2.6.2. Comedy : the intertwined destinies of Aristophanes and Menander (continued)

Abstract

2.6.2. Comedy : the intertwined destinies of Aristophanes and Menander (continued)

Menander's decline due to the increasingly profound mismatch between Menander's language and the linguistic tastes of Late Antiquity ?
This explanation is based on a passage by the Attic grammarian Phrynichos(Eklogê, 394), but the argument cannot be accepted, since the authors of rhetoric textbooks continue to make Menander a benchmark for language and discourse.

Wouldn't Menander's Sentences have suffocated Menander's comedies ?
The compilation of a collection of maxims allegedly extracted from Menander's theater in the ^1stcentury was so successful that it conferred on Menander the stature of both a sage and a master of eloquence, and led to him being one of the authors most used by schoolmasters for his sentences(gnômai). But does this explain why people stopped reading his comedies ?

In fact, the relative treatment of statistical data reveals that Menander remained remarkably popular throughout the period, showing that the growing popularity of his sentences in no way affected the reading of comedies by the same author.

2.7. Prose

2.7.1. The orators

Of the great Attic orators, only Demosthenes and Isocrates continued to be read over the long term, with Isocrates surpassing Demosthenes in the ^6thcentury : the philosophical dimension with which he was invested led him to become a model of eloquence at the service of moral edification. As for the representatives of the Second Sophistic, Aelius Aristides was still highly appreciated in the late period: in addition to their rhetorical value, his speeches have a historical interest (they deal nostalgically with the golden age of Hellenism) that makes them a first-rate teaching aid .

2.7.2. The historians

Thucydides alone stands out, because he belongs to the great age of classical Athens and writes in Attic Greek : he too is becoming a model of eloquence.

2.7.3. The rest

In addition to the recession of philosophy and the abrupt fall of the novel from the ^3rdcentury onwards, the papyri show a rise in scientific literature, at the forefront of which is medicine, with Hippocrates, Dioscorides and above all Galen.

Conclusions

Thus, despite the narrowing of its spectrum, Greek culture remained very much alive between the ^4th and ^7thcenturies. Among the significant trends, poetry, which formed the basis of Greek teaching, enjoyed the most remarkable success. In the field of prose, the most widely-read authors were selected for the rhetorical value of their works, which was also in line with the canons of teaching. Finally, the only non-rhetorical prose writers to make it into the top ten most-read authors for each century were physicians, reflecting an increasingly utilitarian vision of literature.

Thus, far from serving the gratuitous pleasure of reading and the joys of the mind, classical literature, selected for its rhetorical or ethical value, becomes above all a material for study and training, which finds its principle in its utility. We can then legitimately ask what really distinguishes it from documents (a question that will be addressed in the December 5-6, 2019 colloquium Appréhender la culture écrite des anciens : les catégories " documentaire " et " littéraire " en papyrologie et leurs limites).

Next year, we'll be continuing this study of the Christianization of written culture with a descent into the concrete world of those involved in the written word, to see how this process was observed in libraries, schools and copyists' workshops : the aim will be to bring to life the protagonists of the written word at the crossroads between classical and Christian culture.