I know that ancient Greece regarded the home as private space and the marketplace, the street, as public space. I know that these divides were fairly strict. I also know that along with the house being regarded as their realm, popular thinking dictated that children and women were best neither seen nor heard.
Despite all of this, it still seems weird to me that the settings for all of Menander's plays seem to be streets. Specifically, they're mostly streets just out front of two central characters' houses. Ancient Greek theatre was minimalist (as far as I know), but even so it's downright distracting that simply a street in front of peoples' houses could be the setting for so many plays.
Yet, considering the content of these plays, I find myself less and less surprised. Public spaces are spaces in which news trades hands and people from different houses interact and conflict. Those are the essential elements of all of Menander's plays. Thus, Menander's setting his plays on streets makes sense. Not to mention the importance of misunderstanding to most of the comedy of his works and how much of that can be had when news and gossip trade hands.
Nonetheless, I'm left amazed that someone who reused an aspect of successful plays was able to remain popular. Nowadays, if we find a lack of imagination in an author's works we call him/her out on it, myself included.
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