Most of Menander's work did not survive the Middle Ages, except as short fragments. He was further credited with the authorship of some epigrams of doubtful authenticity the letters addressed to Ptolemy Soter and the discourses in prose on various subjects mentioned by the Suda are probably spurious. Caecilius Statius, Luscius Lanuvinus, Turpilius and Atilius also imitated Menander. The Bacchides and Stichus of Plautus were probably based upon Menander's The Double Deceiver and Brotherly-Loving Men, but the Poenulus does not seem to be from The Carthaginian, nor the Mostellaria from The Apparition, in spite of the similarity of titles. The original of Terence's Hecyra (as of the Phormio) is generally supposed to be, not by Menander, but Apollodorus of Carystus. Thus in the Andria were combined Menander's The Woman from Andros and The Woman from Perinthos, in the Eunuchus, The Eunuch and The Flatterer, while the Adelphi was compiled partly from Menander and partly from Diphilus. Eunuchus, Andria, Heauton Timorumenos and Adelphi of Terence (called by Caesar "dimidiatus Menander") were avowedly taken from Menander, but some of them appear to be adaptations and combinations of more than one play. The single surviving speech from his early play Drunkenness is an attack on the politician Callimedon, in the manner of Aristophanes, whose bawdy style was adopted in many of his plays. These maxims (chiefly monostichs) were afterwards collected, and, with additions from other sources, were edited as Menander's One-Verse Maxims, a kind of moral textbook for the use of schools. Seated portrait of Menander, Roman fresco from the Casa del Menandro in PompeiiĪn admirer and imitator of Euripides, Menander resembles him in his keen observation of practical life, his analysis of the emotions, and his fondness for moral maxims, many of which became proverbial: "The property of friends is common," "Whom the gods love die young," "Evil communications corrupt good manners" (from the Thaïs, quoted in 1 Corinthians 15:33). He is praised by Plutarch ( Comparison of Menander and Aristophanes) and Quintilian ( Institutio Oratoria), who accepted the tradition that he was the author of the speeches published under the name of the Attic orator Charisius. How long complete copies of his plays survived is unclear, although 23 of them, with commentary by Michael Psellus, were said to still have been available in Constantinople in the 11th century. Menander, however, believed himself to be the better dramatist, and, according to Aulus Gellius, used to ask Philemon: "Don't you feel ashamed whenever you gain a victory over me?" According to Caecilius of Calacte ( Porphyry in Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica ) Menander was accused of plagiarism, as his The Superstitious Man was taken from The Augur of Antiphanes, but reworkings and variations on a theme of this sort were commonplace and so the charge is a complicated one. His rival in dramatic art (and supposedly in the affections of Glycera) was Philemon, who appears to have been more popular. Numerous supposed busts of him survive, including a well-known statue in the Vatican, formerly thought to represent Gaius Marius. According to the note of a scholiast on the Ibis of Ovid, he drowned while bathing, and his countrymen honored him with a tomb on the road leading to Athens, where it was seen by Pausanias. But Menander, preferring the independence of his villa in the Piraeus and the company of his mistress Glycera, refused. He also enjoyed the patronage of Ptolemy Soter, the son of Lagus, who invited him to his court. He was the friend, associate, and perhaps pupil of Theophrastus, and was on intimate terms with the Athenian dictator Demetrius of Phalerum.
He presumably derived his taste for comic drama from his uncle Alexis. Menander was the son of well-to-do parents his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of Demosthenes De Chersoneso. – early 1st century A.D., Princeton University Art Museum Roman, Republican or Early Imperial, Relief of a seated poet (Menander) with masks of New Comedy, 1st century B.C.
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