Information AboutMenander |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT MENANDER | |
| ancient greek dramatists and playwrights | |
| ancient athenians | |
| 342 bc births | |
| 291 bc deaths | |
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Menander ( 342 – 291 BC ) ( Greek ), Greek dramatist, the chief representative of the New Comedy , was born in Athens . He was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of Demosthenes ''De Chersoneso''. He presumably derived his taste for the comic drama from his uncle Alexis . He was the friend, associate, and perhaps pupil of Theophrastus , and was on intimate terms with Demetrius Of Phalerum . He also enjoyed the patronage of Ptolemy Soter , the son of Lagus , who invited him to his court. But Menander, preferring the independence of his villa in the Peiraeus and the company of his mistress Glycera , refused. According to the note of a scholiast on the ''Ibis'' of Ovid , he was drowned while bathing, and his countrymen built him a tomb on the road leading to Athens, where it was seen by Pausanias . A well-known statue in the Vatican , formerly thought to represent Marius , is now generally supposed to be Menander, although some archaeologists dispute this, and it has also been identified with his statue in the theatre at Athens, also mentioned by Pausanias. Menander was the author of more than a hundred comedies, but only won the prize at Lenaia eight times. His rival in dramatic art (and in the affections of Glycera) was ( Porphyry in Eusebius , ''Praeparatio evangelica'') Menander was guilty of Plagiarism , his ''The Superstitious Man'' being taken from ''The Augur'' of Antiphanes . But, although he attained only moderate success during his lifetime, he subsequently became the favorite writer of antiquity. Copies of his plays were known to Suidas and Eustathius ( 10th and 11th Centuries ), and twenty-three of them, with commentary by Michael Psellus , were said to have existed at Constantinople in the 16th Century . He is praised by Plutarch (''Comparison of Menander and Aristophanes'') and Quintilian (''Institutio Oratoria''), who accepted the tradition that he was the author of the speeches published under the name of the Attic orator Charisius . A great admirer and imitator of 15:33). These maxims (chiefly monostichs) were afterwards collected, and, with additions from other sources, were edited as ''Menander's One-Verse Maxims'', a kind of moral textbook for the use of schools. Menander found many Roman imitators. The ''Eunuchus'', ''Andria'', ''Heautontimoroumenos'' (''The Self-Tormentor'') and ''Adelphi'' of Terence (called by Caesar "dimidiatus Menander") were avowedly taken from Menander, but some of them appear to be adaptations and combinations of more than one play; thus, in the ''Andria'' were combined Menander's ''The Woman from Andros'') and ''The Woman from Perinthos''), in the ''Eunuchus'', ''The Eunuch'' and ''The Flatterer'', while the ''Adelphi'' was compiled partly from Menander and partly from Diphilus . The original of Terence's ''Hecyra'' (as of the ''Phormio'') is generally supposed to be, not by Menander, but Apollodorus Of Carystus . The ''Bacchides'' and ''Stichus'' of Plautus were probably based upon Menander's ''The Double Deceiver'' and ''Philadelphoi'', ''The Brotherly-Loving Men'', but the ''Poenulus'', does not seem to be from ''The Carthaginian'', nor the ''Mostellaria'' from ''The Apparition'', in spite of the similarity of titles. Caecilius Statius , Luscius Lavinius , Turpilius and Atilius also imitated Menander. He was further credited with the authorship of some epigrams of doubtful authenticity; the letters addressed to Ptolemy Soter and the discourses in prose on various subjects mentioned by Suidas are probably spurious. Until the end of the 19th Century , all that was known of Menander were the fragments collected by Augustus Meineke ( 1855 ) and Theodor Kock , ''Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta'' ( 1888 ). They consist of some 1650 verses or parts of verses, in addition to a considerable number of words quoted expressly as from Menander by the old lexicographers. From 1897 to 1907 , papyri were discovered in different parts of Egypt containing fragments of considerable length amounting to some 1400 lines. In 1897, about eighty lines of ''The Farmer''; in 1899 , fifty lines of ''The Shorn Woman'' (''Perikeiromene''), and, in 1903 , two hundred lines from the middle of the same play; five hundred lines from ''The Arbitrants'', generally well preserved; sixty-three lines (the prologue, list of characters, and the first scene), from ''The Hero''; three hundred and forty lines from ''The Woman from Samos''; and twenty lines from an unknown comedy. The complete manuscript of '' Dyskolos (The Grouch)'' was published from a recovered papyrus manuscript in 1959. This play was first presented at the Lenaia n festival in 317 BC , where it won Menander first prize. WORKS
EXTERNAL LINKS An English translation of the Dyscolos . |
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