"Woman Hates Soldier": A Structural Approach to New Comedy Webster, T B L Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Fall 1973; 14, 3; ProQuest pg. 287

Woman Hates Soldier: A Structural 
Approach to New Comedy 

T. B. L. Webster 

M ENANDER is the beginning of the long line of social comedies 
which runs through Plautus, Terence, Shakespeare, Gol­
doni, Moliere, Sheridan, Pinero, Belasco, Milne, Lonsdale, 

Eliot and beyond, with many others whose names I do not know­
the comedy which held the English stage in my youth: middle to 
upper class households well equipped with butlers, maids and nurses, 
in which after surmounting a number of obstacles true love found its 
way. This is Menander's interest for students of comparative litera­
ture.I 

Until 1907 Menander was known only from something like 1,000 
quotations in ancient authors, seldom more than five lines long and 
mostly much shorter, and from the adaptations of four plays by 
plautus and four plays by Terence. In 1907 a papyrus text was pub­
lished which contained rather over half of Menander's Arbitrants and 
rather over a third of The Samian Woman and The Girl Loses her Locks 
(Perikeiromene). From that time on Egypt has produced more and 
more papyri of Menander, including the first virtually complete play 
Grumpy (or Dyskolos). 

The play which I shall discuss now, Woman Hates Soldier (Misou­
menos), is in a thoroughly unsatisfactory state. The sources are seven 
papyri, fourteen quotations in ancient authors, and a picture of the 
last act on a mosaic, which helps very little. The papyri preserve (1) 
the opening 13 lines, (2) about 75 lines, very badly preserved, of the 
second act, (3) 328 lines, very badly preserved but in places reinforced 
by three other copies, of the third and fourth acts, (4) then after a gap 
of 160 lines, the last 50 lines of the play. We have something like half 

1 This is the text of the Gildersleeve Lecture given at Barnard College, Columbia Univer­
sity, on March 27, 1973. For the prologue of Misoumenos I have used the new papyrus pub­
lished by E. G. Turner in GRB Monograph 6, The Papyrologist at Work (Durham [N.C.] 
1973) App. 57-58. I have discussed the identification of the central door as an inn and Getas' 
first monologue (160ft) in the volume in honour of Franz Blatt, Classica et Mediaevalia, ed. 
B. D. Larsen (Copenhagen 1973). On fr.13 Koerte (fr.9 Sandbach) see W. G. Arnott, CR 18 
(1968) 11. In my interpretation of the brother I have followed W. Kraus, RhM 114 (1971) Iff. 

287 



288 WOMAN HATES SOLDIER: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH 

the play, though even that very badly preserved, and the worst gaps 
are in the first act and at the end of the fourth act. Guesswork is 
needed to complete the play and indeed to interpret what we have 
got. The second part of my title, "A Structural Approach," is meant 
to suggest the kind of guesswork that we have to use. 

Comedy was produced in Athens at the Lenaia and City Dionysia, 
both festivals held in honour of Dionysos. The cult hymn of the 
Lenaia called on Iakchos, son of Semele, giver of wealth: it was an 
early spring appeal for the fertility which Dionysos could give. At the 
City Dionysia in late March the appeal for fertility was even more 
obvious, because the god was given phalloi, apparently sent from all 
the cities that made up the Athenian empire. The religious function 
of comedy was to persuade the god to act by showing him a relevant 
story, using laughter both hilariously to create the necessary relaxed 
atmosphere and as mockery to drive away evil spirits (such as poli­
ticians, generals and philosophers). These two functions of laughter, 
as we know them from Greek comedy, are very interestingly illus­
trated in the Pueblo rain-drama.2 Menander comes late in the story 
of comedy, more than a century and a half after the first official pro­
duction at the City Dionysia, and both the hilarity and still more the 
ribald mockery have faded away in this very sophisticated comedy 
written for educated audiences. But the basic story of fertility drama, 
the union of youth and girl achieved after surmounting obstacles, 
remains. This is Menander's tribute to the festival and the god. 

He wrote according to ancient sources 108 plays, of which some 96 
titles survive. Of 60 plays we know enough to say that they conform to 
the basic type; of the rest we can only say that nothing in their titles or 
their fragments precludes it. In tackling the fragmentary remains of 
Menander we are rather in the position of the anthropologist who has 
collected a large number of myths which are somehow intercon­
nected and wants to describe their interconnections and their dif­
ferences. The French structural anthropologist C. Levi-Strauss has a 
terminology3 which I find extraordinarily useful. He says: "I propose 
to give the name <armature' to a combination of properties that 
remain invariant in two or several myths; <code' to the pattern of 

I Jerome Rothenberg, ed., Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North 
Americas (New York 1972) 214. 

8 C. Levi-Strauss, I.e ern et Ie cuit: mytholog~ues (Paris 1964) 207 (=The Raw and the Cooked, 
transl. J. and D. Weightman [New York 1969] 199). 



T. B. L. WEBSTER 289 

functions ascribed by each myth to these properties; and 'message' to 
the subject matter of an individual myth." I am not quite sure in 
what sense he uses 'armature', but it is clear that it is the basic story­
for Menander the union of youth and girl after surmounting ob­
stacles. If we want to subdivide further, we can distinguish (a) youth 
is united with hetaira (Dis Exapaton), (b) youth is reunited with wife 
(Arbitrants and Ring), (c) youth marries girl whom he has raped 
(Sam ian Woman), (d) youth marries virgin (Woman Hates Soldier). This 
is the basic story, and enacting it fulfils the religious requirements of 
the festival. The codes are irrelevant to the festival but relevant to 
Menander and his audience. 

In the Indian myths that he examines Levi-Strauss distinguishes 
various kinds of code: ecological, sociological, technological, acoustic, 
cosmological, astronomical, aetiological. What he means is that ele­
ments in the myth can be interpreted in this way by the audience. 
One great advantage of this terminology is that it allows for great 
variation between myths and between audiences. A myth need not 
contain all the codes, and a member of the audience may decipher the 
code well or badly or may miss it altogether or may find a code that 
is not there. Arnaldo Momigliano once said to me, when I asked him 
whether he believed a recent political interpretation of a Greek lyric, 
"How do I know that one member of the original audience was not 
stupid enough to interpret it like that 1" 

In trying to understand Menander I have found it useful to distin­
guish a historical code, a biographical code, a social code, an ethical 
code, a tragic code and a professional code. These are not all import­
ant for our play, but I should like to illustrate them briefly to show 
my approach. By historical code I mean the clues which the audience 
would interpret as references to historical events and which help us 
to date his plays. Here our play is of some interest. The soldier 
Thrasonides has received the girl as a captive; her father Demeas 
comes to look for her; he has come from Cyprus, and he puts up with 
a guest-friend. The place is not his home but somewhere where one 
might expect to ransom captives. Cyprus was in the news in 306 when 
Demetrios the Besieger won it from Ptolemy I of Egypt in a success­
ful battle, the year after he had restored democracy in Athens by 
expelling the tyrant Demetrios of Phaleron, who took refuge with 
Ptolemy in Egypt. The Athenians would therefore naturally be inter­
ested in what went on in Cyprus. My colleague, Professor Lionel 



290 WOMAN HATES SOLDIER: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH 

Pearson, saw that the obvious place to look for captives from Cyprus 
was Rhodes. So I think that Rhodes was the setting of this play: 
Thrasonides was an Athenian mercenary in the army of Demetrios 
the Besieger. Demeas was an Athenian living in Cyprus, who had 
presumably gone away at the time of the attack. 

Our play was, therefore, produced in 305 when Menander was 37 
years old. A number of events from the past (headlines, as we might 
say) stuck in Menander's mind, and in his later plays he made the 
past history of his characters real by associating them with some of 
these events, which would wake an echo in the memories of his con­
temporaries and seniors. This is what I mean by the biographical code, 
an idea lowe to my colleague, William Berg. To take an obvious 
instance, Heautontimoroumenos is probably to be dated about 298 be­
cause Athens is described as safe: this would mean that the old 
woman, the supposed mother of the girl, left Corinth at the time of 
the troubles of 314, the <headlines' which had given rise in that year to 
The Girl Loses her Locks (Perikeiromene), and the sixty-year-old Mene­
demos campaigned under Alexander, the <headlines' of Menander's 
childhood. Our play is too badly preserved to give its biographical 
code, but I should be prepared to guess that Demeas was one of the 
Athenians driven out of Samos in 322 and took his children to Cyprus. 
The evacuation of Samos was <headlines' for The Samian Woman and 
for Dis Exapaton, produced in 320 or soon after, and was remembered 
also in The Eunuch, which was produced a couple of years before our 
play. 

Menander is careful to fix his people in society, and the indications 
would be a much clearer social code to his contemporaries than they 
are to us. In different plays the dowry named for the girl is 10, 6, 4, 3, 
2, 1 talents or nothing. This must arrange the fathers in a scale of 
wealth, and on our evidence for the fourth century, unless the figures 
are very much exaggerated (and I cannot see the point of quoting 
figures if they are much exaggerated) all the fathers down to the two­
talent level are very rich, probably among the top 300 richest men in 
Athens. Demeas in our play puts up two talents dowry, which is 
between the three talents offered by the very rich father Kallippides 
in Dyskolos and the one talent given by Knemon in the same play. 
Knemon's one talent is a maximum for him; it represents half his 
fortune. Demeas' two talents puts him low in the scale of the very 
rich; he also has a son to help, and he may well have suffered a major 



T. B. L. WEBSTER 291 

reverse if he was driven out of Sa'mos, and possibly more recently in 
Cyprus. 

Our play is not concerned, as far as we can see, with another aspect 
of the social code, the gulf between the rich and the poor-the 
assumption of the poor that they are being exploited, which is often 
shown in the particular case to be unfounded. The most obvious 
example is the relationship between the young peasant Gorgias and 
the rich Sostratos in Dyskolos. A curious instance is the hostility be­
tween the messenger and the rich father Smikrines in Sikyonios. 
Before the messenger speech the messenger abuses Smikrines as an 
oligarch who despises and exploits others, while he himself claims to 
use his power as a juror to prevent exploitation and describes how a 
deme-assembly of ordinary citizens thwarted a rich young man who 
was trying to get hold of a girl. It is ironical that the deme-assembly 
follows the advice of the rival lover, who is equally rich, and that both 
young men turn out to be sons of the Smikrines who is listening to the 
recital. There seems to be no way of identifying the messenger with 
one of the other characters in the play, and I cannot help wondering 
whether the particular form in which Menander has cast this scene 
might not be attributed to the historical code as well as the social 
code. Other indications suggest that The Sikyonian was produced some 
year soon after 308, and this particular (and for the plot irrelevant) 
emphasis on the political activity of the poor citizen would suit very 
well the atmosphere of the restored democracy when Demetrios the 
Besieger had expelled the tyrant Demetrios of Phaleron in 307. 

It would take too long to discuss in detail the evidence for a connec­
tion between Menander and Aristotle and Aristotle's successor 
Theophrastos, whose pupil Menander was said to have been. Again 
and again the audience would recognize philosophical language, par­
ticularly the terminology of the Nicomachean Ethics (for which reason I 
call this the ethical code), and would have to determine whether 
Menander was serious, as he surely was when he explains so carefully 
the effects of 'misunderstanding' on the soldier's behaviour in the 
prologue of Perikeiromene, or fooling (but still saying something about 
the education of the character) as when he makes the slave mock the 
old man in the last act of The Arbitrants. In our play the soldier 
Thrasonides uses two Aristotelian words. In a very corrupt passage he 
defends himself against the charge of being IUKp6t/roxoc, 'small­
souled', evidently in the Aristotelian sense of being excessively grieved 



292 WOMAN HATES SOLDIER: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH 

by misfortunes, and he refers to an &nJxr/iLa, a 'mischance': I suspect 
this is how he describes his supposed killing of the girl's brother, a 
defence which she does not accept. 

Tragedy (particularly classical tragedy of the fifth century), like 
philosophy, could be used both for serious and comic effect, and it was 
up to the audience to interpret Menander's intentions, his use of this 
tragic code. The opening speech of our play, quoted below, is certainly 
serious. The string of tragic quotations with which the slave in Aspis 
persuades the old man of the feigned mortal illness of Chairestratos is 
certainly comic. But a lot of passages between these may very well 
have depended on how the actor played them. In addition to tragic 
quotation and use of tragic metre, Menander sometimes takes over 
from tragedy a situation which would be improbable in ordinary life 
but is accepted as possible just because it has occurred in tragedy: 
tragedy is history, as Aristotle says. The scene which gives The Arbit­
rants its name is taken over from Euripides' A lope, where Kerkyon 
similarly arbitrates in favour of his own unrecognised foundling 
grandson. In our play Demeas recognises the inscribed sword in 
Thrasonides' arsenal and draws the conclusion that Thrasonides has 
killed his son. It is a false conclusion, but the situation is made 
plausible because in the First Hippolytos Theseus similarly deduced 
that Hippolytos had raped Phaidra from the fact that he found her 
faking suicide with Hippolytos' sword. 

Finally, Menander was a professional writing comedy, a kind of 
drama with its own conventions, some old and some new, which en­
couraged the audience to make predictions. From his earliest play 
they would know that he used five acts and that the climax came in 
the fourth; they would know that if a character left the acting area, 
he would not return until the next act, whether he was visiting some­
where near like the marketplace or somewhere far like his country 
estate (if the play was located in the city). They would know sex, 
status and age of each character from costume and mask, and from 
earlier comedy would predict that fathers disapproved of love­
matches for their sons but could be outwitted by slaves, that hetairai 
were only interested in money, that soldiers were brutal and licen­
tious, and that cooks were garrulous and conceited, and a great deal 
else. But Menander might show them a reality which contrasted with 
appearance and so falsify their predictions. These are the sorts of con­
siderations that must guide us in reconstructing Woman Hates Soldier. 



T. B. L. WEBSTER 293 

The audience sees three doors in the stage building, a larger door 
in the centre (which I believe represents an inn) and a smaller door to 
left and right. The soldier (Thrasonides, as we learn later) comes out 
of his house, the lefthand door, and speaks: 

o Night (for no god has greater share of Aphrodite than you, and in 
you many words are spoken and many thoughts of love), have you 
ever seen a man more wretched, a lover more ill-starred? I am 
standing at my own door, and walking in the alley, up and down, 
both, up to now, when you are in mid-course and I could sleep and 
possess my beloved-for she is in my house, and I can, and I want her 
as passionately as any lover. But I do not do it. I prefer to stand under 
the winter sky, trembling and talking to you. 

It is a startling beginning. Tragic metre and language show that the 
soldier is serious, and he certainly cannot be called licentious. The text 
breaks off here. We know that his slave Getas comes out to him, and a 
fragment, "a cheap little slave-girl has completely enslaved me, 
whom not one of my enemies ever (frightened)," probably belongs 
here. Possibly he decided that as he cannot stay in his own house, he 
will go to the inn, leaving Getas to inform him of what happens in his 
own house. He must also have said that the girl hates him and there­
fore he cannot take advantage of her, but he may not know why. 

Having roused the audience's interest, Menander must have told 
them the story and as in many other plays have used a goddess or an 
abstract figure, perhaps Tyche (the way things happen) to do it. 
What she told them was something like this: 

An Athenian Demeas was turned out of Samos with his two small 
children, the girl Krateia and her brother X, and settled in Cyprus. 
When they were grown up, he went away for a year on business. Late 
in that period Demetrios the Besieger attacked Cyprus; the soldier 
Thrasonides was an Athenian mercenary in his army. On the night of 
the battle Krateia was at home; her brother was dining with friends. 
In the confusion when the alarm was given, he snatched someone 
else's sword, and someone else, whom we will call Y, took his in­
scribed sword. They were parted in the battle; X was wounded and 
captured, but Y was killed by Thrasonides, who kept the inscribed 
sword. Krateia was also captured and was later sold to Thrasonides, 
who sets up house with her in Rhodes. Being a soldier, he cannot help 
bragging of his triumphs, which include the killing of X (on the evi­
dence of the inscribed sword). For this reason she hates him and thinks 



294 WOMAN HATES SOLDIER: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH 

more kindly of Kleinias, another Athenian who lives in the house on 
the right and has fallen in love with her. "Do not worry," ends the 
speech, "everything will turn out all right in the end." 

The second act opens with a scene between Getas and Thrasonides. 
Presumably Getas reports; Thrasonides is so depressed that he de­
mands a sword to commit suicide, and Getas refuses to get it for him 
and goes back in. Demeas arrives and asks for Kleinias, who is his 
'guest-friend'. Thrasonides points to the door and goes back into the 
inn. Demeas calls Kleinias out. He is looking for his daughter Krateia; 
Kleinias tells him a Krateia is living with the soldier. Demeas evidently 
fears it may be the wrong Krateia, and Kleinias stresses the brutality 
of the soldier. Again the text deserts us; what must have happened, I 
think, is that Demeas goes into Kleinias' house; Kleinias finds Thra­
sonides and invites him and Krateia to dinner; he refuses. Kleinias 
somehow manages to suggest to Krateia that she and her old slave 
should get out carrying suppliant boughs, while he goes off to market 
to hire a cook. The act probably ends with Getas going into Kleinias' 
house to deposit with Kleinias' old female slave Thrasonides' arsenal 
of swords (including the inscribed sword), so that if Thrasonides asks 
for a sword again he can say "The swords have vanished." 

The third act opens with Krateia and her slave coming out with 
suppliant boughs, presumably to sit on the stage altar until Kleinias 
returns. Getas comes out of Kleinias' house and shoos them back into 
Thrasonides' house again. Left alone, he sums up the situation in a 
very difficult monologue, which is so characteristic that it is worth 
quoting in full: 

I was wrong to leave these women, if he comes back after buying the 
dinner. You were a thick-eyed fool. The woman is a sow. She says, 
"You were watching to try and spy on us women from outside. Is 
this the way a slave should behave? But that man once sang a song of 
peace." Ye precious gods, one ought to get a clear view of that man. 
"At the symposion (she says) he drank and sang exactly as the pro­
verbial good man should, a good thing to hear." You come to us. 
But why did you turn back home, and why do you set out again giv­
ing your slave the dinner-money? Unless you are doing us some 
harm? Nonsense to ask this man back to dinner because he has asked 
my master. He is clearly a criminal. I will go inside and hide myself 
so that I can try and watch all that is being done and said. 

It is clear that Getas thinks of Kleinias as a rival for Krateia, and ex­
pects him soon to make an attempt to get hold of her. What actually 



T. B. L. WEBSTER 295 

happens is that the old woman slave of Kleinias comes out of his house 
and expresses her surprise that Demeas is examining "the swords of 
the neighbours in our and ron." The audience realise that he has seen 
his son's sword among them. Demeas follows her and asks her to 
knock on Thrasonides' door; she refuses and goes back. As he calls to 
the slaves to admit him, Krateia comes out with her old slave; she is 
making another attempt to get to the altar. The following sequence 
is clear and worth translating: 

DEMEAS. Zeus, what vision unexpected do I see? 
KRATEIA (to the old slave). What do you mean, granny? What are you 
saying to me? My father? Where? 
DEMEAS. My daughter, Krateia. 
KRATEIA. Who is calling me? Father, dearest, all my greetings. 
DEMEAS. I hold you, my child. 
KRATEIA. To my longing you appear. I see you whom I thought never 
to see again. 
GETAS. She has gone out. Damn, what's this? What's she to you? 
Man there, what are you doing? Didn't I say? Red-handed I've caught 
my suspect. But he's old, grey, some sixty years. All the same he 
shall suffer. You, who do you think you are embracing and kissing? 
KRATEIA. This is my father, Getas. 

The old woman is taken by a mute because the three actors are all 
needed. Demeas' language and metre is close to a recognition scene 
of tragedy, and Krateia rises to the same tone when she recognises 
him. Getas' staccato style and prosaic language is a sharp contrast. He 
breaks in, thinking his worst fears, expressed in the preceding mono­
logue, are justified. He is, however, soon convinced and goes into the 
inn to fetch Thrasonides. 

Demeas is left alone with Krateia. He evidently asks her about her 
brother, and the dialogue seems to go: 

KRATEIA. He is no more. 
DEMEAS. Who tells you the story? I am utterly undone. 
KRATEIA. Woe is me, wretched in my mischance. How pitiable, father 
dearest, are our sufferings. 
DEMEAS. Is he dead? 
KRATEIA. By a hand which should have been the last to do it. 
DEMEAS. Do you know him? 
KRATEIA. I know him and I live with him as a captive. 

Again the tone is tragic. Demeas' conjecture from seeing the sword 
seems to be confirmed by Krateia's supposed knowledge. They go 
into Thrasonides' house to plan for the future. 



296 WOMAN HATES SOLDIER: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH 

Thrasonides comes out of the inn with Getas. The actor who played 
Getas now plays Thrasorudes. Thrasonides sees that his meeting with 
Demeas is crucial. If Demeas does not "validate him completely and 
give him his daughter," he is ruined. He goes in "in fear and tremb­
ling," "with a foreboding of ill." 

As he goes in, Kleinias comes on talking to the cook. "There is one 
guest-friend and me and thirdly a girl-friend of mine-if, by Zeus, she 
has arrived. For I too am worried. If not, only the guest-friend. For I 
shall run round the whole city looking for her. But you go on, and see 
that you are quick." They both go in. The audience will have expected 
Kleinias back because they had seen him go marketing in the act 
before. The surprise is the silence of the cook, since cooks are the most 
talkative of comic characters. But Menander wants to finish the act. 
One other prediction the audience may make. As far as I know, a 
cook is always a good omen; if a cook is there, whatever the obstacles, 
a marriage feast or a pre-marriage feast will be eaten before the play 
ends. 

The fourth act starts with Kleinias coming out of his house. He talks 
back to his old slave, the old woman: 

What do you say? He recognised the sword which was deposited 
with us and went to the neighbours' when he heard it was theirs? 
When did they leave it here, and why with us, old woman? ... But 
there's a noise: someone is coming out of their door so that I shall 
hear the whole thing clearly. 

Getas enters and for nearly forty lines gives vent to his rage at the 
behaviour of Demeas and Krateia to Thrasonides, while Kleinias 
vainly tries to break in. I give what is clear of this remarkable speech 
without the interruptions of Kleinias: 

Honoured Zeus, extraordinary cruelty of both, and inhuman by the 
Sun ... Herakles, the stubbornness ... He did not answer a syllable 
... then, "I myself am the father of the girl you love; you have the 
legal power," he says. "I fall on my knees, weeping, beseeching." A 
donkey and a lyre. This one thing he repeats: "I here demand that 
you let me ransom my daughter; I'm her father." "But I, Demeas, 
having found you, ask for her as my wife." ... Herakles, she cannot 
take what happened like a human being. A sow on the mountain, as 
the saying is. But that is not so bad. He begs her again: "I beseech 
you, Krateia. Don't leave me in the lurch. You were a virgin when I 
took you. I was the first to be called your husband, I cherished you. I 
cherish you, I love you, dearest Krateia. What in my house pains 



T. B. L. WEBSTER 

you? You will hear that I am dead if you leave me in the lurch." Not 
an answer. A barbarian. The woman's a lioness ... Unexpected. 
He's not completely sane. I would not have let her be ransomed, by 
Apollo here. Hellenic, and happens everywhere, we know. But it's 
right to pity one who'll return pity. When you don't pity me, I have 
no care or thought for you. You cannot? Why? in no way absurd, I 
think. In vain he'll shout and plan to get up and kill himself. His 
eyes blaze, he groans, weeps, and tears his hair. 

297 

Then at last Kleinias succeeds in breaking in. Getas is immediately 
suspicious: "Where has he come from ?" The conversation continues 
for about fifteen lines and then Kleinias goes into his own house. He 
can hardly be said to have heard "the whole thing clearly," which was 
what he hoped. But he must have grasped that Demeas has recog­
nised Krateia as his daughter, that Thrasonides has accepted ransom 
for her, and that Krateia has resisted Thrasonides' appeals; and these 
essential points may also have been made clear in the final dialogue 
with Getas. If Kleinias is in love with Krateia-and I think this is a fair 
deduction from Getas' suspicions and from his own concern (he said 
to the cook "I too am worried")-he must be considerably relieved: 
Demeas is his guest and a fellow-Athenian; he will obviously want to 
take his daughter away from Thrasonides; dinner is being prepared; 
all Kleinias has to do is to wait until they come. 

Menander could have made the confrontation of Thrasonides, 
Demeas and Krateia a stage scene. Perhaps he felt that would have 
been too serious, and preferred the comic possibilities of a tirade by 
Thrasonides' loyal slave, interrupted ineffectively by Thrasonides' 
rival; and it has the further advantage of conveying the information 
to Kleinias without another scene. In The Arbitrants, late in the fourth 
act, the slave's comic description of his master's reactions when he 
overhears his wife telling her father that she is not going to leave him, 
is followed by the master's own serious monologue on the same 
theme. So here the audience would expect to hear Thrasonides' own 
views on the situation. The text is extremely unclear for the last 60 

lines before the big gap, but where anything can be made out Thrason­
ides seems to be speaking. I suggested above that he defended him­
self against the charge of smallness of soul in the Aristotelian sense of 
giving way to grief, and this collapse is exactly what Getas has de­
scribed. Then four lines later: "So be it; to cover up and make my 
heart a stone and conceal my sickness from my companions, shall I 
be able to do that? ... How shall I restrain this and bear it easier? 



298 WOMAN HATES SOLDIER: A STRUCTURAL APPROACH 

For drink will strip the plaster from my lurking wound." What fol­
lows is extremely difficult, but it looks as if he said that Krateia 
deserves pity for the mischance, his supposed killing of her brother, 
and imagines the audience telling him to conquer her hatred by pity. 
Then he quotes Krateia: H 'You are headstrong, and your completely 
irrational courage makes your life impossible.' This reproach which 
she shot at you, you must wipe out by giving her so much that in re­
turn she may regard you as a god. How can I ... ?" And there the 
text breaks off, but we know from Arrian that he sent her gifts, and 
this must happen in the long gap of 160 lines. 

Shortly after the text resumes Getas tells Thrasonides: HThey are 
giving you a wife." The only possible way to break the impasse is for 
Krateia's brother to turn up alive either late in the fourth act or at the 
beginning of the fifth act. The former is the more likely because his 
discovery is the climax of the play. The neat solution would be for 
Kleinias to turn out to be the brother. But Kleinias is known to 
Krateia and Demeas. He could only be the brother if he had been 
kidnapped as a baby. But that is ruled out by the sword. A child can 
have a miniature sword as a recognition token but not a full-size 
sword. And in any case the sword had arrived in Thrasonides' arsenal 
and would have led him or Krateia or Getas straight to Kleinias. To 
suppose that Kleinias both lost his sword and changed his name is 
perhaps possible but surely too complicated. The solution must be, 
as suggested above, that the brother X switched swords with a com­
panion in the confusion of the attack; the companion was killed by 
Thrasonides, who kept X's sword. X was wounded and captured by 
somebody else. X has now been freed or escaped: like Demeas, he 
searched for Krateia; like Demeas, he knows that Rhodes is a good 
place to look for captives from Cyprus, and he naturally, like Demeas, 
seeks out the family guest-friend Kleinias as a base of operations. 

We have in fact a text for this. Professor Arnott made out that the 
correct reading in fr.13 (fr.9 Sandbach) is: Hfather, but they have not 
killed," but he attributed it to Krateia. It is much more natural in the 
mouth of the brother: "They have wounded me, father, but they 
have not killed me." 

We can only guess at the actual sequence of scenes. Possibly (1) 
Thrasonides after his monologue goes into the inn, (2) Demeas, 
Krateia and the old woman move over to Kleinias' house, (3) before 
Demeas goes in, the brother appears, looking for Kleinias' house, just 



T. B. L. WEBSTER 299 

as Demeas had looked for Kleinias' house in the second act. Father 
and son recognise each other, and they both go into Kleinias' house. 
This ends the fourth act. 

The fifth act is illustrated by a mosaic from My til ene, which un­
fortunately does not give the characters' names. Like several of these 
mosaics it has to be read from right to left. A woman dismisses a 
youngish man, and a slave moves off quickly to the left. That the 
woman is Krateia and the slave Getas is certain. The youngish man 
cannot be Demeas, and I think that Thrasonides can be excluded; the 
man is not dressed as a soldier and appears to have no relation to 
Getas. He must be either the brother or Kleinias. As he is very pale, 
and a one-word fragment C corpse-colour' is well suited to a wounded 
man, I take him to be the brother. Krateia is saying good-bye to her 
brother. Getas has been sent out by Thrasonides to see what is going 
on, overhears the doorstep conversation and returns to report. 
Thrasonides, I think, sends Getas back with gifts for Krateia. 

When the text picks up, Thrasonides is on stage alone. Getas comes 
out and announces, "They are giving you a wife." If the plural is to be 
taken literally, it should mean the brother as well as Demeas. Thra­
sonides wants details, and Getas tells him that Krateia said, "Yes, 
father, I truly wish to marry him." Then Demeas comes out and 
makes the formal proposal. Then, "by chance ... supper ... let us 
go in ... tomorrow." This is enough to show us that the cook's meal 
is now going to be eaten and that the wedding will take place to­
morrow. So the play ends. Krateia has been consistent: as long as 
Thrasonides seemed to have killed her brother she would have noth­
ing to do with him. But she must have realised that he had shown 
great generosity both while she was his slave and in allowing Demeas 
to ransom her; the curious phrase which she uses when Demeas asks 
her about her brother's death-"By a hand that should have been the 
last to do it"-shows in fact that she does realise his generosity. Even 
our scrappy text allows us to see an extraordinarily sympathetic pair 
of characters. 

STANFORD UNIVERSITY 

March,1973