First of all, let me begin by introducing Roman literature.
The Romans were something similar to the British. They conquered half of Europe, parts of Asia and Africa centuries ago and ruled them for centuries, imposing their way of life and their culture on the people living in these places. Our Western civilization is very much based on Roman civilization. The Civil Law Code, a compilation of Roman legal works by the Byzantines (the successors to the Romans) was the model on which the first Western laws were based. Western authors, poets and playwrights drew their inspiration from Roman literary works. The list is endless: Milton, Moliere, Shakespeare and so on.. These are just a few of the many ways in which Roman civilization has shaped Western civilization.
Among the many ways in which Romans played a formative role in the development of Western civilization are the influence which Roman literature had on Western civilization. Rather than mentioning how did Roman literature influence Western civilization, I'll be mentioning what makes Roman literature so influential. We'll be looking into how Roman literature contributed to the development of Western literature, its history, nature and features.
Among the oldest works of Roman literature to survive in a substantially complete form are the Latin comedies by the playwrights Plautus and Terence. The comedies these playwrights wrote were translations and adaptations of Greek comedies, mainly those from Greek New Comedy. Before we talk about Terence and Plautus, let's see what Greek New Comedy is actually about.
Greek New Comedy was Greek comedy after the death of Alexander the Great in 323BC till 260BC, during the reign of the Macedonian rulers in Greece. The three most famous and best known playwrights belonging to this genre are Menander, Philemon and Diphilus.
Menander was the most successful of the three comedians. His comedies not only provided their audience with a brief respite from reality, they also gave them an accurate but not too detailed picture of life. This led an ancient critic to ask if life influenced Menander in the writing of his plays or if it was vice versa. Unlike his predecessors like Aristophanes, Menander's comedies tended to be more about the fears and foibles of the ordinary man, his personal relationships, family life and social mishaps rather than politics and public life. They were supremely civilized and sophisticated plays which were less farcical and satirical than the plays before them. This sophistication was what made him more successful than the other Greek comedians belonging to the same genre as him. Not only have hundreds of short passages from his comedies been preserved in literary sources, a complete play, Dyskolos, and substantial portions of five others, Aspis, Epitrepontes, Misoumenos, Perikeiromene, Samia, have been passed down to us.
The other two comedians are Philemon and Diphilus. Philemon was a comedian whose comedies dwelt on philosophical issues and Diphilus was a comedian whose comedies were noted for their broad comedy and farcical violence. Philemon's comedies have come down to us in fragments but Diphilus' comedies were translated and adapted by Plautus (Asinaria, Rudens). From the translation and adaptation of Diphilus comedies' by Plautus, one can infer that he was skilled in the construction of his plots.
The playwrights of the Greek New Comedy genre built on a considerable legacy from their predecessors, drawing upon a vast array of dramatic devices, characters and situations their predecessors had developed. Prologues to shape the audience's understanding of events, messengers' speeches to announce offstage action, descriptions of feasts, sudden recognitions, ex machina endings were all established techniques which playwrights exploited and evoked in their comedies.
However, these playwrights developed a literary style that differed from their predecessors in several ways.
The satirical and farcical element which featured so strongly in Aristophanes' comedies increasingly diminished in importance as time went on. It was eventually given up more or less completely and was not to be revived. The de-emphasis of the grotesque, whether in the form of choruses, humour or spectacle opened the way for increased representation of daily life and the foibles of recognisable character types.
Unlike their predecessor, Aristophanes, some of whose comedies departed from the Athenian setting or covered mythological themes and subjects, their plays were seldom placed in a setting other than their everyday world (Diphilus was a notable exception). Gods and goddesses in Greek New Comedy were personified abstractions who seldom appeared in their plays. There are generally no miracles or metaphorses.
The Greek playwrights from the genre Greek New Comedy not only developed a literary style that differed from their predecessors in multiple ways, they also made considerable innovations in literature. Examples of their innovations were the development of a whole series of distinct stereotype characters which were to become the stock characters of Western comedy and the contributions they made to the development of the play.
The cast of Menander's plays included a number of minor characters drawn from a limited number of one-dimensional stock types such as cooks or parasites who introduced familiar jokes and recognisable patterns of speech. Other stock characters in Menander's plays were the bragging soldier who talked about the number of enemies he killed and how well they'll treat their woman and the kind shrewd prostitute who hid her heart behind a facade of fiere commercialism.
Menander gave stereotype characters a sense that they were character types. In his comedies, they were expected to react the way they were supposed to behave but some resist. These stock characters appear as rich unlayered humans in a new dimension. It was this human dimension that was one of the strengths of Menander's plays. He used these stereotype characters to comment on human life and depict human folly and absurdity compassionately, with wit and subtlety.
An example of such a character is Cnemon from Menander's play Dyskolos. He was an insufferably rude and objectionable character who showed how foolish and absurd humans could be. However rude and objectionable he was, he proved ultimately to be a character who was not necessarily closed to reason. He accepted that other views were possible, proving willing to compromise with life after he was rescued from a well. The fact that this character was not necessarily closed to reason makes him a character whom people can give compassion to.
The 5-act structure later to be found in Menander's plays can first be seen in Menander's comedies. Where in comedies of previous generations there were choral interludes, there was dialogue with song. The action of his plays had breaks, the situations in them were conventional and coincidences were convenient, thus showing the smooth and effective development of his plays.
Sources: The Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World - Classical Literature - A Concise History by Richard Rutherford.
The Making of Menander's Comedy by Sander M Goldberg
The New Greek Comedy by Philippe Legrand
For more information on Greek comedy,one can visit the below website.
http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/ClasDram/chapters/101latergkcomedy.htm
The next topic will be Plautus.
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