Kitap 17
4
IN contests in comedy Menander was often defeated by Philemon, a writer by no means his equal, owing to intrigue, favour, and partisanship. When Menander once happened to meet his rival, he said: Pray pardon me, Philemon, but really, don't you blush when you defeat me?
4
Marcus Varro says p. 351, Bipont. that Euripides also, although he wrote seventy-five tragedies, was victor with only five, Some MSS. of the Greek Life of Euripides give fifteen, which seems a more probable number for so popular a poet. Sophocles won eighteen at the City Dionysia alone. and was often vanquished by some very poor poets.
4
Some say that Menander left one hundred and eight comedies, others that the number was a hundred and nine. But we find these words of Apollodorus, a very famous writer, about Menander in his work entitled Chronica: Frag. 77, p. 358, Jacoby. Cephissia's child, by Diopeithes sired, An hundred plays he left and five besides; At fifty-two he died. Yet Apollodorus also writes in the same book that out of all those hundred and five dramas Menander gained the victory only with eight.
5
That it is by no mears true, as some meticulous artists in rhetoric affirm, that Marcus Cicero, in his book On Friendship, made use of a faulty argument and postulated the disputed for the admitted; with a careful discussion and examination of this whole question.
