What Oxyrhynchus revealed so far

Several years ago I was at the Getty Villa in Malibu to be treated to two theatrical plays from antiquity, one Greek, The Woman from Samos by Menander, and one Roman, Casina by Plautus. Set at dusk in the Peristyle of the Villa from which the statues had been removed for the occasion, it was a unique surrounding to see an old play in the New World.

Evidently, the Greek play caught my attention, and it was explained that Menander’s The Woman from Samos was only recently recovered from the Egyptian desert and had never been performed before. 

The Egyptian desert as the finding place was an odd fact that I could not place at the time until, one day, I learned about the papyrus heap of Oxyrhynchus (see: Hellenica Oxyrhynchia by P.J. McKechnie and S.J. Kern and Get involved with Oxyrhynchus). At this dumpsite, many Greek texts that had been lost for centuries eventually surfaced. Large fragments have been salvaged, like works by Sappho and Alcaeus, poems of Pindar, and considerable bits of authors like Euripides and Sophocles. Also recovered were the most complete diagrams from Euclid’s Elements, a life of Euripides by Satyrus the Peripatetic, and an epitome of seven of the 120 books of Livy that are otherwise lost.

But among the pile of papyri, Menander benefited most from the finds at Oxyrhynchus, with fragments of Misoumenos, Dis Exapaton, Epitrepontes, Karchedonios, Dyskolos (The Bad-Tempered Man or The Malcontent) and Kolax. At last, we have enough works to recognize his status in the Greek theater.

Menander was an Athenian tragedian who lived in the 4th century BC. He was born around 342 BC and, who knows, Alexander may have heard of him or even seen one of his plays while he was in Asia. Menander was a prolific and much-imitated writer, whose success was recognized for centuries after his death. The Romans scrambled to collect unknown plays, which they adapted and translated into Latin. Unfortunately, none of Menander’s plays survived until this chance discovery in the Egyptian desert. 

As I was flipping through a pile of papers, the very program from the Getty Villa fell into my hands again – a most gratifying rekindling of memories. It had been an evening, I never forgot.

The popular The Woman from Samos is a play of deception and misunderstanding in which a marriage that everyone desires almost fails to happen, two women and a baby are almost ruined, and a loving father almost loses his only son, because the people at home and the people abroad have both been doing things behind each other's backs - but somehow everything ends happily after all. It is a complicated story, yet played in such a way that it keeps our attention on edge. It was, of course, executed in English translation.