Meander, Qui Vitae Ostendit Vitam…

• Published in: Greece and Rome
• Main Author: Arnott, W. G.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1968
• Subjects: General Arts and Humanities; Classics; Great auk
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017383500016788; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0017383500016788

The ghost of Aristophanes still breathes over the shoulder of any body who wants to discuss, praise, or debunk Menander. Aristophanes' spiritual presence is both inevitable and irrelevant. Inevitable, because to our western world Aristophanes is the Athenian comic poet par excellence , who achieved that miraculous synthesis of imaginative fantasy, vicious satire, elegant parody, comic invention, civic shrewdness, witty obscenity, and the evocative poetry of precise observation. But the ghost of Aristophanes is also an irritating irrelevance when one is considering Menander. An irrelevance, because Aristophanes and the genre that he and other contemporary practitioners had perfected in the last quarter of the fifth century B.c. were as extinct as the great auk a century later, when Menander and a new type of comedy reigned supreme if not unchallenged.