Menander

What the sand gave back of Menander, leading figure of New Comedy: the Dyscolos, the only comedy to survive whole (969 lines, recovered on papyrus in 1958), substantial fragments of six other plays (The Samian Woman, The Arbitration, The Girl with the Shaved Head, The Shield, The Sicyonian, The Woman Hated), and the Sayings, a collection of three hundred and five single-line gnomic verses. Celebrated in antiquity ('O Menander, O Life, which of you imitated the other?'), then almost entirely lost until its rediscovery on papyrus in the twentieth century. The comedies, outside the reference digital corpus, are given as Notices; the Sayings carry a Greek text and, for want of a public-domain French translation, an original translation made for this edition, with a running commentary.

Reading room

Inside pages — read the excerpt in the reading room

Colophon