ABSTRACT
Menander’s plots and characters have often been analysed in the context of Aristotelian philosophy, 1 and various scholars have attempted to show possible influences of Peripatetic philosophy on Menander’s comic production. 2 This paper aims to take this line of research further: my aim is not to try to demonstrate the direct philosophical influence of Aristotle on Menander, but to show that they share a common thought-world. More specifically, the broader claim at the basis of this paper is that Menander’s construction of characters and plots and Aristotle’s philosophical analyses express analogous approaches on the subject of the relationship between knowledge and ethics; that is, they present analogous ideas on the relationship between knowledge-formation, character, choice and emotions, and of how these factors are affected by contingency and chance. 3 In this paper, I focus on this latter aspect: that is, Menander’s and Aristotle’s analogous treatment of the role of chance and accidental ignorance 4 in the context of people’s ethical life and choices. Various scholars have already noted Menander’s and Aristotle’s shared interest in this topic, 5 but, I believe, more work can be done in showing the analogous ethical and psychological implications involved in their treatment of this subject. In particular, here, I shall focus on the kind of challenge that, in Menander and Aristotle, chance and accidental ignorance present to the agent’s reasoning and ethical understanding. Accordingly, I shall discuss whether, with respect to the action, Menander and Aristotle present the agent’s intellectual and ethical virtues as a constitutively significant factor in the process of dealing with chance events and how this aspect affects the ethical presentation of the agent. In this context, I will consider two comedies of Menander, Perikeiromene and Aspis, in which chance and accidental ignorance play a prominent role in the unfolding of the plot. In this respect, I shall argue that, despite the presence of Chance and Ignorance (Τύχη and Ἄγνοια) as prologue-speaker in these two comedies, and despite their claims to be in control of the characters on stage, 6 figures can only be partly excused for the mistakes they make as a consequence of unexpected events or unknown situations. Independently from the influence of these external factors, it is the mechanism of the characters’ choices and their reactions in given circumstances that characterise them as agents of a certain kind. In the second part of the paper, I will explore these examples together with Aristotle’s treatment of chance and involuntary actions caused by chance and ignorance. In the Physics, in particular, Aristotle makes it clear that, in natural philosophy, the meaning of chance events is significantly affected by the agents’ reactions in response to the specific event. When this happens, it is not always easy to establish where the primary cause of the action lies and, therefore, as he claims in the Nicomachean Ethics, it is difficult to say whether the action is determined by chance or is dependent on the agent’s choice. What seems to be clear, however, is that there is a range of responses that the agent can give to accidental events and, depending on these responses, the agent can affect the ethical quality of his choice and the meaning of the event itself within the context of his life. In conclusion, I will show that the understanding of both frameworks involved is improved by the study of these significant analogies: the depth of Menander’s plots and characters is better understood in this context when compared to Aristotle’s reflection on analogous topics and, on the other hand, Aristotle’s ethical philosophy seems to find in the figures of Menandrian comedies the human material that exemplifies his thought on relevant topics. 7
