ABSTRACT
It has often been remarked that Menander has had a curious fate. 1 In antiquity, he was an extremely popular author at all levels of Greek culture, and yet none of his plays has reached us through manuscripts. 2 From the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars and readers alike have had the good fortune to understand much more of Menander’s dramatic art thanks to papyrological discoveries, but, as Serena Witzke (this volume) reminds us à propos of Oscar Wilde, just 20 years earlier knowledge of Menander’s plays was entirely based on snippets of indirect transmission or, even more remotely, on the adaptations that Roman authors were reported to have made of them.
