From Aristophanes to Menander Author(s): W. Geoffrey Arnott Source

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From Aristophanes to Menander
Author(s): W. Geoffrey Arnott
Source: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Apr., 1972), pp. 65-80
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/642525
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FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER
By w. GEOFFREY ARNOTT
AT the beginning of 405 B.C., fourteen or fifteen months before the
final catastrophe overtook Athens in the Peloponnesian War,
Aristophanes produced the Frogs. It is the last extant play of Old
Comedy proper. Its plot is at times discursive, its subject-matter is pas-
sionately tied to the city in which the play was conceived, and its struc-
ture is largely controlled by such traditional and formal Old Comedy
elements as the agon and parabasis. The Frogs won first prize. In 316
B.C., just eighty-nine years later, if we accept a plausible emendation in
the Bodmer papyrus, Menander in his turn won the first prize at the
same festival with his Dyskolos. The Dyskolos is the first extant play
of the New Comedy to which we can give a firm date. Its plot is tightly
knit, its subject-matter is universal, and its structure is largely governed
by a new set of formal elements. Aristophanes' Frogs had a chorus of
initiates, who charmed the audience by their nostalgic evocation of the
old annual procession to Eleusis, suspended at the time because of the
Spartan occupation of Decelea. This chorus of initiates sang and danced
between the dialogue scenes a series of specially composed, memorable
lyrics which were relevant to the plot, to the city, and to the period;
they and their leader also delivered the parabasis. This vivid, lively,
functional chorus is replaced in Menander by only a dim shadow: a
KCOIOoSf tipsy young men who have no function whatever in the plot,
who serve merely to entertain the audience in the intervals between the
five acts with a song-and-dance routine whose words are not preserved
and possibly were not even specially composed for the play by its
author.
What happened in the period between the Frogs and the Dyskolos?
How did it happen that Old Comedy plays like the Frogs went like cater-
pillars into a chrysalis, to emerge eighty or so years later as the butter-
flies of the New Comedy, so different in form and content? To these
questions there is one simple, honest answer: we do not know. We do
not know, because out of the 800 plays that were written in the inter-
vening years only two survive complete in their original Greek, Aristo-
phanes' last extant plays, the Ecclesiazusae and the Plutus, and two
or three more perhaps partially survive transmogrified in the Roman
adaptations of Plautus. Of the rest, all that we possess is a series of titles
and slightly more than a thousand fragments torn bleeding from their
contexts by excerptors who wanted to make gastronomic, moral, or
3871.1 F
66 FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER
lexicographical anthologies. These fragments tell us very little about
dramatic contexts. 'How hard it is to get a good idea of a play from a
handful of snippets,' Professor Handley himself observed in his inau-
gural lecture not so long ago, 'one can test very simply by trying one of
Shakespeare's plays in a dictionary of quotations, and perhaps adding
a few references to him from a large English grammar for good measure.'"
If it is so difficult to find out what happened in this transitional period,
which it has been convenient since Hellenistic times to call Middle
Comedy, what are we to do then? Obviously, we must rely on guess-
work. But the guesses need more than inspiration, they need circum-
spection. We shall press the evidence of the scattered fragments as far
as it will safely go, like skaters on thin ice. And we shall try to direct
our aim at the right targets, even if sometimes we resemble riflemen
shooting at distant rabbits in the dark. What are the right targets? Pro-
fessor Dover has defined them with his usual precision: 'The attempt
to trace, through the fragments of the fourth-century comic poets, the
development of elements characteristic of New Comedy constitutes the
true study of Middle Comedy.'2 But one final word of caution. In our
way stand some insidious pitfalls that have already trapped a regiment
of scholars. One of these is the food fallacy. Writers who allege that
Middle Comedy was obsessed with food have forgotten that most of the
extant fragments were preserved by one second-sophistic author Athe-
naeus, whose tastes were gastronomic, not dramatic. Athenaeus' bias
leaves a distorted impression of the part that descriptions of food and
drink played in Middle Comedy. Secondly, there is the labelling fallacy.
It is usual to label certain authors, like Anaxandrides, Antiphanes,
Eubulus, Timocles, and Alexis, 'Middle Comedy dramatists'. But
several authors straddle more than one period. Alexis, for instance,
began writing in the early 35os, right in the middle of the Middle
Comedy period, and for this reason he is generally considered a Middle
Comedy poet. In fact Alexis went on writing for over seventy years, and
he outlived Menander. It would be very surprising if Alexis did not
also write a good many plays of the New Comedy type in the New
Comedy period. So when we look at the fragments of Alexis, we must
expect to find there a mixture of Middle Comedy and New Comedy
material.
After taking all these things into consideration, we may then attempt
Menander and Plautus: A Study in Comparison (London, 1968), I. Over a century
before Otto Ribbeck had said something very similar in his Bere lecture Oiberd ie
mittlere und neuere Attische Kom6die (Leipzig, 857), 3: 'It is as if one of our descendants
wished to make up Goethe's or Schiller's works from the German dictionary of the
Grimm brothers and occasional references in bellettrists.'
2 In his essay on Greek Comedy in Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (edited by
M. Platnauer, Oxford, I954), II8.
FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER 67
to produce our picture of Middle Comedy. The picture will inevitably
be dim and blurred, but we must try to make it as faithful a reflection of
the lost truth as the nature of the evidence will allow. In brief, the period
of Middle Comedy is most conveniently defined as extending from the
end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 B.c. down to the later thirties or
the twenties of the fourth century B.C. As Scaliger was the first to
observe,' it was a period of transition. During these seventy-five years
or so Old Comedy died and New Comedy was born. And secondly, it
was a period of experiment. Comedies written then had a wide variety
of themes, targets, and treatments. Even if different types of play pre-
dominated at different times during the period, no one type or genre of
play deserves the particular label of 'Middle Comedy' more than any
other.
The period begins with the shattering defeat of Athens in 404, when
her dreams of imperial power had become a nightmare. The defeat was
followed by a decline in political energy which lasted for two decades.
Comedy reflected this loss of vitality in its own way. The material of
comedy, for example, grew less chauvinistically Athenian and more
cosmopolitan. The development may be observed already in Aristo-
phanes' last two extant plays, the Ecclesiazusae and Plutus, which date
to 392-I and 388 respectively. These two comedies are rightly identified
as embryonic products of Middle Comedy. The hero of the Plutus is no
longer tilting at specifically Athenian bogies, such as corruption in the
city, or objectionable leaders. The villain of this piece is Poverty, and
the poverty is Hellenic, not merely Athenian. To use Professor R.
Cantarella's pungent phrase,2 the polis has been dissolved. There is at
the same time an increasing preoccupation in this play and the Ecclesiazu-
sae with ordinary people and with certain techniques of characterization
which prefigure Menander.3
As with content, so also with form. In Aristophanes' earlier comedies
the chorus voiced their unashamedly Athenian sentiments in their
entrance songs, in the parabases, in their lyric stanzas. In the Ecclesia-
zusae and Plutus, the parabasis has disappeared completely. The mag-
nificent choral songs that characterize Aristophanes' fifth-century
comedies have been replaced by ?ipo36Aicai,n terpolated lyrics whose
words were not considered worthy of preservation. Their place is
denoted in the manuscripts by the laconic note XOPOY, (a song) of
the chorus. By the time of the Plutus, the part specially composed for
the chorus is whittled down to their entrance song and a very few
further verses addressed by the chorus-leader to the actors. Here we
J. C. Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (Lyons, 156I), i. 7, p. I2.
2 Dioniso xl (1966), 41.
3 Cf. particularly G. Maurach, Acta Classica xi (I968), I ff.
68 FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER
are well on the way to the etiolated KCouOSch orus of Menander, which
entertained solely between the acts without being integrated into the
plot. And yet at this point a cautionary note must be sounded. We
must again acknowledge the limited validity of general statements where
material is so fragmentary. The evidence does not allow us to define
just when and how the new type of chorus replaced the old one. Ob-
viously, at some point in the period of Middle Comedy the Aristophanic
type of chorus finally died, and at some other point the new type of
chorus first appeared. The decline of the old type may have been
gradual, but was not necessarily also rectilinear. Both sorts of chorus
could have existed side by side for a spell. Certainly the old type of
chorus was still occasionally flickering in the second half of the fourth
century. The fragments of plays like Eubulus' Stephanopolides prove
this. This play, like many in Old Comedy, took its title from its chorus,
the garland-sellers, who appear to have had composed for them by
Eubulus an entrance song remarkably parallel to that of Aristophanes'
Ecclesiazusae, even though it was written about fifty years after that play
of Aristophanes, and only twenty years or so before Menander began
his career. Two delightful fragments of this entrance song have been
preserved by Athenaeus. The first (fr. 104 Kock, Edmonds) runs as
follows:
O happy the girl in her bower who wears
A garlando f breeze-bornep inks as she welds
Her sinuous form to her bridegroom'se mbrace,
His breath freshly sweet and his hair softly fine,
Like ivy that clings to the calamus reed,
Like ivy that grows in the spring and then fades
As it pines for the love of a tree-frog.
In another portion of this song, one of the chorus is addressed in exactly
the same way that individual members of the chorus are named in the
corresponding entrance song of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae (fr. 105):
Aigidion, now this garlandy ou'll wear,
Garlanda ll-colouredo f myriad flowers,
Garlands o pliant and lovely. O Zeus,
Surely with this you'll not fail to be kissed.
Thus choral devices of the Ecclesiazusae are repeated in a play produced
about half a century later. But that is only half the picture. Eubulus'
Stephanopolides was Janus-headed. Its chorus looks back to Aristo-
phanes and Old Comedy. Its plot, on the other hand, appears to look
forward to Menander and New Comedy, for the fragments reveal that
its characters included a procuress, a daughter whom she wishes to
become a hetaira, and two rival lovers. 'The great interest of these
FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER 69
fragments', Professor T. B. L. Webster has written, 'is the conjunction
of the typical characters of New Comedy . . . with a named chorus of
the old type.'"
A close study of the titles and fragments of Middle Comedy reveals
its wide variety of interest and theme. This is all the more remarkable
when it is contrasted against the more limited range of plot and milieu
in New Comedy. A paper designed to be heard in sixty minutes and
read in twenty needs to be relevantly and appropriately selective. Since
many previous writers have been misled by the bias of Athenaeus into
over-emphasizing the part played by descriptions of food and eating
in Middle Comedy, I shall prefer rather to single out three other of
its aspects here, equally representative and perhaps more interesting;
politics, philosophy, and myth.
Let us begin with politics, that most obsessive theme of extant Old
Comedy. Especially in the first half of the fourth century, plays on
political themes continued to be produced. Literary forms develop and
change, but slowly, gradually. Titles like Eubulus' Peace and Anaxan-
drides' Cities remind us, perhaps unjustifiably so, of fifth-century
comedy. The most notable political titles in the fourth century, how-
ever, are undoubtedly Mnesimachus' Philip and Eubulus' Dionysius.
The latter play was apparently an attack on the tyrant of Syracuse, but
the few fragments that remain from it are too scanty for us to be able
to identify the main lines of its attack. They include the following
description of Dionysius' treatment of flatterers and satirists (fr. 26):
Towards the pompous he is rather stern
And flatterers,t oo. But those who jest at his
Expense, he tolerates, and what is more,
He thinks that only they are free, even if
They're slaves.
Towards the end of the Middle Comedy period political plays seem to
have been far fewer, even if one writer who flourished in the last thirty
years of the fourth century, Timocles, may have tried to revive some-
thing of the old fierce bitterness and political commitment. But political
references can be introduced into comedies with a non-political theme,
and here, although our evidence is perhaps unrepresentative, witty
political comment on non-Athenians and Athenians alike must have
entertained audiences throughout the period, without any notable dimi-
nution in the second half of the fourth century. Thus all the important
Athenian politicians of the time came in for their share of ridicule, even
if their political beliefs were rarely criticized directly, and the brunt
of the ridicule fell on incidentals and accidentals.
I Studies in Later Greek Comedy (Manchester, I950o, I9702), 62. On the chorus in
Middle Comedy see especially K. J. Maidment, CQ xxix (I935), I ff.
70 FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER
Demosthenes, for instance, gave contemporary comedians an easy
opportunity for humorous disparagement by his notorious quibbling
antithesis in the dispute between Athens and Macedon over the owner-
ship of the barren island of Halonnesos in the Aegean Sea just north of
Euboea. In the year 343 Philip offered this island to the Athenians, but
Demosthenes then countered with the claim that as the island was de
jure Athenian and not Macedonian, Philip had no right to give (8o0vai),
but only to restore (&rroSouivai)t,h e island to the Athenians. This anti-
thesis became the popular catch-phrase of the time, and contemporary
dramatists made all the comic capital they could out of it by spatch-
cocking echoes of this ridiculous quibble into the most alien contexts.
Athenaeus collects a sample of these jokes, and one of the most interest-
ing examples comes in a play by Alexis, the Soldier (fr. 209). Two
unidentified characters are speaking:
A: Here, take it back.
B: What is it? A: Here, the baby I took from you,
I've come back with it again. B: How do you mean?
Don't you want to bring it up? A: It isn't ours.
B: Nor ours, neither. A: You gave it us.
B: No we didn't, we didn't give it to you.
A: What? B: No, we restoredi t to you!
A: But I'd no right to take it ...
It is a tantalizing fragment for several reasons, of which two are here
especially relevant. First, there is not much wit in this exchange; the
joke about giving and restoring depends entirely on the political echo
that has been foisted into a comically irrelevant context. Political jokes
of this kind quickly grow stale, and I dare say that Alexis' Soldier
paraded on the stage a very short time after the Halonnesos incident.
Secondly, the year 343 is twenty-two years before Menander began
writing, and writing about babies who had been found abandoned and
whose ownership was disputed by the finders. Once again a fragment
of Middle Comedy turns out to be Janus-headed, looking backwards
with its political echo and implicit joke against Demosthenes, but looking
forward to Menander and New Comedy with its pre-echo of a situation
in the Epitrepontes.
Old Comedy, on the evidence of Aristophanes' Clouds, sometimes
posed as the anti-intellectual opponent of philosophy. Here Aristo-
phanes' victims were Socrates and the sophists. The evidence for a
comparable stance in Middle Comedy is inevitably far more limited,
but several fragments show parallel ridicule of fourth-century sects like
Platonism and the Pythagoreans. The most interesting of these victims
of comic misrepresentation and abuse is obviously Plato himself,
particularly because the picture we receive through the admittedly
FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER 71
distorting lenses of the comic poets is rather different from the one
we get from Plato's written works. Here is a little snippet preserved
from a play by Alexis (fr. i):
You don't know what you're talking about. Run off
And get together with Plato, then you'll learn
All about soap (Airpov,i n fact) and onions ...
The precise point of this sneer is obscure now. Was it directed at the
Academy's interest in definition and classification towards the end of
Plato's life? Was there a dig at the elegant and fastidious cleanliness
that is said to have distinguished the members of the Academy from the
scruffier Pythagorean ascetics, those fourth-century hippies? Do those
onions purposely recall the vegetarian diet proposed by Plato for his
simplest ideal state in the second book of the Republic? Or is the comic
poet here indiscriminately labelling all philosophers as vegetarians just
because some of them (the Pythagoreans, for instance) were ?
Other digs at Plato and Platonism are sometimes less obscure. Epi-
crates' long anapaestic sneer (fr. I I) at the allegedly Platonic fondness
for definitions and identifications, and Ephippus' elaborate description
(fr. I4) of a Platonist from the Academy addressing the Athenian as-
sembly, are too well known to need quotation here. Less familiar is this
fragment from Alexis' Meropis (fr. I47), which seems to offer a man-in-
the-street's-or more precisely a woman-in-the-street's-view of the
philosopher:
You've come just in time, I'd almost given up hope.
I've been walking up and down, just like Plato,
But I haven't made any clever discoveries,
I've just worn out my feet.
Elegant philosophers like Plato, scruffy vegetarians like the Pytha-
goreans: both sorts were grist to the mill of Middle Comedy. But not
only politics and philosophy. The themes were even more varied, as
I have said, than the time and space at my disposal allow me to illustrate.
For example, sometime during the fourth century the theme of mistaken
identity seems first to have been exploited. It became very popular.
Modern scholars have posited with a great deal of plausibility Middle
Comedy Greek originals for the Amphitruo and Menaechmi of Plautus.
To me, however, the most interesting type of play during the period
of Middle Comedy was mythological burlesque. It was a type that
flourished particularly well in the earlier part of the period, here
doubtless continuing and developing the technique of Old Comedy
once again. It is an unfortunate accident that no play of Aristophanes
survives structured entirely as a myth travesty, despite the valuable
72 FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER
glimpses offered by scenes of parody in plays like the Acharnians and
Thesmophoriazusae. Nevertheless, the popularity of myth travesty as
a genre in the period of Old Comedy too is indicated by a wealth of
titles of lost plays, supplemented in a few cases by informative fragments
or descriptive material of other kinds. Of these Old Comedy burlesques
the best known is Cratinus' Dionysalexandros,w hose complicated plot is
preserved on a scrap of papyrus. It was an elaborate burlesque of the
story of the rape of Helen, incorporating political innuendoes relevant
to the time of the play's production about the beginning of the Pelo-
ponnesian War.
In the period of Middle Comedy, two related types of mythological
burlesque seem to have coexisted. The first would be a direct travesty
of a myth, with the heroes and heroines of the story redrawn as con-
temporary, rather vulgar Greeks and barbarians. How much the pro-
cess of vulgarization here owes to previous comedy, and how much to
the influence of Euripides, with his modernized and deglamorized views
of ancient legend, we do not now know. In these Middle Comedy direct
travesties Aphrodite, for example, becomes a bawd, advertising the fee
she charges for the services of her boy-friend Phaon (Plato's Phaon, fr.
I74); Pelops complains of the meagre meals he receives in Greece, after
he has been used in Persia to his large portions of roast camel (Anti-
phanes' Oenomaus or Pelops, fr. I72); and Orestes and Aegisthus leave
the stage at the end of their dispute together, the best of friends (an
unknown play, referred to by Aristotle in the Poetics).' Here is what
remains of an amusing exchange between Heracles and his teacher in
Alexis' Linus (fr. I35); Heracles and Linus are in the library:
Linus: Go and get a book out. Any you like.
Then read it. I've got Orpheus, Hesiod,
Greek tragedy, Epicharmus,H omer, Choerilus,
All sorts of stuff. That way you're sure to reveal
Your own true self, what you go for most.
Heracles: I'll take this. Lin.: First, just show me what it is.
Her.: A cookery book, that's the title. Lin.: You are
A cultured fellow, clearly, passing over
Such great literature,a nd choosing this,
Simus' manual. Her.: This Simus, who was he?
Lin.: A very talented man. He's just gone in
For tragedy, and accordingt o the connoisseurs
He's now by far the best cook among actors
And the best actor among cooks.
Alexis here does not miss a trick. The joke at the end, which inciden-
tally marks the first appearance in literature of one of the modern world's
I 1453a36-9
FROM ARISTOPHANES TO MENANDER 73
favourite joke formulas, is a good one. The hackneyed vulgarization of
Heracles' gluttony is given a new twist which enables the writer con-
comitantly to poke fun at a fashionable cookery-book of the time. And
the presence of Heracles and Linus in a fourth-century Athenian library
produces a delightful gallery of literary anachronisms; could Linus
perhaps have owned a text of Sophocles' Trachiniae or Euripides'
Heracles ?
Exploitation of a myth by comic vulgarization forms one kind of
burlesque apparently practised in Middle Comedy. The second kind
would subsume the parody of currently popular tragedies, and par-
ticularly those of Euripides. Both kinds of burlesque might sometimes
occur in the one comedy. It is true that there is no direct, incontrover-
tible evidence that tragic scenes or even whole tragedies were ever guyed
by the dramatists of Middle Comedy, but a number of hints do exist,
all pointing in the one direction. Euripidean melodramas such as the
Orestes were extremely popular in fourth-century Athens. They were
remounted on the stage frequently enough, and some of their lines became
familiar enough for them to be inserted into alien comic scenes for
parodic purposes. It is interesting to observe how many titles of Middle
Comedy plays are identical with titles from tragedy, especially Euripi-
dean ones. The playwright Eubulus, for instance, has fifty-eight titles
of Middle Comedy extant. About half of them are mythological in
implication. Eleven titles are here shared with Euripides, and eight with
other tragedians. Is it then unlikely that, at least in some of the plays
with shared titles, Eubulus would have parodied some of the more cele-
brated Euripidean scenes? Aristophanes after all had parodied scenes
from the Helen and Andromeda of Euripides already in his Thesmophori-
azusae, a comedy not predominantly devoted to the burlesque of myth.
Eubulus and other fourth-century comedians could hardly have done
less in plays whose titles so often reflected the tragic treatments of myth:
two Seven against Thebest itles, for example, at least two Helens, at least
one Bacchae, Antiope, Orestes . . .
In fact, if the sands of Egypt were ever to restore to us large sections
of just one play of Middle Comedy, I hope and pray it would turn out
to be a mythological burlesque partly at least devoted to the parody of
extant scenes of Euripides. The total loss of plays of this type makes
us pose so many questions, none of them at the moment remotely
answerable. The most interesting of these questions is one that I would
gladly give my eye teeth and what remains of my hair to know its answer.
Was there any connection between these postulated Middle Comedy
parodies of Euripidean tragedy, and the later New Comedy games played
by Menander with a Hellenistically intellectual cunning in some of his
plays, where a well-known situation is taken from a Euripidean play,