Menander

 

PLAYS AND FRAGMENTS

Translated with an Introduction by
Norma Miller

PENGUIN CLASSICS

MENANDER: PLAYS AND FRAGMENTS

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

Menander (341–290 B.C.) was the most distinguished author of Greek New Comedy. An Athenian of good family, he wrote over a hundred plays, although only one survives intact today: Dyskolos or Old Cantankerous. This won the prize in 316 B.C. and was recovered from an Egyptian papyrus as recently as 1958. Many more fragments of his plays have since been discovered, and some sizeable pieces from The Rape of the Locks, The Arbitration and The Girl From Samos have been known since 1907. These confirm Menander’s skill in drawing humorous or romantic characters and making good dramatic use of a limited range of plots with stock scenes of disguise and recognition. Menander’s plays were revived in Athens after his death and some of them were adapted for the Roman stage by Plautus and Terence, through whom they strongly influenced light drama from the Renaissance onwards.

Norma Miller was educated at the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and spent her professional life as a teacher of Greek and Latin languages and literature at the Royal Holloway College. She is now Reader Emeritus at the University of London having retired a little early in order to concentrate on writing. Most of her published works are on Tacitus, but she has taught Greek Drama for many years, and has reviewed books on Greek Drama for the Literary Review and the Journal of Hellenic Studies. In 1985 she lectured in Greek Drama at the University of Trent in Ontario, and also at the University of Toronto.

Preface

‘It is difficult to decide,’ Paul Jennings once wrote, ‘whether translators are heroes or fools.’¹ Most of those who attempt to translate a literary text will probably agree that they more often feel they belong in the second category. I should like to explain some aspects of my own foolhardiness.

This is a prose translation of a verse text, because I felt that the problems of trying to turn Menander’s elegant and economical Greek into the all but uninflected English tongue were merely compounded by trying simultaneously to fit the translation into a metrical frame. References to gods, and oaths, have all been modernized, except where the reference to a particular deity is necessary for the sense; the audience is addressed as ‘ladies and gentlemen’, although the Greek says simply ‘gentlemen’; and references to specific sums of money have been avoided where possible, but where the reference is inevitable, the sums are translated as, say, £5 or 500 drachs, whichever sounds more natural in the context. These and similar devices are simply attempts to avoid jarring the modern ear where Menander did not intend it to be jarred. I have transliterated most Greek names (for example, Knemon, Nikeratos), but have preserved the traditional ‘ch’ in names like Moschion, because it looks more natural in English.

I have based the translation on the Oxford Classical Text of Menander (edited by F. H. Sandbach, Oxford, 1972), and I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the commentary on it by A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach (Oxford, 1973), and to the works on Menander by Professors W. G. Arnott and E. W. Handley, some of which appear in the suggestions for further reading (p. 18). Occasionally, I have borrowed from them the translation of a word or phrase which I thought ideal, as, for example, Professor Arnott’s brilliant dolce vita in The Arbitration (1. 680). I have included in the translation what remains of all but two of the plays which have survived on papyrus; a selection of the longer passages preserved for us by quotation in other authors; and some papyrus fragments which may not be by Menander, but which are certainly from Greek New Comedy. Where evidence is scrappy, every scrap is precious which helps to illuminate range of material, variety of style, names or themes. The plays are presented according to their state of preservation, from virtually complete text to possibly non-Menandrean fragments. Missing or mutilated text is always indicated: this makes for a less easy read, but I think it important that readers should know what we actually possess of what Menander wrote, and understand some of the difficulties of interpreting a fragmentary text. The Introduction is intended to be precisely that, and I hope that interested readers will go on to some of the works listed under Further Reading and to the bibliographies which they contain.

Finally, I wish to record my thanks to the late Betty Radice, who as Editor of Penguin Classics encouraged me to embark on this voyage round Menander; to Trent University in Ontario, where my Ashley Fellowship in 1985 provided me with an agreeable context in which to complete the translation; to the drama students of what was then the Royal Holloway College, for trying out some of the translation in their workshops; and to four friends who have read different parts of the typescript and offered valuable comments upon it – to Robert Gordon, Eric Handley, Leslie Styler and David West. I have incorporated many of their suggestions, and where I have intransigently preferred my own views, I may yet prove to have been indeed foolish.

N.P.M.
July, 1986

FURTHER READING

W. G. Arnott, Menander, Plautus, Terence (Greece & Rome, New Surveys in the Classics no. 9, 1975).

W. G. Arnott, Menander (Loeb Classical Library, vol. I, 1979).

David Bain, Actors and Audience (Oxford, 1977).

D.M. Bain, Menander, Samia (Aris & Phillips, 1983).

S. M. Goldberg, The Making of Menander’s Comedy (Athlone, 1980).

A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander, A Commentary (Oxford, 1973).

E. W. Handley, ‘Comedy’ in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. I (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 355–425 and 779–83.

E. W. Handley, The Dyskolos of Menander (Methuen, 1965).

R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (Cambridge, 1985).

F. H. Sandbach, The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (Chatto & Windus, 1977).

All these books also contain useful bibliographies.

Introduction

1. New Comedy For Old

To the student of European Comedy, the hundred years between 421 B.C., when Aristophanes produced Peace, and 321 B.C., when Menander probably produced Anger, present one of the most remarkable developments in the history of that dramatic form. Comedy, developing from origins that are both complex and largely conjectural, had its first official production in Athens in or about the year 486 B.C. Sixty years later, Aristophanes was producing plays which stand at the peak of that particular development of the comic form. They are extravaganzas, in which wild fantasy (to make a private peace with Sparta, to fetch a poet back from the world of the dead), politics (issues of peace or war, the jury system of the Athenian lawcourts) and personalities (Socrates, Cleon, Euripides) are presented with (occasional) bawdiness of speech and indecency of dress and gesture, the whole blended with song, dance and a poetic text which shows a bewildering mixture of accomplished metres and a wide range of imaginative vocabulary; the structure is loose, and the setting can be in Athens, Heaven, Hell or any station between.

A century later, the plays of Menander present a very different picture. Comedy is now about a very limited range of domestic or personal issues. It is about relations between fathers and sons or husbands and wives, about love affairs or about children lost and found – in various permutations and combinations the elements appear and reappear, and it is remarkable how varied the plots contrive to be. In such dramas, neither fantasy nor politics has any real place; characters are no longer caricatures of real people, no longer called by comic-characteristic names like Justice-for-the-Community or Son of a Twister: instead, they have names like Chremes and Demeas, which are the fourth-century B.C. Greek equivalents of John Smith or Mr Hardcastle. The singing and dancing is reduced to a performance which acts as a kind of living curtain that separates the five acts of a tight plot structure in which it plays no part. The language of the text, while still metrical in form and elegant in style, is now much closer to reflecting the spoken language of the day – both in structure and vocabulary, it is much simpler than the language of Aristophanes. Bawdiness of language and crudity of gesture have all but vanished from the text, and contemporary illustrations in the form of terracottas, sculptures or mosaics, show that the actors, though still masked, now wear ordinary Athenian dress. Both visually and conceptually, we are in a different world. What has happened to Comedy? And why?

Basically, what has happened is that the Greek world has changed – changed quite drastically – and Greek drama has changed with it. Politically, during that hundred years, Athens had first of all been defeated by Sparta, and then taken over by Macedon. Alexander the Great died just about the time Menander started writing, and struggles between and with his successors dominated Athenian politics during most of the playwright’s life. Athens was no longer always mistress of her own city, and certainly had no longer anything resembling an empire. Public life was often bitter and bloody: Macedonian and anti-Macedonian governors, Athenian nationalists who tried, with any available assistance, to ‘restore the democracy’, all tended, on taking over power (and they were constantly taking over from one another), to demonstrate the newness of their regime by executing or exiling anyone suspected of contact with the other side. Menander himself, as a friend (probably from student days) of Demetrius of Phaleron, who governed Athens for Macedon from 317–307 B.C., is said to have been in some danger when Demetrius was expelled in the power struggle of 307 B.C.¹ Such politics were not a suitable subject for Comedy, and to try to make them so would often have been dangerous.

Intellectually, philosophy had become much more the basis of education, and therefore more widely understood. Menander was a pupil of Theophrastus, who was a pupil of Aristotle, who was a pupil of Plato, who was a pupil of Socrates, who was a contemporary of Aristophanes: the line of descent is clear, but the attitude to philosophy in Athenian life was now very different from that suggested by Aristophanes’ The Clouds. ‘Schools’ of philosophy were firmly established, and had introduced a wider curriculum into Athenian education. Furthermore, the great fifth-century tragedians had been established as ‘classics’: references especially to Euripides and his plays are common in what we have left of Menander and his contemporaries and they are references different in tone and in kind from the parodies of Aristophanes.

Socially, the theatre audience had changed. Poorer Athenians had been deprived of their vote, and possibly also of their theatre dole, and so both the political Assembly and the theatre audience was much more solidly middle class and educated. Their education had accustomed them to consider social and ethical problems, and stories involving such problems could be dramatized to produce both reflection and entertainment; and they would be more appreciative of an elegant and realistic portrayal of aspects of their own life than of what was in their eyes a rumbustious and rather primitive romp. Tragedy could not provide what they wanted, because all our evidence suggests that in the fourth century B.C., tragedy was already becoming more and more stylized, artificial and remote from the issues of real life. So the popular dramatic form of the time became one which, in content, tone and structure, shows descent not only from fifth-century comedy, but also from fifth-century tragedy. It became, in fact, what we call New Comedy.

The change was not, of course, as abrupt as our lack of evidence makes it appear. Our evidence for the productions of Greek Comedy in the years between 404 B.C., when Athens surrendered to Sparta, and 323 B.C., when Alexander the Great died, is, as so often in Greek drama, fragmentary, contradictory and hotly disputed. We have two Aristophanic plays produced in the first twelve years of the fourth century; we have fragmentary inscriptions of theatrical records for the period, which provide us with some names and dates of playwrights and their productions; we have a mass of references, ranging from the fourth century B.C. to the twelfth century A.D., which provide us with information which often we cannot check and which is sometimes contradictory; we have some contemporary works of arts which are clearly connected with the theatre; and we have a collection of fragmentary quotations, seldom more than twenty lines long and usually considerably shorter, which tell us little about the dramatic structure or dramatic treatment of the plays, but something of their subject-matter and style.

With all its deficiencies, this material tells us something. It tells us, for example, that Aristophanes was already writing a somewhat different type of comedy in the later years of his life. The fantasy, the earthy humour, the extravagant and imaginative language, the characteristic names – all these things are still there: in Women in Assembly Praxagora, a lady ‘active in the market place’, schemes to take over the government of Athens, and her husband has trouble with his constipation. But the Chorus no longer addresses the audience directly on public issues: that material now belongs to the actors. The manuscripts of these last plays sometimes indicate Choral Interlude when the stage is empty: and although some, if not all, of these indications are wrong, it is interesting that the copyist thought them suitable insertions – no one tries to insert Choral Interludes in The Acharnions or The Frogs. The God of Wealth, Aristophanes’ last extant play, is more concerned with ethical and domestic issues than with Athenian politics. For the first (but certainly not the last) time, a character called Chremes appears in a Greek comedy. And a slave character begins to play a more crucial role in the working out of a comic plot. The move towards New Comedy has already begun.

We know, too, some fifty names of comic playwrights who were producing in the years between 404 and 323 B.C., and nearly seven hundred titles of their plays. These titles range from The Birth of Aphrodite to The Boeotian Girl, from The Doctor to Pot-Belly, from The Titans to The Stolen Girl. From them, and from the fragments which survive, we can see a movement, uneven but steadying, from political comedy and fantastic setting to more private and social themes which, even if they have their own element of fantasy, will have to be treated more realistically. Burlesques of mythology are common, especially in the first half of the century. Such burlesque was not new in Comedy: it can be seen in action at the end of Aristophanes’ The Birds, and several fifth-century titles indicate its presence. But in the comedy of the early fourth century, it is central. Were the tragic playwrights of the time perhaps so inadequate in their serious treatment of the stories as to suggest their extended use as comic material? Were the audience perhaps missing the satyr plays which traditionally provided such burlesque? (By the middle of the century at least, only one satyr play was being performed at each festival of the Great Dionysia.) Was it the obvious device of fantasy and distancing to employ, in a changing comic form, an element which provided a still recognizable pattern of action and motivation in the transition from ‘the gods’, who in fifth-century drama provided that pattern, to the human ethical standards and values which motivate Menander’s characters and therefore the action of his plays? On our very inadequate evidence, we cannot be sure. But these plays somehow provide part of the bridge between comedy and tragedy which was to be important in the later New Comedy.

Other trends, too, can be observed. A good deal of the comedy and the dramatic action of these plays seems to concern people on the fringes of a citizen society: the organizing slave, the professional cook, the ‘parasite’ or hanger-on who makes his living, and especially his food, by buttering up his richer friends, the hetaira, or professional courtesan, who sometimes has a heart of gold, and the professional soldier. Such characters are as old as comedy: but their professional status and their central position in fourth-century comedy probably reflect changing attitudes in a changing society which was watching that comedy. With the possible exception of the soldier, they belong to private life: and even he is not fighting for Athens or for Greece, but has hired himself out in a private capacity, to make his fortune, and has returned to deal with private problems.

With these private problems New Comedy was increasingly concerned. The steadily growing corpus of Menander’s work, the references to and fragments from his contemporaries’ plays, and the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, which were based on the Greek New Comedy, show clearly that that comedy was concerned with an apparently very narrow range of material. A young man in love and the various vicissitudes of the affair; a girl lost, abandoned or stolen in childhood, who is eventually recognized and restored to family and status and so also to the possibility of marriage; an eccentric whose antics affect all those around him; a series of misunderstandings which cause chaos and confusion within a family; the repercussions of a returning soldier, or of what has been wrongly identified as his dead body; such themes, in a variety of patterns, form the basic material of the plays of Menander and his contemporaries. How narrow in fact is the range? And how important are the plays?

Of course the range is narrow compared with the swoop and sweep of Aristophanes. There are no Boeotians, Megarians, birds in heaven or landladies in hell here. But this is a comedy of manners, of human behaviour realistically presented, and manners can be adequately and entertainingly presented within quite a narrow compass, as the novels of Jane Austen and Barbara Pym admirably demonstrate. The issues are basic to human life and to human imagining, and they lie behind the comedies of Shakespeare as much as behind the romances from the house of Mills & Boon. Boeotians, Megarians and their like are not needed to make this sort of point. This is a different kind of drama, with a different dramatic technique and some different dramatic conventions. There are possibilities of variety even in the treatment of conventions; and a narrow range may produce a compensatory concentration. Menander’s characters are much more naturalistic in presentation than are Aristophanes’, and they are more subtly used to make their dramatic point. The total effect is much less funny – there are few belly-laughs in Menander. He produces, rather, an amused appreciation of what fools we mortals can sometimes be. He has been accused of escapism, of providing comfort for the middle classes in a world where they found life hard. Perhaps he did: but if so, it was surely a side-effect. The basis of Menander’s world is real enough. Of course he concentrates on those aspects of it which will provide him with suitable material: that is what dramatists do. No one imagines that the real world behind French farce consisted only of people rushing in and out of bedroom doors: but such activities were no doubt part of it. In Menander’s world, young men did sometimes become mercenary soldiers, unwanted babies were sometimes exposed and abandoned, pirates did sometimes steal children (Pompey’s clearance of pirates from the Mediterranean was still three hundred years away), and respectable girls no doubt were sometimes raped or seduced during the relative freedom of the festivals which provided the only chance for young people of opposite sexes to meet before marriage: in which case, family complications would most certainly ensue. Such happenings were no doubt not as frequent in real life as in the plays, but they were recognizable. No doubt, too, lost children were not found as frequently in real life. But that pattern, which was at least possible in real life, goes back through tragedy (Euripides’ Ion) to mythology, and so provides its own archetypal pattern for some of the stories.

Not all the stories are like that. In Old Cantankerous there is no rape or seduction, no lost or illegitimate children, not a recognition token in sight. But such incidents provide the normal pattern, presumably because they provide interest and excitement and opportunity for displaying human behaviour. And the whole approach has a universal quality that is easily transferable. The Old Comedy of Aristophanes has undoubtedly a universal appeal: but its form and approach, its humour and presentation, were rooted and grounded in its origins, and in the sovereign, democratic city-state of fifth-century Athens. When the origins became remote and the audience more sophisticated, when the sovereign city-state was no more, Old Comedy began to wither. It gradually lost its appeal for fourth-century Athenians, and it certainly did not attract the later and wider Graeco-Roman world. A comparison between Aristophanes and Menander has come down to us with the works of Plutarch from the second century A.D. Some of its points are illuminating:

Coarseness in words, vulgarity and ribaldry are present in Aristophanes, but not at all in Menander; obviously, for the uneducated, ordinary person is captivated by what the former says, but the educated man will be displeased.

Moreover, in [Aristophanes’] diction there are tragic, comic, pompous and prosaic elements, obscurity, vagueness, dignity and elevation, loquacity and sickening nonsense … But Menander’s diction is so polished and its ingredients mingled into so consistent a whole that, although it is employed in connexion with many emotions and many types of character and adapts itself to persons of every kind, it nevertheless appears as one and preserves its uniformity in common and familiar words in general use.

Now Aristophanes is neither pleasing to the many nor endurable to the thoughtful, but his poetry is like a harlot who has passed her prime and then takes up the role of a wife, whose presumption the many cannot endure and whose licentiousness and malice the dignified abominate. But Menander, along with his charm, shows himself above all satisfying. He has made his poetry, of all the beautiful works Greece has produced, the most generally accepted subject in theatres, in discussions and at banquets, for readings, for instruction and for dramatic competitions … For what reason, in fact, is it truly worth while for an educated man to go to the theatre, except to enjoy Menander?²

This is an interesting and revealing view, and it reveals more of the writer and his age than of either of his subjects. There is a complete failure to understand the qualities of Aristophanes; and there is a linguistic and stylistic bias which completely ignores the fact that these men are dramatists, and remarkably able dramatists at that. No doubt pseudo-Plutarch and his contemporaries got the drama they deserved. But the comparison goes a long way to explain why the New Comedy was found to be more adaptable.

Menander’s world, which looks narrower, was actually in many ways a wider one than Aristophanes’. Menander himself is the only notable New Comedy playwright who is also a native Athenian. Diphilus came from Sinope on the Black Sea, Philemon from Sicily and Apollodorus from the island of Euboea. Though he was an Athenian, Menander did not write only for the Athenian theatre: for he wrote something over one hundred plays, and even if he produced at both dramatic festivals for the thirty-two years of his working life (which is on the whole unlikely), that accounts for only sixty-four of them: and dramatists of his calibre wrote only for production, and not as a speculation. There were now theatres and dramatic festivals outside Athens and Attica; actors were highly professional, and beginning to be organized; they travelled all over the Greek world, and sometimes even acted as their country’s ambassadors. Horizons had widened, there is a sense of being not only Athenian but part of a larger Greek world. The New Comedy plays, in form and content, were easily understood by non-Athenians, and could be adapted for their own purposes.

They were. This is in a very real sense the start of European Comedy. By and through the Roman adaptations, it progressed to the commedia dell’arte, to Molière, and beyond. Here are some critical comments:

The reversals spring from the characterisation … The struggle between father and son is presented with rueful humour … The dialogue is replete with wit, yet as easy and natural as if there were none … The moral is obvious in the action … When the language takes a highly literary flow, the reason is often to be found in the self-importance of the speaker … He repeats certain words to fix a type in the minds of the audience … Plays that belong essentially to the society and stage of his own day, continue to give delight to audiences throughout the world.

These statements could all have been made about the plays of Menander. They are in fact a selection of critical comments on the plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.³

Eighteenth-century English comedy stands firmly in the tradition which Menander established. Five-act structure, action in one day (The Rivals) or, ‘the mistakes of a night’ (She Stoops to Conquer), contrast between town and country, love interest, masters and men, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, husbands and wives, intrigue, misunderstanding, high and low comedy and the varied language that accompanies them (Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer has distinct connections with the intriguing slave of ancient comedy), and comment on human behaviour and human society: it is all there, and it starts from Menander. New Comedy provides us with the first real dramatic use of invented material dealing with, more or less, ordinary people. It was therefore easily understood by other peoples. Its progress does not stop with the eighteenth century. T. S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk is a comedy of manners which goes back for its inspiration beyond Menander to one of his sources. It is a modern reworking of the myth behind the Ion of Euripides, and it raises the same questions about human behaviour and human motivation as the original does. The Ion is, for us certainly, and probably for Menander also, the archetypal treatment of the lost-and-found-child story, and it contains, as do Menander’s plays, both humour and serious undertones.

There are certainly things which put Menander in the tradition that stems from Aristophanes. There is, in both, wit and low comedy, the humour of family relationships, and the break of illusion (never with any certainty found in tragedy) which establishes a certain kind of rapport between actors and audience. Aristophanes’ heroes, like Menander’s, are middle-class Athenians, and like Menander’s they eventually triumph over a series of obstacles: only the obstacles and the methods are different. Aristophanes’ Lamachus lies behind Menander’s Polemon and Thrasonides; embryonic ‘clever’ slaves appear in Aristophanes’ Frogs and God of Wealth; food and cooking figure prominently in his Acharnians and Women in Assembly; characters who live or try to live by flattering others are found in his Birds, and apparently formed the Chorus of his rival Eupolis’s Flatterers; and the ancient Life of Aristophanes tells us that in his Kokalos he brought in rape and recognition (of long-lost relatives). Menander is clearly a comic playwright in a continuing Athenian tradition – a truth quite simply demonstrated by the fact that he produced his plays as Comedies, and preserved in his entr’actes a vestige of the komos, the chorus of revellers that lies somewhere behind the dramatic form that we call comedy.

But there is another important strand in Menander’s drama, which comes not from comedy but from tragedy, and in particular from the tragedies of Euripides. Plays like the Ion, Helen and Iphigenia Among the Taurians, the ‘tragi-comedies’ of Euripides, already show, before the end of the fifth century B.C., characteristics of attitude, structure and versification which Menander found useful. The prologue speech by a deity, for example (Hermes in the Ion, Pan in Old Cantankerous), which can tell the audience things they need to know, and which (most important) promises a happy ending, so that they can enjoy the theatrical thrills without being seriously concerned about the ultimate outcome; the light and elegant verse, the fast and witty dialogue; the implicit raised eyebrow which invites contemplation of motivation and behaviour; the series of misunderstandings, alarums and excursions, and escapes; the happy ending which is not without a wry twist – all these Euripides showed Menander. In the fourth century, our evidence suggests that serious dramatic thinking of any quality was no longer being done in the context of tragic production. But the plays of the great fifth-century tragedians, and especially of the ‘modern’ Euripides, provided pointers to a different and profitable treatment of the traditional material. Instead of ‘modernizing’ the mythical stories, Menander and his fellows secularized them. Euripides treated his mythical characters like contemporaries, Menander handles his contemporary characters with something of the universality of myth, and by his presentation of a universally recognizable human situation provides a kind of framework within which his successors could operate.

2. Menander the Dramatist

But Menander is not important simply for his successors. To the ancient world he was a poet ‘second only to Homer’, a ‘mirror of life’, a writer whose ‘polished charm exercises a reforming influence and helps to raise moral standards’, a writer ‘of great invention, with a style adapted to any kind of circumstances, character and emotion’ – a style which was recommended as a model for aspiring public speakers in Rome in the first century A.D.⁴ He is all these things. But he is also a practical playwright of considerable skill, and his dramatic preoccupations and techniques are worth attention. The Girl From Samos illustrates many of them well. It presents two fathers, one mild and reasonable, the other choleric; the son of the first, in the absence abroad of both, has seduced the daughter of the second; there is a good-hearted courtesan, a slave in the know, and a cook. The ingredients are standard. But the play is far from the ‘mixture as before’.

‘Demeas’ is usually the name of a father in New Comedy (other examples can be found in Menander’s The Man She Hated and Terence’s The Brothers), but he is not always mild and reasonable: far from it in Terence’s play, which is based on a lost play by Menander. In The Brothers, Demeas is the choleric father, and the adoptive father in that play (Micio) is a very different character from our Demeas. Demeas in The Girl From Samos has no ‘philosophy of education’, and has his moments of quick temper and ill-considered action, as when he ejects Chrysis from his house. But his temper springs not from a choleric nature, but at least partly from a guilty desire to remove blame from his adopted son. Both father and son tread warily in the adoptive relationship, and that is what causes much of the trouble. The fact that the relationship is adoptive provides not only an interesting variation on a basic theme, but interesting possibilities of dramatic action and dramatic comment, as father and son have to work their own way out of the situation. Standard procedures do not necessarily apply here.

Nikeratos, the neighbour, is not only choleric, he is foolish with it. His staccato conversation in Act One mirrors his butterfly brain; he is slow on the uptake, and over-violent in reaction in Act Four. But these characteristics are necessary to move the action as Menander wants it to move. Nikeratos must not learn the truth before Demeas does; and his ejection of Chrysis helps to secure her safety and to move the action to its desired climax.

‘Moschion’, to judge from the parts played by characters of that name in The Rape of the Locks, The Sikyonian, The Harpist and the play of Title Unknown, is usually a young and somewhat irresponsible man, who either fails to get his girl or incurs considerable difficulty in doing so. The Moschion of The Girl From Samos is no exception, but he is also different. He is adopted and (perhaps because of his attitude to this) he is weak, unable to face responsibility, willing to involve others in his difficulties, and anxious always to shift the blame from himself. His actions (and inactions) cause the initial situation and the initial complications, and in the final act produce sheer but plausible farce. He is the first character we see, because he speaks the Prologue which, although it tells us facts we have to know, tells us more about the self-centred, irresponsible (and so potentially dangerous) young man who delivers it.

Chrysis, the girl from Samos who gives the play its name, and whose expulsion by Demeas in the central scene was chosen by the Mytilenean mosaicist⁵ to represent the play, is not a common courtesan. She has a stable and affectionate relationship with Demeas (she could not, as a non-Athenian, hope for marriage with him); she is good-natured and loyal, she risks real hardship and danger, because an ‘unprotected’ alien woman would find life hard in fourth-century Athens, and Nikeratos in a temper might well inflict physical injury upon her. She has to be what she is, to be what Menander wants her to be, the catalyst of the action. Her good nature and frustrated maternal instinct lead her originally to help Moschion; Demeas’s affection for her as well as for Moschion makes his reaction particularly violent; her need for shelter causes her to accept Nikeratos’s offer and so introduces his as yet unknown grandchild into his house; and her protection of the baby precipitates the crisis and the resolution.

Parmenon, the slave who knows all, contributes to the plot mainly by his absence. Menander likes sometimes to confound the conventions of his comedy, and here his slave does not manipulate or organize, but timidly and prudently removes himself (and his information) from possible involvement. But his rare appearances are dramatically significant. In Act One, his attitude highlights Moschion’s weakness and indecisiveness; in Act Two, his ‘shopping slave’ role provides comic bustle and comic tone; in Act Three, his scenes with the cook and Demeas lower the tension after Demeas’s monologue, and complicate the action by allowing Demeas to associate the baby with Moschion and Chrysis; and his final appearance in Act Five with Moschion gives him the traditional slave role in knockabout farce, but also helps to underline the folly of his young master.

The cook fulfils his traditional role of providing low comedy, but he provides it at significant points of the play. With Parmenon in Act Three, he provides comic reassurance after Demeas’s potentially tragic monologue-cum-messenger speech, and he does the same thing later in the Act, after Demeas’s second monologue. Here, too, he points the irrationality of Demeas’s behaviour and of his treatment of Chrysis.