Theophrastus: The Characters: Menander: Plays & Fragments

Heroism and moral grandeur are the keynotes of most classical Greek literature; realism as we have known it is rare. The two writers included in this volume are among the few who have drawn faces on the Greek crowd and shown them as they were.Theophrastus, the Aristotelian philosopher and botanist, is best known for his unique book, The Characters, a series of portraits of such types as the boor, the slanderer and the ironical man. These certainly influenced his pupil, Menander, who may even have used them as blue-prints for the more realistic characters on the Greek New Comedy: later they were translated and imitated by La Bruyère. All too little of Menander's work survives, but through his Roman imitators, Plautus and Terence, he proved to be the originator of European formal comedy, as seen in Molière, Congreve, Sheridan and even Oscar Wilde.