Library › Greek: Comedy › Misoumenos (Fragments)
These are the fragments of Menander's comedy Misoumenos (The Man She Hated) quoted by later authors, including Epictetus, separate from the papyri that preserve much of the play. Menander (c. 342–c. 290 BC) was the leading poet of Athenian New Comedy. The quotations are short: the soldier Thrasonides' complaint that a cheap little slave girl has enslaved him, whom no enemy ever conquered, lines about sleeplessness, a character's prosperous service with a king in Cyprus, and missing swords.
Epictetus quoted Thrasonides' complaint as a lesson in true freedom: the man no enemy could conquer is himself a slave to desire. The other fragments echo situations known from the papyri, the soldier's night vigil and the sword on which the plot turns, and show how lines from a popular play lived on in philosophy and scholarship.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Sandbach OCT, Misoumenos frr. apud alios servata). 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).