Plutarch may have preferred Menander, greatest practitioner of the genre, to Aristophanes, but by the eighth century A.D. Menander was only a name and a set of disjointed verses that scholars would eventually find among the anthologists and grammarians of late antiquity. Thus, when modern theorists such as George Meredith and Northrop Frye wrote about New Comedy and Menander, they could really mean only Plautus and Terence, spiced with what little they had deduced (not always correctly) from the hodgepodge of Greek testimony. All this changed for good in 1959, when the first complete play of Menander surfaced in a papyrus book of the late third century A.D. Since then, discoveries of other papyri have restored substantial amounts of his comedy, and for the first time since antiquity Menander can be discussed as a literary figure in his own right.
Details of his life remain sketchy. Menander the Athenian, son of Diopeithes and Hegestrate, from the deme Kephisia, was born in 342-341 B.C. and died in his early fifties. He wrote more than one hundred comedies in that time, beginning with a play called Anger in 321 B.C. The Grouch, his one play to survive virtually intact, won first prize at Athens in 316 B.C.
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