Menander's Old Cantankerous (aka The Misanthrope)'s a tidy little play. Curiously, I think it would play well today, with just a few modifications. Why? Because like the recent hit comedy Bridesmaids it depicts women getting as debauched as men stereotypically do. Entertainment really does run in cycles.
At the same time, though, the two women who are the foci of the two male leads' affection are never named. They're just referred to as "the girl" or "the sister" or "the daughter." Such disregard of women is par for the course in much of the Ancient world, sure, but it still strikes me as really odd. Married women (who are also mothers) have names, though. So perhaps when Menander was writing it was a convention that women needed to have a social place/function to be considered worthy of a name.
Nonetheless, Old Cantankerous delivers a few laughs and is a pretty quick read since it's quite short at some 27 pages. I'll have to see what The Girl from Samos holds before I really figure out this Menander fellow, though.
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