Recently I was reading about Athenian playwright, Menander, 342-291 BC, and was surprised at how close to our 21st century drama themes his work was.
Roger Hall's Middle Age Spread explores the different aspects of relationships and love in much the same way that Menander did: filial love, fraternal love, romantic love and love for all mankind. There is evidence that Menander wrote more than 100 plays, of which fragments of many remain, and many copied and adapted by the Roman writers, Plautus and Terence. The only work by Menander that remains completely intact is known variously as The Grouch, The Misanthrope, The Curmudgeon, or The Bad Tempered Man ('Dyskolos', in the original Greek).
Knemon, who makes his stage entrance grumbling that there are too many people in the world, has made his wife's life so miserable that she has fled to her son's neighbouring farm. The grumpy old man is one of the stock characters of early Greek comedy which included Knemon's opposite, the benevolent old man, the bully, the parasite, the prodigal son, the lover, but Knemon was representative of a whole class of people.
Interestingly though, Menander differs from many other dramatists of his time in that he treated slaves sympathetically, as individuals, attributing them with their own personalities and motivations.
The old comedy style of Aristophanes with its burlesque and biting political satire flourished in fifth century Athenian democracy but by the time Menander was emerging as a comedy writer the political climate in Athens had changed considerably. Athens had been overrun by those formidable Macedonians, Philip of Macedon, 338 BC, and Philip's son Alexander the Great 323 BC. The freedom Aristophanes enjoyed no longer existed and Menander contented himself with writing plays about ordinary people and their everyday concerns.
Menander's audiences would have found it easy to relate to the characters he created in much the same way that our modern playwright Roger Hall does. The Alexandrian critic, Aristophanes of Byzantium, was moved to ask, "O Menander and life, which of you has imitated the other?" Perhaps the same question could be put to Roger Hall.
