The relationship between creditor and debtor, in the case of Menander and the Latin playwrights, Plautus and Terence, has been stressed by ancient and modern scholars and intellectuals alike, and most vividly by Julius Caesar, when he called Terence a ‘semi-Menander’. For the modern Greek intellectuals who fl ed the occupied Greek lands, especially after the 1450s, and headed mainly for Italy, the belief that Menander’s plays were superior to his Latin imitators was powerfully motivated, since Greek culture and identity were facing a crisis. In Renaissance Italy, a Greek scholar from Sparta, Dimitrios Moschos, wrote a comedy around 1475, entitled ‘ Neaira ’, which was presented in the court of the duke Gonzaga of Mantua. According to Andreas Moustoxidis, who was the fi rst to publish Neaira in 1845, the main model for the plot of Neaira was the plays of Terence, the ‘semi-Menander’. 1 Moustoxidis affi rms that Moschos’ play was inspired by lost Menandrian originals, but it depended on Latin adaptations since only imitations of the original Menandrian plays had survived.