MENANDER AND NEW COMEDY

The form of New Comedy

During the century following the death of Alexander the Great, hundreds of comic plays were written and produced all over the Greek world, and to this style of comedy later scholars gave the name ‘New Comedy’, to distinguish it from the ‘Old Comedy’ of Aristophanes, Cratinus and Eupolis. The principal dramatists of New Comedy – Menander, Alexis, Diphilus, Philemon and Apollodorus – all worked in Athens, which continued to be considered the true home and origin of comic drama, although of these poets only Menander seems in fact to have been an Athenian citizen by birth. However local comedy's associations had once been, it was to become a kind of Panhellenic lingua franca which, apart from the popularity of staged performances, was to play a very important rôle in rhetorical and ethical education. Primary evidence for the performance of New Comedy is provided by very many surviving representations in paintings and mosaics and by surviving written accounts, replicas and depictions of comic costume and masks; since, however, as far as is known, no manuscripts of New Comedy survived through the Dark Ages to be copied in the medieval period, until the end of the nineteenth century knowledge of the texts of New Comedy was restricted to a very large number of quotations (ranging in length from single words to speeches of more than sixty verses) in later moralists, grammarians, antiquarians and anthologists, and to the adaptations into Latin of Plautus and Terence (cf. below).