Education: Presenting Menander

The greatest Hellenistic literary discovery since the Renaissance, crows Horizon about an exclusive story in its July issue. Readers with a classical bent or those who merely like a yarn about the farmer’s daughter are unlikely to argue. The story is the first English translation in poetry of The Curmudgeon (Greek: ∆σνκολς), written in 316 B.C. by the Greek Playwright Menander, whose 100-odd comedies were outranked in the ancient world only by those of Aristophanes. Out of Egypt. Even more intriguing. The Curmudgeon is the first complete play by Menander discovered by the modem world. Two years ago the only known copy, scrawled on papyrus possibly by a schoolmaster in the 3rd century A.D., turned up mysteriously in the hands of a Greek antique dealer in Cairo. The finder: Martin Bodmer, a millionaire Swiss banker and bibliophile, who whisked it off to his lavish private library in Geneva.

There the play—1,000 lines without punctuation or word spacing—was painstakingly translated into French by Classicist Victor Martin of Geneva University. Menander emerged (circa 342-291 B.C.) during the decline of Athens, an era dominated by the Macedonian occupation. His audiences were no longer intellectually vibrant Greeks; they had an appetite for pulp stories that might have made them content watching a TV western. “Stay at home.” one of his characters says. “A man is free nowhere else.” Menander gave the Greeks sharply etched, lifelike stories, tenderly observed and hilariously written.

He was the poet who wrote: “Think like a free man and you will not be a slave.” and “All that defiles a man comes from within.” To St. Paul, he was the only pagan dramatist worthy of quoting: “Evil communications corrupt good manners.”

Down the Well. Written when he was 25., The Curmudgeon is minor compared to the later shrewd comedies that inspired (by way of plagiarisms by Plautus) European playwrights from Racine to Giraudoux.

The play is still pretty funny—the tale of a misogynist farmer who keeps trying to get rid of a rich Athenian lad in love with his daughter. (Solution: the farmer falls down his well, is rescued with the help of the swain, grudgingly hands over his daughter.) Funniest part is the traffic of devout Athenians to the temple of Pan near the farmer’s shack; their animal “sacrifices” always turn out to be raucous sheep barbecues with only the bones left for Pan. Horizon’s translator (and chief editorial adviser) is Glasgow-born Gilbert Highet, the lively author (The Art of Teaching) and classicist who teaches Greek and Latin at Columbia University. It took him a week to translate the play’s six-beat Greek iambics into six-beat English iambics.

His version is slangy, a bit hammy in spots, and not likely to strain the minds of readers. Highet hopes that it would have pleased Menander, “who loved people, like Shakespeare and Moliere. and so transformed Greek comedy from its original fantasy into reality.”