Menander, the most famous Greek poet of the New Comedy, was born at Athens in 342 B.C., and was drowned at the Piræus in 291. He was the friend, if not the pupil, of Theophrastus, himself a disciple of Plato and Aristotle; and he was the intimate of Epicurus, and the favourite of Demetrius Phalereus and Ptolemy the son of Lagus. His comedies seem to have been more successful with cultured than with popular audiences, for we are told that only eight out of a hundred comedies gained the prize. Unhappily we possess but fragments of his work, but we may safely take our estimate of the 'mundus Menander' from his close copyist and imitator, Terence, and from the words of such writers as Ovid, Propertius, and Pliny. The Attic New Comedy was essentially domestic rather than political in character, and its chief figures are conveniently summed up in the lines of Ovid:
Dum fallax servus, durus pater, improba lena
Vivet, dum meretrix blanda, Menandros erit.
His most famous comedy seems to have been the Thais, and it is interesting that of the five lines preserved one is quoted by St Paul (1 Cor. xv. 33).
Of the Georgos, hitherto known but by five small fragments, Professor Nicole published 87 lines, newly recovered, in 1897. See the edition of the Georgos by Grenfell and Hunt (1898).