Out with the New (New Comedy, that is)
December 20, 2013
Announcing, at last, the publication of Menander in Contexts, the book of the Nottingham conference of July 2012, containing sixteen papers on the comedies of Menander seen in the contexts of the society and thought of his day, of earlier literature, and of subsequent receptions and responses. My edition (with introduction and commentary) of one …
Menander
November 20, 2013
Just to mention that two books of mine about Menander are due to appear in the next few weeks. The first is an edition of his comedy Samia (The Woman from Samos) with introduction and commentary – the first edition of a play of Menander (or indeed of any text that has survived only in …
Connected
October 22, 2013
In last week’s post, I asked: “How does Menander connect a Japanese warlord, a world chess champion, a British prime minister, a Native American chief, and a song about a lamp-post?” The answer will be found in Mario Lamagna’s chapter, “Military Culture and Menander”, in my forthcoming edited volume Menander in Contexts (London: Routledge, 2014). …
Connections
October 15, 2013
“Menander is a vital connecting link. He connects the society of classical Athens … with the era of Hellenistic kings and of mercenary armies; he connects, too, the language of classical Athenians with that of later Greeks; he connects the arguments and theories of medical men and [philosophers of Aristotle’s school] with the life and …
The woman from Samos
March 22, 2013
Just a plug for my forthcoming edition of Menander’s Samia (The Woman from Samos), being published this autumn by Cambridge University Press; see http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item7257906/Menander%20Samia%20(The%20Woman%20From%20Samos%20)/site_locale=en_GB .
From Mount Sinai to Michigan: the rediscovery of Menander’s Epitrepontes (Postscript)
December 13, 2012
Just as I thought I had finished with the subject, comes news of yet another little papyrus fragment of Epitrepontes, again in the Michigan collection, again published by Cornelia Römer in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (volume 183, pages 33-36). This little scrap, just 70mm long and 30mm across at its widest point, contains …
From Mount Sinai to Michigan: the rediscovery of Menander’s Epitrepontes (part 4)
December 6, 2012
The ten new papyrus fragments of Menander’s Epitrepontes that have been published during the last forty years have added very considerably, but rather unevenly, to our knowledge of all five acts of the play. One contains small parts (never more than eight letters) of about 70 lines from Act One; not much can be understood, …
From Mount Sinai to Michigan: the discovery of Menander’s Epitrepontes (part 3)
November 29, 2012
From Mount Sinai to Michigan: the recovery of Menander’s Epitrepontes (part 3) The fifth-century manuscript from Aphroditopolis in Upper Egypt, which came to light in the first decade of the twentieth century, proved to have had a chequered history. Some hundred years after it had been written, its then owner, a man named Flavius Dioscorus, …
From Mount Sinai to Michigan: the rediscovery of Menander’s Epitrepontes (part 2)
November 22, 2012
At St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai, in 1844, Constantin von Tischendorf discovered two leaves of a manuscript containing dramatic dialogue. But they were glued into the cover of another book, and he could only read one side of each leaf. So he did, and took a transcript away with him. And nothing happened; the …
From Mount Sinai to Michigan: the rediscovery of Menander’s Epitrepontes (part 1)
November 15, 2012
Menander’s comedy Epitrepontes (The Arbitration) is an exquisitely constructed drama in which a baby, reluctantly abandoned by his mother to preserve her reputation and her five-month-old marriage, is reunited with his parents by a process to which almost every character in the play makes an essential contribution (often an unintentional one). Virtue repeatedly earns its …
