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xlviii General Introduction
achievement because we are unaware of the labour that it must have
cost him.
Such dramaturgical perfection requires a style that is equally perfect
and apparently just as effortless. This Menander had, and his command
of language was such that the later centuries of the ancient world made
collections of epigrammatical maxims from his plays. Many of these have
come down to us, and it is interesting to note that frequently they are
quite without value for what they say, but over and over again we meet
"what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." In the plays that
we have, such apophthegms are far from numerous, and there is no reason
to believe that Menander ever went out of his way to write very many
of them, but whenever they were dramatically appropriate his marvellous
style phrased them for all time. It is a style eminently flexible
and adaptable, always exactly adequate to whatever demands may be
made on it. Normally it is plain and simple, in keeping with the ideal
of the persons about whom and for whom Menander wrote, but it can be
pathetic and emotional or sparkling and clever, as the dramatic occasion
may require.
Whatever its mood, Menander's style is always clear, and his passion
for clarity may be the principal reason why his plays are never poetic,
even though they are always composed in verse. It is a verse that scans
and no more; otherwise it might just as well be prose. Yet we can but
seldom observe any traces of the restraints which even so free a verse
as the comic trimeter must have imposed. The order of the words is
the normal one of prose, and the dramatist never uses any forms or
phrases that were foreign to the speech of cultured Athenians in the
late fourth century.
With respect to the contents of their plays the dramatists of the New
Comedy operated in a narrow field. Their plots exhibit an astonishing
repetition of stereotyped motifs, and one is tempted to wonder why the
Athenian audiences did not grow weary of young men in love with putative
slave-girls who turn out to be foundlings of citizen extraction, and
hence may marry the young men after all, in spite of the opposition of
parents and the intrigues of slaves. But such things are merely the frame
within which the refined and fertile inventive genius of the playwright
exercised itself. In this department of the dramatic art Menander seems
to have been supreme.
Such are some of the perfections of Menander's genius. If they constituted
his sole merits he might command our boundless admiration, but
he could not excite our love. In trying to explain why he is able to do
this also we have first to get rid of a difficult prejudice. The choice of
the term comedy to designate Menander's plays is unfortunate in the
extreme, for there is nothing really funny about them. The plots most