Menandro ‘politico’. Kolax 85-119 Sandbach (C190-D224 Arnott)

The disputed question of the alleged political character of New Comedy finds its most suitable approach in a historiographic outline of the transition from classical to hellenistic age not as break, but as continuity and change. As for Menander, we ought to check the possibility of a theatre in some way political by means of mimetical and allusive devices. The rhesis against flattery in the Kolax (85-119 Sandbach = C190-D224 Arnott) lends itself to political interpretation in the background of contemporary poetic, pamphletistic and historiographic production opposing Athenian democratic leadership and its patron Demetrios Poliorketes between 307 and 301 BC.