He was " the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg ," in which "... imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates ", and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.

It was also the title of a play by Menander, which we know of from book seven ( concerning Alexandria ) of Strabo's 17 volume Geography, and quotations of Menander by Clement of Alexandria and Stobaeus that relate to marriage.

This becomes the main difference and, also, similarity between Menander and Plautus.

There are differences not just in how the father-son relationship is presented, but also in the way in which Menander and Plautus write their poetry.

Evidence of clever slaves also appears in Menander ’ s Thalis, Hypobolimaios, and from the papyrus fragment of his Perinthia.

The Aristophanes scholia also cite him often, and he is known to have written treatises on Euripides, Ion, Phrynichus, Cratinus, Menander, and many of the Greek orators including Demosthenes, Isaeus, Hypereides, Deinarchus, and others.

Hiram was succeeded as king of Tyre by his son Baal-Eser I. Hiram is also mentioned in the writings of Menander of Ephesus, as preserved in Josephus ’ s Against Apion, where some additional information is given that is not found in the Bible.

The second work traditionally attributed to Alexander Numenius, titled On Show-Speeches (), is acknowledged by virtually all critics to not be the work of this Alexander, but of a later grammarian also named Alexander ; it is, to speak more correctly, made up very clumsily from two distinct works, one of which was written by one Alexander, and the other by Menander Rhetor.

:" The Greeks who caused Bactria to revolt grew so powerful on account of the fertility of the country that they became masters, not only of Ariana, but also of India, as Apollodorus of Artemita says: and more tribes were subdued by them than by Alexander — by Menander in particular ( at least if he actually crossed the Hypanis towards the east and advanced as far as the Imaüs ), for some were subdued by him personally and others by Demetrius, the son of Euthydemus the king of the Bactrians.

:" The Greeks who caused Bactria to revolt grew so powerful on account of the fertility of the country that they became masters, not only of Ariana, but also of India, as Apollodorus of Artemita says: and more tribes were subdued by them than by Alexander -- by Menander in particular ( at least if he actually crossed the Hypanis towards the east and advanced as far as the Imaüs ), for some were subdued by him personally and others by Demetrius, the son of Euthydemus the king of the Bactrians ; and they took possession, not only of Patalena, but also, on the rest of the coast, of what is called the kingdom of Saraostus and Sigerdis.

* Menander also struck very rare Attic standard coinage with monolingual inscriptions ( coin 5 ), which were probably intended for use in Bactria ( where they have been found ), perhaps thought to demonstrate his victories against the Bactrian kings, as well as Menander's own claim to that the kingdom.

With the major influences being Aristotle and Cicero, he also cited Hermogenes, Menander Rhetor, Bartholomeus Keckermann and Nicolas Caussin.

According to the Milinda Pañha, at the end of his reign Menander I became a Buddhist arhat, a fact also echoed by Plutarch, who explains that his relics were shared and enshrined.

The ubiquitous symbol of the elephant in Indo-Greek coinage may also have been associated with Buddhism, as suggested by the parallel between coins of Antialcidas and Menander II, where the elephant in the coins of Antialcidas holds the same relationship to Zeus and Nike as the Buddhist wheel on the coins of Menander II.

# The archives of the most ancient races — the Egyptians, Chaldaeans, and Phoenicians — need to be opened, and their citizens must be called upon, through whom knowledge must be provided — a certain Manetho the Egyptian and Berosus the Chaldaean, but also Jerome the Phoenician king of Tyre ; and their followers, too: Ptolemy the Mendesian and Menander the Ephesian and Demetrius the Phalerean and king Juba and Apion and Thallus and the one who either proves or refutes these men, Josephus the Jew.

Menander is also remembered in Buddhist literature, where he called Milinda, and is described in the Milinda Panha as a convert to Buddhism: he became an arhat whose relics were enshrined in a manner reminiscent of the Buddha.

It is also separately established through another text, the Milinda Panha, and archeological evidence that Menander himself ruled a vast empire in northern India, and that he became a Buddhist arhat.

Sirkap is also said to have been rebuilt by king Menander I.

) It should be noted that sources also claim Aristophanes and Menander were adolescents ( epheboi ) at the start of their own careers.

Athena was also the dynastic deity of the family of Menander, and Agathokleia's prominent position suggests that she was herself the daughter of a king, though she was probably too late to have been a daughter of the Bactrian king Agathocles.

The symbolism of the lion had also been adopted by the Buddhist Indo-Greek king Menander II.

According to the Suda, a 10th century encyclopedia, Alexis was the paternal uncle of the dramatist Menander and wrote 245 comedies, of which only fragments now survive, including some 130 preserved titles.

Outstanding literary figures of the Hellenistic period were Menander, the chief representative of a newer type of comedy ; the poets Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius Rhodius, author of the Argonautica ; and Polybius, who wrote a detailed history of the Mediterranean world.

He says that the “ verbosity of the Plautine prologues has often been commented upon and generally excused by the necessity of the Roman playwright to win his audience .” However, in both Menander and Plautus, word play is essential to their comedy.

* Menander wins the first prize at the Lenaian festival with his play Dyskolos ( The Grouch ).

Greek Buddhist monks continued to play a key role during the time of Menander, as far as Sri Lanka.

Adelphoe ( also written Adelphoi and Adelphi, ) is a play by Roman playwright Terence, adopted partly from plays by Menander and Diphilus.

He supported himself by adapting Greek plays for the Roman stage from the New Comedy writers, especially Menander, a genre called Palliata Comoedia.

Uar and Hunnoi are the names associated with the two biggest tribes of Procopius's White Huns, commonly identified with the Sanskrit Sveta Huna but called Varkhon or Varkunites ( OuarKhonitai ) by Menander Protector.

The Milinda Panha is another famous non-canonical Pali Buddhist text that describes the religious dialogues between the famous Indo-Greek king Menander, whose kingdom was in Sagala in today's Punjab, and a Buddhist monk called Nagasena, around 160 BCE.

:" The Greeks who caused Bactria to revolt grew so powerful on account of the fertility of the country that they became masters, not only of Ariana, but also of India, as Apollodorus of Artemita says: and more tribes were subdued by them than by Alexander -- by Menander in particular ( at least if he actually crossed the Hypanis towards the east and advanced as far as the Imaus ), for some were subdued by him personally and others by Demetrius, the son of Euthydemus the king of the Bactrians ; and they took possession, not only of Patalena, but also, on the rest of the coast, of what is called the kingdom of Saraostus and Sigerdis.

The Alchon were called Varkhon or Varkunites ( Ouar-Khonitai ) by Menander Protector ( 538-582 ) literally referring to the Uar and Hunnoi.

The most substantially preserved text is the Dyskolos (" Difficult Man, Grouch ") by Menander, discovered on a papyrus, and first published in 1958.

The cause of the conflict is uncertain, as the sources are divided ; the Lombard Paul the Deacon accuses the Gepids, while the Byzantine historian Menander Protector places the blame on Alboin, an interpretation favoured by historian Walter Pohl.

While being a Middle Comic poet, Alexis was contemporary with several leading figures of New Comedy, such as Philippides, Philemon, Diphilus, and even Menander.

So Irenaeus tells of the system of Simon Magus, of the system of Menander, of the system of Saturninus, in which the number of these angels is reckoned as seven, and of the system of Carpocrates.

More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declinedhe became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.

The playwright Menander served in the same age-class of the ephebes as Epicurus.

One of Demetrius ' successors, Menander I, brought the Indo-Greek Kingdom to its height between 165 – 130 BC, expanding the kingdom in India to even larger proportions than Demetrius.

Other sources include the histories of Agathias, Menander Protector, John Malalas, the Paschal Chronicle, the chronicles of Marcellinus Comes and Victor of Tunnuna.

Events of the later years of the reign showed that Constantinople itself was not safe from barbarian incursions from the north, and even the relatively benevolent historian Menander Protector felt the need to explain the Emperor's failure to protect the capital from the weakness of his body in his old age.

He depicted, however, Roman life with such accuracy that he is classed with Menander, from whom indeed he borrowed largely.

A coin of Menander I, who ruled the eastern dominions of the divided Greek empire of Bactria and the modern Pakistani provinces of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa | Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab ( Pakistan ) | Punjab and Sindh.

The Indo-Greek Menander I ( reigned 155 – 130 BCE ) drove the Greco-Bactrians out of Gandhara and beyond the Hindu Kush, becoming a king shortly after his victory.

The capital Sagala ( modern Sialkot ) prospered greatly under Menander's rule and Menander is one of the few Bactrian kings mentioned by Greek authors.

He is then said to have worked as a manual laborer and to have studied Greek drama — particularly the New Comedy of Menander — in his leisure.

In order to understand the Greek New Comedy of Menander and its similarities to Plautus, it is necessary to discuss, in juxtaposition with it, the idea of Greek Old Comedy and its evolution into New Comedy.

The risk-taking for which Aristophanes is known is noticeably lacking in the New Comedy plays of Menander.

For example, in Menander ’ s Dis Exapaton there is a focus on the betrayal between age groups and friends.

In Plautus, on the other hand, the focus is still on the relationship between father and son, but we see betrayal between the two men that wasn ’ t seen in Menander.

But the attitudes on these relationships seem much different – a reflection of how the worlds of Menander and Plautus differed.