Hi there. You're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast. Episode 80, Hellenistic literature, menander and new comedy.

It would not be far-fetched to suggest that in most samples of class curriculums that incorporate Greek and Roman literature, you will find almost no examples of works dating

to the Hellenistic period.

With the exception of Homer, the vast majority of authors can be dating to the Hellenistic period. With the exception of Homer,

the vast majority of authors can be traced to the heyday of classical Athens,

those such as Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides. On the other end, you may find the writers

of Imperial Rome, like Virgil and Ovid. Yet the 300-year gap that stretches between them is almost

entirely skipped over, despite the rather large output of material to come out of places like

Alexandria or Antioch. In part, this is due to the limited survival of many of these texts. Yet

those we have reveal much about the radically changing tastes and styles that marked the expansion

of the Greek world following Alexander's death. Nearly 40 episodes ago, I did a survey of the

Hellenistic philosophical schools, and I will do the same for the period's literary movements and authors.

Today we will begin our series by discussing the works of the playwright Menander, the father

of new comedy.

For this episode, I have relied extensively on the translation of Menander's works by Maurice

Balm, published by Oxford World's Classics, which conveniently compiles all the surviving

plays and fragments into a single volume.

Now, by no means was humor invented by the ancient

Greeks. Fart jokes and observational comedy have been recorded in the text of Babylonians and Egyptians,

and the act of finding something funny is probably rooted in some sort of evolutionary behavior

of our earliest ancestors. The Greeks themselves are divided on when or who we can attribute the first comedic

plays.

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