Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 26, 2025
Menander's characters were analysed and classified by the critics, and the translator felt bound to keep to the main outlines of his model. It is said that Terence was not satisfied with his delineation of Greek life, but that shortly before his death he started on a voyage to Greece, to acquaint himself at first hand with the manners he depicted.
-Sume arma, iam te occidam clava scirpea-, Just as Menander's Pseudeirakleis makes his appearance. Hitherto the person providing the play had been obliged to fit up the stage and scenic apparatus out of the round sum assigned to him or at his own expense, and probably much money would not often be expended on these.
There were numerous rivals of whom we know next to nothing except by the quotations of Athenaeus 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.
Nemea is favourable unto him, and the month of his country that Apollo loveth: the youth that came to strive with him he overcame, both at home and by Nisos' hill of pleasant glades . I have joy that the whole state striveth for glory. Know that through Menander's aid thou hast attained unto sweet recompense of toils. And meet it is that from Athens a fashioner of athletes come.
He adds, moreover, that though this city breeds at this time very many and excellent representers of comedy, Menander's plays participate of a plenteous and divine salt, as though they were made of the very sea out of which Venus herself sprang. But that of Aristophanes is harsh and coarse, and hath in it an angry and biting sharpness.
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 its wisdom, so weighty its language, so grave its tone. The brightness of the beautiful Greek spirit is sobered down in him almost to sadness.
There is not Menander's many-sided knowledge of the world, nor the racy drollery of Plautus, nor the rich humour of Moliere, nor the sparkling wit of Sheridan, all is toned down with a severe self-restraint, creditable to the poet's sense of propriety, but injurious to comic effect. His characters also lack variety, though powerfully conceived.
But that is a trifle compared with the following specimen. In Menander's -Plocium- a husband bewails his troubles to his friend: Echo d' epikleron Lamian ouk eireka soi Tout'; eit' ap' ouchi; kurian tes oikias Kai ton agron kai panton ant' ekeines Echoumen, Apollon, os chalepon chalepotaton Apasi d' argalea 'stin, ouk emoi mono, Tio polu mallon thugatri. pragm' amachon legeis' Eu oida
The simplicity of Menander's style is the simplicity of prose, and is the same kind of simplicity as that which Goethe's style, in the passage I have quoted, exhibits; but Menander does not belong to a great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it is the simple passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect, being masterpieces of poetical simplicity.
Caecilius Statius, born among the Insubres, wrote Latin comedies which were largely borrowed from the Greek of Menander. The original of the Synephebi was Menander's Συνε φηβοι 'young comrades'. See Sellar, Rom. Poets of the Rep., Ch. 7.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking