Note 141.1 — Chapter V · THE PERIOD AFTER ALEXANDER

Menander.—The student who is tracking the course of the religious life and experience of Hellas through the Hellenistic period should endeavour to gather beforehand a vivid impression of the spirit of the Menandrian comedy. For Menander, the friend of Epicurus and the devoted admirer of Euripides, was the favoured heir of the humanitarian spirit that had gleamed fitfully even in the Homeric period and had gathered strength and articulate expression in the century before Alexander opened the gates of the East. Patronised and courted by Demetrios Phalereus and Ptolemy, admired by the scholars and reading public of Alexandria and the Hellenistic world even more than he had been by his own contemporaries, Menander was eminently in a position to give a tone to the religious sentiment of this period; and the Anthologies of his works prove that he was actually reverenced as an ethical-religious teacher.141.1 Therefore, for the general exoteric history of Greek religion he counts for more than any of the philosophers, for he addressed a far larger public. Yet the message that he has to deliver has come to him from the philosophers and from the inspiration of the humanised Attic spirit, of which he appears the most delicate and final expression. While writing and thinking pre-eminently as the cultured Athenian of the close of the fourth century, he is the mouthpiece of cosmopolitanism in ethics and religion—“no good man is alien to me; the nature of all is one and the same (οὐδείς ἐστί μοι ἀλλότριος ἂν ᾖ χρηστός· ἡ φύσις μία πάντων)”142.1; the Terentian formula—‘homo sum, humanum nil a me alienum puto’—is only an extension of this, losing something of its ethical colouring. Many of the fragments, showing striking approximations to New Testament teaching, are of vital importance for the history of Greek ethics. As regards religion, they may contain protests against superstition and the extravagance of sacrifice proffered as a bribe142.2; but they exhibit no real or veiled attack on the popular polytheism as a whole. On the other hand, they have preserved many memorable sentences that bear witness to the development of a religion more personal, more inward and spiritual than had hitherto been current, save perhaps in Platonic circles. God is presented as a spirit and as spiritually discerned by the mind of man; and a high ideal of Platonic speculation is delivered to the public in the beautiful line, φῶς ἐστὶ τῷ νῷ πρὸς θεὸν βλέπειν ἀέι, “the light of the mind is to gaze ever upon God.”142.3 The sense of close and mystic communion between man and the divine omnipresent spirit is strikingly attested in the passage of one of his unknown comedies: “a guardian spirit [δαίμων] stands by every man, straightway from his birth, to guide him into the mysteries of life, a good spirit, for one must not imagine that there is an evil spirit injuring good life, but that God is utterly good.”143.1