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THEATRE : ANCIENT & MODERN

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On Editing and Translating Menander

W.G. Arnott, University of Leeds, U.K

In classical scholarship the twentieth century might justifiably be called the century of Menander. Before it dawned, this star of Greek New Comedy was known only from a collection of choice quotations whose quality still made Winckelmann lament the loss of 'the first man to whom the graceful charm of comedy was revealed in its loveliest beauty'.[1] This century, however, excavations in the sands of Egypt and the stripping of mummy cartonnages with surgical skill have repeatedly brought to light papyrus texts of his plays which confirm his innovative influence on the structure and subject-matter of comic plots from Shakespeare down to Molière and even Oscar Wilde and P. G. Wodehouse.

Thirty years ago I was commissioned by Harvard University to produce a three-volume edition of these new discoveries for the Loeb Classical Library, with an introduction, complete Greek texts and English translations on facing pages, and explanatory notes. All of these volumes have now been published (1979, 1996, 2000). My task in this paper is to illustrate the different kinds of work involved in preparing this edition, and this might be done most conveniently if I discuss one short stretch of text which will appear in that third volume, lines 96 to 111 of Menander's Samia, 'The Woman from Samos'. Here is my proposed text, its critical apparatus, and a suggested translation:

96-105 assigned to one speaker by B (Sandbach give 96-97 and 101 ( jAq.) —105 to Demeas, the rest to Nikeratos). 96 a]]r j. Arnott. 98 Arnott: icque~ B . 101, 106 Suppl. ed. pr. 109 eo:ik j B in error.

At line 96 of the Samia two old men, named Demeas and Nikeratos, make their first entry onto an empty stage towards the end of the first act of a five-act play. Incidentally, the standard five-act play of Shakespeare goes back to the time of Menander, when plays began to be so structured in order to provide four opportunities for a chorus no longer involved in the dramatic action to entertain the audience with song and dance entr'actes. In the Samia several scenes precede the arrival of Demeas and Nikeratos. From these earlier scenes the audience learns that Demeas' adopted son Moschion had raped or seduced Nikeratos' daughter while the old men were occupied in business abroad. Moschion, however, has undertaken to marry Nikeratos' daughter, who has now borne the baby started by the rape or seduction. Moschion was the last person on stage, but left just before the old men's arrival.

TEXT

The first task of any editor of an old Greek play is to establish the text. This part of the play is preserved on a single manuscript, a papyrus written in the third century A.D., discovered in the twentieth century and brought to its present home in the Fondation Bodmer at Cologny in the eastern suburbs of Geneva, and first published in 1968.[2] Lines 96-111 of the play are very well preserved.

The text of Menander, Samia 96-110 in the Bodmer codex. Reproduced here by kind permission of the Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny, Geneva.

This is a quite remarkable fact, for often the papyri of ancient comedy are badly mutilated, badly abraded, or both together. In vv.96-111 the first two letters of 96 are torn off, there is slight abrasion in 100 and 101, and a tiny hole in 106. Everything else is continuously and clearly legible. What an apprentice reader of the Greek text needs generally to note here, however, whether he or she reads Greek or not, is a series of facts that apply to virtually all papyrus texts and fragments of later Greek comedy.

1. First, the Greek text consists simply of the words spoken by the characters. The playwright does not normally add descriptive details about stage business, types of delivery, or anything of that sort. Every movement and action of each actor has to be inferred solely from the words that he speaks.
   
2. A speaker's identity is not written down before each individual speech. It was a conventional but not invariable habit to put an abbreviation of the speaker's name in the margin before his first remark on entry. Here you see nikhr (Niker, short for Nikeratos) written in the left-hand margin of 106, and I have little doubt that dhmea~ (Demeas or its abbreviation appeared originally in the same margin at 96 before that part of the margin was torn off. Those are the only identifications of speaker provided by the scribe of this papyrus. In addition to that, however, the scribe employs with some care but not always correctly two further marks to indicate where one speech ends and another begins. An English colon (or rather 'dicolon', to give it its technical name) is used to divide the end of one speech and the beginning of the next (e.g., at the end of v.105, or after the fifteenth letter of 114), and a horizontal line (paragraphus is the technical term) is placed under the beginning of any line in which a speech division occurs (e.g. under 105 and 114).[3] The assignment of each speech to its maker is then left to the intelligence of the reader; there is, of course, no difficulty when only two speakers are on stage (as here), but problems arise when the dialogue is three-sided.
   
3. The scribe of the Bodmer papyrus, like all others in antiquity, does not leave any space between individual words. Scribes in antiquity wrote as they spoke and as we still speak, without word-division. This frequently provides problems for a modern editor, especially in badly holed and mutilated texts, where syllable sequences can be divided in more than one way, and thus cause the kind of problem we associate today in English rather with the clues of the more complicated varieties of Azed or Listener crosswords.

An editor then must present a text acceptable to a modern reader, with words divided and speeches assigned to named speakers. Where the abrasions, tears and holes are small, it is usually easy to add any missing letters. Scribes are human, however; they make mistakes in copying, and the Bodmer papyrus of Samia was written between 500 and 600 years after Menander composed his play. The editor will attempt to correct as many of the copying errors as he can, using the principles that will now be familiar to all who have seen Tom Stoppard's play about Housman, The Invention of Love. Let me illustrate this with two minor textual problems in this passage.

1. At the beginning of v.96 the first one or two letters of text have been torn off. What has been lost? Clearly some introductory word implying that here we have a question ( 'Don't you notice ...'). An acceptable and convincing solution must fulfil two conditions which will be recognised by anyone who has watched the word-adding section of the TV programme Have I Got News For You?: the supplement must make perfect sense, and when written in the scribe's handwriting it must perfectly fit the vacant space. Most editors here accept the suggestion of Kasser and Austin, the first editors of this play: [4]oÜ]koun, but there simply is not enough space in the gap for the letters outo be inserted,[5] and this makes my own suggestion [6] a]]r j ou\n a more acceptable option. Here the left-edge of the torn papyrus shows only a sublinear spot of ink from the first preserved letter of the line, and that spot could come equally well from the tail of either a rho or a kappa.
   
2. At the end of v.98 the scribe writes icque~ afqonoi (no end of fish, perfect sense in this context, but when Menander wrote this play (probably c.314 B.C.[7]) the nominative plural of the word for 'fish' could be spelled in two different ways, icqu'e~ and icqu'~ and towards the end of an iambic trimeter icqu'~ provides a more acceptable scansion (with the first half of the metron scanning as two longs) than icqu'e~ (with the first half of the metron resolved into an anapaest with a word-break between the two shorts and the long syllable). Accordingly it seems likely that here the scribe has replaced Menander's spelling of the word with an alternative form familiar to the writer.[8]

TRANSLATION

Menander's comedies were written in verse. The passage from v.96 to v.111 uses the main stock metre of Attic comedy, unrhymed iambic trimeters that consist of three metra scanning basically x— u — with a series of permissible resolutions that allow individual lines to range from twelve to fourteen syllables. Loeb translators more commonly turn the Greek dramatic poets into English prose, but my own translations of Menander for this series transform Menander's iambic trimeters into the unrhymed iambic pentameters of English blank verse, which seem to me closest in spirit, usage and form to the Greek metre.

A practical reason for this choice was my distress as a teacher over the frequency with which students who could read works of Greek poetry only in translation assumed that if Homer or Euripides were translated into English prose by Penguin or Loeb translators, Homer's and Euripides' original Greek must necessarily have also been written as prose. In addition, as Savory writes, 'when poetry is translated into prose, ... the sense is there, the vista is there, but the music of the verse is missing and the colour of the scene is reduced to black and white'.[9] There is, fortunately for me, no time now to discuss whether the music of my verse translations is harmonious, dissonant, or just plain mediocre, but a Loeb translator needs above all to be faithful, even if (to quote Roy Campbell[10]) 'translations (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive.'

The choice of iambic pentameters causes one inevitable problem for anyone who additionally wishes to match one Greek line to one English, and thus retain Menander's line-numbering in the translation. That problem also often becomes an impossibility: the problem of condensing 12 to 14 syllables of Greek into the 10 or 11 of the English pentameter.

In lines 96-111 there are perhaps three Greek words whose translation calls for specific comment: 'you all notice' (for aijsqavnesqe, 96), 'fat' (for pacei'~, 98), and 'God!' (for   [Apollon, 100).

1. In v.96 there is no Greek word for 'all', but in a scene which involves only two speakers the use of a second-person-plural verb by one of them clearly implies the presence of one or more other (mute) characters on the stage, as we shall later see.
   
2. In v.98, as elsewhere in Greek comedy, the adjective pacei'~ apprehension in the translator, for this is a word that in colloquial usage had a wide range of meanings: 'fat', 'rich' and 'stupid' being three that would all apparently make sense in the present passage. Why then should 'fat' here be the preferred translation? The answer to this question is provided by the geographical and meteorological clues that are here inserted into the context.[11] In this scene Demeas and Nikeratos have just returned to Athens from an area of the Black Sea (Povnto~, v.98) which is bedevilled by fogs that blot out the sun (106-109). The combined evidence of ancient scientists such as the author of the Hippocratic essay on Airs, Waters, Places (ch. 19) and modern climatologists fixes this area as the north-western shoreline of the Black Sea, where according to the former hjhvr ... katevcei polu;~ th'~ hjmevrh~ ta; pevdia (a dense fog covers by day the lowlands),[12] while the latter confirm that in the region around the modern Odessa such fogs today can last over a week.[13] The ancient inhabitants of that area were the Scythians, and the same chapter of the Hippocratic tract emphasises that ta; ei[dea aujtw'n paceva ejsti; kai; a[narqra (their physique is fat, fleshy and with no visible joints).
   
3. The translation of   [Apollon in v.100 by 'God!' rather than precisely by 'Apollo!' will inevitably be contentious. Menander's Athenians frequently add vitality to their remarks by adding oaths sworn to any number of gods: Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Dionysus, the Sun, Poseidon, for instance. Yet if a translator loads his translation with repeated 'yes, by Poseidon's or 'no, by Zeus's, he gains fidelity but introduces expressions that are alien to twentieth-century English. In the first volume of the Loeb Menander I retained the oaths, but largely dropped them in the second and third volumes because of well-presented criticisms by reviewers whom I respected.

INTERPRETATION

Interpretation of this passage is hampered by a number of problems that merit extended discussion; two of these form the pendant to this paper, bringing together questions of text, translation, background reference and theatrical business.

1. Who spoke vv.96-105? The Bodmer papyrus has dicola at the ends of vv. 95 and 105 but none in between; no paragraphi are visible before v.105; and an abbreviation of Nikeratos' name (see above) is placed in the left-hand margin of v.106, ostensibly to introduce his first speech. These facts together imply that Demeas spoke everything from 96 to 105, just as the earliest editors of Menander's Samia indicated. But in 1970 a justifiably influential paper [14] by that most distinguished of Menandrean scholars, the late F. H. Sandbach, argued that the Bodmer papyrus was here (as occasionally elsewhere) at fault, and that Nikeratos interrupted Demeas' flow from v.98 up to v.101 (as far as ajgavq j ). Sandbach defended his view by pointing to the telegraphic shortness of the phrase units in these lines and to the presentation of Nikeratos elsewhere in the play as a man who typically favoured short sentences. Sandbach's convincing demonstration that Menander was a pioneer in differentiating the word patterns and preferences of individual characters induced several scholars, especially in the English-speaking world,[15] to follow him over vv.98-101 — wrongly, in my opinion. The papyrus does not err.

   Demeas too at times indulges in short sentences, and two other aspects in vv.98-101 seem more characteristic of Demeas than of Nikeratos. The pithy comments there on the Black Sea and Byzantium have a punch and flair that throughout the play are generally associated with Demeas, not Nikeratos.[16] And in v.100 the speaker takes Apollo's name in the Greek oath that in my translation is generalised to 'God!'; Demeas does this five times elsewhere in the play,[17] but Nikeratos never.

2. There is one final difficulty of interpretation that all editors and translators of Menander often face. As I noted earlier, virtually all that the Bodmer papyrus contains is the bare words of the spoken text, and stage movements and any other business have to be inferred on the evidence of these words alone. Let us now reconsider the dramatic situation given by vv.96-111 of the Samia. Demeas and Nikeratos have just returned after a long absence abroad trading around the Crimea. You will remember that Demeas at v.96 uses the second-person plural in addressing Nikeratos (aijsqavnesqe:(Don't you all notice : see above). At vv.104-105 Demeas again uses the second-person plural when issuing the command ei[sw paravgete / umei;~ (In you (plural) go!'), before changing to the second-person singular with ajpovplhcq j, e{sthka~ ejmblevpwn ejmoi (Have you (singular) / Been paralysed, to stand and gawp at me?). These switches between second-person singular and plural, when linked with the tone and content of the remarks involved, yield vital — but not unambiguous — clues to stage business. At the beginning of this scene Demeas and Nikeratos are imagined to be returning from a long business trip to the Black Sea which has lasted well over nine months. They must presumably be accompanied by mute characters playing the role of the slaves who are carrying their baggage. Demeas, we know, is rich, and likely to have both a lot of baggage and several slaves to handle it. Nikeratos is poor, and that poverty would be most effectively visible to an audience if he had only a little luggage and just one slave to deal with it. The visual background is unambiguous, but there are two possible ways in which the stage business could be handled. One would have Demeas ordering his slaves at v.104 to go into his house with his baggage, and his own slaves obeying that order. The single slave left motionless and gawping would be Nikeratos' slave, reluctant to obey a command that did not originate with his own master. The alternative possibility would be that Demeas finally shouted at one of his own slaves who, by behaving like a nincompoop, provided a few moments of visual amusement for Menander's audience.[18]

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Endnotes

[1] Cf. U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Neue Jahrbücher XXI (1908) 62=Kleine Schriften I (Berlin 1936) 270.

[2] V. Martin (ed.), Papyrus Bodmer IV. Ménandre, Le Dyscolos (Cologny-Geneva).

[3] On the accuracy of the Bodmer papyrus' dicola and paragraphi see especially E. W. Handley's edition of Menander's Dyskolos (London 1965) 44-49, and cf. Gnomon 42 (1970) 15. F. Stoessl's discussion of the instances in the Samia (Anzeiger, Wiener Akademie, Phil. -Hist. Klasse 106, 1969, 349-67) is still useful although excessively dogmatic.

[4] R. Kasser and C. Austin (edd.), Papyrus Bodmer XXV. Ménandre, La Samienne (Cologny—Geneva 1969).

[5] Cf. A. Barigazzi, RIFC 98 (1970) 159-60, 331, and 100 (1972) 341.

[6] Cf. ZPE 121 (1998) 42.

[7] Cf. ZPE (n.6) 35-36.

[8] Cf. especially the Gomme-Sandbach commentary on Menander (Oxford 1973) on Samia 98 (p. 555).

[9] Theodore H. Savory, The Art of Translation (London 1957) 31.

[10] Poetry Review 40 (June/July 1949) 201.

[11] Cf. ZPE (n.6) 43-44

[12] See also Gregory of Nazianzus, Epist. 4.4 to;n poqouvmenon h{lion, o}n wJ~ dia; kavpnh~ aujgavzesqe, w\ Pontikoi; kimmevrioi ( The sun that you miss and view as it were through a smoke-filled chimney, O you Cimmerians of the Black Sea; the Cimmerians were ousted from their homes north west of the Black Sea by the Scythians); and cf. Homer, Od. 11.15-18 and Virgil, Georg. 3.357-59).

[13] Cf. C. Danoff in RE Suppl. IX (1962) s.v. Pontos Euxeinos, coll. 943-49.

[14] F.H. Sandbach, Menander's Manipulation of Language for dramatic purposes, Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt 16 (1970) 121.

[15] E.g. the edition of Menander by G. Paduano (Milan 1980) and of the Samia by David Bain (Warminster 1983); cf. E. G. Turner, Entretiens (n.14) 138; S. M. Goldberg, The Making of Menander's Comedy (London 1980) 95; K. B. Frost, Exits and Entrances in Menander (Oxford 1988) 104; and Netta Zagagi, The Comedy of Menander (London 1994) 65.

[16] Cf. the remarks of Demeas at Samia 336-37 (Chrysis as a born-again Helen) and 589-96 (first pointing out to Nikeratos, whose daughter bore Moschion's baby, that Greek tragedy has stories of Zeus seducing Danae by changing himself into a shower of gold and so being able to make his way through the roof of the building in which Danae was locked, and then asking whether Nikeratos' roof leaked).

[17] At Samia 444, 455, 567, 570 and 596. Cf. ZPE (n.6) 42-43.

[18] There is a very similar incident at Menander, Dyskolos 439-41, where the slave Getas orders a party arriving at the shrine of Pan to 'go inside' and 'get' things ready (e‡siteandpoie‹te, second person plurals), and then reviling an apparent sluggard with 'What are you staring (kšchnaj, second person singular) at, you imbecile?' See especially Handley (n.3) and Gomme-Sandbach (n.8) ad loc., and Frost (n. 15 ) 50.