitude, and a promise to see Knemon himself ‘first thing in the morning’ . . . the facile readiness to sum up the situation in his own interest is an apt sign of the shallowness of Chaireas’ own character.’ Arnott 1968:14: ‘he takes fright and makes a coward’s exit, postponing his help till the morrow.’ Goldberg 1980:76: ‘When Chaireas is sufficiently frightened to desert the cause, Sostratos recognizes his reasons for the excuse they are.’ 16. Blume 1998:80: ‘Man ahnt es schon, daß daraus nichts wird, weil ja Komödienhandlungen in der Regel innerhalb eines Tages an ihr Ziel gelangen.’ 17. Handley 1965:262. 18. Webster 1960:201; Handley 1965, 271. 19. In some cases, there is simply not enough context to support any argument. For example, Karchedonios 7–8: ἔργον ἐκ πολλου̃ χρόνου / ἄνοιαν ἡμέρᾳ μεταστη̃ναι μιᾳ̃; Men. fr. 630: θυγάτριον, ἡ νυ̃ν ἡμέρα δίδωσί μοι / ἢ δόξαν ἤτοι διαβολήν. 20. Gomme & Sandbach 1973: 519–520. For tragic anagnorisis in comedy more generally, see Hunter 1985:130–4. 21. Gutzwiller 2000:131–2. 22. Leo 1913:242n.; Haffter 1953:79–80; Lefèvre 1994:130–2. 23. Gomme & Sandbach 1973:325–6. 24. Hurst (1990:119) remarks in passing, ‘l’Arbitrage semble bien se dérouler en deux jours,’ but he does not argue the point or engage with the earlier debate. Blume (1998:111–112), by contrast, acknowledges the debate and, though he admits the evidence is not conclusive, takes up Sandbach’s twoday banner. He insists that the meal at the end of Act II is probably an evening symposium and that when Habrotonon escapes the advances of the amorous guests to return to the stage in line 430, it is most likely the following day. Her complaint in line 440 about not being touched by Charisios for three days would thus hint at the unusual passage of time in this comedy, and the busyness of Smikrines’ coming and going would also be mitigated by the assumption of two days. This is an appealing suggestion, but as Arnott pointed out (1987:23), the meal seems to have been specified as ἄριστον (F 3), not an evening symposium, and neither Habrotonon’s remark about three days of celibacy nor Smikrines’ back and forth are evidence of a second day of fabula. 25. There is one other testimony sometimes cited as evidence of a Menandrean play that may violate the Unity of Time: a papyrus fragment (PIFAO 337) from a catalogue of plays containing a badly mutilated hypothesis of which little more is readable than the words του̃το δυει̃ν ἡμερω̃ν χρόν[. See Boyaval 1970:5. Absent any context or even an identification of the play, this scrap is more intriguing than illuminating. Characters in comedy may make plans that span the coming days (renting hetairai, borrowing slaves, promising, predicting), and Roman comedy provides plentiful examples of expressions like hoc biduom (Ter. Eun. 190) or hoc triduom (Plaut. Curc. 208; Men. 376; Truc. 874) referring to such projections, planned but never represented in the play. 26. Gutzwiller 2000:111–112.

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27. Gomme & Sandbach 1973:315. 28. Gomme & Sandbach 1973:317; Arnott 1979:422–3. 29. Gutzwiller 2000:118: ‘Often in Menander it is slaves . . . who mediate between the fictional action and the reality of the play itself.’ 30. Arnott 1987:25. 31. On Habrotonon’s active resourcefulness, rooted in self-interest but leading also to a happy ending for others, see Traill 2008:225–8. 32. Gutzwiller 2000:121. 33. On τρόπος in Menandrean comedy, see Massioni 1998; Traill 2008:82–85. 34. Gomme & Sandbach 1973:382. 35. N.J. Lowe 1987:134: ‘The conventions and dramatic exploitation of space in New Comedy derive closely from the fifth-century tragic stage, but this is only true to a very limited extent of Menander’s use of timing.’ Since the temporal structure of later comedy is easy to trace back to this inheritance, Lowe argues that the conventional treatment of time in European comedy is a Menandrean and distinctly comic invention. I hope to have shown here that Menander’s debt to tragic codes is at least as important in the management of time as of space.

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Aspects of Recognition in Perikeiromene and Other Plays William D. Furley

INTRODUCTION Recognition of identity is a fundamental aspect of Menandrian drama, resulting in the unravelling of a knotty impasse in the play. In Epitrepontes, the gradual revelation that Charisios had in fact made his own future wife pregnant at the nocturnal Tauropolia festival solves the problem of their separation owing to her supposedly illegitimate baby. In Perikeiromene, the establishment of the parentage of Glykera and her brother Moschion paves the way to reconciliation and then marriage between the estranged Glykera and her lover Polemon. These recognitions are classic examples of Aristotelian anagnorisis, recognized in the Poetics as an important element in tragic drama, bringing about a reversal in the action.1 In Sophokles’ Elektra, for example, no less than in Euripides’ plays of ‘catastrophe survived’, recognition of identity is an important springboard to dramatic resolution. In Euripides IT, Iphigeneia’s letter serves to identify her to her captive brother Orestes, destined for the sacrificial altar, and the two can abscond.2 In the Ion, late recognition of Ion as Kreousa’s son saves the young man from death in the nick of time, allowing him to found the Ionian line. As Satyros says, and many have recognized, it seems that Menander was Euripides’ heir in the exploitation of this plot element of lost baby and identification in adulthood by way of salvation: Or the matter of reversals, [involving] rapes of girls, babies foisted on others, recognitions by rings and jewelry—these are the stock-intrade of New Comedy, which [things] Euripides had brought to perfection: ἢ τ ̣[ ὰ κ]α̣τὰ τὰς π̣[ερι]πετείας, β̣[ια]σμοὺς παρθ[έ]νων, ὑποβολὰς παιδίων, ἀναγνωρισμοὺς διά τε δακτυλίων καὶ διὰ δεραίων, ταυ̃τα γάρ ἐστι δήπου τὰ συνέχοντα τὴν νεωτέραν κωμωιδίαν, ἃ πρὸς ἄκρον ἤ̣γα[γ] εν Εὐριπίδης3 One might add that the line of inheritance passes through the theoretical intermediary of Aristotle. Menander, as we hear, was close to Theophrastos and his school and anagnorisis is only one of the devices which features large both in the Poetics and Menander’s plays.4 Not that Menander wrote

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his plays with Aristotle’s Poetics open beside him, I hasten to add. Rather, Menander’s affinity to tragedy in general and Euripides in particular makes the coincidence of such motifs hardly surprising. In a way, these recognitions seem clichéd. Peter Green is not the only critic who has accused Menander of repetitive, hardly distinguishable plots, in short, of second-rate drama.5 Some have even dared to suggest that his plays were perhaps better consigned to the sands of Lethe in Egypt. This impression is underscored, if anything, by the realization that surprise was hardly an element in the audience’s experience of New Comedy. Usually the prologue speaker had spelled out exactly what the perplexing situation is to begin with; all the play had to do was show the conundrum unravelling. Although the prologue of Epitrepontes is lost, there can be little doubt that it informed the audience about Charisios’ escapade at the Tauropolia festival and the fact that Pamphile’s baby was in fact his. While we writhe to see Charisios and Pamphile talking and acting at cross-purposes, the ancient audience could smirk inwardly because they knew the marital crisis was caused by a chimaera, and that recognition of this fact was only a matter of time. Stanley Ireland emphasizes the importance of this fundamental irony in the audience experience of Menander.6 Similarly, in Perikeiromene, we are informed in the prologue that Glykera and Moschion are twins, so that Polemon’s jealousy of Moschion as a putative rival for Glykera’s love is again chimerical.7 In Aspis, Tyche steps up in the delayed prologue to inform us that the soldier who has been taken for dead is in fact alive. What is in earnest for the characters in the play is seen by the audience to be based on a misconception. This might seem to be an aesthetic weakness of Menandrean drama. In fact, it has an advantage in that the audience is then distanced from the characters by superior knowledge. The vantage point allows them to view the antics of the characters critically, to see their folly; but this stance opens the spectator’s own life up to inspection: a distanced observer might easily see its folly. Thus, the inspection of folly and absurdity on Menander’s stage has the indirect effect of reflecting on real life. Aristophanes of Byzantium’s famous comment on Menander: ‘O Menander and Life: which of the pair of you has imitated the other?’ implies exactly this confusion of perspective.8 However, recognition does not end here. In this paper, I wish to show that this rather mechanical use of recognition as a hinge in the plot is, in fact, only a superficial concomitant of a deeper aspect of recognition in Menander, which is the playwright’s true purpose. Recognition in the literal sense of finding out a person’s identity is, if you like, a kind of metaphor for the true recognition in Menander, which concerns a person’s inner identity or character. Medea cries out to the chorus in Euripides’ Medea that people should not judge a person just by looking, that is, trusting their eyes’ visual impression: There is no justice in the eyes of people who, before they really get to know a person’s inner self (σπλάγχνον), hate them at sight, even without suffering any hurt from them.9 (219–221)

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Similarly in Hippolytos Theseus, on hearing of Hippolytos’ alleged rape of his wife, laments O dear, if only one had an external sign, some surefire proof of loved ones’ dispositions, who’s a real friend among them and who not. People should have two voices, one truthful and the other however might be, so that the voice uttering unjust things could be refuted by the just, and we would not be deceived. (925–931)10 The true recognition and revelation of drama, and in this I believe Menander was close to Euripides, lies in the exposure of true character through action. Thus in Epitrepontes, the overt recognition occurs when Habrotonon recognizes Pamphile as the mother, by Charisios, of the baby she is holding, but the deeper recognition occurs at the level of the underlying character of the main participants. Pamphile reveals, in her brave-hearted refusal to divorce Charisios when pressured by her father to do that, her true grit. Charisios, on the other hand, realizes in a striking soliloquy (908–926) that he has acted like a mean and pusillanimous fool, where before he had had a high opinion of his own righteousness. Charisios comes to recognize his shortcomings through recognition of his wife’s stalwart behaviour. The surface-level plot of mistaken identity is only the catalyst to the real drama of revealed character. This fundamental aspect of Menander’s drama applies not only to the plays of mistaken identity. In Dyskolos, we see how the comic frame serves to precipitate the recognition in Knemon (713–747) that his attitude to life has been fundamentally flawed. In Aspis, a variant on the theme of mistaken identity—Kleostratos is mistakenly taken for dead in action—throws the cat among the pigeons in his family back home such that each reveals his true character, in particular Smikrines, shown up as a Scrooge. In Samia, it is the mistaken parenthood of the baby that precipitates the crisis in Demeas’ mental world: the son he’d thought the world of appears to have cuckolded him. Demeas’ long soliloquy (206–282) after the (mistaken) discovery reveals his soul to the marrow, as it were. We may formulate the general rule, in my opinion, that Menander’s plots use recognition on an explicit and an implicit level. The frame of action is both vessel and model for the inner recognitions that give the plays depth.11 PERIKEIROMENE Let us turn to Perikeiromene to see how this works in more detail. On returning from campaign abroad, Polemon hears from his adjutant Sosias that his pallakē Glykera has been caught kissing another man. The scene is now found illustrated in a newly discovered wall mosaic in Antioch, published by Kathryn Gutzwiller and Ömer Çelik in AJA.12

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In a jealous rage, Polemon cuts off Glykera’s hair, no doubt to render her unattractive, and probably maltreats an heirloom piece of clothing in her possession, too.13 Glykera leaves him and seeks refuge in the house next door which is occupied by Myrrhine, her husband, who, in my opinion, is to be identified with Pataikos in the play,14 and their adopted son, Moschion, who was the young man seen kissing Glykera. As we know from the prologue, Polemon’s jealousy is, in an important sense, misguided, since Moschion is Glykera’s twin brother and she knows it. The recognition scene in Act IV, when it comes, has an interesting triangular shape, as, while Glykera talks with Pataikos and establishes gradually that he is her lost father, Moschion is eavesdropping on their conversation, and only shows himself when the facts are out and he has realized that (1) Glykera is his sister and (2) Pataikos is his father. If I am right that Pataikos is also Myrrhine’s husband, then Menander has achieved a nice irony: the man who only passes for Moschion’s father in the early stages of the play turns out really to be his father.15 Menander has duped the audience here, unless the prologue also spelled out this fact.

Metatexts of the Recognition Scene Pataikos recognizes a garment in Glykera’s possession that had belonged to his long-dead wife (758ff). He grills her on how she acquired it and, with Moschion listening, she explains how she was exposed as a baby together with her twin brother and the usual tokens. The conversation reads remarkably like a recognition scene in tragedy, with stichomythia, expressions of woe and regret and a suitable release of emotion when father and daughter embrace. Already the first editor of the Leipzig pages commented on the overtly tragic phrasing and colouring of the scene: The influence of tragedy [sc. on this scene] is not limited to single expressions, the half-verse from the Trojan Women [88], the ship image (810–811 cf. Euripides, Herakles 631–2), but is reflected particularly in the treatment of verses [sc. stichomythia] . . . From all this it emerges clearly that Menander, conscious of the fact that anagnorismos is a feature of tragedy, models the recognition scene as closely on tragic style as his artistic genre permits.16 An important tragic intertext for this scene in Perik., and the play as a whole, has passed relatively unnoticed. Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris also contains an important recognition scene between brother and sister and is also constructed around a triangular conversation.17 Iphigenia fetches the letter that she wished to send to Argos and hands it to Pylades. He reads it aloud and Orestes recognizes the sender as his sister. Instead of being sacrificed by her on Artemis’ altar, the two conceive a plan to escape from the clutches of the barbarian king Thoas. In Perikeiromene similarly Moschion

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discovers his identity through overhearing the conversation between Glykera and Pataikos. Brother and sister are reunited; we note, of course the important difference that in Menander the siblings are saved from the threat of incest, whilst in Euripides Orestes was due to be sacrificed by his sister. The tragic echoes extend from basic plot structure to details of the recognition. In IT Orestes proves his identity to Iphigenia by identifying motifs on a cloth which had been embroidered by Iphigenia as a girl (811–817); in Perikeiromene Pataikos has to pass a similar test by enumerating the embroidered motifs on a dress that had belonged to the deceased wife. On realizing who the girl in the temple is, Orestes exclaims που̃ ποτ᾿ ὄνθ᾿ ηὑρήμεθα; (777) matched closely by Moschion’s exclamation when he recognizes his sister που̃ πότ᾿ εἰμι γη̃ς; (793). This is not the place to consider once more the implications of tragic overtones in Menander. Much has been written on this subject, some of it by contributors to this volume.18 May it suffice to point out here that while Menander is undoubtedly playing on tragedy in this scene, the effect is not so much parody as contrapuntal.19 Glykera and Pataikos really tap into tragic emotions in their peripeteia from past calamity to present joy. Moschion, however, provides a comic element both in his asides, which do not observe tragic diction, and in his absurd situation: in a way he is the jilted lover, thwarted by the recognition that the girl he had his eyes on is his sister. He comments (774–8): ‘It’s not impossible, I suppose, that my mother exposed a baby daughter at the same time as me. If that’s the case, and she’s my sister, that puts me in a very awkward position’.20 When Glykera and Pataikos finally embrace in mutual acceptance of his paternity, Moschion says (if my reconstruction is right): ‘I won’t hide myself either. Why should you two be the only ones to hug each other?’21 Moschion’s absurdity derives from the volte-face from ardent (but misguided) lover to an extraneous third party at a family reunion.22 In a way, however, Moschion is in the same position as the audience of Menander’s comedy: he witnesses, and comments to himself, on the recognition scene, experiencing reciprocally the emotions that Pataikos and Glykera generate. The absurdity of Menander’s plot, involving as it does the misdirected ardour of a brother for his sister, is underlined by Moschion’s exposure in this scene as a fool. Through the distancing effect of witnessing Glykera’s happy recognition through the eyes of a third party, Menander succeeds in uniting the serious and the comic. It is a characteristic aesthetic effect of his comedy: he steers hard by tragedy while introducing touches of the ridiculous at various points.23

Inner recognitions However, as I said, the overt recognitions of a Menander play are only the gearwheels, as it were, of the main motor that powers the play. In Perikeiromene, attention is focussed on two characters in particular, Polemon and Glykera. It is the breach and reconciliation in their relationship that stands in

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the foreground, with Moschion’s antics on the sidelines as an amusing sideshow. The main inner recognition in the sense I have outlined concerns Polemon’s personality. One might think that a homecoming mercenary soldier (he is a chiliarchos, commanding officer of a thousand) would fit the type of the uncouth military man, a braggart and a lout.24 Glykera’s maid Doris points to this stereotype when she says that it is an unfortunate woman who marries a soldier: ‘they’re all ruffians, and unpredictable’. Polemon’s behaviour in act one seems to bear out the stereotype. On hearing about the kiss, he reacts violently, chopping off her hair, possibly with his sword, earning him the description of σφόδρος in the prologue, ‘passionate’ or ‘violent’ (128). Having set up this expectation, however, Menander undermines it completely in the sequel, producing a clear effect of inner recognition. The reversal begins when his adjutant Sosias arrives, announcing that his ‘valiant master, he who does not let women keep their hair on’, has now taken to his bed, in tears, while his friends try to cheer him up with a meal (and wine) (lines 172–7).25 When we finally encounter Polemon in Act III, it is in revealing, almost therapeutic, conversation with Pataikos. Polemon had wished to storm Myrrhine’s house in the company of Sosias and a motley band of ‘mercenaries’ to take Glykera back by force. This is the typical ‘braggart soldier’ pose, which the following conversation serves to deflate. First Pataikos sends off Sosias with his troops, and then he points out diplomatically that what Polemon is attempting is unethical. Glykera is not in fact his wife, so he cannot dispose over her. ‘But I took her for my wife!’ Polemon expostulates. ‘Keep calm’ Pataikos says. ‘Who gave her to you?’ ‘She did herself!’ ‘Fine. You pleased her then, no doubt. But now no longer. She has left you because you treated her improperly.’ ‘What? ’ Polemon cries. ‘Not treated her properly? That’s the most hurtful thing you’ve said to me!’ ‘You love her, I realize that,’ Pataikos says soothingly. ‘So what you’re attempting now is crazy. Where’s it heading? Who will you abduct? She’s her own mistress. Your only option is persuasion. You’re unhappy in your love.’26 Pataikos persuades Polemon through this gentle but firm elenxis that he has no legal claim on Glykera nor grounds for prosecuting Moschion (whom he takes for the seducer).27 Faced with his loss, Polemon concedes, with heart-rending chiasmus: ‘I don’t know what to say, by Demeter, except I’ll hang myself. Glykera has left me. Left me, Pataikos, has Glykera!’ (Γλυκέρα με καταλέλοιπε, καταλέλοιπέ με / Γλυκέρα, Πάταικ᾿ 506–7). Having admitted defeat, Polemon clutches at the last straw available: Pataikos has always been on friendly terms with Glykera. Now he should put in a good word with her on his behalf. ‘Be my ambassador, I beg you’, he implores. Menander finishes the scene with a masterly touch revealing the abject state of Polemon’s mind. He implores Pataikos to look at all the finery he had given Glykera. Not only had he been a generous lover, he wishes the other to see, he wants Pataikos to see Glykera through his eyes, how lovely she looked in the clothes he gave her. This is all that remains for Polemon: an image of Glykera’s beauty, to which he clings in his memory.28

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Glykera, on the other hand, in her ensuing conversation with Pataikos, is shown coolly protecting her own interests. She persuades Pataikos to fetch her valuables from Polemon’s house—this triggers the recognition that we have examined. When Pataikos suggests she should consider all aspects of separation from Polemon,29 she retorts: ‘I know what’s in my own best interest’ (749 ἐγὠ̃ιδα τἄμ᾿ ἄριστα). Glykera’s self-possession is the foil to Polemon’s despair. The crisis in their relations, brought about by a failure of perception—the Agnoia personified in the prologue—serves to expose the inner Polemon behind the military facade. He is the victim of his own impulsiveness and passion; after the domestic violence, Glykera is in the driver’s seat, placing herself at an unreachable distance and forcing him to rue his behaviour. Agnoia, as she herself says in the prologue, has set the ball rolling in such a way that the players ‘will discover their own’: ἵνα . . . τούς θ᾿ αὑτω̃ν ποτε εὕροιεν (166–7). On the surface, this means that Glykera and Moschion will discover each other and Pataikos as their father; but the underlying meaning of the play is that Polemon and Glykera will discover themselves, what they mean to each other, and will be reconciled on a firmer footing than before at the close. The real recognition that occurs is emotional and ethical. Polemon discovers himself, sees the error of his ways and promises to reform; Glykera discovers her origin and accepts Polemon’s reformed suit. It is a conclusion anticipated by R.A. Browne in a little known paper of 1943: ‘Thus it will be seen that the resemblance in structure between the Alcestis and the Perikeiromene is very close indeed. The formal or practical climax which will lead to the dénouement precedes the psychological or emotional climax which is also vitally necessary for the smoothing out of the situation. We have before us two masterpieces, respectively, of the tragi-comedy and the comédie larmoyante. The genesis of the latter has now become clearer’(1943, 169). In her analysis of conventional anagnorisis in Menander, Dana Munteanu concludes: ‘Aristotle’s literary theory provides the lens through which Menander discusses the composition of his comedy and contrasts it with the Greek dramatic tradition’ (2002:126). Indeed, Menander makes conscious references to what we might call the theory of recognition: in Epitrepontes he uses the word ἀναγνωρισμός to describe the culminating recognition between Charisios and Pamphile.30 The word γνωρίσματα, denoting the tokens by which recognition is effected, is used repeatedly, where Aristotle uses more general σημει̃α to include all possible ‘signs’. γνώριμον is used regularly to describe the intellectual process of deducing from evidence. Once Menander uses technical γνωρίζομαι in a line from an unknown play: ἀνδρὸς χαρακτὴρ ἐκ λόγου γνωρίζεται,31 a sentiment that points in the direction of my main thesis here. Fr. 181 shows Menander contemplating the two sides of recognition I have been discussing: the importance of recognizing oneself,

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as the Delphic motto advised, and recognizing others [for what they are].32 Menander’s intellectual affiliation with members of the Peripatos such as Theophrastos and Demetrios of Phaleron is relatively securely attested.33 His is indeed an intellectualizing comedy, yet one that teases philosophers as much as it nods to contemporary philosophical theory. The locus classicus is Charisios in Epitrepontes, who admits in his confessional speech that he thought himself a fine fellow, only to discover that he is a louse compared to his brave-hearted wife. Konrad Gaiser argued that Charisios exemplifies the hypocrisy of the cold-hearted philosopher.34 It was an age when Athens was forced to look in on itself and consider how fallen it was from greatness. Pressure from stronger military powers turned some to doomed resistance, some to collusion with the external powers and some, no doubt, to silent resentment. I have been arguing here that the main interest of Menander’s plays is the revelation of character under pressure. His plays are frequently constructed around superficial anagnorisis but their deeper interest lies in the exploration of character beneath the surface. In this sense, the main recognition often occurs within a character himself, when he or she plunges, like Knemon down the well, into the depths of their own selves and comes out more or less edified. This self-examination and self-exposure, shown in characters such as Polemon, Thrasonides, Knemon and Charisios, may represent a kind of forced introspection in which theatre mirrors what had happened to Athens itself. NOTES 1. 1452a29-b8; 1454b19–1455a21. See Halliwell 1986; Cave 1988; Munteanu 2002. 2. Eur. IT 725ff. 3. POxy 1176 fr. 39 col. 7 lines 6–22. See Schorn 2004:259–262, with note 492 with further literature. 4. Menander was a ‘pupil’ of Theophrastos: D.L. 5.37; Menander was a friend of Demetrios of Phaleron and only narrowly escaped with his life when the other was deposed: id. 5.79. Among many works on Menander and the Peripatos note especially Barigazzi 1965, a strong position defended, with modifications, by Casanova in this volume; Wehrli 1970; Gaiser 1967; Jaekel 1984; Steinmetz 1960. 5. Green 1990:65–79 refers to Menander’s ‘relentlessly low-key colloquial dialogue, recreating . . . the platitudinous exchanges of day-to-day life.’ He quotes William Tarn’s verdict (1952) approvingly: ‘about the dreariest desert in literature’. He does allow: ‘But what Menander himself mirrors for us, with deadly accuracy, is something at once less uplifting and more familiar: the flawed, self-seeking nature of our own common humanity.’ (79) And on the anecdote in Plutarch Mor. 347e: ‘That, alas—formula dressed out in platitude—is just how his work reads’. 6. Ireland 2010a:5–6 and 211. 7. As a matter of interest, in this latter play, part of the prologue is missing so we do not know whether the audience was told about Pataikos’ fatherhood of the twins.

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8. Syrian. comment. in Hermog. II 23 Rabe = Men. test. 83 K-A: ὠ̃ Μένανδρε καὶ βίε, πότερος ἄρ᾿ ὑμω̃ν πότερον ἀπεμιμήσατο; Cf. Halliwell 2007:213: ‘Menandrian comedy . . . permits its audience no automatic outlet for laughter but something more like an appreciation of the unstable, unpredictable relevance of laughter to a social world destabilised by strange intersections of knowledge and ignorance, purpose and chance, deception and self-deception. To achieve maximum satisfaction from the spectacle of such a world, Menander’s audience is encouraged to adopt shifting perspectives—both “internal” and “external”—on the agents of the plays, thereby alternating between close sympathy for (some of) their concerns and a more knowing, ‘godlike’ overview of the total pattern made by the lives of the characters.’ 9. δίκη γὰρ οὐκ ἔνεστ’ ἐν ὀφθαλμοις̃ βροτω̃ν, / ὅστις πρὶν ἀνδρὸς σπλάγχνον ἐκμαθει̃ν σαφω̃ς / στυγει ̃ δεδορκώς, οὐδὲν ἠδικημένος. 10. φευ̃, χρη̃ν βροτοισ̃ ι τω̃ν φίλων τεκμήριον / σαφές τι κει̃σθαι καὶ διάγνωσιν φρενω̃ν,/ ὅστις τ’ ἀληθής ἐστιν ὅς τε μὴ φίλος,/ δισσάς τε φωνὰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἔχειν,/ τὴν μὲν δικαίαν τὴν δ’ ὅπως ἐτύγχανεν,/ ὡς ἡ φρονου̃σα τἄδικ’ ἐξηλέγχετο / πρὸς τη̃ς δικαίας, κοὐκ ἂν ἠπατώμεθα. 11. Cf. Browne 1943:169, and below. 12. Gutzwiller & Çelik 2012. 13. Ancient allusions to this maltreatment show that it was universally taken as the expression of Polemon’s jealous (ζηλότυπος) rage: Agathias in AP 5.218; Lucian, Dial. mer. 8.1; Tibullus 1.10; Polemon himself in Perik. 987. Modern commentators have investigated other possible implications of the act: that cutting the hair was a conventional punishment for adulterers; that a short hair-cut was typical of female slaves in vase-painting, hence that Glykera’s haircut reduced her to slave status; even that the haircut may connote marriage (at the end of the play), as there is evidence that a haircut was a prenuptial rite. For this last hypothesis see May 2005. For discussion of the question see Traill 2008:147, who also cites a good parallel from a description of slave life in the Southern states of America: ‘When Harriet Jacobs’ master and frustrated lover cut off her hair, she understood that he meant to humiliate her and remind her of his authority.’ See Jacobs [1861] 2000:86. 14. For discussion of the question, see Gomme & Sandbach 1973:501–2. 15. As Kichesias in Sikyonioi turns out really to be Kichesias, father of Philoumene, after Theron has tried to persuade him by a bribe to play the part of the girl’s father (thanks to Alan Sommerstein for the reference). 16. See Körte 1908:169–170; see further Goldberg 1980; Gomme & Sandbach 1973:519–520; Cusset 2003:188–200, with detailed metrical analysis, and further literature in n. 119; Hunter 1985:134; id. in Fantuzzi & Hunter 2004:428. 17. Cusset 2003:195–6, on the other hand, sees a close parallel in the Ion, although he acknowledges the pertinence of IT. 18. See W.D. Furley 2009:2–8, with further references; Cusset 2003; Petrides 2010:100–5. 19. See Hunter 1985:134: ‘This scene is a particularly good example of how a dramatist can demand a complex response from the audience: we are amused and concerned at the same time.’ 20. 774–8: [οὐ τω̃ν] ἀδυνάτων ἐστί, τουτί μοι δοκει̃ / [σκοπου̃ν]τ̣ι̣ , τὴν ἐμὴν τεκου̃σαν μητέρα / συνεκτεθ]ε̣ ̣ι̃σθαι θυγατέρ’ αὑτη̃ι γενομένην· / εἰ δὲ γεγένητ] α̣ ι̣ του̃τ’, ἀδελφὴ δ’ ἔστ’ ἐμὴ / [αὕτη, κακω̃ς] δ̣ ̣ιά̣κ̣ειμ᾿ ὁ δυστυχὴς ἐγώ. For text and readings, see my forthcoming edition of the play. I included explanations of the new supplements in my talk at the conference. 21. 824–5 μ̣ηδ᾿ ἐγὼ / λ̣[άθω·] τί προσέχεσθ᾿ ἐμ̣φν̣̣ [όμ]ε̣νο[ι δὴ μόνοις; supplements W.D. Furley (forthcoming).

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22. Cf. Goldberg 1980. 23. Cf. Halliwell 2007:203 (in which Perikeiromene is the main focus of attention): ‘Broadly speaking, [Menander] shapes each work so as to enable full-blooded absurdity to suffuse the fabric of the plot (while still remaining hidden from some of those involved) in at least one substantial block of action’ . . . ‘But if such stretches of action, marked by acute asymmetries between the knowledge or intentions of different characters, provide audiences with opportunities to enjoy the eruption of unrestrained laughter, they do so in part precisely because of what they gain from their juxtaposition with sharply contrasting dramatic material’. In addition, on p. 204: ‘Much of Menander’s subtlety hinges on the mobile ways in which he allows “external” perspectives (audience’s view), whereby spectators watch events like independent witnesses, to converge with and diverge from those of the agents themselves. . . . The intricacy of this process is enriched by the obvious fact that character-centred perspectives are themselves multiple, not only because attached to different characters but also because the same characters can be seen from both the dramatic “inside” especially through monologue, and the dramatic “outside” through others’ observations of them.’ 24. This is indeed the type of his namesake in Lucian’s sketch Dial.meretr.9. 25. For the counter-to-expectation characterization of Polemon cf. Goldberg 1980: 44–58; MacCary 1972:282–5; P. Brown 2004; Zagagi 1994:29–31; for the ēthos of Polemon in a philosophical context see Fortenbaugh 1974. 26. On this passage cf. Traill 2001a. For an interesting analysis of a therapeutic conversation in Euripides’ Ba. between Kadmos and Agave see Devereux 1970. 27. For the legal status of Polemon’s attempt to regain Glykera see Traill 2001a; for a response to Traill’s position see Gaertner forthcoming. For Glykera’s social and legal position as Polemon’s pallakē see Sommerstein, this volume. 28. Traill 2008:45: ‘He (sc. Polemon) leaves the stage lost in remembrance of the days when she was entirely his, an image he intends to recreate with the help of the clothing she left behind.’ 29. 748–49 ἀλλ᾿ ὑπὲρ πάντων [ἐ]χρη̃ν / ὁρα̃ν σε—meaning, I presume, the benefits that accrue from staying with Polemon. 30. Line 1121, with my note (2009). 31. Monost. 27 Jaekel. 32. κατὰ πόλλ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἐστὶν οὐ καλω̃ς εἰρημένον / τὸ γνω̃θι σαυτόν· χρησιμώτερον γὰρ ἠ̃ν / τὸ γνω̃θι τοὺς ἄλλους. 33. See above n.4. 34. Gaiser 1967. Likewise in Epitrepontes we have the ‘philosophizing slave’ in Onesimos, lines 1087–99.

9

Failing Communication in Menander and Others Gunther Martin

The past 35 years of performance studies have been tremendously successful in showcasing the role that physical action has in Greek drama. However, already 15 years before Taplin’s Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Austin’s How to do things with words had made the case that speech is equally to be regarded as ‘action’. Recent years have seen a rising interest in the performative aspect of the language of ancient drama. When, in Samia, Demeas shows Chrysis the door (369–371), the ‘action’ lies in his commands: Δη. οὔκουν ἀκούεις; ἄπιθι. Χρ. ποι̃ γη̃ς, ὠ̃ τάλαν; Δη. ἐς κόρακας ἤδη. Χρ. δύσμορος. Δη. ναί, δύσμορος. ἐλεινὸν ἀμέλει τὸ δάκρυον.

(370)

De. Then don’t you hear? Be off! Chr. Where to? Oh dear! De. To hell— right now! Chr. Poor me! De. Oh yes—poor you! (aside) Yes, tears that stir compassion.1 Whatever else Demeas is doing—gestures, pushing,2 even whether he shouts his order—can only support what the words ‘do’, however dramaturgically effective it may be. In addition to the simple action that lies in the command, the way the exchange is conducted conveys much more; for example, Demeas’ excessive harshness: he himself seems to regret it instantly; the aside reveals that the brutality of the sarcastic pun ἐς κόρακας does not correspond to his true feelings but is a façade to protect the revelation of his own scruples. For such an analysis, the study of comic language has to go beyond semantics and grammar to focus on conversation and interaction.3 Pragmatics can be used to map the techniques that are used in the genre in general, but it also allows comparisons between different authors. A study of comic conversation must be a major undertaking, and the following considerations can deal only with a very limited aspect. I shall restrict myself to a small body of examples that shows the boundaries of successful conversation, namely where conversation falters (at least temporarily), with

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a particular focus on misunderstandings. I shall try to illustrate different categories of failure in Menander and to what extent they are paralleled in the works of other comic writers. Failing communication is an essential constituent in many ‘comic’ sequences, but it is not in itself sufficient to explain the effect. Therefore, I shall not specifically consider humour and shall instead focus on the causes of failure.4 The classic rules for functioning communication are Grice’s maxims of conversation, which set out the requirements for comprehensible utterances. Grice’s idea is that the ‘sender’ has to meet specific criteria if he wishes to ensure that the message he conveys reaches his recipients. The ‘cooperative principle’ runs: ‘Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.’5 Grice explains this rule in its most general form in four maxims, which I shall deal with in the following order: quantity (they must be as informative as, and no more informative than, required), quality (utterances must be truthful and provable), manner (they must be brief and orderly, neither obscure nor ambiguous) and relation (they must be relevant). Where any of these principles is not observed, the utterance has a flaw. Grice gives norms for the creation of utterances; he thus focuses on the ‘sender’ and individual utterances. Conversation is dissected into a sequence of turns, which are regarded separately; the conversational context (the alternating structure in which the response reveals the success of the utterance) does not matter for the principles. The second participant of a dialogue is not considered as an autonomous individual who brings specific properties to the conversation (e.g. knowledge, predispositions). This point of view entails some problems for the approach that is used here: I shall look at conversation from the interpersonal perspective, not from the point of view of either participant, to find out what the problem is between the two. The individuality of the interlocutors, which Grice leaves out of account, however, is the starting point for a great variety of causes that make conversations fail. For this reason, it will be necessary to supplement Grice’s system and to look at each interlocutor’s underlying assumptions, regarding both the utterance as such and the outside world it relates to. In this way, a speaker no longer needs to actively flout Grice’s principles to make the conversation fail: the failure can arise because what meets the requirements subjectively for the speaker breaches the rules for the other conversational partner, who is basing his interpretation on different assumptions.6 The communication is then flawed because compliance with Grice’s rules is relative and judged subjectively by each interlocutor. So if the recipient of an utterance does not share the same assumptions as the sender about some element of the message (which need not be a part of the sequence of words: cf. below), the result will be some complication: if the speakers have different ideas about the truth value of a statement (the

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principle of quality), the result is disagreement; in the case of flaws in the other Gricean categories, the result may be a misunderstanding or incomprehension: if one person says more than is necessary for the other, the intended message may be obscured;7 that is definitely the case if the utterance seems insufficient for the recipient. Misunderstanding (including a complete lack of understanding) is also the case if the relevance of an utterance in the course of a conversation is not clear to the recipient and if a message seems clear, orderly and unambiguous to the sender but is not so for the recipient. QUANTITY A lack of quantity is present in the countless examples where character A, for lack of precise information, does not understand who or what character B is referring to. For example, the following extract (Epitr. 391–3): Ον. ἐπί]δειξον. Συ. ἤν. σὺ δ’ εἰ ̃ τίς; Ον. οὑ̃τός ἐστι. Συ. τίς; Ον. ὁ δακτύλιος. Συ. ὁ ποι̃ος; οὐ γὰρ μανθάνω. Ον. του̃ δεσπότου τοὐμου̃ Χαρισίου. Συ. χολα̃ις. On. Let me see! Sy. There. Who are you? On. It’s it! Sy. It’s what? On. The ring! Sy. Which ring? I don’t know what you mean! On. Charisios’, my master’s! Sy. You are mad. Onesimos’ brief comments are incomprehensible to anyone except himself, because the references are underdetermined. The referent of both οὑ̃τος and of the specifying article ὁ (δακτύλιος) are impossible to gauge for Syriskos, and any other person would have to ask the same questions. With line 393, the situation changes and the problem is solved; Syriskos’ last reaction is no longer confusion caused by a lack of information. Instead the two now disagree, because Syriskos does not believe that the ring is Charisios’; thus it belongs to the next category. QUALITY Lies as such will not be further considered in this paper. They undoubtedly change the character of a conversation and are ‘uncooperative’ in Grice’s sense, but they do not themselves impede communication, at least as long as they remain undiscovered (i.e. as long as the recipient does not assume that he is hearing a lie). Any lie will do for the purpose of illustration, and comic intrigues supply plenty of examples. In Menander, the most extensive one is Daos telling Smikrines that Chairestratos is dying (Aspis 399–423). The number of such lies will be multiplied in Roman comedy, where the plotting slave is a common character.

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However, flouting Grice’s principle, i.e. not telling the truth, does not always mean telling a lie—and untruths are not necessarily followed by a breakdown in communication, as in Plaut. MG 11–20: Art. Mars haud ausit dicere neque aequiperare suas virtutes ad tuas. Pyr. quemne ego servavi in campis Curculioniis, ubi Bumbomachides Clytomestoridysarchides erat imperator summus, Neptuni nepos? Art. memini. nempe illum dicis cum armis aureis, cuius tu legiones difflavisti spiritu . . . Art. Mars wouldn’t dare to call himself such a warrior or compare his exploits to yours. Pyr. After all, I saved him in the Curculionian Fields, where Bumbomachides Clytomestoridysarchides, Neptune’s grandson, was commander in chief. Art. I remember. You mean the one with the golden armour of course, whose legions you scattered with a breath . . . The exploits that Artotrogus mentions never took place, but agreeing that they did is the only way to keep the conversation going. In fact, he does not exchange information with Pyrgopolynices but obliges his request for flattery. Pyrgopolynices does not see the irony in Artotrogus’ words, but both sides accomplish what they aim for: the former sees his bragging confirmed; the latter wants to secure his next meal by flattery.8 On the level of underlying assumptions, different views about the truth value of a statement need not mean an end to the conversation, either. In the example from Epitrepontes quoted above, Syriskos’ χολα̃ις signals disagreement, but the communication does not fail—as long as both sides are aware of each other’s opinion. Where the conversation does reach breaking point (e.g. Men. Aspis 85–90, Plaut. Amph. 755–780), not much can be gained: since a statement’s truth value is binary, i.e. there is nothing in between true and false, there can be different degrees of confidence in the truth of a statement (from doubts to conviction), but no great variation in how communication fails on this ground. MANNER This category is a mixed bag, ranging from unclear elocution or vocabulary to puns and ambiguity that can only be explained on the level of pragmatics. A variety that does not seem to be exploited by Menander and only exceptionally in Roman comedy is incomprehensible pronunciation, something Old Comedy sometimes toys with when barbarians are on stage (Ar. Birds 1628–9):9

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Gunther Martin Ηρ. ὁ Τριβαλλός, οἰμώζειν δοκει̃ σοι; Τρ. σαὺ νάκα βακτα̃ρι κρου̃σα. Ηρ. φησί μ’ εὐ̃ λέγειν πάνυ. Her. Hey, Triballian, do you want a whopping? Tri. Yo basha hide wit steek? Her. He says I’m quite right.10

The only time linguistic variation based on origin shows in extant Menander is the Dorian ‘doctor’ in Aspis (431–464); but while Smikrines may have problems with his medical terminology (which would be an example of obscurity),11 there does not seem to be anything in his dialect that prevents understanding. Misunderstanding as a result of inarticulate elocution (for example by a mumbling speaker) seems to be completely absent;12 where characters have problems understanding what is being said, it is because it is an aside and the speaker is not trying to communicate (e.g. Sam. 545, Ter. Andr. 593). Most types of problem in comic conversation arise from ambiguity, and the comic writers go to great lengths to give variety to them. The simplest type is that of a single ambiguous word. Within the strict framework of Grice’s maxims, that normally means puns, and one may think of the countless double entendres in Aristophanes. On the level of conversation, where the context that determines the intended meaning is normally clear, the matter is more intricate: the word in question does not just have to have more than one possible meaning, but a real misunderstanding must arise out of it. Possibly the most acclaimed example is in Plautus’ Aulularia: Lyconides confesses the rape of Phaedrium to her father Euclio and promises to make amends; but since he refers to the girl only as illa, Euclio, who is preoccupied with his vanished aula full of gold, assumes the referent to be that pot (Plaut. Aul. 737–740): Lyc. deus impulsor mihi fuit, is me ad illam inlexit. Eucl. quo modo? Lyc. fateor peccavisse et me culpam commeritum scio; id adeo te oratum advenio ut animo aequo ignoscas mihi. Eucl. cur id ausu’s facere, ut id quod non tuom esset tangeres? Lyc. Some god urged me to do it; he led me to her/it. Eucl. How so? Lyc. I admit that I’ve done wrong and that I’ve deserved your reproach. And so I’ve come to ask you to forgive me calmly. Eucl. Why did you dare to do it, to touch what isn’t yours? The scene is an extended dialogue (731–795), where Lyconides finds out that they are talking about different matters only after 30 lines. Each character is so sure about the subject of the conversation as not to mention it explicitly, and the phrases they use are vague enough to be applicable to either the girl or the pot. Only when Euclio’s language no longer fits his

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interpretation of the situation does Lyconides realise the error. A similar example cannot be found in extant Menander (nor does any other comedy offer quite such an extended example), but the Aulularia has often been supposed to be the adaptation of a Menandrian play.13 There is no way of knowing for sure where Plautus took the scene from or whether he wrote it himself, but dramaturgically it fits Menander’s technique. For in the scene of Samia that follows the one discussed above, the misunderstanding results from different presuppositions about a fact rather than the meaning of a word: Moschion and Demeas debate whether the existence of Moschion’s child justifies Chrysis’ expulsion from the house. Moschion thinks that his father knows the truth—that the mother is their neighbour’s daughter Plangon. But since Demeas saw the child in Chrysis’ arms, he erroneously assumes that the child is hers, the product of an affair between his adopted son and his mistress (481–7): Μο. τί βοα̃ις; Δη. ὅ τι βοω̃, κάθαρμα σύ; του̃τ’ ἐρωτα̃ις; εἰς σεαυτὸν ἀναδέχει τὴν αἰτίαν, εἰπέ μοι; καὶ του̃το τολμα̃ις ἐμβλέπων ἐμοὶ λέγειν; Δη. παντελω̃ς οὕτως ἀπεγνωκώς με τυγχάνεις; Μο. ἐγώ; διὰ τί; Δη. ‟διὰ τί” φήις; ἐρωτα̃ν δ’ ἀξιοι̃ς; Μο. τὸ πρα̃γμα γάρ ἐστιν οὐ πάνδεινον, ἀλλὰ μυρίοι δήπου, πάτερ, του̃το πεποιήκασιν. Δη. ὠ̃ Ζευ̃, του̃ θράσους. Mo. Why the shouting? De. Filthy rat, you ask why I’m shouting? Tell me, do you take the blame upon yourself? Yet you dare to look me in the face and say those words! Do you flatly turn your back on me like this? Mo. Me? Why? De. ‘Why?’ you say? You dare to ask? Mo. My crime isn’t all that dreadful, father—millions have done the same, surely! De. God in heaven, what a nerve! Ambiguities concerning facts are very similar to those concerning single words, so they do not warrant an extended discussion. Plays of mistaken identity, i.e. ‘comedies of error’, naturally build on these two kinds of misunderstanding. In the preceding examples, the ambiguity concerned the relation between the language and the outside reality it is referring to. Matters become more abstract when the source of error is internal to language. That is the case if the recipient’s assumptions about the speech act as such do not match the sender’s intentions. In the case of ‘indirect speech acts’ the unexpressed intention of the utterance is misunderstood: the grammatical form (question, statement or command) or, more precisely, the illocutionary point (e.g. assertion, wish, permission) does not coincide with what is meant to be conveyed (the perlocutionary effect).14 It is then easy to misinterpret an utterance and assume a different intention. This happens in the passage from

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Samia at the start of this paper: each interlocutor understands perfectly what the other person is saying and also what is intended with the other person’s words. Chrysis (with ποι̃) is not asking Demeas about a destination but lamenting that she has nowhere to go—as the self-pitying ὠ̃ τάλαν makes clear—and thus making an implicit request for mercy. Likewise, Demeas’ response ἐς κόρακας is not an indication of place but the rejection of the request and the confirmation of his order.15 One relevant misunderstanding that has gained the status of a routine in Roman Comedy is based on the formula numquid vis? The (grammatical) question is not so much a request for information but expresses the wish to take one’s leave; it is routinely followed by the reply vale or the like (if anything). However, in about a third of its occurrences in comedy, the second speaker does not follow it up in the way anticipated. It is not always easy to decide whether the second speaker does not realise or deliberately ignores the intended pragmatic force of the formula: in the second case, the answer may merely constitute a pun or make a pragmatic point itself and, for example, reject the first speaker’s attempt to end the conversation.16 By their very nature, indirect speech acts do not clearly signal their intention, but that intention has to be reconstructed from plausibility. In the following example, different paths are open as to how to understand the answer (Ter. Eun. 191–3): Th. numquid vis aliud? Ph. egone quid velim? cum milite istoc praesens absens ut sies. Th. Do you wish anything else? Ph. Wish anything else? When you’re with that soldier, that you be absent from him. As he senses that the farewell from his lover draws near, Phaedria may want to squeeze in his message and admonish her strongly that she not get too close to the soldier who entertains her. However, Phaedria is portrayed as head over heels in love; it is equally plausible that he is so out of his senses (from infatuation and fear) that he fails to recognise the usual function of the phrase and urges Thais at the simplest cue to be faithful to him. The play on the literal meaning of the formula corresponds to the Greek play on χαι̃ρε (if it is not even an adaptation made to fit the Latin formula). The literal interpretation as ‘fare well’ is not restricted to comedy.17 Describing the phenomenon as a pun might give the wrong impression that two (semantic) meanings of the word are played off against each other. However, χαι̃ρε, perhaps more than the English ‘farewell’, still conveys the meaning of ‘fare well’; it is purely the pragmatic function of salute that is or is not realised in the reply. Where the pragmatic function is not linked to a formula or expressed in an unformulaic way, it is less marked and thus easier to overlook or misinterpret. It is therefore less likely that the second speaker just plays with

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the meaning—or easier to determine whether he does so or has genuinely failed18 to perceive the first speaker’s intended message (Men. Epitr. 223–5): Συ. πρὸς τω̃ν θεω̃ν, βέλτιστε, μικρὸν ἂν σχολάσαις ἡμι̃ν χρόνον; Σμ. ὑμι̃ν; περὶ τίνος; Συ. ἀντιλέγομεν πρα̃γμά τι. Σμ. τί οὐ̃ν ἐμοὶ μέλει; Sy. Sir, could you spare us, in the name of heaven, a little time? Sm. You? Why? Sy. We disagree about a point. Sm. What’s that to me? Syriskos’ approach is an example of an indirect speech act. Several features of his first utterance signal that he has turned to Smikrines with a request: the very friendly address, the polite optative and the circuitousness of not mentioning the issue but prefixing a request for attention. These features prepare us for the next utterance, which is phrased as a statement but contains the actual request: Syriskos, out of politeness, avoids putting it bluntly, as he (a slave) is anxious not to confront the elderly, well-to-do Smikrines with a direct demand. Instead, he invites Smikrines to grasp the intention himself and gives him the opportunity to offer his services or decline without being prompted.19 Smikrines, however, fails to understand Syriskos’ intentions and asks how the dispute between the two slaves concerns him. That it is not a refusal becomes clear from his next reaction, when he disapproves of the legal arbitration Syriskos and Daos are intending to hold (228–230), apparently only then realising that Syriskos had asked him. The initial misunderstanding here is also a plausible indication of his state of mind: he is absorbed in worries about his daughter, who is being treated shamefully by her husband. Hence he overlooks Syriskos’ hints and is indifferent towards the arbitration until it becomes clear to him. His rude directness shows that he perceives Syriskos’ courteous request as an intrusion into his own activity; it reveals impatience and an unwillingness to take the time to decode Syriskos’ intentions behind polite indirectness. This analysis is affirmed by a similar instance during the arbitration: Smikrines had rebuked Syriskos for interrupting Daos’ speech and threatened to punish him (Epitr. 247–9). Daos can continue and clearly marks the end of the speech (292–3): Δα. εἴρηκα τόν γ’ ἐμὸν λόγον. Συ. εἴρηκεν; Σμ. οὐκ ἤκουσας; εἴρηκεν. Da. I’ve finished my speech. Sy. He’s finished? Sm. Are you deaf? He’s finished. Syriskos picks up Daos’ εἴρηκα.20 The third person form εἴρηκεν makes it clear that he is not asking Daos directly whether he has finished, but making

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sure that Smikrines will not be thinking that he is interrupting again; he subjects himself to Smikrines’ judgment and guidance concerning the procedure; so what he is asking is really the formal permission from Smikrines to start his own speech. Smikrines, however, does not realise this function; he even appears angry at the (seemingly) pointless question. Both his irritability and his deafness toward Syriskos’ indirectness support the interpretation given above for the first passage. What causes his inability to communicate effectively with Syriskos is less certain (or ascertainable): the more important business of his daughter’s maltreatment, which may encroach on his mind, has already been mentioned; pure disdain for the slave may speak out of the abuse ἐργαστήριον in 367. At that point, the analysis of communication reaches its limits. However, indirect speech acts may not only be overlooked, but also wrongly assumed. At the end of Samia Moschion is cross at his father for thinking that he had a child with Chrysis; he decides to get his own back by pretending to leave and become a mercenary (623–639). He asks Parmenon to fetch the necessary equipment (Sam. 659–663): Mo. χλαμύδα καὶ σπάθην τινὰ ἔνεγκέ μοι. Πα. σπάθην ἐγώ σοι; Mo. καὶ ταχύ. Πα. ἐπὶ τί; Mo. βάδιζε καὶ σιωπη̃ι του̃θ’ ὅ σοι εἴρηκα ποίει. Πα. τί δὲ τὸ πρα̃γμα; Mo. εἰ λήψομαι ἱμάντα—Πα. μηδαμω̃ς· βαδίζω γάρ. Mo. Bring me out a cloak and sword! Pa. Bring you a sword? Mo. Yes, quickly, too! Pa. What for? Mo. Just go, and carry out my orders in silence. Pa. What’s it all about? Mo. If I must grab a whip—Pa. Not that! I’m going. Parmenon does not understand the reason for the order; Moschion’s wish does not make sense to him—in his ignorance about Moschion’s ‘plan’; therefore he does not draw the consequence from it that it needs to be followed but assumes that something else underlies the seemingly invalid command. He does not accept that illocutionary and perlocutionary speech act coincide. Instead he attempts to figure out the reason for the order, i.e. Moschion’s indirect speech act behind the command—although Moschion, even though his ultimate intention is different, means exactly what he says. At the same time, the example shows how the domains of communication and of action blend into each other: the misunderstanding manifests itself by the omission of an action. Moschion’s order is not followed because its meaning and seriousness are not taken for real. Similarly situated at the boundary of words and action is the use of language as part of a code of conduct. The door-knocking scenes can serve as an example of a verbal exchange that is embedded in a standard sequence of physical actions and dialogue. The scene type goes back to the fifth century.21 A gap between expected behaviour (both verbal and physical interaction)

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and what is really said and done leads to incomprehension. The challenge is to find ever-new variations of the stock scene (Ar. Ran. 464–6):22 Δι. παι̃ παι̃. Αι. τίς οὑ̃τος; Δι. Ἡρακλη̃ς ὁ καρτερός. Αι. ὠ̃ βδελυρὲ κἀναίσχυντε καὶ τολμηρὲ σὺ καὶ μιαρὲ καὶ παμμίαρε καὶ μιαρώτατε . . . Di. Boy, boy! Ae. Who’s that? Di. The mighty Heracles. Ae. You loathsome, shameless audacious creature! You villain, you arch-villain, you utter villain . . . Dionysus dresses up as Heracles precisely because he believes that he can build on his brother’s reputation; but when the door is opened, it appears that his assumptions about Heracles’ standing in Hades and hence about his reception were erroneous.23 In Menander, Dyskolos provides the best example, when Knemon confronts Getas at his door (464–476):24 Γε. παι̃δες. οὐδὲ εἱς̃ ἐστ’ ἔνδον. ἠήν. προστρέχειν τις φαίνεται. Κν. τί τη̃ς θύρας ἅπτει, τρισάθλι’, εἰπέ μοι, ἄνθρωπε; Γε. μὴ δάκηις. Κν. ἐγώ σε νὴ Δία, καὶ κατέδομαί γε ζω̃ντα. Γε. μή, πρὸς θεω̃ν. Κν. ἐμοὶ γάρ ἐστι συμβόλαιον, ἀνόσιε, καὶ σοί τι; Γε. συμβόλαιον οὐδέν· τοιγαρου̃ν προσελήλυθ’ οὐ χρέος σ’ ἀπαιτω̃ν οὐδ’ ἔχων κλητη̃ρας, ἀλλ’ αἰτησόμενος λεβήτιον. Κν. λεβήτιον; Γε. λεβήτιον. Κν. μαστιγία, θύειν με βου̃ς οἴει ποει̃ν τε ταὔθ’ ἅπερ ὑμει̃ς ποει̃τε; Γε. οὐδὲ κοχλίαν ἔγωγέ σε. ἀλλ’ εὐτύχει, βέλτιστε.

465

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Ge. Servants!—There’s no-one in. Aha! There’s someone dashing to the door, apparently. Kn. Tell me, you wretched cur, why are you clinging to my door? Ge. Don’t bite my head off. Kn. That I will, by Zeus, and eat you up alive, too! Ge. By the gods, no! Kn. Villain, have I ever signed a contract with you? Ge. Contract, no—that’s why I haven’t come collecting debts from you or serving summonses—but just to borrow a stewpot. Kn. A stew-pot? Ge. A stew-pot. Kn. You scoundrel, do you think I offer cattle when I sacrifice, and act just like you? Ge. Cattle? I don’t think you even give a snail! Good-bye then, my dear sir! Getas understands Knemon’s remarks as hostile (467) but does not reckon with an outright rejection of his request and continues the standard procedure (or script) of asking for a piece of kitchenware (472). The antagonists hold different underlying assumptions concerning the script—Knemon

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simply ignores it, Getas sticks to its normative character; so the clash of assumptions concerns different ideas about the rules of the conversation (as part of the interaction). Both Knemon and Getas comment on the other person not saying and doing what would be right (467, 469–470). The problem in communication does thus not lie in a failure to grasp what the other person is doing but in the incomprehension of how the other person can (dare) stick to the course of the conversation and the manner of conducting it as he does. But while Knemon is annoyed but not surprised (since the request is standard), Getas does not at once understand how to interpret Knemon’s hostile behaviour and continues asking (473). They fail to find a way of dealing with each other and negotiating their respective messages. So far, the examples have shown Menander using techniques, or making use of structures, of failed communication that he shared with comedians before and after him. Before moving on to the field in which we will see Menander exercising particular restraint, let us look at one example which, as far as our evidence goes, is unique to him—and can shed light on particular characteristics of his plays (Asp. 14–86)25: Δα. ἐγὼ δ’ ὁ παιδαγωγός, Κλεόστρατε, τὴν οὐχὶ σώσασάν σε τήνδ’ ἐλήλυθα ἀσπίδα κομίζων ὑπὸ δὲ σου̃ σεσωμένην πολλάκις· ἀνὴρ γὰρ ἠ̃σθα τὴν ψυχὴν μέγας, εἰ καί τις ἄλλος. Σμ. τη̃ς ἀνελπίστου τύχης, ὠ̃ Δα̃ε. Δα. δεινη̃ς. Σμ. πω̃ς δ’ ἀπώλετ’, ἢ τίνι τρόπωι; . . . Δα. τοὺς ἀγροὺς ἔκοπτον, αἰχμάλωτ’ ἐπώλουν, χρήματα ̃ πόλλ’ ἀπελθών. Σμ. ὡς καλόν. ἕκαστος εἰχε ... Δα. ἠ̃ν τὸ στρατόπεδον ἔκ τε χώρας ἄφθονα ̃ εἰκὸς γίνεται· ἅπαντ’ ἐχούσης, οἱον ἐβρύαζον οἱ πλει̃στοι. Σμ. πονηρόν γε σφόδρα. Δα. ἄφνω γὰρ ἐπιπίπτουσιν αὐτοις̃ μοι δοκει̃. ... Δα. ἀκήκοάς μου πάντα. Σμ. χρυσου̃ς φὴις ἄγειν ἑξακοσίους; Δα. ἔγωγε. Σμ. καὶ ποτήρια; Δα. ὁλκὴν ἴσως μνω̃ν τετταράκοντ’, οὐ πλείονος, κληρονόμε. Σμ. πω̃ς; οἴει ἐρωτα̃ν, εἰπέ μοι, διὰ του̃τ’; Ἄπολλον. τἀ̃λλα δ’ ἡρπάσθη;

(31)

(46)

(82) (85)

Da. It’s I who’ve come, Kleostratos, your tutor, bringing back this shield which didn’t protect you, though you often protected it. You always showed fine spirit, second to none. Sm. Oh Daos, what an unexpected turn of fortune! Da. Terrible! Sm. How did he die? What way? . . . Da. They were destroying crops, selling their booty. Everyone came back

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with loads of money. Sm. Excellent! . . . Da. When the troops were back from scouring a land of plenty, and in their tents, what happened next was natural: most of our men were carousing. Sm. That’s quite scandalous! Da. Yes. I think there was a surprise attack. . . . Da. You’ve heard all my story. Sm. Do you say you’ve brought six hundred gold staters? Da. Yes. Sm. Silver cups as well? Da. Weighing some forty minas, hardly more—for you, heir! Sm. What? Tell me, do you think that’s why I ask? Apollo! And the rest were seized? Daos reports and bemoans the (supposed) death of his master Kleostratos; Smikrines, by contrast—happy that he will come into the inheritance of his deceased nephew—encourages Daos to tell the details he is interested in. His comments reveal his emotions only gradually. At first they sound as if they echoed Daos’ complaints: in the first instance, ἀνέλπιστον is ambivalent and can be a comment on good and bad news alike.26 The first clearer hint at Smikrines’ real attitude is when he responds to the news of great booty with ὡς καλόν in 33—but again the comment is not in itself inappropriate, for it could just refer to the success that Kleostratos and his companions enjoyed and in this way show his empathy. When he hears that after the first victory the army of Kleostratos were celebrating, he expresses his disapproval (πονηρόν)—maybe too harshly if Kleostratos’ fate affected him deeply. But Daos does not seem to mind: he continues with γάρ and in this way expresses his assent, assuming the disapproval of the carelessness refers to the danger to the soldiers’ lives rather than their booty. So he is not yet seeing behind Smikrines’ questions. The conversation takes a turn when he signals that he has finished the story, as far as he is concerned (82). It becomes obvious that Smikrines’ thoughts revolve only around his inheritance. So the flaw in the conversation is based on Daos’ initial wrong presupposition about the connotations and specific reference points of the evaluative adjectives καλόν and πονηρόν, or more fundamentally: about Smikrines’ attitude. From the wrong assumption he extrapolated the gist of the utterances incorrectly. The communicative failure of that scene contributes to the characterisation of Smikrines: his greediness and his focus on all matters financial are here highlighted, before they become a central plot-driving motif. The foil is Daos: in his loyalty to his master, he is so occupied with his weighty grief that he does not reckon with a different attitude until Smikrines’ questions become irreconcilable with that assumption. The different preoccupations of Daos and Smikrines and the resulting failure of their communication throw their respective characters into relief. RELEVANCE The portrayal of characters seems equally to be essential when we come to types of communication that Menander does not include in his plays, in

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contrast to other comic writers.27 The situation is exemplified by the following passage (Ar. Thesm. 4–14): Κη. ποι̃ μ’ ἄγεις, ωὐ̃ριπίδη; Ευ. ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἀκούειν δει̃ σε πάνθ’ ὅσ’ αὐτίκα ὄψει παρεστώς. Κη. πω̃ς λέγεις; αὐ̃θις φράσον. οὐ δει̃ μ’ ἀκούειν; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν μέλληις ὁρα̃ν. Κη. οὐδ’ ἀ̃ρ’ ὁρα̃ν δει̃ μ’; Ευ. οὐχ ἅ γ’ ἂν ἀκούειν δέηι. Κη. πω̃ς μοι παραινεις̃ ; δεξιω̃ς μέντοι λέγεις· οὐ φὴις σὺ χρη̃ναί μ’ οὔτ’ ἀκούειν οὔθ’ ὁρα̃ν. Ευ. χωρὶς γὰρ αὐτοι̃ν ἑκατέρου ‘στὶν ἡ φύσις. Κη. πω̃ς χωρίς; Ευ. οὕτω ταυ̃τα διεκρίθη τότε. αἰθὴρ γὰρ ὅτε τὰ πρω̃τα διεχωρίζετο . . .

(5)

(10) (13)

In. Euripides, where are you taking me? Eu. You don’t have to hear it all from me, considering that you’re presently going to be seeing it in person. In. What do you mean? Say it again. I’ve not got to hear it? Eu. Not what you’re going to be seeing. In. So I’ve not to see it either? Eu. Not what you’ve got to hear, no. In. What is the advice you’re giving me? You do put it cleverly! You say that I mustn’t either hear or see? Eu. The point is that the two things are distinct in nature. In. How do you mean, distinct? Eu. This is how they were separated originally. When in the beginning the sky became a separate entity . . . For the analysis of the absurdity in this passage, we have to go back to the starting point of Grice’s maxims: the idea of cooperativeness as the basis of meaningful conversation. The In-Law is portrayed farcically as a rather dim-witted character, in fact so much so that his replies to Euripides are implausibly incoherent: if we impose the standards of ‘real’ conversation, i.e. one that is not incoherent just for the sake of raising laughter,28 we may speak of a boycott or refusal to cooperate. The only way in which the conversation is kept going is by an equally absurd move by Euripides, who digresses into a cosmogonic explanation. The best way of integrating this kind of non-communication into the categories of Grice is to class it as a lack of relevance: In-Law gratuitously makes the wrong inference οὐδ’ ἀ̃ρ’ ὁρα̃ν δει̃ μ’ and thus ends with a thought that is no longer connected (other than by the word-material) with the preceding conversation. Similar passages in Menander differ in that the lack of relevance on the surface hides a deeper intention (an indirect speech act) underneath.29 Most notably, Knemon’s ‘re-education’ at the end of the Dyskolos is taken over by the cook and his aide (902–4, 921–3): Γε. τὸ δ’ ὅλον ἐστὶν ἡμι̃ν ἅνθρωπος ἡμερωτέος· κηδεύομεν γὰρ αὐτω̃ι, οἰκει̃ος ἡμι̃ν γίνετ’ . . . Σι. παι̃, παι]δίον, γυναι̃κες, ἄνδρες, παι̃ θυρωρέ. Κν. μαίνει,

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ἄνθρωπε· τὴν θύραν κατάξεις. Σι. δάπιδας ἐννέ’ ἡμι̃ν χρήσα]τ ̣ε . Κν. πόθεν; Σι. καὶ παραπέτασμα βαρβαρικὸν ὑφαντόν. Ge. Top to toe, we must civilise the fellow! He’s related now by marriage, a member of our family. . . . Si. Boy, boy! Ladies! Gentlemen! Ho, boy! Ho, porter! Kn. Sir, are you mad? You’ll smash the door to pieces! Si. Could your people [lend] us nine rugs? Kn. Impossible! Si. And [let us have] a curtain of foreign weave. The two repeat the door-knocking routine, exaggerating the demands and staging an absurd scene: they ignore Knemon’s responses or act as if he were accommodating their wishes; so communication is prevented because Sikon (and later Getas) refuses to engage in anything Knemon says while pretending to be in a conversation. The difference to the passage from Thesmophoriazusae lies in the purpose which Getas states explicitly at the start of the scene: to soften Knemon’s character. So the non-sequitur character of their utterances has an extra-conversational function, exhausting Knemon so much that he gives up resistance and can be reformed from his misanthropy. Irrelevant conversations may of course have existed in Menander’s lost plays. But it is unlikely that they were a common feature. Firstly, such a noncooperative dialogue is shown to be a Plautine insertion in our one instance of a substantial bit of text transmitted in both the Greek original and its Roman adaptation (Plaut. Bacch. 538–560):30 Pist. numquae advenienti aegritudo obiecta est? Mnes. atque acerruma. Pist. unde? Mnes. ab homine quem mi amicum esse arbitratus sum antidhac. Pist. multi more isto atque exemplo vivont, . . . (540) improbum istunc esse oportet hominem. Mnes. ego ita esse arbitror. (552) Pist. obsecro hercle loquere, quis is est. Mnes. benevolens vivit tibi. nam ni ita esset, tecum orarem ut ei quod posses mali facere faceres. Pist. dic modo hominem qui sit: si non fecero (555) ei male aliquo pacto, me esse dicito ignavissimum. Mnes. nequam homost, verum hercle amicus est tibi. Pist. tanto magis dic quis est; nequam hominis ego parvi pendo gratiam. Mnes. video non potesse quin tibi eius nomen eloquar. Pistoclere, perdidisti me sodalem funditus. (560) Pist. Did you have some unpleasant experience on your return? Mnes. Yes, a most unpleasant one. Pist. What’s the reason? Mnes. A man whom I used to believe to be my friend till now. Pist. There are many people that fit this type and description . . . He must be a reprobate. Mnes. I think so. Pist. Please, tell me who it is. Mnes. He lives on good terms with you. If it weren’t like this, I’d ask you to do him every bad turn you could. Pist. Just tell me who he is. If I don’t do him a bad turn somehow, call me a complete loser. Mnes. He is a crook, but yes, he is your friend. Pist. Tell me all the more who he is. I care little for the

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Mnesilochus delays the revelation, for no obvious reason: there is, for example, no evidence that it is too painful for him to confront Pistoclerus at once. The motivation for the delay rather lies in Plautus’ wish to raise the suspense level by retardation. What Mnesilochus says instead is the avoidance of the relevant answer, with the identification of Pistoclerus as the supposed wrongdoer.31 Sosias in Dis Exapaton, by contrast, gives the information straightaway (105–110): Mo. μὴ νεώτερον κακὸν κατείληφάς τι τω̃ν [γ’] ἐνταυ̃θα; Σω. ναί. Mo. εἰτ̃ ̣’ οὐ [λέ]γεις; Σω. ἔνδον γὰρ ἀμέλει, Μόσχε. Mo. πω̃ς; Σω. [ ] φιλου̃ντα τὸν πρὸ του̃ χρόνον [ ]α· του̃το πρω̃τον ὡ̃ν ἐμὲ [ ]ἠδίκηκας.

(110)

Mo. Have you met with some new trouble here? So. Yes. Mo. Won’t you tell, then? So. Moschos, it’s in there, of course. Mo. How do you mean? So. [You?] previously [claimed to be my?] friend, [and you betrayed me?]. That’s the first [vile?] wrong you’ve done me. A second indication could be that Terence, who is similar to Menander also in avoiding breaches of the dramatic illusion (in contrast to Aristophanes and Plautus), does not stage a conversation of this type, either. In the following instance from Adelphoe, the refusal to answer in a relevant way conveys Aeschinus’ disdain for the pimp and the weak negotiating position of Sannio (177–80): Sa. quid hoc rei est? regnumne, Aeschine, hic tu possides? Ae. si possiderem, ornatus esses ex tuis uirtutibus. Sa. quid tibi rei mecumst? Ae. nil. Sa. quid? nostin qui sim? Ae. non desidero. Sa. tetigin tui quicquam? Ae. si attigisses, ferres infortunium. (180) Sa. What’s going on here? Are you the king of this place, Aeschinus? Ae. If I were, you’d be decorated according to your deserts. Sa. What do you want from me? Ae. Nothing. Sa. Well, do you know who I am? Ae. I have no desire to know. Sa. Have I ever touched anything of yours? Ae. If you had, it would be your misfortune. So Menander’s plays (like Terence’s) show communication that does not flout Grice’s maxim of relevance except where an indirect effect (which may not be inferable from the conversation, as in Dyskolos) is aimed at. In this, he differs from both Aristophanes and Plautus, but also from (at least some of) his contemporaries, as we can see from the following fragment (Diphilus fr. 74.3–11):

Failing Communication in Menander and Others B. πω̃ς ἂν βάλοιμ’ Εὐριπίδην; A. οὐκ ἄν ποτε Εὐριπίδης γυναι̃κα σώσει’. οὐχ ὁρα̃ις ἐν ται̃ς τραγωιδίαισιν αὐτὰς ὡς στυγει̃; τοὺς δὲ παρασίτους ἠγάπα. λέγει γέ τοι . . . B. πόθεν ἐστὶ ταυ̃τα, πρὸς θεω̃ν; A. τί δέ σοι μέλει; οὐ γὰρ τὸ δρα̃μα, τὸν δὲ νου̃ν σκοπούμεθα.

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B. How might I throw a ‘Euripides’?32 A. Euripides would never save a woman; don’t you see how hostile he is to them in his tragedies? But he liked parasites. As he said: . . . B. Where’s that from, by the gods? A. What do you care? It’s not the play we’re considering; it’s the attitude. The conversation derails through the gratuitous, if obvious, pun on the name Euripides.33 We cannot be sure that there was no higher purpose to the pun, but this is not the only such passage among the fragments of Greek New Comedy.34 The reasons why Menander keeps his dialogues cooperative must remain elusive. We must not take the idea too far that he cleanses his plays from everything that does not foreground the ethical character of the plays—for example, some elements of slapstick and physical comedy remain. However, it is conspicuous that the passages from Menander concern questions of character and humanitas. A simpler explanation would be that he reduces the expressive means to approximate the standard of the tragic genre in the avoidance of frivolously irrelevant communication,35 as he does with the preservation of the dramatic illusion.36 NOTES 1. Translations are taken (and partly adapted) from Sommerstein (Aristophanes), Arnott (Menander), de Melo (Plautus), Barsby (Terence), and Olson 2007 (comic fragments). 2. So Bain 1983 ad loc. 3. Such an approach has been tested with good results for tragedy in a recent DPhil thesis by Van Emde Boas 2011; studies on pragmatics by other, chiefly Dutch, scholars have shown interesting and promising approaches, e.g. the papers in de Jong & Rijksbaron 2007 and Bakker & Wakker 2009. 4. Problems of communication in Aristophanes, the comedian with the most versatile handling of communication, have been a key issue in three book-length investigations: Kloss 2001, Robson 2006, and Ruffell 2011. The focus in these studies has been on the mechanics of humour. The overlap with the study of failing conversation is substantial, but neither field is a subset of the other. The same reasons for failing communication can have ‘comic’ as well as ‘tragic’ effects, and to produce humour at least a suitable expectation in the audience is required in addition: cf. Robson 2006:29–34, Ruffell 2011:101–5. 5. Grice 1975:45. 6. Assumptions are related to the concept of pragmatic presuppositions, as presented in Mey 2001:184–9. The main difference is that presuppositions, in linguistic parlance, denotes only what can be inferred from the utterance (and thus again only the sender’s share of the conversation).

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7. According to the theory of conversational implicature, an excess of information lets the recipient search for further meaning; confusion arises when no purpose is recognisable. In the sentence ‘She has no more than five children,’ ‘no more than’ is redundant except if it carries extra meaning: this could, for example, be moral disapproval of the small number or a reference to a law that forbids having more than five children. 8. In fact, the humour derives in part from the fact that the conversation works so well, even though it has no little connection with the truth (cf. Ruffell 2011:31–32, on impossibilities); more on such ‘pragmatic acts’ below. 9. Colvin 1999:287–295 with more passages. The only known Roman examples are in Plautus’ Poenulus, where, however, the text seems to be proper Punic. 10. Cf. Ach. 100–8. 11. 442 and 443 του̃το δήπου μανθάνω suggests that Smikrines has not understood something before, but the relevant text has been lost. 12. There would be potential, as shown by the pun based on Alcibiades’ lisp in Ar. Wasps 44 ὁλα̃ις Θέωλον; τὴν κεφαλὴν κόλακος ἔχει. However, the word play is not translated into a dialogue that could foster misunderstanding. 13. Cf. the synopsis in Stockert 1983:13–16; for the opposite case cf. e.g. Arnott 1988. 14. Cf. Mey 2001:111–117. 15. The comic effect lies in the ambiguity, i.e. in the possibility of a literal interpretation: a proper question about a place of refuge and the ‘ravens’ as the indication of that place. The illocutionary force differs from the pragmatic (i.e. the perlocutionary) function but matches the structure, i.e. it makes sense on the surface level. 16. Plaut. Bacch. 757–8, Capt. 400–414; rejection: Plaut. Poen. 190–7. For full explanation and a discussion of each case, see Hough 1945. 17. E.g. Aesch. Ag. 538–9, Soph. Trach. 227–8. 18. Such formulations come close to crediting the literary characters with ‘real’ life, intentions and cognitive processes. However, because they can be awkward to avoid, their use may be justified as shorthand for: ‘The author scripted the utterance in such a way that the character might appear . . .’ 19. The avoidance of face-threatening acts is one of the clearest motives for flouting Grice’s principles: cf. Brown & Levinson 1987:5–6. 20. For the distribution of speakers cf. Gomme & Sandbach ad loc., who, not very convincingly, interpret: ‘Can this be all he has to say?’ 21. Traill 2001b:98–105. 22. P. Brown 1995, 2008b; Roman comedy: Duckworth 1952:117. 23. P. Brown 2008b:367–8. 24. Traill 2001b; P. Brown 1995:84 with n.47 also deals with the continuation of this tradition. 25. For a fuller discussion of this passage, see Lamagna, this volume. 26. It is used more commonly in happy circumstances (e.g. Eur. Hel. 412), but also applied to unexpected misfortune (Thuc. 4.55.1). 27. I do not here deal with passages such as Thesm. 855–923, which Kloss 2001:193–8 makes the centrepiece of his treatment of ‘bewußtes Mißverstehen’: there Euripides and the In-Law transgress the frame of the play’s action and impersonate characters of Euripidean tragedies, leaving Critylla—who remains bound to the frame—uncomprehending. Since Menander’s comedy does not flout dramatic illusion in a similar way, any conversation playing with the levels of dramatic and extra-dramatic reality must be absent. 28. I.e. ‘displacement’ through faulty reasoning in the Freudian typology; cf. Ruffell 2011: 80–81.

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29. Apart from the fifth act of Dyskolos cf. Sam. 589–599, where Demeas tries to break it to Nikeratos as gently as possible that his daughter has a child whose father is Moschion. There levels of simile and reality are blurred in a way that Nikeratos cannot follow, and he regards Demeas’ remarks as ̃ δὴ τί του̃το;) until the incoherence becomes so great that irrelevant (592 εἰτα Nikeratos (by way of Gricean implicature) recognises the hidden meaning of the comparison with Danae. Again the politeness and indirectness contributes much to the characterisation of the relationship between the men and of Demeas’ considerateness. 30. Fraenkel 2007:78–95 already identified such passages in Plautus as insertions. 31. The additional complication that lies in the mistaken identity is subordinate. 32. A ‘Euripides’ is a throw of 40 with a set of four four-sided knucklebones (the mathematics is unclear). The name, however, allegedly originates from another Euripides, not the tragedian: schol. Pl. Lys. 206e Εὐριπίδης δὲ ὁ τὸν μ· εἱς̃ γὰρ Εὐριπίδης τω̃ν τεσσαράκοντα Ἀθήνῃσι προστατω̃ν μετὰ τὴν τω̃ν λ τυράννων κατασταθέντων κατάλυσιν (cf. Ar. Eccl. 823–9, which implies a different and more plausible explanation for Euripides’ association with this number). Pollux 9.101 spells the name Εὐριππίδης, which would make the pun all the more artificial. 33. A pun is a form of ambiguity, but this instance differs from the ones mentioned above: for it is the recipient who constructs an ambiguity in a situation in which the term ‘a Euripides’ is contextually determined. The forced character of the ambiguity makes his or her utterance irrelevant. 34. For a similar technique cf. Alexis fr. 117. The fashion of γρι̃φοι may have been an important factor in the principles of co-operative communications being sacrificed for a laugh: cf. Antiphanes frr. 75, 192. 35. For extreme cases in tragedy, cf. e.g. the conversations of Menelaos and the old gatekeeper in Euripides’ Helen or the scenes between Kreon and the guard in Sophocles’ Antigone. 36. Work on this paper took place at the Universities of Nottingham and Berne. I thank these two institutions and the Swiss National Science Foundation for their generous help.

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Part III

Context: Philosophy and Medical Thought

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10 Menander and the Peripatos New Insights into an Old Question Angelo Casanova

From the testimonies collected by Kassel and Austin,1 we learn that (T 2) Menander was born in Athens in the archonship of Sosigenes, i.e. in 342/1 BC, the same year in which Epicurus was born on Samos. Strabo (T 7) lets us know that Epicurus came to Athens (from Samos, where he was born) at the age of 18 to undergo ephebic training and was a fellow-ephebe of Menander. Diogenes Laertius 5.36 (T 8) informs us that Menander had Theophrastus as a teacher, as reported by Pamphile in book 32 of her Hypomnemata. Diogenes Laertius 5.79 (T 9) further reports that Menander was a friend of Demetrius of Phalerum (a Peripatetic philosopher and likewise a pupil of Theophrastus, who ruled Athens from 317 to 307) and that due to this friendship he was nearly put on trial when Demetrius was ousted by Demetrius Poliorcetes (307 BC). During the 1960s, when I was still a student, and there was an outburst of interest in Menander—owing to the publication of the Bodmer papyrus (Dyskolos 1958, Samia and Aspis 1969)—my teacher Adelmo Barigazzi taught that all the data mentioned above are equally credible and trustworthy, but the degree of their relevance is unequal. That Menander was a contemporary and a fellow-ephebe of Epicurus— so Barigazzi’s argument went—is just a chronological coincidence, a mere curiosity item. Epicurus, though the child of Athenian parents, lived on Samos and at Colophon; he later taught at Mytilene and at Lampsacus, and opened his school at Athens in 306 BC, when Menander had already been writing comedies for at least 15 years—obviously too late to influence the latter’s intellectual development or his theatre, all the more so since it is an established fact that comedy-writers, unlike philosophers, began their literary activity at an early age. The same holds even more true as far as Stoicism is concerned: Zeno opened his school at Athens only in 301. By contrast, the information connecting Theophrastus and Menander appears obvious and even self-evident. The education of a youth from a good family, as Menander was, who happened to study at Athens around 325 BC, would no doubt be marked by the influence of the prevailing philosophic trend, i.e. of Plato’s and Aristotle’s teaching, originally stemming

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from a common origin, even if by then it had split up into the scepticallyoriented Academy and the Peripatos. The real cultural authorities at Athens in those years were the old master Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus. This could not fail to influence Menander, unless one believes him to be totally ignorant of philosophy. It should not be overlooked, however, that even Aristophanes frequently referred to contemporary philosophical trends, as shown especially by his earliest plays (from the Banqueters to the Clouds). Now in 1965, Adelmo Barigazzi published his important monograph La formazione spirituale di Menandro, in which he maintained that in Menander all the ethical considerations concerning the characters’ behaviour, as well as the moral and aesthetic outlook in general, not merely reflect Theophrastus’ teaching (and the approach found in his Characters), but directly refer to Aristotle’s thinking and the formulations of his various ethical treatises. It should be added that around the same time a long paper on Menander’s relation to the Peripatos was also written by Gaiser (1967). Barigazzi’s book struck—or perhaps shocked—many readers, inasmuch as, intent as he was on emphasizing Menander’s links with Aristotelian philosophy, he wished to provide a compelling demonstration for each and every one of even the slightest similarities, and consequently neglected the other components in Menander’s cultural development, namely the theatrical and literary aspects, taking it for granted that these had been and would continue to be investigated by other scholars. I remember a fine review by Blume (1968), which in sum defined the book as ‘exaggerated’ (‘weit über Gebühr’). This is why Barigazzi’s monograph was met not merely with praise but also with some rather cold appraisals—Marcello Gigante’s (1971) was particularly stern. Barigazzi’s thesis was approved by Sandbach (as shown by the many letters the two scholars exchanged over the years, preserved in the Barigazzi household, which I was able to peruse some years ago), but even more significant is the fact that the exposé on Menander and philosophy at the 1969 meeting for the ‘Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt’ (published the following year) was actually entrusted to a great expert on Aristotle’s school, Fritz Wehrli. Wehrli, however, accustomed as he was to working with very different kinds of source material for the Peripatetic school, did not venture beyond a very short report (Wehrli 1970), shielding himself behind an extremely cautious attitude. In my opinion, this attitude played a decisive role in the matter. After the 1960s hardly anybody connected Menander with philosophy and it was taken for granted that his comedies could be understood without resorting to this approach. Hunter 1985 (esp. 147–151), for one, is rather trenchant on this subject: the comic tradition is all that is needed. A more balanced attitude does not begin to be found before Blume’s fine book on Menander: he, at least, wrote that ‘The influence of Peripatetic thinking goes deeper in Menander than in his competitors on the comic stage’.2 I cannot help considering this ostracism rather odd: in my opinion Menander’s Peripatetic training is as plainly to be seen in the seriousness of

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his characters’ moral attitude as is the Aristophanic and Euripidean legacy. One could easily expatiate on this. To put it shortly: over 40 years later, and after the death of Barigazzi, Gigante, Sandbach, Arnott, etc., it seems to me to be high time to draw a final balance and to reconsider the whole matter seriously and in a spirit free from polemic. I will state immediately that in my opinion Barigazzi’s approach, broadly speaking, still holds—though of course we should leave aside a few simplifications perhaps meant to be provocative: for example, I do not believe that Menander was ‘the poet of the Peripatos’, as Barigazzi called him. I do believe, however, that we should now recognize that Menander was deeply influenced by the Peripatos, for the simple reason that this is proven by his plays. For the sake of brevity I will make only a few points that appear to be worth pondering. 1. Gigante himself wrote that ‘for the interpretation of a poet like Menander, whose floruit is to be placed in the age of Epicurus, Theophrastus, and Zeno—to limit ourselves to the philosophers—the problem of the relation between his comedy and the contemporary philosophies is correctly posed’ (Gigante 1971:482). One can totally agree with the beginning and end of this sentence, but I object that Menender’s floruit does not exactly fall ‘in the age of Epicurus, Theophrastus, and Zeno’. This is a historical mistake: there is no such thing as an age of Epicurus, Theophrastus, and Zeno: Theophrastus was 30 years older than the other two. And Menander’s floruit falls in the age of Theophrastus, not in that of Epicurus and Zeno. Or at least: we must agree on the meaning of the term floruit. A comedy-writer’s floruit takes place early: Aristophanes made his start in comedy at a very early age, and so too did Menander. Scholars debate whether his play Orgé marked his first production or his first victory,3 but the difference is hardly significant: in any case, he was 20 or 21 years old at the time. In addition, the brilliant Dyskolos, which to this day is the object of admiration, and certainly earned the victory in the comic contest, was written in 317, when the poet was younger than 25 years old. Epicurus opened his school at Athens in 306, which was 11 years later. Zeno opened the Stoic school later still, in 301. If we look for traces of Epicureanism and Stoicism in Menander’s cultural development, we commit a historic mistake: one’s masters are not one’s coevals. While Menander was studying, while he was a student at his own ‘University College’, in the 320s—the years of his training—, he could attend Theophrastus’ lectures (this philosopher was born around 370), he could read and study Aristotle’s works; but he could not listen to—and much less read—Epicurus or Zeno, who would start their teaching later on. Obviously, philosophers matured at a later age than comic dramatists and started their teaching later still. In Menander’s plays written in the 290s (the last decade of his life) one might theoretically be able to detect some traces of Epicureanism, and once the Florentine scholar Ettore Bignone (1973) looked for them in all earnestness;4 but such influence has been ruled out so far by scholarship

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from Wilamowitz (1925) to Webster (1960, 1974). One example may suffice. In fr. 844 ‘necessary’ or ‘natural’ evils are distinguished from those that we make for ourselves in addition. Some have thought this might be a parody or mockery of the Epicurean doctrine of the natural and necessary goods as opposed to the unnatural and unnecessary ones. As the context is missing, this cannot be absolutely excluded, but it appears to be a forced interpretation nevertheless. This fragment, in any case, offers a closer match with Theophrastus (Char. 16.8, on superstition: both passages refer to the screech-owl’s cry). To be sure, by the time he turned forty, Menander had no doubt become acquainted with both Epicureanism and Stoicism: this is apparently suggested, for example, by Onesimos’ tirade at the end of the Epitrepontes (1084–99). It should not be overlooked, however, that this is an old question, already exhaustively investigated by scholarship. I would like to make it clear, anyway, that mocking old Smikrines through a comic pastiche whimsically mixing together different philosophical doctrines, including the latest and most fashionable ones in the 290s, does not by any means offer a clue to determine which philosophical position, if any, had been decisive in the author’s intellectual development. A few more words must be added concerning the similarities between Theophrastus’ Characters and some figures in Menander’s plays. To be sure, strictly speaking no connections can be philologically demonstrated through verbal correspondences; nevertheless, the similarity in both authors’ close observation of reality, bent on pointing out the ridiculous side in people’s petty faults and wrong attitudes in daily life, can hardly be missed. If Theophrastus’ collection is correctly dated in the year 319 BC,5 his teaching may well have directed Menander towards the observation of different human characters portrayed through their actual behaviour, but—as far as we yet know—none of his dramatic characters can be directly coupled with any specific Theophrastean specimen. And yet among Menander’s plays we find a Kolax, an Apistos, a Deisidaimon, and an Agroikos: each one of these titles is also found in Theophrastus. Besides, a deilos (coward) appears in the Samia (Moschion), and an aischrokerdes (a man sordidly greedy for gain) in the Aspis (Smikrines). There is no doubt that in Menander the technique of close observation of human behaviour is extremely well developed. Several scholars (e.g. Gigante) have maintained that Theophrastus was influenced by comedy; if chronology is taken into account, however, we must conclude that he cannot have drawn on Menander, but is rather indebted to earlier comedy—a genre much studied in Peripatetic circles. Menander, who is strongly indebted to Euripides as far as the psychological analysis of his characters is concerned, may in turn have learned or perfected his subtlety in typological analysis in the school of Theophrastus. The important difference is that Menander did not aim to frame human types or characteristic faults, but rather to create convincing theatrical characters with their distinctive tics and foibles.

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2. Barigazzi pointed out that at least three of Menander’s plays (Perikeiromene, Samia, and Epitrepontes) are thematically constructed around Aristotle’s doctrine of men’s responsibility for their actions, amply developed in his works, particularly in the Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric. It is certainly true that Menander follows the philosopher, by distinguishing— among men’s faults or mistakes (ἁμαρτήματα)—the ἀτυχήματα (misfortunes) from the ἀδικήματα (wrongdoings). The latter are the object of tragedy, not comedy, according to Aristotle’s well-known distinction. Menander often shows that ignorance (ἄγνοια) and chance (τύχη) are the factors that prevent man from foreseeing or controlling the events concerning himself, and thus extenuate the responsibility of those who are at fault. It is not by chance that the prologue is spoken by Agnoia in Perikeiromene (and by Tyche in Aspis). This Aristotelian distinction is most evident in the Epitrepontes, when Charisios realizes that his wife Pamphile’s fault or responsibility is limited, since she suffered an ‘involuntary misfortune’ (ἀκούσιον ἀτύχημα), and of lesser significance than his own. It can also be found, however, in other more fragmentary plays. I do not intend to dwell on this subject, which is discussed elsewhere in this volume.6 I will only add that, in my opinion, the distinction was already to be found in Menander’s first play, Orgé. The topic of anger is typical of Menander and lets him develop the theme of responsibility for a wrong action committed under the impulse of anger: can this be forgiven or not? And how can it be atoned for? A very similar theme is treated in Perikeiromene, in which the soldier Polemon has cut his partner’s hair in a burst of rage caused by jealousy. This is a rather particular kind of anger, but the idea is very close. All this is true and correct. I would add, however, that the comic side must be considered too: Polemon, the protagonist, a violent soldier who cuts his partner’s hair in a fit of jealousy, turns into a pathetic character in all the rest of the play; he is desperate for his deed and unable to take any sensible decision—simply a ridiculous figure. This aspect too should be given its proper due. Similarly, in Misoumenos, the soldier Thrasonides weeps at night, out of doors and in the rain, because his own captive mistress does not love him, and perhaps even hates him. The ridiculous sides of the characters’ behaviour should be given proper attention, as well as the depth of the serious elements. I do not wish to dwell on these considerations, which are well known, but simply state that in my opinion Barigazzi’s argument retains validity to this very day. To be sure, we cannot follow Barigazzi in every single detail: for example, I do not believe that Onesimos’ tirade at the end of Epitrepontes (1084ff) really proves Menander’s connection with Peripatetic philosophy, as he maintained.7 In my opinion, the comic element is prevalent here: the speaker is Onesimos, a cunning slave, and he means to mock old Smikrines, not to instruct him. His speech should rather be taken as a pastiche of philosophical

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commonplaces meant to bewilder and mock the old man;8 the speech intentionally pieces together different and incoherent arguments in order to prevent the opponent from responding. It should be regarded as a set piece meant to amuse the audience rather than convey a definite message. This is where I perceive the limits of Barigazzi’s argument: his view of Menander’s connection with the Peripatos invariably points to a serious, instructional, or theoretical attitude. In my opinion, Menander has nothing to teach in general, nor does he ever preach to the audience. Onesimos’ tirade is a comic piece of mockery directed at the old miser, who is made fun of in order to elicit the audience’s applause—a liberating applause joined with a comic smile—just as at the end of Dyskolos Sicon and Getas mock old Knemon after he has been vanquished. I do believe, however, that today the study of Menander’s relation to philosophy can and should be supplemented with a keen attention to the ridiculous side of his plays. I have often heard it stated that the comic element in Menander appears in the details, in the scenes in which slaves and minor characters appear.9 I think I shall devote my old age to rereading Menander in order to fully grasp his comic side. Of course I share the belief that Menander studies and portrays people’s condition as they live daily at the mercy of chance, incapable of foreseeing and controlling the events or properly managing their responsibilities—a situation from which their efforts can enable them to escape, if they are able to fully understand the relevance of virtue, the value of friendship and solidarity, of moderation and balance, in their behavior towards family and society. But Menander is a comedy writer, not a philosopher: his message appears to me to be always joined with a smile, for the very reason that on his stage we witness a continual succession of people who commit or have committed errors and are unable to make up for them, and thus are made to appear ridiculous, as they childishly and vainly attempt to correct reality and paradoxically end up by further complicating it. Menander’s theatre is governed by a good-natured smile stemming from sympathy and compassion for all the faults, mistakes, traps, and deceptions by which people often complicate their lives. In the Dyskolos, we laugh not merely at the peevish Knemon, a character of Aristophanic stature (surely Aristophanic is the grotesque mould after which he is modelled), whom the author follows all through his evolution, up to the point where he finally acknowledges the value of human solidarity: laughter is also raised by all the people around him, who appear incapable of directing and correcting him. We laugh at the slave Pyrrhias, who tries to speak to Knemon in his field and is brusquely driven away; at the wealthy city dandy, Sostratos, who ends up breaking his back working in the fields, in the vain hope of impressing him (thus becoming ridiculous), etc. There is a whole gamut of ridiculous characters, including Sostratos’ mother (she goes round the district day after day to make sacrifices, as related by Sostratos himself, Dysk. 260–3). 3. Let us go back to Epitrepontes, of which we were speaking before. The papyrus evidence, already multifarious, has recently been increased

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further by additions to the Michigan papyrus. The first fragments of this were published by Gronewald 1986 as P.Mich. inv. 4733;10 more were made known by L. Koenen and T. Gagos in 1995 as P.Mich. inv. 4801a,11 and now Cornelia Römer (2012a, 2012b) has published four more pieces as P.Mich. inv. 4752 a, b, and c and 4805)—and it should be added that the text preserved by these fragments connects with that of two Oxyrhynchus papyri (3532 and 3533) previously edited by E.G. Turner 1983. Clearly, then, the papyrological problem is a formidable one; it has been adroitly tackled by Furley in his recent edition,12 but the publication of further fragments has of course altered the situation. Indeed, the new papyrological finds have finally proved two different and almost opposed facts: (a) On the one hand, Barigazzi was wrong in assigning the text of the socalled rhesis of the P.Didot 113 to the fourth act of Epitrepontes. So, finally, these lines will be excluded from future Menander editions: in Sandbach’s (1972 and 1990) they are still included in the appendix; but they are surely a scholastic imitation of Pamphile’s speech.14 (b) On the other hand, though, almost as a compensation, the new fragments have brought to our knowledge a passage in which we find, oddly coupled and almost piled up, such expressions as μηδὲν ἠδικηκυι α̃ ν τυχει ν̃ and ἁμαρτούσας (807 f.), then more terms connected with τύχη (εὐτυχία, ἀτυχία) and the idea of human responsibility (αἴτιος etc.)—which peculiarly belongs in the conceptual world of the Peripatos (and of Menander as portrayed by Barigazzi). The passage is very difficult, even though the efforts of several papyrologists have been devoted to it, including notable articles by Arnott 2004 and Austin 2008. Furley’s edition (2009) has made a further considerable contribution, but the new fragments published by Römer revealed several new readings as far as the right-hand side of lines 786–823 is concerned, which have forced scholars to reconsider the whole question. In my opinion, the essence of the speech is now understandable, but many problems have not been solved and there is still need to make much progress in interpretation. At present, in view of the theme of this paper, I will limit myself to the part containing Pamphile’s reply to her father (i.e. lines 801–823). I would like to make a preliminary statement, relevant for the interpretation of the whole rhesis. I do not believe that the first lines (801–3) can be interpreted as done by Furley (2009:111): ‘Father, I can dissemble and choose my words / on anything to suit what you think proper, / [or speak] my mind. I’m [capable] of being sensible. . .’. Nor do I believe that Pamphile is saying ‘O father, you have trained me to speak my mind / about anything, whatever you think useful: / do not deprive me of it, for I am capable of thinking,’ according to Römer’s translation (2012a:120)—though she offers no restoration for the end of 801 or 803, or the beginning of 802. In my opinion the text and its meaning are as follows.15

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Angelo Casanova οὐ, πάτε]ρ, ἐμὴν γνώμην λέγειν πε̣π̣λ̣α̣[σμένως ἔχω περὶ] πάντων ὅ̣ τ ̣ί ποθ᾿ ἡγει̃ συμ̣φέρε̣[ιν, ἀλλ᾿ εὐτ]ελη̃· καὶ γὰρ φρονει̃ν εἰ ̃ μ̣[ου σοφὸς βέλτ]ι ̣ον, ἥ τ᾿ εὔνοι᾿ [ὑ]ερισταμένη [κρατει̃ τελέω]ς̣ σε πείθεσθα[ί τ᾿] ἐμοὶ μα̃λλον ἐπά[γει.

805

‘Father, I cannot speak my mind in a sophisticated way about all the arguments, whatever you think to be useful for me, but (only) in simple words.16 You are in fact skilful at reasoning better than I do . . .’ In my opinion, Pamphile says she is not able to express her mind with rhetorical ability about all the matters and problems,17 following every argumentation proposed by her father (719ff) about what could be useful or advantageous for her; but she will only say simple words. Then—equally important—I prefer reading εἰ ̃ at line 803, rather than εἰμ[ί, as all editors have done so far18: ‘you are’, not ‘I am’. I think that what is presented here is not a heroine of the Euripidean type, boasting about her rhetorical skills and clever at debating about everything in every way, but rather a Menandrian girl, strong, but simple-minded and well-bred. The young woman says—in all probability—: ‘you are skilful at reasoning better than I can, and the εὔνοια that is in you, your benevolence, your goodwill, your fondness for me (an important word, to which we will return) will finally prevail and will lead you to take heed of me’. The reconstruction of the exact wording of the text remains very difficult, but the reading ἐμοί, now attested by the Michigan papyrus, appears to be precious. Some doubt may still be raised by the reading ἥ τ’ εὔνοια, since the conjunction τε is regarded by several scholars as hardly appropriate here; as a matter of fact, Gronewald proposed the correction έ. I believe, however, that τε is right, since (once the first three verses are understood) Pamphile’s meaning is clear: ‘I can hardly state my opinion in a sophisticated way about all questions, but only in simple, cheap (εὐτελη̃) words: (first) because you can reason better than I can (you are σοφός, not I), and (second) because I know that benevolence prevails in you and makes you take heed of me.’ After this introduction—surely a rhetorical introduction, as it adopts the assertion of the speaker’s simplicity, topical in certain types of oratory, and also contains some cajoleries aiming at captatio benevolentiae—, at line 806 Pamphile begins to answer her father with a first statement. I have no doubt that πρω̃τον δ]έ must be conjectured here, because at the end of line 808 we read δεύτερο[ν. ‘In the first place, father, this seems to me. . .’ To make my interpretation clear, I will state at once that—in the light of the new Michigan fragments—the text must be reconstructed as follows19: πρω̃τον δ]ὲ του̃το, πάπ[᾿, ἐμ]οὶ πα̣ρὸν δοκει̃ δεινόν με] μηδὲν ἠδικηκ̣υι̃α[ν] τυχει̃ν· καὶ τὰς] ἁμαρτούσας ἐω̃μεν.

808

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‘In the first place, father, what is happening to me seems awful,20 that this must be my lot, though I have done nothing wrong; and let’s not talk about the women who went astray.’ Alternatively, if we follow the variant attested by P.Oxy. 3532–3, the text seems to be this: πρω̃τον δ]ὲ του̃το, πάπ[α,] λ̣υπ̣η̣ρὸν δοκει̃ παρόν με] μηδὲν ἠδικηκ̣υι̃α[ν] τυχει̃ν·

807

‘In the first place, father, this seems distressing,21 it being possible for me to have this lot, though I have done nothing wrong . . .’ The text is not certain and the papyri seem to have two different readings, but the meaning is similar: in any case, the sentence is undoubtedly an introductory remark on the part of this unhappy woman, who has become involved, through no fault of hers, in a seemingly never-ending chain of troubles: first, having fallen victim to a rape, she became pregnant; she exposed her child, in an attempt to save her marriage; then, since her secret had been revealed (by Onesimos),22 she was deserted by her husband; finally, now, she is being forced by her father to an undesired divorce. Once more, she is the victim, without any fault of hers. This is, so to speak, a ‘classic’ protest in ancient theatre, where the relation between fate and fault is always strongly emphasized—and it is especially peculiar to Menander, who often refers to τύχη (and to Τύχη), always stressing her importance in the life of everyone. Nevertheless, often in Menander the conviction—or rather the hope—may be perceived that Fortune might favor the good and reward the innocent: cf., for example, the Aspis prologue (particularly lines 147–8). In our text, by contrast, Pamphile complains that such an unpleasant fate must be her lot, though she has done nothing wrong. Τυγχάνω is nothing but the verb derived from τύχη and (if followed by a genitive or an accusative) it means precisely ‘to receive as a lot’. In my opinion this του̃το, coupled with the verb τυγχάνω (με τυχει̃ν), is clearly equivalent to του̃το τὸ ἀτύχημα. In addition, the pairing of the two verbs is quite unexpected, almost an oxymoron giving verbal expression to the opposition ἀδίκημα/ἀτύχημα. Pamphile weeps because she is being pushed into an ἀτύχημα, a fatal mistake prompted not by herself, but by her father. Once more, Pamphile seems to fall victim to fate, but in reality, at this moment, she is the victim of Smikrines’ pettiness. A famous definition by Aristotle, EN 1135b 18–19, comes to mind: man ἁμαρτάνει . . . ὅταν ἡ ἀρχὴ ἐν αὐτῳ̃ ᾐ̃ τη̃ς αἰτίας, ἀτυχει̃ δ᾿ ὅταν ἔξωθεν. It must not escape attention that, immediately after this, Pamphile adds: ‘and let’s not talk about those women who went astray’ (καὶ τὰς] ἁμαρτούσας ἐω̃μεν). These words amount to a reproach by Pamphile to her father, who had just said: ‘you cannot compete with a whore’ (line 793–4). The father used the word πόρνη; the daughter’s language is more subdued and sounds like a reproach to him: ‘please, avoid this speech.’ It should be added that

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she uses the plural, because she is referring to the whole category, not to a single woman. Nevertheless, we can perhaps also grasp in these words some consciousness on the girl’s part that she too has done something wrong.23 One important nuance should not indeed be missed in these lines, where the verbs ἀδικέω and ἁμαρτάνω are significantly paired. Pamphile is fully aware she has never committed any ἀδίκημα, and, accordingly, perceived as heavily burdened by having to endure an adverse fortune for no fault of hers: this is a bitter recurring theme in the whole of Greek theatre, including tragedy. It should not escape attention, though, that Pamphile’s language is marked by extreme terminological precision: though she rules out having incurred ἀδικήματα, she prefers not to mention ἁμαρτήματα, and she complains about her τύχη. There is, then, a triple distinction, which perfectly corresponds to Aristotle’s at Rhet. 1368b6, where ἀδικει̃ν is defined as τὸ βλάπτειν ἑκόντα παρὰ τὸν νόμον, and at EN 1135a20-b11, where the concept of ἀδίκημα is fully illustrated and, shortly after (at 1135b11–25), three types of βλάβαι are distinguished: ἀδίκημα, ἁμάρτημα, and ἀτύχημα. The first is intentional harm, the second is a mistake incurred in ignorance, that is to say with no evil will (but whose origin is to be sought within the subject himself); the third is a misfortune that befalls, whose origin lies outside the subject. Our text confirms that Menander applies with remarkable precision Aristotle’s triple distinction.24 There is hardly any need to dwell on this aspect, which was treated in detail by Barigazzi almost 50 years ago (Barigazzi 1965:135ff). A second argument follows, which now we are able to understand fairly well: δεύτερο[ν], τω̃ν νυ̃ν] παρὰ τούτου γ᾿ αἴτιον του̃τ ̣ο ν [ἐ]τί ̣θεις· ἀλλ᾿ οὐ]δὲν α[ἰ]σχρό̣ν. ἐν̣ ὀλίγοις εὑρί[σκε]ται τἀκρι]βές· οἱ πολλοί ̣ [δὲ] τὸ γεγονὸς [μ]όνον ἴσ]ασι καὶ λέγουσιν ὥς μ̣ε τίνεται, ά̣τ ̣υχω̃ν ἐπίπροσθε τ ̣[η̃] ς ἀληθείας̣ [μι]α̃ς.

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‘Secondly, for the troubles now coming from him, you were judging him guilty, but there’s nothing shameful in it. Few are aware of the truth; most people only know what has happened, and say that he is punishing me— missing the mark of truth, which is only one.’ At line 809, I prefer to restore [τω̃ν νυ̃ν] (sc. παρόντων) rather than [τω̃ν μοι], suggested by Gronewald and accepted by Römer. Pamphile is probably referring to her father’s concern over the parties held (and the expenses incurred) by Charisios in Chairestratos’ house: these things are recent, they have happened now, as compared with the troubles that happened to Pamphile before. In particular, Smikrines in his speech was considering him guilty because of these heavy expenses, and others likely to

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ensue (749–751). Of course, αἴτιος is a key-word in every discussion about responsibility, but what is remarkable is the repetition παρὰ τούτου . . . του̃τον: Pamphile may be thinking also of Chairestratos too, who hosted the symposia. But this is only for a moment: her most important observation is that there is nothing shameful (οὐδὲν αἰσχρόν) in the symposia. And then, she adds, few people know the plain truth. Pamphile does not wish to pass judgment before gaining full knowledge: she allows for the possibility that the real truth may be different from the way things now appear (as in fact it is: there was nothing between Charisios and Habrotonon). She is surely thinking of her own case: few are aware that she herself had given birth to an illegitimate child (in particular, Smikrines does not know it). Concerning Charisios, people only know what has openly happened—he has left home and is having a good time at Chairestratos’ house—but they do not know that this behaviour has been caused by his wife’s (alleged) betrayal. Only— Pamphile adds with a syntactic brachylogy25—he misses the mark of truth, if the real truth is considered, which is one only, and unknown to most people. The expression ἀτυχω̃ν ἐπίπροσθε τη̃ς ἀληθείας μια̃ς is beautiful and effective; it is reminiscent of Plato Tht. 186c (οὑ̃ δὲ ἀληθείας τις ἀτυχήσει, ποτὲ τούτου ἐπιστήμων ἔσται;), but the preposition is carefully chosen and intentionally placed before the noun, so that the verb is used absolutely: ‘to miss’, or better ‘to get wrong’. And the pairing (in enjambement) of τίνεται with ἀτυχω̃ν is an oxymoron: whoever thinks he has the right to punish is in fact wrong. The verb τίνομαι implies the will to punish whoever is guilty of ἀδικία26: so Charisiοs is believed to hold her guilty. The verb ἀτυχέω, if followed by the genitive means ‘to miss’ (the target or something akin); but, if used absolutely, it simply means ‘to be wrong or mistaken’ and it ends up being used to denote any human mistake. Similarly, at line 891 Charisios will confess: ἠτύχηκα, ‘I made a mistake’: it belongs, then, in Menander’s (and the Peripatos’) typical language to denote an unintentional error, a misjudgement so great that one is not willing to recognize it as one’s own, due to a mistaken personal choice (ἁμάρτημα), but prefers to pass it off as a misfortune coming from outside, a stroke of fate that hits the subject as a misfortune to be endured (ἀτύχημα). The lines that follow are equally interesting, and important: “φ[υ]γει̃ν δὲ δει̃ του̃τον̣ σ̣᾿ ὅσον γ᾿ Ὀνήσιμον”; ̃ ἃ̣ μὲν γὰρ εἰπας ἀρτίως, αἰσχρὸν τ ̣ί ̣ π̣ω[ς] ̃ αὐτὴ̣ [φύγ]ω ἐ[φ]η̃κας. “ἀπολει̃θ᾿ οὑ̃τ ̣ος” · εἰτ᾿ ̃ διὰ του̃το; πότερον ἠλ̣θ[ον] εύ̣π̣ο̣ρω ̣ ̣τ ̣ά̣[τ]ῳ συνευτυχήσουσ᾿; ἂν ἄ[πο]ρος δ᾿ ᾐ̃, μ̣η̣κ̣[έτι αὐτῳ̃ προΐδω; μὰ τὸν εὐμενου̃[ντ]α μ[οι Δία κοινωνὸς ἠ̃λθον το[υ̃ βί]ου κα[ὶ] τη̃ς τύ[χη]ς. ἔπταικεν; οἴσω του̃τ[ο] λοιπὸν ὡς ἀ[εὶ δύ᾿ οἰκίας οἰκου̃νθ᾿ ὑπ᾿ [ἐκ]είνης ἀγόμε[νον προσέχοντ᾿ ἐκείνῃ ταις̃ θαλα.[

815

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‘You must get away from him as from Onesimos’!? To be sure, in what you uttered a short time ago you launched a somewhat27 shameful proposal. ‘He will be ruined!’: should I then desert him for this reason? Did I come to share his happy lot, as long as he is very rich? And if he becomes poor, then should I no more care for him? By Zeus, who shows his benevolence to me! I came here as a partner in his life and in his lot. Did he go astray? I will bear this from now on, as always: that he has two homes, that he is attracted to her, that he turns his mind to her . . .’. Clearly, Pamphile is repeating words uttered by her father; the first ‘quotation’, so to speak, (‘you must get away from him as from Onesimos’) is centered on Smikrines’ order to her to leave her husband’s house (cf. v. 703): Pamphile must get away from Charisios and his servant (obviously, to Smikrines, Onesimos is as responsible as his master, whose factotum he is). What is shameful is indeed Smikrines’ order—or suggestion—not Charisios’ behaviour: it should be noticed that Pamphile turns against her father the very epithet (αἰσχρόν) that she refused to apply to her husband’s behaviour. The second ‘quotation’ concerns her father’s prediction of Charisios’ impending downfall, which we know very well from Epitrepontes 657 ff. and 716 ff. These words seem to be a sort of answer or objection by Smikrines, who, in his preceding speech, had said that Charisios is ruined and will end up a pauper. Pamphile reacts to this with two rhetorical questions: 817 πότερον ἠ̃λθον . . . συνευτυχήσουσα; (‘did I, by any chance, come to share (only) a happy lot with him? And if he becomes a pauper shouldn’t I care for him any more?’, 819). Confronted with this eventuality, she bursts into an apotropaic expression: ‘by Zeus favorable to me!’ Obviously, this is not a swearword: it is merely a deprecation aiming to avert the chance that in the future she should no more take care of her husband.28 And then, finally, Pamphile herself answers her own question, and it is a powerful programmatic statement: κοινωνὸς ἠ̃λθον το[υ̃ βί]ου κα[ὶ] τη̃ς τύ[χη]ς (‘I came to share life with him, to be a partner in his life and in his lot’). This latter detail has emerged in the last published fragment, and it is an important one: what must be shared is the uncertainty in one’s lot. At lines 920–922 Charisios will repeat what Pamphile told her father: κοινωνὸς ἥκειν του̃ βίου / [. . . κ]οὐ δει̃ν τἀτύχημ᾿ αὐτὴν φυγει̃ν / [τὸ συμβ]εβηκός. At line 821 Pamphile surely asks a single question: ἔπταικεν; ‘has he fallen?’, ‘has he gone astray?’ (this metaphor reminds of the preceding ἁμαρτούσας, line 809). Once more, she answers her own question, and the answer comes immediately: οἴσω (‘I shall bear’). It is the language of tolerance: ‘I will bear from now on that he has two homes, is attracted to her, turns his mind to her’, and so forth. And she goes on, until, at line 830, we encounter a splendid expression: αἰθήσετ᾿ εὔνουν οὐ̃σ[αν ἐμέ—an expression containing an adjective peculiar to Menander’s conception of life, just as it was illustrated by Barigazzi, who pointed to εὔνοια as a keyword in Menander’s message as it emerges from the ending of Dyskolos

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(line 720, cf. Barigazzi 1965:52), a speech reminiscent of Aristotle’s reflections on φιλία in the Nicomachean Ethics. Eunoia is an important word for Menander and Aristotle, who distinguishes it from philia in EN 1155b33–1156a5 and then, in 1166b30– 1167a21, analyses it in detail, distinguishing it both from friendship and from love. Menander makes just the same distinction. Eunoia is the message underlying Knemon’s monologue in Act IV of Dyskolos, and here, in the final discussion between Pamphile and her father, we find a splendid confirmation. ‘Why should she throw me out or denigrate me, if she sees that I use only benevolence?’ (lines 829 ff.). With eunoia (goodwill, benevolence) she believes she will be able to solve her problem with her husband (and the other woman): this, and not love nor friendship, will be her weapon. Besides, with this weapon—as we saw before (803 ff.)—she is confident of winning the argument with her father too, with simple eunoia, rather than with cleverness in debate. Therefore, clearly eunoia appears to be a key word in this discussion: it occurs twice in the same passage, to solve two different important problems in human relationships: first her problem with her father and then that with her husband. This amounts to a fine and important confirmation for those scholars—such as Barigazzi and Gabriella Bodei Giglioni29—who did grasp and stress in Menander this simple message for everyday ethics. I would like to add, in connection with my previous remark, that Pamphile is here speaking seriously, not in jest. She is defending herself and her life against her father, who is striving to urge her to divorce. The dialogue is extremely serious, allowing no room for the comic element. On the other hand, we should be looking for some comic elements in the following scene, when Charisios arrives, in despair, saying: ‘how stupid I was when I did not understand such a woman!’. One who feels desperate and guilty for his own behaviour clearly is ridiculous. J.R. Porter, in a paper (Porter 2000) mentioned by Furley in his commentary,30 suggested that strong Euripidean echoes were to be found in Act IV of Epitrepontes, and maintained that Pamphile’s speech is reminiscent of the rheseis uttered by Euripides’ Melanippe (in Melanippe Sophè) and by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; Arnott, in turn,31 remarked that ‘by making her [Pamphile] so fluent and polished, Menander has abandoned the crudity of realism in order to create one of the finest defences of marital loyalty in ancient Greek’. I believe that, though both statements contain some truth, they should be considerably downsized. In my opinion, Menander is surely influenced by those Euripidean (and Aristophanic) models, but clearly rejects the oratorical aggressiveness that distinguished those characters, one of whom was mythical and the other paradoxical, and has instead sketched the portrait of a woman who—much more realistically—does not flaunt her σοφία, but rather appeals to her father’s (line 803) and relies on his benevolence (εὔνοια) to persuade him (804–5). At the same time, she relies

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on her own eunoia (830) and tolerance (821 ff.) to solve the problem of her relationship to her husband and (possibly) to her rival. In other words, Pamphile’s unassuming steadfastness is a whole world away from Melanippe’s and Lysistrata’s sophia and contributes to make her a credible character from daily life, being much closer to the type of wife that every man, in the ancient Greeks’ general frame of mind, would wish or hope to have. It is hardly possible to decide whether her speech in this play may echo ideas on fate or destiny elaborated by Theophrastus (who, among many lost works, also wrote a περὶ εὐτυχίας) or reflect those of Demetrius of Phalerum (author of a περὶ τύχης, also lost),32 but it surely presupposes all the great philosophical reflection on fault, guilt, and responsibility, on what is and what is not shameful (αἰσχρόν), and the moral distinctions that led precisely to Aristotle’s works on ethics. It certainly communicates a powerful message of benevolence, tolerance, and will for sound social intercourse, which is typical of Menander, but at the same time clearly reveals the foundations of his philosophical upbringing. NOTES 1. Kassel & Austin 1983–2001: vi.2 (1998) pp. 1–45. 2. ‘Der Einfluß peripatetischen Gedankenguts reicht bei Menander tiefer als bei seinen Konkurrenten auf der komischen Bühne’ (Blume 1998:6). 3. Cf. Ferrari 2001:xv. 4. Cf. also Barigazzi 1965:87–102. 5. Cf. Pasquali & De Falco 1982:x. 6. See Cinaglia, this volume. 7. See Barigazzi 1965:192–217; cf. Gaiser 1967:26–30. 8. Cf. Gomme & Sandbach 1973:378; Vogt-Spira 1992:179–183; W.D. Furley 2009:248. 9. Cf. recently Paduano 2004 and Hurst 2004. 10. The text was subsequently published by Sandbach in the Appendix to his 1990 edition (pp. 348–350). 11. Martina was able to avail himself of these fragments in his 1997 edition of the Epitrepontes. 12. W.D. Furley 2009: 86–89. 13. Or P.Louvre 7172 (= com. adesp. 1000 K-A). 14. As I demonstrated in a paper presented at the Berlin papyrology conference of 1995, and has been independently confirmed by W.D. Furley (2009:210), who was unaware of my paper. 15. I illustrate the reasons in Casanova 2013. 16. The adjective may be taken either as a singular accusative, predicative of γνώμην, or as neuter plural: the meaning does not change. 17. In Casanova 2013, I proposed πρὸ] πάντων for papyrological reasons; I am now convinced that περὶ] πάντων (Gronewald) fits the argument better (and is not too long for the space). 18. All the supplements for line 803 are mine; at the beginning of line 804, βέλτ] ιον had already been proposed by Arnott. 19. Römer restores σ]οι in line 806, and then ἔμ’ ἄνδρα] . . . τυχει̃ν; (she takes the sentence to be a question): ‘Firstly this, Daddy: do you take it for granted / that I never wronged my husband?’. I cannot follow her along this path.

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20. Δεινόν, of course, is nothing but a tentative conjecture of mine, put forward merely exempli gratia. 21. Or ‘impossible’: but Furley read λυπηρόν, rather than δυνατόν or ἀ]δύνατον (Turner). 22. Cf. Epitr. 422–7. 23. Probably not so much having exposed the child as her decision not to tell anybody. 24. The fact that another character (of an unknown play) oppose two types of βλάβαι (in fr. 688: ἀτύχημα κἀδίκημα διαφορὰν ἔχει· / τὸ μὲν διὰ τὴν τύχην γίνεται, τὸ δ᾿ αἱρέσει) is obviously no contradiction; rather, it confirms that this was a theme often discussed in Menander’s theatre. 25. This remark can hardly be referred to people’s opinion, but is clearly added by Pamphile herself, who is aware of the truth (as only a few others are). 26. Cf. e.g. h. Dem. 367 τω̃ν ἀδικησάντων τίσις ἔσσεται. 27. Römer read π̣ω. The supplement πω is mine. The word is clearly intended to mitigate αἰσχρόν. 28. W.D. Furley 2013 has now proposed a new reading for line 819 (as well as for lines 809 and 813), which in my opinion is hardly acceptable (see Casanova, forthcoming). 29. G. Bodei Giglioni, Menandro e la politica della convivenza (Bodei Giglioni 1984). 30. W.D. Furley 2009:218 f. 31. Arnott 2004:277. 32. Cf. Barigazzi 1965:25ff.

11 Menander, Aristotle, Chance and Accidental Ignorance Valeria Cinaglia

Menander’s plots and characters have often been analysed in the context of Aristotelian philosophy,1 and various scholars have attempted to show possible influences of Peripatetic philosophy on Menander’s comic production.2 This paper aims to take this line of research further: my aim is not to try to demonstrate the direct philosophical influence of Aristotle on Menander, but to show that they share a common thought-world. More specifically, the broader claim at the basis of this paper is that Menander’s construction of characters and plots and Aristotle’s philosophical analyses express analogous approaches on the subject of the relationship between knowledge and ethics; that is, they present analogous ideas on the relationship between knowledge-formation, character, choice and emotions, and of how these factors are affected by contingency and chance.3 In this paper, I focus on this latter aspect: that is, Menander’s and Aristotle’s analogous treatment of the role of chance and accidental ignorance4 in the context of people’s ethical life and choices. Various scholars have already noted Menander’s and Aristotle’s shared interest in this topic,5 but, I believe, more work can be done in showing the analogous ethical and psychological implications involved in their treatment of this subject. In particular, here, I shall focus on the kind of challenge that, in Menander and Aristotle, chance and accidental ignorance present to the agent’s reasoning and ethical understanding. Accordingly, I shall discuss whether, with respect to the action, Menander and Aristotle present the agent’s intellectual and ethical virtues as a constitutively significant factor in the process of dealing with chance events and how this aspect affects the ethical presentation of the agent. In this context, I will consider two comedies of Menander, Perikeiromene and Aspis, in which chance and accidental ignorance play a prominent role in the unfolding of the plot. In this respect, I shall argue that, despite the presence of Chance and Ignorance (Τύχη and Ἄγνοια) as prologue-speaker in these two comedies, and despite their claims to be in control of the characters on stage,6 figures can only be partly excused for the mistakes they make as a consequence of unexpected events or unknown situations. Independently from the influence of these external factors, it is the mechanism of the characters’ choices and their reactions in given circumstances that characterise them as agents of a certain kind. In the second part of the paper, I will explore these examples together

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with Aristotle’s treatment of chance and involuntary actions caused by chance and ignorance. In the Physics, in particular, Aristotle makes it clear that, in natural philosophy, the meaning of chance events is significantly affected by the agents’ reactions in response to the specific event. When this happens, it is not always easy to establish where the primary cause of the action lies and, therefore, as he claims in the Nicomachean Ethics, it is difficult to say whether the action is determined by chance or is dependent on the agent’s choice. What seems to be clear, however, is that there is a range of responses that the agent can give to accidental events and, depending on these responses, the agent can affect the ethical quality of his choice and the meaning of the event itself within the context of his life. In conclusion, I will show that the understanding of both frameworks involved is improved by the study of these significant analogies: the depth of Menander’s plots and characters is better understood in this context when compared to Aristotle’s reflection on analogous topics and, on the other hand, Aristotle’s ethical philosophy seems to find in the figures of Menandrian comedies the human material that exemplifies his thought on relevant topics.7 MENANDER’S PERIKEIROMENE AND ASPIS The first surviving part of the Perikeiromene starts in the middle of the prologue given by the personified figure of Ἄγνοια (Ignorance), who appears for the first time in extant Greek literature in this prologue.8 We are told by Ἄγνοια that an old Corinthian woman once found two exposed siblings, Glykera and Moschion: the woman decided to keep the girl with her and to give the boy to Myrrhine, a wealthy woman who was her neighbour. Before dying, the old Corinthian woman let Polemon (a soldier in love with Glykera) have the girl and, to prevent unintended (ἀκούσιον) accidents happening between them,9 she revealed to her the story of her adoption and the identity of her brother, giving the girl the old clothes that were in her cradle.10 Having learned the truth from her foster mother, Glykera decides to withhold this information from her brother: Moschion happens to have the chance of leading a comfortable life and Glykera decides, for the sake of his happiness, not to change his state of ignorance (147–150). The prologue continues and the focus now moves toward the other characters who do not know how things really stand. The divine-like figure of Ἄγνοια tells us that the insolent (θρασύς) Moschion, in love with Glykera and always hanging with intent around Polemon’s house, decided to kiss her (151–6). At this moment, Sosias, Polemon’s slave, happened to pass by the house: he saw them hugging and kissing and he told everything to Polemon. It is at this point that Ἄγνοια says: πάντα δ’ ἐξεκάετο ταυ̃θ’ ἕνεκα του̃ μέλλοντος, εἰς ὀργήν θ’ ἵνα οὑ̃τος ἀφίκητ’—ἐγὼ γὰρ ἠ̃γον οὐ φύσει

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IGNORANCE: All this flared up for the sake of what was to come, so that he might get angry (I brought him to this as he is not like this by nature, and so as to set in motion the revelation of all the remaining things) and so that they might finally discover their families.11 The incident of Polemon getting excessively angry and cutting Glykera’s hair is said to be the origin (ἀρχή) of all the following events. How much is the quality of Polemon’s reaction dependent on a totally external force? The fact of not knowing the truth is not something that Polemon can control; it is a circumstance that Ἄγνοια and the other two female characters, the old Corinthian and Glykera, contribute to creating.12 In this sense, Ἄγνοια does have an effect on Polemon.13 However, Ἄγνοια acts on an agent who is already excessive (σφoδρός) in his responses:14 Polemon’s decision to cut Glykera’s hair is an extreme act that he decides to perform himself and it is not the necessary outcome of the anger that Ἄγνοια produced. Several scholars have defined Polemon’s reaction as a misfortune (ἀτύχημα)15 caused by ignorance and, to some extent, we might say that we have here the basis for describing the situation as such. Polemon would have been right to be angry with Glykera for kissing Moschion. He loved her and treated her as a wife (489–490).16 In these circumstances, knowing that Glykera has kissed another man, Polemon would be right to feel νέμεσις, that is, righteous anger aroused by injustice,17 which is an emotion ‘generally aroused at behaviour that runs contrary to socially accepted norms’.18 If he felt this kind of emotion toward Glykera, we would be right in describing his indignation as an ἀτύχημα, when he finally discovers her to be Moschion’s sister. However, Polemon’s indignation does not stop here: it bursts out in excessive anger and this causes his violent act. Polemon transforms what could have been an ἀτύχημα into an ἀδίκημα: he does not control his temper and he makes a mistake in considering the right measure of indignation he should feel in the specific circumstance and in determining how he should react to that. This kind of ignorance depends on him and it is a kind of ignorance that is displayed in moral choice: the ἀρχή of his action cannot be placed entirely outside the agent,19 it is not dependent on his accidental ignorance of the facts but on the fact that he does not understand the right measure of anger he needs to feel towards Glykera and what he has to do in relation to her. As Pataikos suggests, Polemon has behaved badly (491–6), being in a senseless state of mind (ἀπόπληκτον): although Polemon’s angry reaction can be partly justified by his partial ignorance of the circumstances, the situation was not properly handled and this caused a state of confusion that prevented him from reasoning appropriately. He now understands what he has done and he regrets his violence to Glykera before knowing she is Moschion’s sister. Thus, independently of his state of knowledge, he recognises that he has

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not behaved properly and that he was inappropriately driven by his temper (985–8). However, because of his violent reaction, Glykera does not want to come back to him: even if she knows that Polemon did not know about her and Moschion, she cannot forgive Polemon (722–3). It is revealing that, at the end of the play, Polemon’s injury to Glykera will be excused not as an accident provoked by the fact that he did not know the kinship between her and Moschion, but because all the troubles he created were resolved in a happy ending. If we now turn to Moschion, we appreciate that his assault on Glykera is more clearly classifiable as injustice (ἀδίκημα) towards the girl and Polemon, and it is so described by Pataikos (499–503).20 It is true that Moschion’s deed is done, to some extent, out of ignorance and, for this reason, we might be inclined to excuse him for it. However, we do not and, as audience, we are more inclined to agree with Pataikos that what Moschion has done is in any case wrong. The fact that Moschion falls in love with his sister unknowingly is an ἀτύχημα. By contrast, the fact that he thinks about a plan to kiss her, knowing that Glykera lives with Polemon and Polemon loves her, cannot be described in this way. Moschion knows he is wrong in kissing her, but he still does it. Without asking her, forming the desire to possess her and planning a way to do it, he runs to her, suddenly, as soon as she appears at the door (151–6). In this way, he transforms his action into an ἀδίκημα as he does not control his desire for the girl and decides to obtain a kiss that he knows it is wrong to have: not because Glykera is his sister but because she is Polemon’s girl.21 Ἄγνοια has told the audience that Moschion is insolent (θρασύς, 151) and the audience has confirmation that he is when, for instance, after having kissed Glykera, he still wants to see her and he does not consider that she might not want him to. Daos needs to tell him to stop his stubborn attempts to enter Myrrhine’s house and see the girl immediately after she has escaped from Polemon’s house.22 Moschion’s act is different from Polemon’s also in another respect: the soldier feels regret after having assaulted Glykera but Moschion does not, and the difference in the response is sensed by the audience, which tends to sympathise with Polemon but not with Moschion.23 The ethical quality of the deeds performed in Perikeiromene seems, therefore, to have its origin in the way the characters handle their states of knowledge or accidental ignorance:24 what gives their action a different ethical colour is how characters make a decision in the context of an unexpected or unclear situation and how their actions are reflected on and discussed by the other characters. The other comedy I wish to examine, Aspis, presents analogous examples that I hope will contribute to defining more clearly Menander’s treatment of the topic of chance and accidental ignorance. At the beginning of Aspis, the slave Daos tells how, after an assault made on their camp, he identified his master Kleostratos with a corpse lying close to Kleostratos’ shield, and reports this news to Smikrines, Kleostratos’ greedy uncle (Aspis 1–92). After this first scene, the goddess Τύχη25 enters the stage and explains that Kleostratos is not dead; Daos and the others are ignorant (ἀγνοου̃σι) of what

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really happened and they are going astray (99); the goddess says who she is and claims that she is in control of the entire plot (146–8).26 Τύχη has certainly created various accidents that are at the basis of the following events; however, it is the diverse quality of human reactions aroused by these events that finally determines the ethical characterisation of the figures on stage. Accordingly, if we consider the rest of the prologue, we notice that Τύχη directs her attention to Smikrines: the wicked old man is not shown feeling any sorrow at Kleostratos’ death; on the contrary, he wants to take advantage of it, but later developments will reveal his greedy nature to everyone (143–5). We are told in the prologue that, following the announcement of Kleostratos’ death, Smikrines is attracted by his nephew’s war chest and he now plans to take advantage of the circumstance as a pretext to marry Kleostratos’ sister, though she was promised originally to Chaireas, Kleostratos’ cousin.27 From a legal point of view Smikrines is allowed to demand the girl in marriage:28 now that Kleostratos is dead, Smikrines is in danger, or so he says, of not having a reliable administrator for his property when he dies (167–171). In fact, Smikrines does not accept the choice of his younger brother, Chairestratos, to give the girl in marriage to Chaireas. Therefore, for the sake of his own property, Smikrines considers the best option that of marrying the girl himself. Smikrines’ plan is to mask his wicked intrigue as a wise solution to an ἀτύχημα, namely Kleostratos’ death, but this decision is perceived, by the others, as a demonstration of a lack of decency and human feeling.29 The old man does not consider the relevance of his age; he thinks he deserves to have Kleostratos’ wealth and he is determined to have it: he does not recognise his greed and he does not understand how his claim is improper in the situation. To thwart his designs, Daos makes up a plan: Chairestratos’ family will pretend that Chairestratos has suddenly died, Smikrines will then transfer his interest to Chairestratos’ daughter as she will inherit her father’s much more substantial property. Δα: [ ]. φερόμενον εὐθὺς ἐπ̣[ προπετη̃, διημαρτηκότ’, ἐπτ[οημένον ὄψει μεταχειριει̃ τε του̃τον εὐπόρως. ὃ βούλεται γὰρ μόνον ὁρω̃ν καὶ προσδοκω̃ν ἀλόγιστος ἔσται τη̃ς ἀληθείας κριτής. DAOS: You will see him rushing in, making mistakes, [carried away by excitement] so you will have him in your hands easily. He is only looking and thinking about this thing he wants and he will be an unreasoning judge of the truth.30 Daos’ skilfully orchestrated accident is meant to lead Smikrines to engineer another plan with the intention of making his wicked nature evident to everyone: Daos, like Τύχη, thinks that Smikrines is not acting in a humane way (ἀνθρωπίνως) and that something needs to be done to

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resolve the situation;31 through his plan, all the other characters would have enough evidence to condemn Smikrines and his selfish scheme. The interesting thing, in this scene, is that when Daos announces that Chairestratos has just died, he says, quoting tragic lines, that it is τύχη and not sound judgement (εὐβουλία) that controls human beings (411). However, what he is doing here actually proves the contrary: chance affects people’s life in various ways but people’s responses to it are also important. Arguably Kleostratos’ appearance, at the end of Act IV (491–505), will untie the whole knot; however, it is Smikrines’ reaction to the various events that identifies him as a certain kind of agent, unmasks his wicked intention, unleashes the other characters’ negative judgment on his actions and makes the plot evolve towards the happy ending. ARISTOTLE These ideas can plausibly be linked to Aristotle’s treatment of chance and accidental ignorance in his works on ethics and physics. It has already been noted that the common ground that chance and accidental ignorance share, in Aristotle as in Menander, is that of events that are external to human agency and just happen to occur in human life.32 Within the context of this analogy, I believe that more can be said about the attention that both Menander and Aristotle seem to pay to the agent’s response to these kinds of events. Also in Aristotle, as we have just seen in Menander, we find the idea that, given an unexpected circumstance, the agent and the action are labelled with a name that indicates the ethical quality of the action, depending on the agent’s response to the accidental circumstance in which he found himself acting. It is this involvement that identifies the quality of the agent of an action that he may or may not have expected to be in a position to perform. Thus, the agent, being involved in an event, inevitably becomes significantly active because, depending on the response he gives, he decides what significance the accident has for him and his ethical life. In Physics II, Aristotle offers an extensive treatment of the topic of chance. The context in which he is treating this topic is a general inquiry on nature (φύσις), which is defined as a source and cause of change and remaining unchanged in that to which it belongs primarily and of itself and not by virtue of concurrence (192b20–23). Within this inquiry, Aristotle notes that it is possible that certain things owe their change, movement and rest not to nature but to causes that are external to the φύσις of the moving or resting beings (192b16–18).33 At first, human beings are included in the category of things that are made and develop according to nature’s plan and possess an internal origin of change, namely, their own nature (193a35-b21). However, in Physics II, chapters 4 to 6, we find cases in which rational beings are shown to not only develop and bring to perfection their inner φύσις but also to adapt to things or events that are external to it, for instance, accidental events

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(τὸ αὐτόματον). Aristotle therefore considers accidental events involving human beings with a view to deciding whether they can be characterised as natural causes. One difficulty that Aristotle seems to face derives from the fact that, when an accidental event happens in the human realm, it seems to change its nature: it does not seem any longer to have been produced by chance but appears as if planned by nature or thought.34 In fact, when a rational being is affected by an event per accidens, he transforms it into chance using the event itself as a means through which, with thought and choice, he can create his own good or bad luck; thus, the accident turns out not to be in vain but to take place for some sort of purpose (ἕνεκά του). This is why, when an automatic event strikes a human being, it is no longer categorised as τὸ αὐτόματον but as τύχη. δη̃λον ἄρα ὅτι ἡ τύχη αἰτία κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς ἐν τοι̃ς κατὰ προαίρεσιν τω̃ν ἕνεκά του. διὸ περὶ τὸ αὐτὸ διάνοια καὶ τύχη· ἡ γὰρ προαίρεσις οὐκ ἄνευ διανοίας. It is evident then that τύχη is a cause per accidens of things done according to choice that serve a purpose. Hence, τύχη [is concerned] with the same [class of events] as thought [is] for there is no choice without thought.35 Therefore, Aristotle concludes that chance events are defined as concurrent external causes36 that, together with human choice, produce change and rest in human beings and, thanks to human rational choice, they appear to happen for some purpose and not in vain, that is to say, they produce the opportunity for further rational action.37 Turning back to Menander, we can find examples that are particularly suitable for illustrating what I have just said about Aristotle’s thinking on this topic. In Aspis, Menander presents us with a plot in which accidental events of different types are produced by the rational thought and (good or bad) choices of his characters: it is worth looking more closely at this material to see whether we can find ideas that are analogous to those of Aristotle. I have already explained how, in this play, it appears that a misfortune has happened to Kleostratos, and that Smikrines has taken advantage of it. When Daos conceives his plan to unmask Smikrines, he engineers another misfortune, pretending that Chairestratos has died. The interesting thing here is that Daos provides an accidental event, though planning to achieve an explicit aim, that is, to unmask Smikrines. We are offered here an insight into how Menander conceives chance: we might say that, Daos’ role here can be associated with that of Τύχη, and to some extent Ἄγνοια, because, like the prologue-speakers, he decides to surprise the other characters with an accident that is intended to bring about certain discoveries. Daos knows that, when he provides the accidental event, Smikrines will take advantage of it in some way and it will be clear to everyone that he and his actions are

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wicked. The unfortunate event, that is, Chairestratos’ death, will create the desired results: as predicted by Daos, Smikrines uses it as an opportunity to take Chairestratos’ daughter as his wife with the intention of getting a richer estate. However, if Chairestratos’ death is directed by Daos, Smikrines’ response is not a necessary outcome of this event: Smikrines decides to make (bad) ethical choices when he is given the chance; these choices disclose his true nature to him and the other characters. From Aristotle’s standpoint, Smikrines has exercised a choice and he has become the cause of the quality of his action: he cannot choose what has happened (Kleostratos’ and Chairestratos’ alleged deaths) but he can choose what to do about things that have happened to him.38 The circumstances of the plot are provided by divine intervention, chance or Daos’ ruse, but the choice itself is made by people like Smikrines who have the opportunity. This being said, Aristotle also appreciates that, from an ethical point of view, in the context of acts performed in circumstances of chance and accidental ignorance, it becomes difficult to define exactly the agent’s level of responsibility for his deeds: that is, it is difficult to draw the line between voluntary acts, which can be praised or blamed, and involuntary acts, induced by external causes, and which can be excused.39 In particular, involuntary actions are classified by Aristotle as acts done under compulsion and acts done through ignorance (EN 1109b35–1110a1). In treating the first category of involuntary acts done under compulsion, Aristotle specifies that what we sometimes claim to have done under compulsion and involuntarily is indeed not well described in those terms. One cannot claim, for example, that one has acted under the compulsion of passions (1110b9–17). In this case, the person is just incontinent (ἀκρατής), and the cause of the action is internal and not external to the agent: his action is therefore voluntary.40 Aristotle explains that only in situations in which the agent, under compulsion of an external force, contributes nothing by his choices can we say that he did something involuntary; for all other cases implying a choice, a sharp distinction is difficult. The examples offered below may clarify this point. Ex. 1 presents an action done throughout the agency of an external force that completely controls the agent; Ex. 2 refers to an action done under external compulsion but one that requires, to some extent, human choice to be performed: Ex. 1: βίαιον δὲ οὑ̃ ἡ ἀρχὴ ἔξωθεν, τοιαύτη οὐ̃σα ἐν ᾑ̃ μηδὲν συμβάλλεται ̃ εἰ πνευ̃μα κομίσαι ποι ἢ ἄνθρωποι κύριοι ὁ πράττων ἢ ὁ πάσχων, οἱον ὄντες. ̃ Ex. 2: ὅσα δὲ διὰ φόβον μειζόνων κακω̃ν πράττεται ἢ διὰ καλόν τι, οἱον εἰ τύραννος προστάττοι αἰσχρόν τι πρα̃ξαι κύριος ὢν γονέων καὶ τέκνων, καὶ πράξαντος μὲν σῴζοιντο μὴ πράξαντος δ’ ἀποθνήσκοιεν, ἀμφισβήτησιν ἔχει πότερον ἀκούσιά ἐστιν ἢ ἑκούσια. Ex. 1: Forced [is the action] whose origin is outside of the [subject], this being [the action] in which the one who acts or is acted upon

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contributes nothing, for example if he was carried away somewhere by the wind or by men holding him under their power. Ex. 2: But those things that are done by fear of greater evils or for some sort of good—for example if a tyrant, who has in his power [someone’s] parents and children, orders him to do something shameful and, if he does it, they would be saved and, if he does not, they would die—give room for a debate on whether they are non-voluntary or voluntary.41 The difficulty that Aristotle has in defining as involuntary or not cases that are different from Ex. 1 is that, in cases such as Ex. 2, the agent chooses something. In addition, once the agent chooses, even if he is in a situation of constraint, he becomes the ἀρχή of this action. καὶ γὰρ ἡ ἀρχὴ του̃ κινει̃ν τὰ ὀργανικὰ μέρη ἐν ται̃ς τοιαύταις πράξεσιν ἐν αὐτῳ̃ ἐστίν· ὡ̃ν δ’ ἐν αὐτῳ̃ ἡ ἀρχή, ἐπ’ αὐτῳ̃ καὶ τὸ πράττειν καὶ μή. Thus, they [the actions explained by Ex. 2] have in the agent the origin of the movement of the parts of the body instrumental to the act. And because the origin is in the agent it is up to the agent to do it or not to do it.42 Consequently, the act is defined as a mixed case, and it is closer to a voluntary than to an involuntary action. Consequently, it is possible to say that the evaluation and the characterisation of an action that takes its origin from an external event are in any case based on the person that responds to it: the external event is just a concurrent cause but does not determine the agent’s choice.43 Considering now actions done through ignorance, Aristotle again specifies that we cannot indiscriminately list all of them as involuntary. Actions that are done in ignorance of the right choice to be taken are definitely voluntary: this ignorance is again internal to the agent as he, first of all, does not know the best thing to do before performing the action (1111a22-b3). However, if the agent is ignorant of the particular circumstances in which he finds himself acting and performs the action, we characterise the action in different ways when we have examined the reaction of the agent after having done the deed and having come to know how things really were. If the agent regrets what he has done in ignorance, the action is genuinely unintended, that is to say involuntary. On the other hand, if the agent does not regret what he has done, then the action is described as not genuinely involuntary. In fact, even if he did not know the particulars of the action before doing it, he appears to be happy about what he has done in ignorance because he does not feel pain about it (1110b18–22). Regarding what we have been saying so far about Aristotle, the characters of Polemon and Moschion in Perikeiromene offer interesting examples. On the one hand, both are driven by a kind of passion that overpowers their

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better judgment in relation to the best choice to make: in this respect, they act voluntarily and they perform actions that are unjust. On the other hand, both Polemon and Moschion are also ignorant about the real identity of people involved in their actions and, to some extent, they act in ignorance. When they discover the truth, however, Polemon is even more ashamed of his deed and Moschion is not: these responses affect the way in which they and their acts are viewed by the audience. The first is an impetuous, reactive act, done in ignorance of the actual circumstances: it is still seen as an unjust, violent act but it is clearly an act that Polemon wishes he had not performed; the other is a voluntary act of bravado typical of a profligate young lover who does not show regret and would be likely to do similar sorts of things in the future. In addition to that, Aristotle further argues that, if the attitude of the agent after the action is important to identify its quality, the same applies for the attitude of the agent before the deed: this aspect is of key importance, for instance, from a juridical point of view, to classify an injury as an act done through ignorance. We are told by Aristotle that there are three kinds of injuries that might be done with respect to other people: ἀτύχημα, ἁμάρτημα and ἀδίκημα. In the case of misfortune (ἀτύχημα), the agent is completely ignorant of the person, the instrument and the aim of the action. To distinguish the two other cases of injury, the critical element that we need to know is what the attitude of the agent was before doing the deed. The fact that the person acted with or without vicious disposition defines the deed as an ἁμάρτημα or ἀδίκημα. [1] ὅταν μὲν οὐ̃ν παραλόγως ἡ βλάβη γένηται, ἀτύχημα· [2] ὅταν δὲ μὴ παραλόγως, ἄνευ δὲ κακίας, ἁμάρτημα (ἁμαρτάνει μὲν γὰρ ὅταν ἡ ἀρχὴ ἐν αὐτῳ̃ ᾐ̃ τη̃ς αἰτίας, ἀτυχει̃ δ’ ὅταν ἔξωθεν)· [3] ὅταν δὲ εἰδὼς μὲν [a] μὴ ̃ ὅσα τε διὰ θυμὸν καὶ ἄλλα πάθη, ὅσα προβουλεύσας δέ, ἀδίκημα, οἱον ἀναγκαι̃α ἢ φυσικὰ συμβαίνει τοι̃ς ἀνθρώποις· ταυ̃τα γὰρ βλάπτοντες καὶ ἁμαρτάνοντες ἀδικου̃σι μέν, καὶ ἀδικήματά ἐστιν, οὐ μέντοι πω ἄδικοι διὰ ταυ̃τα οὐδὲ πονηροί· οὐ γὰρ διὰ μοχθηρίαν ἡ βλάβη· [b] ὅταν δ’ ἐκ προαιρέσεως, ἄδικος καὶ μοχθηρός. [1] When the harm done is contrary to calculation, it is a misfortune; [2] when it is not contrary to calculation yet without vice, it is an error, (for one is mistaken when the source which causes the harm is in him, [and] one is unfortunate when it is outside [him]); [3] when a man acts knowingly but [a] without previous deliberation, the harm is an injustice (e.g. like those through anger or passion which are compelling or natural to men), for although men act unjustly when they cause harm and are mistaken, and the effect is unjust, still they are not yet unjust and wicked men because of these actions, since the harm done results not through an evil habit; but [b] when a man acts with deliberation, he is unjust and evil.44

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To act without a vicious disposition modifies the way in which the action is seen. Moreover, as we have seen before, the regret that the agent feels after an action done in ignorance determines the classification of the action as involuntary: this means that the agent acted in a certain way because he did not know certain facts and not because of his vicious disposition. On the other hand, not feeling pain means that the agent is overall satisfied with what he has done in ignorance and, therefore, it means that he acted with a genuine intent to produce certain results and he would do that again even in circumstances when he exactly knows how things stand. This is why, in the Rhetoric to Alexander, it is argued that, if we want to try to defend someone from the accusation of having been unjust, we have to demonstrate that he did the act but that the damage done to the other person has not been done voluntarily and, therefore, it has been done through genuine ignorance and without a vicious disposition;45 thus, we need to present the deed as an ἁμάρτημα rather than an ἀδίκημα. To give an example of this sort of distinction, we can go back to Polemon: we know that he is angry with Glykera because he did not know that she let Moschion kiss her because she was his sister and, because of this kind of ignorance, Polemon decided to cut her hair to punish her. This decision is taken driven by temper (διὰ θυμόν) and it is an ἀδίκημα of the first kind (that is, of the kind 3(a): εἰδὼς μὲν μὴ προβουλεύσας δέ according to the paragraph quoted above). Polemon’s reaction is unjust because it is excessive independently of his ignorance of the facts: as a matter of fact, he feels regret immediately for what he has done in a moment of anger even before discovering the whole truth. However, we also know that Polemon did have some reasons to get angry because he really thought he had been wronged by Glykera. Had he managed his anger more appropriately, his harm could have been classified as an ἀτύχημα, or more precisely, as a ἁμάρτημα because it would have been done in ignorance responding to a supposed slight: therefore it would have been done with calculation but without a vicious disposition (that is, case 2: μὴ παραλόγως ἄνευ δὲ κακίας). During the comedy, in fact, Polemon regrets his actions for two reasons: he understands that he has misbehaved because he acted out of excessive anger and in ignorance.46 Moschion, on the other hand, performs an action that marks the agent as ἄδικος and also μοχθηρός. He kisses a girl who lives in someone else’s house, who has decided to give herself to a specific man, and he does it while she is not expecting the kiss. From this point of view, Moschion had all the pieces of information he needed to refrain from kissing Glykera but he did it nevertheless; he took his decision according to what his desire suggested to him and he also planned it. His action is more clearly classifiable as an ἀδίκημα of the kind 3(b) (that is, εἰδὼς καὶ ἐκ προαιρέσεως). Smikrines, in the Aspis, represents another example of 3(b) as independently of the legal position, Smikrines’ motivations for marrying the two girls are ethically wrong and are part of a wicked, reasoned plan.

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In conclusion, I hope to have shown that there is a range of ideas that seem to indicate a common thought-world between Menander and Aristotle with respect to these topics. For both Aristotle and Menander, in matters of accidental event and accidental ignorance, the specification of the agent’s character and choices depends significantly on what the agent decides to do according to his good or bad motivation. Even in cases in which there is an external element that interferes with one’s life, the agent should be able to make appropriate use of it to produce an ethically correct action. I hope to have explained how Aristotle and Menander find this topic relevant, and how they aim to analyse the part that human rationality takes in circumstances of chance or accidental ignorance. In Aristotle, chance events, in the natural realm, are given different names according to how human thought and choice decide to take advantage of them. In matters of ethics the response that the agent gives, in cases of accidental events, and his attitude before and after the deed is indispensable for characterising actions as good or bad, voluntary or nonvoluntary. Aristotle concludes that few of the so-called involuntary actions can be said to have been compelled by accidental external events. For the most part, in cases of accidental events or accidental ignorance, human choice and right or wrong ethical habituation are the variables to take into account in order to classify the specific action as a voluntary action, an error or an injustice. Menander, in his turn, underlines an analogous point: he constructs plots in which characters affected by accidents and ignorance need to make choices and, in doing so, they reveal their true nature. He is interested in drawing a distinction between the quality of their choices in the face of various accidents: different people, acting in analogous situations of misfortune or ignorance, react in different ways according to their desires and their reasoned choices. Thus, I hope to have shown that the way in which Menander presents his characters to his audience corresponds to the analysis that Aristotle would give of their actions. That is, the ethical and psychological parameters within which Menander constructs his characters in this context are analogous to the ones suggested here by Aristotle. Accordingly, to promote this kind of parallel analysis would significantly help the understanding of the characterization of key Menandrian figures and also that of the intellectual and ideological context of Menander’s plays. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

Post 1938; Fortenbaugh 1974; Munteanu 2002; Scafuro 2003. Tierney 1936; Webster 1950; Barigazzi 1965; Gaiser 1967. For further discussion on this topic, see Cinaglia 2011, 2012. I am using the expression ‘accidental ignorance’ to distinguish ignorance of particulars that we cannot control, namely, a kind of ‘nonculpable ignorance’ from the ethical ignorance to which we are led by incontinence and intemperance (Sorabji 1980:235).

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5. See particularly Tierney 1936 and Barigazzi 1965:135–160, who explore this theme with specific reference to the prologue of the Perikeiromene; and Gutzwiller 2000. 6. For a detailed account of the discussion about the interaction (or lack of interaction) between divine prologue-speakers and human characters in Menander’s comedy and its relation with its Aristophanic and tragic predecessors, see Gutzwiller 2000:132–7 and Miles, this volume. See also Stafford 2000:13 on the role of personifications in Menandrian comedies. 7. The broader research question behind this idea is that the study of these analogies raises questions about how far these resemblances are limited to Aristotle and Menander or form part of the thought-world of Athens in the fourth (or fifth and fourth) century BC, and whether we can record possible changes in that thought-world. This analysis goes beyond the scope of this paper, but it is further explored in Cinaglia 2011:206–210. 8. With respect to visual representations, we have two definite images of Ἄγνοια. In one of them (LIMC Agnoia 1), she is a female figure, and the picture is probably part of an illustrated edition of the Perikeiromene. In the other (LIMC Agnoia 2), she is presiding at the murder of Laius by Oedipus, turning her face away from the crime that Oedipus is about to perform. 9. Men. Perik. 136–142. 10. It is thanks to these tokens of recognition that, at the end of the comedy, Glykera’s and Moschion’s identity as citizens and as offspring of Polemon’s friend, Pataikos, will be revealed. 11. Men. Perik. 162–7. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. With respect to this passage, Körte suggests instead ending the parenthetical expression of Ἄγνοια at ἐγὼ γὰρ ἠ̃γον οὐ φύσει τοιου̃τον ὄντα του̃τον, so as to oppose her negative influence on Polemon to the rest of the sentence, ἀρχὴν δ’ ἵνα λάβηι μηνύσεως τὰ λοιπά τούς θ’ αὑτω̃ν ποτε εὕροιεν, describing the good effect of the discovery produced by Polemon’s anger (Körte 1938 ad loc.). 12. ‘L’inciso è inoltre importante per la caratterizzazione di Polemone, che per la prima volta viene presentato come privo delle abituali proprietà di miles comico: anche se egli è σφοδρός, l’eccessiva violenza della sua ira è causata dalle circostanze eccezionali, non è un aspetto costante del suo carattere’ (Lamagna 1994 ad 178). See also, for a contrasting account of Polemon’s character, Friedrich 1953:164–5. 13. See Barigazzi 1965:155. For a broader discussion of the modes of the influence of Ἄγνοια on Polemon see Fortenbaugh 1974; Zagagi 1990; and also Miles, this volume. 14. For an analogous treatment of this topic with regard to Homeric heroes, see Lloyd-Jones 1971:23; Schmitt 1990: 87–129; Lesky [1961] 2001:175. 15. See Lamagna 1994:56; Tierney 1936: 249 and Webster 1950:204–5. Analogously, commenting on Men. Perik. 162–7, Capps 1910 ad loc. and Gomme & Sandbach 1973 ad loc. 16. Although Polemon treated Glykera as a wife, legally she was not, and Polemon had no rights over her, on paper. For further details on this topic, see Konstan 1987:127; Omitowoju 2002:216–217; Traill 2008:40–44; and Sommerstein, this volume. 17. LSJ, s. v. 18. Konstan 2006:116. 19. See also Fortenbaugh 1974:435–6. 20. ‘The points on which Pataikos is clear are (1) that Polemon has a cause for private complaint at least, ‘if he can discuss the matter with Moschion’,

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21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

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(2) that Moschion’s offence is not one that can be redressed by forcible means but that if Polemon uses force to recover Glykera he will be acting illegally and be condemned when brought to trial’ (Gomme & Sandbach 1973 ad loc.) It is true that the status of Glykera in Polemon’s house was not clear: she had not been given to the soldier by her (citizen) father but by the old Corinthian woman who claimed to be her mother. For this reason, Glykera is not marriageable and Polemon has no rights over her. However, those who knew the situation, including Moschion, knew the kind of affectionate relationship that existed between Glykera and Polemon. On this point, see Rosivach 1998:54; Omitowoju 2002:216; Traill 2008:41; and Sommerstein, this volume. Men. Perik. 336–41. See Traill 2008:33–40. Goldberg 1980:57. See also Zagagi 1990:77–8 and Vogt-Spira 1992:116–120. In the fourth century BC, τύχη became quite an important concept and its cult seems to start in this very period in Athens, Thebes, Megara and Corinth (Der Neue Pauly s.v.). It is also possible that she was characterised by a particular kind of costume (LIMC s.v.), which was easily recognised by the audience (Gomme & Sandbach 1973:73). For a more detailed account of these line and their dramatic implications, see Zagagi 1990:65–67; Vogt-Spira 1992:78–81; and Miles, this volume. Men. Aspis 114–129; see Goldberg 1980:34. With Kleostratos and his father dead, the girl has in fact become an ἐπίκληρος (heiress) and Smikrines, as her paternal uncle, is entitled to ask her hand. For further discussion see Harrison 1968:10–11 and, with specific reference to this play, Gomme & Sandbach 1973:29 n.1 and 76–77; MacDowell 1982; P. Brown 1983. See also Blume, this volume. Men. Aspis 257; 260 and 307–9. Smikrines’ interpretation of the Athenian law is not appropriate in this context: this element highlights the negative aspects of Smikrines’ personality. Men. Aspis 323–7. This theme seems to be set out explicitly in Plautus’ Rudens. In the prologue, Arcturus states that Jupiter sends gods into the world to ascertain those who act correctly and those who do not so that he can then punish or reward them accordingly (Plaut. Rud. 9–30). See also Zagagi 1990:78. On this analogy, see Tierney 1936, esp. 224, and Gutzwiller 2000:116–124. On this specific passage see W.D. Ross 1936:499–500. Arist. Ph. 196b21–4. For extended commentary on the meaning of these lines, see Lennox 1984:58–60. Arist. Ph. 197a5–8. Translations are adapted from Apostle 1969 for all passages of Ph. And not natural causes: see Arist. Ph. 198a9–13. ‘Because the beneficial results of natural processes occur regularly “always or for the most part” they cannot be the outcome of chance which would yield beneficial results only irregularly’ (Granger 1993:168). See also Hankinson 1998:133–140. See Sorabji 1980:227–245. Cf. Arist. EN 1112a18–35. Arist. EN 1109b30–4. On the relation between involuntariness and moral responsibility in Aristotle, see Sorabji 1980:243–256. Arist. EN III 2, 1110b26–11a2. ‘An action in the sense of what is done (or what might be done) is right, wrong, appropriate or not, for reasons grounded in external situation. But in praising or condemning we consider not what is done but the doing; it is to this that voluntary applies’ (Broadie 1991:125).

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41. Arist. EN 1110a1–8. Translations are adapted from Apostle 1975 for all passages of EN. 42. Arist. EN 1110a15–18. 43. ‘Admittedly, he [Aristotle] thinks that there is an internal origin of voluntary conduct, but an internal origin may be a member of a chain which stretches back ultimately to external factors [. . .] the notion of an internal origin needs not to exclude external co-operating influences’ (Sorabji 1980:321). On this topic, see also D.J. Furley 1980; Irwin 1980; and Meyer 1994. 44. Arist. EN 1135b16–25. 45. [Arist.] Rhet. ad Al. 4, 1427b5–8. 46. Men. Perik. 982–9.

12 Melancholic Lovers in Menander Christophe Cusset

Molière, whose comic theatre is the direct heir to New Comedy, gives as a subtitle to his Misanthrope: l’Atrabiliaire amoureux, ‘the cantankerous man in love’. By doing this, he attracts our attention to the fact that a character can be both melancholic and in love at the same time, and it is on the connection of these two states of being that I would like to focus here, starting from the example furnished to us by the character of Pheidias in Menander’s Phasma, the fragments of which have been perhaps a little neglected since the discovery of the Bodmer papyrus so greatly extended the surviving Menandrian corpus. Melancholy is associated, from the origin of Hippocratic medicine, with the four humours (which are blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) that condition man’s health through an equilibrium that exists between them. Each of these humors is associated with a quality (cold, dryness, heat, humidity), with a season, and with a period of life. This is not a simple character disposition as in modern usage, but a state of serious pathology1 that assumes a relationship between illness of the body and illness of the soul, without knowing clearly whether the excess of black bile is the cause of abnormal behaviour or, on the contrary, one of its effects. In any event, melancholy shifts very quickly to the intersection of body and soul to become an affection directly linked to the psyche. Melancholic behaviour is a well-known element in the theatre of Menander, who took advantage of contemporary advances in medicine to embellish his characters. It is also in Menander that one finds for the first time the expression χολὴ μέλαινα used to designate an excess of melancholic madness in Epitrepontes (880–1). So, after recalling the constituent parts of ordinary melancholy in Menander’s drama, I would like to try to show that this essentially mental disorder is associated directly, in the case of Pheidias in the Phasma, with love sickness, to make clear certain more general features of erotic behaviour in Menander. MELANCHOLIC BEHAVIOUR Melancholic behaviour is best described and best utilized in the plot by the dramatist in Aspis. This is well known and I will simply recall the essential

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elements here.2 In this comedy, Chairestratos is despondent because of the wickedness and avarice of his brother Smikrines, who, on the announcement of the death of their nephew Kleostratos, decides to marry the latter’s sister, who had been destined to be married to Chairestratos’ stepson Chaireas. Faced with this situation, Chairestratos wants only to quit life as quickly as possible (278–283), and retires to his home where he remains prostrate in obscurity. Daos, Chairestratos’ slave, presses Chairestratos to abandon this depressive state (299–300 cf. ἀθυμει̃ν), but the latter presents the seriousness of his condition as follows (311–315 J = 305–309 S): [Χα] Δα̃ε παι̃, κακω̃ς ἔχω. μελαγχολω̃ τοι̃ς πράγμασιν· μὰ τοὺς θεούς, οὐκ εἴμ᾿ ἐν ἐμαυτου̃, μαίνομαι δ᾿ ἀκαρὴς πάνυ· ὁ καλὸς ἀδελφὸς εἰς τοσαύτην ἔκστασιν ἤδη καθίστησίν με τη̃ι πονηρίαι. Chairestratos : Daos, my boy, I’m ill. The affair’s produced a black Depression. No, by the gods, I can’t control myself, I’m practically totally deranged. My noble brother Is driving me to such distraction by his villainy!3 The character here multiplies the expressions of his internal malady, caused by his brother’s villainy: he uses everyday expressions, but also more technical terms like ἔκστασις or again the verb μελαγχολω̃, which is surely meant to be understood in its proper medical sense, and not with the current meaning of μαίνομαι as this verb also occurs. This descriptive, mainly asyndetic accumulation endeavors to best describe the malady that Chairestratos experiences. Chairestratos analyses the effects that his elder brother Smikrines’ basic wickedness has upon him: Chairestratos is going mad as a result of the interior rage that undermines him. He expresses his ill-being in several ways: first in a neutral and general way (κακω̃ς ἔχω); then he gives a precise diagnosis of what is going on within him (μελαγχολω̃), before evoking the psychological effects of his physiological derangement (μαίνομαι). He is able to make this analysis because he has not yet quite descended into madness (n.b. ἀκαρὴς). This effort at specification itself casts a spotlight on what the character of Chairestratos is undergoing: but this constitutional weakness of the character is justly transformed by the slave Daos in what follows into dramaturgic and strategic force (337–350 J = 329–342 S): (Δα) δει̃ τραγωιδη̃σαι πάθος ἀλλοι̃ον ὑμα̃ς· ὃ γὰρ ὑπει̃πας ἀρ[τίως δόξαι σε δει̃ νυ̃ν, εἰς ἀθυμίαν τινὰ ἐλθόντα τω̃ι τε του̃ νεανίσκου πάθει

330

Melancholic Lovers in Menander τη̃ς τ᾿ ἐκδιδομένης παιδός, ὅτι τε τουτονὶ ὁρα̃ις ἀθυμου̃ντ᾿ οὐ μετρίως ὃν νενόμικας ὑὸν σεαυτου̃, τω̃ν ἄφνω τούτων τινὶ κακω̃ν γενέσθαι περιπετη̃· τὰ πλει̃στα δὲ ἅπασιν ἀρρωστήματ᾿ ἐκ λύπης σχεδόν ̃ καὶ ἐστιν· φύσει δέ σ᾿ ὄντα πικρὸν εὐ̃ οἰδα μελαγχολικόν. ἔπειτα παραληφθήσεται ἐνταυ̃θ᾿ ἰατρός τις φιλοσοφω̃ν καὶ λέγων ̃ πλευρι̃τιν εἰναι τὸ κακὸν ἢ φρενι̃τιν ἢ τούτων τι τω̃ν ταχέως ἀναιρούντων.

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Daos : You must perform A sombre tragedy. What you just said Must now come true for you—apparently. You slump into depression through the ordeal Of that young man and his intended bride, And through observing Chaireas sunk in Deep gloom, the boy you’ve looked on as your own son. So you fall prey to one of these acute Afflictions. Grief’s the likely cause of most Of this world’s ailments. And I know you have This bitter side to you, this proneness to Depression. Next, a doctor will be called, An intellectual ; ‘Pleurisy’s the trouble’, He’ll say, or ‘phrenic inflammation’, or one of Those things that’s quickly fatal. In this famous passage, we see that Daos describes, with precision and according to the principles of Hippocratic medicine, the forms of melancholic depression (ἀθυμίαν) that he explains in a general way as the consequence of sorrow (τὰ πλει̃στα δὲ / ἅπασιν ἀρρωστήματ᾿ ἐκ λύπης σχεδόν): the excess of black bile is the cause of the character’s dark humour. It is worth emphasizing that Daos immediately perceives the dramaturgic potential in the figure’s melancholic state: indeed this remark should draw our attention to the interest that the melancholic constitution has more generally for Menander’s theatrical works. At issue are probably the corporeal symptoms themselves and the emotional troubles that are caused by black bile in the melancholic state (as the whole body is afflicted by sympathetic convulsions of the heart) such as palpitation, trembling, problems with vision, stammering or loss of speech, all characteristics with rich dramatic potential.4 Such an observation of a dramaturgical order invites us to consider the use that Menander makes elsewhere of the verb μελαγχολω̃, which is often thought to be expressive of metaphoric usage, equivalent to μαίνομαι. Here I think primarily of the character Knemon in the Dyskolos: the old

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misanthrope, who does not seem to be an ‘atrabilious’ person in the medical sense of the term,5 yet he is deemed μελαγχολω̃ν (89) by the slave Pyrrhias whom the enraged old man pursues and bombards with clumps of earth and stones; the term here seems meant to be understood in the sense of “crazy”,6 as the repeated use of the verb μαίνομαι at lines 82 and 116 would appear to confirm. There is however every reason to think that the composite noun is originally a technical term, though one that passed into everyday language,7 and we might ask ourselves about the effect of its use by Pyrrhias, who has already earlier characterized the old man’s behaviour as madness. Yet at lines 88–90, the slave posits several hypotheses on the old man’s nature that are by way of an explanation of his mad behaviour. Without going so far as to say that he makes a medical diagnosis of the old man, it is not impossible that he uses a verb that, in current usage, has retained its medical connotations. This use of the verb, in any case, should be linked to the fact that misanthropy, which is Knemon’s primary character trait, is one of the symptoms, among others, that suggest melancholy. The melancholic state is most notably characterized by a marked lack of interest in the outside world, a disinclination for activity and loss of the capacity to love, which are also typical of Knemon. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that Menander here is playing on the double sense of the verb μελαγχολω̃ and that, behind the current usage in the sense of ‘to be crazy’, he is also making reference to the behavioural disorder of the misanthrope, who is shut in on himself, a sign of his dissatisfaction with the world, and one that could be the present result of mourning for an unfinished past, an old wound that has not healed, characteristic of the melancholic crisis. It would perhaps be possible to distinguish between a latent underlying melancholic temper and a depressive melancholic crisis that shows itself in significant physiological effects. It is perhaps this type of distinction that allows us to best understand the relationship between melancholy and eros, the relationship of particular interest to us. MELANCHOLY AND EROS To better appreciate this relationship, we should look briefly at the fragments of Phasma, which feature a character who can well be termed a ‘melancholic lover’. At the play’s beginning, two figures are in dialogue with one another: Pheidias and a slave who may at one time have served as his paidagogos (9–28): ὅταν δ’ ἀγρυπνει̃ν εἴπηις, τί σο[ι τὸ δυσχερές; τὴν αἰτίαν γνώσῃ· περιπατει̃ς κ[ατ᾽ ἀγοράν. εἰση̃λθες εὐθύς, ἂν κοπιάσηις τ ̣[ὰ σκέλη· μαλακω̃ς ἐλούσω· πάλιν ἀναστ[ὰς περιπατει̃ς πρὸς ἡδονήν· ὕπνος αὐτὸς ὁ βί[ος ἐστί σοι

10

Melancholic Lovers in Menander τὸ πέρας· κακὸν ἔχεις οὐδέν, ἡ ν[όσος δέ σου ἔσθ’ ἣν διη̃λθες. φορτικώτερο[ν δέ τι ἐπέρχεταί μοι, τρόφιμε—συγγνώ[μην δ’ ἔχε. τὸ δὴ λεγόμενον, οὐκ ἔχεις ὅπο[ι χέσηις ὑπὸ τω̃ν ἀγαθω̃ν, εὐ̃ ἴσθι. (Φε.) μὴ ὥ[ρασί γε ἵκοιο. (?Πα.) τἀληθη̃ λέγω, νὴ τοὺς θε[ούς· του̃τ’ ἐστὶ τἀρρώστημα. (Φε.) καὶ μὴ[ν – ‿ – ἀτόπως ἐμαυτου̃ καὶ βαρέως [ἔχω σφόδρα. [?Πα.] ά̣σ̣θ̣ε̣νικόν ἐστι τἀνόητο[ν ̃ πάνυ γὰρ ταυτὶ λελο̣[γισται κατὰ τρόπον. [Φε.] εἰἑν· τί μοι παραινει̃ς; (?Πα.) ὅ τι παρ[αινω̃; του̃τ᾽ ἐγώ. ̃ , Φειδία, εἰ μέν τι κακὸν ἀληθὲς εἰχες ζητει̃ν ἀληθὲς φάρμακον τούτου σ’ ἔδει· νυ̃ν δ’ οὐκ ἔχεις· κενὸν εὑρὲ καὶ τὸ φάρμακον πρὸς τὸ κενόν, οἰήθητι δ’ ὠφελει̃ν τί σε. SYROS (?) When you complain of sleeplessness, what’s really Your [problem] ? I’ll tell you the cause. You stroll [All round the market], come straight home when [legs] Are weary, bathe in luxury. Then up you get And [take a] pleasant [stroll. Your] life itself [Is] sleep ! So, finally, there’s nothing wrong with you. This [sickness] you’ve described is—well, [a] rather coarse Expression comes to mind—forgive me, master— The saying goes, you’re so well off you don’t Have anywhere [to shit], I’d have you know ! PHEIDIAS Be [damned] To you ! SYROS (?) I swear I’m telling you the truth— That’s your affliction! PHEIDIAS [Syros,] in myself [I] really [feel quite] strange and out of sorts. SYROS (?) The root of your complaint is folly, [Pheidias]. PHEIDIAS Well, since [you’]ve worked this out so [sensibly], [What]’s your advice ? SYROS (?) What’s [my] advice ? [Just this :] If your complaint had been a real one, Pheidias, You would have had to seek real medicine for it.

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Christophe Cusset You’re not now really ill, though ! Find a quack Treatment for your sham illness, and believe it’s helping.

This reference to insomnia should be linked to what Daos tells us about Pheidias’ first reaction to the vision: he is terrified (cf. Traill 2008:66). It is this initial fear that has provoked this psychosomatic reaction. At issue here is not a normal ailment: Pheidias’ situation cannot correspond to the generality the pedagogue envisions here in using the general protasis (ὅταν δ’ . . . εἴπῃς). But for the slave, if Pheidias has insomnia, this is not accidental, but because of his way of life, as he spends his time lying around and sleeping during the day (lines 10–12): his problem is not medical, but behavioural. The slave rejects the idea of an illness, even though he uses a description that takes on aspects of medical diagnosis. Thus he uses the verb κοπιάσῃς: if the verb is used in Attic comedy (cf. Ar. Birds 735, Thesm. 795, etc.), we should recall that verbs in -ιάω are in any case characteristic of medical vocabulary, and may go back to Hippocratic language. Moreover, comparison of the idle life to sleep does not seem to be much developed in ancient literature: rather it is Menander himself who sets up here an analogy that is very appropriate to Pheidias’ situation, given that he believes that he has seen an apparition as though he were dreaming. The picturesque definition given here by the slave of Pheidias’ life would agree with the young man’s observation that he can no longer distinguish between waking and sleeping since he has seen this vision: this is anyway what the emphatic pronoun αὐτός would suggest. The judgment he makes in any case is intended to be decisive and incisive (as the use of asyndeton suggests) and this emphasis underlines a double contradiction: in Pheidias’ behaviour, and also in the slave’s suggestion. In fact, although the slave refuses to speak of illness, he describes behaviour that has very much the appearance of an illness that he cannot decipher, in spite of his claim that he can. This slave seems to me to be a sort of anti-Nurse, in the same way that Pheidias is an anti-Phaedra in his experience of discovering his love and revealing his passion. In spite of himself, the slave speaks of Pheidias’ condition as an illness, because he has not understood that Pheidias is in fact suffering from an erotic melancholy: the slave only wants to see in the young man’s dejection proof of an ill-regulated life, when this is in fact the involuntary expression of a deeper unhappiness of which he himself knows nothing. The young man in fact a little later laments his own deep-seated malady without being able to reveal its origin (ἀτόπως ἐμαυτου̃ καὶ βαρέως [ἔχω πάνυ, 21). The use of the rare term ἀρρώστημα confirms this slippage of meaning. Attested as a medical term in the Hippocratic Corpus (Epid. 6.8.31, 7.1.93) and in Demosthenes (24.5), the term should be considered here an element of the paidagogos’ linguistic characterization and functions in the role of uncovering Pheidias’ illness, which the characters themselves do not understand. The only other occurrence of the term is in Aspis, spoken by Daos, former paidagogos of Kleostratos:

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τὰ πλει̃στα δὲ ἅπασιν ἀρρωστήματ᾽ ἐκ λύπης σχεδόν ἐστιν. Grief’s the likely cause of most of this world’s ailments. In this passage, Daos has observed Chairestratos’ depressive state, symptom no doubt of a deep melancholy (lines 339–340)—similar to that of Pheidias in Phasma—and knows that he can use this observation to come up with a stratagem likely to defeat Smikrines. He formulates here a generalization that relies strictly on the most severe types of sorrow and illness. The paidagogos uses here an apparent certain knowledge to set up his diagnosis (του̃τ’ ἐστὶ): his use of the technical term is enough for him to show that he is analysing the situation correctly, given the evidence available to him (even if he is deceived). Confident in his reasoning, though his confidence be misplaced, the paidagogos engages in a system of present counterfactual statements (εἰ μέν τι κακὸν ἀληθὲς εἰ̃χες) which recalls, as he has himself declared at line 14, that the illness from which Pheidias suffers is not real. In the paidagogos’ argument by analogy, we should note the term φάρμακον which, by its repetition, creates a link between the two parts (cf. line 26). However, while there is but one remedy to search out in the case of a true illness, here one must find the remedy, which is a sort of panacea, of miraculous solution that will work for every situation. So we see that the slave—in spite of himself, because he does not believe the illness is real—little by little sets up the idea that Pheidias is suffering. The medical rhetoric that he uses to show the absence of an illness in the young man blinds the speaker and keeps him from establishing a relationship between concealed love and true melancholic behaviour. All the same this relationship is confirmed by another fragment of the play (lines 82–85): [τὸ πρότερο]ν8 ὑπεμελαγχόλη[σέ τι [ ὄν]τα νυ̃ν ὑγιέστερο[ν [ ]καὶ γαμει̃ πάλιν [ ]εται τἄνδον̣

82

. . .before, [he] was quite depressed . . .now he’s healthier . . .and once more he’s getting wed . . .things inside The association of the fragments of the two first lines of the passage allows us to understand that they refer to the developmental chronology of a character that upon succumbing to a mild state of melancholic madness, has in the end recovered his health. The character is, it appears, Pheidias,

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whose malady the first scene had already evoked, one more or less fictitious depending on the view of the speaker, which could be thought of as melancholia. Here we find a brief informative account of one earlier affliction, given in the third person. The speaker must be in a position to give information on Pheidias’ malady; it is very likely his slave, and may be the same slave as the one in the earlier scene, as it is far from certain that one should multiply the number of slave characters.9 This passage is remarkable for the use of the composite ὑπομελαγχολάω unknown elsewhere; the prefix indicates an approximation to, or a lesser degree of, the idea expressed by the simple verb.10 The composite ὑπομελαγχολάω retains its primary value, and is not a simple synonym for μαίνομαι. Rather the term is used in a technical way to refer to psychophysiological effects of violent emotion, which here turns out to be an undeclared erotic passion. The name μελαγχολία and its related terms, although they may be used in a more colloquial and wider sense to designate any state of being that is depressive and abnormal, and that goes back to some form of madness or psychic disorder, always remain more or less associated with the sphere of medicine. Menander uses these terms in descriptions that, if not exactly clinical, at least attempt to explain a character’s abnormal behaviour. According to Freud, in fact,11 ‘melancholy is characterized psychically by a profoundly sorrowful mood disorder, suppression of interest in the external world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all action and a lowering of self-esteem that expresses itself in self-reproach and self-negation’. Freud establishes an analogy between melancholy and mourning, which is not a pathological state. In both of these expressions of psychic experience, one can find the same clinical features: loss of a beloved figure provokes self-dislike, disinterest and cutting off from the external world, a darkening of character. If in the case of Pheidias it is not a question of mourning, the state in which he finds himself does have analogies with mourning: he has to renounce the young woman with whom he has fallen in love, cannot say that he is in love with her, and finds himself the object of an arranged marriage with another girl. His melancholic behaviour is provoked by the early loss of the object of his affection that he has not been able to enjoy and now never can. The case of Pheidias is, to be sure, a less serious one than the profound mental disorder of Knemon in the Dyskolos: his depressive affect is not yet become a definitive character trait and has a very temporary explanation. In his case, it is the worry occasioned by his love that is at the base of his trouble, and it is likely that Syros shows here, in using the technical verb ὑπομελαγχολάω, a type of amused and ironical condescension in relation to Pheidias’ state of suffering. Indeed, it is perhaps the use of this term in an explicitly erotic context that might suggest a certain ironic tone on the part of the speaker. The association of love and sickness is not a new phenomenon. In Sappho’s lyric poetry erotic passion can be thought of as a state of illness

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accompanied by psychological and somatic symptoms that are quite defined, and capable of disturbing both body and spirit. Medicine however seems to have shown a certain reticence in associating love and sickness, and especially in talking about erotic melancholy. For example, only with Aretaeus of Cappadocia in first century AD Rome does one find in his De causis et signis diuturnorum morborum a chapter on melancholy (1.5) that reports the case of a stricken young man with no hope for cure who is in love with a young girl. Aretaeus clearly indicates that love is responsible for the state of the young man, who is not himself the producer of melancholy, as melancholy develops in the body, while love is a passion of the soul, so that the two manifestations should not be linked together as causes. However, it is well known that irregularities of the spirit can have effects upon the body, and one would in this case make a first assessment of ‘erotic melancholy’. In medicine, this is then taken up regularly until Paul of Aegina (early seventh century). However, in addition to traits that are purely medical, some of the passions, which are alterations of the senses, can come from the body and have a profound influence on the mental health of the individual. Aristotelian philosophy then gives a systematic form to the concept of erotic passion as illness. After Aristotle, Theophrastus (D.L. 5.43), Demetrius of Phalerum (D.L. 5.81) and Heraclides of Pontus (D.L. 5.87) studied erotic passion. From a reading of the fragments of Phasma, we can legitimately ask ourselves to what extent Menander, whose links to the Lyceum are known, is not echoing theories that already associate love and melancholy. In Pheidias’ case, the contradictory emphasis with which links between passion and melancholy are deconstructed and constructed, in a discourse that is often sententious, moralizing and rhetorical, suggests that the playwright is not only playing here on the misunderstanding of the young man by his pedagogue, but also on philosophical discussions of the behaviour of the young in love. SECONDARY EFFECTS OF EROTIC MELANCHOLY If the case of Phasma is a good illustration of thinking that unrequited love can lead to melancholic crisis, it is possible to briefly reconsider more broadly certain aspects of erotic behaviour in the Menandrian corpus as possible, though often less direct, witnesses of such a consideration. In the fourth act of Epitrepontes, the slave Onesimos, on leaving the house of Chairestratos, describes the state in which he has found his master Charisios. It is worth citing the whole of the slave’s speech (878–900): ON. ὑπομαίνεθ᾿ οὑ̃τος, νὴ τὸν Ἀπόλλω, μαίνεται· μεμάνητ᾿ ἀληθω̃ς· μαίνεται νὴ τοὺς θεούς. τὸν δεσπότην λέγω Χαρίσιον. χολὴ

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Christophe Cusset μέλαινα προσπέπτωκεν ἢ τοιου̃τό [τι. τί γὰρ ἄν τις εἰκάσειεν ἄλλο γεγονέναι; πρὸς ται̃ς θύραις γὰρ ἔνδον ἀρτί[ως πολὺν χρόνον διακύπτων ἐνδ̣[ιέτριψ᾿. . . ὁ πατὴρ δὲ τη̃ς νύμφης τι περὶ [του̃ πράγματος ἐλάλει πρὸς ἐκείνην, ὡς ἔοιχ᾿, ὁ δ᾿ οἱα̃ μὲν ἤλλαττε χρώματ᾿, ἄνδρες, οὐδ᾿ εἰπει̃ν καλόν. “ὠ̃ γλυκυτάτη” δὲ “τω̃ν λόγων οἵους λέγεις” ἀνέκραγε, τὴν κεφαλήν τ᾿ ἀνεπάταξε σφόδρα αὑτου̃. πάλιν δὲ διαλιπών, “οἵαν λαβὼν γυναι̃χ᾿ ὁ μέλεος ἠτύχηκα.” τὸ δὲ πέρας, ὡς πάντα διακούσας ἀπη̃λθ᾿ εἴσω ποτέ, βρυχηθμὸς ἔνδον, τιλμός, ἔκστασις συχνή. “ἐγὼ” γὰρ “ἁλιτήριος” πυκνὸν πάνυ ἔλεγεν “τοιου̃τον ἔργον ἐξειργασμένος αὐτὸς γεγονώς τε παιδίου νόθου πατὴρ οὐκ ἔσχον οὐδ᾿ ἔδωκα συγγνώμης μέρος οὐθὲν ἀτυχούσῃ ταὔτ᾿ ἐκείνῃ, βάρβαρος ἀνηλεής τε.” λοιδορειτ̃ ᾿ ἐρρωμένως αὑτῳ̃ βλέπει θ᾿ ὕφαιμον ἠρεθισμένος The man’s quite mad—yes, by Apollo, mad! He’s really crazy. Yes, he’s mad, by heaven! I mean Charisios, my master. He’s Got melancholia, or [some] such ailment! How else could one explain the circumstances? You see, just now indoors [he spent a long (?)] Time peeping through that door [. . .] His wife’s father was discussing [the affair] With her, apparently, and, gentlemen, I can’t with decency describe how he Kept changing colour. ‘O my love, to speak Such words,’ he cried, and punched himself hard on His head. Pause, then resumption : ‘What a wife I’ve married, and I’m in this wretched mess!’ When finally he’d heard the whole tale out, He fled indoors. Then—wailing, tearing of Hair, raging lunacy within. He went On saying, ‘Look at me, the vilain. I Myself commit a crime like this, and am The father of a bastard child. Yet I Felt not a scrap of mercy, showed none to That woman in the same sad fortune. I’m A heartless brute.’ Fiercely he damns himself, Eyes bloodshot, overwrought.

885

890

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His speech is initially exaggerated, due to his panic and surprise: the repetition of the verb μαίνομαι, used four times in two lines, together with two assertions that call upon the gods, emphatically assert the young man’s derangement. It is worth underlining that the first use of the compound ὑπομαίνομαι indicates that the ‘madness’ of Charisios is not total: this is a madness in part metaphorical, which serves to tell, with exaggeration, of the young man’s psychological state. The sudden nature of this change justifies the explication that follows, with its impressive enjambment at lines 880–1: χολὴ / μέλαινα. The slave here hazards an explanation, without holding specifically to medical diagnosis, but his explanation implicitly refers to the kind of diagnosis that one would usually make in such a case. The alternative ἢ τοιου̃τό τι shows that he does not pretend to speak in the manner of one with more precise technical knowledge, but that he is making a judgment founded on experience or just good sense (cf. 882). The slave speaks first of a quasi-madness and then he imagines a case of melancholic depression. This judgment is based partly on the young man’s character, which the slave knows well, and partly on the abnormal and excessive behaviour that he now shows. The point of this speech is to describe the depressive melancholic young man in love: he has an attitude of prostration (διακύπτων, 884) ; his colour is altered (ἤλλαττε χρώματα, 887), which is a physical sign of internal malaise; he assaults himself (τὴν κεφαλήν τ᾽ ἀνεπάταξε σφόδρα, 889), tears his hair (883), throws out exclamations (885) and reviles himself (ἁλιτήριος, 894 and βάρβαρος, 898)—which the text says explicitly also at line 899: λοιδορει̃τ᾽ ἐρρωμένως.12 The final bodily manifestation of this depression resides in his eyes, which are infused with blood (900). The ensemble of details that the slave gives, details that precisely correspond with the characteristics of melancholic depression, keep one from seeing in the slave’s initial judgment on his master a mere expressive metaphor. However, this melancholic depression is linked directly to erotic loss: it is because he is on the verge of losing his wife, whom he loves, though after he has treated her unjustly and abandoned her, that Charisios is in this depressive state. Above all, he has heard his wife say to her own father that she does not wish to leave her husband: the nobility of her spirit and sweetness of her affection only serve to show up his own ignominious inhumanity. However, he has also heard Smikrines make it clear that he is determined to take Pamphile away from him regardless of her wishes. Charisios thus puts himself, by anticipation, into the depressed state into which the loss of the one whom he loves but has not respected would plunge him, if he were to persist in his attitude. In the fifth act of Samia, we find another model, this time a very theatrical one, as it is explicitly played out, of the melancholic depression of the young man in love, or its secondary effects. In this comedy, Moschion has raped his neighbour’s daughter, Plangon, but has promised to marry her. A child is born as a result of the rape, in the absence of the fathers of both young

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people, and is entrusted to Chrysis, a Samian concubine of Moschion’s father. After many mistakes and misunderstandings, the conflict situation is resolved at the end of Act IV: Moschion and Plangon are recognized as the child’s parents and their marriage, already agreed upon by their fathers while still abroad, can happen. However at the beginning of Act V Moschion comes back on the scene in a state of fury (792–3 Jacques = 620–1 Sandbach), and has decided to avenge himself for the accusation that his father had made against him. For his revenge, he wants to frighten his father, and has chosen to make him believe that he wants to embark on a career as a mercenary soldier. So he asks his slave Parmenon to get him a sword and a chlamys, which is a military cloak (831 J = 659 S). The attitude of the slave, who refuses to obey, highlights opposition between this departure and the marriage being prepared for Moschion: the slave believes that Moschion, who does not know that the marriage has now been agreed to, has despaired of its ever taking place. He therefore supposes that the young man’s discouragement has pushed him to this extreme decision (844 J = 672 S): διὰ κενη̃ς σαυτὸν ταράττεις εἰς ἀθυμίαν τ᾿ ἄγεις. You’ve no reason to be worried or to sink into despair! This remark shows that Moschion’s plot has worked perfectly. Even though we know that he is profoundly in love with Plangon, as he says himself a little earlier (802 J = 630 S), the risk of seeing his love reduced to nothing might have made him suddenly fall into a situation of depression and despair, into a typical melancholic crisis of one in love who sees himself deprived of the object of his love. In such a situation, it would not be surprising to see the young man succumb to an impulse to die, to which the departure for war is the equivalent. Of course, this is not a true melancholic crisis because it is only a trick on Moschion’s part to obtain apologies and total recognition. However, Moschion can be considered as playing the characteristic dramaturgical part of a young man in love deceived of his hopes, which in turn rapidly darkens his mind and leads him to commit extreme acts. What is important here is, I think, to underline the dramaturgic dimension of this stratagem that allows discovery, to a small extent, of the theatrical potentialities of melancholy as used in Aspis or Dyskolos. To the extent that melancholy essentially poses the problem of the relationship of individual to group, the relation of self to other, but also the self to the self, this serious psycho-somatic ailment is actually a wonderful way of entering into the complexities of the human psyche that, to a greater or lesser extent, are of interest to the playwright Menander. The effects of this malady on the body and on human behaviour are such, and have such a scope, that they are perfectly adapted to the visual aspect of the comic stage. If we want to further consider, aside from the example of Phasma analysed here, that melancholic depression is readily associated with the

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love-problems that are always at the heart of Menander’s comic intrigue, we can consider that the Athenian dramatist may have had a particular interest in the figure of the ‘melancholic lover’ of which we find several appearances, some of them in plays that do not explicitly or principally figure melancholy as a central theme. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

Nat. Hom. 1.1.3, 4,1 and 5,2 : these are the first mentions of black bile. See Jacques 1998b. Adapted translation of Arnott 1979. In the ensuing false tragedy of the death of a melancholic patient, predicted by a fake doctor, we find a great variety of medical vocabulary: the doctor based himself on the observation of the patient’s bilious nature (439 S) to consider a fatal aggravation into phrenitis, which is commonly attributed to bile (445 S), as the Hippocratic treatises Morb. I and II confirm it: phrenitis offers symptoms similar to those of melancholy. See Jacques 1998b:232–3. See Jacques 1998b:226. This metaphoric use is still present in Aristophanes, Birds 14, Eccl. 251, Wealth 12, 366, 903. In the Aristophanic scholia, we learn that this ordinary meaning is specially an Attic one (sch. Wealth 12). However, see Miller 1945:82, who says that μελαγχολω̃ is always a medical term in Aristophanes. Taillardat 1965, § 478 ; see also Casevitz 1983. Handley’s restored text has been suggested by the opposite νυ̃ν in the following line. It could be also another slave in the adjoining house. There is also ὑπομαίνομαι (but it could be ἀπομαίνομαι which appears in Samia 591 J = 419 S : see W.D. Furley 2009:227) in an illuminating expression of Epitrepontes (878 : ὑπομαίνεθ᾿ οὑ̃τος, νὴ τὸν Ἀπόλλω, μαίνεται) ; ὑπομαίνομαι occurs only elsewhere in technical and medical texts. In his treatise on Mourning and Melancholia (1917). Jacques 1998b:227–8 in his remarks on this passage did not note all these characteristic features of melancholic depression.

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Part IV

Context: Posterity

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13 On the Reception of Menander in the Imperial Period Orestis Karavas and Jean-Luc Vix

A large number of mosaics and school papyri from the early centuries of our era testify to the popularity of Menander in that period, at least up to the eighth century.1 The poet’s work is constantly used in schools at all levels, whether for drawing up lists of two- or three-syllable words using the titles of his comedies, or to work on agônes with the rhetoric-teacher—not to speak of the sententiae, of course, whose eventual fate was exceptional.2 And yet, notwithstanding the favour he enjoyed, ‘the glory of Menander, immense throughout antiquity, did not prevent the poet’s work from disappearing’.3 In fact, starting in the fourth century, for a number of reasons, there was a reversal that gave Aristophanes a new supremacy, especially in education.4 What is the situation regarding attestations in the literary texts that we possess from the early centuries of the Christian era? Strangely enough, it shows greater variety. While Plutarch’s preference for Menander and his rejection of Aristophanes are well known, other authors such as Lucian or Aelius Aristides seem by contrast to privilege the latter compared with the former. This raises all the more acutely the question: what really was the place that Menander held in the Greek world of the Imperial period? The present study aims to present some elements of an answer to these questions by directing its attention to the references to Menander and placing them in relation to the judgements passed on his work in the early centuries of our era. The corpus taken into account will cover some of the most important authors of the period, whose texts will be confronted with the evidence of theoretical works and progymnasmata: Dio Chrysostom, Galen, Plutarch, Lucian of Samosata, and Aelius Aristides. This body of texts will enable us to see in what light, positive or negative, Greek authors of the Imperial period perceived Menander, what was the corpus of his work that was known to them, and what the name of the poet of New Comedy represented in their eyes. Let us begin with Dio Chrysostom and Galen. In his Rhodian Oration (31.116), Dio Chrysostom speaks of the statue of a poet placed near the statue of Menander: οὐ μόνον χαλκου̃ν ἑστάκασιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ παρὰ Μένανδρον, a mark of honour for this unknown poet and, for us, confirmation of the

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favour enjoyed by the dramatist through the erection of a statue which was still in place in the first century AD. But it is in his Letter on Oratorical Education (18.6–7) that we find direct references to the poet’s work.5 Here, in a reading programme6 for the unidentified addressee, Dio recommends in-depth reading (μὴ παρέργως ἐντυγχάνειν) of Menander and Euripides among dramatic poets, just as doctors recommend, to patients in need of a cure, not the most sumptuous foods but those which are most beneficial (ὠφελίμους). The most important criterion is that of progress in the oratorical art, a strictly practical and utilitarian point of view, as Antonio Garzya7 rightly emphasizes. This is why Dio classes Menander and Euripides among the authors who are ὠφέλιμοι, and Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Sophocles among those who are πολυτελέστατοι. Dio explains that ‘Menander’s representation of every character and of every grace surpassed all the ingenuity of the old comic poets’ (ἥ τε γὰρ Μενάνδρου μίμησις ἅπαντος ἤθους καὶ χάριτος πα̃σαν ὑπερβέβληκε τὴν δεινότητα τω̃ν παλαιω̃ν κωμικω̃ν). He tells his interlocutor, furthermore, that it would be preferable for him to have Euripides and Menander read to him by other people qualified to interpret and explain these authors—who are thus perceived as hard for a non-initiate to understand. Although this reference to Menander and his work is the only one in Dio’s corpus, one cannot fail to observe an admiration for the poet equal to that professed by Quintilian (10.1.69).8 This indicates unambiguously that the reading of this poet was regarded as useful, indeed indispensable, in oratorical education. The second author in our first pair is the physician Galen, who mentions Menander’s name four times. In De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 4.6.34 de Lacy, Galen refers to the De affectibus of Chrysippus (von Arnim SFV 3.478, p. 128.17) in the following manner: ὅταν μνημονεύῃ (sc. Chrysippus) του̃ Μενανδρείου ἔπους, ἐν ὡ̃ φησι ‘τὸν νου̃ν ἔχων ὑποχείριον/εἰς τὸν πίθον δέδωκα’ [. . .], ‘when he recalls the passage of Menander in which he says: “when I had my heart in my hands, I gave it into the wine-jar” ’ (or, more plausibly, with Cobet’s correction δέδυκα, ‘I sank into the wine-jar’) (Men. fr. 476). Galen here contents himself with reproducing the passage of Chrysippus with the line of Menander, without any further commentary that might give an idea of his perception of the comic poet. In the doubtfully authentic Quod qualitates incorporeae sint 19.467 Kühn, when the author is speaking of Chrysippus’ Physicae doctrinae fundamenta (von Arnim SFV 2.384, p. 127.22), he makes this exclamation: εἰ δὲ λέγοι τις ταυ̃τα [. . .] καλὸν ἐπειπει̃ν αὐτῳ̃ τὸ Μενάνδρειον ‘ταυ̃τά σ’ ἀπολώλεκεν, ὠ̃ πονηρέ’,9 ‘If anyone says that [. . .] it is good to reply to him with this line of Menander: “that’s done for you, you wretch” ’ (Men. fr. 477). The line has no very marked comic features, and its very banality might make it ascribable to almost any writer, were it not specified by name as τὸ Μενάνδρειον. Nor do we know to which comedy the citation belongs. These factors may lead one to think that the sentence was part of a list of extracts learned in the rhetorical schools; for while the learner was expected

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to take pains about elegance and clarity of style, no account was taken, at least in the early stages, of the pungency of the content. The third mention of Menander’s name comes in De naturalibus facultatibus 2.67 Kühn ( = Men. test. 115 K-A). Here Galen is speaking of Erasistratus and Asclepius and comparing their disciples to the slaves Daos and Getas, typical characters of Menandrian comedy. The disciples of Erasistratus and Asclepius ‘are like Daos and Getas, the slaves brought on stage by the excellent Menander in his comedies’ (ὁμοίως τοις̃ ὑπὸ του̃ βελτίστου Μενάνδρου κατὰ τὰς κωμῳδίας εἰσαγομένους οἰκέταις, Δάοις τέ τισι καὶ Γέταις). What deserves special attention in this passage is the use of the superlative βέλτιστος which gives a clear idea of he esteem in which Galen held our author. But in interpreting this reference to the slaves Daos and Getas, who are common to several Menandrian comedies, various hypotheses are possible. Perhaps Galen knew these comedies at first hand by reading them—the evocation of the deceptions practised by these slaves on their masters might suggest this; perhaps, however, the slave figures of Menandrian comedy had acquired a kind of proverbial status as prototypes of cunning and perfidy. The rarity of mention of Menander in the corpus of Galen favours the latter hypothesis, since if the physician had had an indepth knowledge of the comedies, he would certainly have taken pleasure in citing them more often. Galen’s last mention of Menander is concerned with a grammatical point: he cites the play-title Αὑτὸν τιμωρούμενος as an example of the construction of the verb τιμωρέομαι with accusative in the sense ‘punish’ (De humero iis modis prolapso quos Hippocrates non vidit 18a.384–5 Kühn): διαφέρει γὰρ τὸ τιμωρω̃ν του̃ τιμωρούμενος, ὃ μετὰ τη̃ς καλουμένης αἰτιατικη̃ς πτώσεως σημαίνει τὸ κολάζον· οὕτως γου̃ν καὶ ἑαυτὸν τιμωρούμενος ἐπιγέγραπται τὸ Μενάνδρου δρα̃μα. Here again we find ourselves face to face with school learning: the titles of Menander’s comedies had served as a source for the compilation of catalogues, and also, as we can see from the information that Galen provides, for commentaries of a grammatical nature. In agreement with the remarks of Christopher Jon Elliott,10 one is tempted to conclude that Galen is essentially fascinated by the language and vocabulary of the comic poet. He perceives Greek comedy more as a sort of dictionary than as a play for the theatre. His actual knowledge of Menander’s text seems rather limited, and doubtless originates from his school studies. It thus appears that Dio and Galen have a schoolboy’s approach to the works of Menander. They used him in their studies, and all their reminiscences of his texts no doubt stem from that period. One point, nevertheless, differentiates Dio from Galen: the former seems to have a more complete knowledge of the poet’s works than the latter. However, while the style of Menander has to be taken as a model, the ethical aspect of his work is none the less present. This leads us directly to Plutarch. Concerning Plutarch’s relationship with Menander, things are at once simpler and more complex: quite apart

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from the numerous Menandrian citations in the Plutarchan corpus, we also have at our disposal a rich bibliography on the subject.11 Plutarch mentions Menander’s name 47 times, and most of these mentions are followed by a quoted fragment of the comic poet. He also cites two play titles: in De audiendis poetis (19a), he refers to the prologue of Thais, and in De adulatore (59c), to the appearance of the main character in the comedy Pseudherakles. In addition to this, he mentions the names of characters: Thrasonides in De cupiditate divitiarum (524f) and Strouthias and Bias in De adulatore (57a), in which latter passage he gives a summary of the scene in Kolax in which they appeared. In De Iside et Osiride (379a), the proper name ‘Menander’ is used in the manner of a synecdoche to refer to his compositions: Μένανδρον ὑποκρίνεσθαι, that is ‘to act/interpret the plays of Menander’, an expression repeated in the Quaestiones convivales (673b). For Plutarch, the name of Menander evoked a stage action as well as a text. It is in this sense that he uses the adverb θεατρικω̃ς before citing fr. 670 in De communibus notitiis (1076c). According to Plutarch, Menander was the best accompaniment for a banquet: he maintains this view several times in the Quaestiones convivales (673b, 706d, 712b, 712d), and this is why he allows no excuse for bad actors who do not know how to perform Menander’s comedies (De vitioso pudore 531b). Furthermore, it is Plutarch who has preserved for us an anecdote about the manner in which Menander composed his plays (De gloria Atheniensium 347e): ‘A friend of Menander said to him one day: “The Dionysia is approaching, and you still haven’t written your comedy!—My play is all composed, replied Menander; I’ve organized the structure of it—all I’ve got to do now is put it into verse.” ’ Plutarch gives high praise to New Comedy and Menander twice in his corpus: in the Quaestiones convivales (712b–d) and in the Comparationis Aristophanis et Menandri compendium (853a–854d). In the first passage, Plutarch is answering the question ‘What is the best kind of drama to accompany a banquet?’ and does so by making a comparison between Old and New Comedy. Old Comedy is not suitable for men who are drinking, because it presents too much violence and tension, a tendency to insult and buffoonery, a heavy load of inappropriate words and vulgar expressions, with allusions to the life of the fifth century BC that no one can any longer understand. The style of New Comedy, on the other hand, is pleasant and simple, and its characters are models of virtue and goodness. In the famous Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander, Plutarch compares Aristophanes to ‘a courtesan who has passed her prime and has taken to posing as a married woman; his poetry is thought by the mob to be insupportably pretentious, while people of virtue are horrified by its licentiousness and perversity’. According to Plutarch, the πεπαιδευμένοι find Aristophanes displeasing. Menander, on the other hand, ‘always gives complete satisfaction, whether in the theatre, in conversations or in banquets. [. . .] Menander is the sole reason why any cultivated man can justifiably go to the theatre’. Putting into reverse the shortcomings that he

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finds in the art of Aristophanes, one could say that according to Plutarch ingenuity is synonymous with civility (πανου̃ργον = πολιτικόν), rusticity is the equivalent of simplicity (ἄγροικον = ἀφελές), ridiculous effects become playful (γελοιο̃ ν = παιγνιω̃δες) and the erotic is enjoyable (ἐρωτικόν = ἱλαρόν). In a word, Menander is a writer for all decent folk. In his works, Plutarch emphasizes another characteristic of Menander that he finds very important: in his comedies, there is no pederastic love, and all the seductions of virgins and the liaisons with courtesans lead to marriage. Menander is described as ἐρωτικός (Quaestiones convivales 654d)—an epithet also given to Sappho (De Pythiae oraculis 406a), the elegiac poet Phanocles (Quaestiones convivales 671b), Euripides (fr. 136 Sandbach) and Pammenes (Amatorius 761b)—and as ἥδιστος (Quaestiones convivales 712d)—an epithet also given to Mark Antony (Antony 25.3). In the slightly sarcastic words of Dwora Gilula, Plutarch’s arguments are ‘wife-oriented’.12 ‘The Plutarchan Menander’, to use the apt expression of Angelo Casanova,13 has characteristics that are found nowhere else. The Chaeronean used the comic poet as an authority on the subjects that interested him, isolating and putting into relief his ethical features exclusively. In addition, some precious evidence is provided for us about the performance of plays of Menander in Plutarch’s time: he is probably one of very few authors of the Imperial period to be so precise, and to speak of the comic poet and his plays in a manner, so it would seem, that does not derive from the schoolroom. All the same, his passionate defence of the comic poet did not save the latter’s works from disappearance. We have still to examine two authors, Lucian and Aelius Aristides, who are in a certain sense unique in the framework of our inquiry. Lucian of Samosata wrote more than 80 short works. He was moulded in the schools of the grammatikoi and also worked for a number of years as an orator. His work, like that of the authors of the Second Sophistic, abounds in citations of classical and Hellenistic poets and prose writers. Nevertheless, we find in his corpus only two mentions of Menander’s name, plus two citations of fragments of the comic poet which had already become proverbial by his time. To this total, however, we can still add two passages that apparently allude to lines of Menander. The first mention of the comic poet’s name occurs in the Pseudologista (4), where Lucian calls to his aid ‘a character from Menander’s prologues, Elenchos, that god who loves truth and free speech. [. . .] It would be very agreeable if this god was willing to appear in the theatre for a moment and explain the play to the audience’. No play of Menander is now known in which Elenchos appeared in the prologue, and this passage is therefore merely Men. fr. 507. According to the great Lucian scholar Jacques Bompaire, the prologues of Menander were at that time applicable ‘to an introduction of any kind, in a discourse of any kind’.14 It is certain that the invocation of this god Ἔλεγχος, defender of truth and free speech, was particularly appropriate at the start of the Pseudologista. It is also to be noted that this character,

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and therefore the Menandrian prologue, must have been particularly well known in the early centuries of our era,15 for both Pseudo-Hermogenes and Aphthonius cite it in their progymnasmata, in the chapter on ethopoeia.16 Both the technographers, at the start of their chapter, seek to differentiate ethopoeia and prosopopoeia: ‘when we personify a thing, like Elenchos in Menander [. . .]’ (Pseudo-Hermogenes, Progymnasmata 9.1: προσωποποιία δέ, ὅταν πράγματι περιτιθω̃μεν πρόσωπον, ὥσπερ ὁ Ἔλεγχος παρὰ Μενάνδρῳ [. . .]); ‘we have prosopopoeia when everything is fiction, the ethos and the character, in the manner of Menander when he created Elenchos’17 (Aphthonius, Progymnasmata 11.1: προσωποποιία δέ, ὅταν ἅπαντα πλάττηται, καὶ ἠ̃θος καὶ πρόσωπον, ὥσπερ ἐποίησε Μένανδρος Ἔλεγχον). The similarity between the two texts should not surprise us; it is the usual thing, since the surviving Progymnasmata texts, except that of Theon, all probably have a common origin.18 The date of this archetype cannot be precisely fixed, but it is certain that Lucian and other authors of the second century AD knew a version of the school exercises close to that of Pseudo-Hermogenes. It is therefore quite possible to suppose that in this evocation of Elenchos, Lucian reproduced school precepts, using a prologue of Menander, in rather stereotyped fashion (such is Jacques Bompaire’s thoroughly justified analysis), as a prologue to his own discourse. Lucian mentions Menander again in an oracle given to Rutilianus by the false prophet Alexander (Alexander or Pseudomantis 34 = Men. test. 110 K-A): ‘You were first the son of Peleus, then Menander, / then the man we see today; after that you will be a ray of the sun./ You will live eighty revolutions of the sun beyond a hundred’.19 This oracle informs Rutilianus of two previous incarnations, in the sarcastic mode typical of Lucian. It is hard to understand the reason that led Lucian to name the comic poet here. According to Marcel Caster,20 Menander embodied literary refinement, which thus follows after heroic action (Achilles). This analysis is all the more plausible because the predictions about the future likewise seek to flatter Rutilianus’ vanity. In exercising his wit at the expense of the false prophet, Lucian will thus be giving us a positive image of the comic poet, which will place him, in his literary domain, on a level with Achilles in the epic field. We should not forget, either, that the exploits of Achilles had been sung by Homer, the father of Greek literature, which will certainly add further positive force to the appearance of Menander at the hero’s side. Thus, even if Menander is not one of Lucian’s specially favoured authors, Lucian nevertheless appreciated him, or at least gave him a select place in the literary pantheon. However, we know that with Lucian it is well to be cautious, so often can his satirical thrusts, here against the false prophet, change the prima facie meaning of his statements. Lucian cites only very few verses of Menander. In Zeus Rants [Zeus Tragoidos] (53), Hermes reassures Zeus: ὀρθω̃ς ἐκει̃νό μοι ὁ κωμικὸς εἰρηκέναι δοκει̃ ‘οὐδὲν πέπονθας δεινόν, ἂν μὴ προσποιῃ̃’, ‘You haven’t suffered any misfortune, if you don’t admit you have’. The fragment is taken from the comedy Epitrepontes (F 9 Sandbach = Monostichoi 594). It is an isolated

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line which is cited also by Plutarch (De tranquillitate animi 475b and De exilio 599c), Diogenianus (Paroemiae 7.38), St John Chrysostom (PG 58.729), Stobaeus (4.44.57) and Orion (Anthologium 7.8). Lucian does not here mention the name of the comic poet, since what he is concerned to do is end his dialogue, in which Zeus appears as a tragic actor, with a comic line. But everything indicates that we have here one of those Menandrian sententiae so prized in antiquity, as is abundantly proved by the number of times this line is cited. This particular comedy, moreover, enjoyed great popularity in the early centuries of our era, attested both by the very rich papyrological tradition dating from these centuries and by such texts as a letter by Alciphron (4.19.19) or a discourse by Themistius (21.262c).21 Its agôn, moreover, was one of those that were worked on in the rhetorical schools. In On Salaried Posts [De Mercede Conductis] (35), Lucian alludes elliptically to another line of Menander: πήχεως ἐνίοτε τὴν ῥι̃να ἔχοντας, ‘sometimes having a nose a cubit long’ (referring to flatterers), the comic line being: ῥι̃ν’ ἔχουσαν πήχεως (fr. 296.12, from the lost comedy Plokion). The very fact that Lucian can thus distort a verse of Menander’s, without any mention of the poet’s name, illustrates how famous this passage must have been—certainly, this time, for its comic force; in this case, too, a panel of the Mytilene mosaic devoted to this play confirms its importance in antiquity. This explains how Lucian could safely content himself with an allusion. Similarly, in The Ass (45), Lucian says: κἀκ τότε ἐξ ἐμου̃ πρώτου ἠ̃λθεν εἰς ἀνθρώπους ὁ λόγος οὑ̃τος, Ἐξ ὄνου παρακύψεως (fr. 189), ‘it was from me first of all that the saying arose, “it’s the donkey at the window” ’, from the lost comedy Hiereia according to Pausanias the Atticist (Ἀττικω̃ ν ὀνομάτων συναγωγή ο23). Zenobius tells us that this expression had already become proverbial to satirize people who had been the target of ridiculous calumnies (1.70: ἐπὶ τω̃ν καταγελάστως οὐ̃ν συκοφαντουμένων εἴρηται ἡ παροιμία). These passages together confirm that Lucian knew Menander, but here and there in his work we also find the names of Menandrian characters, such as Strouthias in The Runaways (19)—one of the characters in the comedy Kolax, also mentioned by Plutarch in De adulatore (57a), or Mnesippus in Toxaris (1) (Men. fr. 862.1). The Dialogues of Courtesans offer a collection of fifteen short dialogues in which appear the most typical figures of New Comedy, such as courtesans, peasants, boastful soldiers, adolescent males: Lucian borrows freely from Menander’s picture-gallery to form his own.22 And it is not impossible that the Dyskolos was the inspiration for his Timon or Misanthropos.23 All the same, apart from these passages, Menander is absent from the satirist’s work, which may seem strange, particularly in view of the character of that work, so often given to mockery. Why did he not draw more fully on these comedies to attack his contemporaries? Did he not find material there on which to exercise his pungency because Menander’s ethical aspect was too prominent, at least in the minds of second-century Greeks? This may have been his reason for deciding to cover the name and the work of the comic poet in virtual silence. This

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attitude conforms with his attitude to Sophocles, and as we have been able to show in a recent study, this absence of the Greek tragedian is not a sign of contempt, but on the contrary of respect.24 Perhaps Lucian had the same feelings of esteem towards Menander, which could be the explanation of the poet’s modest presence in his work. Let us turn now to the last author in our corpus, Aelius Aristides. He occupies a special place in it, inasmuch as he clearly marked his opposition to the comic genre in discourse 29K, the Περὶ τοῦ μὴ κωμῳδεῖν [συμβουλευτικός25]. His critique of the comic theatre performances of his time, essentially on moral grounds, is merciless. On the other hand, he does not hesitate to lament the passing of the Old Comic parabasis, with their admonitory (νουθεσία) and educational (παίδευσις) effects (§28). Might this be an indication that the sophist of Smyrna rejected New Comedy, wishing to keep only the Old, and of that only certain parts, such as the parabasis, which he saw as being useful for the education of the young? It is discourse 28K, the Περὶ τοῦ παραφθέγματος, in which he justifies a panegyric on himself, that gives us some indications pointing in that direction. This discourse is presented as a series of citations of ancient authors, brought together to justify the attitude of Aristides. Thus in §§91–4 he calls the comic poets to witness; and on this occasion he brings forward only the three great names of Old Comedy, Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes, ignoring Middle and New Comedy entirely. This trio seem to have a privileged status in the works of Aristides.26 However, references to Menander’s works are not entirely absent from the Aristidean corpus: he has the honour of being cited alongside the other great authors of the past. On the count made by Ewen Bowie,27 Aristides apparently cites Menander as much as he does Cratinus. The name of the poet appears twice, and citations attributable to him appear at least four times.28 Of the two explicit mentions of the name of Menander, one is not directly tied to the poet’s works. In the First Sacred Discourse (47.51 = Men. test. 111 K-A) Aristides tells us that when he was uncertain whether to make a voyage to Pergamum, he had a dream: ‘I dreamed that someone had come from Hadrianoutherai, bringing me a book of Menander . . . ’ (ἐδόκουν ἀπὸ Ἀδριανου̃ θήρας τινὰ ἐλθει̃ν, βιβλίον τι κομίζοντα τω̃ν Μενάνδρου). This episode is situated at the time when Aristides is hesitating about making the voyage to Pergamum, and by means of the dream the god is in fact instructing him not to go, playing on the name of the poet, μένειν τὸν ἄνδρα.29 Dream interpretation is a delicate art, and if one tries to understand the second significance of the book, one cannot help asking why the messenger came from Hadrianoutherai: it has often been thought, indeed, that Aristides was a native of that city. Could this dream, then, be connected with reminiscences of childhood and schooling? If so, this book coming from Hadrianoutherai would testify to the presence of the comic poet, in the form of books, in Aristides’ education too.

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The second mention of Menander appears in discourse 3 (Πρὸς Πλάτωνα ὑπὲρ τω̃ν τεττάρων) at §665. In a passage replete with literary references (Hesiod, Archilochus, Demosthenes, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles), Aristides takes aim at certain contemporary philosophers, perhaps Cynics.30 He mocks them, describing them as fine talkers who discuss abstinence and preach virtue, but who lose all their continence, not only on seeing a Helen, but even at the sight of a ‘slave-girl like the Phrygian maid created by Menander’ (ἐὰν ἴδωσι τὴν Ἑλένην, Ἑλένην λέγω; θεράπαιναν μὲν οὐ̃ν ὁποίαν ἐποίησε Μένανδρος τὴν Φρυγίαν) (Men. fr. 432).31 This extremely polemical passage has the interesting feature that it integrates Menander and his work in the midst of an anthology of allusions or quotations, thus implicitly confirming the important place which he occupied in paideia, not only in Aristides’ mind but more generally in that of his readers, that of the πεπαιδευμένοι whom he is addressing. In relation to this passage, Thomas Williams32 has further conjectured that the ‘Phrygian slave-girl’ might be the same person who is mentioned under the name of Mania in section 237 of discourse 2 (Πρὸς Πλάτωνα περὶ ῥητορικη̃ς), a defence of rhetoric against the Gorgias of Plato. Aristides is there recalling, doubtless from memory,33 Gorgias 471a-c, where the philosopher recalls the crimes of Archelaus. Aristides’ text follows Plato’s narrative, except at the end where he adds an appendix to suggest another explanation that Archelaus might have given for the death of Cleopatra’s son, whom he had in fact murdered: ἢ μανίᾳ τινὶ παρελήρησεν ἐπὶ τη̃ς μύλης (Men. fr. 642). Aristides does not here name Menander, and we owe to his scholiast a long note (3.410.32 Dindorf) which offers three different explanations of this line, which the ancients found obscure. It is the first of these explanations (and probably the oldest34) that mentions Menander: Μανίας τινὸς οὕτω καλουμένης εἰσαχθείσης ὑπὸ Μενάνδρου ἐν μυλω̃νι δεδεμένης καὶ φλυαρούσης, ‘A woman named Mania was brought on stage by Menander, chained in a mill and talking nonsense’. Williams, in a lengthy demonstration, proposes to emend the Aristides’ passage ἢ μανίᾳ τινὶ παρελήρησεν ἐπὶ τη̃ς μύλης so as to read ἢ Μανία τι παρελήρησεν ἐπὶ τη̃ς μύλης (‘or Mania said something absurd when chained to the mill’), replacing a reference to madness (hardly intelligible, it is true) with a proper name, in agreement with the scholium. The mill figures traditionally as a punishment imposed on delinquent slaves, as early as the classical period (Lysias 1.18) and also in the comedies of Menander (Aspis 244–5: τοιγαρου̃ν/ γέμουσιν οἱ μυλω̃νες ἡμω̃ν, Heros 3: μυλω̃να σαυτῳ̃ καὶ πέδας, ‘the mill and fetters that are waiting for you’). In what follows, Aristides makes the connection with rhetoric by asking the question ‘What has that got to do with rhetoric?’ (τί ταυ̃τ’ ἐστὶ πρὸς ῥητορικήν), reproaching Plato for having used irrelevant arguments—even anecdotes like this one—to discredit the oratorical art. The slave-girl named Mania would thus, for Aristides, be a symbol for false rhetoric, which talks drivel, and the allusion to comedy would be a way of devaluing Plato’s thesis. The

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correction proposed by Williams is quite convincing, not least the idea that the slave-girl named Mania appeared as early as the prologue, chained in her mill. Thus at the outset of the play she would explain how she came to be in this situation and try to justify herself—this being ironically expressed by παρελήρησεν. Her identification with Aristides’ ‘Phrygian slave-girl’ is in itself tempting, and is supported by a certain amount of ancient evidence, in particular the occurrence elsewhere of the names Manes and Mania for Phrygian slaves (cf. Ar. Lys. 908 etc.) It is perhaps in Machon (fr. 14.188–94 Gow = Athenaeus 13.578b-c) that we can find the most convincing evidence: explaining the name Mania borne by an Athenian courtesan, he admits that to bear the name of a Phrygian slave-girl is not appropriate for an Athenian woman. This identification of the two characters referred to by Aelius Aristides would also corroborate the observation that this sophist is fond of constantly recurring to the same sources. Taken together, this dossier corresponds to the features already noted about Menander, in particular the popularity of his prologues and of his slave characters. We cannot doubt—if this combination of hypotheses should prove to be correct—that this play (that of the Phrygian slave-girl and that of Mania being one and the same) will still, in Aristides’ time, have been familiar, not only to the sophist but also to the wider public. Other passages of Aristides take us more directly to the Menander of the Sententiae. In discourse 2, already mentioned above, Aristides, concerned to prove that rhetoric is an art, is engaged in developing a wide-ranging parallelism between rhetoric and divination. At §16835 he states that ‘it is not only in this way that divination is proved to amount to guessing the future, as one of the poets has already testified’ (ὅπερ καὶ τω̃ν ποιητω̃ν ἤδη τις ἐμαρτύρησεν). Aristides has the habit of not citing the names of authors, especially poets, but merely making a vague reference such as is found here. A scholium ̃ γάρ, (3.403.17 Dindorf ) refers explicitly to Menander: ὁ Μένανδρος εἰπε Μάντις ἄριστος, ὅστις εἰκάζει καλω̃ς. The passage has been identified with a line of Theophoroumene (F 2.2 Sandbach), but the possibility cannot be excluded that the scholiast has confused Menander with Euripides (fr. 973). Another passage of Aristides in which an echo of Menander can be found is in discourse 3 (also mentioned previously), at §133. Aristides begins a defence of Cimon by asking whether all public duties were synonymous with slavery, before laying it down as a principle that the head of a household is himself both master and slave, adding, with the precision that we need, καὶ τὸ του̃ κωμῳδιοποιου̃ βεβαίως καὶ παγίως ἔχει, which this time at least guarantees a comic source: ἄρ’ εἱς̃ εἴη τη̃ς οἰκίας δου̃λος ὁ δεσπότης (Men. fr. 506 = Monostichoi 241). This formula is well known in antiquity, since even in the sixth century Nicolaus of Myra gives it as an example of a sententia in his progymnasmata (27.4 Felt). Similarly, Libanius cites this sentence and links it to Menander in his discourse 25.66 (Περὶ δουλείας). If we therefore accept that Menander is the originator of this formula (see

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however Ar. test. 94 K-A, and schol. Aristides 3.519.25 Dindorf, which attributes the formula both to Aristophanes and to Menander), it is apparent that Aristides is employing expressions which were felt as sententiae in his time, were attributed to Menander, and were well known to the sophists’ public. Several remarks must be made if we are to attempt a synthesis of these various features of Aristides’ text. We can see first of all that the identification of an allusion to Menander, or indeed of a citation, is not easy, elliptical as the author often is: frequently it is only the scholia which direct us to the comic poet’s work. It is therefore quite probable that the sophist’s work contains further passages that alluded to Menander. Next, we can note that mentions of the comic poet’s name, and also explicit citations, are much less numerous than those linked to Aristophanes, which seems, at the least, to indicate that Aristides was more familiar with the latter. It is quite possible, though there is no direct evidence, that this attitude is connected with linguistic purity and with Atticism, of which Aristides was an ardent defender. We have found, furthermore, that while Aristides does not escape the temptation to use Menandrian sententiae, he also has recourse to the poet to illustrate passages of a more polemical tone. It is not insignificant, too, that a substantial number of the citations we have found come from the ‘Platonic discourses’, where the tone is particularly vehement. Aristides, while not ignoring the sententiae, was also sensitive to the more pungent aspects of the poet’s work, and re-used them to assail his opponents. Even when he uses sententiae, as in the last three examples, Aristides does so in a more polemical, less ethical way than other authors do. This perhaps emphasizes that in the early centuries of our era, the schools were a vehicle for several different facets of Menander: their approach was less monolithic than is often supposed, and accommodated the comic aspect of his work among others. It remains to bring our findings so far into relation with the references made to the poet in rhetorical treatises and progymnasmata. Among rhetorical treatises, we will fix our attention on the Περὶ ἑρμηνείας of Demetrius and on the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The latter mentions Menander’s name twice: in De imitatione 2.14, he recommends the imitation of all the virtues of the language of comic poets, since their diction (τὸ λεκτικόν) has purity and clarity, brevity and grandeur, ingenuity and morality. He then gives Menander as an example, saying in particular: Μενάνδρου δὲ καὶ τὸ πραγματικὸν θεωρητέον, ‘in Menander, the structure is also admirable’. The example of Menander is thus to be followed not only in style but also for his artistry in composition, τὸ πραγματικόν, which stands in contrast to τὸ λεκτικόν (De compositione verborum 1). Similarly, in the Ars rhetorica attributed to Dionysius, the author distinguishes the various styles of discourse—forensic, historical, dialectical, comic. Regarding the latter, he notes a difference between the comic style of Aristophanes, Cratinus, Eupolis and Menander without giving any further details. The information

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supplied by Dionysius is thus rather meagre.36 We may note that he cites Aristophanes only twice (De compositione verborum 22.14, 25.13); comic poetry, it seems, did not receive a large share of the theoretician’s attention. Nevertheless, his remark about the πραγματικόν of Menander’s work shows beyond doubt that he held Menander in high esteem, not so much from an artistic point of view as for his practical utility in rhetorical training. Demetrius in Περὶ ἑρμηνείας (193–4) makes the distinction, in a paragraph devoted to clarity, between what he calls a style ‘without links, completely disjointed’ (τὸ δὲ ἀσύνδετον καὶ διαλελυμένον), which lacks clarity, and a style ‘connected and, as it were, secured by means of linking words’.37 The former is suited to theatrical performance, while the latter is better for reading. The following paragraph studies a line of Menander (fr. 456), since the poet’s style here is particularly well adapted to theatrical performance, and Demetrius offers an analysis of the passage, several lines long.38 At §153, the author again cites Menander, using the prologue of Messenia as an example of χάρις, a quality often placed in opposition to the γελοι̃ον of Old Comedy. As we have several times seen in authors of the first and second centuries, here we find again, from the theoretician’s pen, this predilection for the poet’s prologues. Under the name of Hermogenes we possess both treatises of rhetoric and progymnasmata. In the treatise entitled Περὶ ἰδεω̃ ν λόγου (On Stylistic Categories), Menander is mentioned twice as an example. The first mention is in the chapter on vivacity (περὶ γοργότητος), where the poet is praised for his numerous passages in trochaic metres. His name occurs for a second time in the chapter περὶ ἀφελείας, when the theoretician turns to discuss naive thoughts; he states that one can find in the comic poet’s works thousands of examples—‘things said by women, by young men in love, by cooks, and so on’. In Περὶ εὑρέσεως 4.11 (περὶ σεμνου̃ λόγου), Menander is praised for having given nobility to the words of a young woman who had been the victim of a seduction (Men. fr. *337). We are dealing here, then, with an appreciation of the style of the work from an ethical point of view. Thus in Hermogenes aesthetic and ethical considerations are blended in appreciations of Menander’s works, which are always eulogistic. If we now examine the progymnasmata, we will not be surprised to find that Menander is not forgotten, and that consequently generations of apprentice orators were led to take his works as an example in composing their discourses. We have direct proof in the two passages mentioned above in connection, respectively, with Luc. Pseudolog. 4 (Pseudo-Hermogenes and Aphthonius, cf. Ethopoeia) and with Aristides 3.133 (Nicolaus of Myra 27.4 Felt), which cannot be regarded as coincidental. The earliest treatise on progymnasmata, that of Theon, refers to Menander in a kind of preamble on Pedagogical Considerations, in connection with prosopopoeiae (68.24–5 Spengel): those of the comic poet are cited as

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examples to follow, along with the poetry of Homer and the dialogues of Plato and other Socratics.39 Even if prosopopoeia ‘est le principe même de la production du discours comique et du dialogue en général’ (Patillon 2008 ad loc. [n.82]), it is important that Menander alone is cited as exemplifying comic poetry. Our evidence suggests, then, that prologues and prosopopoeiae were seen by the ancients as the strongest features of Menander’s plays. We find two more mentions of Menander in the chapter on narrative (περὶ διηγήματος). The first is on the subject of the epiphonema (a maxim added to the end of a narrative) (91.16–23 Spengel), which is particularly ‘appropriate to the theatre and the stage’: the only dramatist given as an example is Menander, from whom four lines are cited, taken, according to Theon, from the beginning of Dardanos and of Xenologos (The Recruiter; ἐν ἀρχῃ̃ δὲ του̃ τε Δαρδάνου καὶ του̃ Ξενολόγου, Men. frr. 105, 255). Two observations may be made on this subject: first, that we have here once again citations coming from prologues; second, that the epiphonema takes us back directly to Menander’s sententiae, as we see in this case: ‘The son of a poor man was brought up / in greater affluence, and was ashamed to see / his father still in poverty; for straight away / his good education yielded fine fruit’ (παιδευθεὶς γὰρ εὐ/̃ τὸν καρπὸν εὐθὺς ἀπεδίδου καλόν, Men. fr. 255.2–3). A little further on (92.15–22 Spengel) Theon comes back to Menander to give an example of an epiphonema which precedes the narrative, taken from Epikleros B (Men. fr. 129, ‘ “Is insomnia the most talkative condition there is?” followed by a narrative [. . .]’), thus indisputably testifying to the ethical aspect of the poet’s work. So much is Menander associated with this aspect that Theon adds, in connection with epiphonemata added at the end: ‘The addition of the last line is actually superfluous, and is only done in pursuit of the spectators’ applause’, a reflection clearly indicating the technographer’s disapproval of the over-use of this device. Moreover, if we are to believe Theon, Menander was given to reproducing the same sententiae in play after play, since this one adorned the prologues of two different dramas. CONCLUSION The picture that we draw from this study is a variegated one. Aelius Theon is the only one among our authors to make some critical remarks about Menander’s comedies. Nevertheless, while it is undeniable that Menander was a well-known and indeed a much-praised author during the first two centuries of our era, its authors generally cite him relatively little, with the exception of Plutarch whose position is undoubtedly distinct from the rest. Some plays seem to be particularly well appreciated—citations and iconographic evidence agree on this; but were they still known in their entirety? The specially favoured position of prologues, and of sententious expressions, might make one doubt it. And while we know, thanks to Choricius

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of Gaza and his treatise on mimes, that Menander was probably still being played in the sixth century, we cannot assert that performances of complete plays of his were still taking place then. While in the first century Plutarch, and to a lesser extent Dio—in view of his reading recommendations—seem to have an in-depth knowledge of Menander’s comedies, from the second century onwards one has the feeling that the authors have a more fragmentary idea of him, drawn from collections of sententiae and from extracts studied at school. The phenomenon of gnômai drawn from the theatre was not a new one: Euripides40 had already been abundantly pillaged in the classical period, so much so that confusion could arise about the origin of one or another fragment (cf. Aristides: Theophoroumene fr. 2.2 Sandbach = Eur. fr. 973) and lines could be attributed to the New Comedy poet which did not belong to him.41 Menander comes at the end of a chain, re-using a body of material, some of it very ancient, in which sententiae could be recycled and adapted for characters of any age and condition in his comedies. It is virtually certain that the schools played an important role in this diffusion of sententiae: one has only to read Nicolaus of Myra, in the sixth century, to be convinced of this. These conclusions are far from surprising. What is most surprising, since it is rarely noted, is the declared importance of the reading and study of Menander for the practice of the art of oratory. Several generations of writers in the early centuries of our era were sensitive to Menander’s style and the merits of his writing, and not just to the ethical dimension of his drama; this aspect emerges strongly from the rhetorical treatises and the progymnasmata. The epithet βέλτιστος given to the poet illustrates this admiration. Menander is perceived as an author who is ὠφέλιμος in rhetorical studies, and the writers of these centuries testify to a certain familiarity with his work. All the same, the question of the Nachleben of Menander and the disappearance of his works crops up in every study, and it is hard to avoid it, in view of the author’s relative popularity, at any rate in the period of the Second Sophistic. Moreover, when we look more closely, the papyrological and iconographic evidence mentioned at the start of this chapter seems not to match the ‘literary’ evidence we have discussed. In the majority of authors—again leaving Plutarch aside—Aristophanes seems more popular than Menander. Atticism is commonly put forward to explain this gap (see however Tribulato, this volume); should we think in terms of a division between an intellectual elite, with a tendency to prefer Old Comedy, and a significant part of the population who, following the tastes of the period and by their upbringing, were more susceptible to the charms of Menander’s compositions, which were linguistically and culturally closer to them?42 In that case, Plutarch will be echoing this ‘popular’ movement, while Aelius Aristides will exemplify the elitist, traditional, conservative approach. But, in view of our inquiry, one might also ask whether the fault-line does not lie between a model of writing or composition that is good to

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imitate when learning the art of oratory (ὠφέλιμος) and a style more suitable for citation because it was more acid and could be employed for mockery, the γελοι̃ον of Old Comedy. Aristides, as we have seen, uses citations from Menander freely to attack his opponents, and Lucian too exercises his wit with the help of Menandrian lines, but this remains a minor feature and dwindles further as the centuries pass. It is in this sense that the comparison made by Dio (18.7) between medicine and oratorical training takes its full meaning: just as doctors recommend, to patients needing to be cured, not the most sumptuous foods but the most beneficial (ὠφελίμους), so too the apprentice orator should work on Menander; but once the cure has been achieved, the finished orator will be able to revert to a richer diet and take his fill of πολυτελέστατοι authors like Aristophanes. So, paradoxically, the much-praised χάρις of Menander may actually have been one of the causes of his progressive disappearance from the discourses of orators.43

NOTES 1. Blanchard 1997:217–8; Fournet 1999:676–7; Miguélez Cavero 2008:232, 236. 2. Cribiore 1996:45–6; Blanchard 2007:32–3; Miguélez Cavero 2008:211–2, 240. 3. Blanchard 1997:213. 4. In the view of Blanchard 2007:34, one of the reasons for this reversal of preference is found in the transfer of the imperial capital to the east. See also Miguélez Cavero 2008:113 n.55, 197. 5. For a study of this discourse, see Billault 2004. 6. In all, Dio cites six authors to be read. 7. Garzya 1959:245. 8. Garzya 1959:241–2; Miguélez Cavero 2008:230 nn. 281, 288. 9. The line, as cited, will not scan, and Meineke therefore amended it to ταυ̃τά σ’ ἀπολώλεκ’, ὠ̃ πονηρέ. 10. Elliott 2005:29 and 207–22. 11. Karavas 2013:251 n.1. 12. Gilula 1987:512 n.3. 13. Casanova 2005:112 n.27. 14. Bompaire 1958:324. 15. See ad loc., Men. fr. 507. 16. See also Miguélez Cavero 2008:232 n.304. 17. See also the French translation by Patillon 2008. 18. On the Hermogenian tradition of the Progymnasmata see Vix 2010:333–7. According to Connolly 2001:348, there were very few changes in a thousand years in the content and even the order of the school exercises, to judge by the papyri. ̃ ὃς νυ̃ν φαίνῃ, μετὰ δ’ 19. Πρω̃τον Πηλεΐδης ἐγένου, μετὰ ταυ̃τα Μένανδρος,/ εἰθ’ ἔσσεαι ἡλιὰς ἀκτίς,/ ζήσεις δ’ ὀγδώκοντ’ ἐπὶ τοι̃ς ἑκατὸν λυκάβαντας. 20. Caster 1938:57. 21. One could also mention the Mytilene mosaic (fourth century AD) that devotes one panel to the main scene in Act II; but this iconographic tradition quite

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

Orestis Karavas and Jean-Luc Vix certainly goes back to a more distant period, perhaps close to Menander’s own time, and therefore is not sufficient to prove that the play was particularly well known in the second century of our era. See Legrand 1907, 1908. See Tomassi 2011:81–5. Karavas 2007:50. The specification συμβουλευτικός appears in the title in several medieval manuscripts. Vix 2010:352–3. Bowie 2007:33–4. The listing below is not meant to be exhaustive, and is confined to the clearest cases. Nomen omen του̃ μένειν: Keil 388.20 (v. 24, 26 and 389.1). See the discussion of this subject in Boulanger 1923:259–62. Full context: ‘If, while they talk about abstinence, someone stands in front of them holding cakes and pastries (Dem. 18.260), they let their tongues fall out like Menelaus dropping his sword (Eur. Andr. 620, Ar. Lys. 155–6). And if they actually see Helen—Helen, do I say? If they see a slave-girl like the Phrygian maid created by Menander, they make the satyrs of Sophocles (in his satyr-drama Ἑλένης γάμος, Soph. fr. 181) look like child’s play.’ Williams 1963. He confuses Alexander, son of Alcetas, who was a young man, with the 7-yearold son of Perdiccas. See the discussion of the authenticity of the scholium (whose author probably had access to the text of Menander) in Williams 1963:288–9. At §412 of the same discourse are found parallels with sententiae (Monostichoi 429, 468, 579, Men. frr. 663,741, Eur. fr. 1079). For further analyses, see Quadlbauer 1960:58–60. ̃ ἠσφαλισμένη τοι̃ς συνδέσμοις. Ἡ συνηρτημένη καὶ οἱον ‘ “I conceived you, I bore you, I am rearing you, my precious”. In this unconnected style, the line will force anyone, even against their will, to use an actor’s delivery, because of the disjunction. But introduce linking words—“I conceived you and I bore you and I am rearing you”—and with the linking words one introduces a very unemotional tone; and the unemotional is thoroughly untheatrical’ (ἐδεξάμην, ἔτικτον, ἐκτρέφω, φίλε. οὕτως γὰρ λελυμένον ἀναγκάσει καὶ τὸν μὴ θέλοντα ὑποκρίνεσθαι διὰ τὴν λύσιν· εἰ δὲ συνδήσας εἴποις, ἐδεξάμην καὶ ἔτικτον καὶ ἐκτρέφω, πολλὴν ἀπάθειαν τοις̃ συνδέσμοις ἐμβαλει̃ς. πάνυ δὲ τὸ ἀπαθὲς ἀνυπόκριτον). Προσωποποιίας δὲ τί ἂν εἴη παράδειγμα κάλλιον τη̃ς Ὁμήρου ποιήσεως καὶ τω̃ν Πλάτωνος καὶ τω̃ν ἄλλων τω̃ν Σωκρατικω̃ν διαλόγων καὶ τω̃ν Μενάνδρου δραμάτων; ‘what finer examples of prosopopoeia could there be than in the poetry of Homer, the dialogues of Plato and the other Socratics, and the plays of Menander?’ Menu 2008:558–9. Easterling 1995:155; Cusset & Lhostis 2011:93. Perhaps the same ‘demographic’ that was attracted by the novel, which enjoyed great success in the Imperial period but was apparently disdained by the sophists and the intellectual elite. This paper was translated by Alan Sommerstein. We thank him warmly for his attentive reading of it and for his valuable observations.

14 ‘Not even Menander would use this word!’ Perceptions of Menander’s Language in Greek Lexicography Olga Tribulato AN ODD FATE It has often been remarked that Menander has had a curious fate.1 In antiquity, he was an extremely popular author at all levels of Greek culture, and yet none of his plays has reached us through manuscripts.2 From the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars and readers alike have had the good fortune to understand much more of Menander’s dramatic art thanks to papyrological discoveries, but, as Serena Witzke (this volume) reminds us à propos of Oscar Wilde, just 20 years earlier knowledge of Menander’s plays was entirely based on snippets of indirect transmission or, even more remotely, on the adaptations that Roman authors were reported to have made of them. Scholars have long debated why Menander ceased to be copied out and hence read after Late Antiquity. A popular view is that his plots, populated with prostitutes, rapists and sons quarrelling with fathers, were considered inappropriate by the Church.3 This belief is partly contradicted by the fact that citations from Menander are widespread in pagan and Christian ethical writings: Stobaeus alone is our main or sole source for one fourth of the fragments collected in PCG vi.2;4 Clement of Alexandria is the main source of frr. 106, 236, 317, 323, 449–53, 707; individual Menandrian lines like fr. 165 (a verse which may have been borrowed from Euripides) may be quoted by Christian authors ranging from St. Paul to Origen and John Chrysostom (although it has been argued that these authors drew from the collections of monosticha in circulation as early as the first century AD rather than from the plays themselves).5 Another line of interpretation follows a very different path. In the second century AD, at the height of Menander’s success, the Atticists headed by Phrynichus began to routinely disparage his language and, by exposing its proximity to koine and popular usage, warned those who wished to be considered true Attic-speakers against imitating him. This view is subscribed to by distinguished scholars.6 Yet, as Pat Easterling has argued, such an approach is vitiated by two kinds of distortion. First, we should be wary of superimposing Phrynichus’ stances on Atticism as a whole, particularly

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because in spite of the few surviving lexica we know relatively little about how nuanced the Atticist linguistic approach might have been.7 Second, the fact that Menander’s plays ceased to be copied after the seventh or eighth century AD does not automatically signify his disappearance from rhetoric, school education, philosophy and even religious writings (see Karavas & Vix, this volume). It is probably the case that the true reason lies somewhere at the crossroads between Christian and linguistic disapproval paired with the mutated cultural horizon of an age when comedy (be it Old, Middle or New) was no longer interesting for its theatrical or literary value and when only Aristophanes held his ground, as the somewhat stereotypical representative of Athenian democracy and παρρησία.8 Still, no matter how we wish to settle the question of the role of Atticism in Menander’s disappearance, the first danger evoked by Easterling calls for a better understanding of his special (and specialist) fate in ancient lexicography. These sources prove that Menander enjoyed a special status, different from that of other comic poets. For instance, while Cratinus survived mainly for his linguistic interest and many representatives of New Comedy were preserved for their ethical usefulness,9 Menander was frequently quoted not only for his philosophical appeal, but also because he was perceived to be a useful linguistic source. This no doubt owes a lot to his paramount role in the school and rhetorical canons throughout antiquity and to his enduring popularity on the stage and on the written page. This paper investigates the ways in which Menander could be considered useful for linguistic purposes by giving a sample of the perceptions of Menander’s language at different stages of Greek lexicography and by considering attitudes that diverged from Phrynichus’ condemnation of his work. Because of its fame, Phrynichus’ judgment necessarily provides the point of comparison against which the other positions are assessed. In particular, I shall consider examples from the anonymous lexicon known as the Antiatticist, which was produced in the age of Atticism but may have partaken of a more open approach to linguistic correctness. PHRYNICHUS AGAINST MENANDER: THE BIRTH OF A POLEMIC The beginnings of Menander’s disgrace, but also a pointer to the pervasive popularity that he enjoyed in the time of Atticism (on which see also Karavas & Vix, this volume), can be found in an uncommonly long excerpt from Phrynichus’ Eclogue containing a famous and violent outburst against Menander:10 Phryn. Ecl. 394 Fischer: οὐχ ὁρω̃, μὰ τὸν Ἡρακλέα, τί πάσχουσιν οἱ τὸν Μένανδρον μέγαν ἄγοντες καὶ αἴροντες ὑπὲρ τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἅπαν. διὰ τί δὲ θαυμάσας ἔχω; ὅτι τὰ ἄκρα τω̃ν Ἑλλήνων ὁρω̃ μανικω̃ς περὶ τὸν

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κωμῳδοποιὸν του̃τον σπουδάζοντα, πρώτιστον μὲν ἐν παιδείᾳ μέγιστον ἀξίωμα ἁπάντων ἔχοντα σὲ καὶ διὰ του̃το ἐκ προκρίτων ἀποφανθέντα ὑπὸ βασιλέων ἐπιστολέα αὐτω̃ν, ἔπειτα δευτέρᾳ τιμῃ̃, λειπόμενον πολὺ τη̃ς ση̃ς παρασκευη̃ς, ἐξεταζόμενον δ’ ἐν τοι̃ς Ἕλλησιν, Βάλβον τὸν ἀπὸ τω̃ν Τράλλεων, ὃς εἰς τοσου̃το προθυμίας καὶ θαύματος ἥκει Μενάνδρου, ὥστε καὶ Δημοσθένους ἀμείνω ἐγχειρει̃ν ἀποφαίνειν τὸν λέγοντα μεσοπορει̃ν καὶ γυ̃ρος καὶ λήθαργος καὶ σύσσημον καὶ πορνοκόπος καὶ ὀψωνιασμός καὶ ὀψώνιον καὶ δύσριγος καὶ ἄλλα κίβδηλα ἀναρίθμητα καὶ ἀμαθη̃· τὰ αὐτὰ δὲ σοὶ καὶ Βάλβῳ πεπονθότα καὶ Γαϊανὸν τὸν Σμυρναι̃ον ῥήτορα, ἄνδρα ζηλωτὴν καὶ ἐραστὴν τη̃ς ση̃ς ἐν παιδείᾳ φιλοκαλίας. ἄγε οὐ̃ν ὅπως λύσῃς μου τὴν ἐν τῃ̃ τοιᾳ̃δε δυσχερείᾳ τω̃ν ὤτων ἀπορίαν· οὐ γὰρ περιόψεσθαί σε ἡγου̃μαι ἐρήμην ὀφλόντα σου τὰ παιδικὰ Μένανδρον. By Heracles, I do not know what is the matter with those who consider Menander great and extol him as the highest representative of all things Greek. Why am I surprised? Because I see the brightest Greeks manically busying themselves with this writer of comedies: first of all you (Cornelianus), who have the greatest worth of all in learning and for this reason have been elected secretary ab epistulis by the emperors themselves out of the most selected men; and then, in the second place, someone who of course is much inferior to your preparation though he is held in regard among the Greeks—I mean Balbus of Tralles, who reaches such a level of enthusiasm and admiration of Menander that he attempts to demonstrate that someone who uses words such as μεσοπορειν̃ , γυ̃ρος, λήθαργος, σύσσημον, πορνοκόπος, ὀψωνιασμός, ὀψώνιον, δύσριγος and other innumerable spurious and unlearned expressions, is better than Demosthenes. And another one who is in the same state as you and Balbus is the orator Gaianus of Smyrna, a zealous man and a devotee of your good taste in culture. Come on, release me from my bafflement in hearing such (contradictory) things: for I do not think that you will allow that sweetheart of yours, Menander, to be condemned in absentia. The indignation shining through Phrynichus’ words is a clear reflection of that mind-set which—under the influence of Aristotelian and later Stoic philosophy—had informed Greek linguistic studies since the birth of Alexandrian glossography, mixing grammar with ethics. Aristotle regarded literary works as organisms that in order to function must have all their ‘parts’ in the right place; among these, in the grammarians’ eyes language had pride of place. Accordingly, since in the Aristotelian ‘organic’ notion form is an integral part of content, the speech of someone who is able to speak correctly will also be correct in content, and hence ethically right.11 Atticism—a phenomenon which developed in a linguistic sphere, but which soon took on a literary and cultural normative function—takes this philosophy to the extreme, morally condemning what is linguistically incorrect.

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The subtle rhetoric of this passage reminds us of the closing speech of a prosecutor who is publicly accusing Menander and challenging his defender (in the person of the rhetorician Cornelianus, dedicatee of the Eclogue) to pronounce a statement in his defence. What is Menander’s crime? Apparently not using grammar badly, but rather (in line with the Atticist interest in defining correct semantics, word formation and phonology) his use of ‘innumerable (ἀναρίθμητα) and unlearned (ἀμαθη̃) spurious expressions (κίβδηλα)’.12 As Mario Lamagna has shown in two penetrating contributions, κίβδηλα is the keyword here: the choice of an adjective that in current language identified adulterated gold or silver reveals that the main issue about Menander’s lexicon is not that it is ἀμαθής, but that it deliberately cheats those who imitate it, in that it purports to be something which it is not (i.e. good Attic).13 Those mentioned among Menander’s supporters are not mere side actors on the Imperial cultural stage, but leading personalities from the Greekspeaking intelligentsia: Cornelianus is worthiest of all in terms of learning (παιδεία), to the point of having been elected chief minister of the Imperial chancery; while Balbus, though he is a not a Greek by birth, is ranked among the Greeks (ἐξεταζόμενον δ’ ἐν τοι̃ς Ἕλλησιν), obviously on account of his Greek erudition. The rhetorically pregnant sentence explaining why the (for us) obscure Gaianus of Smyrna is the third man in this learned trio gives us another important interpretative key. Gaianus is an admirer of Cornelianus’ ἐν παιδείᾳ φιλοκαλία, an expression compressing the notion of ‘erudition’ (παιδεία), which Phrynichus has amply evoked in the previous sentences, with what literally means ‘love of beauty’ (φιλοκαλία) and may be better translated as ‘good taste’. Phrynichus implicitly gives an important lesson of style: it is not enough to be erudite, one must also be able to couple erudition with an unfailing instinct for cultural refinement. This subtle preamble leads Phrynichus to the main point: to admire Menander is not in good taste, and hence it cannot be paired with the authentic παιδεία that Cornelianus possesses. In fact, twice in his address to Cornelianus Phrynichus uses forms of πάσχω in the specialised meanings of ‘being affected by a malady, being in a state’ (τί πάσχουσιν; πεπονθότα) to describe Menander’s supporters. In hearing Cornelianus sing Menander’s praises Phrynichus experiences an ἀπορία τω̃ν ὤτων (literally: ‘difficulty of the ears’) which puts him in a state of δυσχέρεια (‘distress’). With a final rhetorical move, Phrynichus challenges Cornelianus to free him from this unpleasant condition by intervening in defence of his beloved Menander. The plea conceals a final blow to Menander’s reputation as he is portrayed as the young sexual pursuit (τὰ παιδικά) of older Cornelianus, and thus implicitly as a weak, unprotected person who is unable to defend himself by his own means. Among the eight terms condemned in this attack, three (ὀψώνιον ‘salary’, ὀψωνιασμός ‘furnishing with provisions’ and σύσσημον ‘badge’) are seemingly censured for being late creations without an Attic pedigree,14 while

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γυ̃ρος and λήθαργος are probably rejected for their meaning, as is often the case with Menandrian expressions quoted by Phrynichus.15 The issue with μεσοπορει̃ν ‘to be half-way’ and δύσριγος ‘impatient of cold’ seems to concern word formation in the first instance and may be connected to certain structural developments affecting compounding in post-Classical Greek. In Ecl. 32 μεσονύκτιον ποιητικόν, οὐ πολιτικόν and Ecl. 167 μεσοδάκτυλα· ἐναυτίασα του̃το ἀκούσας τοὔνομα. λέγομεν οὐ̃ν τὰ μέσα τω̃ν δακτύλων Phrynichus criticizes other compounds in μεσο-. In this class of compounds the first member ends up behaving as a sort of governing preposition meaning ‘in the middle’ (the same happens with compounds in ἀκρο-), a relatively recent phenomenon in Greek since the first specimens are found in Pindar (μεσονύκτιος) and Aeschylus (μεσόμφαλος) and the type later develops in post-Classical prose.16 Phrynichus’ dislike is therefore directed against formations which, being used either in highly poetic language or in the ‘bastardized’ Greek of his time, were not canonical Attic. As concerns δύσριγος, its rejection may be linked to word-formation (compounds of ῥι̃γος should end in -ριγής) as well as semantics, since the first member behaves as a sort of verbal governing element. Such function of δυσ- is already attested in Herodotus, who was not regarded as a linguistic authority by the Atticists; it is however less clear why Phrynichus should criticise a word used by Aristophanes (fr. 94), if we are to trust Pollux’s testimony on this point.17 Judging from the long harangue for Cornelianus and the several passages in which Phrynichus unfailingly censures Menander’s linguistic choices, the conclusion that we are entitled to draw is that the playwright enjoyed no indulgence from Phrynichus. Yet the question remains as to whether Phrynichus’ attitude can be considered representative first of Atticism as a whole and secondly of the cultural climate that produced Atticism in the second century AD. While the notion that Phrynichus detested Menander is pervasive in modern literature on the matter, it is seldom recognised that in a few passages of the Eclogue, as well as in the Praeparatio Sophistica, Phrynichus also manifests a less scathing stance.18 Directly or indirectly, Menander has a prominent role in Pollux’s Onomasticon19 and Moeris’ lexicon.20 Athenaeus, an author who was not immediately involved in linguistic purism but whose erudite interests were usually exemplified with copious quotations from authors of the approved Atticist canon, quotes Menander several times. Such discrepancy of treatment may of course be boiled down to the popular idea that the Atticists had more or less strict canons. Mario Lamagna for instance provides useful examples of how many of Pollux’s entries on Menander are aimed at disavowing Phrynichus’ judgments, concluding that Menander was the very battleground on which the ‘dispute’ between Phrynichus and Pollux was fought.21 However, the analysis of other lexicographical sources indicates that the attitude embodied by Pollux was more widespread and went well beyond the borders of Atticist controversies,

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revealing that the playwright enjoyed a status as linguistic auctoritas both before and after Phrynichus.22 MENANDER IN A NEUTRAL LIGHT? EARLY AND LATE LEXICOGRAPHY To gauge Menander’s role in linguistic studies before the age of Atticism is a difficult task since a huge amount of Alexandrian glossography and grammar prior to Apollonius Dyscolus and Herodian is lost to us. Yet, his constant presence in later lexicography suggests that an earlier interest in his language must have existed also in the heyday of Alexandrian scholarship, perhaps in the context of studies on comic language or on Attic. An active personality in both these fields was Aristophanes of Byzantium, editor of Aristophanes, collector of λέξεις and perhaps, according to the Bodmer codex, editor of Menander as well.23 The only titled Aristophanic work dealing with him has been transmitted by Porphyrius (in Euseb. Praep. Ev. 10.3.12) with the bewildering title of Παράλληλοι Μενάνδρου τε καὶ ἀφ’ ὡ̃ν ἔκλεψεν ἐκλογαί. This is at odds with Aristophanes’ professed admiration of Menander (see the famous test. 83 K-A). The idea that Menander ‘stole’ lines from other authors, and particularly from the tragedians, was widespread in antiquity and clearly resulted from his practice of quoting tragedy and using ‘tragic’ plots and modes of expression. We may wonder whether this belief might not have ended up influencing the title of Aristophanes’ work, turning it into something that it originally was not: it has been argued that the Παράλληλοι were in fact aimed at showing how classical Menander’s poetry was.24 That some linguistic interest in Menander pre-dates the Christian era is also suggested by the prominent role that he occupies in the works of the two scholars who are credited with having started Atticist lexicography proper: Aelius Dionysius and Pausanias (both early second century AD). If we trust Erbse’s authoritative edition of these lexica, both appear to have shared a view that Menander was an authority on all things Attic. In the fragments attributed to Aelius Dionysius, Menander is a source on Attic phonology,25 word-formation26 and semantics.27 As far as we can grasp from its fragments, Pausanias’ lexicon seems to have concerned Attic traditions and culture more than language: even in this realm, however, Menander holds a major position, being quoted no less than twenty-three times,28 and only once in critical terms.29 Such agreement can of course be the result of independent interest in the playwright, but the nature of the other lexicographers’ linguistic knowledge, which appears to have been based on previous scholarship rather than on first-hand experience of the texts themselves, suggests that both Aelius and Pausanias might have been guided in their use of Menander by earlier works.30 The turning point in the change of perceptions of Menander in secondcentury lexicography was the transition from a descriptive approach—by

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which the Attic dialect was illustrated with quotations from a vast range of Attic authors—to a clearly prescriptive concern, which aimed at indicating rules for speaking correct Greek. This entailed an ideological shift, implying a definite view of the parameters that defined Greek culture (ἑλληνισμός). One of these parameters was the exclusion of elements associated with koine, the language of a geographically and culturally fluid Greek-speaking world. Menander was in a shaky position in that he sat on the fine dividing line between ‘old’ Attic (of which he still preserved many uses) and ‘new’ Attic, a linguistic variety shockingly close to the koine and to the developments of spoken Greek that the Atticists sought to eradicate.31 Such contradiction may have prompted some scholars (and among them Phrynichus) to devote sharper attention to Menander, with the aim of ‘sifting’ the fine from the coarse language. Whatever reception Phrynichus’ intransigence might have had in the immediate future,32 his efforts to oust Menander from the canon of correct Greek do not seem to have been successful in lexicography. Later lexicographers, from Orus (fifth century AD) to Photius (ninth century), the Suda (tenth century) and Eustathius (twelfth century), unanimously follow the more ‘neutral’ approach that we have attributed to Aelius Dionysius. If Erbse is right, a lot of Menander in these later lexicographers comes from Aelius himself. Due to limitations of space we shall consider only one example. Phot. α1197 (which Erbse, on the basis of the parallel passage α1030, edited as Ael. Dion. α98) discusses the issue of the Attic initial aspiration of ἀμίς ‘piss-pot’. A line of an ‘approved’ Attic author, Eupolis, is quoted (Eup. fr. 52); but Menander’s fr. 252 immediately follows, because it contains the συναλοιφή (‘coalescing’) of κει̃νται into κει̃νθ’, a phenomenon proving the initial aspiration of the following ἁμίδες on empirical grounds. Photius thus inherits Aelius’ method without fussing over whether Menander can be considered an Attic auctoritas or not: and this is the winning tendency in Greek lexicography, no matter how loudly Phrynichus protests against considering Menander a good author.33 DEFENDING MENANDER: THE EVIDENCE FROM THE ANTIATTICIST So far, we have been reckoning with three grades of Menander’s perception in ancient lexicography. Between Phrynichus’ polemical stances and that neutral attitude, which I have suggested was shared by various early scholars (Aelius Dionysius, Pausanias, perhaps also Aristophanes of Byzantium) and late-antique and medieval lexicographers (for instance Photius), we have had a glimpse of a middle ground represented by Atticists like Pollux and Moeris, who sometimes openly criticise Menander for leaning towards koine and other times exploit him as an Attic source. A fourth position, which might have been almost as militant as that of Phrynichus, is the one contained between the lines of the anonymous lexicon

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that goes under the title of Antiatticista. This heavily shortened work is transmitted in only one copy by the Codex Coislinianus 345, a tenth-century parchment manuscript of paramount importance for Greek lexicography.34 In the codex the lexicon bears the title of Ἄλλος ἀλφάβητος but Immanuel Bekker, following the eighteenth-century Dutch philologist David Ruhnken, edited it in the first volume of his Anecdota Graeca as Ἀντιαττικιστής.35 The title has clearly oriented the modern interpretation of the lexicon as a work on a mission to systematically overturn Atticist prescriptions, but as Kurt Latte argued the lexicon is more likely to aim at an alternative view of what was acceptable as learned Greek.36 Probably we will never be able to date this work securely, but its evident (though complex) relationship with Phrynichus’ Eclogue has induced scholars to situate its genesis in the second century AD.37 For our present purpose the question of whether the Antiatticist was conceived as a direct reply to uncompromising forms of purism as exemplified by Phrynichus, or whether it itself represented a line of linguistic thought against which Phrynichus later fought, is of secondary importance. The main point of interest for us is that the lexicon partakes of the more open attitude also shown by Pollux’s Onomasticon, which clearly emerges from the fact that both works frequently use not only minor Attic playwrights, but also non-Attic authors like Hesiod, Pindar, Herodotus, Epicharmus, Sophron and Deinolochus.38 At the same time, the Antiatticist seems to have a more radical agenda than Pollux. My analysis in this direction starts from the seven Menandrian quotations in the lexicon: 1. Antiatt. 81, 12 Bekker: ἀνάβα, κατάβα, διάβα, ἀπόστα· Μένανδρος Ἐπικλήρῳ· ὅρα σὺ καὶ φρόντιζε κἀπόστα βραχύ ( = Men. fr. 134) 2. Antiatt. 83, 31 Bekker: βίος· ἐπὶ {συν}ουσίας. Ἡρόδοτος, Μένανδρος Δημιουργῳ̃, Εὔπολις Αἰξίν, ὁ ποιητὴς πολλάκις ( = Men. fr. 112) 3. Antiatt. 96. 1 Bekker: ἐξαλλάξαι· ὡς Ἀλεξανδρει̃ς, ἀντὶ του̃ τέρψαι. Μένανδρος (fr. 540) 4. Antiatt. 97, 2 Bekker: ἐπεπτώκειμεν· Μένανδρος Καταψευδομένῳ. ( = Men. fr. 206) 5. Antiatt. 89, 29 Bekker: δεδείπνηκας· Μένανδρος (fr. 427) 6. Antiatt. 105, 20 Bekker: καταφαγα̃ς· Μένανδρος Πωλουμένοις ( = Men. fr. 320) 7. Antiatt. 115, 1 Bekker: ὑπόθεσιν· ἀντὶ του̃ ὑποθήκην. Μένανδρος (fr. 428) Four of the quotations (nos. 2, 3, 6 and 7) concern semantics, two (nos. 1 and 4) pertain to verbal morphology, while no. 5 is a puzzling entry since the active perfect δεδείπνηκας is irreproachable Greek.39 If the issue concerning the quoted form was a morphological one, then it is likely that the original form was different (Meineke suggested δεδειπνήκασι, a more recent and less ‘Attic’ form than δεδειπνα̃σι). The other option is that the Antiatticist

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originally discussed, in a more extended fashion, a particular meaning of the form δεδείπνηκας: speculatively, this might have involved the evolution of the perfect into a narrative tense, a usage that would eventually lead to a merger with the aorist. No. 1 provides a good illustration of the approach to language evolution displayed by the Antiatticist. The forms ἀνάβα ‘get on!’, κατάβα ‘go down!’, διάβα ‘go through!’ and ἀπόστα ‘keep away!’ are imperatives of new formation from compounds of βαίνω and ἵστημι. In older Greek, the corresponding root aorists yield the imperatives ἀνάβηθι, κατάβηθι, διάβηθι and ἀπόστηθι. The new imperatives in -ᾱ clearly behave as if they derived from the present tense of contract verbs (type τίμᾱ etc.);40 they are part of a larger phenomenon of convergence between the thematic and athematic conjugations (see also ζη̃θι instead of ζη̃).41 On a grammatical level, purists may have been right in snubbing these aorist imperatives in -ᾱ, insofar as they are linguistically aberrant. Precisely because of their perceived ‘regularity’, however, they had become common in koine Greek.42 The author of the Antiatticist would thus be set to prove that they were acceptable forms insofar as they were used by an Attic (and extremely popular) author, Menander. The aim of this entry may not just be the defence of these particular verbal forms but, more programmatically, the rehabilitation of Menander as a suitable linguistic auctoritas. Imperatives of this type are found also in Aristophanes (κατάβα, ἔμβα) and Euripides (ἔμβα, πρόβα, ἐπίβα, ἔσβα) who would undoubtedly have lent them a higher Attic pedigree.43 In the other discussions of these forms in Greek lexicography Euripides is never quoted, and so the Antiatticist is not alone: probably, the material on which all these works rest was concerned with comic language in particular.44 A good candidate is Aristophanes of Byzantium (see for instance fr. 28 A-D Slater). From him, the debate may have reached Atticist lexicography: Erbse’s attribution of the lemma in Σb α1978 Cunningham (also present in Photius and the Suda) to Aelius Dionysius is considered certain.45 The wording of Σb α1978 ἀπόστα, οὐ μόνον ἀπόστηθι implies that both forms were acceptable by Attic and this may have been Aelius’ belief too. We have no direct evidence of Atticist stigmatization of ἀπόστα etc., but the comment μόνως γὰρ λέγεσθαι ἀξιου̃σί τινες τὸ κατάβηθι in Su. κ474 seems to point in that direction. However, while all the other lexicographical sources dealing with these imperatives quote or imply an Aristophanic locus classicus, the Antiatticist is silent. Of course, this could be the result of the epitomization: in the original entry the imperatives might have been exemplified with more than one quotation, but the epitomist would have kept only the last one, which correctly gives Menander as the source where ἀπόστα is attested.46 However, if the epitomization has not omitted any other quotation, the absence of Aristophanes vis-à-vis his presence in other sources speaks volumes and must be due to a programmatic choice on the part of the author of the Antiatticist,

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who might implicitly be giving his readers a wider lesson, not just on linguistic correctness, but also on the constitution of the canon for ἑλληνισμός. In a more radical manner than Pollux, whose practical rule was to resort to Menander for things which did not have a name in other authors,47 the Antiatticist restored Menander to the full respect that he deserved, on account of the beauty of his art and the popularity of his plays. The quotation in no. 3 may follow the same criterion. The pluperfect ἐπεπτώκειμεν features the replacement of the old ending -εμεν with the new ending -ειμεν, which was part of the tendency towards paradigmatic regularity eventually achieved in the koine, where the old Attic endings characterised by -η-, -ει- or -ε- were remade by extending the -ει- of the third person singular as if it were a suffix.48 Atticist lexicographers strove to teach people to keep the old Attic pseudo-apophony, as is testified by a variety of sources, for example Phryn. Ecl. 119 Fischer: ἠκηκόεσαν, ἐγεγράφεσαν, ἐπεποιήκεσαν, ἐνενοήκεσαν ἐρει̃ς, ἀλλ’ οὐ σὺν τῳ̃ ι, ἠκηκόεισαν; Phot. ε1427: ἐπεπόνθη· ἀντὶ του̃ ἐπεπόνθειν. καὶ ἑωράκη καὶ ᾔδη, ἀντὶ του̃ ᾔδειν καὶ ἑωράκειν; Phot. ε2530: ἑωράκη· τὸ πρω̃τον πρόσωπον, ὡς ἐπεπόνθη καὶ ἐπεποιήκη καὶ ᾔδη, τὸ ᾔδειν· Πλάτων τοι̃ς τοιούτοις χρη̃ται σχηματισμοι̃ς. As in the case of ἀνάβα etc. above, the Antiatticist could have defended these new pluperfect endings by providing irreproachable evidence, their use by approved authors: Demosthenes, for instance, uses the pluperfects ἀπωλώλειτε (18.49) and ἐδεδώκειμεν (58.9), Aristophanes (Pl. 684) has ἐδεδοίκεις. Again, we do not know whether in the case of ἐπεπτώκειμεν the choice of this form was also prompted by a particular meaning that it might have in a context that is lost for us. However, we must consider as at least probable the other option, namely that the choice of Menander has an agenda behind it. It might perhaps seem surprising that a lexicon allegedly on a mission to support koine usages against Atticist attacks should quote Menander only seven times, and only in two cases with the aim of defending morphological innovations. By carefully going through the apparatus in PCG vi.2, however, one can also identify other entries in the Antiatticist that might have originally concerned Menander and confirm the idea that the lexicon drew from collections of material where Menander played a prominent role. I give two examples. Antiatt. 77, 12 Bekker: ἀποκριθη̃ναι, οὐκ ἀποκρίνασθαι concerns verbal voice, a linguistic topic that is often debated in Greek lexicography, since post-Classical Greek began to abandon the tripartite system activemiddle-passive in the future and aorist tenses. In all tenses, the deponent ἀποκρίνομαι has a meaning (‘to answer’) which is unrelated to the meaning of the active voice ἀποκρίνω ‘I separate’. In the future and aorist the passive meanings ‘I will be separated’ and ‘I was separated’ are conveyed by a separate form (ἀποκριθήσομαι, ἀποκρίθην), but in the present, perfect and pluperfect the middle-passive forms ἀποκρίνομαι, ἀποκέκριμαι, ἀπεκεκρίμην cover for both the deponent (‘I answer’) and the passive (‘I am separated’).

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This morphological identity seems to have led to a semantic reshuffling in other tenses as well, bringing about the use of the aorist and future passives to mean ‘to answer’ instead of ‘to be separated’. The use of the aorist passive ἀποκρίθην in the meaning ‘I answered’, which also extends to the future passive, is particularly frequent in the Septuagint and in New Testament Greek; its popularity in the koine explains why Atticists took great pains to wipe it from correct Greek. The laconic entry in Phot. (z) α2526 ἀποκριθείς× ἐπὶ του̃ ἀποκρινάμενος. Μένανδρος Φανίῳ (fr. 393), for instance, hides an Atticist discussion, as passages in Phrynichus and Ammonius, later followed by Thomas Magister, show.49 The aim with which Menander is quoted elsewhere in the Antiatticist advises us to attribute a prescriptive nature to this entry which would be saying something like ‘It is fine to use ἀποκριθη̃ναι instead of ἀποκρίνασθαι (for ‘to answer’) because this is what Menander also does’. Another entry probably going back to a Menandrian locus classicus, omitted in the Antiatticist but not in other lexicographical sources, is Antiatt. 83, 19 Bekker: γλαφυρώτατον· τὸν χαριέστατον, which reflects on the Attic specialised meaning of γλαφυρός as ‘elegant, witty’, a development of the secondary meaning ‘polished’ (itself deriving from the primary meaning ‘hollow’). Phrynichus Praep. Soph. 58.3: γλαφυρός· ὁ εὐτράπελος καὶ χαρίεις shows that the specialised meaning of γλαφυρός was not stigmatized by the Atticists. Phrynichus and the Antiatticist then agree on its Attic pedigree and the epitomes of both works omit the loci classici. Moreover, both interpret γλαφυρός with the synonym χαρίεις, while the synonym εὐτράπελος is shared by Phrynichus, Photius and the Lexicon Αἱμωδει̃ν.50 The aim behind this entry is more difficult to interpret. A necessary premise is that the heavily epitomized status of the discussion on γλαφυρός in both Phrynichus and the Antiatticist, the oldest surviving sources, does not allow for bold conclusions. The idea that both have a Menandrian line as the locus classicus is a supposition, but a likely one because of the evidence in Photius and the Lex. Αἱμ. If this is so, we would have other indirect evidence for the existence of a collection of glosses which contained words from Menander as well as other authors and which was an important source for the lexica of the Atticist era, and later for other works as well. CONCLUSIONS: THE ANTIATTICIST, MENANDER AND GREEK LEXICOGRAPHY If we look at the quotations from Menander in the Antiatticist we realise that there are two groups of glosses. Regarding morphology (the imperatives, pluperfect forms, even compounds) and verbal voice, the Antiatticist quotes Menander to bear witness to developments that other lexicographical sources condemn as non-Attic. The laconic style of the epitome makes it difficult for us to decide whether these quotations are made with the aim

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of describing the koine features that found a precedent in literary sources (something along the lines of ‘I inform you that developments like ἀπόστα and ἀποκριθη̃ναι are already attested in Menander’) or whether they are intended to serve a more prescriptive aim (something along the lines of ‘you can say ἀπόστα and ἀποκριθη̃ναι and should not think that they are mistakes since an important author like Menander uses them as well’), but the overall structure of the lexicon advises us to lean towards the latter. The Antiatticist systematically gives a comprehensive picture of the lexical and morphological range of the Greek language by quoting a vast array of authors who did not have any room in Atticist prescriptions. This approach reminds us of the open-mindedness of Alexandrian linguistic studies, with their wide-ranging interest in the many Greek dialectal and literary varieties.51 If this is not the accidental result of a compilation of different sources on the part of its author, the original Antiatticist could have been an example of a scholarly work set not only on resisting any form of purism, but also on programmatically preserving the variegated nature of Greek. In the typical style of ancient Greek linguistics, there is no historical perspective in the methodology that places Homer, Hesiod and the poets of New Comedy on the same level, but this is precisely the strength of the collection: it gives its readers a snapshot of the great diversity attained by Greek, considered as an immanent entity, which will eternally exist as long as its boni auctores all continue to be considered good models. It would be wrong to conclude that in each individual entry the Antiatticist advises real speakers to imitate the language of Homer, Hesiod or Epicharmus. More probably, the aim of the lexicon was to show that not every non-Attic word (in the Atticists’ sense) was automatically ‘bad Greek’, because Greek was a melting-pot of dialects and literary varieties. It is precisely in connection with this that the more literary face of the lexicon sometimes gives way to a more practical stance. We see it clearly in the entries dealing with morphological innovations (such as the new imperatives and pluperfects considered above, or the use of passive forms in place of middle ones) which are explained, supported even, with quotations from more recent authors. Among them, Menander and the poets of New Comedy have an important share. Of course, a lot of what we can learn from anonymous lexica or epitomes is always bound to have a degree of speculation. In the case of the Antiatticist in particular we will never be able to settle many questions (including that of its relation with Phrynichus) until a thorough study of its sources and agreement with other works is done in earnest. Even a superficial consideration of some of its glosses, however, has provided us with further thoughts on Menander’s reception in antiquity. The entries in the Antiatticist—but also their many parallel passages in later lexicography and their likely points of contact with earlier personalities such as Aelius Dionysius—allow us to see that Menander’s opponents, whom many scholars consider to have exerted

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dramatic influence on his fate, were in fact a minority party. Menander’s prestige was by no means limited to the literary and theatrical scenes: his acolytes crowded the lexicographical circles too.

NOTES 1. See e.g. Cantarella 1954:22–24; Easterling 1995; Blanchard 1997. 2. On Menander’s role in Greek education, see Morgan 1998:69, 97; Cribiore 2001:199–200. 3. E.g. Gomme & Sandbach 1973:2. 4. On Stobaeus’ role in the transmission of Menander, see Dain 1963:298–9. 5. The question is discussed by Dain 1963:296–8. 6. Arnott 1979:xiii-xiv; Blanchard 1997:222–4; Blume 1998:22; Lamagna 2004b:198, 207. 7. See Slater 1977:260, particularly à propos the supposed dispute between Phrynichus and Pollux. 8. Thus e.g. Blanchard 1997:222. An additional factor, noted by N.G. Wilson 1983:20, may have been that Menander’s plays were too easy for school study (and had thus never been thought to need a commentary). 9. See Nesselrath 2010. 10. Lamagna 2004b:199–200 also provides an insightful analysis of this passage. 11. See Morgan 1998:179. 12. See too Lamagna 2004b:199. 13. Lamagna 2004b:200–1; Lamagna 2004c. 14. ὀψώνιον and ὀψωνιασμός are common terms in Hellenistic Greek pertaining to the military sphere, but are not used by other literary authors before Polybius and the Septuagint; σύσσημον ‘signal, token’, another relatively common term in Hellenistic Greek, was censured because it had replaced the ‘more Attic’ σύμβολον. As Lamagna 2004b:203 notes, Phrynichus is completely deaf to the dramatic dimension of Menander’s language in this and other cases; other intellectuals (e.g. Plutarch) recognised that Menander’s language was appropriately mixed: see also Sandbach 1970. 15. See Ecl. 162 = Men. fr. 162 (χειμάζω used for λυπέω ‘to vex’, as in koine Greek); Ecl. 170 = Men. fr. 584 (μεγιστα̃νες is not used by ancient authors, who use the periphrasis μέγα δυνάμενοι ‘men in great power’ instead); Ecl. 341 = Men. fr. 540 (ἐξαλλάττω to mean τέρπω ‘to delight’ is not found in the approved authors); Ecl. 397 = Men. fr. 589 (the correct meaning of μετριάζω is ‘to patiently endure what happens’ not ἀσθενέω ‘to be weak’). 16. See Risch 1945, Tribulato 2005:325–330. For μεσοπορει̃ν, see also Phryn. Ecl. 392. 17. On Poll. 4.186 (and on whether the attribution to Aristophanes is trustworthy), see Lamagna 2004b:201. In Ecl. 410 = Men. fr. 589 Phrynichus also condemns the compound verb ἀκρατεύω. In another passage (Ecl. 390) he recommends using the compound πορνότριψ ‘one who frequents prostitutes’ rather than the more recent πορνοκόπος. The discussion about πορνότριψ and πορνοκόπος shows how narrow-minded Phrynichus’ approach was: he deemed more appropriate a form which, judging from the fact that it is only quoted by him, probably was not only residual, but also a literary creation. Root compounds of the kind of πορνότριψ were a residual type in Greek and were steadily replaced by thematic formations in -ος like πορνοκόπος: see Tribulato

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18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

Olga Tribulato 2005:158–164. The vast majority of root compounds found in post-Homeric Greek are not only literary, but also poetic: see Tribulato 2005:161–2. On πορνοκόπος in particular, see also the remarks in Lamagna 2004b:202. See e.g. Phryn. Ecl. 157 = Men. Sam. F 1 (Menander correctly uses λιβανωτόν for ‘incense’ against the new use of λίβανον); Praep. soph. 33.9 = Men. fr. 527 (Menander quoted to exemplify the meaning of ἀτεράμων ‘hard’ as opposed to ἀτενής ‘stubborn’); Praep. soph. 58.3 = Men. fr. 531 (Menander quoted to exemplify the meaning of γλαφυρός ‘refined’; cf. Antiatticista 87.19); Praep. soph. 28.4 = Men. fr. 592 (Menander uses αὐθέκαστος ‘self-willed’ to mean ‘unpleasant’). To these passages add Ecl.183 on μειράκιον as the correct form to be used for ‘young boy’: Menander is not quoted, but Ps.-Hdn. Philet. 228 shows that the original discussion involved the quotation of fr. 494. See Men. frr. 30, 66, 73, 399, 615, 617–618, 620–3, 625–8 and also Kassel & Austin’s apparatus to frr. 94, 101, 123, 285, 292, 370, 468, 492, 496, 590 (words discussed by Pollux without a direct quotation from Menander). Pollux openly criticizes Menander in 1.79, 2.82, 3.29, 6.38, 6.161, 9.139. Naechster 1908:6 is wrong in adding 6.26 ( = Men. fr. 66), where Menander is quoted in a neutral fashion. Moeris’ lexicon usually does not quote its sources but many entries discuss words that we know from other sources to have been used by Menander: see the apparatus to frr. 99, 118, 292, 361, 383, 424, 667. In many cases Menander’s practice coincides with that of the Ἀττικοί; in one case, Menander’s linguistic usage is implicitly criticized (Moer. α 133 = Men. fr. 590). Lamagna 2004b:198. On the question of the Atticist canon(s), see Bethe 1917:778; Naechster 1908:11–21; Swain 1998:53–56. See Pfeiffer 1968:190–2. Stempingler 1912:8. α71 (on the variant ἀλάβαστον for ἀλάβαστρoν), 98 (on ἁμίς having initial aspiration in Attic); μ2 (on μάγαρον as a by-form of μέγαρον). α156 (on aorist first person singular ἀπέδραν), 163 (on new imperatives ἀπόστα and παράστα, with λέγουσιν implying ‘Attic-speakers’); β5 (βασίλιννα); π 45 (πλοκαμίς); τ3 (on the gender of τάριχος in Attic). α4 (ἀβέλτερος), 6 (ἄβρα), 8 (ἀβυρτάκη), 16 (ἄγγαρος, ἀγγαροφορέω, ἀγγαρεύω), 64 (ἀκέω and ἀκέομαι), 84 (ἀλύω), 115 (meaning of ἀναγκαι̃οι); ε76 (meaning of εὐτελής); η4 (ἡδυλίζω); λ20 (λυκοφίλιος); ο6 (on Menander’s use of the term οἰκει̃οι to refer to relatives by kin rather than to acquired relatives); π33 (on πέμπω for πομπεύω); ρ10 (ῥινάω); τ21 (meaning of the expression τὸν ἀφ’ ἰερα̃ς); υ12 (on the metaphorical meaning of ὑπόξυλος and ὑπόχαλκος); φ9 (φερνή), 10 (φέρνιον); χ11 (χιτωνάριον), 19 (χρυσολαβής); ψ5 (on the ethnonym Ψύλλοι); ω5 (on the Attic meaning of the expression ὠ̃ μέλε). Paus. α61 (ἀλάστωρ), 122 (on the reflexive meaning of the aorist passive ἀνηνέχθη), 141 (Ἀράβιος αὐλητής); β13 (βοΐδης); δ9 (δεύτερος πλου̃ς), 30 (Δωδωνειο̃ ν χαλκειο̃ ν); ε22 (εἰς τὸ δέον), 35 (ἔμβαρός εἰμι); κ4 (κακὴ ὄψις), 13 (κανθάρου μελάντερος), 15 (Καρκίνου ποιήματα), 22 (καυσία), 36 (κοινὰ τὰ τω̃ν φίλων), 44 (κριὸς τροφεια̃ ἀπέτεισεν), 60 (Κωρυκαι̃ος ἠκροάζετο); ν1 (νεοττός); o19 (ὄνος λύρα); π33 (προτέλεια), 40 (Πύθια καὶ Δήλια); σ14 and 31 (on the basins called σκάφαι); τ19 (Τενέδιος ἄνθρωπος), 57 (τω̃ν τριω̃ν κακω̃ν ἕν); φ4 (on the name Φάων). θ2 (Menander condemned for using θάτερος). See e.g. Naechster 1908:1–2 à propos Pollux’ indirect knowledge of comedy. On ‘old’ and ‘new’ Attic, see Probert 2004. We still lack a complete study of Menander’s language and its relation to koine. Apart from Rosenstrauch

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

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1967, the following works provide useful starting points: Durham 1913, Zini 1938, López Eire 2002, Vessella 2008. Karavas & Vix (this volume) for instance suggest that the Menandrian allusions hidden in Aelius Aristides may be due to his uneasiness about overtly quoting an author who was not approved by linguistic Atticism. The pro-Phrynichean attitude that according to Blanchard 1997:223, Photius would display in the Bibliotheca is therefore contradicted by his use of Menander in the Lexicon. Among other lexica, the codex contains Phrynichus’ Eclogue and Praeparatio sophistica and the anonymous Συναγωγὴ λέξεων χρησίμων. See Ruhnken 1765:43. Latte 1915. According to Latte, the Antiatticist was written after book 1 of Phrynichus’ Eclogue, while book 2 in turn replies to the Antiatticist. Fischer 1974:39–41 argues that the Antiatticist is a major source of Phrynichus’ Eclogue in its entirety. Slater 1977, however, deems unlikely the hypothesis that the Eclogue was written against the Antiatticist, given that Phrynichus never mentions this work or its author. Agreement between the Antiatticist and the Eclogue can be explained by positing the existence of an intermediary source between them. The quotations of Sicilian playwrights in the Antiatticist are studied by Cassio 2012. As far as I am aware there is no such study for those contained in Pollux’s Onomasticon. The use of ἐξαλλάττω for τέρπω is condemned by Phryn. Ecl. 341 Fischer. That the origin of these imperatives is analogical on contract verbs is shown by the fact that in both βαίνω and ἵστημι these forms, rather than selecting the /e:/ that characterizes their full grade in Attic-Ionic and features in the aorist imperative in -θι, generalize the vowel of the zero grade (α) and lengthen it as if it were the result of a contraction (α-ε yielding ᾱ in Attic, as in τίμᾱ). -θι is the inherited ending for the athematic present imperative from monosyllabic roots (e.g. ἴσθι, ἴθι, φαθί) as well as for the athematic aorist imperative (στη̃θι, γνω̃θι, βη̃θι etc.). However, in Attic many disyllabic stems of athematic present such as διδο- and τιθε- formed a different present imperative by adding the thematic ending -ε (: φέρε). Crucially, the result were forms which could be taken to be imperatives of contract verbs (δίδου, τίθει = ἀξίου, φίλει). All four imperatives characterize particularly the language of Christian authors, sometimes as early as the New Testament (not κατάβα). See Lautensach 1917:190–1. Note that διάβα is never attested in our literary sources. See Eust. 1761.38 = Arist. Byz. 28 A-D Slater (ἀπόστα, κατάβα), Σb α1978 Cunningham = Phot. α2665 = Sud. α3545 = Ael. Dion. 163 Erbse (ἀπόστα, παράστα both exemplified with quotations from Menander), schol. Ar. Frogs 35a Koster (from Tzetzes; κατάβα), Suda κ474 (κατάβα), Thom. Mag. 191.6 Ritschl (κατάβα), Or. fr. B 12 Alpers (ἀνάβα, κατάβα, ἀνάστα). See Cunningham 2003:53 n.114. On the dependence of some of the expansions of Σ on Aelius Dionysius, see Erbse 1950:22–34. As far as we can see, both ἀνάβα and διάβα have no literary authority behind them. Poll. 3.29 ᾧ [Menander] ἀεὶ μὲν οὐ χρηστέον ὡς οὐκ ἀκριβω̃ς Ἑλληνικῳ̃, ἐπὶ δὲ τω̃ν ἀκατονομάστων πιστευτέον ἠ̃ ὡ̃ν γὰρ γενω̃ν ἢ πραγμάτων ἢ κτημάτων ὀνόματα παρ’ ἄλλοις οὐκ ἔστι, ταυ̃τα ἀγαπητὸν ἂν εἴη καὶ παρὰ τούτου λαβει̃ν). In fact, the original pluperfect paradigm showed no alternation of this kind: at least in the first and third person singular -η- is the outcome of the contraction of ε- with the original endings (-ε-α, -ε-ε).

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49. Phryn. Ecl. 78 Fischer: ἀποκριθη̃ναι· διττὸν ἁμάρτημα, ἔδει γὰρ λέγειν ἀποκρίνασθαι, καὶ εἰδέναι, ὅτι τὸ διαχωρισθη̃ναι σημαίνει, ὡσπερου̃ν καὶ τὸ ἐναντίον αὐτου̃, τὸ συγκριθη̃ναι, εἰς ἓν καὶ ταὐτὸν ἐλθει̃ν. εἰδὼς οὐ̃ν του̃το ἐπὶ μὲν του̃ ἀποδου̃ναι τὴν ἐρώτησιν ἀποκρίνασθαι λέγε, ἐπὶ δὲ του̃ διαχωρισθη̃ναι ἀποκριθη̃ναι. Ammon. α67 Nickau: ἀποκριθη̃ναι καὶ ἀποκρίνασθαι διαφέρει. ἀποκριθη̃ναι μὲν γάρ ἐστι τὸ ἀποχωρισθη̃ναι, ἀποκρίνασθαι δὲ τὸ ἐρωτηθέντα λόγον δου̃ναι. Thom. Mag. α 24.10 Ritschl: ἀποκρίνασθαι τὸ ἀπολογήσασθαι· ἀποκριθη̃ναι δὲ τὸ χωρισθη̃ναι. οὐ γὰρ εὕρηται ὅλως παρὰ ῥήτορσι του̃το ἀντὶ του̃ ἀπολογήσασθαι. 50. Phot. γ132 γλαφυρόν· τὸν εὐτράπελον. οὕτως Μένανδρος (fr. 531); Lex. Αἱμ. γ1 Dyck: γλαφυρώτατος· ἡδύς, καλός, σοφός, ἔμπειρος, ἀκριβής, καὶ παρὰ Μενάνδρῳ ὁ εὐτράπελος. 51. The same approach may have informed Aristophanes of Byzantium’s Περὶ τω̃ν ὑποπτευομένων μὴ εἰρη̃σθαι τοι̃ς παλαιοις̃ that tried to connect odd forms of the spoken language of his day to older varieties of Greek: see Pfeiffer 1968:200–2.

15 An Ideal Reception Oscar Wilde, Menander’s Comedy and the Context of Victorian Classical Studies Serena Witzke ‘The aim of social comedy, in Menander no less than in Sheridan, is to mirror the manners, not to reform the morals, of its day.’ Oscar Wilde could have been reacting to the critical dismissal of his final so-called Society Play, The Importance of Being Earnest, derided by several critics as ‘inconsequential,’ ‘frivolous,’ and dressed up in the latest costumes of its day while reflecting none of the political or moral concerns featured in late-Victorian drama.1 Instead, he was writing his own review in reaction to his former tutor J.P. Mahaffy’s latest book, Greek Life and Thought, in which the scholar snidely criticizes the social climate of Hellenistic Athens, reporting that such a shallow and decadent age was incapable of producing anything better than the triviality of Menander: ‘It is usual to lament the irreparable loss of the plays of Menander, but it may be doubted whether, apart from style, history would gain much more from a further knowledge of him.’2 Wilde vehemently disagreed. Wilde’s review stands as only one example of his lifelong, but oftforgotten, affinity for the Classics and classical scholarship.3 In this study, I seek to demonstrate his reception of ancient New Comedy, particularly Menander, in his Society Plays. Most modern Wildean criticism focuses on either the influence of 1890s theatre on Wilde’s dramatic works, or on the modernist elements and innovations in his plays.4 Though his dramatic works have much in common with the slapstick humor of Plautus and the more serious social commentaries of Menander and Terence, the relationship of Oscar Wilde’s society dramas to ancient New Comedy and the playwright’s debt to that genre have gone virtually unrecognized. I have identified more than 80 character types, plot elements, and miscellaneous tropes that appeared in these playwrights’ works. Shared elements include hidden identities, rascally young men, the ‘wronged woman’ and ‘woman with a past’ motifs, foundlings, tokens of recognition, separated young lovers, marriages endangered through misunderstanding, clever friends who save the day, and outcomes where ‘the good end happily and the bad unhappily’ as Wilde satirically puts it (Earnest, Act 2). In a larger ongoing project I investigate the influence of the extant New Comic playwrights

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Menander, Plautus, and Terence on all of Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays, but I limit my scope here to the specifically Menandrian aspects of Wilde’s work. Throughout his career, Wilde saw himself as a Classicist and a Hellenist, taking every opportunity to display his educational pedigree and affinity for ‘Greek Things’.5 It has frequently been argued by modern scholars that because Wilde had very little Menander to work with, he could not have been influenced by the Greek playwright.6 Iain Ross7 discusses Wilde’s engagement with New Comedy, concluding that while it is tempting to look for New Comedy, particularly Menander, in Wilde, we are better off looking to Euripides’ Ion instead.8 Ross asserted that though Earnest had a few New Comic elements,9 the influence was slight. I seek to prove just the opposite. I argue that we can trace a definitive line of direct engagement with the source material10 from Menander to Plautus to Terence to Wilde.11 OSCAR WILDE, CLASSICIST Born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde in 1854 in Dublin, Oscar Wilde was the son of an ophthalmologist and a revolutionary female poet. Oxfordeducated, he established himself as a professional aesthete in 1881 and fashioned himself an art critic in London after the publication of his first volume of poems. He had already gained fame by being parodied as a dandy in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience by the time he embarked on an American tour in 1882, giving lectures on art and aesthetics. While in the US he attempted to promote his first play, the historical piece Vera, with little success.12 In 1883, after returning to the UK, Wilde resumed his lectures and tried to again to launch a successful career as a playwright with The Duchess of Padua, another melodramatic historical play. Marrying Constance Lloyd in 1884, Wilde became the father of two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886). After a brief stint as the editor of Women’s World, Wilde returned to writing, this time more successfully. His miscellaneous tales and children’s stories, released in three volumes, established him as a prose author. He followed these up in 1890 with Dorian Gray, an exercise in Decadence and Aestheticism, abounding with Classical references. After toning down the ‘immoral’ elements of Dorian Gray for publication as a single novel in 1891,13 he returned to theatre. Though his play Salomé was banned by the Lord Chamberlain from the stage (portraying biblical characters on stage was forbidden at the time), Wilde pressed on with his composition.14 In 1892, he began writing his Society Plays,15 with which he finally found great success, until his legal troubles and the subsequent scandal destroyed his career in England in 1895.16 To pay his legal debts, Wilde’s property was seized, and the contents of his house at 34 Tite Street in London were auctioned off.17 Upon his release in 1897, Wilde lived in exile in France,

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suffering anxiety, writer’s block, and poverty. In November 1900, Wilde died of complications from a severe ear infection that had plagued him since prison. However, before Oscar Wilde was the famous aesthete, novelist, critic, lecturer, and playwright of dramas and comedies, he was a young student studying the Classics. In his final year at the boarding school Portora, 1871, Wilde won the Carpenter Prize for the highest mark in the Greek Testament exam, and then won a scholarship to study Classics at Trinity College in Dublin, based on strong marks on his entrance exam, which included Terence. His personal library and notebooks demonstrate his knowledge of, and engagement with, New Comedy at Trinity. In 1874, Wilde won the Berkeley Medal for Greek, his set text being Meineke’s Fragmenta Comicorum Graecorum. His notes indicate that he studied Menander in the Novae volume and knew the fragments well. At Trinity he studied under Robert Tyrrell, a philologist, and J.P. Mahaffy, whom Wilde called his ‘best and first teacher’ and ‘the scholar who showed me how to love Greek things.’18 His tutor for the Berkeley Medal was John Townsend Mills, another celebrated Classicist. Following his success at Trinity, Wilde won a Demyship to Magdalen College at Oxford where he would further study Classics. During his years at Oxford, Wilde also made a pilgrimage to Greece under the supervision of his former tutor Mahaffy.19 He performed well in his exams, despite his cheeky attitude towards his examiners20 and his insistent claims that he never studied.21 Kottabos published his translations of speeches from Agamemnon in 1877. In 1878, he won the Newdigate prize for best verse composition with his poem Ravenna and was awarded a marble bust of Augustus.22 He also tried for the Chancellor’s Essay prize in 1879 with a paper on Historical Criticism, though he did not win.23 At this point, graduation behind him, Wilde struggled to use his Classics training in the real world: he sketched an essay on The Women of Homer, and proposed to George Macmillan, his travelling companion in Greece, that he translate Herodotus for Macmillan’s publishing house. He also expressed a wish to edit something like Hercules Furens or the Phoenician Maidens, as he had been working on Euripides.24 Wilde tutored the famous actress Lillie Langtry in Latin and called her ‘Helen, formerly of Troy, now of London’.25 He then wrote a scathing review in Athenaeum of Jebb’s contributions on Greece for the Encyclopaedia Britannica—Wilde was incensed that in his description of the literature, Jebb did not include Menander.26 Disappointed in his attempts to get a job in Classics in academia, and reeling from the failure of his first historical play, Vera, in 1880, Wilde turned to aesthetic criticism and lecturing. In prison, Wilde abandoned his love of Greek and Latin, complaining that the Classics now gave him a terrible headache.27 It was not until several years later, released from prison, that Wilde thought again of Greeks and Romans. He toyed with the idea

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of writing a libretto of Daphnis and Chloe with Dalhousie Young, and he commented to a friend that he should like to write a life of Heliogabalus, but sadly, Wilde would never complete another work before his death in 1900.28 OSCAR WILDE, HELLENIST Throughout his studies and beyond, Wilde identified strongly as a Hellenist. His commonplace books are full of notes on Classical material, particularly Greek language and philosophy, and Greek is scattered throughout his works (especially De Profundis). References to Greek tragedy are scattered throughout his letters, and he makes clear his preference for Greek material in his exams at Oxford: for his viva voce he feared Catullus, but got Aeschylus. He also wrote on the Odyssey and Aristotle.29 In general, Wilde was little interested in Rome, unless it allowed him access to Greek material; it took his tutors years to convince him of the value of Latin.30 Throughout his life, he was inspired by Greek social habits and philosophy, likening his relationships to young men to ancient Athenian practices and that culture’s worship of the ephebe.31 Wilde’s interaction with Greek material situates him among the other great intellectuals advancing British Hellenism. His interest in Menander was part of the larger British interest in demonstrating a cultural continuity from Greece to Britain. By the mid-eighteenth century, Rome had become passé: everyone who was anyone had been to Italy, Roman-inspired buildings were all over England, and the history of Rome was tied up in Christian history, and as a result, Roman culture seemed very familiar and well-known. Greece was still a fantasy, difficult to make a reality, thanks to Turkish occupation. However, once James Stuart and Nicholas Revett had made the journey and their discoveries and drawings were published in England, interest in Greece became mania: Greek art, archaeology, history, and philology occupied the British cultural consciousness.32 Greece was not Rome; Greek culture was not tied up in modern Christian Europe, and was therefore very convenient for the modern writer. Greece could represent anything: it could be decadent, sensual, subversive. It could undermine contemporary aesthetics and offer new, secular morality. Hellenism was the new philosophy.33 After the British rediscovery of Greece, there was a fascination with re-appropriating her works (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit), inspiring Shelley (‘We are all Greeks’), Swinburne (‘Greece is the mother country of thought and art and action’), John Addington Symonds (‘All civilized nations were colonies of Hellas’), and Ruskin (‘We have lost all inheritance from Florence and Venice, and are now pensioners upon the Greek only’).34 The Romantic Poets reinvented Greek lyric, the novelists paid homage to

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Homer, and the playwrights and poets resurrected tragedy. Wilde’s affinity for Hellenism and contemporary social comedy indicates that he had aspirations to bring Menander to the modern stage, as his school friend Frank Benson had brought Agamemnon to the Oxford stage.35

Menander in Wilde’s time Who was Wilde’s Menander? Before the Cairo codex was published in 1907, Menander was a collection of fragments preserved by scholiasts and compilers of linguistic oddities, complemented by a scattering of papyrus finds. The monostichoi comprised the greatest unified section of his works. The obvious question is, what of Menander’s style and content could really be determined from this scattering of disjointed fragments and one-liners? Apparently, quite a bit, given the proliferation of works on Menander. In 1853, the French Academy offered its annual prize, the subject being Menander. This contest inspired a variety of entries, essays on Menander’s tone, style, life, and relationship to the span of Greek comedy from Aristophanes to his own time. The Academy awarded the prize to two authors, Guizot and Benoît, and in 1856, after both works were published, the London Quarterly Review issued a review of their essays. Though it is common today to talk about the ‘Menander-shaped hole in Western dramatic history,’36 at least until the discoveries of the twentieth century, Victorian scholars confidently wrote about their Menander as an immortal, accessible through his imitators. They based this assertion partly on the testimony of the ancients themselves; Aristophanes of Byzantium, Caesar, Cicero, Ovid, and Suetonius all sang his praises.37 Menander’s subject matter also served to universalize him. While Aristophanes required considerable glossing, thanks to his numerous contemporary, but now obscure, political references, Menander’s work ‘was drawn and drew most of its immutable truth from universal human nature, from passions common to all mankind, from follies and vices of all ages; it appeared to reflect only the surface, but in fact reflected the very depths of our experience,’ according to the London Quarterly Review.38 Furthermore, the fragments (the monostichoi in particular) ’embody some striking sentiments, or point with inimitable and undying expressiveness some eternal moral truth.’39 MENANDER AND WILDE Though the large-scale discoveries of Menander’s plays did not occur until over a decade after Wilde wrote his Society Plays, we cannot dismiss the material that Wilde did have, about 2,000 verses in fragments of one or several lines quoted in other authors or preserved in the monostichoi. I include the following chart of published Menander scholarship for reference:40

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Table 1 Menander Scholarship Pre-1892*

Menander Scholarship Post-1892 1897

Verses of Georgos

1899 1907

Verses of Perikeiromene Gustave Lefebvre, Cairo codex (fragments of Heros, Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, Samia, Fabula Incerta) G. Vitelli, Comoedia Florentina (fragments of Aspis) Various fragments (Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, Kolax, Misoumenos) Bodmer papyrus (Dyskolos)

1553

Guilelmus Morelius, Ex veterum comicorum graecorum fabulis quae integrae non extant sententiae

1626

Hugo Grotius, Excerpta ex tragoediis et comoediis graecis

1709

Jean Le Clerc, Menandri et Philemonis reliquiae

1913

1710

Richard Bentley, Emendationes in Menandri et Philemonis reliquias Meineke, Menandri et Philemonis reliquiae (later expanded into Fragmenta Comicorum Graecorum)

1914–1957

1823

1853 1876

French Academy Menander Cobet (unknown verses)

1880–1888

Theodor Kock, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta

1891

Viktor Jernstedt (republished Cobet’s verses, now attributed to Phasma and an unknown play later identified as Epitrepontes)

1958

1964

Sorbonne papyrus (found in 1906, fragments of Sikyonios)

1965–1968

Oxyrhynchus, further fragments of Misoumenos and Dis Exapaton Bodmer papyrus (fragments of Samia and Aspis)

1969

*The year Lady Windermere’s Fan, Wilde’s first Society Play, appeared.

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Meineke’s edition of Menander, Wilde’s set text, collected the extensive authentic fragments and more problematically attributed monostichoi,41 and several treatises and essays based on these fragments were published in the 1850s. In studying for the Berkeley Prize, Wilde would have become well acquainted with the extant material.42 He came to know the tone of Menandrian comedy through these fragments, and gained some knowledge of the plots through the ancient synopses and the scholarship that stressed Terence’s dependence on Menander; it was stressed by Wilde’s tutors that reading Terence was almost the same as reading Menander.43 Though their opinions differed on the quality of Menander’s plots, Wilde learned much about Menandrian drama from his tutor Mahaffy, who strongly disdained Athenian culture in Menander’s time, and noted with disfavour the mild, apolitical plots, and inoffensive themes of New Comedy. Mahaffy was a great admirer of Classical Athens, its philosophies, its art, and its literature, and saw the Hellenistic Age as a terrible decline in Athenian culture, its literature a shadow of former greatness. In Greek Life and Thought he complains, They [the New Comic plays] appear carefully to avoid all the great events of the day, all large political interests, all serious philosophy, and merely to reflect the idlest, the most trivial, and the most decayed gentility of Athens. . . Starting from a commonplace as old as Aristophanes, the ‘rape and recognition’ of some respectable and therefore wholly insignificant girl, or from the passion for some girl in the hands of a procurer, they added a few other stock characters—the young and fashionable spendthrift, the morose and stingy father, the indulgent uncle, the threadbare parasite, the harpy courtesan, and by ringing the changes upon these constituents of decayed and idle Attic society produced a whole literature of graceful talk, polite immorality, selfish ethics, and shallow character.44 Wilde disagreed with this prescriptive view of comedy and its purpose, as well as with Mahaffy’s sole preference for Classical literature, finding much value in subsequent Athenian culture and its literary output. Other contemporary views of Menander were more favourable. As far as style was concerned, Menander, though fragmentary, was held up as a paragon. His Greek was praised for its grace, and it was common practice to bemoan the loss of his fine Attic poetry, of whose quality Victorian scholars were in no doubt. The content, however, was another thing entirely. Contemporary scholarship varied wildly over the quality of Menander’s (and so Roman comedy’s) contribution to modern understanding of the age. Many were confident of the universalizing nature of Menander’s subject matter, as we saw in the London Quarterly Review essay on Menander: he wrote about the human experience, his characters were timeless, and his social discourse was relevant even in the modern day.45

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Wilde was exposed to the views of his tutors J.P. Mahaffy and Robert Tyrrell while at Trinity, was familiar with K.O. Müller’s and R.C. Jebb’s scholarship on Hellenistic literature generally, and constantly consulted and studied his volumes of J.A. Symonds. All lauded Menander’s style and its worthiness for emulation, but they differed in opinion on the quality of the content. At Trinity Wilde was rarely parted from Symonds’ first volume of Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), and when the second volume came out during Wilde’s time at Oxford (1876), he purchased it immediately.46 The two even corresponded for a time.47 Symonds ranked Menander among the ‘pure literature’ of the age, but noted what he considered a decline from the great concerns, events, and politics that marked Aristophanes’ work. In contrasting the two playwrights, Symonds wrote, ‘The audience of Aristophanes listened with avidity to comedies of which politics upon the grandest scale were the substance. Menander invited his Athenians to the intrigues of young men, slaves, and hetairai, at warfare with niggardly parents. Athens has ceased to be an empress. She has become a garrulous housewife.’48 Symonds was more laudatory of Menander in his second volume. He cited Goethe’s high opinion of Menander, ‘He is thoroughly pure, noble, great, and cheerful, and his grace is unattainable. It is to be lamented that we possess so little of him, but that little is invaluable.’ He also noted Menander’s modern tone, and cited his importance to the western theatre tradition, saying ‘the comedy of Menander determined the form of drama in Rome, and, through the influence of Plautus and Terence upon the renascent culture of the sixteenth century, fixed the type of comedy in modern Europe.’49 In his copy, Wilde marked out this passage.50 He would later exemplify Symonds’ remark with his own appropriation of New Comedy. MENANDRIAN TERENCE It was popular practice to laud Menander while denigrating the Latin playwrights who inherited his craft, even though these Latin playwrights were considered the best access to Menander. Plautus was too vulgar (and had too many naughty slaves and prostitutes),51 and Terence was derivative, but the latter was useful to get at Menander. Victorian scholars acknowledged Roman comedy’s role in disseminating Menander: Symonds, in his Studies of the Greek Poets, noted the progression from Menander to Plautus to Terence to the comedy of the modern West.52 However, they also downplayed the artistic agency of Menander’s inheritors, and discounted other lines of influence. Mahaffy asserted in Greek Life and Thought, ‘We owe Terence to Menander.’53 K.O. Müller, a Classicist and literary historian, stressed the usefulness of Plautus and Terence, encouraging students of Menander to project back from the plots that drew on Menandrian originals. He presumed that if one simply excised the particularly Roman material and supplied the Greek, these ‘perfectly Greek’ plays could conjure up the essence of

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Menander.54 After all, it was widely accepted that Terence did ‘hardly more than transpose or mould two plays of Menander into one.’55 Wilde himself was encouraged to try his hand at this re-creation: he translated scenes from Plautus’ Aulularia (believed to be based on a Menandrian original) ‘back’ into Greek.56 The lines of influence, adaptation, and appropriation were obviously much more complex than Müller suggests,57 but Terence does acknowledge his debt to Menander in his prologues. Andria is based on Menander’s Perinthia and Andria, Heauton Timoroumenos is based on Menander’s play of the same name, Eunuchus adapted Menander’s Eunouchos, while also borrowing material from his Kolax, and the Adelphoe was based on Menander’s Adelphoi B. Terence’s remaining two plays, Hecyra and Phormio, were based on plays by Apollodorus of Carystus.58 Donatus occasionally notes the Menandrian material in his commentaries on Terence’s comedies. The prologues, frustratingly vague in their details, have prompted numerous scholars from antiquity to the present day to speculate on Terence’s content: a plethora of books, articles, and dissertations have attempted to parse the Menandrian material from Terence’s innovations, and every new discovery of fragmentary Menander is an opportunity to check the accuracy of those speculations.59 When his direct access to Menander fell short, Wilde was taught to rely on Terence. He was very familiar with Plautus and Terence as required reading for his exams at Oxford60—half of Plautus’ corpus and all of Terence’s were on the reading list. After his graduation from Oxford he requested from the Bodleian stacks a literal prose translation of Terence’s Andria, Heauton Timoroumenos, and Hecyra.61 Influenced by Menander, Terence wrote lively and witty dramas mirroring the mores of his society, while casting a critical light on the hypocrisy of the upper-middle class families of his day, all expressed with a masterly command of urbane and cultured language and polished style.62 Terence’s lucidity and elegance of style ensured his enduring popularity as a school author through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He has been most celebrated up to our own period for his sententiae, extracted witticisms compiled for their elegance and sentiment into books of notable quotations and memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Caesar had called Terence ‘dimidiatus Menander,’63 an appellation that would not have gone unnoticed by Wilde, eager for all things Menander. I have already noted Menander’s own survival in the collection of his monostichoi, a collection of quotations copied out by schoolchildren in the ancient world. The quotable currency of these short statements lent immortality to their authors, even when the longer works were unknown or unappreciated. Wilde, ever cognizant of the value of a bon mot, would take after Menander and Terence in this respect too. Aware of his own appeal as a quotable wit, Wilde did not wait for posterity to extract his aphorisms: he wrote his own collection for the Saturday Review and an Oxford journal.64

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Oscar Wilde had an extraordinary memory—he could quote ancient authors years after he studied them and often annotated his texts with quotes from authors from memory.65 For a playwright who had shown repeatedly the ability to assimilate, adapt, refine, and invert elements of hundreds of French and English dramas in his own work, incorporating the convoluted plots of Roman comedy studied 10 years earlier, and the disjointed fragments of Menander memorized as a young man, would pose little difficulty. MENANDER IN EARNEST With Wilde’s classical pedigree and familiarity with Menander and his Roman inheritors established, we can examine how Menander featured in his works. As we have seen, Wilde was familiar with Menander’s fragments and had been taught to use Terence to get back to Menander. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde borrows considerably from Terence’s Adelphoe and Eunuchus, both based on Menandrian originals, as Wilde knew. The Importance of Being Earnest premiered at St. James’s Theatre on Valentine’s Day 1895 to an enthusiastic audience. Unlike Wilde’s earlier Society Plays, which were political dramas and social commentaries punctuated with wit and dry humor, Earnest was overtly farcical, subordinating more serious themes for outright comic appeal. In this play, a foundling, Jack Worthing, pretends to be a degenerate young man named Ernest, his fictional brother, so that he may spend more time in London wooing wealthy socialite Gwendolen and gadding around with his friend Algernon. The two men find decadent entertainment all over the city, skipping out on unpaid bills, and seeing shows. When the bachelor dandy Algernon discovers that his friend Ernest is actually a dull country landowner named Jack with a beautiful young ward named Cecily, Algernon decides to dress up as Ernest to gain entrance to Jack’s country home and woo Cecily. Upon seeing Cecily, he immediately falls in love and vows to have her. Meanwhile, Jack is thwarted in love when Gwendolen’s mother, the wealthy Lady Bracknell (Algernon’s aunt), will not allow a foundling to marry her daughter. When Gwendolen sneaks away from her mother to run off to the country to see Jack, Lady Bracknell storms after her to thwart the union. In retaliation for Lady Bracknell’s intervention, Jack refuses to allow Algernon to marry Cecily. After many humorous antics, Cecily’s governess recognizes the handbag in which Jack was found (a recognition token) and Jack’s parentage is revealed—he is, in fact, Algernon’s brother. A deal is struck with Lady Bracknell, and both men may marry their beloveds. Modern critics cite the influences of Lestocq and Robson’s play The Foundling, De Musset’s Il ne faut jurer de rien, Gilbert’s Engaged, and Maddison Morton’s A Husband to Order.66 Wilde was also accused by contemporary critics of stealing wholesale from the Scribe-Sardou tradition of the well-made-play, as they had used elements of recognition tokens, the woman

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with a past, a man caught between two women, and the helpful friend.67 Equally important, however, are the plethora of plot elements drawn from Menander and Terence, of which Earnest is a veritable pastiche. Present are the plot elements of the missing child, the double love story, disguised identity, recognition and tokens, and formidable wealthy women, all common to the New Comedy tradition. This play is primarily indebted to Terence’s Adelphoe and Eunuchus, both adapted from Menander’s plays of the same names. Though Terence’s plays survive while Menander’s are fragmentary, Wilde was taught to see Menander in Terence’s originals. Eunuchus is generally considered to be faithful to Menander’s original in the basic essentials of the plot, while significant changes have been made to expository speeches, entrances/exits, four-actor adaptations, and depth of the blocking characters.68 The ending of Eunuchus has been hotly debated: Terence may have adapted it from Menander’s Kolax along with the soldier and parasite characters.69 The ending of Terence’s Adelphoe and its relationship to Menander’s Adelphoi B has also been contested, though scholars now mostly agree that Terence remained close to his original.70 The Adelphoe has two brothers, Aeschinus and Ctesipho, who go back and forth between city and country to see their respective lady-loves, and the mistaken assumption that one brother has abandoned his lady for the other woman. Both brothers enjoy running around the city getting into various scrapes, as Algernon and Jack do. When one brother gets into trouble, the other brother has to bail him out and take the blame. At the end of the play, after various obstacles are removed, both young men can enjoy their girlfriends, one in marriage, the other in a long-term arrangement with his music girl. The influence of Adelphoe is apparent in the characters of Jack and Algernon. Just as the titular Brothers do, these two wild boys go back and forth from city to country, getting into trouble along the way. Like Ctesipho, Jack behaves very politely and stoically in the country, but both Ctesipho and his brother, Aeschinus the city dweller, behave outrageously in town. In one scene, Aeschinus gets into an altercation with a pimp, who threatens legal action for the theft Aeschinus had performed on his brother’s behalf, and the pimp must be bought off. In a deleted scene in Earnest, a debt collector gets into an altercation with Jack over the unpaid bills of ‘Ernest’, and he must be bought off. In Eunuchus, a young man, Phaedria, is in love with the high-class courtesan Thais, who is looking after her ward, the suspected-citizen girl Pamphila. He cannot patronize Thais exclusively, however, because of the impediment of a wealthy soldier who has contracted her. The soldier (or just ‘rival’ in the Menandrian original) adds the further complication of ownership of Pamphila. He has given the girl to Thais as a gift, but on the condition that Thais stay away from Phaedria. When Phaedria’s brother Chaerea sees Pamphila, he immediately falls in love and dresses up as the eunuch

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Phaedria had brought for Thais to gain entrance to Thais’ home. He is led inside, in the eunuch’s place, and then rapes Pamphila. After her identity and citizen status are revealed, Chaerea may marry her. Pamphila’s guardian Thais is put under the protection of Phaedria’s family, and Phaedria is allowed access to her once more. This play’s disturbing plot is lightheartedly adapted for Earnest: a younger brother (Chaerea/Algernon) dresses up under pretence to meet a girl (Pamphila/Cecily) connected to his brother (Phaedria/Jack), who is frustrated in love with his own girl (Thais/Gwendolen). In Earnest a double engagement replaces the rape and family protection, and in both plays an engagement is facilitated by the identity-recognition of one of the characters.71 Both plays also feature a wealthy blocking character preventing access to the elder brother’s girl. In Eunuchus, comedy is increased when the soldier attacks Thais’ house to remove her ward and pick a fight with Thais, who he believes has betrayed him. Terence notes in his prologue (lines 30–33) that this character was imported from Menander’s Kolax. In Earnest, the braggart soldier is replaced with the imposing wealthy matron Lady Bracknell.72 The soldier’s comical threats of violence are replaced by Lady Bracknell’s arch and cutting wit as she bursts in on the lovebirds, throwing cold water on amorous affections and delivering some of the funniest lines in the play. The recognition plot in Earnest, its most memorable element, has a long pedigree in ancient New Comedy. Jack has been misplaced by Miss Prism, a careless servant of the household, who, in a ‘moment of mental abstraction’ put her three-volume novel ‘of more than usually revolting sentimentality’ in the perambulator, and the baby in her handbag, which she then left in the cloakroom at Victoria Station—the Brighton Line. Jack was miraculously found by Thomas Cardew, a wealthy old gentleman who made Jack his heir. The ‘missing brother’ element appeared in Plautus’ Captivi and Menaechmi,73 but the ‘missing male’ and ‘adoption of a boy’ motifs were first made popular in Menander (Aspis, Epitrepontes, Hiereia, Misoumenos, Sikyonioi).74 Menander was in turn inspired by Euripides’ Ion in this motif.75 Roman adaptors were fonder of the ‘missing citizen daughter’.76 For Earnest and A Woman of No Importance Wilde employed the earlier tradition of the boy’s hidden parentage, while in Lady Windermere’s Fan he used the more common Roman tradition. Identity, a crucial element in ancient New Comedy, can be obscured in a variety of ways (exposure, kidnapping, separation through natural disaster). Misplaced children will be saved from slavery, prostitution, or poverty by the existence of ‘tokens’, little items that may reveal their parentage and re-assert their place in society. Wilde’s Earnest clearly draws on the ancient New Comic tradition of the recognition plot. Recognition and identity were fundamental elements in both his Society Plays and his earlier works.77 More than one third of the extant Roman comedies featured recognition plots, using jewelry, toys, and baskets to identify the missing children, now grown up. Menander’s comedies were understood to be full of recognition

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plots as well (see Mahaffy’s comments above), though their details were largely conjectured from ancient commentaries and fragments. We know today that many of Menander’s plots featured the recognition of male and female children, both infants and adults (Aspis, Epitr., Heros, Karch., Kith., Mis., Perik., Phasma, Sik., Theoph.). Wilde firmly associated the recognition motif with Menander early in his studies (see note 42). At the climax of Earnest, Miss Prism identifies the handbag in which Jack was found by three of its characteristics78 (a clever wink at New Comedy’s recognition tokens), and Jack’s identity as the missing baby is revealed. Normally in New Comedy, a token reveals the identity of a long-lost citizen who is then reunited with his or her family, and the tension or conflict in the play is resolved. In Eunuchus, Pamphila is discovered to be a citizen, recognized by her brother and her former nurse. Miss Prism, Jack’s former nurse and the current tutor of his ward Cecily, is herself a pastiche of ancient ‘nurse’ tropes. Like the identified children of ancient New Comedy, Jack can take his place in proper society (for the ancient world, citizen society, for the modern, ‘Society’) and make a good marriage. CONCLUSIONS Unlike European imitators of Terence, Wilde was trained as a Classicist and was by preference a Hellenist. Hrotsvita, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, and Molière may have appreciated Terence as a school author, and modelled their works on him, but they were not students of the earlier Greek New Comic tradition.79 Wilde appreciated Menander and used Terence to channel Menander’s tone, style, and plots in addition to the extant fragments of Menander and variety of monographs about his works. Though Wilde clearly read Terence and appreciated him, imitation of Terence was not the goal. Rather, Wilde studied Terence for what he brought of Menander. Identifying Wilde’s sources is important to understanding how he worked as a playwright. His contemporaries derided Wilde’s plays as derivative pastiches of other works, and he was frequently accused a plagiarism, to which he replied, ‘Of course I plagiarize. It is the privilege of the appreciative man.’ At other times he claimed to pull his plots from the headlines of the papers.80 He was also attracted by the idea of secret lives, and at one point claimed that Lillie Langtry’s abandonment of her child was the basis of Windermere,81 while at other points in his life claiming that his plays had no source but his own imagination. He was satirized by Beardsley, depicted writing Salomé with a French dictionary, the Bible, Ahn’s First Course, Gautier, French Verbs, and Swinburne surrounding him, the implication being that Wilde’s plays generally were a pastiche of their source material.82 A number of contemporary sources and inspirations for Wilde’s Society Plays have been collected by Kerry Powell, further evidence of Wilde’s penchant for borrowing.83 Yet the full picture of Wilde’s composition process remains

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incomplete. He was a voracious reader, play-goer, intellectual, and student. To fully grasp the extent of his compositional skill and appreciate the subtle nuances of his work, we must acknowledge and study all the rich influences, including New Comedy, that Wilde pulled together to create his most beloved works. The influences of contemporary theatre and literature on Wilde’s creative process are well-known, but as I have argued here, his debt to Classical comedy should not be ignored. He was very familiar with Menander’s tone and general aspects, and revived him through his relationship to Terence. Engaging with this material, Wilde took his place as an inheritor of New Comedy. Wilde was an author and thinker passionately interested in the Classics, both in school and long after graduation, a fact that can be seen throughout his entire oeuvre, particularly in the dramas that would ensure his enduring popularity—his Society Plays—systematically reviving and recreating ancient New Comedy for the modern English-speaking world. Unlike his late-Victorian tutors, Wilde saw the dramatic value of New Comedy, both in Menander and in his Roman inheritors (though he always identified as a Hellenist). Though he was clearly attracted to the farcical aspects of the genre, Wilde made a nuanced reading and adaptation of the Greek and Roman material, identifying the modern relevance of the age-old themes of male friendship, class warfare, divided families, and the hopeful love of youth. Though Wilde lived and died too early to see the miraculous rediscovery of Menander in the twentieth century, his sensitivity to the thematic material proved remarkably correct, and he made excellent use of what he did have: numerous fragments, much speculative scholarship, and a discerning mind. Reading Wilde can enrich our reading of Menander: Wilde interpreted him for modern audiences with modern relevance, bridging the gap between our modern world and that of the ancients, and making Menander less alien to our own world and culture.84 NOTES 1. On the other hand, some reviewers were more interested in the fashions than the play itself: see Kaplan & Stowell 1999:325–8. Jackson (1980:27–31) collects the initial reviews of Earnest in his introduction to the New Mermaids edition of the play. 2. Mahaffy 1887:116. 3. Happily, there has been renewed interest in Wilde’s education and literary interests in recent years: see Smith & Helfand 1989, Wright 2008, Mendelsohn 2010, A. Ross 2011. 4. See Powell 1990 on 1890s theatre, and Worth 1984 on modernist elements in Wilde. 5. Holland & Hart-Davis 2000: 561–2. 6. Arnott 1975:140; Sharrock & Ash 2002:139. 7. I. Ross 2012:173–182. 8. Ross repeats the argument in Hall & Macintosh 2005:151.

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9. I. Ross 2012:178 notes that in Terence’s Andria the girl has a different name as a child, and the plot hinges on a relative trying to remember it. He also observes that Adelphoe presents an early form of Bunburying, and features badly behaved brothers, one taking the blame for the misconduct of the other. He dismisses, however, other analogues within Earnest. Others have noted the similarity of Lane to Plautus’ cheeky slaves: Guy & Small 2006:126. 10. As has been done successfully with Roman comedy and Shakespeare and Molière. On Shakespeare and New Comic influences, see Miola 1994. On Molière and New Comedy, see Calder 1993. 11. Other playwrights have recognized the Menandrian appeal of Wilde. In 1980, when Menander’s Epitrepontes was resurrected on the Greek stage, the director Spyros Evangelatos interpreted Act IV in Wildean fashion. See Kiritsi, this volume. Similarly, when interpreting a scene from Eunuchus, the participants of the NEH Summer Institute on Roman Comedy were inspired by Wilde. ‘Eunuchus 19th Century’ can be viewed on YouTube: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=4WLz9lmhW6U. As I will demonstrate, Eunuchus succeeds as a Wildean imitation because Wilde was inspired by Eunuchus in the first place. 12. Reviews were mixed, and the play closed quickly. Critics cited the topic of nihilism, a long fourth act, the dress and incompetence of the lead actress, and Wilde’s style (some accused him of insincerity) as reasons for its failure. Wilde is conspicuously silent in his letters about Vera’s failure. See Ellmann 1988:241–3. 13. Most texts of Dorian Gray available in libraries and bookstores are Wilde’s 1891 edition. Harvard Press recently issued the unexpurgated version (Wilde [1890] 2011) that appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890 before Wilde made his changes. Despite Wilde’s re-writes, Dorian Gray was still considered immoral, or at least amoral. 14. On Salomé and the problems Wilde faced with its production, see Beckson 1992:50–57; Hall & Macintosh 2005:521–554; Powell 1990:33–54; and Showalter 1990:144–168. 15. Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). 16. Court transcripts from Wilde’s libel trial against Lord Queensberry (which preceded Wilde’s criminal trial) have been edited by Wilde’s grandson Merlyn Merlin Holland (Holland 2004). 17. The catalogue from the auction of Wilde’s Tite Street possessions includes many volumes of Classics: Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato 5; Teufel’s Roman Literature; Hellenica, 8 vols; Young’s Sophocles; Donaldson’s Theatre of the Greeks; Horae Hellinicae [sic] (with Daniel O’Connell’s autograph); Virgil; Roman Art, illustrated; de Vere’s Translations from Horace; Pollard’s Odes from the Greek Dramatists; Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art; Morley’s English Men of Letters, Ancient Classics; Mommsen’s History of Rome 5; Latin and English Dictionary; Newgate Calendar; Cicero; assorted “Classics,” half bound vellum, 2 parcels; Juvenal with plates; Grote’s History of Greece, 9 vols (and other books); Journal of Hellenic Study; Munro’s Lucretius. See Munby 1971:371–388. 18. Ellmann 1988:28; Holland & Hart-Davis 2000:561–2. 19. Wilde travelled to Greece in April 1877 with George Macmillan and J.P. Mahaffy. He visited Corfu, Olympia, Argos, Mycenae, Arcadia, and Athens. Wilde was punished for his lateness back, and for his attempting to defend the trip as an academically important one; the approach (using archaeology to further understand texts) was not appreciated at Oxford at the time. Wilde later became a member of the pro-archaeology Hellenic Society after graduation.

230 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Serena Witzke Armitage 2003:21–22. Ellmann 1988:41. Ellmann 1988:92, 97. For a frank evaluation of the quality of this paper, see Guy & Small 2006: 82–88. Contra, Mendelsohn 2010. Holland & Hart-Davis 2000:78. Ellmann 1988:114, 143. He also called her ‘the Venus Victrix of our age’ (Holland & Hart-Davis 2000:224). Wilde 1880:301–02. ‘In the account of Athenian comedy there is no mention of the remarkable Sicilian influence, and the name of Menander does not occur.’ Holland & Hart-Davis 2000:653. Holland & Hart-Davis 2000:936. Holland & Hart-Davis 2000:19–20. Ellmann 1988:43. Throughout the Queensberry trial (see note 16) Wilde’s interactions with much younger men were questioned (see Holland 2004). Wilde later expressed his regret for his relationship with the much younger Lord Alfred Douglas in De Profundis and his letters. On Victorian homosexuality, see Beckson 1992:186–212; Showalter 1990:169–184. Jenkyns 1980:1–6. F.M. Turner 1981:1–14. For more information on Victorian Hellenism, see Clarke 1945; DeLaura 1969; and Goldhill 2011. Jenkyns 1980:15. In 1880, Benson put on a production of Agamemnon in Greek at Oxford, allegedly at Wilde’s suggestion (Ellmann 1988:105–6). Sharrock and Ash 2002:140. Ar. Byz. on Syrianus’ Hermogenes 2,23; Caes. ap. Suet. Vita Ter.; Cic. ap. Suet. Vita Ter.; Ov. Am. 1.15.17–18. The anonymous author in the London Quarterly Review ([Anonymous] 1856:49) does concede that the Menander of the ancients seems very different from the Menander of the 1850s. [Anonymous] 1856:47. [Anonymous] 1856:37. For a thorough explanation of the discoveries of Menander in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Arnott 1970 and Blume 2010. Some of the monostichoi were not authentic Menander, but were included in the collections. Wilde would have been aware of the problematic nature of the lines, but he had a significant number of legitimate fragments in Meineke to complement the monostichoi. Wilde’s school notes mention Menander, summing him up with ‘ἀναγνώρισις’. MS Clark Library Wilde W6721M3 E96 [1873?], cited in I. Ross 2012:175. See below, notes 55–56, for specifics. Mahaffy 1887:115–16. [Anonymous] 1856. Wright 2008:69. Ellmann 1988:32. Symonds 1880:43. (Note: I did not have access to Wilde’s editions, so I have used the page numbers corresponding to the 1880 reprint.) Symonds 1880:236. See I. Ross 2012:180 n.330. Wilde’s tutor Tyrrell (1895:51–52) lauds Plautus for at least reminding the audience constantly of the non-respectable status of these women, and for not making them attractive to the audience, unlike the authors of degenerate French novels.

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52. Symonds 1880:236. 53. Mahaffy 1887:115–116. 54. Müller & Donaldson 1858: ii 63–64. Contra, Anderson (1993:3–29) who demonstrates the dangers in this assumption with a test case: parallel scenes from Menander’s Dis Exapaton and Plautus’ Bacchides. Through side-by-side analysis, one can observe the ways in which Plautus adapts, deconstructs, and re-envisions Menander by elaborating speeches and changing the tone. 55. [Anonymous] 1856:36. 56. See I. Ross 2012, Appendix G for Wilde’s translation. 57. Plautus and Terence both combined plots (contaminatio) and remade single plays in Latin (vortere, transferre). This was not an act of simple translation, but a complex adaptation and reinterpretation of the original plays, thus rendering any attempt to ‘roll back’ to Menander through their versions a complicated exercise that must be undertaken with caution. See the prologues in Plautus (Asin. 11, Trin. 19) and Terence (Ad. 6–11, An. 9, 13–14, Eun. 7–8, 19–20, 31–33, Heaut. 4–5, 16–21, Phorm. 24–26) for the playwrights’ acknowledgment of their debts and their innovation with this material. 58. Some think Apollodorus was Menander’s pupil (Barsby 2001:9), while others make him a contemporary of Machon and Posidippus, and therefore later than Menander (Athenaeus 14.664a). 59. Some of which are noted below in the section Menander in Earnest. 60. Plautus: Ritschl’s Mostellaria, Menaechmi; Wagner’s Aulularia; Fleckeisen’s Amphitryo, Captivi, Miles Gloriosus, Rudens, Trinummus; Terence: Wagner’s collected. See Oxford University 1875/76: 48–49. 61. Smith 2003:290. The text contained Ter. An., Haut., and Hec. in literal English prose translation by Jonathan Adair Phillips (1836); Wilde kept it on call from April 1880 till May 22 1880. 62. Quint. Inst. 10.1.99 called Terence’s writing scripta elegantissima. 63. Caes. ap. Suet. Vita Ter. Boyle 2004 collects the praises of Terence from antiquity to the modern day. 64. Wilde 1894a, 1894b. Wilde had earlier collected various vaguely connected maxims in the preface to the 1891 edition of Dorian Gray (Ward, Lock & Co.). Wilde also shared Menander’s celerity in production. An ancient anecdote preserved in Plutarch (Mor. 347e) has Menander conversing with a friend about the upcoming Dionysia and the deadline for Menander’s play. When asked how far along he was, Menander blithely replied, ‘Oh, I’ve got the plot . . . I just need the dialogue!’ Wilde similarly wrote in flurries of short-term activity, boasting of having finished Earnest in only three weeks (Ellmann 1988:397). Unlike Menander, however, Wilde first wrote his jokes and epigrams, fitting them into a plot that came later in the process. See Guy & Small 2006:54–5 on Wilde’s composition process. 65. Wright 2008:61–3. 66. Powell 1990:108–23. 67. Mikhail 1968. 68. Barsby 1993; Konstan 1995:131–140; J.C.B. Lowe 1983. It is impossible to know for certain, however, what was really Menander and not original to Terence, as there are very few extant fragments of Menander’s Eunouchos and Donatus is largely unhelpful. 69. Barsby 1993:174–9; 2001:309. 70. Grant 1975; Lord 1977. 71. The bowdlerization of Eunuchus had been ongoing throughout the nineteenth century. See P. Brown 2008a. 72. Both blocking characters are pompous and threatening, but neither has any real power and each is undermined throughout their respective plays. In the

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74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Serena Witzke end, both characters are mollified by solutions offered by the pairs of brothers. Menander’s original had a blocking character in the rival in Eunouchos, and the soldier in Kolax, but the invention of the imposing wealthy matron is credited to Plautus (Artemona in Asinaria, Matrona in Menaechmi, and Dorippa in Mercator), and his creations are among Wilde’s inspirations for Lady Bracknell. In Menaechmi, a boy is lost at a raucous festival, then adopted by a wealthy man in Epidamnus, who makes the boy his heir. Years later, through bizarre and humorous circumstances with mistaken identity, he is discovered by his brother. This plot element is similar to the structure of Earnest. Small fragments of these plays were available to Wilde. Ion’s influence on Menander (and Wilde) is effectively summarized in I. Ross 2012:173–4. On the relationship between Euripides and Menander generally, see Andrewes 1924. Plaut. Cas., Cist., Curc., Epid., Poen., Rud.; Ter. Andr., HT, Phorm. In the ‘Star Child’, a children’s story from Wilde’s second collection of tales, The House of Pomegranates (1891), there is a fight between two woodcutters over the titular foundling child’s recognition tokens that bears striking similarity to a scene in Epitrepontes where two slaves argue over a foundling child’s recognition tokens. Though Menander’s play was largely lost to him, Wilde was clearly interested in the New Comic tradition of recognition tokens and foundlings preserved in Roman comedy. These characteristics were a scuff from the overturning of an omnibus, a stain from the explosion of a temperance beverage, and her initials. On eighteenth-century adaptation of Plautus and Terence, see Kelsall 2012:461–4. On Hrotsvita, see Brown et al. 2004; on Molière, see Calder 1993. Ellmann 1988:376–7. Ellmann 1988:275, 113. ‘Oscar Wilde at Work (Il Ne Faut Pas Le Regarder)’, (1893) page proof included in The Uncollected Work of Aubrey Beardsley (1925). Powell 1990. Powell also did extensive research into the sources of Dorian Gray (Powell 1983). I would like to thank first Alan Sommerstein, whose interest has encouraged and improved this paper. Audiences at the 2011 APA meeting, the 2012 Nottingham Menander Conference, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill heard versions of this paper and provided lively, helpful responses. I am also grateful to Professor Kimberly Stern for advising me on all things Victorian. Finally, I thank Sharon James, who inspired my study of New Comedy, and who has been with me through every draft of this paper from its inception.

16 Menander’s Epitrepontes in Modern Greek Theatre The Poetics of Its Reception and Performance Stavroula Kiritsi

‘[I]nheritance from the ‘spirits of the past’ consists, as always, in borrowing. . . And the borrowing speaks: borrowed language, borrowed names, says Marx. A question of credit, then or of faith.’ —Derrida (1994)

INTRODUCTION The relationship between creditor and debtor, in the case of Menander and the Latin playwrights, Plautus and Terence, has been stressed by ancient and modern scholars and intellectuals alike, and most vividly by Julius Caesar, when he called Terence a ‘semi-Menander’. For the modern Greek intellectuals who fled the occupied Greek lands, especially after the 1450s, and headed mainly for Italy, the belief that Menander’s plays were superior to his Latin imitators was powerfully motivated, since Greek culture and identity were facing a crisis. In Renaissance Italy, a Greek scholar from Sparta, Dimitrios Moschos, wrote a comedy around 1475, entitled ‘Neaira’, which was presented in the court of the duke Gonzaga of Mantua. According to Andreas Moustoxidis, who was the first to publish Neaira in 1845, the main model for the plot of Neaira was the plays of Terence, the ‘semi-Menander’.1 Moustoxidis affirms that Moschos’ play was inspired by lost Menandrian originals, but it depended on Latin adaptations since only imitations of the original Menandrian plays had survived. The discovery of the papyrus, in 1905, which included fragments of Menander’s play Epitrepontes, and its publication in 1907,2 reinforced the pride of Greek scholars and intellectuals and proved, in their view, the superiority of the glorious Greek past, just as Greece was attempting to establish its identity within Europe and in contrast to the East. The first recorded modern production of a Menandrian play took place in Menander’s hometown, Athens, only a few months after the fragments of Epitrepontes were read aloud in a Paris institution by Maurice Croiset.3 The Greek production included the arbitration scene of the play, just as it was

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presented in France. Eustratios Eustratiades, a novelist and journalist, personally translated the newly discovered fragments very quickly from French into modern Greek (demotic), and with three male actors, who were equally appreciative and proud of the discovery, to present it to the Greek audience.4 For Eustratiades, such a major discovery did not allow for any delay, as he considered it his patriotic duty to act as quickly as possible.5 The performance of the arbitration scene in Athens, in the venue of the philological association of Parnassos in 1908, was preceded by a talk by Giorgos Soteriades,6 a professor of Classics at the University of Athens, who stressed once again that Plautus and Terence ‘imitated or rather plagiarized’ Menander’s plays,7 but that Menander’s spirit survived through all the imitations. As more Menandrian fragments were discovered, classical scholars increasingly stressed that Menander’s plays, including their themes, plot structures and characters, influenced not only Plautus and Terence but also the modern genre of European comedy. Most recently, William Furley, in his commentary on Epitrepontes, has gone even further, stating that ‘Menander has been seen as the ancestor of not only “high” forms of later European comedy such as the Commedia dell’Arte and, in France, Molière and Marivaux, in which mistaken identity, recognitions and reunions play a large part, but also of forms as low as modern “soaps”,’ whose themes are ‘conflict between generations, love-affairs, illegitimate babies, break-ups and reconciliations’.8 A number of modern Greek directors and translators share Furley’s view of Menander’s influence on various forms of comedy, popular soaps, and movies, and have been eager to produce the three best preserved Menandrian plays, namely Samia, Epitrepontes and Dyskolos, for the modern Greek audience, especially since 1959 when Dyskolos was discovered. However, they are uncertain about how to make a Menandrian play appeal to a modern Greek audience, which has been bred, among other things, on modern TV soaps. In addition, for a modern Greek audience, ancient Greek comedy is synonymous with Aristophanes’ plays, with their fantastic plots and characters, and these plays are easily adapted since they can also be used to satirize contemporary political and social situations. Unfortunately, Menander does not produce Aristophanic laughter for a contemporary audience.9 Hence the dilemma: the rediscovery of Menander has been a point of national pride among intellectuals and theatre people in Greece, and yet he runs counter in many ways to modern taste and tradition. The director Spyros Evangelatos, who has a doctorate in classics and studied modern theatre in a number of European institutions, decided to produce Epitrepontes in 1980, for the first time, and to repeat it in 1985, with his theatrical company, the Amphi-theatre; indeed, he celebrated his company’s first participation in the Epidaurus festival, in 1980, with this play. His daring decision sprang from his appreciation of Menander and of Menander’s influence on modern European drama. However, Evangelatos

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thought hard about how to stage the play to communicate his view of it to the audience. As Evangelatos stated: ‘I was aware that the play—for a modern audience—is not complex. Its plot is unsophisticated, and its characters are dated. Regarding their melodramatic dimension, the characters remind us of a “faded” Molière, without, however, having the charm of Molière’s characters, or Goldoni or, to some extent, Oscar Wilde . . . Nevertheless, I believed firmly—if unreasonably—that this was the right play for the debut of the Amphi-Theatre in Epidauros . . . Suddenly, I saw the “light” . . . we aimed at underlining Menander’s influence on European theatre . . .’.10 Evangelatos staged his Epitrepontes in five different theatrical periods, which correspond to the five acts of the original Menandrian play. Act I took place in Greece in the Hellenistic era; Act II in Renaissance Italy, via the genre of Commedia dell’ Arte;11 Act III in France in reference to Molière’s plays; Act IV in Victorian England, in relation to the plays of Oscar Wilde and Tom Robertson, more specifically the latter’s play Society; and, finally, Act V was located in modern Greece, in connection with the melodramatic films of the 1950s and 60s. Evangelatos chose this type of modern film as the setting for Act V because this genre includes among its themes the exposure of illegitimate babies, the ero s between rich and poor that must overcome a number of barriers before it achieves its fulfilment, and the ‘odyssey’ of lost children until they are reunited with their biological family, all of which are themes in Menander’s plays as well. Each act of Evangelatos’ production reflected the corresponding theatrical era and its playwrights through theatrical costumes, setting, and the style of acting. The link between the several acts—apart from the continuity of plot and character—was the language of the translation or adaptation—that is, demotic Greek—and the musical interludes, which the director inserted into his production after each act. The actors remained the same in all acts.12 The play was translated by one of the most accomplished Greek classical scholars, Tassos Roussos, who has had a long and successful career translating ancient Greek and Roman comedies and tragedies for theatrical productions by many theatrical companies, especially for the Greek National Theatre. MY SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY For my analysis, I consider first, the actual performance, the show, in recorded DVD format; second, the original ‘source’ text; and third, the performance text, as it is preserved in the production programme. In addition, in my reading and interpretation of the production, I consider practitioners’ views, as revealed in the interviews I conducted with them, in particular with the director Spyros Evangelatos, the translator Tassos Roussos and Kostas Tsianos, who played the role of Smikrines.13

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CREATING AND INVERTING AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS BY MEANS OF THE PROGRAMME FOR THE PRODUCTIONS I begin with the programme cover for both the 1980 and 1985 productions, since this prepares the audience for much of what is to come.14 This is adorned with an imaginative picture referring to an essential element of the story of Epitrepontes, which, however, in both the ancient play and the modern adaptation, the audience do not see enacted on stage but hear about through the play’s characters. The source for the image and its caption is Charisios’ reaction when he learns that Pamphile has given birth to a child that he thinks is not his. As Figure 16.2 shows, the programme design represents Charisios and Pamphile in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century European costume. Charisios tells Pamphile that ‘the child is illegitimate’ (Παμφίλη, είναι νόθο!) in a stern and pompous manner and pushes away the baby in its pram. Pamphile, in turn, cries out in despair, ‘oh my child’ (αχ! παιδί μου!). The cover of the programme thus indicates to the audience that these characters have an important role in the play and that the story will revolve around this apparently illegitimate child—the bare bones, we might say, of the drama. However, over the course of the play itself, the audience will experience a different side of Charisios, reflecting the way in which the director perceived him. He is not so much pompous as complex and morally aware, even though Evangelatos sometimes exaggerated Charisios’ character as compared to the original play or added characteristics designed above all to amuse the modern audience. Charisios’ first actual appearance in Act IV is, as I have indicated, far from the haughty character which the programme presents. On the other hand, the representation of a desperate Pamphile on the programme is not wholly inconsistent with her role in the drama. Like her persona in the original play, Pamphile appears strong when she faces her father’s reaction in Act III of the adaptation, resisting his demand that she leaves her husband. But even though her anguish, before Habrotonon recognizes her and reveals that the baby that she pretends is hers is actually Pamphile’s and Charisios’, is not much different from her reaction in the original play, Evangelatos gives her behaviour a more melodramatic air in the adaptation. Thus, the programme cover serves two functions, both to create and to invert the audience’s expectations regarding the story and the play’s characters. Furthermore, the characters on the cover are more reminiscent of those of popular melodrama than of comedy, and in this respect the cover concurs with the director’s intention to suit the play to the expectations of his modern audience; at the same time, however, it allows for an element of surprise, in that the audience is not led to expect the kind of amusement that is proper to comedy. I now turn to discuss some representative scenes, the added prologue, the reconstruction of Act I, the character of Charisios and a choral interlude.

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THE ADDED PROLOGUE Evangelatos’ adaptation starts with an added introductory part, which leads into Act I. At the same time, this additional section serves as the introduction to the plot line that is specific to the adaptation, that is, the question of Menander’s influence on European drama. The introductory part includes the appearance of a troupe of actors, who have roles in the production, and a chorus, who perform the choral interludes. The actors and the chorus advance together and, in a metatheatrical gesture, appear on the empty stage to prepare it for the setting of the first Act. The setting for this act is minimalistic. It represents a Hellenistic house abstractly, in the form of some ancient columns. The scene is accompanied by the instrumental music of a famous Greek song composed in 1972 by the composer Yannis Markopoulos, with lyrics by the classicist and translator Kostas Georgousopoulos, entitled ‘a thousand, ten thousand waves away from Aivali’ (χίλια μύρια κύματα μακριά από τ’Αϊβαλί). The song refers to the traumatic experience of the Greek population of the city of Aivali (modern Ayvalik), which was captured by the Turks in 1922. The population was in despair as they searched for new settlements in Greece and other countries. The link between the song’s content and the ‘loss and survival’ (in Pat Easterling’s phrase15) of Menander’s plays and, more specifically, the return home, as it were, of Epitrepontes in the form of a production in Menander’s homeland, cannot be missed. Markopoulos16 composed various kinds of songs, including some during the 1970s that had political connotations in Greece under the dictatorship. However, in choosing this and other songs by Markopoulos in his adaptation, Evangelatos did not have any intention of raising contemporary political issues. In his interview with me, Evangelatos was adamant that he chose Markopoulos’ songs for his production because the tunes of the songs suited the chorus’ and actors’ movements. It is perhaps worth remarking that recent interpretations of Menander have often stressed the political side of his comedies, although there is little agreement on his political allegiances;17 despite the modern Greek delight in political satire of the Aristophanic sort, this modern adaptation chose to sacrifice this dimension and emphasize more strictly theatrical aspects. RECONSTRUCTION OF ACT I Act I of the original Menandrian text is in a fragmentary condition, and a large part of the beginning of the Act is lost. Roussos, the translator of our adaptation, used Sandbach’s 1972 Oxford edition of the play for his translation.18 He took into consideration the surviving fragments and reconstructed the lost part of Act I for the production. In the translator’s

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note in the programme, Roussos stresses that in reconstructing the original text, he considered the whole plot of the play, the development of the story, Menander’s style, and modern scholars’ suggestions for reconstruction of the text, so that the additions he made to the original text would not seem ‘extraneous’ to the preserved parts of the play.19 However, the result is not as straightforward as Roussos’ comments might suggest. By way of illustration, we may consider in some detail two brief episodes. In Roussos’ supplements to the text, Onesimos and the cook, Karion, discuss what led Charisios to abandon his wife and his house, and Smikrines also appears, as he did in the original. In responding to the cook’s questions, Onesimos informs the audience about facts that are not part of the actual play, since they happened outside it, but which are nevertheless crucial to the story. Here, Roussos’ text serves, in part, the same function as a Menandrian prologue would have served in an original play, the only difference being that this kind of information would have been given by a god or a supernatural figure in a Menandrian play and not usually by a character in the comedy.20 Karion asks Onesimos: ‘Well, Onesimos, tell me, tell me, for god’s sake, your master who has Avroula,21 the singer, as his little girlfriend (φιλεναδίτσα), isn’t he newly-married?’22 Reacting to Onesimos’ confirmation that his master was indeed married just five months ago, Karion seems still more puzzled: ‘Now that your master has got into the honey, well and truly, he abandons it? Isn’t his behaviour unnatural?’23 Onesimos, however, justifies his master’s action: ‘No, not at all. I consider his behaviour right and natural.’ Karion is not only confused but also irritated: ‘What are you talking about, man? Who abandons the pleasures of marriage before he even tastes them, and slips out? Unless he married an ugly, hunch-backed and knock-kneed woman, but with a substantial dowry?’24 Onesimos confirms that his mistress’s dowry is indeed substantial, but her beauty is also great. Karion doubts, even after Onesimos’ affirmation, that Charisios’ wife is beautiful because he cannot find a possible reason for Charisios’ behaviour in abandoning her. Karion wonders whether Charisios’ problem is his sexuality and thinks that perhaps he is not a real man: ‘Is then your master, is he . . .?’25 Karion accompanies his question by pointing at his genitals, making a pendulum-like motion with his hands that is suggestive (among Greek gestures) of weak sexual energy and of males who are not real men. His gestures and words are, nevertheless, not vulgar in the strong sense; in this respect, they are far removed from the Aristophanic style, and thus suggest implicitly the atmosphere of Menandrian comedy. Onesimos reacts strongly to Karion’s question: he kicks Karion and firmly replies: ‘There is no if or what. My master is a bull with strong kidneys, an upstanding and daring man.’26 Karion tries to justify his curiosity to Onesimos by reference to his profession: ‘Now pay attention to me. How can I cook food which would be appropriate for my clients if I don’t know their troubles and their desires? Just think what a mistake it would be to serve one who is deeply upset something heavy, such as baked beans or baked fish

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with onions and garlic and in addition filled intestines. That is it. He will blow up. If one is angry and you serve him salty snacks which make him thirsty, he will start drinking wine and then the wine coupled with anger will get him all steamed up. And before you could say Jack Robinson, everything will be smashed up, with a rumpus and all the rest.’27 Onesimos is convinced by Karion’s speech and accepts his reasons as to why he needs to know Charisios’ situation, and thus he explains about Pamphile’s illegitimate baby, the exposure of the baby in the forest, the nurse Sophrone’s assistance in the situation, and finally Charisios’ reaction. Karion considers that what has befallen Charisios is a total debacle (καζίκι, a colloquial expression).28 Onesimos also reveals to Karion that it was he who informed Charisios about his wife’s story, and this has created severe problems for him. As Onesimos puts it: ‘Now, I pay for the damage. Wherever Charisios meets me, he adds insults to injury. As if I were responsible for my mistress giving birth to a child after five months of marriage.’ Roussos informed me in his interview that he based the reconstruction of the character of the cook on the stereotypical cook who appears in Middle and New Comedy. The added scene with Onesimos and Karion produced such a hilarious response in the audience that Evangelatos commented to Roussos that his adaptation elicited more laughter than the original Menandrian play.29 For all the desire to stick to the Menandrian model, as he conceived it, even in this Act, where Evangelatos chose to set the scene in ancient Athens, he and Roussos made clear concessions to modern taste. The suspicions of Charisios’ motives in marrying Pamphile, the idea that he might be less virile than he seems, the low motives that are ascribed to him for moving in with another woman, all smack of modern popular comedy. The signs of effort in adapting Menander to the modern Greek stage are already in evidence. After the scene between Onesimos and Karion, Smikrines appears on stage in a fury. Smikrines’ part serves two purposes for the audience: it allows them to discover more about Charisios’ situation and behaviour, and also to learn something about Smikrines’ own character and role in the play. Smikrines cannot believe the disaster that has befallen his home. In exasperation he states: ‘A lazy but healthy man is much worse than a sick man because he guzzles double portions and without gain. If you happen to be related to such a man, who is greedy, a drunkard and a yobbo, your possessions will vanish into thin air and then . . . run to catch them! This is what happened with my son-in-law, Charisios. In the beginning he seemed good, modest, a keen worker, a man with tidy habits, and he showed my daughter genuine affection and love. He could deceive even the judges of Hades; the hypocrite, the liar, the scumbag. As soon as he got married and got hold of the dowry that I, poor man, gave him, he abandoned his house to have the time of his life. He gulps the most expensive wine like a water-snake; curse him. This makes me blow up, and choke with anger. Ι am not talking only about his drunkenness; his gluttonous behaviour is beyond greediness. He

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forces himself to drink more and more wine for which he pays one obol per jar.’30 The director, the translator, and also Kostas Tsianos, the actor who played Smikrines, told me in their interviews that they perceived Smikrines as an old, tight-fisted man, but also a caring father. When the moment comes for him to try and persuade Pamphile to abandon Charisios, his concern for his daughter’s welfare is genuine. Of course, financial issues emerge since meanness is part of his character and he cannot control it. The modern Greek reading of Smikrines’ character looks like a capitulation to modern sentimentality, but recent discoveries of papyrus fragments, which include parts of Smikrines’ big speech, suggest that the producers may have been closer to Menander’s original in this respect.31 However, Evangelatos goes even further than Menander’s surviving fragments in representing Smikrines as a loud-mouthed, coarse, and blustering character, as a way of catering to modern taste and amusing his audience but also, more subtly, to hint at how this type of character would be stereotyped in later theatrical forms such as the Commedia dell’Arte and beyond. Kostas Tsianos told me that he modelled his acting for Smikrines’ character on the Greek actor Orestis Makris who starred in 1950s and ’60s’ melodrama and comedy films, playing multifaceted characters who were at once authoritarian and sarcastic but also caring, protective, fair, strict and old-fashioned in their concern for their daughters. CHARISIOS’ CHARACTER AND ROLE Charisios’ first appearance in Evangelatos’ production takes place in Act IV, as in the Menandrian play. The setting is a Victorian-style house belonging to Charisios and Pamphile. Charisios staggers onto the stage, holding a bottle of wine and occasionally drinking, upset at having overheard Smikrines trying to convince Pamphile to abandon her useless husband. His speech of self-accusation and remorse is directed to a photograph of himself that Pamphile had placed in a prominent location in the house. In Roussos’ text Charisios berates himself for his behaviour towards Pamphile, using many strong terms, as in the original Menandrian text,32 such as ungrateful (ἀχάριστος), little man (ἀνθρωπάκι), uncouth (παλιοχωριάτης), and πρόστυχος, which in modern Greek carries the sense of immoral, base. The modern Greek text, however, is more colloquial and more contemptuous in comparison with the original Menandrian text at this point. While talking to himself, Charisios pauses to take a few sips from his bottle. In Act IV, Evangelatos underlines Charisios’ emotional confusion and his drinking, to which he resorts on account of his remorse for his past behaviour. Evangelatos did not consider Charisios to be an alcoholic but rather a young man who likes the good life, but who is proud and who might well go over the top when difficulties arise and his pride and

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confidence are shaken. With this scene, Evangelatos sharpened the delineation of Charisios’ character, as compared with Menander’s version, perhaps with modern perceptions of a man and husband like Charisios in mind, or else due to the pervasive influence of Aristophanes, and with a view to augmenting the audience’s emotional response through visual comic effects; or perhaps both contemporary ideas of realism and the Aristophanic tradition combined to round out the representation of Charisios. Onesimos, on overhearing Charisios’ speech, comments in a manner reminiscent of a polite and cool British butler, repeating expressions such as ‘Oh dear, oh my god!’ When Charisios realizes that Onesimos is present and scolds him, saying ‘Are you still talking? I will tear you to pieces if I catch you,’33 Onesimos addresses Charisios in the polite second person plural: ‘Sir, you have been unjust to me’ (με ἀδικει̃τε κύριε). This would be the usual way (apart from the plural) for a scared slave in Menander’s time to address his furious master. But Onesimos puts on an overtly theatrical performance. His acting at this point provoked laughter. According to the director, the way Onesimos behaves in this Act is intended to recall the acting style of a butler34 in the theatrical plays of the Victorian age, for example in the style of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a well-known instance of the comedy of manners.35 On the one hand, the themes and values of the plays of the Victorian age, such as the portrayal of home, the virtues of the domestic life, and family relationships,36 squared well with the principal preoccupations of Menandrian comedy. On the other hand, and in partial tension with its domestic naturalism, Victorian drama was marked by a high degree of pure farce,37 and this too played an important part in Evangelatos’ decision to use the drama of this period as the theatrical backdrop for the fourth Act of his production. CHORAL INTERLUDES As stated above, at the end of each Act there is a choral interlude.38,39 A travelling troupe of three women, dressed in long costumes and with facial expressions depicting agony, tiredness and effort, appear on stage, drawing a cart. The cart serves to carry away the props for the Acts that have been completed. The group of women is led by the leading member of the chorus, in the original production played by the late Leda Tassopoulou. As noted above, music from Markopoulos’ songs accompanies the chorus during all their appearances. At the end of Act IV, when the situation between Charisios and Pamphile has been resolved, the choral interlude seems to reflect this happy dénouement. Before the entrance of the chorus, a boy of 5 or 6 years of age is present on the stage and he seems lost, sad and in suspense. As the chorus arrives, the lead woman suddenly notices his presence, recognizes him, calls to him and embraces him tenderly and affectionately. The boy briefly greets

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the other two women who make up the chorus but returns to the leader’s arms, and she holds him tightly, in apparent fear of losing him again. In this case, unlike the opening interlude, the accompanying song had no particular socio-political connotations even in its original context; rather, it evokes emotions of tenderness, melancholy and respect, without specifying the object of these feelings—thus, though it could be read as romantic, it may also have a wider application. It was incumbent on the audience, once again, to summon up the lyrics, since here, as throughout the play, the music is solely instrumental. However, most of the spectators would have recalled at once the well-known words: ‘I worshipped your image and protected it; I will clasp my hands on it sooner than surrender it to begging. Colours, colours and scents . . . Stop acting up.’ An allusion to the recovery of the child, and perhaps the reconciliation between the parents, is not far to seek. When I asked Evangelatos whether this interlude was in fact intended to represent the reunion of Charisios with Pamphile and of the two with their baby, or if it might even have had a meta-theatrical significance, symbolizing the return of Menander’s plays to his homeland, he did not offer a definitive answer. But he did not exclude my interpretations. At the end of Act V, the chorus and the actors of the scene gather all the props, thereby deconstructing the stage, probably for another artistic activity. CONCLUSION It is hard to know quite how to label this production of the Epitrepontes: is it a translation, a recreation, an adaptation, or some new kind of hybrid?40 On one hand, fidelity to the original was part of the translator’s and director’s intention, and is reflected in the philological care with which the original text, as far as it is preserved, was rendered and in the attempt to maintain the proper tone and character even in the additional inserted episodes that filled in the lacunae in the Menandrian comedy. On the other hand, the play is not only updated in respect to plot and characterization, but constitutes a veritable history of the comic genre. Whatever the proper label, it was an immensely creative and bold attempt to update the revered Menander and adapt him to modern Greek taste. In the process, various strategies were employed, involving both shifts in characterization and linguistic register and also the extraordinary device of embedding Menander’s original Greek play in an act-by-act sequence that traces the history of comedy from antiquity through the Renaissance to today. The director offers us an implicit poetics of translation and a restaging of the play that generates a multiplicity of theatrical experiences. This was the prelude to the construction of the new Menander and his re-creation as a hero of the comic theatre worthy of the new Greece and its self-image.41

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Figure 16.1

The five theatrical eras of the Evangelatos production.

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Figure 16.2a,b The programme cover for the Evangelatos production (Greek and English versions).

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Figure 16.3 The chorus of Evangelatos’ Epitrepontes, led by the late Leda Tassopoulou.

Figure 16.4 The chorus of Evangelatos’ Epitrepontes.

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NOTES 1. Moustoxides 1845:402. 2. Published by Gustave Lefebvre 1907. For editions of Epitrepontes, see W.D. Furley 2009:34–35; Ireland 2010a:109–263 and Blanchard 2013. 3. On the newly discovered Menandrian fragments, see Housman 1908 and Richards 1908. 4. One of the actors who participated in the staging of the Arbitration scene of the Parnassos production, P. Lazaridis, in Soteriades 1909:16, wrote: ‘The newly found fragment in Egypt, which included a scene of a play of the famous Greek comic playwright of ancient Greece, Menander, came to Greece with a French passport. The fragment was translated from French into Greek by Mr. Eustratios Eustratiades’. The production was later staged by the Municipal Theatre in Athens (September 1908), the Musical Club of Volos (May 1908) and in Tripolis (February 1909). Productions of the scene were preceded by talks with established Greek scholars who emphasized Menander’s greatness as a playwright in antiquity and the importance of the discovery of the fragment to the modern Greek culture. For the first Menandrian production in Greece, see also Sideris 1976:230–1. 5. When the scene was produced in Parnassos, almost immediately after the fragments were represented in Paris, the Greek Newspaper Σκρίπτ reported on 17 April 1908 that ‘some duties are not susceptible to delays’ («μερικὰ καθήκοντα δὲν ἐπιδέχονται, βλέπετε, ἀναβολήν»). 6. Soteriades was well known for his controversial translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia into demotic vernacular in 1903. His translation was the cause of bloody confrontations in Athens between supporters of the demotic and the archaic forms of the Greek language. For Soteriades’ translation of Oresteia, see Van Steen 2000:113, 245 n.87. 7. Soteriades 1909:6. 8. W.D. Furley 2009:2–3. 9. Regarding the modern Greek audience’s lack of familiarity with Menander’s plays, see also Diamantakou 2007:423–9. Alexis Solomos was the first Greek director to direct Dyskolos alongside Lysistrata in the Epidaurus festival in 1960. On the occasion of these two productions Solomos 1980:63 wrote that ‘in Epidaurus Dyskolos was staged with a repeated production of Lysistrata and [Dyskolos] was sunk ingloriously amidst the waves of the Aristophanic laughter’. 10. The quotation comes from an article by Evangelatos in the supplement Epta Imeres (50 Χρόνια. Επίδαυρος: οι 30 καλύτερες παραστάσεις) in Kathimerini, 19 June 2005. The translation of Evangelatos’ Greek into English is mine. 11. For the theatrical influences on and of the Commedia dell’ Arte, its sources, characters, and audience see, Oreglia 1968, George & Gossip 1993 and Henke 2002. In Evangelatos’ production, Smikrines became Pantalone; Syriskos and Daos recalled the characters of Arlecchino and Brighella. 12. Plate 16.1 shows photographs of reproductions of original plays in each theatrical period, which inspired the director’s production. These photographs formed part of Evangelatos’ production programme. 13. I conducted the interviews in person with the above-mentioned practitioners in Greek. Interviews with theatrical practitioners by academics, for the purpose of research are a useful tool for the discipline of reception studies. For the advantages and limitations of the practitioners’ interviews as a source of information see Burke & Innes (2004), esp. 13–14. 14. For a thorough discussion of this topic, see Michelakis 2010:95–107.

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15. Easterling 1995. 16. Markopoulos is known to British audiences for his composition of the music for the BBC show ‘Who pays the Ferryman’ in 1977. 17. See, for example, Lape 2004 on Menander’s democratic sympathies, and contrast Major 1997. 18. Many more fragments identified as belonging to Epitrepontes were added in the revised edition of Sandbach’s (Oxford 1990). The most recent editions (W.D. Furley 2009, Ireland 2010a) include still more fragments, and further publications continue (Römer 2012a, 2012b); see also Casanova, this volume. 19. Roussos’ translation was influenced by two earlier modern Greek translations of the play: to a great extent by the translation of Nikos Sfyroeras 1975, especially in the reconstruction and translation of Acts I and III and to a lesser extent by the translation of Thrasyvoulos Stavrou 1954. Sfyroeras’ translation was the script that was used for the first production of the whole play of Epitrepontes in 1959. Sfyroeras took Jensen’s edition of the play into consideration in his translation. 20. For the supposed lost prologue of the original play and the possible identity of the character who would have delivered this part of the play, see W.D. Furley 2009:8–10. Furley proposes that the prologue of the play might have been delivered by a personification of Reconciliation, Diallagē. 21. Roussos opted for the name Avroula for the character of Habrotonon, following Stavrou and Sfyroeras’ choice of this name; see n. 19 above. 22. Karion: «Λοιπόν, λοιπόν, Ὀνήσιμε, γιά πές μου, πές μου, γιά τό θεό, τ’ ἀφεντικό σου πού ‘χει φιλεναδίτσα τήν Ἀβρούλα τήν τραγουδίστρα, νιόπαντρος δέν ̃ εἰναι;» . All translations of the adaptations cited in this paper are mine. 23. Karion: «Τώρα πού μπη̃κε γιά καλά στό μέλι, τώρα τ’ ἀφήνει; Ἀφύσικο δέ μοιάζει;» ̃ 24. Karion: «εἰσαι καλά, ἄνθρωπέ μου; Ποιός ἀφήνει του̃ γάμου τίς χαρές καί ξεπορτίζει, προτου̃ κάν τίς γευτει;̃ Ἐξόν ἄν πη̃ρε καμιά ἄσκημη, καμπούρα, στραβοκάνα, μέ προίκα ὅμως ἀτράνταχτη, ὅπως λένε». 25. Κarion: «μά τότε πω̃ς; . . . τ’ ἀφεντικό σου μήπως. . . . ». ̃ 26. Onesimos: «τί μήπως καί ξεμήπως . . . εἰναι ταυ̃ρος˙ γερά νεφρά, λεβέντης, παλικάρι». ‘Kidney’ in modern Greek does not elsewhere have the secondary sense of testicles, as it did, according to Athenaeus (9.384e), in classical Greek, though here it clearly signifies masculine energy. 27. Κarion: «γιά πρόσεξε με. Πω̃ς νά μαγειρέψω φαγιά πού νά ταιριάζουν στόν καθένα, ἄν δέ γνωρίζω κάπως τούς μπελάδες, τίς ἔγνοιες, τά μεράκια πού ̃ τόν δέρνουν; Σκέψου τί λάθος εἰναι νά σερβίρεις σ’ ἔναν πού τόν πλακώνει ἡ σταναχώρια, κατί βαρύ, πλακί στό φου̃ρνο ἄς που̃με μέ σκόρδο, κι ἀποπάνω νά του̃ δώσεις νά φάει γαρδούμπα˙ τελείωσε, θά σκάσει. Ἄν πάλι ‘ναι ὀργισμένος καί του̃ φτιάξεις μεζέδες ἀρμυρούς πού φέρνουν δίψα, θ’ ἀρχίσει τό κρασί καί θά φουντώσει σέ λίγο ἀπ’ τό θυμό καί τότε . . . κλαφ’ τα˙ ὥσπου νά πει̃ς κρεμμύδι, γίναν ὅλα γιαλιά καρφιά, καυγάδες καί τά τέτοια». 28. Karion: «κατάλαβα . . . μεγάλο τό καζίκι πού βρήκε τόν ἀφέντη σου, στ’ ἀλήθεια». 29. Perhaps the Onesimos-Karion scene in the original Menandrian text was quite like Roussos’ version of it. If only POxy 4936 had been a bit better preserved, we might have a better understanding. ̃ 30. Smikrines: «ένας τεμπέλης που’χει τήν ὑγειά του, εἰναι ἀπ’ τόν ἄρρωστο χειρότερος, γιατί περιδρομιάζει τό διπλάσιο καί δίχως νά ‘χεις διάφορο κανένα. [Λοιπόν ἄν συγγενέψεις μ’ ἔναν τέτοιο ἀχόρταγο, μεθύστακα κι ἀλήτη, τά ὑπαρχοντά σου γρήγορα θά γίνουν καπνός καί τότε . . . τρέχα νά τά πιάσεις. Ἔτσι μέ τό Ξαρίσιο τό γαμπρό μου. Καλό φαινόταν κι ἄξιο παλικάρι, σεμνός καί

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

Stavroula Kiritsi δουλευτής καί νοικοκύρης κι ἔδειχνε γιά τήν κόρη μου στ’ ἀλήθεια μιά ἀγάπη τρυφερή, πού θά μπορούσε καί τούς κριτές νά ξεγελάσει του̃ Ἄδη. Ὁ ὑποκριτής, ὁ ψεύτης, ὁ κοπρίτης. Μόλις παντρεύτηκε ὅμως καί στήν προίκα πού ὁ δόλιος του̃ ‘χω δώσει ἔβαλε χέρι, παράτησε καί σπίτι καί γυναίκα κι ἀλλου̃ γλεντοκοπα̃. Σά νεροφίδα τό πιό ἀκριβό κρασί—-πανάθεμά τον—-ρουφάει ὁ καλός μου. Αὐτό μέ κάνει νά σκάω, νά πλαντάζω ἀπ’ τό κακό μου. Γιά τά μεθύσια δέ μιλάω. Μά φτάνει τό ἀχόρταγο του φέρσιμο πιό πέρα κι ἀπό τήν ἀπληστία, νά βιάζει τόν ἑαυτό του γιά νά πίνει κι ἄλλο . . . κι ἄλλο κρασί, πού τ’ ἀγοράζει—-για φαντάσου—-ἕνα ὀβολό, γιά μία μόνο κανάτα». Smikrines’ speech includes not only colloquial expressions, like the dialogue between Onesimos and Karion, but also a number of asyndeton phrases, a linguistic characteristic of Menander’s style, which is a further manifestation of his anger and disappointment. For the role of asyndeton in Menander, see Wiles 1991:210–227, esp. 210–214, and Handley 2002:165–188. See Römer 2012a, b. According to Onesimos, Charisios called himself ἀλιτήριος (894) and βάρβαρος (898). Charisios: «Μιλα̃ς ἀκόμη; Θά σέ κομματιάσω». Rather a surprising choice for Evangelatos to make, since it does not fit at all with Onesimos’ personality as presented by Menander. The role of a valet or footman might have been more suitable for Onesimos. For theatrical plays in the Victorian age, see Booth 1991: esp. 94, 130 and 213 with reference to Robertson’s realism. For an analysis of various aspects of The Importance of Being Earnest, see Bloom 1988, and on Wilde’s debt to Menander, especially in this play, see Witzke, this volume. See Booth 1991:99, 125, 131–3 and 139. D. Parker 1988:37–8. Plates 16.3 and 16.4 show the chorus at two different moments in the production. The songs between the acts are: chorus entrance, as part of the added prologue: ‘a thousand, ten thousand waves away from Aivali’ (χίλια μύρια κύματα μακριά από τ’ Αϊβαλί); Αct I ‘Golden words’ (μαλαματένια λόγια); Αct II ‘The enemy invaded the city’ (μπήκαν στην πόλη οι οχτροί); Αct III ‘I talk about my children and I sweat’ (μιλώ για τα παιδιά μου και ιδρώνω), a song focusing on the Greeks who emigrated to other countries, especially in the 1950s and 60s; Act IV ‘Colours and scents’ (χρώματα και αρώματα); Αct V, the end of the play, which also coincides with the end of the chorus’s, the theatrical troupe’s artistic endeavour, a reprise of ‘Α thousand, ten thousand waves away from Aivali’. Cf. Hardwick 2000 and esp. 9–22. I am grateful to Professors Alan Sommerstein, Anne Sheppard, David Konstan and Chris Carey for their invaluable suggestions and comments. I would also like to thank the director Professor Spyros Evangelatos, the translator Tassos Roussos and the actor Kostas Tsianos for their interviews. I am indebted to Professor Evangelatos for kindly allowing me to publish the photos of the production which belong to the archives of the Amphi-Theatre and Mr Panagiotis Anastasopoulos (Art2Face, publishing company) for permitting me to publish the two photos of the chorus from the book: Λήδα Τασοπούλου . . . προς ύστατον φως by S. Evangelatos (Athens, 2012).

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Contributors

Eftychia Bathrellou is a teaching fellow in classics at the University of Edinburgh. She is preparing a critical edition with commentary of Menander’s Epitrepontes, and has published articles on Menander and on comic papyri. Horst-Dieter Blume is a retired professor of classics at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität of Münster. His main areas of research are ancient drama and classical theatre history and performance. His publications include Menanders Samia: Eine Interpretation (1974); Einführung in das antike Theaterwesen (2nd ed. 1991); Renaissance Latin Drama in England (II,13): Hymenaeus. Victoria. Laelia (1991); Menander (1998); Menander, Dyskolos / Der Menschenfeind (Greek/German) (2007). Angelo Casanova is a professor of Greek literature at the University of Florence, editor of the journal Prometheus, and co-director (with Guido Bastianini) of the Convegni Papirologici Fiorentini which have been held annually since 2002. His main research interests have been in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women; the Epicurean inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda, and the anti-Epicurean writings of Plutarch; the fragments of Greek tragedy; papyrus texts; and Greek comedy, from Aristophanes to Menander. Valeria Cinaglia completed her PhD at the University of Exeter in 2011, on Aristotle and Menander on the Ethics of Understanding, and is now teaching in the Department of Philosophy at King’s College London. She has written several papers on the relationship between New Comedy and Aristotelian philosophy, and also one (with David Konstan) on Machiavelli’s comedy Mandragola; she is currently working on the concept of comic error in Aristotle’s Poetics and extending her analysis of Aristotle and Menander to include late Middle Comedy. Christophe Cusset has been a professor of Greek at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France) since 2006. His main fields of research are

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Hellenistic poetry, scientific poetry, and New Comedy. He is the author of (inter alia) La Muse dans la bibliothèque: réécriture et intertextualité dans la littérature alexandrine (1999), Les Bacchantes de Théocrite (2001), Ménandre ou la comédie tragique (2003), and editions of Lycophron’s Alexandra (with C. Chauvin, 2008), of Theocritus VI (2011), and of the fragments of Euphorion (with B. Acosta-Hughes, 2012). William D. Furley is a professor in the Seminar für Klassische Philologie at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of Andokides and the Herms (1996), of a two-volume edition of Greek Hymns (2001, with J.M. Bremer), and of an edition of Menander’s Epitrepontes (2009); he is currently working on an edition of Menander’s Perikeiromene and, in collaboration with Fritz Mitthof, on the Georgian collection of papyri in Tbilisi. Robert Germany is an assistant professor of classics at Haverford College, with special interests in Roman comedy, the Homeric Hymns, magic in Latin literature, and the reception of the classics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany. He is the author of Mimetic Contagion: Art and Artifice in Terence’s Eunuchus (forthcoming) and is preparing a book on temporal mimesis in ancient and modern theatre. Sharon L. James is an associate professor of classics in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author or editor of many books and articles on issues of gender in Greek and Roman literature and society, including Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy (2003) and A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (co-edited with Sheila Dillon, 2012). She is preparing a book on Women in New Comedy. Orestis Karavas is a lecturer in ancient Greek philology at the University of the Peloponnese, Kalamata. His main research interests are in Lucian and his contemporaries, the literature and religion of the Imperial age, and classical and post-classical drama. He is the author of Lucien et la tragédie (2005) and has recently completed a commentary on Colluthus’ Rape of Helen. Stavroula Kiritsi is completing her PhD at Royal Holloway University of London, under the supervision of Prof. Anne Sheppard and Prof. Christopher Carey, on ‘Menandrean Characters in Context: Menander’s Characters in the fourth century BC and their reception in Modern Greek theatre’. Mario Lamagna is a ricercatore in Greek literature at the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ and a Socio Ordinario Residente of the Accademia

Contributors

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Pontaniana; his main fields of research are Menander and New Comedy, theatre history, Atticism, Greek patristics, and Byzantine medicine. He has produced editions with commentary of Menander’s Perikeiromene (La fanciulla tosata, 1994) and Samia (La donna di Samo, 1998). Gunther Martin, having previously taught and carried out research at Oxford and Nottingham, is currently a research fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Bern. His research has led to publications on different aspects of Greek and Latin literature, in particular to books on Dexippus of Athens (2006) and on religion in Athenian oratory (2009). At present, he is working on drama (in particular on Euripides’ Ion) with a focus on communicative structures and the social and political background. Sarah Miles is a lecturer in classical language and literature at the University of Durham. Her research focuses on Greek comedy (from Old to New), comic fragments, and the engagement between tragic and comic genres. She has published articles and chapters in these areas, and is preparing a book on Greek Tragedy and its Reception in the Fragments of Old Comedy. Alan H. Sommerstein is Emeritus Professor of Greek at the University of Nottingham. He has worked mainly on Greek tragedy (editing the Loeb Aeschylus, 2008; co-editing Sophocles: Selected Fragmentary Plays, 2006–12; The Tangled Ways of Zeus, 2010), Old Comedy (The Comedies of Aristophanes, 1980–2002; Talking about Laughter, 2009), and ancient oaths (Oath and State in Ancient Greece, with Andrew Bayliss and others, 2012; Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece, with Isabelle Torrance and others, forthcoming); his edition of Menander’s Samia appeared in late 2013. He is editor of the Encyclopedia of Greek Comedy (in preparation). Olga Tribulato is a research fellow in Greek language and literature at the Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice. She is the editor of Language and Linguistic Contact in Ancient Sicily (2012) and the author of many articles on the ancient Greek language and its dialects and Kunstsprachen; she is now preparing a linguistic commentary on the Antiatticista. Jean-Luc Vix is an associate professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Strasbourg. His recent work deals with the Second Sophistic and especially with teaching at that time, and he is the author of L’enseignement de la rhétorique au IIe s. ap. J.-C. à travers les discours 30–34 d’Aelius Aristide (2010). Another major interest of his is the transmission of works and manuscripts from Antiquity down to the

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Contributors

Renaissance period. He is currently working on the edition of discourses 30–34 of Aelius Aristeides for the Budé series. Serena Witzke is completing her PhD at the University of North CarolinaChapel Hill, under the supervision of Prof. Sharon James, on The Influence of Greek and Roman New Comedy on Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays.

General Index

Entries for titles of plays by Menander are marked with an asterisk. Académie Française 219, 220 accidents (in Aristotle) 152, 157–8, 159, 163 *Adelphoi B 10 n.1, 223, 225; see also Terence (Adelphoe) adikema xiii, 141, 145 – 6, 151 n.24, 154, 155, 161 – 2 Aelius Dionysius 204, 205, 207, 210, 213 n.45 Aeneas Tacticus 66 – 7 Aer (Air) 85 Aeschylus xvi n.9, 75, 91, 184, 203, 218, 246 n.6; Eumenides 79; Prometheus Bound 81; Xantriai 81 Agis II of Sparta 67 Agnoia (Ignorance/Misapprehension) 78, 81, 88 n.41, 112, 141, 153 – 4, 155, 158, 164 n.13; images of 164 n.8 Alcesimarchus (in Plautus’ Cistellaria) 17 Alexander the Great 70 n.15 Amphi-theatre (theatrical company) 234, 235 anagnorisis, see recognition *Andria 14, 223; see also Terence (Andria) anger 21, 31, 38 n.30, 78, 124, 141, 154, 161, 162, 164 n.11, 239, 248 n.30 Antiatticist, the xiv, 200, 205 – 10 Apollodorus of Carystus 22 n.8, 223, 231 n.58 Archelaus I of Macedon 191 Aristeides, Aelius xiv, 183, 190 – 3, 196, 197, 213 n.32

Aristophanes 3, 4, 8, 45, 80, 81, 82, 120, 130, 131 – 4, 138, 139; Birds 79, 83; Knights 47; language 207; Lysistrata 149; Peace 47; reception in antiquity 183, 184, 186 – 7, 190, 193, 194, 196, 197, 200, 204; reception in modern times 219, 222, 234, 241; Wasps 47; Wealth 79 Aristophanes of Byzantium 107, 204, 205, 207, 214 n.51, 219 Aristotle xii, xiii – xiv, 52 n.2, 53 n.12, 137 – 8, 139, 150, 152 – 3, 157 – 8, 163, 165 n.39, 166 n.43, 175, 201; Nicomachean Ethics 141, 149, 159 – 62; Physics 157 – 8; Poetics 106 – 7, 112; Rhetoric 141; Wilde on 208 Asclepius 185 Aspasia 12 *Aspis xiv, xv n.7, 4, 7 – 8, 10 n.5, 53 n.16, 79, 82, 85, 88 n.40, 97, 107, 108, 155 – 6, 158, 167 – 9, 220, 226, 227; see also Chairestratos; Daos; Kleostratos; Smikrines; Tyche Astydamas 99 Athenaeus (fl. 312 BC) 64 – 5, 66 Athenaeus (fl. AD 200) 203 Atticism xiv, 193, 196, 199 – 214 atychema xiii, 141, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151 n.24, 154, 155, 156, 161 – 2 audience xii, xiii, 5, 6, 8, 21, 41, 43, 51, 52, 55 n.36, 64, 66, 69, 75, 76, 77, 82 – 3, 85 – 6, 88 n.50, 89 n.64, 91, 101, 109, 110, 114

270

General Index

n.8, 114 n.19, 115 n.23, 131 n.4, 142, 155, 161, 163, 165 n.25; address to 79, 80, 83 – 4, 89 n.55, 89 n.57, 103 n.8, 155, 181; modern Greek 234 – 5, 236, 239, 240, 241, 246 n.9; privileged knowledge of 14, 84 – 5, 92, 97, 98, 107, 113 n.7 autourgoi 4, 5 babies 6, 8, 14, 15, 20, 21, 26, 30, 33, 34 – 5, 36 n.14, 38 n.28, 48 – 9, 98 – 100, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 226, 227, 234, 235, 236, 239, 242 Balbus of Tralles 201 – 2 barbarian vs. Greek 43, 64, 119 – 20; see also Phrygians; slaves (ethnic identities); Thracians Barigazzi, A. 137 – 9, 141 – 2, 143, 148 – 9 Beardsley, Aubrey 227 Bendis 54 n.27 bile, black xiv, 167, 169; see also melancholia ‘bourgeois’ model of Menander’s audience 82 – 3 brother’s duty to sister xv n.3, 6 – 8 burial on campaign 66 Caecilius Statius: Plocium 10 n.4, 10 n.6; Synephebi 58 Capablanca, J.R. 63 Carcinus 96 – 7, 99 Cassander 64 causation 153, 154, 157 – 61, 165 n.36 Chaireas (in Dyskolos) 92 – 3, 94, 100, 104 n.15 Chairestratos (in Aspis) 7, 97, 168 – 9 Chairestratos (in Epitrepontes) 8 – 9, 10 n.2, 15, 19 chance xiv, 3, 96, 114 n.8, 141, 142, 152 – 3, 155, 157 – 9, 163; see also Tyche Charisios xiii, 8 – 9, 10 n.2, 14, 15, 38 n.27, 38 n.30, 100 – 1, 106, 107, 108, 113, 141, 147, 148, 149, 175 – 7, 236, 238 – 41 Choricius of Gaza 195 – 6 chorus: in a modern Menander production 237, 241 – 2; in tragedy 91, 92 Chremes (in Ter. Phormio) 22 n.8

Christian attitudes to Menander 199, 200 Chrysis 11, 12, 13, 14, 20 – 1, 34, 116, 121 – 2, 178 citizenship xi – xii, 7, 12 – 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22 n.8, 23 n.14, 23 n.20, 26, 33, 34, 38 n.35, 43, 50, 80, 164 n.10, 165 n.21, 225 – 6, 227 Cleopatra (wife of Perdiccas II) 191 Comedy, Old 119, 186, 190, 194, 196, 197; see also Aristophanes; Cratinus Commedia dell’Arte 234, 235 compulsion 159, 163 conversational analysis 116 – 31 cooks 43, 45, 46, 54 n.31, 55 nn.38 – 41, 128 – 9, 238 – 9; see also Karion; Sikon cooperative principle 117, 128 Corinth 18, 23 n.19, 58, 153 – 4, 165 n.25 Cornelianus 201 – 2, 203 Corycian god 78 Crannon, battle of 64 Cratinus 76, 190, 193, 200 Croiset, Maurice 233 Custer, Lt.-Col. G.A. 68 Cyaxares 67 Cynics 85, 191 Cyrus (the Great) 67 Daos (in Aspis) 7, 42 – 4, 53 n.16, 54 n.22, 60 – 9, 96 – 7, 110, 126 – 7, 155 – 7, 158 – 9, 168 – 9, 172 – 3 Daos (in Dyskolos) 47, 53 n.16 Daos (in Epitrepontes) 45, 48 – 9, 55 n.38, 55 n.48, 99, 123 – 4 Daos (in Georgos) 53 n.16 Daos (in Heros) 34, 55 n.48 Daos (in Perikeiromene) 53 n.16, 54 n.30, 155 Daos (in Perinthia) 47 – 8 *Dardanos 195 Demeas (in Samia) xv n.4, 19, 20, 108, 116, 121 – 2, 133 n.29 ‘Demetrius’, Περὶ ἑρμηνείας 193, 194 Demetrius of Phalerum 58, 96, 137, 150, 175 Demetrius Poliorcetes 137 deus ex machina 75, 76, 80 dialect 120, 210 Didot rhesis 143 Dio Chrysostom xiv, 183 – 4

General Index Dionysius of Halicarnassus 193 – 4 Diphilus xiii, 21 n.1 *Dis Exapaton 4, 9, 16 – 17, 130, 220, 231 n.54; see also Plautus (Bacchides) divorce 13, 14, 20, 28, 108, 145, 149 Donatus 223 door-knocking scenes 82, 124, 129 Doris (in Perikeiromene) 54 n.30, 111 Dorkion (in fab. inc. 5 Arnott) 16 – 17 double entendre 59, 120 dowry xi, xv nn.3 – 4, xv n.6, 4, 5 – 7, 8, 10 n.6, 13, 14, 20, 21, 238, 239 Dromon (in Sikyonioi) 50 – 1 Dryden, John 90 *Dyskolos xii, xiii, xv n.1, xvi n.7, 4 – 6, 7 – 8, 46, 47, 78, 81, 82, 108, 139, 142, 169 – 70, 174, 220; inspiration for Lucian? 189; modern Greek productions 234, 246 n.9; see also Chaireas; cooks; Daos; Getas; Gorgias; Kallippides; Knemon; Pan; Sikon; Simiche; Sostratos Elenchos 78, 81, 87 nn.21 – 2, 187 – 8 *Encheiridion 78 ephebeia 58, 137, 218 Ephesus 4, 9, 18, 23 n.20 Epicurus 58, 137, 139 – 40 Epidaurus xiv, 234 – 5, 246 n.9 epikleros 7, 9, 10 n.6, 12, 165 n.28 *Epikleros A/B 10 n.5, 195 epiphonema 195 *Epitrepontes xv n.1, xvi n.7, 8 – 9, 10 n.1, 15, 26, 33, 35, 46, 78, 106, 107, 108, 141, 232 n.77; date 39 n.36; time structure 97 – 102; 1980 production xiv, xv, 229 n.11, 233 – 48; 1980 programme 236, 243 – 4; see also Chairestratos; Charisios; Daos; Habrotonon; Karion; Onesimos; Pamphile; Smikrines; Syriskos Erasistratus 185 ethopoeia 188 Euclio (in Plautus’ Aulularia) 120 eunoia 144, 148 – 50 *Eunouchos 58, 223, 232 n.72; see also Terence (Eunuchus) Euripides xii, 36 n.4, 37 n.21, 75, 83, 91, 96, 106 – 7, 139, 140, 144, 184, 191, 196, 199, 207; Alcestis 81, 87

271

n.28; in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae 128, 132 n.37; Auge 102; Bacchae 79, 85, 115 n.26; Helen 133 n.35; Heracles 81, 109, 217; Hippolytus 78, 79, 85, 108; Ion 38 n.33, 78, 106, 216, 226; Iphigeneia in Tauris 106, 109 – 10; Medea 107; Melanippe Sophe 149; name of a dice throw 131, 133 nn.32 – 3; Phoenissae 95 – 6, 217; Troades 87 n.28, 109 Eustratiades, Eustratios 234 Evangelatos, Spyros 234 – 42 father: influence over son’s marriage 4, 5, 6, 17, 22 n.4 Gaianus of Smyrna 201 – 2 Galen xiv, 183, 184 – 5 Gellius, Aulus 9 *Georgos 6, 7 – 8, 10 n.1, 21, 26, 30, 38 n.27, 38 n.35, 78, 220; see also Daos; Gorgias; Kleainetos; Myrrhine Georgousopoulos, Kostas 237 Getas (in Dyskolos) 53 n.16, 125 – 6, 128 – 9, 142 Getas (in Misoumenos) 53 n.16, 55 n.44, 60 Glycerium (in Terence’s Andria) 14 – 15 Glykera (in Perikeiromene) xiii, 12, 13, 18, 20 – 1, 34, 45, 54 n.30, 58, 96, 106, 107, 108 – 12, 114 n.13, 115 n.27, 153 – 5, 162 gods 63, 75 – 89, 102; in Aristophanes 79, 83; as didaskaloi 85, 86; in tragedy 75, 78 – 9, 81, 85; see also Aer; Agnoia; Bendis; Corycian god; deus ex machina; Elenchos; ‘hero god’; Nymphs; oaths; Pan; Tyche Gorgias (in Dyskolos) 4 – 6, 7 – 8, 94 – 5 Gorgias (in Georgos) 6, 7 – 8 Grice, H.P. xiii, 117 – 18, 128, 130, 132 n.19, 133 n.29 Habrotonon (in Epitrepontes) 8 – 9, 10 n.2, 14, 15, 21, 33, 34, 35, 38 nn.30 – 1, 47, 101 – 2, 105 n.31, 247 n.21 Habrotonon (in Perikeiromene) 59 Hadrianoutherai 190

272

General Index

hamartema xiii, 141, 145 – 6, 147, 161 – 2 *Hauton Timoroumenos 223; see also Terence (Heauton Timiorumenos) Hellenic Studies, Society for the Promotion of ix, 229 n.19 Hellenism, British 218 – 19 Heracleides Ponticus 175 Hermogenes, pseudo- 188, 194 Herodotus 203, 206, 217 ‘hero god’ 78 *Heros 26, 35, 38 n.27, 38 n.35; see also Daos; ‘hero god’ Hesiod 81, 191, 206, 210 hetairai 8, 9, 13, 15, 16 – 17, 19, 20, 21, 23 n.19, 38 n.31, 101, 104 n.25, 222; fidelity contracts 14 *Hiereia 26, 35, 38 n.27, 38 n.35, 189, 226 Hippocratic corpus 167, 169, 172, 179 n.4 Homer 91, 164 n.14, 188, 195, 210, 218 – 19; Iliad 91, 92; Odyssey 91; Wilde on 217, 218 honour killing 28, 36 n.14 Hyginus, pseudo- (tactician) 64, 67 ignorance 141, 146, 152 – 5, 157 – 63; see also Agnoia; misapprehension illocutionary and perlocutionary acts 121, 124, 132 n.15 illusion, dramatic 130, 131, 132 n.27 incest averted 99, 110, 155 indirect speech acts 121 – 4, 128, 130 inscriptions, status of persons named in 50 involuntary acts 153, 159 – 60, 162, 163 Ipsus, battle of 64 Japan 37 n.20, 68 Jebb, (Sir) Richard C. 217, 222 Kallippides 4 – 5, 95 Karion (in Epitrepontes) 238 – 9 Kichesias 114 n.15 *Kitharistes 18 – 19, 23 n.20 Kleainetos 6 Kleinias (in Misoumenos) 21 Kleostratos xv n.3, 7 – 8, 42 – 3, 60, 63, 68, 108, 127, 155 – 7, 165 n.28

Knemon xiii, 4 – 5, 78, 87 n.29, 93 – 4, 108, 113, 125 – 6, 128 – 9, 142, 149, 169 – 70, 174 koine 199, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211 n.15, 212 n.31 *Kolax 140, 186, 189, 223, 225, 226, 232 n.72 *Koneiazomenai 78 Krateia 12, 13, 19 – 20, 21, 23 n.19, 30 Krobyle 9 – 10 Laches (in Perinthia) 47 – 8 Laches (in Plokion) 9 – 10 Lakota Sioux 68 Lamian War xvi n.8; see also Crannon Langtry, Lillie 217, 227 Laureion, workers at 52 n.1, 54 n.25 Lemnos 22 n.8 Life of Aesop 52 Lili Marleen 59 Little Bighorn 68 – 9 London Quarterly Review 219, 221 love xi, 4 – 5, 7 – 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 34, 110, 111, 122, 141, 149, 153, 154, 155, 161, 215, 224, 225 – 6, 228, 234; pederastic 187 lovesickness xiv, 167, 170 – 9 Lucian 183, 187 – 90, 197; Sale of Lives (Vitarum Auctio) 56 n.68; Timon 189 Lycia(ns) 60 – 7 Macmillan, George 217, 229 n.19 Mahaffy, J.P. 215, 217, 221, 222, 227, 229 n.19 Makris, Orestis 240 Malakand campaign (1897) 71 n.37 Malthake (in Sikyonioi) 16, 20 Mamund valley 71 n.37 Mania (character in unknown play) 191 – 2 Markopoulos, Yannis 237, 241 marriage xi, xv n.4, xv n.6, 4 – 10, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 27 – 8, 95, 96, 97, 106, 114 – 17, 156, 168, 174, 177 – 8, 187, 215, 224, 225 – 6, 227, 238, 239; consent to 16, 19, 28; laws of 7, 9, 12 – 13, 16, 18, 20, 22 n.4, 156, 165 n.21; see also rape (and marriage); weddings medical language 120, 168, 170, 172, 173, 179 n.4, 179 n.6, 179 n.10

General Index mekhane, see deus ex machina melancholia 167 – 79 Menander’s texts, loss of 183, 197, 199 – 200, 210 – 11 mercenaries, see soldiers metatheatricality 85, 92, 94, 99, 102, 237 Michigan papyrus of Epitrepontes 22 n.9, 22 n.12, 143 – 9 middle vs. passive voice 208 military service, see soldiers Mills, J.T. 217 misapprehension, see Agnoia; ignorance *Misoumenos xiii, xv n.7, 12, 19, 53 n.16, 55 n.44, 78, 141, 220, 226; see also Getas; Kleinias; Krateia; Thrasonides misunderstanding 80, 117 – 24, 175, 178, 215; see also Agnoia; ignorance Moeris 203, 205 Molière: Le Misanthrope 167 money on stage 4 Monluc, Blaise de 63 monosticha, see sententiae mosaics 183; Antioch 108; Chania 10 n.4; Mytilene 9, 10 n.4, 20, 189, 197 n.21 Moschion (in fab. inc. 5 Arnott) 16 – 17 Moschion (in Kitharistes) 18 Moschion (in Perikeiromene) 18, 45, 106 – 12, 153 – 5, 160 – 1, 162 Moschion (in Plokion) 10 Moschion (in Samia) xiii, xv n.4, 13, 36 n.8, 86 n.8, 121, 124, 140, 177 – 8 Moschos, Demetrios 233 mothers (of grown children) 13, 17, 18, 19, 22 n.13, 38 n.35, 142, 165 n.21, 224; see also Myrrhine (in Georgos); Nikeratos’ wife Moustoxidis, Andreas 233 Müller, Karl Otfried 222 Mylasa, slave-market at 50 Myrrhine (in Georgos) 6, 21, 30, 35, 38 n.28 Myrrhine (in Perikeiromene) 18, 21, 109, 153 Nabataeans 64 – 5 Neaera 15, 22 n.5, 23 n.19 nemesis 154 Nicolaus of Myra 192, 196

273

Nikeratos xv n.4, 11, 12, 20 – 1, 133 n.29 Nikeratos’ wife (Plangon’s mother, in Samia) 13, 20 – 1 Nobunaga Oda 68 novercae 67 Nymphs 4 oaths 13, 17, 140, 171 Okehazama battle 68 Onasander 64, 66 ‘one day’ theme 92 – 7; see also Unity of Time Onesimos (in Epitrepontes) 38 n.31, 47, 53 n.6, 53 n.16, 55 n.42, 55 n.44, 97 – 102, 115 n.34, 118, 140, 141 – 2, 145, 148, 175 – 6, 238 – 9, 241 *Orge 139, 141 Ovid 219 paidagogoi 60, 64, 170, 172 – 3 pallake 9, 11 – 23, 108 Pamphile xiii, xv n.1, 8 – 9, 14, 21, 30, 32 – 4, 35, 107, 108, 112, 141, 143 – 50, 236, 240, 241, 242 Pan xii, 4, 78, 79, 81 Panactum 64 parabasis 190 Parmenon (in Samia) 53 n.16, 124, 178 Parnassos, Philological Association of 234 Pataikos 13, 21, 59, 96, 109 – 10, 111 – 12, 154 – 5 Paul of Aegina 175 Pausanias the Atticist 204, 205 pederasty, see love (pederastic) Pericles: citizenship law 12 *Perikeiromenei 96, 99, 106, 107, 108 – 12, 141, 152, 153 – 5, 160 – 1, 164 n.8; see also Agnoia; Daos; Doris; Glykera; Habrotonon; Moschion; Myrrhine; Pataikos; Polemon; Sosias *Perinthia 14, 47 – 8, 223 Peripatetic philosophy xiii – xiv, xv, 113, 137 – 51, 152; see also Aristotle; Theophrastus peripeteia 110 personifications as gods xiv, 76, 78, 81, 88 nn.42 – 3, 112, 153, 164

274

General Index

n.6, 247 n.20; see also Agnoia; Elenchos; gods; Tyche Petra (Arabia) 65 Phaedria (in Ter. Eunuchus) 122, 225 – 6 *Phasma 26, 35, 38 n.27, 38 n.35, 78, 170 – 5, 178, 227 Pheidias (in Phasma) 167, 170 – 5 Philemon 85 Philoumene (in Sikyonioi) 15, 16, 19, 50 – 1, 114 n.15 Photius 205 phrenitis 179 n.4 Phrygians 42 – 3, 191 – 2 Phrynichus the Atticist 199 – 204, 205, 206, 210 Phyle 4, 64 pirates 19, 50 Plangon (daughter of Pamphilus, Dem. 39) 22 n.3 Plato 137, 193, 195; Gorgias 191 Plautus 82, 88 nn.45 – 6, 102, 130, 215, 216, 222, 229 n.9, 230 n.51, 231 n.57, 234; Asinaria 232 n.72; Aulularia 223; Bacchides 9, 16, 231 n.54; Captivi 226; Cistellaria 17 – 18, 38 n.27; Epidicus 38 n.31, 99; Menaechmi 226, 232 n.72; Mercator 232 n.72; Poenulus 132 n.9; Rudens 38 n.31 *Plokion 9 – 10 pluperfect endings 208, 209, 210 Plutarch xiv, 183, 185 – 7, 195, 196, 211 n.14; Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander 186 – 7 Polemon xiii, 13, 18, 20, 21, 45, 106, 107 – 13, 141, 153 – 5, 160 – 1, 162 Pollux 23 n.14, 54 n.31, 203, 205, 206, 208, 211 n.7, 212 n.19, 212 n.30, 213 n.38 Polyaenus 64 poor, see rich and poor Portora School 217 Priam 66 productions, modern xiv, xvi nn.9 – 10, 219, 229 n.11, 233 – 48 progymnasmata 87 n.22, 188, 192, 194, 196 prologues 11, 76, 86 n.8, 89 n.63, 186, 192, 194, 195; added in a modern production 236 – 40; divine xii, xiv, 23 n.19, 43, 47,

50, 75 – 6, 78 – 86, 87 n.18, 88 n.46, 94, 107, 109, 112, 141, 152, 153, 156, 165 n.31, 187 – 8, 247 n.20; in Roman comedy 82, 87 n.18, 88 n.46, 97, 165 n.31, 187 – 8, 247 n.20; in Shakespeare 89 n.57; in tragedy 78, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86 prosopopoeia 188, 194 – 5 pro uxore xii, 12, 13, 17 *Pseudherakles 186 rape xii, 4, 15, 20, 22 n.8, 23 n.20, 24 – 39, 101, 102, 106, 108, 120, 145, 177, 221, 226; Algeria 28; China 28, 30, 31; concealment of 30, 32, 33, 35; cross-cultural evidence 24 – 39; Deuteronomy 28; India 28; and marriage 6, 10, 13, 18, 25 – 6, 28, 32, 34, 35; Japan 37 n.20; Mexico 30; Pakistan 29, 37 n.19; Palestine 27, 29, 31; Peru 25, 26, 28; Russia 31; South Africa 30; victims’ responses to 25, 26, 29, 30 – 5 reception (ancient) 183 – 214; see also Caecilius; Plautus; Terence reception (modern) 215 – 48; see also productions (modern) recognition xiii, 9, 15, 78, 87 n.26, 96, 106 – 15, 221, 225, 226 – 7, 234; ‘inner’ xiii, 78, 107 – 8, 110 – 13 recognition tokens 99, 109, 112, 164 n.10, 215, 224 – 5, 226, 227, 232 n.77 relevance, lack of, in conversation 118, 127 – 31 religion 77, 80, 82 – 3; see also gods rhetoric 99, 144, 175, 183, 184; 189, 191, 192, 193 – 4, 196, 200, 202; see also progymnasmata rich and poor 3 – 8, 95, 148, 235 Robertson, Tom 235 Roussos, Tassos 235, 237 – 9, 240, 247 n.19, 247 n.21, 247 n.29 Rutilianus 188 *Samia xv n.7, 10 n.1, 13, 14, 15, 36 n.8, 46, 76, 78, 86 nn.4 – 5, 108, 141, 177 – 8, 234; see also Chrysis; Demeas; Moschion; Nikeratos; Nikeratos’ wife; Parmenon

General Index schools, use of Menander in 183, 185, 188, 196, 200, 211 n.8 Second Sophistic 187, 196 Selenium (in Plautus’ Cistellaria) 17, 18 sententiae (monosticha) xiv, 183, 189, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198 n.35, 199, 219, 221, 223, 230 n.41 Sfyroeras, Nikos 247 n.19, 247 n.21 Shakespeare, William 229 n.10; Henry V 89 n.57; The Winter’s Tale 91 Sicyon 16, 17 – 18, 51 Sikon (in Dyskolos) 128 – 9 *Sikyonios/-oi xv n.7, 15, 16, 19, 50 – 2, 78, 81, 114 n.15, 226; title 23 n.14; see also Dromon; Kichesias; Malthake; Philoumene; Stratophanes; Theron Simiche 47 Sitting Bull 68 – 9 slaves, slavery xv n.4, 4, 6, 11 – 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22 n.7, 35 n.3, 38 n.31, 40 – 57, 69 n.6, 104 n.25, 105 n.29, 123, 142, 168, 169, 170 – 4, 176 – 7, 178, 185, 191 – 2, 222, 226, 229 n.9, 241; clever/scheming slaves 7, 9, 48, 93 – 4, 96 – 7, 100 – 2, 115 n.34, 118, 141; conflict among slaves 44 – 6, 123 – 4, 232 n.77; cooks as slaves 54 n.31; ethnic identities 42 – 4, 191 – 2; given freedom 15, 19; living apart from masters 46, 48 – 9, 5 n.38, 55 n.42; ‘natural’ slavery 41 – 2; in New World 51, 52, 114 n.13; ‘principal’ slaves 42, 46, 55 n.32; sales 11, 50 – 2; slave ‘marriages’14, 34, 56 n.63; see also Daos; Doris; Dromon; Getas; Habrotonon; Mania; Onesimos; Parmenon; Sosias; support networks; Syriskos Smikrines (in Aspis) xiii, 7, 10 n.5, 43, 70 n.20, 79, 87 n.29, 96 – 7, 108, 127, 140, 155 – 7, 158 – 9, 162, 168 Smikrines (in Epitrepontes) xiii, 8, 10 n.2, 87 n.29, 102, 123 – 4, 145 – 8, 177, 238, 239 – 40, 246 n.11

275

soaps, TV xv, 234 soldiers, soldiering xi, xii, 7, 8, 9, 14, 16, 17, 58 – 71, 78, 111, 122, 141, 178, 225, 226, 232 n.72; boastful 59, 60, 111, 189, 226; see also Kleostratos; Moschion (in Samis); Polemon; Stratophanes; Thrasonides Solomos, Alexis 246 n.9 Sophocles 75, 91, 184, 190, 191; Ajax 85; Antigone 133 n.35; Oedipus Tyrannus 84; Tyro 99 Sosias (in Perikeiromene) 45, 54 n.30, 59, 108, 111, 153 Sostratos (in Dyskolos) xiii, 4 – 6, 7 – 8, 22 n.4, 93 – 6, 142 Soteriades, Giorgos 234 Stavrou, Thrasyvoulos 247 n.19, 247 n.21 Stoicism 137, 139, 140, 201 Stratophanes 15, 16, 22 nn.13 – 14 Strouthias (in Kolax) 189 support networks xv n.5, 20, 21, 47 – 52 Symonds, John Addington 218, 222 *Synaristosai 17, 38 n.27, 38 n.35 *Synepheboi 58 Syr(isk)os (in Epitrepontes) 14, 45, 48 – 9, 55 n.38, 55 n.42, 97 – 101, 118, 119, 123 – 4, 246 n.11 tactics, military xii, 60, 63 – 9 Tassopoulou, Leda 241, 245 Terence xiv, xvi n.9, 13, 33, 39 n.36, 88 n.45, 102, 130, 215, 216, 217, 221, 222 – 4, 227, 228, 231 n.57, 231 nn.62 – 3, 232 n.79, 233, 234; Adelphoe 224, 225, 229 n.9; Andria 14 – 15, 17, 229 n.9; Eunuchus 38 n.30, 58 – 9, 224, 225 – 6, 231 n.71; Heauton Timorumenos 17, 97; Hecyra 38 n.27, 38 n.30; Phormio 22 n.8 *Thais 186 Thaleia 10 n.4 Theon 188, 194 – 5 Theophrastus 106, 113, 137 – 8, 139, 150, 175; Characters 138, 140 theoric fund 82, 88 n.50 Theron (in Sikyonioi) 16, 23 n.14, 114 n.15 Thracians 43 – 4, 54 n.27 Thrasonides xiii, 20, 23 n.19, 113, 141, 186

276

General Index

time, dramatic treatment of, see ‘one day’ theme; Unity of Time *Titthe xv n.1 tragedy xii – xiii, 3, 36 n.5, 55 n.4, 63, 75 – 7, 78 – 80, 81, 83 – 4, 85 – 6, 91 – 2, 95 – 7, 99, 102, 106 – 7, 109 – 10, 131, 133 n.35, 141, 146, 164 n.6, 189, 204, 219 Trinity College, Dublin 217, 222 Troy, Trojans 3, 66 Tsianos, Kostas 235, 240 Tyche (Chance) xiv, 3, 5, 73, 79, 81, 85, 88 n.40, 96, 107, 141, 152, 155, 158 Tyrrell, R.Y. 217, 222, 230 n.51 Unity of Time 90 – 105 uxor dotata 10 n.6 Vatican palimpsest xv n.1 Vegetius 64 Verginia 37 n.16 vocabulary and lexicon 11, 26, 29, 37 n.19, 112, 149, 185, 199 – 214 voluntary acts 159 – 61, 163

waiter (in Aspis) 42 – 4, 55 n.38 weddings 6, 7 – 8, 9, 10, 16, 42, 87 n.29; see also marriage wife, duties of 20 Wilde, Oscar xiv, 215 – 32, 235, 241; De Profundis 218, 230 n.31; The Duchess of Padua 216; The House of Pomegranates 232 n.77; The Importance of Being Earnest 215, 216, 224 – 7, 229 n.9, 231 n.64, 241; Lady Windermere’s Fan 220, 226, 227; The Picture of Dorian Gray 216, 229 n.13, 231 n.64, 232 n.83; Society Plays 215 – 16, 219, 220, 224, 226, 227, 228; Vera 216, 217, 229 n.12; A Woman of No Importance 226 *Xenologos 195 Xenophon 64, 69 Yoshimoto Imagawa 68 Zeno 137, 139

Index of Passages

Citations from named plays of Menander follow the numbering of Sandbach 1990 or (if marked A) of Arnott 1979/1996a/2000, unless otherwise stated. Passages listed as Menander ‘fragments’, and fragments of all other comic dramatists, are cited from Kassel & Austin. AELIUS DIONYSIUS α98 Erbse: 205 AENEAS TACTICUS 22.1: 66 – 7 AESCHYLUS Agamemnon 290 – 4: 103 n.5 Eumenides 234: 103 n.7 377 – 9: 103 n.5

ANTIATTICIST (Bekker) 77.12: 208 81.12: 206 83.19: 209 83.31: 206 89.29: 206 96.1: 206 97.2: 206 105.20: 206 115.1: 206

Persians 237 – 8: 3

ANTIPHANES fr. 75: 133 n.34 fr. 166: 56 n.68 fr. 189: 80 fr. 192: 133 n.34

Prometheus Bound 12: 81

ANTIPHON 1.14 – 20: 12

Fragments 169: 81

APHTHONIUS Progymnasmata 11.1: 188

ALEXIS fr. 117: 133 n.34 AMMONIIUS α67 Nickau: 214 n.49 ANAXIMENES OF LAMPSACUS, see [ARISTOTLE] ANTHOLOGY AP 5.18: 114 n.13

ARETAEUS De causis et signis diuturnorum morborum 1.5: 175 ARISTEIDES, AELIUS (Keil) 2.168: 192 2.237: 191 2.412: 198 n.35 3.133: 192, 194

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Index of Passages

3.665: 191 28.91 – 4: 190 29.28: 190 47.51: 190 ARISTOPHANES Birds 1628 – 9: 119 – 20 Ecclesiazusae 823 – 9: 133 n.32 Frogs 464 – 6: 125 Peace 742 – 9: 45 – 6 Thesmophoriazusae 4 – 14: 128 Wasps 44: 132 n.12 Fragments 339: 56 n.68 Testimonia (Kassel-Austin) 94: 193 ARISTOPHANES OF BYZANTIUM fr. 28 A-D Slater: 207, 213 n.44 ARISTOTLE Nicomachean Ethics 1109b30 – 4: 165 n.39 1109b35 – 1110a1: 159 1110a1 – 8: 159 – 60 1110a15 – 18: 160 1110b9 – 17: 159 1110b18 – 22: 160 1110b26 – 1111a2: 165 n.40 1111a22 – b3: 160 1135a20 – b11: 146 1135b11 – 25: 146 1135b16 – 25: 161 1135b18 – 19: 145 1155b33 – 1156a5: 148 1166b30 – 1167a21: 148 Physics 192b16 – 18: 157

192b20 – 23: 157 193a35 – b21: 157 196b21 – 4: 165 n.34 197a5 – 8: 158 198a9 – 13: 165 n.36 Poetics 1449b12 – 13: 90 1452a29 – b8: 113 n.1 1454b19 – 1455a21: 113 n.1 Politics 1254a11 – 13: 53 n.12 Rhetoric 1368b6: 146 [ARISTOTLE] Rhetorica ad Alexandrum 1427b5 – 8: 166 n.45 ATHENAEUS 9.384e: 247 n.26 14.658e-f: 54 n.31 14.664a: 231 n.58 CAECILIUS STATIUS 211 – 12 Guardì: 69 n.8 CHRYSIPPUS SVF 2.384 (p. 127.22): 184 SVF 3.478 (p. 128.17): 184 COMICA ADESPOTA fr. 1000: 150 n.13 fr. 1008: 76 fr. 1089: 16 fr. 1147: 17 CRATINUS fr. 259: 12 [DEMETRIUS] Peri Hermēneias 153: 194 193 – 4: 194 Peri Heureseo¯s 4.11: 194 DEMOSTHENES 23.53: 12 46.18 – 19: 12 59.31 – 2: 22 n.5, 23 n.19

Index of Passages DIO CHRYSOSTOM 18.6 – 7: 184, 197 31.116: 183 DIODORUS SICULUS 19.95.3 – 5: 65 DIOGENES LAERTIUS 5.36: 137 5.43: 175 5.79: 137 5.81: 175 5.87: 175 DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS De Compositione Verborum 1: 193 22.14: 194 25.13: 194 De Imitatione 2.14: 193 DIPHILUS fr. 74.3 – 11: 130 – 1 EURIPIDES Helen 412: 132 n.26 Hippolytus 925 – 31: 108 Iphigeneia in Tauris 725ff: 113 n.2 777: 110 811 – 17: 110 Medea 219 – 21: 107 340: 92 Phoenissae 555 – 8: 95 – 6 Fragments 973: 196 1079: 198 n.35 EUSEBIUS Praeparatio Evangelica 10.3.12: 204

279

GALEN de humero iis modis prolapso quos Hippocrates non vidit 18a.384 – 5 Kühn: 185 de naturalibus facultatibus 2.67 Kühn: 185 de placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 4.6.34 de Lacy: 184 quod qualitates incorporeae sint 19.467 Kühn: 184 GELLIUS, AULUS Noctes Atticae 2.23: 10 n.4 HERMIPPUS fr. 52: 56 n.68 HERMOGENES Progymnasmata 9.1 – 7: 87 n.22 9.1: 188 HERODOTUS 7.102.1: 3 HESYCHIUS α176: 22 n.7 HOMER Iliad 7.427 – 9: 66 [HYGINUS] De Munitionibus Castrorum 57:71 n.35 HYPEREIDES 3.24: 52 n.1 Against Timandros 27 – 35 Horváth: 56 n.68 fr. 139a Jensen: 57 n.70 INSCRIPTIONS CIL VI 22355a = ILS 8432: 57 n.73 IG ii2 1283: 44 IG ii2 2940: 52 n.1 IG ii2 8927: 54 n.25 IG ii2 10051: 52 n.1, 54 n.25 IG ii2 10575a: 54 n.25

280

Index of Passages

ISAEUS 3.39: 22 n.3 LEXICON AIMΩΔEIN γ1 Dyck: 214 n.50 LIBANIUS 25.66: 192 LIFE OF AESOP G 11 – 28: 56 n.68, 57 n.74 LIVY 2.48: 37 n.16 LUCIAN Alexander 34: 188 Asinus (The Ass) 45: 189 De Mercede Conductis 35: 189 Dialogi Meretricii 8.1: 114 n.13 9: 115 n.24 Fugitivi (The Runaways) 19: 189 Pseudologistes 4: 87 n.22, 187, 194 Toxaris 1: 189 Zeus Tragoedus 53: 188 LYSIAS 1.18: 191 MENANDER Aspis 1 – 92: 155 1 – 18: 54 n.22 11 – 12: 54 n.22 14 – 86: 126 – 7 23 – 82: 60 – 9 30: 65

33: 63 41: 67 43: 67 48: 63 75: 63 78: 66 85 – 90: 119 99: 156 114 – 29: 165 n.27 114 – 21: 7 143 – 5: 156 146 – 8: 78, 89 n.62, 145, 156 167 – 71: 156 216 – 33: 42 216 – 20: 55 n.38 222 – 32: 46 232 – 3: 55 n.39 233 – 46: 42 – 4 233 – 5: 55 n.38 241: 54 n.20 244 – 5: 191 257: 165 n.29 258 – 69: 10 n.5 260: 165 n.29 278 – 83: 168 299 – 300: 168 305 – 9: 168 307 – 9: 165 n.29 323 – 7: 156 329 – 42: 168 – 9 336 – 40: 173 399 – 423: 118 408: 96 411: 157 412: 96 416 – 19: 96 – 7 431 – 64: 120 439: 179 n.4 445: 179 n.4 491 – 505: 7, 157 Dis Exapaton 105 – 10: 130 Dyskolos 34 – 44: 78 40 – 1: 4 82: 170 88 – 90: 170 89: 170 116: 170 125 – 34: 92 – 3 163 – 5: 4

Index of Passages 179 – 88: 93 – 4 260 – 3: 142 327 – 8: 5 341 – 4: 5 369 – 70: 5 456 – 62: 55 n.44 463: 55 n.44 464 – 76: 125 – 6 535: 4 538 – 41: 94 546 – 51: 55 n.40, 55 n.44 594 – 5: 55 n.47 647: 55 n.39 713 – 47: 108 720: 148 738 – 9: 5 755: 94 759 – 63: 22 n.4 761 – 2: 5 773 – 4: 22 n.4 775: 4 788 – 90: 5 797 – 812: 95 797 – 804: 5 825 – 31: 5 829ff: 148 844 – 7: xi 845: 5 860 – 5: 95 902 – 4: 128 – 9 921 – 3: 128 – 9 Encheiridion F 2 A: 87 n.19 Epitrepontes 130 – 1: 8 135: 8 136 – 7: 8 219: 100 223 – 5: 123 228 – 30: 123 247 – 9: 123 250 – 75: 55 n.48 250 – 1: 55 n.38 256 – 61: 48 – 9 266 – 8: 49 292 – 3: 123 – 4 294 – 307: 55 n.48 299 – 301: 49 320 – 45: 98 – 9 367: 124 378: 100

380: 55 n.38 382 – 4: 46, 55 n.40 391 – 418: 55 n.42 391 – 3: 118 412 – 13: 100 414 – 16: 100 414: 97, 100 430: 104 n.24 440: 104 n.24 442 – 63: 55 n.42 445: 101 464 – 556: 47 486 – 90: 32 522 – 32: 101 – 2 526 – 30: 33 538 – 49: 15 563 – 6: 55 n.44 657ff: 148 693: 8 699 – 701: 15 700 – 1: 10 n.2 715 – 800: 14 716ff: 148 719ff: 144 749 – 51: 8, 147 786 – 823: 143 801 – 23: 143 – 9 803: 149 804 – 5: 149 821ff: 150 830: 150 858 – 77: 14 873 – 4: 15 878 – 900: 175 – 7 878: 179 n.10 880 – 1: 167 894: 248 n.32 898: 248 n.32 919 – 22: 14 920 – 2: 148 979 – 89: 15 1060 – 1: 15 1085: 102 1084 – 99: 140, 141 1087 – 99: 115 n.34 1093: 102 1121: 115 n.30 1123 – 4: 102 F 8: 38 n.34 F 9: 188 Georgos 7 – 12: 6

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Index of Passages

56 – 8: 55 n.48, 56 n.52 56: 6 87 – 8: 6 Heros 3: 191 21 – 4: 55 n.48, 56 n.61 43: 56 n.63 52: 55 n.38 56: 56 n.63 Karchedonios 7 – 8: 104 n.19 Kitharistes 19 – 20: 18 35 – 9: 18 35: 18, 19 41: 18 45: 23 n.20 79 – 101: 18 96 – 100: 18 Kolax F 7: 59 – 60 Misoumenos 9 – 12 A: 20 33 – 36 A: 60 37 – 8 A: 19 38 – 40 A: 13, 19 97 A: 55 n.44 417 A: 21 425 A: 21 634 – 5 A: 58 699 A: 23 n.19 712 A: 55 n.44 715 – 16 A: 23 n.19, 55 n.44 969 – 72 A: 19 Perikeiromene 125 – 6: 69 n.4 128: 111 130 – 1: 12, 18 136 – 42: 164 n.9 146 – 7: 112 147 – 50: 18, 153 151 – 6: 153, 155 162 – 7: 78, 153 – 4 169 – 71: 89 n.55 172 – 7: 111 336 – 41: 165 n.22 361 – 97: 45

380 – 2: 8 398 – 406: 54 n.30 482 – 5: 59 489 – 90: 154 489: 13, 18, 20 490 – 9: 14 491 – 6: 154 499 – 503: 155 506 – 7: 111 508 – 9: 21 519 – 20: 20 722 – 3: 155 748 – 9: 115 n.29 749: 112 750: 20 758ff: 109 – 10 774 – 8: 110 793: 110 802 – 7: 96 824 – 5: 114 n.21 979 – 90: 19 982 – 9: 166 n.46 985 – 8: 155 987: 114 n.13 1006 – 9: 19 Phasma 9 – 28: 170 – 3 82 – 5: 173 – 4 Samia 35 – 8: 13 50 – 3: 13 130 – 1: 20 206 – 82: 108 258: 13, 20 269: 89 n.55 283 – 95: 46, 55 n.40 301 – 4: 20 302 – 3: 55 n.44 369 – 71: 116 369: 20 377 – 9: 20, 22 n.6 381: 13 390 – 7: 20 398: 20 421: 21 447: 89 n.55 481 – 7: 121 508: 11 545: 120 561: 20 577: 12

Index of Passages 589 – 99: 133 n.29 620 – 1: 178 623 – 39: 124 630: 178 659 – 63: 124 659: 178 672: 178 683: 89 n.55 726 – 8: xi 730: 20 F 1: 212 n.18 Sikyonios/-oi 1 – 19: 50 – 1, 55 n.48 2 – 6: 19 125 – 43: 16 144 – 5: 16 354 – 7: 19 372 – 3: 15 385 – 95: 22 n.13 386 – 9: 20 411: 20 419: 16 420: 16 F 1 (4 A): 23 n.14 F 4 (7 A): 23 n.14 F 9 (12 A): 16, 23 n.14 Theophoroumene F 2.2: 192, 196 F 5: 75 Fabulae Incertae 5 A: 16 8 A: 17 Fragments 66: 212 n.19 105: 195 112: 206 129: 195 134: 206 162: 211 n.15 165: 199 181: 112 188: 19 189: 189 206: 206 252: 205 255: 195 258: 8 296.11: 9 296.12: 189

297: 10 320: 206 337: 194 393: 209 411: 11, 22 n.7 427: 206 428: 206 432: 191 456: 194 476: 184 477: 184 494: 212 n.18 506: 192 507: 87 n.21, 187 508: 55 n.44 531: 212 n.18, 214 n.50 540: 206, 211 n.15 584: 211 n.15 589: 211 n.15, 211 n.17 590: 212 n.20 592: 212 n.18 630: 104 n.19 642: 191 663: 198 n.35 665: 55 n.36 670: 186 688: 151 n.24 741: 198 n.35 779: 58 783: 69 n.6 815: 19 844: 140 862.1: 189 Monosticha (Jaekel) 27: 115 n.31 241: 192 429: 198 n.35 468: 198 n.35 579: 198 n.35 594: 188 Testimonia (Kassel & Austin) 2: 137 7: 137 8: 137 9: 137 83: 204 110: 188 111: 190 115: 185 141: 15

283

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Index of Passages

MOERIS α133: 212 n.20 NICOLAUS OF MYRA Progymnasmata 27.4 Felt: 192, 194 OLD TESTAMENT Deuteronomy 22.28 – 9: 28 ONASANDER 10.7: 66, 71 n.29 36.1 – 2: 66, 71 n.30 ORUS fr. B 12 Alpers: 213 n.44 OVID Metamorphoses 1.600: 37 n.20 Tristia 2.369: 4 PAPYRI (not otherwise cited) P.Didot 1: 142 PIFAO 337: 104 n.25 PHAEDRUS 5.1.12 – 15: 58 PHILEMON fr. 95: 89 n.63 PHOTIUS Lexicon α1197: 205 α2526: 209 α2665: 213 n.44 γ132: 214 n.50 PHRYNICHUS THE ATTICIST Eclogae 32: 203 78: 214 n.49 119: 208 157: 212 n.18 162: 211 n.15 167: 203 170: 211 n.15 183: 212 n.18 341: 211 n.15, 213 n.39

390: 211 n.17 394: 200 – 3 397: 211 n.15 410: 211 n.17 Praeparatio Sophistica 28.4: 212 n.18 58.3: 209, 212 n.18 PLATO Gorgias 471a-c: 191 Laws 841d: 12 Theaetetus 186c: 147 PLAUTUS Amphitruo 58 – 61: 86 211 – 61: 64 755 – 80: 119 Aulularia 23 – 33: 87 n.18 731 – 95: 120 – 1 737 – 40: 120 Bacchides 538 – 60: 129 – 30 757 – 8: 132 n.16 1097: 14 Captivi 400 – 14: 132 n.16 Cistellaria 8 – 11: 17 85: 17 98 – 105: 17 182 – 7: 17 312 – 19: 17 755: 18 Miles Gloriosus 11 – 20: 119 Poenulus 190 – 7: 132 n.16 Rudens 9 – 30: 165 n.31

Index of Passages PLUTARCH Antony 25.3: 187 Moralia 19a: 186 57a: 186, 189 59c: 116 104a: 95 – 6 347e: 113 n.5, 186, 231 n.64 379a: 186 406a: 187 524f: 186 531b: 186 654d: 187 671b: 187 673b: 186 706d: 186 712b-d: 186, 187 761b: 187 853a-854b: 186 – 7 853e-f: 87 n.33 1076c: 186 Fragments fr. 136 Sandbach: 187 POLLUX 1.79: 212 n.19 2.82: 212 n.19 3.29: 212 n.19, 213 n.47 4.119: 16 6.26: 212 n.19 6.38: 212 n.19 6.161: 212 n.19 9.101: 133 n.32 9.139: 212 n.19 POLYAENUS 4.3.10: 70 n.15 POSIDIPPUS fr. 1: 55 n.39 fr. 28: 55 n.41 QUINTILIAN 10.1.69: 184 10.1.99: 231 n.62 SATYRUS POxy 1176 fr. 39 col. 7 lines 6 – 22: 106 SCHOLIA Aelius Aristeides (3.403.17 Dindorf): 192

285

Aelius Aristeides (3.410.32 Dindorf): 191 Aelius Aristeides (3.519.25 Dindorf): 193 Aristophanes, Frogs 35a: 213 n.44 Aristophanes, Wealth 12: 179 n.6 Plato, Cleitophon 407a2: 75 Plato, Lysis 206e: 133 n.32 SOPHOCLES Ajax 131 – 2: 92 Oedipus Tyrannus 438: 92 STRABO 14.1.18: 69 n.7 SUDA α1138: 87 n.17 α3545: 213 n.44 κ474: 207, 213 n.44 ¯ N CHRE¯SIMO ¯N SYNAGOGE LEXEO (Cunningham) α1978: 207, 213 n.44 SYRIANUS Commentary on Hermogenes II p. 23 Rabe: 87 n.33, 114 n.8 TELES fr. II (p.5 Hense): 89 n.65 fr. VI (p.52 Hense): 89 n.65 TERENCE Adelphoe 177 – 80: 130 Andria 9 – 14: 22 n.10 145 – 6: 12, 13 273: 13 593; 120 Eunuchus 191 – 3: 122 317 – 18: 69 n.9 Heauton Timorumenos 6: 97 98: 13

286

Index of Passages

Phormio 114: 22 n.8 1016 – 18: 22 n.8

THUCYDIDES 4.55.1: 132 n.26 5.65: 67

THEON Progymnasmata (Spengel) 68.24 – 5: 194 91.16 – 23: 195 92.15 – 22: 195

TIBULLUS 1.10: 114 n.13

THEOPHRASTUS Characters 16.8: 140 THEOPOMPUS COMICUS fr. 33: 56 n.51

VEGETIUS Epitome Rei Militaris 1.22: 71 n.35 XENOPHON Cyropaedia 3.3.28: 67 3.3.31: 67 3.3.47: 67