When considering which books of the Odyssey I might offer a commentary on, I discovered that all the most popular books were already spoken for, so it seemed a good idea to investigate the merits of the less popular second half of the epic. Books 13–14 were chosen, in part because they contain the hinge between the account of Odysseus’ wanderings and the return to the ‘real’ world, but more because they are the ones which in the past have received the least complimentary criticism, as being too leisurely and devoid of incident. Episodes like that in Eumaeus’ farmstead had considerable influence on later literature, but the magical world of the wanderings has long been of greater fascination. There is a slow revaluation of the second part taking place, and this commentary attempts to add to that. I set myself the task of rescuing the reputation of these books, by seeking where their merits lie and gaining a sense of what it is that the poet is here doing with the epic genre. My particular interest has been in the way this part of the Odyssey seems to take a radically new direction for epic, by giving major roles to ‘lower status’ figures and the facts of everyday life, with some aristocratic figures acting as the arch-villains of the piece. This goes along with a critical view of what was achieved by the Trojan War.

It will soon be seen that this is a resolutely ‘unitarian’ edition. This is not just a personal predilection. The fact that the ‘Analysts’ have never succeeded in creating an account of the text that most can agree on does not necessarily invalidate the method, but the second part of the Odyssey in particular reveals itself as very tightly constructed, and though there are indeed problems in the narrative they are not such as lead me to think that there is a basic inconsistency in the episodes. Many traditions of oral literature – and whether our Odyssey was composed orally or with the help of writing, it is still heavily marked by oral tradition – are characterised by inconsistencies which could be condemned in a written text, but which are and were tolerated by the societies which produced the works. I have therefore given little space to discussion of the various deletions which have been proposed for these books.

Heterosexual desire focused on a specific person – what Greeks called ἔρως – may or may not be a human universal, but certainly its favoured forms of expression and paths to fulfilment, whether in real life or in artistic imagination, vary enormously between cultures, and within the same culture they can change profoundly in comparatively short periods. In Western popular fiction today – whether in novel, drama or film – the typical pattern is for desire to be felt by one party and sooner or later reciprocated by the other, after which a sexual relationship is established which may or may not lead to cohabitation and eventually marriage. As recently as the 1950s this pattern was almost unknown, and would have led many readers/spectators to take a disparaging view of the morality of the characters concerned (especially the woman) and possibly of the author's morality too: fictional courtship was expected to be chaste, and the sexual relationship was (tacitly) taken to be part of the marital bond that was typically established right at the end of the story. With a contrast like this in mind, we may be better prepared for the assumptions about ἔρως that we find in New Comedy.

These assumptions depend crucially on the status and upbringing of the woman concerned. In New Comedy there are basically two possible modes of life for a free woman; which one of them she adopts is determined almost entirely by the manner in which she is brought up, and this in turn is largely determined by whether she was known or believed to be of citizen birth. One was the life of a hetaira, who in principle was prepared to sleep with anyone for a suitable payment, but who would usually prefer, if possible, to become, as Chrysis does, the live-in partner (παλλακή, 508n.) of an unmarried man on a more or less permanent basis – though, as Chrysis discovers, such a position did not in itself confer any security on her, and it was the man's exclusive right to decide whether any children she might bear could be reared or whether they had to be exposed (132n.).

This edition represents the first appearance of Menander in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. Next to Dyskolos, Samia is the play of Menander that in its present state comes nearest to completeness: we have virtually the whole of the last three Acts, and in the first two, although almost half the text is completely lost and much of the remainder is badly damaged, it is almost always possible to infer with considerable confidence what was done, and often also the substance of what was said, in the missing portions. I hope that this edition will serve to encourage the study (especially at undergraduate level) of Greek New Comedy, the ancestor of an entire western tradition of light drama.

My thanks are due above all to Pat Easterling and Richard Hunter, first for inviting me to undertake this edition and then for all the help they have given me in the course of its preparation. They have read the whole edition in draft and made many valuable suggestions. I have not felt able to adopt all of them, but responsibility for any errors or infelicities is entirely mine. I have received much assistance from other scholars who had often been working on Menander far longer than I, among whom particular mention is due to Horst-Dieter Blume, to Christophe Cusset and especially to Richard Green, who kindly made available to me his images of the fragmentary Brindisi mosaic (see Introduction §11) and shared with me his ideas about it: my disagreement with these ideas does not diminish my respect or my gratitude.

If the Odyssey is a very different kind of poem from the Iliad in its ideology, there is also a strong strand running through it which devalues any notion that the Trojan War was a great Greek triumph. When Eumaeus talks of what Odysseus would have done for him as a good servant if he had not died, he bursts out with ‘I wish the tribe of Helen had perished utterly, since she undid the knees of many men’ (14.68–9). Later, he makes clear the negative effects of the War on the household:

This is very much the attitude of the poem to the victory: it was not worth it. T. E. Lawrence described the poet of the Odyssey as ‘a great but uncritical reader of the Iliad’, but there is a growing consensus that the Odyssey was in fact far from uncritical of the Iliad. It presents, as we have seen, a very different ideology, but it also seems to wish to ‘cut down to size’ the war at Troy.

Erving Goffman's opening statement is his assessment of the field of sociological theory in the 1960s. This book is concerned with a subfield of sociology called ‘social movement studies’, which is multi-disciplinary, involving political scientists, economists, social psychologists, and human geographers. Modern social movement studies – which supplies the predominant conceptual framework for studying social movements and protest today – can be dated back to the early 1970s with theoretical developments in the US and Europe. Modern social movement studies however has an important predecessor in the shape of the field of collective behaviour (CB), a subfield of US sociology which claimed social movements and protest as its subject matter in the first part of the twentieth century, alongside the study of crowds, mobs, crazes, panics, fads, and fashions. CB reflected upon non-democratic movements, like fascism, and as such formed an understanding of social movements as the irrational expression of shared grievances, arising from deprivation or the alienating conditions of ‘mass society’.

CB theorists, like the sociologist Herbert Blumer (1951 [1946]), made it clear that while much of the time social science concentrates upon questions of social order and reproduction, questions of social change are equally as important to study. Indeed, social movements have fascinated sociologists for decades because they open up the possibility of exploring the relationship between human action and social structures. Social movements are those collective efforts orientated towards social change that point to circumstances in which creative human action actually shapes and alters social structures, rather than being shaped by them. The study of social movements therefore brings to our attention those moments when, as Karl Marx put it, ‘people make history’.

Menander's comedies continued to be widely read throughout antiquity (though interest increasingly concentrated on a relatively small number of plays), and a few surviving papyri, including one of Samia (A2), date from as late as the turn of the sixth/seventh century ad. But then the Arab conquest cut Egypt and Syria off from the Byzantine Greek world, and in the Byzantine empire itself the eighth century in particular was a time of neglect for all learning that did not have either a practical or a religious application: the only pagan Greek poetry that continued to be read was that which was studied in the schools. Menander had by then ceased to be a school author, except for the so-called Sententiae or Monosticha, single-line maxims of very mixed origin which as a corpus had come to be associated with his name and which have survived in numerous medieval manuscripts (Jaekel 1964, Pernigotti 2008). That his actual plays were no longer used as school texts may have been due to several factors: their Attic dialect was not considered to be as pure as that of Aristophanes (Blanchard 1997); their sexual morality may have seemed dubious, especially from a Christian point of view (Easterling 1995: 156–8); and unlike Homer, Pindar, the tragedians and Aristophanes, they had hardly ever been thought difficult enough to be worth equipping with a commentary (N. G. Wilson 1983: 20). At any rate the plays ceased to be copied and soon ceased to be read; the very few early medieval ‘Menander manuscripts’ that exist are palimpsests, i.e. the original writing (of the late antique period) has been partly scraped off and the surface reused for the writing of a different text.

This chapter explores the challenge to conceptualizations of social movements that comes from a consideration of terrorism. We will look at theories of political violence, but focus especially upon the kind of violence that targets ‘non-combatants’, like civilians, and therefore attracts the label of ‘terrorism’ (Goodwin, 2004). World events have placed terrorism on the agenda for many social science disciplines. The September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC by Al-Qaeda raised questions about why ‘ugly’ social movements (Tarrow, 1998, 6), like terrorist movements had not been on the list of cases studied by social movement scholars. Is it because terrorism is a ‘special case’ of collective action, best left to ‘terrorism studies’? Or can social movement studies help us to understand terrorism?

This chapter will make three points about the value of social movement theory for the study of terrorism: first, social movement theorists from different persuasions are adept at explaining political violence as one of the possible repertiores employed by social movements, viewing its adoption largely as the result of an interaction between the movement and its political context (Della Porta, 1995; Tilly, 2003; Smelser, 2007). On its own however, this analysis does not explain the political violence particular to terrorism. As Jeff Goodwin (2004) argues, terrorism requires us to explain how activists come to employ violence against civilians as a political strategy. This, he suggests, necessitates the kind of cultural constructionist approach which we looked at in Chapter 4.

Menander, son of Diopeithes (of the Athenian deme of Cephisia) and his wife Hegestrate, was born in the Athenian year 342/1 bc; he was thus about three years old when Macedonian hegemony over Greece was firmly established with Philip II’s defeat of the Athenians and Thebans at Chaeronea, and came of age, at eighteen, in the year (324/3) near the end of which Alexander the Great died in Babylon. In accordance with the practice of the time ([Arist.] Ath.Pol. 42), he spent the following two years (323/2 and 322/1) living the semi-segregated life of an ‘ephebe’ (cf. 10n.) in the company of his age-mates, one of whom was destined for a fame equalling his own – the future philosopher Epicurus; these years witnessed the crushing of an Athenian-led anti-Macedonian revolt in the so-called Lamian War, followed by the disfranchisement of the poorer citizens (many of whom were deported to Thrace) by command of the Macedonian regent Antipater, who also ordered several leading democratic politicians, including Demosthenes and Hypereides, to be executed without trial, and placed a Macedonian garrison at the Peiraeus. From then on, despite repeated regime changes including several restorations of democracy, Athens always remained dependent on one or another of the Macedonian dynasts who fought each other for shares of Alexander's empire.

Menander, it seems, had chosen the profession of a comic poet at an early age; one source claims that he attached himself to an established dramatist, Alexis of Thurii, to learn the craft. At any rate he was still an ephebe when, in 321, he produced Orge (Anger), the first of his 108 plays. We do not know for certain when he won his first victory; it may not have been until 316, when he was successful at the Lenaea with Dyskolos. The following year he won at the City Dionysia for the first time; in total, however, he was to gain in his career only eight victories – though this may still have been more than any of his numerous rivals achieved in the same period. It should be remembered that little more than half of Menander's plays can have been produced at the two main Athenian festivals during his thirty years of activity, even supposing that he applied and was selected to compete on every possible occasion; the remainder must have been staged at some of the many other dramatic festivals which by the late fourth century were being held in Attica and elsewhere.

Thus wrote Geoffrey Kirk sixty years ago, expressing a view which is still alive in the way that the second half of the poem tends to be less prized and studied than the first. Recent criticism has however moved to an assessment of the Odyssey which is closer to Aristotle's summary, where the sensational aspects of books 6–12 are ignored:

The disguising of Odysseus as a beggar by Athena heralds a concentration in the second half on ‘lower-status’ igures. As with the prevalence of leisurely conversations, this concentration looks unepic and suggests that the Odyssey is deliberately seeking to bring into the epic genre subjects which might be thought to be alien and even opposed to it: epic poetry, it seems to be saying, can be made out of such subject matter just as well as from more traditional tales of derring-do.

It is not possible to prove conclusively that the Odyssey was doing something new in thus concentrating on the world of the less privileged, because, apart from the Iliad, we have nothing previous to compare it with: the other Greek epics of which we have evidence all post-date the Odyssey. A full survey would be needed to establish the point, but the work of scholars who have surveyed various epic traditions suggests that humbler characters are usually found in epic only in subordinate roles. Bowra noted that a ‘characteristic of heroic narrative is that on the whole it concentrates on the happy few and neglects the others’; of the few low-status characters whom he came across he wrote, ‘though these humble characters may have roles of some importance, they are introduced mainly because they help the great and indeed display towards them that self-denying devotion which a hero expects from his servants’. Of Ugaritic epic, Wyatt states trenchantly, ‘epic is definitely not proletarian in its concerns!’ A character like Sargon, king of Babylon, may be brought up by herdsmen, but his main exploits are as a king; Gilgamesh may meet an Ale-wife, but she is a divinity more like Calypso than Eurycleia.

The language of Menander's comedy is essentially the Attic Greek of his day. This has changed in some respects from what we think of as the classical norm; for example, γίνομαι and γίνωσκω have largely supplanted γιγν-, and οὐθείς (with μηθείς‚ οὐθαμῶς, etc.) has established itself as a competitor with οὐδ-, μηδ- (a competition which the newer forms are destined eventually to lose). There have been many changes in vocabulary and lexical usage (far fewer in inflection or syntax), often found already in the speeches of Demosthenes and his contemporaries; these are discussed where they occur in the Commentary.

Menander's language seems in most respects, by comparison with that of Old Comedy, much closer to the language of conversational prose. The exuberant compounds and neologisms of Aristophanes are gone; almost, though not quite, gone are poetic alternative inflectional forms such as –οισι‚ -αισι and –μεσθα, and asyndeton is very frequent. The loose relationship between sentence-structure and verse-structure (see below) also adds to the colloquial feel of the diction. However, the language of New Comedy has its own conventions and mannerisms: a notable one is the tendency to postpone connective particles, especially γάρ, to remarkably late positions in the sentence.

An important element of the situation out of which the action of Samia arises is the disparity in economic circumstances between the two households involved, between the wealth of Demeas and the poverty of Nikeratos: this will manifest itself in the clothing of the characters, in the contrast between the retinue and luggage of the two old men when they arrive home (96–119a n.), in the fact that Nikeratos has to do his own shopping (196–8) whereas Demeas sends one of his many slaves, in the poor quality of his sacrificial animal (399–404) and, at the end (727–8), in Nikeratos’ inability to give any dowry with his daughter. This disparity also helps explain some key features of the action, such as Moschion's hesitancy in seeking his father's permission to marry Plangon (see §3) and Nikeratos’ willingness, when not mastered by anger, to accept (sometimes after token resistance) almost any assertion or proposal made by Demeas (see §4(c)).

Yet to Demeas the wealth gap seems irrelevant, except when he exploits it to get Nikeratos to fall in with his wishes (and even when he does this, the agreed action is always also in Nikeratos’ interests, or at least not contrary to them). In particular, he has chosen Nikeratos as his companion on a long business voyage, and he has taken the initiative in proposing a marriage alliance which in economic terms is far better than anything Nikeratos could reasonably have expected for his daughter, and far inferior to what a rich man would normally seek for his son. He may have explained his motives in a lost soliloquy (119a/b, 166/167nn.). In any case they are paralleled elsewhere in Menander. In Dyskolos, after Gorgias has betrothed his sister to Sostratos (Dysk. 761–2) on the latter's somewhat airy assurance that his father will not oppose the match (761) despite the wide socioeconomic gap between them, Sostratos presents his father Kallippides with the fait accompli and Kallippides readily agrees, perceiving how deeply his son is in love (786–90).

Uncertainty surrounds the ‘text’ (in the broadest sense) of the Odyssey (and indeed the Iliad) throughout a good deal of its history, particularly in the early period. We do not know when the figure of Odysseus and the tales of his adventures were joined: some of them could have come from the Argonautic tradition, some from the Near East. We do not know for certain where or when the poems reached something like their current form. The dialect mixture points to Ionian-speaking parts, and Asia Minor has generally been thought to be the broad area, but the case for Euboea is now made more strongly. The traditional date for their composition is the late eighth century, but a date later in the seventh now has growing support. We do not know whether one poet for more than one was responsible, nor whether the composition involved original creation or some form of compilation of earlier versions, nor whether the same poet or poets produced both epics. Uncertain too is whether he/they composed the poems orally, in writing or in a mixture of the two: comparative evidence from outside Greece suggests that poets can adapt their speed to make dictation possible, and writing can contribute to the generation of poems on a grander scale than normal. The fact that the linguistic development of the Homeric language stopped at a very early stage, difficult to date but most likely in the eighth or early seventh century, is best explained by the development being stopped by the recording of the texts in writing.