Wisconsin (2024) 201pp h/b £75.11 (ISBN 9780299349608)
Did you know that ‘those whom the gods love die young’ comes from Menander’s The Double Deceiver? That Horace’s holiday reading (Sat. 2.3.11) includes this playwright along with the weighty Plato? Menander was in ancient times the most popular ancient Greek author (after Homer) and yet there are people today who have barely heard of him.
B.’s book will certainly help to change all that. His main argument is that Menander’s theatre was a different sort of place from that of the 5th century. The new two-storey stage cut the actors off from the level of the chorus and the audience, and coincided (not coincidentally) with the chorus being reduced to the role of entr’actes entertainers. The old concertina-ing of time—such as the squeezing of a few hours’ action into the space of a single choral lyric in (say) Sophocles Antigone 1116-52—has gone and been replaced by a new level of realism in which the poet ‘showed life to itself’ as Manilius says (5.476). The crucial point for B. is that the houses portrayed in Menander are the sort of houses the audience will have lived in, rather than the grand palace of an Oedipus or an Agamemnon. The people portrayed by Menander are themselves more like the members of the audience than the ones who strutted the stage in 5th century tragedy and comedy, and this ‘domestic drama’ would go on to have a huge impact on the shaping of all theatrical writing ever since.
Menander’s only complete surviving play is Dyskolos (‘The Bad-tempered Man’) and B. devotes the first chapter to it, pointing out that Knemon—the bad-tempered man—can stand up to deliver his speech (recanting his former misanthropy) only because his daughter is holding him up after his fall down the well, and that this ‘serves as the apogee of the playwright’s complex treatment of household isolation’ (p.27). The daughter is the fulcrum of the play, being both the apple of her father’s eye and the love of Sostratos’ life: indeed, the old man’s curmudgeonly attitude is the cause of her isolation. This domestic isolation makes ‘domestic drama’ difficult to achieve and Menander has to work hard to ‘integrate the household interactions of father and daughter into the onstage drama’ (p.42): it is the climactic incident of the old man’s falling down the well which brings on-stage and off-stage action together with a range of attitudes expressed from daughterly sympathy to the cook’s lively Schadenfreude. Paradoxically, Knemon’s fall both increases his dependence on her and also accelerates her leaving his household, and the play ends with the tableau of Knemon forced to dance by strangers while his daughter leaves his home.
Woman’s place in Athenian life was largely indoors, and so it is hard to see how a playwright who aspires to comic realism can present the life of freeborn women without going inside the house to do so. One such woman—Myrrhine in Perikeiromene—lacks the visibility of prostitutes and enslaved women, but does not lack agency and her power (literally) behind the scenes drives the male decisions on stage. Squaring the circle of showing domestic drama while also reflecting the maman au foyer side of Athenian life is something which B. does well in his chapters on Perikeiromene and also on Samia, where much of the action is again driven by women—Chrysis the paternal pallake, the hapless pregnant Plangon—while the men who are nominally in charge of events will always get the wrong end of every stick. Girl-power trumps male authority every time, and B. neatly shows how ‘Menander’s presentation of the scenes inside both houses is the key to the female camaraderie that permeates the atmosphere of [Samia]’ (p. 71). Curiosity about what women get up to behind closed doors is nothing new in comedy, of course, and some of this plays to the same (male) humour about suppositious children such as we find in Aristophanes (e.g. Thesmophoriazusai 502-16). The wedding celebrations which end Samia neatly restore order to the troubled domestic world of Demeas and Niceratos and demonstrate how the males have been the ones who over-reacted hysterically while the women behind the skene in the two houses have everything under cool control.
Epitrepontes is a curious and a wonderful play. Rather like Herakles and Deianeira in Sophocles’ Trachiniae (or Phaedra and Hippolytus in Euripides’ Hippolytus), the male and female lead characters never interact on stage together. The gulf between them is thus enacted in the staging as well as in the dialogue, and Menander’s psychological insight into the reasons for the besotted husband’s reprehensible behaviour is brilliantly brought out here by B. The play also ends with a provocative stance on the old double-standard, in which the errant husband admits that he is as much at fault as his apparently unfaithful wife. They all end up happy, but the comedy along the way is tinged with enormous kindness, moral sympathy, and implied social criticism.
Similar emotional trauma is at work in Terence, whose debt to Menander is obvious and whose Self-Tormentor show more than a touch of Menandrian stagecraft. As in the case of Epitrepontes, the fathers are as emotionally interesting as their sons: Menedemus has played the strict-father role too far and driven his son Clinia away. There is a lot of dramatic irony and comedy-of-errors stuff with the two young men and the compliant hetaira Bacchis, with the clever slave (Syrus) running rings round the freeborn folk and the usual happy ending. Behind all this good humour, however, lurks a very Menandrian critique of male pride such as we see in the angry father who alienates his son and torments himself with remorse, and the wiser owl Chremes who turns out to be as much of an idiot as anybody else. Like all the best comedies, this one makes you think as well as laugh, and B. is excellent at unpacking the thought behind the humour. B. closes his book with a discussion of Ariosto’s 1508 comedy La Cassaria and Machiavelli’s Mandragola to show the influence of Menander on the writers of the Italian Renaissance.
B. is at all times helpful to his readers. He does a good job of explaining the convoluted stories without losing his readers in a fog of Greek names. He translates all the Greek quoted into (very) good English, gives us ten pages of bibliography, an index locorum and a general index, and supports his argument with copious endnotes. By the end of this book, you will have some idea of just why the ancient world thought Menander was such a great writer, and why his plays matter so much in the history of the theatre.
John Godwin