It’s our last plays, the last surviving Greek play, The Girl from Samos (315 BCE) by Menander. How tastes, or circumstances, had changed in the seventy years since Wealth, our last Aristophanes play. The political and social satire is gone, the sexual and scatological jokes are gone, and the specificity of the Athenian moment is replaced by type characters and domestic conflicts. Comedy has mixed with melodrama – the influence of the “romantic” strain of Euripides is as strong as that of Aristophanes – and the result would not be out of place on American television.
I mean, the conflict in The Girl from Samos is over a
baby. Imagine the great Greek
dramatists worrying about some ordinary man’s baby. Here we have, depicted in a mosaic, the baby
itself, carried by the Girl from Samos.
We are in Act III where they are expelled from their home because of the
usual misunderstanding which will be cleared up by Act V. I know we are in Act III of The Girl from
Samos because that is literally written in the mosaic.
This example belongs to a set of seven scenes from Menander
that can be found in the House of Menander in Mytilene on Lesbos, not to be
confused with the House of Menander at Pompeii.
In fact there are many extant mosaics depicting scenes from Menander’s
plays. He was enormously popular for
centuries. The Mytilene mosaics are like
from the fourth century CE, six hundred years after Menander, like someone
today decorating a home with scenes from Shakespeare.
I noted that the direct political satire of Aristophanes is long
gone, suppressed perhaps by censorship (Athenian democracy is also long gone)
as much as changing tastes. But domestic
comedy is also inherently satirical, critiquing familial and social
arrangements. Here Moschion, the father
of that (currently illegitimate) baby, critiques the notion of illegitimacy:
MOSCHION: I don’t think any
One individual is better at
Birth than any other. If you look at it
Rightly, it’s the moral man who is
Legitimate, the immoral who is
Illegitimate, and a slave. This is
What Diogenes says, bidding us revalue. (17)
I believe that is my hero Diogenes the Cynic. It sounds like him.
I read Eric Turner’s 1972 translation of The Girl from
Samos, written for radio performance, so meant to function; I don’t know what
adaptations he made. It works. The (almost) complete text of the play was
only discovered a few years earlier.
I have been writing the phrase “Our next play is” every
week, but now there is no next play.
Next week I will write up kind of summary, and soon after I hope to
write some notes on On the Sublime by Longinus. And maybe another post after that: “what next”?
I can't wait to see what comes next. I am having to read Longinus slowly as many of the authors are unknown to me as yet. However, a quick Google helps in understanding and I am getting a lot out of the reading. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteAlthough i haven’t commented previously I would like to say how much I have enjoyed this year long adventure. It has been educational and a whole lot of fun. Like you I am interested in pursuing more classical Greek literature including a re-read of Homer as I think I would appreciate them now more than ever. Also considering some Roman theater as my library has the complete works of Plautus. Thanks again for opening a whole new slant on classical literature for me.
ReplyDeleteLonginus has a curious mix of the most famous writers from hundreds of years earlier - Homer, the tragedy writers - and later obscurities. There is so much lost writing.
ReplyDeleteI am so happy to read these comments. The year has been rewarding for me, too.