Menander
c. 340 BCE – 290 BCE · aged 50
Athenian playwright of New Comedy
- Born
- 340 BCE · Kephisia
- Died
- 290 BCE · Freattyda
Life timeline
Their life from birth to death. On the timeline, world events of the time are shown faintly.
- c. 340 BCEBornBorn in Kephisia
- c. 290 BCEDiedDied in Freattyda
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Meanwhile in the world
Major world events during their lifetime (340 BCE – 290 BCE).
- 323 BCE – 30 BCEHellenistic period
Biography
Menander (Ancient Greek: Μένανδρος, romanized: Ménandros; c. 342/341 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek playwright and the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy. He wrote 108 comedies and took the prize at the Lenaia festival eight times. His record at the City Dionysia is unknown.
He was one of the most popular writers and most highly admired poets in antiquity, but his work was considered lost before the early Middle Ages. It now survives only in Latin-language adaptations by Terence and Plautus and, in the original Greek, in highly fragmentary form, most of which were discovered on papyrus in Egyptian tombs during the early to mid-20th century. In the 1950s, to the great excitement of Classicists, it was announced that a single play by Menander, Dyskolos, had finally been rediscovered in the Bodmer Papyri intact enough to be performed.
Text from the Wikipedia article Menander, CC BY-SA 4.0
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