SOURCE: Walton, J. Michael and Peter D. Arnott. “Menander in Time and Place.” In Menander and the Making of Comedy, pp. 21-43. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Walton and Arnott explain how the history and politics of Greece in the century leading up to Menander affected his comedies and Greek theater in general.

Menander was born some forty years after the death of Aristophanes and did not begin writing for the stage until the last twenty years of the fourth century b.c. The second half of the fourth century was a time of change in more things than the theatre. Audiences had already learned to accept a social emphasis in the plays that they saw, tragedies included, but this was symptomatic of a whole new climate of political and economic pressures that had rapidly reshaped the Mediterranean world.

In earlier times Greece had evolved...