Nothing to Do with Athenian Law? Legal Poetics and the Problem of Debt-Bondage in Menander?s Heros

BUIS, EMILIANO JERÓNIMO

Nottingham

Congreso; International Conference Menander in Contexts; 2012

University of Nottingham, Department of Classics

If compared to Old Comedy, law in New Comedy does not seem to be radically subject to textual parody, exaggeration or subversion. Athenian nomoi here are not explicitly taken as a source of humour, and the institutions of the polis are not openly criticized. In spite of its appeals to legal issues concerning inheritance and epikleroi, for the most part New Comedy does not include direct references to specific laws via parodic quotation. Of course, this does not mean that the Athenian audience ?or, for that matter, an audience elsewhere in Greece? was not in control of the legal details regarding the play. But it does not mean either that a good knowledge of specific laws by the public was required by Menander himself when writing his plays. It rather means to me that literary representations of law in Menander´s theatre, in a new political context where public affairs on stage are replaced by a domestic environment, seem less attached to the reproduction or distortion of statutes or decrees, and more generally inspired by a forensic practice whose rhetoric is appropriate for dramatic reasons. What is more, law plays an important part in the performance of the plots, since legal principles and procedures are always necessary to explain the agonistic interaction of characters and their personalities on stage: either as a means to support or contradict the protagonist or his adversaries, resorting to the legal sphere becomes a useful comic technique.