Prof Alan Sommerstein's new edition of Menander's Samia published!

Samia front cover

For eight centuries after his death Menander was a highly popular poet in the Greek-speaking world, and his plays - through Roman imitations and adaptations - promoted a tradition of European light drama that extends through to today.  However, it is only since 1844 that some of the actual texts of his plays have been rediscovered, mostly in Egyptian papyri. Two of these have given us four-fifths of the script of Samia (The Woman from Samos), a play of deception and misunderstanding in which a marriage that everyone wants almost fails to happen, two women and a baby are almost ruined, and a loving father almost loses his only son – but somehow everything ends happily after all!

This is the first full-scale edition with English commentary and includes a substantial introduction, test-driven by Prof Sommerstein’s students in his undergraduate module on comedy in Spring 2013.