The recently established Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series, under the general editorship of Niall W. Slater and C.W. Marshall, sets out to provide high-quality critical introductions to every single surviving comedy of ancient Greece and Rome. These books are primarily designed to cater for the needs of students, in that they offer a general guide to the plays and their themes together with an overview of critical approaches, but they also contain much that will be of interest to professional scholars, including original ideas and fresh interpretations of the material. This series is a well-conceived and timely one, not least because there are still rather a lot of ancient comedies that remain comparatively neglected and little studied. Many of them have never before had entire monographs exclusively devoted to them, so it is gratifying to see that alongside old favourites such as Frogs this series of Companions features volumes on Plautus’ Curculio and Mostellaria, Terence’s Andria and Menander’s Epitrepontes among its first publications.
Epitrepontes has not exactly been neglected by scholars since its rediscovery: in the last couple of decades there have been a number of notable editions and commentaries (by Alain Blanchard, Antonio Martina, Stanley Ireland, William Furley and others), the most recent of which have benefitted from the continued publication of important new papyri. Nevertheless, interpretative work, in the form of critical discussions, books and articles, has been surprisingly thin on the ground (not just for Epitrepontes, in fact, but for Menander’s drama in general). For this reason, any new book devoted to the play would be well worth a look, but a book by Alan Sommerstein deserves an especially warm welcome. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a better or more trustworthy guide to the world of Menander than Sommerstein, who has spent the best part of half a century thinking about Greek comedy and has published the definitive modern commentary on Menander’s Samia (Cambridge 2013) as well as the important edited volume Menander in Contexts (New York 2014). Sommerstein not only understands Menander more acutely than most, but also, crucially, possesses a sense of humour in full working order (something that cannot, alas, be said of every scholar who has worked on Menander). Explaining why Menander is interesting is easy enough; explaining why Menander is funny often seems to pose more of a challenge.
Chapter 1 (‘Menander the Athenian’) provides a general introduction to the poet and his work, and situates Menander within his historical and political context; chapter 2 (‘Menander and New Comedy’) discusses Epitrepontes in the light of generic conventions, stock formulas and theatrical resources. Both of these introductory chapters succeed well in conveying a huge amount of useful background detail in a short space. Chapter 3 (‘What we know about Epitrepontes, and how we know it’) grapples with the difficulties posed by our principal papyrus text (the lacunose Cairo Codex) and the status of other types of evidence (such as book fragments and the Mytilene mosaics) when it comes to filling in the gaps. Chapter 4 (‘What happens in Epitrepontes’) provides a plot summary interlaced with critical and interpretative comments, including many illuminating insights into Menander’s comic technique, his manipulation of comic conventions, his use of paratragedy and his nuanced portrayal of character and human relationships. Chapter 5 (‘Rape, marriage, legitimacy, citizenship and child exposure’) deals with a central theme of the play (and of New Comedy in general) and tries to come to terms with the huge gulf between ancient and modern audiences in terms of their reactions to the play’s treatment of sexual relationships and domestic life. Chapter 6 (‘Characters’) examines each of the play’s speaking characters in turn, showing how Menander subtly balances stereotypical and individual traits. Chapter 7 (‘Structural patterns’) analyses the play’s action in terms of recurrent motifs which give coherence and unity to the plot. Chapter 8 (‘Literary and intellectual background’) is an excellent discussion of the interplay between Menander, tragedy and Peripatetic philosophy. Chapter 9 (‘The next twenty-three centuries’) offers a series of revealing snapshots from the play’s discontinuous reception history. The book concludes with a useful appendix (on editions, commentaries and translations), glossary and notes.
This is a hugely stimulating, well-written and enjoyable book, which will be a valuable resource for teachers and students as well as (I very much hope) a stimulus to further study of this important play.
