Menander Volume 1. Loeb Classical Library No. 132

Menander

ISBN 10: 0674991478 / ISBN 13: 9780674991477

Published by Harvard University Press, 1997

About this Item

Near fine unmarked book in dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 066687

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Menander Volume 1. Loeb Classical Library No. 132
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674991478
• ISBN 13: 9780674991477
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

The master of New Comedy.

Menander (?344/3–292/1 BC) of Athens, the leading playwright of the New Comedy, wrote more than 100 plays. Many of his comedies were adapted by Roman dramatists. By the middle ages, however, his works were lost. Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, papyrus texts, preserved from antiquity by the dry heat of Egypt, began to be discovered. These have yielded so far one play virtually complete (Dyskolos), large continuous portions of four more (Aspis, Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, Samia), and sizable chunks of many others. Menander remains a paradox: artificial plots based on unlikely but conventional coincidences, enlivened by individualized characters, realistic situations, and at times deeply moving dialogue.

Volume I of Geoffrey Arnott’s three-volume edition of Menander contains six plays, including Dyskolos (The Peevish Fellow), which won first prize in Athens in 317 BC, and Dis Exapaton (Twice a Swindler), the original of Plautus’ Two Bacchises. Ten plays are in Volume II, among them the recently published fragments of Misoumenos (The Man She Hated), which sympathetically presents the flawed relationship of a soldier and a captive girl; and the surviving half of Perikeiromene (The Girl with Her Hair Cut Short), a comedy of mistaken identity and lovers’ quarrel. Volume III begins with Samia (The Woman from Samos), which has come down to us nearly complete. Here too are the very substantial extant portions of Sikyonioi (The Sicyonians) and Phasma (The Apparition), as well as Synaristosai (Women Lunching Together), on which Plautus’ Cistellaria was based.

About the Author

William Geoffrey Arnott, FBA (1930–2010) was Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Leeds.