Meander

“ The agencies of modification inherent in the art in its practice are such that any particular animal form extensively employed in decoration is capable of changing into or giving rise to any or to all of the highly conventional decorative devices upon which our leading ornaments, such as the meander, the scroll, the fret, the chevron, and the guilloche, are based. ”

“ As soon as the sun rises, we repair to the mountain you see before us, at the foot of which flows a stream of the most limpid water, which meanders in graceful windings through that meadow-enamelled with the loveliest flowers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is, again, the family nurse, garrulous but faithful; and sometimes we have another of the household in the person of the family cook. Lastly, there is the hateful slave-merchant, the most repulsive character in the Greek and Roman drama, and upon whose ways and doings there is no need for us here to dwell.
The philosophy of Menander has been spoken of as distinctly of an Epicurean character, and his morality is certainly no whit higher than that of his age and times. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All that Menander loved—baths, feasts, theatres, horses and chariots, games in the arena, anointed limbs, roses and garlands, purple-garments, wine and the love of women—lie behind me like some foul bog out of which a traveller has struggled with difficulty. Not a vein of the old man survives in the new, and a new life has begun for me, mid-way to the grave ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the comedies of Menander, as far as we may judge of them from fragments and critiques, and from their Latin copies, a very noticeable change in the spirit of literature is apparent. The so-called New Comedy, of which he was the representative, is the product of a meditative and inactive age. The great concerns of the world, and of human life seen in its profoundest depth, which formed the staple of Aristophanes, have been abandoned. We are brought close to domesticities: the events of common life occupy the stage of Menander. ”

“ The style of his language is described by an old grammarian as λέξις λελυμένη καὶ ὑποκοιτική, which may be contrasted with another writer's description of the diction of Philemon, as συνερτημένην καὶ οἷον ἠσφαλισμένην τοῖς συνδέσμοις. (Meineke, pp. xxxvi, xxxvii.)
To criticise the poetry of Menander is to describe the whole spirit and genius of the New Comedy, of which his plays may be safely taken as the normal representatives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In order to form a proper estimate of an author's vocabulary we should examine not only the individual words he uses, but also the kinds of words. In comparing Menander's diction with the Koine we should study his use of certain types of words known to have been favorites in Hellenistic Greek. Such a test involves a statistical comparison on the one hand with certain writers of classical Attic, and on the other with typical writers of the Koine. For the former I have selected Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato and Demosthenes ”

“ Whereas, the diction of Menander, which is always uniform and pure, is very justly adapted to different characters, rising, when it is necessary, to vigorous and sprightly comedy, yet without transgressing the proper limits, or losing sight of nature, in which Menander, says Plutarch, has attained a perfection to which no other writer has arrived. For, what man, besides himself, has ever found the art of making a diction equally suitable to women and children, to old and young, to divinities and heroes? ”

“ Taking Menander for our guide, we cannot cry: "You Greeks are always children." Yet the fact that Stobæus found him a fruitful source of sententious quotations, and that alphabetical anthologies were made of his proverbial sayings, ought not to obscure his fame for drollery and humor. The highest praise awarded by the Romans to Terence is contained in the apostrophe dimidiate Menander; and it appears that what the Latin critics thought their poet wanted was the salt of Attic wit, the playful ease and lively sparkle of his master. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In addition to the words to which the grammarians definitely take exception, and to those of which they approve, we naturally find in Menander a good many other words which do not appear in the extant works of good writers of the classical period. Some of these words are doubtless missing in the approved writers merely by accident, because, for example, those authors did not happen to have occasion to use them in the books which have come down to us. A writer's vocabulary is of course governed very largely by the subject of which he treats. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The sentiments are so natural and unstudied, that midst wine, as it were in fire, they soften and bend the rigidest temper to be pliable and easy. And the mixture of gravity and jests seems to be contrived for nothing so aptly as for the pleasure and profit of those that are frolicking and making merry. The love-scenes in Menander are convenient for those who have already drunk their cups, and who in a short time must retire home to their wives ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No one has asked of Aristophanes the question which the Alexandrian critic put to Menander: "Oh, Nature and Menander, which of you copied the other?" Yet Menander is scarcely more to us than the memory of departed greatness, [116] or at best an echo sounding somewhat faintly from the Roman theatre, while Aristophanes survives among the most highly cherished monuments of antiquity. The answer to this question is, no doubt, that Aristophanes was more worth preservation than his predecessors or successors. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There were numerous rivals of whom we know next to nothing—except by the quotations of Athenæus and Plutarch, and the Greek grammarians who cited them to support a dictum—in this as in the preceding periods of comedy in Athens, for Menander’s plays are counted by many scores, and they were crowned by the prize only eight times. The favourite poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was Menander ”

“ Nay, so great is this affinity of tone and spirit, between Euripides and the poets of the New Comedy, that apophthegms of Euripides have been ascribed to Menander, and vice versa. On the contrary, we find among the fragments of Menander maxims of consolation, which rise in a striking manner even into the tragic tone." (It may be added, that we have abundant testimony to prove that Menander was a great admirer and imitator of Euripides. An elaborate comparison of the parallel passages is instituted by Meineke in an Epimetrum to his Trag. Com. Graec. vol. iv. p. 705.) ”

“ The land that bred me is a goddess in my eyes.” We think of Menander himself as a frequent visitor to the harbour town. Tradition says that he was drowned while bathing at the harbour and his countrymen gave him a tomb and an epitaph on the road from Piræus to Athens by the Long Walls. There, too, was the cenotaph of Euripides, who had sailed away to the court of the Macedonian king, never again to enter through the harbour’s arms that welcomed so many returning voyagers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From Theophrastus, on the other hand, he must have derived much of that skill in the discrimination of character which we so much admire in the Χαρακτῆρες of the philosopher, and which formed the great charm of the comedies of Menander. His master's attention to external elegance and comfort he not only imitated, but, as was natural in a man of an elegant person, a joyous spirit, and a serene and easy temper, he carried it to the extreme of luxury and effeminacy. ”

“ 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. ”