"Rara coronato plausere theatra Menandro?" Menander's success in his lifetime

There is a widespread impression that Menander was not successful as a dramatist in his lifetime. A number of ancie t authors point out that Menander's merits were not appreciated by his contemporaries and his plays only rarely met with success in the theatre (Manil. 5, 475; Mart. 5,10, 9; Quint. 3,7,18; Gell. 17, 4, 6); elsewhere we hear that Philemon, though in ferior to Menander as a playwright, found greater favour with the audience of the time and beat Menander in several competitions (Quint. 10,1,72; Gell. 17, 4,1-2; Apul. Flor. 16, p. 24 Helm). This information is usually accepted as historical fact and the image of Menander as a genius unappreciated by his contemporaries has become almost standard in modern scholarship.2 But is this image true? It is striking that the authors presenting it (Manilius, Martial, Gellius, Quintilian, Apuleius) are much later than Menander and Philemon: they all belong to the imperial age and, incidentally, are all Latin. Gellius (17, 4, 4-6) draws his information about Menander's career from Apollodoros' Chroni cle (2nd c. B.C.), possibly via an intermediate source, and seems to attribute to Apollodoros a remark about the paucity of Menander's victories (17,4,6): ex istis tarnen centum et quinqu? omnibus solis eum octo vicisse idem Apollodorus eodem in libro scripsit. But it seems doubtful that the qualification solis here is derived from Apollodoros. Apollodoros presumably limited himself to recording the number of Menander's victories at Athenian dramatic festi vals. We may form an impression of Apollodoros' manner of recording such facts from passages of other authors drawing from his Chronicle, like