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From Aristophanes to Menander Author(S): W. Geoffrey Arnott Source: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol

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From Aristophanes to Menander Author(S): W. Geoffrey Arnott Source: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol 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 Accessed: 25/11/2009 09:33 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press and The Classical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Greece & Rome. http://www.jstor.org 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 KCOIOSof 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 Oiberdie 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.
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