Menander
（
Μένανδρος).
1.
The chief representative of the New Comedy. He was born in B.C. 342, at Athens, of a
distinguished and wealthy family, received a careful education, and led a comfortable and
luxurious life, partly at Athens, and partly at his estate in the Piraeus, the harbour of
Athens, enjoying the intimate friendship of his contemporary and the friend of his youth,
Epicurus, of Theophrastus, and of Demetrius Phalereus. He declined an invitation from King
Ptolemy I. of Egypt, so as not to have his comfort disturbed. At the height of his poetic
productiveness he was drowned while bathing in the Piraeus, at the age of fifty-two. His
uncle Alexis had given him some preparatory training in dramatic composition. As early as 322
he made his first appearance as an author. He wrote above a hundred pieces, and worked with
the greatest facility; but he only obtained the first prize for eight comedies, in the
competition with his popular rival Philemon. The admiration accorded him by posterity was all
the greater: there was only one opinion about the excellence of his work. His principal
merits were remarkable inventiveness, skilful arrangement of plots, life-like painting of character, a clever and refined wit, elegant and graceful language, and a
copious supply of maxims based on a profound knowledge of the world. These last were
collected in regular anthologies, and form the bulk of the extant fragments. Unfortunately
not one of his plays has survived,
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Menander. (Vatican.)
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although they were much read down to a late date. However, apart from about
seventy-three titles, and numerous fragments (some of considerable length), we have
transcripts of his comedies (in which, of course, the delicate beauties of the original are
lost), in a number of Latin plays by Plautus (
Bacchides, Stichus, Poenulus）
and Terence (
Andria, Eunuchus, Heauton Timorumenos, Adelphi). Lucian also, in
his Conversations of Hetaerae, and Alciphron in his epistles, have made frequent use of
Menander. Menander's most popular play seems to have been the
Thais, a line of
which is quoted by St. Paul (1 Cor. xv. 33). The fragments of Menander were printed in the
collections of Meineke
(1841) and Kock
(1880). See the monographs
by Guizot
(1855), Horkel
(1857), and Lübke
(1892).
2.
A Greek rhetorician of Laodicea, who probably lived at the end of the third century after
Christ. He is the author of two treatises about speeches for display, which add to our
knowledge of the theory of the sophistic type of oratory. They can be found in Spengel's
Rhetores Graeci, iii. 331- 446.
3.
A Byzantine historian of the sixth century A.D., who wrote a history of the Empire from
559-582, in eight books, of which some portions are preserved, edited by Bekker and Niebuhr
(Bonn, 1830).
