Menander (342-291 BC) was an Athenian comic playwright. He was the acknowledged master of the so-called New Comedy in Greece. Famed for his realistic portrayal of situations and characters, he greatly influenced later comic dramatists.

New Comedy was the term for the comedy of manners popular in Greece after 320 B.C., in strong contrast to the Old Comedy, whose most famous practitioner was the Athenian Aristophanes (ca. 450-385 B.C.). Whereas the Old Comedy was characterized by broad burlesque, fantasy, coarseness, and biting political and social satire and the Middle Comedy (ca. 400-320 B.C.) by stock "characters" like the courtesan, the parasite, and the braggart soldier, the New Comedy portrayed ordinary people and their private domestic problems. The absurdity and fantasy of the Old and Middle Comedy were abandoned in favor of realistic situations and characters who speak and act as they would in real life. The...