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Updated: June 18, 2025
Full of this idea, the grammarian Aristophanes exclaimed in a somewhat affected, though highly ingenious turn of expression: "O life and Menander! which of you copied the other?" Horace informs us that "some doubted whether Comedy be a poem; because neither in its subject nor in its language is there the same impressive elevation which distinguished from ordinary discourse by the versification."
Benedict and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the poetically comic. His Comedy of incredible imbroglio belongs to the literary section. One may conceive that there was a natural resemblance between him and Menander, both in the scheme and style of his lighter plays.
Now when the generals Tydeus, Menander, and Adeimantus came with the entire Athenian fleet to Aegospotamoi, they used early every morning to go to Lampsakus to challenge the fleet of Lysander, which lay there, to a sea-fight. After this ceremony they would return and spend the whole day in careless indolence, as if despising their enemy.
Among the pieces of Terence, whose copies, with the exception of certain changes of the plan and structure, are probably much more faithful in detail than those of the other, we find two from Apollodorus, and the rest from Menander.
Menander idealized them without purposely elevating. He satirized a certain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neither professionally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two Andrians, Chrysis and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for tenderness.
By this means he amassed for himself considerable treasure, and, at the same time, secured the bordering Greeks from the incursions of the barbarians. Tydeus, Menander, and Adimantus, the newly made generals, were at that time posted at Aegospotami, with all the ships which the Athenians had left.
He was greatly inferior to Plautus in originality, and has not exerted a like lasting influence; but he wrote comedies characterized by great purity of diction, which have been translated into all modern languages. Terence, whom Mommsen regards as the most polished, elegant, and chaste of all the poets of the newer comedy, closely copied the Greek Menander.
He tells us how two Persian monks, long resident in China, amid their pious occupations viewed with a curious eye the manufacture of silk; how they made the long journey to Constantinople, imparting their knowledge of the silkworm and its strictly guarded culture to the great Justinian; finally, how a second time they entered China, 'deceived a jealous people by concealing the eggs of the silkworm in a hollow cane, and returned in triumph with the spoils of the East. 'I am not insensible of the benefits of an elegant luxury, adds the historian, 'yet I reflect with some pain that if the importers of silk had introduced the art of printing, already practised by the Chinese, the comedies of Menander and the entire decade of Livy would have been perpetuated in the sixth century.
Outspoken attacks in public on the leading statesmen did not accord with the senatorial idea of government. Hence such poets as possessed a comic vein were driven to the only style which could be cultivated with impunity, viz. that of Philemon and Menander. But a difficulty met them at the outset.
On the obverse is a woman holding a flower or a priest offering incense. It appears to be a Kanirkos coin. No. 6. A round silver Indo-Scythian coin. No. 7. The characters and figures on this coin are very distinct. No. 8. Another coin of Menander. This is an old and valuable coin. No, 9. A gold coin, supposed by Lady Sale to be a Kadphises. The legend begins with Amokad and ends with Korano.
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