Page:Vocabulary of Menander (1913).djvu/11



For nearly two thousand years Menander's reputation as a writer of pure Attic has been somewhat tarnished through the attacks made upon him by the atticizing grammarians of the first centuries of our era. Notwithstanding his great popularity in ancient times, which lasted for centuries after his death, and the faithful picture of life that he painted in his comedies, our estimate of him has probably suffered on account of their adverse criticism. The recent additions to the extant body of his works give us at last an opportunity to test his diction and to decide to a certain extent for ourselves independently of the ancient grammarians where he stood among Greek writers from the point of view of language.

The present study is an examination of Menander's vocabulary, as compared with that of his predecessors and successors. For this purpose a careful list was made of all words used by him which do not appear in the literature we now possess from the classical period, together with words which he uses with new meanings. These two classes of words have been traced through the rest of the literature, and through the grammarians and lexicographers. My chief helps have been the Greek-English lexicon of Liddell and Scott, the Paris edition of the Thesaurus, and the indices listed in H. Schöne's