Menam

But since 5844 when C. Tischendorf found in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai three papyrus fragments containing 52 lines from the Phasma, 41 from the Epitrepontes, six from an un certain play—all in a more or less mutilated condition—the Me nander corpus has been greatly augmented by fresh papyrus dis coveries. Incomparably the most important is the Cairo papy rus, discovered in 1905 by G. Lefebure at Aphroditopolis, con taining 659 lines from the Epitrepontes, 83 from the Heros, 341 from the Sarnia, 324 from the Perikeiromene, and 61 from an uncertain play. In addition 87 lines of the Georgos were recov ered in Egypt by I. Nicole in 1897. A series of Oxyrhynchus pa pyri published by Grenfell and Hunt restored to us, in 1899, 51 lines of the Perikeiromene ; in 1903 and 1914, 115 (fragmentary) lines of the Kolax; in 1908, 23 lines of the Perinthia; in 1910 and 1920, some 8o (fragmentary) lines of the Misoumenos. A Berlin papyrus (pub. 1907) gives 93 (fragmentary) lines of the Kith aristes, while another (pub. 1918) contains 23 lines of the Misou menos. Some mutilated lines of the Georgos are given in a Flo rence papyrus (pub. 1912) and 20 (mutilated) lines of the Koneiazomenai in a Dorpat papyrus.

In structure, in subject matter, and in general tone, the New Comedy, which is essentially a comedy of manners, presents a marked contrast to the Old Comedy as we know it in the plays of Aristophanes. The chorus as an organic element in the play has wholly vanished—although there seems to have been some sort of choric interlude between the acts, as indicated in our texts by the single word XOPOT—and with it the Parabasis, and the agon, the central element in the Old Comedy, in the sense of a formal debate between two clearly defined antagonists, has also disap peared. The theme is no longer some high question of political or social or religious moment, but merely the presentation of some commonplace complication of ordinary Athenian life, in which common types of character—the wealthy father, the dis solute son, the cunning slave—play their part, the complication being most commonly due to love (Ovid, Trist. II. 369 Fabula iucundi nulla est sine amore Menandri) in its least lovely guise, and the disentanglement being usually effected, more or less plausibly, by recognition ('Ava-yv6pcorts), i.e., by the timely dis covery that some supposed stranger is in reality a long lost son or daughter, who had disappeared, whether by exposure in in fancy or by shipwreck in a foreign land or other similar mts fortune. The humour, whether of situation or of character, is of a subdued type, and the general atmosphere is quiet and little charged with emotion. A glance at the titles of Menander's plays, such as K6XaE, The Flatterer, Aactbai..x.ov, The Superstitious Man, and the like, suggest the prominence of character study, while the long list of such titles as Avapla, The Lady from Andros, Kvt6La, The Lady from Cnidus, etc., emphasize the place of rec ognition as a mode of denouement, the supposed foreigner being discovered to be a true-born Athenian.

"Truth to life," his scrupulous observation of "propriety" or what the Greeks called To rpfrov, was the great merit which the ancients recognized in Menander. "St Mblavopt lad (31, rOrepos irOrepov arElitp'yra-ro, 0 Menander and Life, which of you imitated the other?" so runs the highly flattering apos trophe to Menander attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium. So Quintilian X. 1.69 writes of "Menander who, in my judgment, would alone, if carefully read, be sufficient to illustrate all my precepts : so well has he expressed the whole picture of life (om nem vitae imaginem expressit), such copiousness of invention has he, such a gift of speech, so appropriate is he in all his incidents, characters, emotions." Cf. Dio Chrysos. xviii. 7. Plutarch comp. Menand. et Aristoph. p. 853. A.P. vii. 37o. ix. 187. The subtle presentation of character is perhaps a thing too delicate in its na ture to exert its full appeal after the lapse of more than 2,000 years, but even the broken fragments of his work that remain enable us as assent to the judgment of antiquity.

Lastly it may be remarked that the sententious character, which he shared with Euripides (of whom he was a confessed admirer and imitator, Quintil. x. 1. 69) is not nearly so marked in the new fragments as one might have expected from the Movoartxot, two of which—"Whom the gods love dies young" (6v of 0E01 cin.Xoi3o-tv etroOviicKa 14os) and "Evil communications corrupt good manners" (clhdpovo-tv i Katcal—cf. N. T. I Cor inth. xv., 33)—are known to multitudes who never heard the name of Menander.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

The old fragments are in Comicorum Atticorum ed. Kock (188o-88), iii. 3 Newly discovered f rag ments ed. Sudhaus (1909) ; Menandrea, A. Koerte, ed. major (Berlin, 1912) ; Selections, from Menander, ed. Waddell (Oxford, 1927). (A. W. MA.) MENANDER (MILINDA), a Graeco-Indian dynast. When the Graeco-Indian king Demetrius had been beaten by Eucratides of Bactria, about 160 B.C., and the kingdom of Eucratides (q.v.) dissolved after his assassination (c. 150 B.c.), a Greek dynasty maintained itself in the Kabul Valley and the Punjab. The only two kings of this dynasty mentioned by classical authors are Apollodotus and Menander, who conquered a great part of India. Trogus Pompeius described in his forty-first book (see the pro logue) "the Indian history of these kings, Apollodotus and Menan der," and Strabo, xi. 516, mentions from Apollodotus of Artemita, the historian of the Parthians, that Menander "conquered more tribes than Alexander, as he crossed the Hypanis to the east and advanced to the Osamus; he and other kings (especially Deme trius) occupied also Patalene (the district of Patala near Hyder abad on the head of the delta of the Indus) and the coast which is called the district of Saraostes (i.e., Syrastene, in mod. Gujarat, Brahman Saurashtra) and the kingdom of Sigerdis (not otherwise known) ; and they extended their dominion to the Seres (i.e., the Chinese) and Phryni ( ?)." The last statement is an exaggeration, probably based upon the fact that from the mouth of the Indus trade went as far as China. That the old coins of Apollodotus and Menander, with Greek legends, were still in currency in Barygaza (mod. Broach), the great port of Gujarat, about A.D. 7o we are told by the Periplus maris Erythraxi, 48. Their reigns may be placed about 140-80 B.C. Menander appears in Indian traditions as Milinda; he is praised by the Buddhists, whose religion he is said to have adopted, and who in the Milindapanha or Milinda Paiiho (see below), "the questions of Milinda" (Rhys Davids, Sacred Books of the East, xxxv., xxxvi.) relate his discourses with the wise Nagasena. Plutarch (Praec. reip. 28, 6) relates that "when Menander, one of the Bactrian kings, died on a campaign after a mild rule, all the subject towns disputed about the honour of his burial, till at last his ashes were divided between them in equal parts." (The Buddhist tradition relates a similar story of the relics of Buddha.) Besides Apollodotus and Menander, we know from the coins a great many other Greek kings of western India, among whom two with the name of Straton are most con spicuous. The last of them, with degenerate coins, seems to have been Hermaeus Soter. These Greek dynasts may have maintained themselves, with diminished realms, in some part of India till about 4o B.C. (See INDIA History.) The Milinda Paiiho is preserved in Pali, in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, but was probably composed originally in the extreme north west of India, and in a dialect spoken in that region. Neither date nor author is known ; but the approximate date must have been about the 2nd century of our era. The work is entitled Milinda Paiiho—that is, The Questions of Milinda. The work is several times quoted as authority by Buddhaghosa, who wrote about A.D. 450, and it is the only work, not in the canon, which receives this honour.