Menander bad company
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Menander
Athenian comic playwright (c. 342/41 – c. 290 BC)
For other uses, see Menander (disambiguation).
Menander (; Ancient Greek: ΜένανδροςMenandros; c. 342/41 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek dramatist and the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy.[1] He wrote 108 comedies[2] and took the prize at the Lenaia festival eight times.[3] His record at the City Dionysia is unknown.
He was one of the most popular writers and most highly admired poets in antiquity, but his work was considered lost before the early Middle Ages. It now survives only in Latin-language adaptations by Terence and Plautus and, in the original Greek, in highly fragmentary form, most of which were discovered on papyrus in Egyptian tombs during the early to mid-20th-century. In the 1950s, to the great excitement of Classicists, it was announced that a single play by Menander, Dyskolos, had finally been rediscovered in the Bodmer Papyri intact enough to be performed.
Life and work
Menander was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is iden
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Bodmer Papyrus: History Becomes Reality
Bodmer Papyrus: History Becomes Reality
Sever Juan Voicu
Scriptor Graecus, Vatican Apostolic Library
Bodmer Papyrus 14-15 arrives at the Vatican
Two dates: on 30 April 1451, Pope Nicholas V established with a Brief a library "pro communi doctorum virorum commodo" (to facilitate the research of scholars). Thus, today's Vatican Apostolic Library came into being.
On 22 November 2006 the Bodmer Papyrus 14-15, generously donated to His Holiness Benedict XVI by the Sally and Frank Hanna Family Foundation and the Solidarity Association (U.S.A.), and the Mater Verbi/Hanna Papyrus Trust, was deposited in the Vatican Apostolic Library.
During the five and a half centuries between these two dates, despite various adversities, such as the losses occasioned by the Lansquenets during the Sack of Rome (1527) and the transfer of manuscripts to Paris in the Napoleonic period, the Vatican Apostolic Library was faithful to the mandate it had received to enrich, safeguard and preserve with the proper care the cultural treasures entrust
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Menander of Athens was the foremost representative of Greek New Comedy; he was born in Athens around 342 b.c. and died, allegedly by drowning in the harbour of the Piraeus, around 292 b.c. During his lifetime he wrote around 96 plays, competing with his two main rivals Diphilus and Philemon.
Menander, for a long time, was only known from excerpts quoted in the texts of later writers (like the Theophoroumene fragment below), and from Latin adaptations of the plays made by Plautus and Terence. The ‘Latin Menander’ consists of the following plays: Terence Eunuchus, Andria, Heautontimorumenos and Adelphoe; and Plautus Bacchides, Cistellaria, Stichus and (more doubtfully) Aulularia. Recent developments have allowed us to improve our knowledge of Greek comedy, thus also increasing our understanding of Roman comedy’s autonomy.
At the end of the nineteenth century, scholars began to discover early copies of texts written on vellum and papyrus; among the very earliest finds was a page of a play by Menander, the Phasma. A little later, a large codex was discovered in C
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