ABSTRACT
Molière, whose comic theatre is the direct heir to New Comedy, gives as a subtitle to his Misanthrope: l’Atrabiliaire amoureux, ‘the cantankerous man in love’. By doing this, he attracts our attention to the fact that a character can be both melancholic and in love at the same time, and it is on the connection of these two states of being that I would like to focus here, starting from the example furnished to us by the character of Pheidias in Menander’s Phasma, the fragments of which have been perhaps a little neglected since the discovery of the Bodmer papyrus so greatly extended the surviving Menandrian corpus.
