Library › Greek: Comedy › Doubtful Fragment (Papyrus)
This doubtful fragment is a short papyrus scene printed among the fragments of Menander of Athens (c. 342–291 BC), the leading poet of New Comedy, although its authorship is uncertain. It presents a betrothal: a father pledges his daughter to a young man named Moschion with the traditional formula for the begetting of legitimate children and names a dowry of two talents, while a character named Chaireas speaks of his long love for a girl. The papyrus is damaged and many lines are incomplete.
Betrothal scenes of this kind typically close the plots of New Comedy, and the fragment's language and characters are close to Menander's. It shows how such scenes were staged and gives a sense of the many comic texts recovered from papyri whose authors cannot be identified with certainty.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Sandbach OCT, fragmentum dubium). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ). This papyrus betrothal scene with Chaireas and Moschion is printed among Menander's doubtful fragments, and its authorship is uncertain.