Menander Comedy Survived Two Millennia

For nearly 1,000 years, Greek playwright Menander of Athens ranked among the ancient world's most popular and admired comic writers. He wrote 108 comedies and won Athens's Lenaia festival eight times, yet nearly all his original work disappeared during the Middle Ages, leaving only quotations, fragments, and Roman adaptations. In 1952, researchers recovered a papyrus manuscript of his comedy Dyskolos in Egypt, making it the only Menander play to survive nearly complete and intact enough for performance. Scholars published it in 1958, and the University of Sydney Classical Society staged its first major modern performance on July 4, 1959.

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