Menander

“ Somebody gave the Tyrant immediately a Whisper, and told him, Sir says he, This is the Poet Menander that you your self have been pleas'd to own so Great an Admiration and Esteem for. Demetrius recollects himself, and changes his Humour in the very instant; calls Menander to him, and Treats him with all the Instances imaginable of a singular Liking and Respect. ”

“ Menander, however, used this subject-matter less for sensational effect or sentimental pathos than for the expression of a deep and tranquil wisdom. If we were to judge by the fragments transmitted to us, we should have to say that Menander's comedy was ethical philosophy in verse; so mature is their wisdom, so weighty their language, and so grave their tone. The brightness of the beautiful Greek spirit is sobered down in him almost to sadness. Middle age, with its maturity, has been substituted for youth with its passionate intensity. ”

“ Quintilian advises an orator to seek in Menander for copiousness of invention, for elegance of expression, and all that universal genius which is able to accommodate itself to persons, things, and affections: but that which appears to us more decisive than any other eulogy bestowed upon him, is the opinion of Cæsar, who, praising his favourite Terence, calls him a half-Menander, thereby leaving upon record his testimony that Menander had twice the merit of the greatest comic poet of Rome. ”

“ Still, the comedies of Terence are a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Menander, especially considering the scantiness of the extant fragments.
Meineke well remarks that the quality which Caesar missed in Terence was what the Greeks call τὸ παθητικόν, which Menander had with admirable art united with τῷ ἠθικῷ. And thus the poetry of Menander is described as διὰ πολλῶν ἀγομένη παθῶν καὶ ἠθῶν by Plutarch, in his Comparison of Menander and Aristophanes (p. 853, d.) , which is the most valuable of the ancient testimonies concerning our poet. ”

“ That Terence was indebted to him for all his ideas and very many of his lines, is true enough; but that from any one play of Terence we can form a fair notion of the corresponding play of Menander, is disproved by the confession of Terence himself (Prolog, in Andr.) that he compressed two of Menander's plays into one; while the coolness with which he defends and even boasts of the exploit, shows how little we can trust him as our guide to the poetical genius of Menander. The one merit of Terence was felicity of expression ”

“ In the extant fragments of Menander may be found powerful delineations of human passions, especially of the pains and pleasures of love, melancholy but true views of the vanity of human hopes, elevated moral sentiments, and noble ideas of the divine nature. A vein of temperate and placid gentleness, intermingled with amiable pleasantry, pervaded the comedies of Philemon, and his sentiments are tender and serious, without being gloomy. ”

“ As already noticed Strabo (a.d. 20) mentions that Menander’s conquests (b.c. 120) included Cutch and Suráshṭra.13 And the author of the Periplus (a.d. 240) writes: ‘Up to the present day old drachmæ bearing the Greek inscriptions of Apollodotus and Menander are current in Barugaza (Broach) .’14 Menander’s silver drachmæ have been found in Káthiáváḍa and Southern Gujarát.15 Though their number is small Menander’s coins are comparatively less scarce than those of the earliest Kshatrapas Nahapána and Chashṭana (a.d. 100–140) . ”

“ Menander, on the contrary, always shows himself a man agreeable and witty, a companion desirable upon the stage, at table, and in gay assemblies; an extract of all the treasures of Greece, who deserves always to be read, and always to please. ”

“ Upon this article of Menander, Plutarch does not know how to make an end; he says, that he is the delight of philosophers, fatigued with study; that they use his works as a meadow enamelled with flowers, where a purer air gratifies the sense; that, notwithstanding the powers of the other comick poets of Athens, Menander has always been considered as possessing a salt peculiar to himself, drawn from the same waters that gave birth to Venus. ”

“ But Menander hath so addressed his style, as to proportion it to every sex, condition, and age; and this, though he took the business in hand when he was very young, and died in the vigor of his composition and action, when, as Aristotle tells us, authors receive most and greatest improvement in their styles. If a man shall then compare the middle and last with the first of Menander's plays, he will by them easily conceive what others he would have added to them, had he had but longer life. ”

“ All departures, or supposed departures, from the old Attic in vocabulary and syntax were ruthlessly condemned, and these standards were applied not only to contemporary writers but also to the best writers of the Alexandrian period, such as Menander. For if the grammarian had condemned a word in an author of his own time, he could not afford to be confronted by a student with the same word in Menander. The great popularity of Menander made it all the more necessary for the strict stylist to utter a warning against him. ”

“ This attempt to give Menander to the english stage is based Upon his ‘Heautontimorumenos’ as we know it through Terence. That play, though marked by roman taste, is a work of high excellence; but as it stands would be unpresentable to a christian audience, chiefly on account of the story of Antiphila’s exposure, which must deprive Chremes of sympathy. And, since the liberties which Terence took with Menander cannot be determined, it was but mannerly to extend the necessary alteration, and suppress the slaves with their tedious and difficult intrigue. ”

“ Menander replied to the charge by appearing on the stage with an armful of new-born puppies, which he cast into a tub of water. Bidding the audience mark how they swam, he exclaimed: “You ask me, Athenians, how at my years I can have the knowledge of life required in the dramatist; I ask you under what master and in what school these creatures learned to swim?”
Despite his superior merit, however, Menander obtained the dramatic prize but eight times, owing to the greater influence of his rival Philemon with the masses. It is stated that this injustice at length led the poet to drown himself. ”

“ And at private entertainments among friends, for whom doth the table more justly make room or Bacchus give place than for Menander? To philosophers also and hard students (as painters are wont, when they have tired out their eyes at their work, to divert them to certain florid and green colors) Menander is a repose from their auditors and intense thinkings, and entertains their minds with gay shady meadows refreshed with cool and gentle breezes. ”

“ Verbal adjectives in -τος were included in this investigation because they appear to be very common in the pages of Menander, rather than because they are frequent in the Koine. [21] The statistics here collected bear out in general the statement of Jannaris, to the effect that it became far more popular since Graeco-Roman times; except that perhaps their popularity began slightly earlier than he asserts. The fact that they were so late in coming into favor seems to show that it is a mere personal pecularity in Menander. ”

“ Menander is remarkable for the elegance with which he threw into the form of single verses, or short sentences, the maxims of that practical wisdom in the affairs of common life which forms so important a feature of the New Comedy. Various "Anthologies" of such sentences were compiled by the ancient grammarians from Menander's works, of which there is still extant a very interesting specimen, in the collection of several hundred lines (778 in Meineke's edition) , under the title of Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι. Respecting the collection entitled Μενάνδροι καὶ Φιλιστίωνος σύγκρισις, see Philistion. ”

“ Even the casual reader of Menander will notice that such words are rarely employed by him. It is hardly fair to regard this last group of words as of very great authority in determining Menander's relation to the Koine, if only for the reason that Aristophanes is even more liable to censure than Menander if they are barred out as bad Greek. ”

“ On the other hand we also find in Menander many words which are specifically mentioned by grammarians as Attic and are contrasted with others called "Hellenic" or "Koine". This has been noticed by Bruhn, [14] but he seems to attach too much importance to the fact. For "even Menander", though guilty of sacrilege against the holy Attic dialect, would not always use the word which was later put under the ban. ”

“ The losses which the poetical world has sustained are sufficiently known by those who are conversant with the few invaluable fragments of Menander, who might have interested us perhaps more than Homer: for he was evidently the domestic poet, and the lyre he touched was formed of the strings of the human heart. He was the painter of passions, and the historian of the manners. ”

“ Menander’s chief excellence’s seem to be facility of language, accurate portrayal of manners, and naturalness of the sentiments which he puts into the mouth of his dramatis personae. It is remarkable that the maxims, which form the chief part of the earlier collections of fragments, are few in the later. ”

“ Menander’s work was taken over bodily by the Roman poets Plautus and Terence, who did little more than translate his comedies into Latin, and sometimes weave two of them together into one play, a process known by the not inappropriate technical name “contamination.” ”

“ A comic poet's verse naturally approaches the speech of the common people whom he portrays. Menander was especially famous in antiquity for his ἠθοποιία. [32] As the colloquial language is the source out of which the Koine was in a large degree developed, it is to be expected that the vocabulary of comedy will show Koine elements. We should therefore a priori expect to find Menander's diction in a noticeable degree different from that of writers of the classical period. ”

“ The story of Terence's having converted into Latin plays this large number of Menander's Greek comedies, is beyond all probability, considering the age at which he died, and other circumstances. Indeed, Menander never wrote so many as are here stated. ”

“ As one who is, and sees thee, always fear him.
—Trans. by J. A. SYMONDS.
MENANDER.
The acknowledged master and representative of this period, however, and the last of the classical poets of Greece, was Menan'der, an Athenian, son of Diopi'thes, the general whom Demosthenes defended in his speech "On the Chersonese," and a nephew of the poet Alexis. Menander was born in 342 B.C.; and although only fragments of his writings exist, he was so closely copied or imitated by the Roman comic poets that his style and character can be very clearly traced. ”

“ And in very nearly all the plays of Plautus, if it be not the chief mainstay of the plot, it appears at least here and there.
The new fragments of Menander prove that Menander had frequently constructed his plays with this effect in mind. Indeed it is the decisive factor in all that are extensive enough to permit of analysis. In the Arbitrants Smicrines all unconsciously arbitrates against his own child. In the Samia the old man is misled by a chance remark into the belief that his son has betrayed him, and the resulting irony runs through the central part of the play. ”

“ But these, O Rhode, are but the cunning schemes
Which daring men of intrigue, unabashed,
Invent to earn themselves a livelihood,
And yield a laughing-stock unto the age." Again, the same Menander, stating his opinion ahout those who are received as gods, proving rather that they are not so, says:
"Yea, if I this beheld, I then should wish
That back to me again my soul returned.
For tell me where, O Getas, in the world
'Tis possible to find out righteous gods?"
And in the Depositum:
"There's an unrighteous judgment, as it seems,
Even with the gods." ”

“ For nearly two thousand years Menander's reputation as a writer of pure Attic has been somewhat tarnished through the attacks made upon him by the atticizing grammarians of the first centuries of our era. ”

“ The moral character of Menander is defended by Meineke, with tolerable success, against the aspersions of Suidas, Alciphron, and others. (Menand. Reliq. pp. xxviii. xxix.) Thus much is certain, that his comedies contain nothing offensive, at least to the taste of his own and the following ages, none of the purest, it must be admitted, as they were frequently acted at private banquets. ”

“ Bursian attributes the first to Menander, whom he placed in the 4th century, and the second to an anonymous rhetorician of Alexandria Troas, who possibly lived in the time of Diocletian. Others, from the superscription of the Paris MS., assign the first to Genethlius of Petrae in Palestine. In view of the general tradition of antiquity, that both treatises were the work of Menander, it is possible that the author of the second was not identical with the Menander mentioned by Suïdas ”

“ Ver. 35. On the “currentes servi,” see the Prologue to the Heautontimorumenos, l. 31. Ovid, in the Amores, B. i., El. 15, l. 17, 18, mentions a very similar combination of the characters of Menander’s Comedy: “So long as the deceitful slave, the harsh father, the roguish procuress, and the cozening courtesan shall endure, Menander will exist.” ”

“ Thus mimics, drolls, Menander and his actors were admitted into banquets, not because they can free the eye from any pain, or raise any tickling motion in the flesh; but because the soul, being naturally philosophical and a lover of instruction, covets its own proper pleasure and satisfaction, when it is free from the trouble of looking after the body. ”