The Book of Lost Books (8 page)

Aristophanes

{
c.
444–
c.
380 B.C.E.}

AT THE END of Plato's great debate on the nature and purpose of love,
The Symposium,
three of the guests remained awake: Socrates, the philosopher, Agathon, the tragedian, and Aristophanes, the comedian. The conversation had moved on from metaphysical investigation into the precise interrelations between passion, devotion, and friendship, and, as the wine was passed around, and the men passed out, they discussed drama. Unfortunately, with the exception of Socrates' contention that a man capable of writing tragedy would necessarily be able to write comedy, and vice versa, we do not know what occurred.

How did two of the most notable practitioners of their respective genres react to Socrates' theory? What theory of literature did they themselves subscribe to? And, with their tongues sufficiently loosened by the wine, did either Socrates or Agathon upbraid their comedic colleague for having satirized them on the stage?

Aristophanes would certainly have agreed that comedy had a function every bit as serious as that of tragedy. In the eleven plays we have, out of the forty he is said to have written, there is a consistent emphasis on the castigation of vice, the promotion of harmony, and the proper responsibilities of the ruling class. “What do you want a poet for?” Dionysus is asked in
The Frogs
as he attempts to liberate one of the great dramatists from the Underworld. “To save the city, of course” is the answer. That such noble intentions were quite compatible with knockabout farce, sexual innuendo, and even personal invective is in part explained by the heterogeneous, hybrid nature of the comedy itself. Aristophanes is the earliest comic dramatist whose works have survived, yet he incorporated many of the registers, methods, and propensities of his shadowy, lost predecessors.

According to the inscriptions on the Parian Marble, the comic chorus was invented by a writer called Susarion in the sixth century B.C.E. Almost nothing is known of this Thespis of comedy except his name. Archilochus of Paros (
c.
714
–c.
676 B.C.E.) is credited with the invention of the lampoon, in iambic meter. His barbed, vituperative poetry was notoriously so cutting that it drove its subjects to suicide. Aristotle maintained that the first person to develop comic plots was a Sicilian, Epicharmus (
c.
540
–c.
450 B.C.E.), and Plato refers to him as comparable to Homer in the field of comedy. He was supposedly a student of Pythagoras, and only a few fragments and titles have survived.

Two figures dominate the scene just prior to Aristophanes' debut in 427 B.C.E. Cratinus (519–422 B.C.E.) was famous for the extremely vicious diatribes he launched on public figures of the day. The statesman Pericles, with his “squill-shaped head,” was a frequent target, as was his mistress Aspasia, and his advisers. Tragedians and lyric poets were satirized in the
Euneidae.
Though none of his plays survive, the fact that one was called
The Followers of Archilochus
amply attests to where Cratinus derived his lashing style. The
Dionysalexandros,
the
Nemesis, Chiron, Drapedites,
and
Thracian Woman
all reiterate his accusations.

Crates, who flourished around 470 B.C.E., had originally appeared as an actor in Cratinus' plays; however, he became increasingly uncomfortable with the torrent of vitriol he was forced to enunciate. According to Aristotle, he adopted the more philosophically nuanced plots of Epicharmus: a fragment from Crates' play about the Golden Age,
The Beasts,
depicts fishes willingly basting and cooking themselves. If Aristotle is correct, then Cratinus followed Crates' example with his own utopian play
Riches.
Aristophanes eulogized Crates' wit and dry humor, though, as ever, he qualified this by stating that he rarely won any prizes for it.

Although Aristophanes praises Cratinus' choruses in
The Knights,
he also launches an equally unsparing attack on the satirist; in short, Cratinus was a drunk. The Chorus in
The Knights
proclaims its truthfulness by claiming that if they are lying, they would rather be Cratinus' bedclothes, saturated with the results of his incontinence. Likewise, it is wholly appropriate that he sits next to the statue of Dionysus, god of drama, and alcohol. These jibes did not go uncountered: Cratinus took the daring step of producing a work entitled
The Bottle,
showing his bibulous self torn between his wife, the Muse, and his mistress, Booze. It won the prize in 423 B.C.E., relegating Aristophanes' satire on Socrates,
The Clouds,
to an ignominious third place.

Aristophanes' early career quickly became embroiled in controversy. His lost play,
The Babylonians
of 426 B.C.E., attacked Cleon, the demagogue who had risen in influence after the death of Pericles. Cleon, unlike Pericles, attempted to use the law to quell criticism, and it would appear that Aristophanes was fined. Nonetheless, by 422 B.C.E., Aristophanes was so successful that the only reason his play
The Wasps
came second in the dramatic contest was that he had anonymously entered another,
The Preview,
as if it were the work of one Philonides. Despite winning,
The Preview
is lost. The attacks on Cleon continued.

Aristophanes' plays combined Crates' philosophical speculation with Cratinus' energetic satire. Aristophanes was a very literary comedian, and the loss of
The Poet, The Muses, Sappho,
and
Heracles the Stage
Manager
not only robs us of examples of the earliest theatrical self-consciousness, but also prevents us seeing, askance, the literary world that indubitably furnished him with ample targets for ridicule.

Today, Aristophanes' work seems for the most part unaffected by the obsolescence that so often engulfs comedies from the past. The founding of “Cloud Cuckoo Land” in
The Birds
or the sex strike in
Lysistrata
seem just as fresh, even if puns about figs and informers, or double entendres about piglets, disappear in translation. Of all the Attic Greek writers, Aristophanes exhibits the highest frequency of
hapax legomenon:
the one-off use of a word. Only in Aristophanes could we read an adjective like
archaiomelisidonophrynicherata,
meaning “in the old, sweet style of Sidonian Maidens in the work by Phrynicus.” What makes him difficult also makes him unique.

Toward the end of his life, in
Wealth,
his last extant play—and apparently in the two lost subsequent plays,
Aeolosicon
and
Kokalos—
Aristophanes paved the way for the “New Comedy” of Menander, simplifying the plots and reining in much of the fantasia and verbal pyrotechnics of his earlier work. He had written another play called
Wealth
twenty years previously, but the earlier work no longer exists to contrast with the later, less flamboyant style. His son, Araros, continued the family tradition of comedy, though under the constraints of the new antilibel laws.

There were, of course, some critics for whom Aristophanes' particular brand of comedy was anathema. Plutarch, writing in the first century C.E., fulminated that “his use of words combines the tragic and the comic, the grandiose and the prosaic, the obscure and the commonplace, bombast and elevation, verbal diarrhea and outright sickening rubbish”—in many ways, the very qualities we still admire.

Xenocles and Others

{
fourth century
B.C.E.}

POOR XENOCLES! ALL we know of him comes from Aristophanes' comedies, in which he becomes almost a byword for weak writing. His only lines, from the tragedy
Tlepolemus,
are held up for mockery in Aristophanes'
The Birds.
All that has been retained for posterity is

O cruel goddess, O, my chariot smashed Pallas, thou hast destroyed me utterly!

But he is not alone in having himself been destroyed utterly: what of

ACCIUS,
one of the first tragedians in Latin;

ARISTAEUS OF PROCONNESUS,
whose three-volume
Arimaspeia
dealt with the far north;

ARISTEA
's
Who the Jews Are;

ASTYDAMAS,
the grandnephew of Aeschylus whose self-promotion was so blatant the Athenians tore down his statue;

CALLIPEDES,
the Roman comedian who specialized in running on the spot;

CARCINUS
'
Thyestes,
with its birthmark recognition scene;

CHAEREMON,
author of
The Centaur;

CHOERILUS,
the poet whose epic on Alexander only had seven good lines;

CINAETHON
's epic,
Oedipus;

CRATIPPUS,
the inventor of
Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid;

DICAEOGENES,
whose
Cyprians
involved Teucer bursting into tears at a portrait;

ENNIUS,
the father of Roman poetry, who wrote, “No sooner said than done; so acts the man of worth” in his
Annals;

EPIMARCHUS,
the cookery writer;

EUGAMMON OF CYRENE,
who wrote the sequel to
The Odyssey;

EUPOLIS,
the comedian rumored drowned by Alcibiades;

LESCHES OF MITYLENE,
author of the
Little Iliad;

MAGNES,
the comedian who put talking animals into plays;

NEOPHRON,
who introduced onstage torture and child-minders for young actors;

NICOCHARES,
who showed men in a bad light;

PYTHEAS,
author of
On the Oceans;

STESICHORUS,
whose father was reputedly Hesiod and whose soul was Homer's, who wrote, in twenty-six volumes,
The Boar Hunter;

TELECLIDES
' version of
Cloud Cuckoo Land;
or

VARRO OF ATAX
's adaptation of Apollonius'
Argonautica
?

It is only through Suetonius that we have an account of the reign of Caligula, since Tacitus' version is lost, along with Suetonius'
Royal Biographies,Roman Manners, Roman Festivals, Roman Dress, Greek
Games, Grammatical Problems, Methods of Reckoning Time, Essay on
Nature, Critical Signs Used in Books, The Physical Defects of Mankind,
and the wonderful
Lives of the Famous Whores.

Technology is no bulwark. Crashed software, surreptitious viruses, an unthinking click, or a toppled drink can dispense with writing quicker than flames, waves, or the stale air of library cellars. At least Xenocles, in a sad, etiolated, and pitiable way, is still known to have been a writer. Thousands had a far more absolute extinction.

Menander

{
c.
342–291 B.C.E.}

ARISTOPHANES OF BYZANTIUM, who held the prestigious position of chief librarian at Alexandria, thought that the works of the comic playwright Menander were second only in talent to those of the divine Homer. Whereas the epic excelled in depicting the deeds of gods and heroes, the outcome of which shaped whole civilizations, Menander's work was the pinnacle of a different order of magnitude. In plays like
The
Hated Man
and
The Arbitration,
he had shown people just like his audience, speaking as they did, in situations they recognized: in short, his plays established a sparkling new form of realism. Or, as Aristophanes of Byzantium enthused, “O Menander! O Life! Which of you is imitating the other?”

Critical veneration of Menander's “New Comedy” was a commonplace in antiquity. No less a person than Julius Caesar dismissed the writer Terence as being merely “a half-pint Menander.” The Roman rhetorician Quintilian recommended that all aspiring orators study the plays assiduously, since “the picture of life he presents to us . . . is so brilliant, there is such an abundance of invention and turns-of-phrase, he is so adept in every situation, characterization and emotion.”

Plutarch's encomium of Menander in the
Moralia
becomes dizzy, encapsulating the widely held sense of his dramatic preeminence:

Menander's charm makes him utterly satisfying, for in these works that present with universal appeal the splendors of Greece, society finds its culture, the schools their study, the theater its triumph. The nature and possibilities of literary elegance were first revealed by him: he had conquered every quarter of the world with his invincible glamour, bringing all ears, all hearts, under the sway of the Greek language. What reason does any educated man have for entering a theater, except Menander?

This paradigm of refinement was born in Athens around 342 B.C.E. His family seems to have been well-to-do, and his father, Diopeithes, may have been a general. His uncle, Alexis, was a remarkably prolific writer of comedies—the
Suda
suggests 245, and Plutarch claims he died while being given the triumphal laurels onstage at the age of 106. Except for titles, Alexis' only literary remains are fragments recorded in anthologies of wise or witty proverbs—such priceless pearls as “There is only one cure for the illness known as love: prostitutes,” “How come cookbooks outsell Homer?” and “Human life is completely mad.” In these bons mots, Alexis parodied the teachings of both ascetic Pythagoreans and the abstruse Platonists. His nephew may have imbibed some of his intellectual prejudices, and was known to be a friend of Epicurus.

Menander's choice of vocation may also have been influenced by his teacher, Theophrastus. Theophrastus had been a pupil of both Plato and Aristotle, and succeeded Aristotle as head of the Lyceum, inheriting his library and his private papers. Aristotle himself nicknamed him “Theophrastus,” meaning “divine speaker.” Theophrastus became a much-loved and respected teacher; and, when Ptolemy Soter was beginning to assemble the Great Library at Alexandria, it was to the libraries of Aristotle and Theophrastus that he turned.

Theophrastus' book
The Characters
is the clearest indication of his influence on Menander. Although it was published a few years after Menander's first recorded play, it seems likely that the young playwright was aware of Theophrastus' classification of humans into clearly recognizable types. These observations of boasters, bumpkins, and boors are translated into the stock characters of the New Comedy stage; the archetypes segue into theatrical stereotypes. The text we have of
The Charactersis
, unfortunately, itself incomplete, covering only the negative personality traits.

Menander's first victory at the dramatic festival was in 317 B.C.E., with a play called
Dyskolos.
There would be few repetitions of the event, and the later epigram writer Martial took some comfort in the idea that true genius is unappreciated during one's lifetime. How Menander felt may be surmised from an anecdote where he berated Philemon, his great dramatic rival, asking, “Why don't you blush every time you beat me?”

Like Alexis, Menander wrote voluminously and, apparently, with ease. The use of generic characters in formulaic circumstances allowed for near-infinite variations. Once, when being badgered by a friend about not having completed his contribution for that year's festival (and hampering impatient actors, scene painters, and musicians), Menander breezily retorted, “The play is done. All that remains is to write the dialogue.” If you have one play, so his logic runs, you pretty much have them all.

The theater in Menander's day was changing. His friend Demetrius of Phalerum, the Macedonian viceroy of Athens, had, among other tax breaks for the aristocracy, discontinued the payment of
theorica,
a fund that reimbursed artisans who wished to attend the festival. It was therefore a new, more “middle-class” audience that could enjoy plays like
The
Shoemaker, The Goat-herds,
and
The Farmer.
Although Anaxandrides was reputedly the first to make “love and seduction” the staple of the comedy, Ovid tells us that Menander “never wrote a play without romance in it.”

Menander died, drowned, while swimming, or failing to, at Piraeus. He was to become so famous that a later writer, Alciphron, had a modest success with a fictitious correspondence between Menander and his mistress Glycera (whose name Menander had immortalized in
The Girl
Who Gets Her Hair Cut
). The Athenians erected a statue to him, as they had done for the great tragedians.

Menander's fame grew and grew. Diphilus, Ephippus, Xenarchus, Antiphanes, Aristophon, and Anaxilas fell from favor. Even Philemon and Alexis were lost. And the works of Menander, bolstered by the posthumous panegyrics of orators, poets, and moralists, eventually accompanied them. Just over a thousand lines were kept as proverbs in commonplace compilations. When Goethe praised the “unattainable charm” of Menander, he chose his adjective carefully. The last known manuscript had disappeared in Constantinople two hundred years previously.

Hold on, hold on. Cut. Imagine, for a moment, reader, the sound of a stylus ripped hastily across the surface of a record.

We got him back.

Nineteen hundred and five, Aphroditopolis, Egypt, and the house of a lawyer, Flavius Dioskoros, was being excavated. In a large jar, a sheaf of fifth-century C.E. papyrus documents was discovered. Securing the bundle were fragments of five plays by Menander. Among parts of
The
Woman from Samos
and
The Arbitration
were twelve shorter extracts from a play called
Dyskolos.

The “Cairo Codex,” as it was called, caused ripples of appreciation and murmurs of approval in the world of classical studies. But when Professor Victor Martin of the University of Geneva announced nearly fifty years later that he had acquired a rare third-century papyrus from Martin Bodmer, the Swiss bibliophile and book collector, it was a sensation. The “Bodmer Codex” had nearly all of the rest of
Dyskolos.
The play, translated as
The Bad-Tempered Man, The Misanthrope,
or
Old Cantankerous,
could be staged for the first time since antiquity.

Then the trouble really started.

Contemporary critics were well aware of their classical counterparts' lofty evaluation of Menander: expectations would naturally run high. Textual critics struggled to produce a workable version; after all, as the manuscript stood, there were neither stage directions nor line attributions. The script was reassembled, like Frankenstein's monster, edited, translated, and on Friday, October 30, 1959, broadcast by the BBC.

“Tell me why Menander is anything but a wet fish?” G. S. Kirk, the Regius Professor of Greek, was reported to have said when visiting Yale. Christopher Fry was less outspoken, referring to it in the introduction to the English translation as “slight and predictable.” Even Philip Vellacott, the translator, admitted it was “not a work of . . . calibre” and “remarkably unambitious.” Special pleading, especially since it was known to be a juvenile work, did little to enhance the reputation of the newly discovered play. Euripides, the last great tragedian, had experimented with tragicomic plays with magical resolutions: Erich Segal, author of
Love
Story
and professor of humanities, now referred to Menander as “a suburban Euripides.”

Moreover, as more of the papyri were deciphered, more problems with the “comic genius” became evident. The author whose “lifelike-ness” was proverbial appeared to have a curious penchant for incredible revelations about orphans' parentage and other hackneyed dramatic devices. Some brave critics suggested that the Greece of Menander's day, recovering from civil war and Alexandrian belligerence, did, indeed, have an inordinate number of orphans. Whether many of them were reconciled with their families, who turned out to be the very individuals they had, unaware, grown up among, is not known.

One of the other favorite plots could be summarized as: “Whoops! I raped someone last night,” which normally ended with perpetrator and victim realizing they are the love of each other's lives, and getting married. The “narrowly avoided incest” setup attracted equally few admirers.

Menander had been regarded as the hypothetical progenitor of a dramatic line that culminated in Shakespeare, Molière, and Feydeau. Introducing him back into the theatrical repertoire now seemed as sensible as cloning a caveman and asking him to cook for a dinner party. Lost, Menander was a genius; found, he was an embarrassment.

There was one other important, and unlikely, figure in antiquity who appreciated the plays of Menander: St. Paul. Verse 33 of chapter 15 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians is, though unacknowledged in the letter, a quotation from Menander. “Be not deceived,” says Paul. “Evil communications corrupt good manners,” a line from Menander's play about a courtesan,
Thais.
St. Paul does not quote from any other nonbiblical source, and the thought of the erstwhile persecutor of, Damascene convert to, and martyred sufferer for Christianity—the very individual who did most to change a Jewish apocalyptic sect into a world-governing religion—enjoying a little light comedy is boggling enough in itself.

Menander might well have preferred to stay lost, rather than be deflated by posterity. But although he never made it on Broadway, he may have approved of his work, hidden like a stealthy mine, endangering the edifice of the doctrine of scriptural authority.