Menander

New finds, many of them in Egypt at Oxyrhynchus, have expanded the extant work of Menander since Allinson's one-volume Loeb edition was published in 1921. This Loeb Menander is three times the size of the Allinson volume. W.G. Arnott brings us all of the work of the Hellenistic comic playwright that is now available. A Greek text based on careful study of the discovered papyri faces a translation that fits today's tastes, with full explanatory notes. One volume of Arnott's edition of Menander is already available. This second volume contains the surviving portions of ten plays. Among these are the fragments of "Misoumenos" ("The Man She Hated"), which sympathetically presents the flawed relationship of a soldier and a captive girl; and the surviving half of "Perikeiromene" ("The Girl with Her Hair Cut Short"), a comedy of mistaken identity and lovers' quarrel. Influential in antiquity - his plays were adapted for the Roman stage by Platus and Terence - Menander's comic art can be fully known again. It is a comedy that focuses on the hazards of love and trials of famiy life - as is typical of New Comedy, a style of which Menander is a leading writer.