For a scholar like myself who is interested in Menander's reception today, it is a pleasant surprise that W.'s companion to Menander's Samia begins with the author's confession: ‘Samia was the first Greek play I ever watched – in Evis Gavrielides’ stunning production in the open-air theatre at Epidaurus in July 1993 – and I have had a soft spot for it ever since’ (p. vii). Gavrielides's production was innovative and addressed to a modern Greek audience, at a time when Aristophanes reigned supreme and Menander was relatively unknown.
W. offers a ‘critical introduction to the play and to Menander's comic art’, combining attention to detail with modern scholarly approaches. But he also ‘aims to bring Samia to life by considering it primarily as a work in performance and showing how Menander makes this performance funny and engaging’ (p. 1).
The companion is divided into five chapters, each dedicated to the analysis of one act. Throughout, W. tries ‘to evoke the sensation of watching a play in performance’, as though he were a member of the original audience. He asks what spectators could see on the stage and what they needed to know in order to appreciate the drama. This invites the further question: ‘how does the experience of reading the play differ from that of watching it in performance?’ (p. 2).
W. succeeds marvellously in showing that Samia is fun to read and stage, and that Menander is not flat, dull, lame or predictable (p. 8). His forte is not the verbal humour of Aristophanes or Plautus. It is rather ‘a more subtle, restrained type of humour, arising largely from character, situational irony and incongruity’. W. observes that this ‘is an acquired taste’ and that actual jokes in Menander are all the more surprising (p. 69).
Although Menander's plots are highly stylised, the plays are not the same, even if they all feature young lovers, ‘old men at odds with their sons, troublesome servants, mistresses, money worries’, and the like. Repetition and variation are the point: ‘the fun comes from seeing how a very limited fund of material is endlessly recycled, with inventive tweaks and modifications each time’ (p. 9). In Samia, for example, there are none of the usual obstacles to Moschion's and Plangon's wedding; all the delays occur due to misunderstandings, character weaknesses and bad luck (p. 28). The comedy depends above all on timing. Menander toys with audience expectations. For example, what will result from Demeas’ and Nikeratos’ trip to Pontus? Will they return safely to Athens? (p. 29) Who is Moschion's mother? Is Chrysis a Samian or might she be the long-lost daughter of an Athenian citizen? (This latter is impossible in my view, since she has had sexual relations with other men.) In fact, not much occurred in Pontus, where, as Demeas says, ‘the sun shone on the people there as little as it could get away with!’ This was so funny, W. points out, that Nikeratos repeats it in Act III: ‘The Black Sea isn't a healthy place’ (416–17). This is the ‘callback’ technique, as W. observes, that is regularly exploited by stand-up comedians (p. 38). For W. Nikeratos’ unnamed wife is the funniest character in the play. ‘Mrs Nikeratos’ is ‘an⋅early example of a familiar stock figure – the wife-as-ogre …, familiar to modern readers from a hundred and one variety shows, sitcoms and stand-up routines’ (p. 59).
Linguistically, too, Menander is inventive, and his characters employ ‘a surprisingly varied and exuberant range of derogatory expressions’. As W. remarks, ‘Menander clearly revels in the sheer joy of being rude’ (p. 76). The comic ending of Samia, like those of Dyskolos and Epitrepontes, involves ‘the release of tension, as at the punchline of a joke’ (p. 115), a theory popular since Lord Shaftesbury and Sigmund Freud.
W. discusses why Menander's plays are not frequently staged today, unlike Aristophanes’ plays, which are very popular. Samia has been staged in Greece and Cyprus a few times (Gavrielides mounted it on three separate occasions), but not in the British theatre by a professional theatrical company. I have found that Greek directors have hesitated to put on Menander because his comic style was perceived as dull for a modern audience, and so they incorporated elements from more lively and farcical genres, such as Oscar Wilde's or Μοlière's plays, or Commedia dell'arte. W., like A. Sommerstein ([ed.], Menander: Samia [2013]), notes that the social issues and sexual relationships that are part of Menander's plots may be sensitive for a modern audience (p. 8). For example, Moschion's sexual liaison with Plangon ‘would not have corresponded to modern discourses of sexual morality’ (p. 25). But the word ‘rape’ is ‘too distracting or anachronistic to use … in connection with Menander’. Though we would call Moschion a ‘rapist’, he would not have described himself that way. What is more, ‘what troubles him is the thought of his own father's reaction rather than the feelings of the girl and her family’ (pp. 61–9). As W. concludes, ‘any director who does attempt to stage Samia for a modern audience will have to find a way of confronting – or skating over? – the central problem of sex and the R word’ (p. 27).
Echoes of philosophical ideas, in particular with respect to the Peripatetic tradition, have occupied the attention of a several scholars of Menander (e.g. A. Barigazzi, La formazione spirituale di Menandro [1965]; K. Gaiser, ‘Menander und der Peripatos’, Antike und Abendland 13 [1967]; T.B.L. Webster, An Introduction to Menander [1974]; N. Bozanic, Structure, Language and the Action in the Comedies of Menander [1977]). More recently, V. Cinaglia (Aristotle and Menander on the Ethics of Understanding [2014]) has shown how perceptions and emotional responses to situations in Menander reflect Aristotle's ethical and cognitive presuppositions. W. touches on Menander's link with philosophical ideas, especially in relation to tychē or to automaton or, as he dubs it, ‘the power of happenstance’ (p. 51). W. notes that such correspondences do not necessarily entail that Menander was seriously engaging with the philosophy of the Lyceum, though he was reputed to have studied with Theophrastus. He might also, like Aristophanes before him, have been ‘merely flirting with fashionable ideas that were in the air or peppering his plays with a few superficial references and allusions, or even making fun of the intellectuals’. But W. allows that we may, ‘if we choose to do so’, treat Menander's plays as ‘serious expositions of philosophical ideas through the medium of drama’ (p. 53). Furthermore, ‘by emphasizing the importance of improbable coincidences and the apparent lack of design behind the events of the plot, perhaps Menander is implicitly drawing attention to his own role as author’ (p. 54). A third function of the role of accident and apparently random turns of event in Menander's comedies is the invocation of the world of tragedy. As W. puts is, ‘when his characters invoke happenstance as a cause, or complain about the apparent randomness and uncertainty of life, their outbursts often sound distinctly “tragic”’ (pp. 54–5). W.'s emphasis on the metatheatrical role of philosophy in the comedy and how it serves the humour of the play is a subtle and important contribution to the question of Menander's relationship to the Peripatos.
W.'s interpretation of Samia is up to date in its scholarship, sensitive to the key issues involved in interpreting Menander's plays, entertaining to read and accessible to a broad public. I recommend W.'s Samia to all students and scholars who are interested in classical studies, ancient drama and cultural studies in general.
