Menander's <i>Dyskolos</i> and Demetrios of Phaleron's Dilemma

Abstract

Critics have been fairly unanimous in their assessment of Menander's concerns. F. H. Sandbach asserts that ‘the authors of New Comedy shut their eyes, generally speaking, to politics as a whole’. He writes of Menander that ‘the politics of his time were far too grim and frustrated to make a suitable subject for an audience that wished to be entertained on a public holiday.… It is within domestic and private life that he found the subjects for his comedy’. T. B. L. Webster agrees that recent political events were ‘too painful to be remembered in comedy’. E. W. Handley believes that in Dyskolos Menander's ‘basic point is an ethical and not a political one’; considering the possibility that ‘the thought and moral tone are politically inspired’, he dismisses the idea that Menander was a propagandist. Michael Anderson recognizes that Dyskolos , as an ‘ethical’ comedy in Aristotelian terms, must relate the behaviour of individuals to society, but he does not go on to relate the play to the particular society for which Menander wrote.