Menander: Samia

Matthew Wright

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350124769
• eBook ISBN: 9781350124783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

Matthew Wright brings Menander's Samia to life by explaining how it achieves its comic effects and how it fits within the broader context of fourth-century Greek drama and society. He offers a scene-by-scene reading of the play, combining close attention to detail with broader consideration of major themes, in an approach designed to bring out the humour and nuance of each individual moment on stage, while also illuminating Menander's comic art. The play dramatizes a tangled story of mistakes, mishaps and misapprehensions leading up to the marriage of Moschion and Plangon. For most of the action the characters are at odds with one another owing to accidental delusions or deliberate deceptions, and it seems as if the marriage will be cancelled or indefinitely postponed; but ultimately everyone's problems are solved and the play ends happily. Samia is one of the best-preserved examples of fourth-century Greek comedy: celebrated within antiquity but subsequently lost for many years, it miraculously came back to light, in almost complete form, as a result of Egyptian papyrus finds during the 20th century.

1

First Act

The comedy is about to begin! The spectators take their seats in the open-air theatre, talking among themselves while glancing down from time to time at the empty playing area (orchēstra) below.

We do not know where or when Samia was originally produced, but let us assume that the scenario under discussion takes place in the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, at one of the Athenian dramatic festivals best known to us, the City Dionysia or the Lenaea. By the end of the fourth century BCE this theatre is a permanent, semi-circular stone structure, with more or less the same layout as can still be seen on the site today. The seating capacity of this theatre is well in excess of fourteen thousand.¹ Is it full, or nearly full, for the first performance of an exciting new work by Menander? It is hard to be certain. But we can be certain that the audience is making plenty of noise: these big Greek theatres are noted for their acoustic properties. It may well be that many of the spectators have already been sitting there for most of the day, watching other tragedies or comedies. If it is now evening, quite possibly some of them will have had too much to drink. In between the performances they may have taken the opportunity to stretch their legs, partake of refreshment or catch up on gossip with friends. We have to imagine a theatre bustling with noise, energy and movement.²

But now it is time to settle down quietly and pay attention to Menander’s new play. How does the audience recognize the exact moment when the play has started? In a modern theatre there are usually clear signals to indicate that the world of the play has taken over from the real world – the dimming of the house lights, the raising of the curtain, the sound of the orchestra striking up an overture – but it seems that none of these conventions existed in the Greek theatre. Probably the spectators gradually stop talking and start watching when they notice that an actor has entered the stage, either through one of the doors in the stage building (skēnē) or via one of the gangways (eisodoi) to the left and right of the orchēstra. They can see that this person is an actor, rather than an accidental intruder onto the stage, because he is wearing a theatrical costume and a mask. Nevertheless, the absence of a curtain or equivalent makes it seem likely that not everyone notices the actor’s entrance immediately. Has the background noise entirely subsided by the time the actor starts speaking? Possibly not: in which case some of the spectators will inevitably fail to catch the play’s opening lines.³

It is worth thinking carefully about these crucial moments at the beginning of the play – not just for the sake of making an imaginative effort to understand the experience of ancient theatregoers, or reminding ourselves of the importance of theatrical conventions, which differ widely between cultures and historical periods. These considerations are important whenever we contemplate ancient Greek drama, but they have a special significance in the case of Samia in particular. This is because Bodmer Papyrus XXV, the only surviving ancient copy of Act I, is missing several lines from the beginning. This is how it starts:⁴

…

] …ε. [.] υπερ[

]ονετι λυπῆσαί με δεῖ;

ὀδ]υνηρόν ἐστιν· ἡμάρτηκα γάρ.

… [c. 7 missing lines; several unintelligible words or parts of words] …do I have to cause distress [to myself or to someone else]? It’s [pai]nful, for I have done wrong.

The fact that the papyrus is mutilated and lacunose at this point (as at many others) would normally be regarded as a serious misfortune. But, paradoxical though it may seem, one could argue that it actually brings us closer to the experience of Menander’s original audience.

As modern readers we are accustomed to having neatly printed, complete playscripts to deal with: we experience them as texts, even if we attempt to approach them from a dramaturgical perspective, and we have access to contextual information to help us make sense of them. For instance, we see each character’s name – in this case, MOSCHION – clearly printed in capital letters or italic script before the character himself has uttered a word. Theatre audiences, with only masks to guide them, have to wait for longer before the characters are fully identified (but see the next section for more on the signifying properties of masks). More importantly, readers of texts can pause and reread the first lines if they get confused. Theatre audiences have to work much harder to process the expository and scene-setting information provided at the beginning of a play. This is not true of ancient theatre audiences alone; it is an inherent part of the experience of any play in performance. The difficulty of ‘the first five minutes’ is a well-known phenomenon among contemporary audiences, especially when verse drama is being staged. As Nicholas Hytner writes (in Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre):

‘Hang on in there,’ I told the audience at a pre-show talk one evening. ‘It gets easier.’ Even with Shakespeare, the first five minutes are always a problem. I sit there thinking I have no idea what these people are talking about, and I’m supposed to be the director of the National Theatre.⁵

Considerations of this sort can give us a new perspective on the defective, fragmentary opening of Samia. If we miss a few words at the start of Moschion’s prologue speech, or fail to grasp what he is talking about at first, could we not say that we readers are thus getting a more authentic ‘theatrical’ experience?

*

[I.1: Moschion alone on stage] Moschion explains his background and his relationship with the other members of his household, namely Demeas, his adoptive father, and Demeas’ Samian mistress Chrysis. Moschion reveals that he has fathered an illegitimate baby with Plangon, the girl next door, and announces that he wishes to marry her; but he can do so only with the approval of her father, Nikeratos, who is currently away on a business trip with Demeas (1–58).

Mask and character

One of the most striking aspects of Menander’s comedy, and one which distinguishes the plays from most other types of drama, is that all its characters wear masks. This fact can easily escape the notice of readers. Masks are never explicitly mentioned in the texts,⁶ and even if we deliberately try to imagine the play in performance we are used to quite different conventions of acting on the stage or screen. The idea of masked performance probably strikes many of us as alien and distinctly odd. Ancient theatre audiences, by contrast, would have been long accustomed to watching masked actors. Masks invariably featured in all the Greek dramatic genres – tragedy, comedy and satyr-play – and their use seems to go back as far as the earliest origins of drama.⁷ The symbolic significance of the mask may originally have had something to do with religious ritual, but the persistence of the convention probably owed more to practical considerations. Menander’s comedies, like Greek tragedies, have a variable number of parts – Samia, with six speaking characters, has fewer than average – but the rules of the festival dictated that they had to be performed by a cast of only three main actors.⁸

Nevertheless, the precise function of masks changed and developed during the classical period. By the late fourth century, it appears that comedians were using a system of standardized masks, each of which denoted a particular type of character. This meant that the spectators, if they were familiar with the different mask types, would have been able to tell at a glance whether the actor standing in front of them was playing the part of an old man, a boastful soldier, a cook, a prostitute, a slave, or whoever it might be. Thus when the actor playing Moschion enters the stage at the start of Samia, it is immediately apparent because of his mask that he represents not just any character but a young man.

But how do we know all this? There are two main sources of evidence for these comic mask types. The first is the Onomasticon, a lexical work compiled by the Roman scholar Julius Pollux in the second century CE. This is sometimes dismissed as a late and not entirely trustworthy source, but it is generally accepted that Pollux drew on earlier scholarship, including the treatise On Masks by Aristophanes of Byzantium.⁹ The Onomasticon (4.143–54) contains a detailed list and discussion of forty-four comic masks, which I summarize here:

Old men

1.the first grandpa (cropped hair, placid features, beard, lean cheeks, white face)

2.the second grandpa (leaner, more serious and troubled-looking, sallow face, beard, red hair, cauliflower ears)

3.the leading old man (head crowned with hair, hook-nosed, full in the face, one eyebrow raised)

4.the long-bearded, wavy-haired old man (like 3, but with a longer beard and no raised eyebrow; sluggish appearance)

5.the Hermonios (receding hairline, full beard, raised eyebrows, fierce expression)

6.the pointy-bearded old man (like 6, with a different beard; difficult-looking expression)

7.the Lycomedeian (curly hair, long b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 First Act
• 2 Second Act
• 3 Third Act
• 4 Fourth Act
• 5 Fifth Act
• Notes
• Guide to Further Reading
• References
• Index
• Copyright