Dyskolos: The Curmudgeon

The Dyskolos was written by the playwright Menander in Greece during the Hellenistic period(around the time of the worldwide reign of Alexander the Great and his successors), a period which is not easily defined insofar as when it begins and ends. However, all scholars tend to agree that the artistic output during the Hellenistic period is characterized by extreme pathos, originality, and realism. Menander's vibrant and funny play, being no exception to the definition above, is a Comedy of Manners, an ensemble production with a lot in common with the zany skits of Saturday Night Live and sharp sitcoms like Seinfeld and Married with Children. The main character, an old hardworking farmer named Knemon (he is The Dyskolos, which translates from Greek into something like crumudgeon or bad-tempered) is forced to abandon his life of hard-work and solitude when his daughter Myrrine (a Juliet with no lines) falls in love with a rich kid (a buff Romeo) down the corner. What follows is nothing less than a wonderfully enjoyable screwball comedy. You'll have fun reading it while you giggle. The nifty colorful style and comfortable feel of the book is also quite attractive, as it always distinguishes itself from other books on the bookshelf, even though the book, containing text coupled with introduction and endnotes, is only about 100 pages long.Browsing through Moulton's other titles, I noticed his special interest in music, and his Dyskolos also contains postulations describing the type of music the Greeks played during the interludes of these plays; Moulton also explains in his preface why he wrote his translation in meter, pointing out in his preface that Menander was first and foremost a Greek poet who wrote all of his plays in verse, just as the Greek dramatists Aeschlyus, Sophokles, and Euripides had done so before him.And Menander,writing in the tradition of those great Greek writers before him, possesses eloquence equal to the Athenian tragedians, although he seems to have eschewed their lofty and formal dialogue in favor of a more everyday style which seems to mirror the colloquial diction of the street and marketplace. Books like this deem the classics irresistible.