Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, 2001
Les efforts de Polémon d’user de moyens légaux pour sauver son ex-petite amie de la maison d’un v... more Les efforts de Polémon d’user de moyens légaux pour sauver son ex-petite amie de la maison d’un voisin, démontrent son profond respect des lois de sa communauté. L’ambiguïté du statut légal et social de la concubine sème la confusion chez Polémon qui se questionne sur la légalité des moyens qu’il pourrait prendre. Cette scène le dépeint sous des traits sympathiques. Convaincu de son bon droit, il devient un soldat atypique des comédies par son empressement à renoncer à la violence en faveur d’une solution pacifique. Dans cette scène, commence la nécessaire métamorphose de son caractère en vue d’un éventuel mariage et de son intégration dans la communauté civile.
Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2001
Ambivius Turpio would have found the Dyskolos exactly the sort of play his troupe was always comm... more Ambivius Turpio would have found the Dyskolos exactly the sort of play his troupe was always commissioned with (or so he complains), a fabula laboriosa. 1 Much of the play's physical humor involves characters busily coming and going at the shrine of Pan, with many of them knocking-at their peril-on Knemon's door. 2 Given that these stage buildings figure so prominently in the action, it is no surprise that their important thematic role, as well as the play's distinctive use of stage space, have attracted scholarly attention. Two stimulating studies, published within a year of each other in the late 80s, elucidated the spatial symbolism of the Dyskolos in terms of binary oppositions. G. Hoffmann revealed the sociological opposition of rural poverty vs. urban wealth encoded in the two houses, arguing that their juxtaposition created an atopia, a setting at the periphery of society where these groups could effect a reunion impossible in any real place and time. Independently, N. J. Lowe identified similar "thematic polarities" (though these are based, he cautioned, on oppositions more complex than simple class divisions) and explored how these are mapped onto both visible stage space and imagined spaces offstage. Just as the left parodos and Knemon's house carry different meanings from the right parodos and Kallippides' *An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the annual meeting of CAMWS in Knoxville, April 2000. I am grateful for many helpful comments from the audience there, and from the anonymous reviewers for TAPA. 1 Heauton 44. 2 Mooney 49-58 used entrances and exits as a rough measure of the amount of action in a play and was able to demonstrate a significant difference between tragedy (Aeschylus averages 16.7 entrances and exits per play, Sophocles 25.7, and Euripides 25) and comedy (Aristophanes 41.6, Plautus 40.7, Terence 53.2). His figure for Menander (32.7) is based on a much smaller corpus than we have now. Frost 42-64 identifies 76 entrances and exits in the Dyskolos alone.
... (2.6.1-6) They didn't fill the house of Corinthian Lais like this, and all of Greece lay... more ... (2.6.1-6) They didn't fill the house of Corinthian Lais like this, and all of Greece lay at her door. Nor was the crowd of Menander's Thais, with whom the Athenian public played, so large back then. ... The key is 33These are not their home cities. Lais reputedly came from Sicily (Ath. ...
Despite its general title this volume deals with a specialised category of female characters who ... more Despite its general title this volume deals with a specialised category of female characters who appear in the few complete plays and fragments of Menander, namely women who either have the status of hetairai ('female companions') or are wrongly perceived to be hetairai, and are involved in a specific dramatic context: the mistaken identity plot. The study of men's misperceptions of the status of some female characters in Menander's Sikyônioi, Misoumenos, Perikeiromenê, Hêrôs, Dyskolos, Aspis, Phasma, and P. Köln 203 enables Traill to demonstrate how the errors of male characters reflect male anxieties concerning the identity, social mobility, and juridical status of women in Menander's era; it also allows us to view the plays of Menander as case-studies in understanding or misunderstanding human character and human psychology-a feature which Menandrean comedy shares with Aristotelian rhetorical treatises and Greek tragedy. But cultural prejudices concerning female social status are also inextricably linked with wrong judgements about female character and its moral values, and Traill shows clearly examples of this sociological phenomenon in Menander's Samia, Dis Exapatôn, Misoumenos, Perikeiromenê, and Theophoroumenê, in Plautus' Cistellaria, and in Terence's Heauton Timoroumenos and Eunuchus. Her observations are not surprising, given the social fluidity and moral vulnerability of lower class women, such as the marginalised hetairai, in antiquity. Furthermore, Menander cautions his audience not to draw hasty conclusions about what they see and what they hear in their everyday life. The Hellenistic period was a difficult era politically, socially, and emotionally, and Menander (Traill persuasively argues) presents loyal, generous, and morally upstanding female fictional characters of a lower social status (such as Glykera in Perikeiromenê, Krateia in Misoumenos, and Chrysis in Samia) both to justify in dramatic terms the ultimate reward of these characters within the world of the play and to convey a social message of hope, harmony, and optimism for the members of the audience. The highlight of the volume for me is the section on the female characters in Menander's Epitrepontes. In 68 pages of sound and detailed philological analysis of select passages (mainly speeches) from the play (all Greek and Latin passages are cited both in the original and in English translation throughout the volume), Traill brilliantly scrutinizes the characters of the low class and kind hetaira Habrotonon and of the upper class and faithful wife Pamphile, and views them in relation to all the other (male) characters in the play. Traill's conclusions square with her earlier observations: "By allowing his whores-withhearts-of-gold to earn the protection of a respectable oikos by benefiting it in ways 1) The translation of the passage comes from Brown, P. 2006. Terence: The Comedies, translated with introduction and notes by P.B. (Oxford), 70.
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2011
... 2. Robert S. Miola, “Seven types of intertextuality”, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextual... more ... 2. Robert S. Miola, “Seven types of intertextuality”, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, edited by Michele Marrapodi (Manchester and New York ... On incest law under Elizabeth I, see Richard A. McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature's Law 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge ...
Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada, 2001
Les efforts de Polémon d’user de moyens légaux pour sauver son ex-petite amie de la maison d’un v... more Les efforts de Polémon d’user de moyens légaux pour sauver son ex-petite amie de la maison d’un voisin, démontrent son profond respect des lois de sa communauté. L’ambiguïté du statut légal et social de la concubine sème la confusion chez Polémon qui se questionne sur la légalité des moyens qu’il pourrait prendre. Cette scène le dépeint sous des traits sympathiques. Convaincu de son bon droit, il devient un soldat atypique des comédies par son empressement à renoncer à la violence en faveur d’une solution pacifique. Dans cette scène, commence la nécessaire métamorphose de son caractère en vue d’un éventuel mariage et de son intégration dans la communauté civile.
Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2001
Ambivius Turpio would have found the Dyskolos exactly the sort of play his troupe was always comm... more Ambivius Turpio would have found the Dyskolos exactly the sort of play his troupe was always commissioned with (or so he complains), a fabula laboriosa. 1 Much of the play's physical humor involves characters busily coming and going at the shrine of Pan, with many of them knocking-at their peril-on Knemon's door. 2 Given that these stage buildings figure so prominently in the action, it is no surprise that their important thematic role, as well as the play's distinctive use of stage space, have attracted scholarly attention. Two stimulating studies, published within a year of each other in the late 80s, elucidated the spatial symbolism of the Dyskolos in terms of binary oppositions. G. Hoffmann revealed the sociological opposition of rural poverty vs. urban wealth encoded in the two houses, arguing that their juxtaposition created an atopia, a setting at the periphery of society where these groups could effect a reunion impossible in any real place and time. Independently, N. J. Lowe identified similar "thematic polarities" (though these are based, he cautioned, on oppositions more complex than simple class divisions) and explored how these are mapped onto both visible stage space and imagined spaces offstage. Just as the left parodos and Knemon's house carry different meanings from the right parodos and Kallippides' *An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the annual meeting of CAMWS in Knoxville, April 2000. I am grateful for many helpful comments from the audience there, and from the anonymous reviewers for TAPA. 1 Heauton 44. 2 Mooney 49-58 used entrances and exits as a rough measure of the amount of action in a play and was able to demonstrate a significant difference between tragedy (Aeschylus averages 16.7 entrances and exits per play, Sophocles 25.7, and Euripides 25) and comedy (Aristophanes 41.6, Plautus 40.7, Terence 53.2). His figure for Menander (32.7) is based on a much smaller corpus than we have now. Frost 42-64 identifies 76 entrances and exits in the Dyskolos alone.
... (2.6.1-6) They didn't fill the house of Corinthian Lais like this, and all of Greece lay... more ... (2.6.1-6) They didn't fill the house of Corinthian Lais like this, and all of Greece lay at her door. Nor was the crowd of Menander's Thais, with whom the Athenian public played, so large back then. ... The key is 33These are not their home cities. Lais reputedly came from Sicily (Ath. ...
Despite its general title this volume deals with a specialised category of female characters who ... more Despite its general title this volume deals with a specialised category of female characters who appear in the few complete plays and fragments of Menander, namely women who either have the status of hetairai ('female companions') or are wrongly perceived to be hetairai, and are involved in a specific dramatic context: the mistaken identity plot. The study of men's misperceptions of the status of some female characters in Menander's Sikyônioi, Misoumenos, Perikeiromenê, Hêrôs, Dyskolos, Aspis, Phasma, and P. Köln 203 enables Traill to demonstrate how the errors of male characters reflect male anxieties concerning the identity, social mobility, and juridical status of women in Menander's era; it also allows us to view the plays of Menander as case-studies in understanding or misunderstanding human character and human psychology-a feature which Menandrean comedy shares with Aristotelian rhetorical treatises and Greek tragedy. But cultural prejudices concerning female social status are also inextricably linked with wrong judgements about female character and its moral values, and Traill shows clearly examples of this sociological phenomenon in Menander's Samia, Dis Exapatôn, Misoumenos, Perikeiromenê, and Theophoroumenê, in Plautus' Cistellaria, and in Terence's Heauton Timoroumenos and Eunuchus. Her observations are not surprising, given the social fluidity and moral vulnerability of lower class women, such as the marginalised hetairai, in antiquity. Furthermore, Menander cautions his audience not to draw hasty conclusions about what they see and what they hear in their everyday life. The Hellenistic period was a difficult era politically, socially, and emotionally, and Menander (Traill persuasively argues) presents loyal, generous, and morally upstanding female fictional characters of a lower social status (such as Glykera in Perikeiromenê, Krateia in Misoumenos, and Chrysis in Samia) both to justify in dramatic terms the ultimate reward of these characters within the world of the play and to convey a social message of hope, harmony, and optimism for the members of the audience. The highlight of the volume for me is the section on the female characters in Menander's Epitrepontes. In 68 pages of sound and detailed philological analysis of select passages (mainly speeches) from the play (all Greek and Latin passages are cited both in the original and in English translation throughout the volume), Traill brilliantly scrutinizes the characters of the low class and kind hetaira Habrotonon and of the upper class and faithful wife Pamphile, and views them in relation to all the other (male) characters in the play. Traill's conclusions square with her earlier observations: "By allowing his whores-withhearts-of-gold to earn the protection of a respectable oikos by benefiting it in ways 1) The translation of the passage comes from Brown, P. 2006. Terence: The Comedies, translated with introduction and notes by P.B. (Oxford), 70.
International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2011
... 2. Robert S. Miola, “Seven types of intertextuality”, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextual... more ... 2. Robert S. Miola, “Seven types of intertextuality”, in Shakespeare, Italy, and Intertextuality, edited by Michele Marrapodi (Manchester and New York ... On incest law under Elizabeth I, see Richard A. McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature's Law 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge ...
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