(b Athens, 342 bce; d Athens, c290 bce). Greek comic poet. The most famous playwright of Greek New Comedy, he wrote more than 100 plays, domestic comedies in which intrigues, reversals and recognition scenes abound. The plays, of which few survive, have little metrical variety, being mostly in iambic trimeters. However, in a long scene (880–958) from the Misanthrope, Menander changed the metre to the 15-syllable catalectic iambic tetrameter which was recited to an aulos accompaniment. Two brief fragments of another play, the Possessed Girl, contain an invocation to Cybele and a corybantic dance and song in hexameters. For the latter the aulos modality would almost certainly have been Phrygian. A mosaic (100 bce) from the Villa of Marcus Tullius Cicero at Pompeii shows three actors in this comedy playing (or pretending to play) the double aulos, small cymbals and hand-held tympanum.
The characters represented as musicians in these comedies were usually young women of slave status skilled in playing the double aulos or psaltērion (a harp-like instrument; see Psaltery, §1). Apparently the psaltria was more respectable than the aulētris, who was often a prostitute (see Aulos, §II, 4). One psaltria, Habrotonon, had a major role in the Arbiter. Phanias, the main character of the Citharistes, was apparently a successful concert performer, freeborn and wealthy. One fragment of this play (Sandbach, no.7) refers to someone (presumably not Phanias) who through instruction (paideuesthai) is acquiring or perhaps imparting an affected taste for music; but little more than 100 lines have survived.
The male aulete who provided the accompaniment played the music that was supposedly being performed by an aulētris, but his principal task was to accompany the chorus (by convention a group of drunken revellers, votaries of Pan, huntsmen etc.), who were irrelevant to the plot. Only their initial appearances were even acknowledged in dialogue; otherwise a mere stage direction ‘chorus’ (chorou) sufficed, or occasionally ‘aulos music’ (aulei, ‘[someone] plays the aulos’), as in the manuscripts of Aristophanes. These entr'acte performances were probably a combination of song, dance and mime.
F.G. Allinson, ed. and trans.: Menander: the Principal Fragments (London and Cambridge, MA, 1921, 2/1930/R)
E.W. Handley, ed.: The Dyskolos of Menander (London, 1965), esp. 171ff, 210–11, 282ff
F.H. Sandbach, ed.: Menandri reliquiae selectae (Oxford, 1972)
T.B.L. Webster: Studies in Menander (Manchester, 1950, 2/1960)
A.D. Trendall and T.B.L. Webster: Illustrations of Greek Drama (London, 1971), 145
A.W. Gomme and F.H. Sandbach: Menander: a Commentary (Oxford, 1973)
G. Comotti: ‘L'aulo ghingras in una scena menandrea del mosaico di Dioscuride’, Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica, xx (1975), 215–23 and 4 pls.
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN