Vocabulary of Menander (1913)/Introduction

by Donald Blythe Durham

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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 "Repertorium griechischer Wörterverzeichnisse und Speziallexika", Leipzig, 1907, with the following important exceptions:

Aesopus: fabulae Planudeae ed. Schaefer. Lips. 1818.

Agapetus: scheda regia ed. Groebel. Lips. 1733.

Anthologia Graeca: Fr. Jacobs animadvers. in epigr. Anth. Gr. Brunckii. vol. III. pars. III. tom. XIII. Lips. 1814.

Democritus: Ethica ed. Natorp. Marburg 1893.

Ioannes Glycas: de vera syntaxeos ratione ed. Alb. Jahn. Bernae 1849.

Medici: I have used only Ermerins' Anecdota and Castellus' Lexicon.

Papyri Graeci Musei antiq. publ. Lugduni Batavi ed. C. Leemans. I. and II. Lugduni Bat. 1843, 1885.

Papyri Graeci Regii Taurinensis Musei Aegyptii ed. ab Amadeo Peyron. Taurini 1826.

Synesius: Calvitii encomium ed. Krabinger. Stuttgart 1834.

Theodoretus: Graec. affectionum curatio ed. Gaisford. Oxonii 1839.

Meursius: Glossarium Graecobarbarum. ed. altera. Lugduni Batavorum 1614.

In his Nachträge (p. iv.):
Martyria]: Martyrium S. Theodoti et S. Ariadnes ed. Franchi. Roma 1901.

Passio S. Perpetuae et Felicitatis ed. Franchi. Rome 1896.

In the case of authors to whose writings two or more indices exist, I have used only the one which seemed the latest and best. As the year 600 A.D.^[4] is a convenient date at which to divide the Koine from the Greek of the middle ages, authors after that time have been disregarded. Indices which exist only in manuscript have not been consulted.

This list of omissions represents in the main books not accessible to me. Yet many citations from the authors covered by them have been found from other sources, such as the general lexica; hence the loss for this study is not so great as it might seem.

In the course of my work I have occasionally found additional indices, of which the most important are:

Alcaeus: Gerstenhauer, de Alcaei et Sapphonis copia vocabulorum. In Diss. phil. Halens. 12 (1894) pp. 231–257.

Epicurus: Linde, de Epicuri vocabulis ab optima Atthide alienis. Breslau 1906. In Bresl. phil. Abh. 9.3.

Eusebius: vol. II., Kirchengeschichte. Tl. iii. Register. ed. E. Schwartz. Leipzig 1909.

Papyri: Tebtunis Payri vol. II. London 1907.

Papyri: Revenue Laws of Ptolemy Philadelphus. ed. by B. P. Grenfell and J. P. Mahaffy. Oxford 1896.

Papyri: Oxyrhynchus Papyri ed. Grenfell and Hunt. vols. V, VI, VII, VIII, IX. London 1908, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1912.

Diels, H.: die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 2te Auflage. II. 2. Wortindex von W. Kranz. Berlin 1910.

Scholia in Aristophanem ed. Fr. Dübner. Paris 1877.

Theophrastus: Characteres rec. H. Diels. Oxford 1909.

Theophrastus: ed. Wimmer. Didot. Paris 1866.

Theophrastus: Hindenlang, L.: Sprachliche Untersuchungen zu Theophrasts botanischen Schriften. Diss. Strassburg 1910. (Diss. phil. Argent. sel. XIV. 2.)

van Herwerden: Lex. Gr. suppletor. ed. II. Leyden 1910.

van Herwerden: Addenda ad lex. gr. suppl. ed. II., in Mnemosyne N. S. 39 (1911) pp. 10–12.

A statement is necessary about the authors whose use of a word has been considered sufficient to mark it as good Attic. All the Atticists agree in accepting as standard Attic (δόκιμοι) the orators, Thucydides,^[5] and Aristophanes and the other writers of old comedy. As regards tragedy, the practical difficulty is much slighter than the theoretical. It is difficult, indeed almost impossible, to separate the "good"^[6] words in tragedy from the "bad". And yet, in spite of the large element in tragedy of Epic and Ionic words, the dialogue portions furnish a large body of the best Attic usage,^[7] though generally of a style more elevated than that of Menander's comedy. However, since the latter is the basis of our investigation, and the element of paratragedy in it is relatively small, for practical purposes the dialogue of tragedy supplies a fair test of Menander's vocabulary and has been accepted in this treatise along with the approved writers. For the same reason I have not taken into account paratragedic passages in the comic writers. No word in such passages would incur the censure of the Atticists. In the case of Plato, who is included by the Atticists, and whose stylistic excellence is unquestioned, I adopted the following plan. In view of the large number of words which he employs which are not found in earlier Attic writers, I regarded the purity of his diction as doubtful. Indeed, his long absence from Athens might well have caused his vocabulary to become tainted. But after considerable progress had been made in this investigation, and various tests, as will be seen below,^[8] had been applied, the purity of his diction in the main seemed amply vindicated. The Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία found among the works of Xenophon, which has often been ascribed to Critias,^[9] has been accepted in this study as pure Attic. To these we must add the old Attic inscriptions.

The canon of good writers, then, in following discussion contains the ten orators, Plato, Thucydides, Aristophanes and the fragments of old comedy, the dialogue of tragedy, Attic inscriptions previous to the death of Alexander, and the Xenophontic Ἀθηναίων Πολιτεία.^[10] This is the standard adopted in the selection of the words in the third chapter, which represents the bulk of my work. In chapter II are contained special studies, involving a comparison of Menander with certain of these classical writers taken as representative, and certain later authors in addition.

 

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1. 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.
2. 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".

3. A few words intentionally left out, with the reasons for their omission, are noted at the end of chapter III.
4. See Thumb, Der griech. Sprache im Zeitalter d. Hellenismus, Strassburg, 1901, pp. 9 f.
5. In spite of the fact that Thucydides used a fairly large number of non-Attic words, the difficulty of deciding in the case of a particular word has led me to accept his writings as canonical. Professor C. F. Smith, in articles in the Proceedings of the American Philological Association on "Traces of Tragic Usage in Thucydides" (vol. 22 [1891] pp. xvi ff.), and "Poetic Words in Thucydides" (vol. 23 [1892] pp. xlviii ff.) gives a partial list of such words. Among them are the following which appear in Menander: αἰών (Cratin.), ἄνθος (Aristoph.), δράω (Aristoph.), ἐξαλείφω (Aristoph., Dem.), ἐξαπίνης (Aristoph.), (εὐπραξία, doubtful restoration in Men.; found in Dem.), ἤπιος (Aristoph.), μοχθέω (Aristoph.), νέμω (orators), οἱ πέλας = the neighbors, (ῥόθιον, a restoration in Men., found in Aristoph.), σμικρός (Pherecr.), and φιλέω = soleo (Aristoph., Isocr.). Professor Smith also compares πληγέντες, Thuc. 3.18.2, al. ( = μεγάλως νικηθέντες Schol.) with Men. 1053 K. πέπλεκται = ἥττηται (Phot.). Of these twelve (or possibly fourteen), all except οἱ πέλας and πέπλεκται or πληγέντες appear either in old comedy or the orators, as noted above.
6. "Good" words are of course the words which might properly appear in the works of an author who wrote correct Attic prose; "bad" words, those which would not be used by such writers.
7. Cf. Thumb, Hdb. d. griech. Dialekte, Heidelberg, 1909, pp. 369 f., 374.
8. See tables in Chapter II of this dissertation.
9. Among others, by Böckh, Staatshaushaltung der Athener I² p. 432. See also Christ, Griech. Litteraturgeschichte⁴ p. 367; I⁵ p. 452 n. 2, and the literature cited there. The conclusion of Kalinka, the latest editor, is that the writer cannot be identified.
10. In addition to these writers, Bruhn (l. c. p. 6) accepts also the writings of the Atticists as standard. But W. Schmid, Der Atticismus in seinen Hauptvertretern, IV pp. 578, 585 ff., 597 ff., 606 n., shows that in spite of their efforts at accuracy in using only Attic words and forms they sometimes went astray. See also Thumb, Griech. Spr. p. 8. The Atticists therefore are unreliable. Moreover, even if we could trust them to use only Attic words, they are prejudiced witnesses, and their testimony must be thrown out. Our only standard of comparison must be Attic writers. Bruhn also includes the Πολιτεία Ἀθηναίων of Aristotle; but it seems best to omit this work, owing to the harsh criticism of Aristotle by Phrynichus (p. 311 L., 366 R.). Bruhn omits the three great writers of tragedy from his canon.