Menander
(This painting was done much later, in the Roman period,
by someone who had never seen Menander)
Menander is the only playwright from the Hellenistic period whose plays survive. Actually only one play, the Dyskolos, survives, and a lot of fragments. Even the Dyskolos was unknown until about thirty years ago, when archaeologists found a copy of it on some old papyri in Egypt.
Like Aristophanes, Menander wrote comedies (funny plays). Most of Menander's plays were like sit-coms or chick flicks today - boy meets girl, then there's some kind of problem (usually their parents don't want them to marry), and then in the end something happens so that they do get married. Menander is the first person we know of who wrote this kind of story. Later writers like Shakespeare used his plots, and so do modern TV writers.
To find out more about Menander, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Greek Theatre, by Stewart Ross (1999). For kids.
Greek and Roman Theater, by Don Nardo. For teenagers.
Plays and Fragments (Penguin Classics) by Menander. Translated by Norma Miller. The plays themselves.
Menander and the Making of Comedy, by J. Michael Walton and Peter D. Arnott (1996). Both authors are theater people more than classicists, so their study of Menander is very interested in how to produce his plays.
The Comedy of Menander: Convention, Variation, and Originality, by Netta Zagagi (1995).
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