To a very considerable extent New Comedy relied upon stereotyped plots and stock characters; in a genre as productive as this (cf. above pp. 2–4) it would indeed be surprising if this were not the case. Modern popular entertainment (westerns, detective novels etc.) provides many parallels for this phenomenon. We must remember also that in antiquity literary originality was thought to reside in the creative reworking of material that was common to all. No poet ‘owned’ a plot; what mattered was not what happened, but how it happened. In classical tragedy, for example, poets based their plays upon myths which, at least in their broad outlines, were familiar to the audience, and yet when we can compare the treatment of the same myth by different poets (as we can with the stories of Electra and Philoctetes), we find that the plays are entirely different. Mutatis mutandis, the situation is similar in New Comedy. As an illustration I choose a case where two plays by different poets are quite unlike, but where a simple plot summary would make them appear very much alike.

The Epitrepontes of Menander concerns a young man called Charisios who is informed by his slave that his wife, Pamphile, has given birth to and subsequently exposed a child. As they have not been married long enough for the child to be his, Charisios takes off to a neighbour's house where, in the arms of a courtesan, he tries to forget his troubles.