C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Selections
By Menander (c. 342–c. 292 B.C.)
All Terence’s comedies, save the ‘Phormio,’ are based on lost plays of Menander. Of direct Roman allusion they contain hardly anything. The one plot is, to be sure, in several cases, skillfully framed from two Greek dramas; but the adapter’s own contribution need have been little more than a graceful Latin style. Professor Lindsay seems to claim much more originality for the Roman author; and the problem cannot be definitely solved, save by the recovery of Menander’s own scrolls.
In his comparatively brief life Menander surpassed his chief rival in fruitfulness, leaving a hundred comedies. His popularity also must have come quickly after death. Though he gained only eight prizes, the fragments from his plays are by far the most copious of all, amounting to two thousand four hundred verses. Tantalizing as these bits are, they fully justify the exclamation of a famous Alexandrian scholar: “O Menander, and Life, which of you has imitated the other?” Goethe, also, counted the tolerant, philosophic Greek poet among his chief teachers.
I
“Crato, when you have died, you shall again
Be born; and shall be what you please,—dog, sheep,
Or goat, man, horse,—but live again you must:
That is your destiny. Choose what you will:”
“Anything rather,” I methinks would say,
“Make me, but man! Unjustly happiness
And sorrow fall to him, and him alone.
The horse that’s excellent has better care
Than does another; if a dog prove good,
He is more prized than is the baser hound.
The valiant cock hath better sustenance,
The ignoble is in terror of the brave.
But man, if he be good, yea, excellent
And noble,—that avails not, nowadays.
The flatterer fares the best of all, and next
The sycophant; while third the rogue is found.
Rather an ass I’d spend my life, than see
Men worse than I in higher honor set!”
T
Who, after he has viewed the splendors here,
Departeth quickly, whither he hath come.
This common sun, I mean, stars, waters, clouds,
And fire,—these shall he see if he abide
A century, or if his years be few;
Nor aught more glorious shall he see than they.
O
Pray, if you love me, mother, harp no more
Upon our family! ’Tis they to whom
Nature accords no other excellence
Who trust to monuments, or high descent,
And count how many ancestors were theirs!
Nor have they more than all men:
Who doth live
That had not grandsires? Else how came he here?
And if he cannot name them, ’tis some change
Of home, or lack of friends, accounts for this;
And wherein is he worse than those who boast?
He who is fitted for heroic deeds,
Mother, although he be an African,
Or savage Scythian,—he is noble born.
Was Anacharsis not a Scythian?
I
Who pay no interest, did not thus lament
The whole night through, nor tossing to and fro
Cry “Woe is me”; but sweetly took their rest,
While only beggars had such miseries.
But now I see you, who are called of men
The fortunate, behaving like ourselves.
Is Worry, then, to life so close akin?
She clings to luxury; the illustrious man
She leaves not;—with the poor she waxes old!
O
How pitiful the life they waste, their guards
Always about them, pent in citadels,
And ever ready to suspect that each
Who comes hath in his hand a dagger hid:
How bitter are the penalties they pay!
F
To know thyself: more profitable it is
To know thy neighbors!
T
Is by that conscience made most cowardly.
We cannot check, nor word that leaves the tongue.
In self-wrought worriment fast-bound he stands.
Himself is guilty—for credulity.
Good fortune would be lacking then for none.
We are ashamed to tell the deed we do.
Hath hoarded hatred doubling all his wealth.
Who nothing can enjoy of what he keeps.
The drunkard, but our own capacity!
Unless it be a friend’s unflinching word.
Leads forth but sacrifices to the foe.
The total mass of these comic fragments (chiefly from the Middle and New Comedy) is extremely large. They are most accessible in two volumes of the Didot series, ‘Fragmenta Comicorum’ and ‘Aristophanes, etc.’ The latter volume includes most of Menander and Philemon. There is added a Latin translation, with helpful notes. These estrays have not been translated into English,—and as a whole perhaps hardly deserve to be; but a most vivid picture of the Attic fourth century could be reconstructed from them, and numberless exquisite bits of pure poetry still glimmer in the dust.
Altogether, there is hardly another terra incognita so rich as this, lying so close outside the beaten track of classical scholarship. F. A. Paley, toward the end of his laborious life, made a rather flippant little volume of rhymed versions from the ‘Fragmenta Comicorum.’ Symonds, in the chapter mentioned above, has some good versions. Of Menander many of the finest sustained passages were rendered by Francis Fawkes, in the free Johnsonian fashion of the eighteenth century. But the field lies fallow.
The term “comedy” is, as we have tried to illustrate in the citations, rather too narrow. Plautus’s ‘Rudens,’ a romantic tale of shipwreck, may well remind us of Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ or ‘Winter’s Tale’; his ‘Captives’ is in its essential plot a story of heroic sacrifice for friendship’s sake, like the ‘Merchant of Venice.’ The Greek originals of such plays may have formed a transitional class of romantic dramas, not precisely tragic, and by no means essentially comic. This was doubtless especially true of the “Middle” period, when Athens had not forgotten her more heroic past, nor renounced her freedom forever. Agathon’s ‘Flower,’ again, may have been rather a melodramatic opera than a drama. In general, our traditional types are entirely too few and too rigid to include the numberless masterpieces of the Attic imagination.
The preceding paragraphs were written in 1897. During the twenty years following, Egypt has doubled for us the actual number of Menandrian verses which can be read more or less exactly. In particular, a single manuscript found at Aphroditopolis in 1905 contains very large though still fragmentary and tattered portions from four of the master’s plays. Not one, unhappily, has a tinge of the heroic quality to be felt in the Plautine ‘Captivi.’ Nor is one of the four plots fit, as is that of the ‘Trinummus,’ to be frankly recounted to “ingenuous boys and maids.” Every one of the four turns largely on the fate of an infant who is the fruit of shame if not also of violence. The social conditions are utterly ignoble; of patriotism or any large public duty there is hardly a whiff.
The most the enthusiastic editor can praise is “Menander’s inimitable dialogue and monologue.” The peculiar grace of the phrasing, while undeniable, of course evaporates in any translation. The wit, the quickness in repartee, may be fairly illustrated in a single scene, the one which gives its name to the ‘Epitrepontes’ or ‘Arbitrants,’ which will be cited following.
These “four plays” (all still fragments) are edited with much devotion and learning by Professor Edward Capps of Princeton (Ginn & Co., 1909). A clever but rather willful and “restored” English version has been published, with the Greek text, by “Unus Multorum” (Oxford, 1909). Among the volumes announced in the Loeb Library is one by Professor F. G. Allinson of Brown University, already known for spirited translations from classical poets. This volume will no doubt contain both an accurate text and a faithful translation of every significant fragment, however recently discovered, from any Menandrian play.