Menander: The Plays and Fragments Book

I'm doing a project where I'm discussing each of the surviving Greek plays in a Youtube video (at ). I've completed my Menander videos, which are linked at the end of each review below. My video about Menander himself is at:

The Bad-Tempered Man (Dyskolos): This is Menander's only play which survives almost in its entirety--maybe 25 lines are missing from a few scattered sections--so it gives us the best sense of his dramaturgy and style. Basically, Dyskolos uses the kind of stock comic characters that would later populate Roman comedy, commedia dell'arte, English renaissance comedy, 19th century melodrama, etc. We have figures like the clever slave/servant, the misanthropic/miserly father of the female beloved, the lovelorn suitor, and so on. Basically, Sostratos is a wealthy young man who falls in love with a girl (who doesn't seem to have a name, bizarrely; she's always referred to as Knemon's daughter or Gorgias' sister) he see while out hunting, but her father Knemon is a fanaticaly misanthrope and hermit who detests having anyone around. Sostratos tries, with the help of Gorgias--Knemon's estranged son--to get the old man to let Sostratos marry the girl. When a servant drops a bucket down the well and then loses a mattock trying trying to retrieve the bucket, Knemon falls in the well trying to get them out himself. Gorgias rescues him and tells Knemon that Sostratos was key to the rescue, though as Sostratos has already told the audience he basically just stood around staring at the girl. Moved more by Gorgias' willingness to help despite all the rotten things Knemon had done to him, the old man puts Gorgias in charge of the farm and of finding a husband for the daughter, so Gorgias agrees to let Sostratos marry her, while Sostratos convinces his own father that Gorgias should marry Sostratos' sister. The play ends with two servants, Getas the slave and Sikon the cook, harassing the wet, injured Knemon until he agrees to go to the party they're having to sacrifice to the god Pan, even though Knemon just wants to be left alone.


The Girl from Samos (Samia): This is a great example of a standard five act play, a genre that doesn't really seem to predate Menander. The plot revolves around Moschion, who wants to marry his neighbor's daughter Plangon because they've had a baby together while their fathers were away. However, they don't want people to know that it was their baby, so Chrysis (Demeas' mistress/courtesan--Demeas is Moschion's adoptive father) is raising the infant in place of her and Demeas' baby that died (Demeas didn't know about that baby either). The first act basically sets the stage for these circumstance, and ends with Moschion planning how to convince his father to let him marry Plangon. In the second act, the plot is moved forward as Demeas and Plangon's father return, planning to have their children marry. Moschion agrees and asks to have the wedding as soon as possible. Demeas also isn't pleased that Chrysis has a baby, but he agrees to keep her as his mistress. However, in the third act, Demeas learns that the baby is Moschion's, and he mistakenly assumes that Moschion and Chrysis had an affair, at which point he throws Chrysis out of the house and Plangon's father takes her in. Then in act four Plangon's father learns Demeas' suspicion that Moschion had sex with his father's mistress, and he drives Chrysis from his house. Meanwhile, Moschion reveals to his own father what really happened and Demeas takes Chrysis back, but when Plangon's father learns that it's his daughter's child he is outraged. Finally he is calmed down and everyone agrees to go through with the marriage. Then, at the beginning of the fifth act, Moschion realizes how insulting it is that his father thought he had sex with Chrysis, and he resolves to get even by pretending he's going to run away and join the army, whereupon both fathers prevail upon him to stay and the play ends with Moschion and Plangon's wedding.


The Arbitration (Epitrepontes): This play is really fragmented, so it's difficult to actually get a good sense of Menander's writing because so much of this is either guesswork, reconstruction, or summary of what the editors think must have happened in a particular portion. But basically the story runs on the kinds of misrecognitions and mistaken identities that form such a central part of the comic repertoire up through the present. Pamphile had a baby about four months after her marriage to Charisios, which she left outside to die to try and hide the baby. However, Charisios was told by a servant about the baby, so he moved in with his friend Chairestratos and took up with a harp-girl from the brothel named Habrotonon. Smikrenes, Pamphile's father, was understandably upset about his daughter being abandoned, and he basically spends the whole play trying to get her dowry back and take her home. Meanwhile, the baby has been picked up by a shepherd, who then gives the baby to a charcoal burner who works for Chairestratos, but the shepherd tries to keep the jewelry that was left with the baby. The charcoal burner demands the jewelry, and they get Smikrenes to arbitrate the dispute--none of them realize that Smikrenes is the baby's grandfather. Smikrenes is persuaded by the charcoal burner that the jewelry may someday help the baby figure out who its family was, and therefore he awards possession of the jewels to the charcoal burner on behalf of the baby. However, Charisios' servant sees the charcoal burner with his master's ring and thereupon they determine to figure out what relation the baby is to Charisios. Habrotonon comes on, and she realizes that Charisios must have given the ring to a girl he raped at a festival several months before he got married, because she remembers that one of the girls was raped, but she doesn't remember who. So Habrotonon concocts a ruse to confirm her suspicions--namely, that she's going to pretend she was raped and it was her baby in order to confirm that Charisios is the father, then she's going to find the real mother. Shortly after confirming Charisios as the dad, Pamphile happens to be outside and recognizes one of the jewels that Habrotonon has with the baby, at which point they confirm that she was the mother, and Charisios was the one who raped her, thereby fathering their baby. The upshot of this is that it's a happy ending (I guess, though it's pretty fucked up) because Charisios now returns to his wife/rape victim and they all live happily ever after.


The Shield (Aspis): Slightly more than half of this play is missing, which makes it pretty hard to really appreciate as a work of art. The plot is largely dependent on all of the characters thinking this young man is dead in a foreign military campaign, so a miserly uncle tries to marry the dead man's sister in order to inherit his war loot. However, the sister is already engaged to another uncle's son, so the miser tries to break up that wedding. With the help of a cunning slave (a stock figure in New Comedy) the good uncle and his son come up with a scheme to pretend that the good uncle is dying, so the miser will try to marry his daughter and therefore inherit the larger fortune of the good uncle, thereby leaving the sister free to marry the man she was originally betrothed to. However, the supposedly dead man shows back up, claims his fortune and invalidates the miser's plan to inherit it through marriage. The not-dead man marries the good uncle's daughter, while the good uncle's son marries the not-dead man's sister. They all end up rich, married, and happy, except the miserly uncle who gets his comeuppance (probably, but virtually the entire fifth act is lost, so it's not clear what exactly happens).
The thing I do find really interesting about Aspis, however, is that virtually the whole play is an example of dramatic irony. After an initial scene where the man's death is reported, Menander gives a delayed Prologue in which the goddess Chance tells us that he actually isn't dead and that he'll be back before the end of the play. So throughout the whole of the play, the audience knows a crucial piece of info that the characters don't know, and we see all of their actions predicated on this gap in their knowledge.


The Girl with the Shaven Head (Perikeiromene): Rather like Aspis, this play runs on dramatic irony and misrecognitions, and is so fragmented that it's pretty difficult to read and enjoy. The plot centers around a soldier who throws his mistress out of the house and shaves her head (a big insult in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean) because he thinks she has a lover. The guy the soldier suspects actually does love the girl, but she doesn't have romantic feelings for him because she knows he is her long lost brother from when they were both exposed as babies by their widowed father. Unbeknownst to any of them, their father becomes the girl's friend and tries to get her back together with the soldier. At some point, she shows her father the tokens she was given when he abandoned them, and they realize he's her dad. The brother, overhearing this conversation, has his suspicions confirmed that she is his sister, and he is reunited with them. Then they effect the reconciliation between the girl and the soldier.
What's interesting about this play, as opposed to the other fragmented texts I've reviewed here, is that here the middle section of each act survives, but the beginnings and ends are lost. With most of them, either the opening or the ending of the play is largely intact, but here there are just fragments of each act.


The rest of the plays are mostly lost, with less than about 40% surviving, so I am not going to review them all.