080: Hellenistic Literature - Menander and New Comedy
The Hellenistic Age Podcast
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Menander and the Comedy Movement
For almost a thousand years, from the early Hellenistic period to the end of the Western Roman Empire, Menander's works were overwhelmingly the most popular form of comedic writing. Many wealthy Romans adorned their living spaces with works of art containing images from his plays and of the man himself. Yet by the modern day, Aristophanes has firmly entrenched himself as the comedy playwright par excellence of the Greco-Roman world. It seems rather contradictory to imagine that an author with such a sizable corpus of works that remained popular for millennia would not survive the test of time but we have been largely bereft of Menander's plays until relatively recently.
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