Reliquiae Selectae

Menander was the greatest writer of Attic New Comedy. He wrote prolifically in the late fourth century BC, and nearly one hundred titles of his plays are known. Due to the plays' exclusion from the Greek school curriculum in the fifth century AD and subsequent centuries mainly because they were not written in the classical Attic dialect, but koine, Menander's works were preserved only in the quotations of other authors. It was not until the twentieth century and the discoveries of papyri in Egypt that even a sizeable fragment of his work was available for study. Now we have one complete play, the Dyskolos (`the bad tempered man'), and considerable fragments from fourteen other plays. The plots of his plays are set in contemporary Athens and the surrounding countryside, and are concerned with the private lives of middle-class families. Menander's work is characterized by his sympathetic attitude to his characters who seem natural and their actions real, and by the resolutions to the problems in the plays which are achieved through generosity and understanding. This Oxford Classical Text (first published in 1972) contains all the extant fragments of Menander's works, including all fragments recovered from quotation, and has been brought fully up to date with the inclusion of an appendix containing the latest discoveries.