INTRODUCTION
For nearly two thousand years Menander's reputation as a writer of pure Attic has been somewhat tarnished through the attacks made upon him by the atticizing grammarians of the first centuries of our era. Notwithstanding his great popularity in ancient times, which lasted for centuries after his death,[1] and the faithful picture of life that he painted in his comedies,[2] our estimate of him has probably suffered on account of their adverse criticism. The recent additions to the extant body of his works give us at last an opportunity to test his diction and to decide to a certain extent for ourselves independently of the ancient grammarians where he stood among Greek writers from the point of view of language.
The present study is an examination of Menander's vocabulary, as compared with that of his predecessors and successors. For this purpose a careful list was made of all words used by him which do not appear in the literature we now possess from the classical period, together with words which he uses with new meanings.[3] These two classes of words have been traced through the rest of the literature, and through the grammarians and lexicographers. My chief helps have been the Greek-English lexicon of Liddell and Scott, the Paris edition of the Thesaurus, and the indices listed in H. Schöne's
- ↑ Cf. Phryn. p. 418 L., 492 f. R. In this dissertation, Phryn. L. = Phrynichi Eclogae Nominum et Verborum Atticorum ed. C. A. Lobeck, Lips. 1820; Phryn. R. = W. G. Rutherford, The New Phrynichus, London 1881.
- ↑ Cf. the lines of Aristoph. Byz. ap. Walz, Rhet. Graec. IV. p. 101.3 f.:
ὦ Μένανδρε καὶ βίε,
πότερος ἄρ᾽ ὑμῶν πότερον ἀπεμιμήσατο;So far as we know, Aristophanes made no criticism of Menander on the score of his vocabulary. Stemplinger, Das Plagiat in der griechischen Literatur, Berlin 1912, p. 8, in speaking of Aristophanes' work Παράλληλοι Μενάνδρου, adds the interesting comment: "An und für sich ist es nicht unwahrscheinlich, dass Aristophanes bei seiner Menandrosstudien die Parallelen dieses Dichters mit den Alten zusammenstellte, vielleicht auch um zu zeigen, wie gut attisch und klassisch Menandros sei".
- ↑ A few words intentionally left out, with the reasons for their omission, are noted at the end of chapter III.
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