page_title: Menander
section_title: 20th-century discoveries
hierarchical_section_title: Menander / 20th-century discoveries
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Портрет Менандра; Римская копия с греческого оригинала пергамского стиля (начало II в до н.э.). В основе типа портрет работы Кефисюдота и Тимарха, сыновей Праксителя (около 290 г до н.э.); Мрамор А 850 English: Menander (Greek playwright, 343-291 B.C.). Roman copy, after original by Kephisodotos the Younger and Timarchos, sons of Praxiteles, of 4th century B.C. Marble. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. Français&#160;: Buste de l'auteur grec Ménandre (343-291 Av-JC). Copie romaine d'un original de Kephisodotos et Timarchos, fils de Praxitele (IVe s Av-JC). Marbre. Musée de l'Ermitage, Saint-Pétersbourg, Russie.
context_page_description: Menander was a Greek dramatist 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 but may well have been similarly spectacular.
  One of the most popular writers of antiquity, his work was lost during the Middle Ages and is known in modernity in highly fragmentary form, much of which was discovered in the 20th century. Only one play, Dyskolos, has survived almost entirely.
context_section_description: This situation changed abruptly in 1907, with the discovery of the Cairo Codex, which contained large parts of the Samia; the Perikeiromene; the Epitrepontes; a section of the Heros; and another fragment from an unidentified play. A fragment of 115 lines of the Sikyonioi had been found in the papier mache of a mummy case in 1906.
  In 1959, the Bodmer papyrus was published containing Dyskolos, more of the Samia, and half of the Aspis. In the late 1960s, more of the Sikyonioi was found as filling for two more mummy cases; this proved to be drawn from the same manuscript as the discovery in 1906, which had clearly been thoroughly recycled.
  Other papyrus fragments continue to be discovered and published.
  In 2003, a palimpsest manuscript, in Syriac writing of the 9th century, was found where the reused parchment comes from a very expensive 4th-century Greek manuscript of works by Menander.  The surviving leaves contain parts of the Dyskolos and 200 lines of another, so far unidentified, piece by Menander.
caption: Menander. Roman copy, after original by Kephisodotos the Younger and Timarchos, sons of Praxiteles, of 4th century B.C. Marble. The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
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