Does anyone have any resources they recommend for reading Menander in Greek? (The Dyskolos, Epitrepontes, or Samia). Thus far a text I’ve read has normally been available on Perseus or the TLG which made it very easy to look up words I did not know. I can certainly go back to using dictionaries in a more old-fashioned way, but if anyone had any tips or resources that would make reading these texts swifter, I would greatly appreciate it!
What is TLG?
There a good Bryn Mawr Commentary on the Dyskolos by David Konstan, but the Samia is an infinitely better play (and its themes are very topical), and now there’s a first-rate Cambridge green-and-yellow on it by Alan Sommerstein, though it may be too advanced for beginners. The Loeb Menander by Geoffrey Arnott, three volumes, is accessible and excellent but not fully up to date. It’s hard to keep up with new discoveries but things seem to have mostly settled down, at least for the time being. So the Loeb may be the thing for you to use. You can cover up the facing page!
Menander is very much a male preserve, unfortunately.
Thanks mwh, I had been hoping to avoid using a bilingual text, but it seems like it’s the only option if I want to speed up my reading. I’ll use the Loeb then, and have a look at the commentaries you recommended!
If you know French, here’s the text of Dyskolos with vocabulary:
I read through the first couple of acts of Dyskolos with the Loeb translation for help during my second year of Greek, I think. I eventually put it away as I wanted to read Menander later when I could read him easily.
Your thread reminded me that I wanted to get back to Menander some time, so I read through Aspis in the Sandbach OCT and Dyskolos in the Lloyd-Jones OCT this week. I actually wound up re-reading Dyskolos a second time yesterday, after a first read on Christmas.
I thoroughly enjoyed the plot setup of Aspis, and the creative plan in lines 329-342 was worth the price of admission. The ah-ha moment was wonderful.
On my Christmas read-through of Dyskolos, I thought that it was simply a fun comedy, but fell into an easy resolution with the well scene. Like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, the eventual resolution and marriages are clear from Act I. The constant stream of items into the well along with the hysterical reactions of the old lady effectively signal the main event. The fun is not in where they are going, but in being along for the ride.
My first-read criticism, however, was that the central conflict is resolved too easily and the marriages are put together lazily. But on the second-read I found that I had mistook the central conflicts. The hardest difficulties are not the separated lovers, but that Sostratus and Gorgia and Cnemo are all unsuitable as husbands until each is transformed. Sostratus begins as a rich idle youth who can’t speak for himself, and is transformed by hard work and love. Gorgia is cured by wealth. And Cnemo is forced into society by a near-death experience followed by a hazing incident. The characters are better done psychologically than they first appear.
Menander’s vocabulary is slightly easier than Euripides for me, coming from Plato. But the prose writers seem to be a decent bridge to him, so maybe it is worth waiting until your Greek is good enough to simply read through without the help of a Loeb or commentary, like you would a modern playwright. I’m glad I have.
I’ll probably give Samia a try today, and then a few of the other plays in Sandbach at random.
Like Joel, I was also inspired to look at the Dyskolos by this thread. I have a bilingual edition that I acquired many years ago. I was surprised that I found it not particularly difficult, although I made no effort to avoid the translation. I decided to put aside Xenophon for the moment and read the play.
There are a lot of first and second person singular verb forms, including a lot of perfects, including middle perfects which I had not encountered much before. There’s also a lot of elision. It feels like this is the way people actually talked. Xenophon, of course, reports speeches not everyday chat.
I can see why people consider this play to be inferior. The plot is not particularly interesting. I can imagine that the greater complexity of other plays would add pleasure. I did laugh at the explanation of why the young lover’s mother had traveled to a remote corner of Attica to offer a sacrifice at the shrine of Pan. She dreamt that Pan gave her son a goat hide to wear and a mattock and ordered him to dig in a nearby field. I expect that other plays by Menander will offer more delightful ironies.
And they take the dream figuratively (instead of literally), thinking that the son is going to experience dire poverty, leading into the major theme of rich to poor and poor to rich, and the social interactions of both groups towards each other. It’s (partly) a comedy of manners rather than the melodrama you might expect.
It took me two reads through Samia to work it out. The biggest difficulty for me was grasping that Samia = Chrysis, which I wasn’t really sure of until I had finished the play the first time.
The play drew me in, but the central misunderstanding that drives all the conflict of Act IV got on my nerves, especially on the second read, patiently waiting for it all to be explained away. Also, the technical mastery and use of staging that was present in Dyskolos is not really used here. The characters are far more realistic in Samia (absent the forced credulities of Act IV), but the meat grinder is not grinding them as tightly or as comically. The Oedipus moment was the height of the comedy, but might have worked better if the characters had been less real and more exaggerated.