The present volume joins William Furley’s previous outstanding editions of Menander’s Epitrepontes (BMCR 2011.03.43) and Perikeiromene (BMCR 2016.05.43) in the BICS series, published in the same handsome format. Its five chapters offer a richly detailed introduction, a Greek text whose purpose is “to push things as far as they can go, without fantasizing and without inventing” (p. 1), a chapter of “composite readings” (as in Furley’s Epitrepontes edition), a translation, and a superbly detailed and fair-minded commentary, along with a comprehensive and thoroughly up-to-date bibliography and two indices.
The introduction lays out the particular challenges of editing and understanding Misoumenos. The play was clearly one of Menander’s more famous in antiquity, as witnessed by the surviving papyri and book fragments, but despite evidence for almost 1000 lines, central issues of the plot remain mysterious. The hated character of the title, Thrasonides, became a byword. The precise reason that Krateia, the prisoner of war he purchased as a slave but with the eventual intention of making her his pallake, developed such a hatred remains unknown. The essentials would certainly have been revealed to the audience in the now lost delayed prologue, probably delivered by a divinity, but nothing in the other remains of the play clarifies the vital details. Krateia’s father Demeas, coming on a visit to a house nearby, learns by chance that Krateia is living in Thrasonides’ house, identifies her as his captured daughter, and demands her release. Complicating the situation is Demeas’s discovery of a sword he recognizes among Thrasonides’ war booty, probably an heirloom he gave to his son. The implication is that the son is dead in the war—and that Thrasonides killed him. Furley anticipates in his introduction and convincingly argues in the commentary that Krateia’s hatred cannot originally arise from a belief that Thrasonides has killed her brother. Rather, she learns this suspicion from her father in their recognition scene. The brother is of course not dead and probably reappears in the final act. Krateia’s original, separate hatred is resolved, and with her recognition as Demeas’s freeborn daughter and his consent, Thrasonides can marry her as he wishes.
In addition to sketching the plot complications, known and unknown, and characters (including a persuasive argument that the barely attested Chrysis is not Krateia’s old nurse, captured with her, but a hetaera, perhaps from a lost subplot), Furley’s introduction offers very helpful discussions concerning the legal questions of Krateia’s status and the overall staging. In his reconstruction, the central location on stage is occupied by a tavern separating the houses of Thrasonides and Kleinias, whom the neighbor Demeas has originally come to visit. A very accessible discussion of Menander’s trimeter highlights the flexibility but also artistry of his often fast-moving verse. The introduction begins with Turner’s monumental work in recovering so much of the text from P.Oxy. 2656 in the 1960s and concludes with a clear account of further discoveries and editions down to Blanchard’s Budé of 2016.
Furley presents his text in the very user-friendly format seen in his earlier editions. The text as recovered from papyri and book quotations (with the usual sublinear dots for uncertain or disputed letters) is printed in black, with relatively certain restorations in square brackets but black as well. Conjectural restorations he prints in gray, helpfully differentiating the probable from the much more conjectural. Full discussions of choices regularly appear in the commentary. Speaker attributions and changes shown in the papyri are clearly indicated. In addition, however, Furley prints miniatures of representative character masks (mostly from Lipari figurines) in the margins to indicate character entrances and exits, an ingenious aid to imagining stage action (also used in the earlier volumes). There is a generally full and clear apparatus, although some documentation appears in the next section.
In passages where two and sometimes three regularly highly lacunose papyri contribute to the reconstitution of the text, “Composite Readings” presents the text line by line in pairs or triads (similar to his approach in the Epitrepontes edition). Furley’s goal, admirably accomplished, is to show as clearly as possible the process of reconstruction and to “allow others to share in the fun of reconstructing Menander from a diversity of pieces on papyrus” (p. 67).
The fourth chapter offers a smooth and serviceable translation “using free English verse,” though at a few points one may need recourse to the commentary to reconcile some changes in style or metaphor with the printed text.
The commentary is a treasure trove of insights (philological, papyrological, historical, literary, and dramaturgical), and only some highlights can be sketched here. Furley is keenly interested in Menander’s play with dramatic conventions and touches of metatheatrical awareness. The drama opens at night, with the title soldier Thrasonides (the colophon in O3 [P.Oxy. 2656] indicates his name became an alternate title to Misoumenos) pacing up and down outside his own house in the rain because of Krateia’s rejection of him in what seems to be an ironized version of the paraclausithyron, both parodic and pathetic. Likewise, the act will close with his slave Getas pulling him back into the house to avoid an arriving chorus, viewed not merely as rowdy revelers but potential nighttime footpads (λωποδύτας, 246).
More even than most Menander plays, Misoumenos is built on miscommunications. How Krateia initially conceived her hatred of the soldier remains unknowable in the present state of the text, but that hatred rises to a new level when the father Demeas, having discovered among Thrasonides’ war booty a sword he not merely recognizes as family property but almost certainly as one that he passed on to his still missing mercenary son. Thus, when the father recognizes and reunites with Krateia, he apparently shares with her the belief that his son, her brother, is dead—and that Thrasonides killed him. The sword gets its own mini-recognition scene, played offstage but recalled by Demeas onstage, perhaps with the exiting slave Syra eavesdropping and thus able to react to his narrative as the old man concludes his son must be dead (esp. lines 592–93, with Furley’s commentary ad loc.). The paratragic recognition scene of Demeas with his daughter follows immediately.
Furley shows how earlier and later eavesdropping scenes are essential to the play’s dramaturgy. As Act Three opens, Getas is moving weaponry and other booty from Thrasonides’ house to the neighbor’s in order to keep anything lethal out of his despairing and potentially suicidal master’s hands, while Syra and Chrysis (who Furley convincingly argues is a hetaira and not a fellow household slave) observe—and misinterpret. Similarly, Krateia herself overhears Thrasonides’ powerful soliloquy in which he either plans suicide or plans faking his own suicide (προσποου[μένῳ, 815, and Furley ad loc.). (The marginal speaker identification for Thrasonides near the beginning of his speech at 757 is missing from the translation, p. 104, but not hard to figure out.) Furley further notes the great demands on the actor playing Thrasonides as he performs imagined and rapidly changing dialogue with other characters and therefore suggests the role may even have been written with a particular accomplished actor in mind. Earlier, in the opening of Act Four, Getas soliloquizes on Thrasonides’ failure to win Demeas’s consent to his marrying Krateia, also imitating as he quotes the changing character voices. Indeed, Getas is so frantic he fails even to notice for 40 lines that the neighbor Kleinas is following and speaking to him, thus playing broad character and physical comedy off against the central plot conundrum that ought to be resolved by now (which, as Furley points out, would be typical for Menandrean play structure).
The Mytilene mosaic of Misoumenos, labelled as from Act Five (excellent color illustration, fig. 1.2, discussion pp. 19–20, and 213 ad 827), likely depicts the play’s most famous scene, from which alas no papyrus text survives. Thrasonides’ (probably faked?) suicide attempt must have closely preceded the revelation that Krateia’s brother is indeed alive and well (by his own appearance?), a plot manoeuvre Furley labels “real brinksmanship” (213). With her free status ratified, both earlier and later grounds for hatred resolved (see ad 971 on her laughter as reconciliation), and familial permission granted, Krateia can and will now marry Thrasonides, with Demeas providing a proper dowry.
Furley’s thoroughly up to date bibliography and two indices, one of ancient passages cited, from Aeneas Tacticus to Xenophon, and another of significant Greek words discussed, complete the volume. This edition and commentary (absent really significant new papyrus finds) will undoubtedly be the standard for decades to come.