The story of the grumpy, cantankerous old man, Knemon, and his attempts to prevent the wealthy young Athenian, Sostrates, from marrying his daughter, Myrrhine.

The United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) entrusted author James Robinson with tracking down the place where the Nag Hammadi Codices had been discovered. Priests whom the author interviewed in the region told Robinson that the codices had once been in the possession of a priest in the town of Dishna, a bit further upstream than Nag Hammadi itself. Robinson found that this priest had not had the Nag Hammadi Codices but rather the Bodmer Papyri. For Dishna is where the monastery headquarters of the first monastic order was located. The Bodmer Papyri discovery consisted of all that was left of the library of the Pachomian monastic order: Coptic letters of Pachomius and very early Greek copies of Luke and John, perhaps donated when Athanasius was in hiding at the monastery. These treasures were preserved in a jar hidden in the mountain where monks were buried. This book traces the story of the Bodmer Papyri from beginning to end.

Taking a fresh look at mistaken identity in the work of an author who helped to introduce the device to comedy, in this book Professor Traill shows how the outrageous mistakes many male characters in Menander make about women are grounded in their own emotional needs. The core of the argument derives from analysis of speeches by or about women, with particular attention to the language used to articulate problems of knowledge and perception, responsibility and judgement. Not only does Menander freely borrow language, situations, and themes from tragedy, but he also engages with some of tragedy's epistemological questions, particularly the question of how people interpret what they see and hear. Menander was instrumental in turning the tragic theme of human ignorance into a comic device and inventing a plot type with enormous impact on the western tradition. This book provides original insights into his achievements within their historical and intellectual context.

Offers profiles of ancient Greek writers, including Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch, and traces the development of Greek literature.

The discovery on papyrus of plays by Menander, the greatest writer of Greek New Comedy, at last makes possible an evaluation on his own terms of an ancient author who, through the adaptations of Plautus and Terence, profoundly influenced the course of western drama. The present study establishes a critical perspective for understanding the kind of comedy Menander wrote, his roots, the theatrical effects he sought, and the extent of his achievement. Chapters on the major plays analyse their techniques of construction and characterisation, suggesting both the strengths and the limitations of Menander's comic tradition. This study is based on the Oxford Greek text but cites all ancient authors in translation to open the discussion to a wider audience. An introductory chapter places the tradition of New Comedy in the history of drama, and modern parallels are drawn wherever helpful. It will therefore be of value to students of drama as well as to classicists.

Menander was renowned—and still is—for his naturalistic representations of character and emotion. However, times change, and our ideas of what is ‘natural’ change with them. To appreciate Menander’s art fully, we need to attune ourselves to the expectations of his time, and for this there is no better guide than Aristotle (along with his successor Theophrastus), who described and analysed notions of character and emotion in brilliant detail. This book examines the relevant observations of Aristotle, and explores two of Menander’s comedies in this light. It also discusses how these comedies, which have only been recovered in the past century, were adapted and performed on the Modern Greek stage, where tastes were different and Menander had been virtually unknown. The book’s comparison of the ancient originals and the modern versions sheds new light on both, as well as on cultural values then and now.

Ancient Greek comedy relied primarily on its text and words for the fulfilment of its humorous effects and aesthetic goals. In the wake of a rich tradition of previous scholarship, this volume explores a variety of linguistic materials and stylistic artifices exploited by the Greek comic poets, from vocabulary and figures of speech (metaphors, similes, rhyme) to types of joke, obscenity, and the mechanisms of parody. Most of the chapters focus on Aristophanes and Old Comedy, which offers the richest arsenal of such techniques, but the less ploughed fields of Middle and New Comedy are also explored. Emphasis is placed on practical criticism and textual readings, on the examination of particular artifices of speech and the analysis of individual passages. The main purpose is to highlight the use of language for the achievement of the aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual purposes of ancient comedy, in particular for the generation of humour and comic effect, the delineation of characters, the transmission of ideological messages, and the construction of poetic meaning. The volume will be useful to scholars of ancient drama, linguists, students of humour, and scholars of Classical literature in general.