Tom Lister, University of Oxford
In the fifth century, the tragedian Melanthios was one of Athens’ most prominent komoidoumenoi. Mocked for gluttony (Ar. Pax. 796-816; 1009-1014; Σ Ar. Pax. 803; Ath. 8.343c), effeminacy (Σ Ar. Av. 151; Eust. Il. 1201, 4), and disease (Av. 150-151), he featured in no less than eight comedies, over more than twenty years. However, the details of his life and works were quickly lost: they did not, it seems, make it to Hellenistic Egypt. Thus, Athenaios, presumably echoing Alexandrian scholarship, assimilated the tragedian, unconvincingly, with another Melanthios, an elegist friend of Kimon (Ath. 8.343c; Plut. Kim. 4.1; 4.6; 4.8 cf. Dihle 1976; Olson 1998, 229). More probably, the tragedian was also Xenophon’s oligarch, who supervised the Four Hundred’s disastrous Piraeus fortification (Hell. 2.3.46). Yet, despite this fate, by the time of the Second Sophistic, Melanthios had acquired seven separate anecdotes: two, from Klearchos’ On Lives, appear in Athenaios’ Deipnosophistai (1.6c; 12.549a); and five in Plutarch’s Moralia (20c; 41d; 144c; 631d; 633d; contra, wrongly, Wilamowitz 1893, 287) – both texts which suggest further oral circulation at the dining tables of the Greek elite (cf. Jacob 2000; Goldhill 2009). Since these are exceptional – Sophocles, alone, of tragedians enjoys a comparable tradition – Melanthios represents a striking subject for mnemonic analysis.
In recent years, scholars examining ‘The Memory of Literature’ have advanced two significant programmes: (1) presenting writing as a mnemonic act – especially, interpreting intertextuality as a mnemonic space; and (2) identifying canon formation as the basis of (most) literature’s mnemonic longevity (Lachmann 1997; Erll & Nünning 2005). Melanthios’ journey through ‘cultural memory’, I suggest, offers insights into their fascinating interconnection.
Lykourgos is the key figure in the formation of the tragic canon: he explicitly intervened to memorialise Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; and, in so doing, he implicitly left the so-called ‘minor’ tragedians to cultural neglect. Yet, this merely formalised a ‘tradition-in-the-making’ (Lardinois 2022): from Old Comedy onwards, this hierarchy is already apparent. In Frogs, especially, Aristophanes not only anticipated the future Lykourgan canon, but also offered an all-too-true prediction for their rivals: they would quickly be forgotten (93-94). Since comedy provided a privileged venue for public literary debate (Rosen 2006), I interpret such stratified, critical, paratragedy as a real mnemonic force, both in popularising and – in the case of Melanthios – denouncing individual poets.
However, I suggest this same intertextual architecture ensured Melanthios and the ‘minor’ tragedians were not entirely forgotten. Through comedy and its reception, they acquired a singular place in cultural memory, not in the ‘canon’, but in Assmann’s ‘archive’; not culture’s widely-(re)circulating ‘working memory’, but its expertly-cultivated ‘reference memory’ (Assmann 2008; Grabes 2017). Importantly, the ‘archive’ stores material inert, but awaiting a second life. I argue Melanthios, uniquely, achieved this potential. On a macro-level, I situate his rebirth – as essentially an ahistorical, intertextual creation – within the politicised emergence of Hellenistic literary chreiai (cf. Dalby 2000; Kurke 2002). Then, on a micro-level, I illuminate the mnemonic dynamics that underlie individual anecdotes: the evolving liaison between ‘active’, ‘subjective’, (mis)memorialising, and ‘passive’, ‘intersubjective’, forgetting.