by Stuart Kelly
Aristophanes’ early career quickly became embroiled in controversy. His lost play, The Babylonians of 426 B.C.E., attacked Cleon, the demagogue who had risen in influence after the death of Pericles. Cleon, unlike Pericles, attempted to use the law to quell criticism, and it would appear that Aristophanes was fined. Nonetheless, by 422 B.C.E., Aristophanes was so successful that the only reason his play The Wasps came second in the dramatic contest was that he had anonymously entered another, The Preview, as if it were the work of one Philonides. Despite winning, The Preview is lost. The attacks on Cleon continued.
Aristophanes’ plays combined Crates’ philosophical speculation with Cratinus’ energetic satire. Aristophanes was a very literary comedian, and the loss of The Poet, The Muses, Sappho, and Heracles the Stage Manager not only robs us of examples of the earliest theatrical self-consciousness, but also prevents us seeing, askance, the literary world that indubitably furnished him with ample targets for ridicule.
Today, Aristophanes’ work seems for the most part unaffected by the obsolescence that so often engulfs comedies from the past. The founding of “Cloud Cuckoo Land” in The Birds or the sex strike in Lysistrata seem just as fresh, even if puns about figs and informers, or double entendres about piglets, disappear in translation. Of all the Attic Greek writers, Aristophanes exhibits the highest frequency of hapax legomenon: the one-off use of a word. Only in Aristophanes could we read an adjective like archaiomelisidonophrynicherata, meaning “in the old, sweet style of Sidonian Maidens in the work by Phrynicus.” What makes him difficult also makes him unique.
Toward the end of his life, in Wealth, his last extant play—and apparently in the two lost subsequent plays, Aeolosicon and Kokalos— Aristophanes paved the way for the “New Comedy” of Menander, simplifying the plots and reining in much of the fantasia and verbal pyrotechnics of his earlier work. He had written another play called Wealth twenty years previously, but the earlier work no longer exists to contrast with the later, less flamboyant style. His son, Araros, continued the family tradition of comedy, though under the constraints of the new antilibel laws.
There were, of course, some critics for whom Aristophanes’ particular brand of comedy was anathema. Plutarch, writing in the first century C.E., fulminated that “his use of words combines the tragic and the comic, the grandiose and the prosaic, the obscure and the commonplace, bombast and elevation, verbal diarrhea and outright sickening rubbish”—in many ways, the very qualities we still admire.
Xenocles and Others
{fourth century B.C.E.}
POOR XENOCLES! ALL we know of him comes from Aristophanes’ comedies, in which he becomes almost a byword for weak writing. His only lines, from the tragedy Tlepolemus, are held up for mockery in Aristophanes’ The Birds. All that has been retained for posterity is
O cruel goddess, O, my chariot smashed Pallas, thou hast destroyed me utterly!
But he is not alone in having himself been destroyed utterly: what of
ACCIUS, one of the first tragedians in Latin;
ARISTAEUS OF PROCONNESUS, whose three-volume Arimaspeia dealt with the far north;
ARISTEA’s Who the Jews Are;
ASTYDAMAS, the grandnephew of Aeschylus whose self-promotion was so blatant the Athenians tore down his statue;
CALLIPEDES, the Roman comedian who specialized in running on the spot;
CARCINUS’ Thyestes, with its birthmark recognition scene;
CHAEREMON, author of The Centaur;
CHOERILUS, the poet whose epic on Alexander only had seven good lines;
CINAETHON’s epic, Oedipus;
CRATIPPUS, the inventor of Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid;
DICAEOGENES, whose Cyprians involved Teucer bursting into tears at a portrait;
ENNIUS, the father of Roman poetry, who wrote, “No sooner said than done; so acts the man of worth” in his Annals;
EPIMARCHUS, the cookery writer;
EUGAMMON OF CYRENE, who wrote the sequel to The Odyssey;
EUPOLIS, the comedian rumored drowned by Alcibiades;
LESCHES OF MITYLENE, author of the Little Iliad;
MAGNES, the comedian who put talking animals into plays;
NEOPHRON, who introduced onstage torture and child-minders for young actors;
NICOCHARES, who showed men in a bad light;
PYTHEAS, author of On the Oceans;
STESICHORUS, whose father was reputedly Hesiod and whose soul was Homer’s, who wrote, in twenty-six volumes, The Boar Hunter;
TELECLIDES’ version of Cloud Cuckoo Land; or
VARRO OF ATAX’s adaptation of Apollonius’ Argonautica?
It is only through Suetonius that we have an account of the reign of Caligula, since Tacitus’ version is lost, along with Suetonius’ Royal Biographies,Roman Manners, Roman Festivals, Roman Dress, Greek Games, Grammatical Problems, Methods of Reckoning Time, Essay on Nature, Critical Signs Used in Books, The Physical Defects of Mankind, and the wonderful Lives of the Famous Whores.
Technology is no bulwark. Crashed software, surreptitious viruses, an unthinking click, or a toppled drink can dispense with writing quicker than flames, waves, or the stale air of library cellars. At least Xenocles, in a sad, etiolated, and pitiable way, is still known to have been a writer. Thousands had a far more absolute extinction.
Menander
{c. 342–291 B.C.E.}
ARISTOPHANES OF BYZANTIUM, who held the prestigious position of chief librarian at Alexandria, thought that the works of the comic playwright Menander were second only in talent to those of the divine Homer. Whereas the epic excelled in depicting the deeds of gods and heroes, the outcome of which shaped whole civilizations, Menander’s work was the pinnacle of a different order of magnitude. In plays like The Hated Man and The Arbitration, he had shown people just like his audience, speaking as they did, in situations they recognized: in short, his plays established a sparkling new form of realism. Or, as Aristophanes of Byzantium enthused, “O Menander! O Life! Which of you is imitating the other?”
Critical veneration of Menander’s “New Comedy” was a commonplace in antiquity. No less a person than Julius Caesar dismissed the writer Terence as being merely “a half-pint Menander.” The Roman rhetorician Quintilian recommended that all aspiring orators study the plays assiduously, since “the picture of life he presents to us . . . is so brilliant, there is such an abundance of invention and turns-of-phrase, he is so adept in every situation, characterization and emotion.”
Plutarch’s encomium of Menander in the Moralia becomes dizzy, encapsulating the widely held sense of his dramatic preeminence:
Menander’s charm makes him utterly satisfying, for in these works that present with universal appeal the splendors of Greece, society finds its culture, the schools their study, the theater its triumph. The nature and possibilities of literary elegance were first revealed by him: he had conquered every quarter of the world with his invincible glamour, bringing all ears, all hearts, under the sway of the Greek language. What reason does any educated man have for entering a theater, except Menander?
This paradigm of refinement was born in Athens around 342 B.C.E. His family seems to have been well-to-do, and his father, Diopeithes, may have been a general. His uncle, Alexis, was a remarkably prolific writer of comedies—the Suda suggests 245, and Plutarch claims he died while being given the triumphal laurels onstage at the age of 106. Except for titles, Alexis’ only literary remains are fragments recorded in anthologies of wise or witty proverbs—such priceless pearls as “There is only one cure for the illness known as love: prostitutes,” “How come cookbooks outsell Homer?” and “Human life is completely mad.” In these bons mots, Alexis parodied the teachings of both ascetic Pythagoreans and the abstruse Platonists. His nephew may have imbibed some of his intellectual prejudices, and was known to be a friend of Epicurus.
Menander’s choice of vocation may also have been influenced by his teacher, Theophrastus. Theophrastus had been a pupil of both Plato a
nd Aristotle, and succeeded Aristotle as head of the Lyceum, inheriting his library and his private papers. Aristotle himself nicknamed him “Theophrastus,” meaning “divine speaker.” Theophrastus became a much-loved and respected teacher; and, when Ptolemy Soter was beginning to assemble the Great Library at Alexandria, it was to the libraries of Aristotle and Theophrastus that he turned.
Theophrastus’ book The Characters is the clearest indication of his influence on Menander. Although it was published a few years after Menander’s first recorded play, it seems likely that the young playwright was aware of Theophrastus’ classification of humans into clearly recognizable types. These observations of boasters, bumpkins, and boors are translated into the stock characters of the New Comedy stage; the archetypes segue into theatrical stereotypes. The text we have of The Charactersis, unfortunately, itself incomplete, covering only the negative personality traits.
Menander’s first victory at the dramatic festival was in 317 B.C.E., with a play called Dyskolos. There would be few repetitions of the event, and the later epigram writer Martial took some comfort in the idea that true genius is unappreciated during one’s lifetime. How Menander felt may be surmised from an anecdote where he berated Philemon, his great dramatic rival, asking, “Why don’t you blush every time you beat me?”
Like Alexis, Menander wrote voluminously and, apparently, with ease. The use of generic characters in formulaic circumstances allowed for near-infinite variations. Once, when being badgered by a friend about not having completed his contribution for that year’s festival (and hampering impatient actors, scene painters, and musicians), Menander breezily retorted, “The play is done. All that remains is to write the dialogue.” If you have one play, so his logic runs, you pretty much have them all.
The theater in Menander’s day was changing. His friend Demetrius of Phalerum, the Macedonian viceroy of Athens, had, among other tax breaks for the aristocracy, discontinued the payment of theorica, a fund that reimbursed artisans who wished to attend the festival. It was therefore a new, more “middle-class” audience that could enjoy plays like The Shoemaker, The Goat-herds, and The Farmer. Although Anaxandrides was reputedly the first to make “love and seduction” the staple of the comedy, Ovid tells us that Menander “never wrote a play without romance in it.”
Menander died, drowned, while swimming, or failing to, at Piraeus. He was to become so famous that a later writer, Alciphron, had a modest success with a fictitious correspondence between Menander and his mistress Glycera (whose name Menander had immortalized in The Girl Who Gets Her Hair Cut). The Athenians erected a statue to him, as they had done for the great tragedians.
Menander’s fame grew and grew. Diphilus, Ephippus, Xenarchus, Antiphanes, Aristophon, and Anaxilas fell from favor. Even Philemon and Alexis were lost. And the works of Menander, bolstered by the posthumous panegyrics of orators, poets, and moralists, eventually accompanied them. Just over a thousand lines were kept as proverbs in commonplace compilations. When Goethe praised the “unattainable charm” of Menander, he chose his adjective carefully. The last known manuscript had disappeared in Constantinople two hundred years previously.
Hold on, hold on. Cut. Imagine, for a moment, reader, the sound of a stylus ripped hastily across the surface of a record.
We got him back.
Nineteen hundred and five, Aphroditopolis, Egypt, and the house of a lawyer, Flavius Dioskoros, was being excavated. In a large jar, a sheaf of fifth-century C.E. papyrus documents was discovered. Securing the bundle were fragments of five plays by Menander. Among parts of The Woman from Samos and The Arbitration were twelve shorter extracts from a play called Dyskolos.
The “Cairo Codex,” as it was called, caused ripples of appreciation and murmurs of approval in the world of classical studies. But when Professor Victor Martin of the University of Geneva announced nearly fifty years later that he had acquired a rare third-century papyrus from Martin Bodmer, the Swiss bibliophile and book collector, it was a sensation. The “Bodmer Codex” had nearly all of the rest of Dyskolos. The play, translated as The Bad-Tempered Man, The Misanthrope, or Old Cantankerous, could be staged for the first time since antiquity.
Then the trouble really started.
Contemporary critics were well aware of their classical counterparts’ lofty evaluation of Menander: expectations would naturally run high. Textual critics struggled to produce a workable version; after all, as the manuscript stood, there were neither stage directions nor line attributions. The script was reassembled, like Frankenstein’s monster, edited, translated, and on Friday, October 30, 1959, broadcast by the BBC.
“Tell me why Menander is anything but a wet fish?” G. S. Kirk, the Regius Professor of Greek, was reported to have said when visiting Yale. Christopher Fry was less outspoken, referring to it in the introduction to the English translation as “slight and predictable.” Even Philip Vellacott, the translator, admitted it was “not a work of . . . calibre” and “remarkably unambitious.” Special pleading, especially since it was known to be a juvenile work, did little to enhance the reputation of the newly discovered play. Euripides, the last great tragedian, had experimented with tragicomic plays with magical resolutions: Erich Segal, author of Love Story and professor of humanities, now referred to Menander as “a suburban Euripides.”
Moreover, as more of the papyri were deciphered, more problems with the “comic genius” became evident. The author whose “lifelike-ness” was proverbial appeared to have a curious penchant for incredible revelations about orphans’ parentage and other hackneyed dramatic devices. Some brave critics suggested that the Greece of Menander’s day, recovering from civil war and Alexandrian belligerence, did, indeed, have an inordinate number of orphans. Whether many of them were reconciled with their families, who turned out to be the very individuals they had, unaware, grown up among, is not known.
One of the other favorite plots could be summarized as: “Whoops! I raped someone last night,” which normally ended with perpetrator and victim realizing they are the love of each other’s lives, and getting married. The “narrowly avoided incest” setup attracted equally few admirers.
Menander had been regarded as the hypothetical progenitor of a dramatic line that culminated in Shakespeare, Molière, and Feydeau. Introducing him back into the theatrical repertoire now seemed as sensible as cloning a caveman and asking him to cook for a dinner party. Lost, Menander was a genius; found, he was an embarrassment.
There was one other important, and unlikely, figure in antiquity who appreciated the plays of Menander: St. Paul. Verse 33 of chapter 15 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians is, though unacknowledged in the letter, a quotation from Menander. “Be not deceived,” says Paul. “Evil communications corrupt good manners,” a line from Menander’s play about a courtesan, Thais. St. Paul does not quote from any other nonbiblical source, and the thought of the erstwhile persecutor of, Damascene convert to, and martyred sufferer for Christianity—the very individual who did most to change a Jewish apocalyptic sect into a world-governing religion—enjoying a little light comedy is boggling enough in itself.
Menander might well have preferred to stay lost, rather than be deflated by posterity. But although he never made it on Broadway, he may have approved of his work, hidden like a stealthy mine, endangering the edifice of the doctrine of scriptural authority.
Callimachus
{c. 320–c. 240 B.C.E.}
TO BE CALLED “sophisticated” is an ambiguous plaudit. The luster of polish contains a suspicion of superficial veneer; suave urbanity raises the shadow of oleaginous artifice. Sophisticated authors may well be complex, but their cleverness is always denounced as mere cleverness. They may be charming, refined, chic, and stylish, but the hint lingers that they lack a soul. Sophistication is a taunt and a triumph, an accomplishment and a snub.
Callimachus would have easily appreciated the manifold, contradictory meanings bound up in that single word. Born in Cyrene, he rose to a position of eminence in the
Alexandrian Library, which he catalogued in 120 scrolls called the Pinakes (or Tablets) of the Illustrious in Every Branch of Literature and What They Wrote. His own output purportedly exceeded eight hundred volumes, and covered a polymathic plenitude of interests: as well as satires, tragedies, and comedies, he wrote On the Changes of the Names of Fish, On Winds, On Birds, On the Rivers of Europe,The Names of the Months According to Tribes and Cities, and even A Collection of Wonders of the Entire World According to Location.
All we have left of this encyclopedic oeuvre is six hymns and a collection of fragments and epigrams. Two poems, the Aitia, or Origins, and the epyllion Hekale, can be partially reconstructed: the fifty-eight slivers of Hekale, some from papyri and others preserved by commentators, make up around a fifth of the entire poem. It is enough for us to glimpse not only Callimachus’ character, but also his literary ideology.
Callimachus preferred finely honed, elegant poems. Brevity was a virtue, and poetry, he wrote, should be judged by the art, not the mile. He abhorred the bombast of the “cyclic” epic writers, comparing their work to a sluggish, muddy river, and wryly suggesting that whereas Zeus might like thundering, he did not. In the “Hymn to Apollo,” he puts his partialities in the mouth of the god of poetry himself: sacrifices should be fattened animals, but the Muse was best when slender. Intellectually precocious and linguistically deft, his poetry announced itself as a break from tradition.
He not only promoted his own aesthetic, but lambasted his opponents, calling them the Telchines, after a primitive race of invidious spirits from Rhodes. A long-standing legend pits Callimachus against his onetime pupil and the future head librarian of Alexandria, the poet Apollonius of Rhodes, whose four-volume epic The Argonautica was presumed to be the object of Callimachus’ derision. Ovid translated a poem by Callimachus called The Ibis, though the original Greek is lost. It is a fearsome pasquinade about the carcass-eating stork, a bird “full of filth.” Ancient scholars read the poem as another sustained attack on the author of The Argonautica. The sneering association between Apollonius, the Telchines, and their mutual homeland of Rhodes seems clear, but the reason why an ibis might remind readers of Apollonius is not.