Would Socrates say so?
His last surviving play, Wealth, was produced in 388 B.C. Wealth is notoriously blind, and gives his benefits to the
wrong people, so Apollo shows him how blindness can be cured by Asclepius at Athens. Wealth does recover his
eyesight, but the resulting redistribution of money produces comic confusion. The old rich woman loses her
gigolo, because now he has enough without her; Hermes reports chaos among the gods; Wealth gets enthroned in
his home of the good old days, the national treasury inside the west end of the Parthenon. This play has no choral
lyrics and hardly any chorus, its arguments are in social and philosophic, not in political terms, the humour is more
often low than obscene, and even the most farcical episodes begin to be handled more gently.
Menander
Comedy never seems to have hardened or died on its feet as tragedy did, but the next substantial glimpse that we
get of Athenian comedy in good health is many years after the deaths of Aristophanes and the comic poet Plato. A
generation had passed, and few alive had any serious recollection of the fifth century, when Menander was born in
342 B.C. He lived through the reign of Alexander and its aftermath. He was a baby when the freedom of Greece
was lost, and by the time he was twenty Alexander was dead. His Athens was cosmopolitan, crowded, full of
foreign business. But it could not take its fate into its own hands or alter its future. Even in private life fate was
something that was done to you; it was what happened more than what you did. Great cities had their Lady Luck as
well as individuals; in a world in which everything was uncertain, people concentrated on their private lives.
Philosophy was some consolation; it implied an order of a kind.
This state of things produced a comedy of manners, with social targets and an action of limited consequences. It
depended on surprise piled on surprise by the turning wheel of fortune, and the guiding genius of the comic poet
came to include some of the skills of the modern thriller-writer. Writing for the theatre became a sophisticated,
technical matter. It was no longer a mystery or a matter of genius. And yet what was produced is astonishing. The
numerous papyrus texts of Menander recovered in the last hundred, even in the last thirty, years, have heavily
reinforced his reputation. He is funnier, faster, and stronger altogether than scholars used to expect. It is much
better to emphasize heavily the intervening darkness between him and Aristophanes, to forget regret, and to see
Menander's theatrical poetry as a new-created world. His work has not been successfully translated. He was a poet
after all, and his subtly modulated verse demands more understanding of poetry than it has been offered.
One could hardly go beyond the mythic hero and the comic type after all, in a theatre in which masks were still
worn, though the masks were more realistic now, and so were the clothes and settings. Still, it is surprising how
much can be done with type-cast characters. One may question whether Agatha Christie in our own times ever
used anything else, though she was no poet, and not so great an artist as Menander.
His world is one in which soldiers thought to be killed in some Asian battle turn out to be 'living and saved as
never before', thus confusing people's hopes to inherit. A chest is fished out of the sea, the shipwrecked come to
land, or a treasure gets dug up in a field. Intrigues between lovers and confidential slaves produce intricate crossed
lines. Slaves turn out to be free-born, kidnapped in childhood. Families are reunited, and improper marriages
become suddenly possible. The love interest is not dominant, though; it is largely secondary to the relationships
and fortunes of the inner family, and a young man may as easily fall for a whore as for a character capable of a
permanent romantic link. This is one inherited convention among others.