III. MENANDER

Like the other arts, the drama enjoyed in this age its greatest quantitative prosperity. Every city, almost every third-rate town, had its theater. The actors, better organized than ever, were in great demand, enjoyed high fees, and lived with characteristic superiority to the morals of their time. Dramatists continued to turn out tragedies, but, whether by accident or good taste, tradition has covered them with oblivion’s balm. The mood of Hellenistic Athens, like ours today, preferred the lighthearted, lightheaded, sentimental, happy-ending stories of the New Comedy. Of this, too, only fragments remain; but we have some discouraging samples of it in the pilferings of Plautus and Terence, who composed their plays by translating and adapting Hellenistic comedies. The high concerns of state and soul that aroused Aristophanes are in the New Comedy put aside as too perilous for the literary neck; usually the theme is domestic or private, and traces the devious roads by which women are led to generosity, and men nevertheless to matrimony. Love enters upon its triumphant career as master of the boards; a thousand damsels in distress cross the stage, but achieve honor and wedlock in the end. The old phallic dress is abandoned, and the old phallic bawdiness; but the story circles narrowly about the virginity of the leading lady, and virtue plays as small a role in it as in our daily press. Since the actors wore masks, and the number of masks was limited, the comic dramatist wove his plots of intrigue and mistaken identity around a few stock characters whom the audience was always delighted to recognize—the cruel father, the benevolent old man, the prodigal son, the heiress mistaken for a poor girl, the bragging soldier, the clever slave, the flatterer, the parasite, the physician, the priest, the philosopher, the cook, the courtesan, the procuress, and the pimp.

The masters of this comedy of manners in third-century Athens were Philemon and Menander. Of Philemon hardly anything survives except the echo of his renown. The Athenians liked him better than Menander, and gave him more prizes; but Philemon had raised to high excellence the art of organizing a claque. Posterity, being ignored in the subsidy, reversed the judgment, and gave the crown to Menander’s bones. This Congreve of Athens was a nephew of the fertile dramatist Alexis of Thurii, the pupil of Theophrastus, and the friend of Epicurus; from them he learned the secrets of drama, philosophy, and tranquillity. He almost realized Aristotle’s ideal: he was handsome and rich, contemplated life with serenity and understanding, and took his pleasures like a gentleman. He was an inconstant lover, content to repay Glycera’s devotion by touching her name with immortality. When Ptolemy I invited him to Alexandria he sent Philemon in his stead, saying, “Philemon has no Glycera”; Glycera, who had suffered much, rejoiced at having triumphed over a king.¹⁵ Thereafter, we are assured, he lived faithfully with her until, at the age of fifty-two, he died of a cramp while swimming at the Piraeus (292).¹⁶

His first play, as if announcing a new epoch, appeared in the year that followed Alexander’s death. Thereafter he wrote one hundred and four comedies, eight of which won the first prize. Some four thousand lines remain, all in brief fragments except for a papyrus discovered in Egypt in 1905; this contains half of the Epitrepontes, or The Arbitrants, and has lowered Menander’s reputation. We shall waste our reproaches if we complain that the themes of these plays are as monotonous as those of Greek sculpture, architecture, and pottery; we must remind ourselves that the Greeks judged a work not by the story it told—which is a child’s criterion—but by the manner of its telling. What the Greek mind relished in Menander was the neat polish of his style, the philosophy concentrated in his wit, and so realistic a portrayal of common scenes that Aristophanes of Byzantium asked, “O Menander, O Life, which of you imitated the other?”¹⁷ In a world that had fallen forfeit to soldiers nothing remained, in Menander’s view, but to contemplate human affairs as a spectator indulgent but uninvolved. He notes the vanities and vacillations of woman, but concedes that the average wife is a blessing. The action of The Arbitrants turns in part upon a rejection of the double standard;¹⁸ and of course one play is about the virtuous prostitute who, like Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias, refuses the man whom she loves in order to get him respectably married to a profitable wife.¹⁹ Lines that are now proverbs appear in the fragments, like “Evil communications corrupt good manners” (quoted by St. Paul²⁰), and “Conscience makes cowards of the bravest men”;²¹ some credit Menander with the original of Terence’s famous line—Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto—“I am a man, and consider nothing human to be alien to me.” Occasionally we come upon jewels of insight, as in “Everything that dies dies by its own corruption; all that injures is within”;²² or in these typical verses, prophetic of Menander’s early death:

Whom the gods love, die young; that man is blest
Who, having viewed at ease this solemn show
Of sun, stars, ocean, fire, doth quickly go
Back to his home with calm uninjured breast.
Be life or short or long, ‘tis manifest
Thou ne’er wilt see things goodlier, Parmeno,
Than these; then take thy sojourn here as though
Thou wert some playgoer or wedding guest,
The sooner sped, the safelier to thy rest.
Well-furnished, foe to none, with strength at need,
Shalt thou return; while he who tarries late
Faints on the road out-worn, with age oppressed,
Harassed by foes whom life’s dull tumults breed;
Thus ill dies he for whom death long doth wait.²³