Philosophical Conversion: Experiences of Being Re-born in Pre-Christian Greek Times

Lars Rydbeck

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to fragments of Menander that I consider important parallel materials to the New Testament (NT). These texts have not received the attention they deserve in NT scholarship. The points of contact with the NT texts lie in their description of the human condition and a concept of conversion. The texts are monologues spoken by characters in the plays, and this makes their interpretation difficult. Still, the difference in genre between the New Comedy of Menander and the NT texts should not prevent us from examining correspondences between them. An obvious difference between the NT and Menander is that, in Menander’s plays, it is always possible to assume an ironic distance, and that the words a character speaks are there only for the sake of characterization or some other purely dramatic purpose. While some NT authors also know how to characterize a speaker by his words, the ideological point of view always remains static; one can hardly doubt that the apostles’ speeches in Acts are to be understood as congruous with the narrator or author’s point of view. In drama, the identification of the characters with the author becomes more uncertain. For this reason, most commentators on Menander have not taken the philosophical reflections in the plays seriously. Thus, R. L. Hunter has argued that the only certain inference that can be drawn from the philosophical passages in Menander is that the poet, not

1

2

surprisingly, was familiar with the philosophical ideas of his times.
and F. H. Sandbach in their commentary on the works of Menander consider it self-evident that the philosophical or existential contents of the monologues do not represent Menander’s own views. In addition to this question related to the author, they have a negative evaluation

of these passages – even styling those ideas as philosophical rigmarole. judgment, we should let the texts speak for themselves.

To evaluate their

The following fragments are from Menander’s comedy Hypobolimaios (‘The Changeling’). We owe the quote to Stobaeus’ Ecloge. Here, I reproduce the text together with the translation by Maurice Balme into admirable blank verse.

Fragments (text from R. Kassel and C. Trans. by M. Balme4 Austin)3

Similarly, A. W. Gomme

 

τοῦτον εὐτυχέστατον λέγω, ὅστις θεωρήσας ἀλύπως, Παρμένων, τὰ σεμνὰ ταῦτ ̓ ἀπῆλθεν, ὅθεν ἦλθεν, ταχύ‧ τὸν ἥλιον τὸν κοινόν, ἄστρ ̓, ὕδωρ, νέφη, πῦρ. ταῦτα, κἂν ἑκατὸν ἔτη βιῷς, ἀεὶ ὄψει παρόντα, κἂν ἐνιαυτοὺς σφόδρ ̓ ὀλίγους‧ σεμνότερα τούτων ἕτερα <δ ̓> οὐκ ὄψει ποτέ πανήγυριν νόμισόν τιν ̓ εἶναι τὸν χρόνον ὅν φημι τοῦτον, τὴν ἐπιδημίαν ἄνω ὄχλος, ἀγορά, κλέπται, κυβεῖαι, διατριβαί.

‘I say that he’s most happy, Parmenon, Who, free from suffering, has gazed upon These holy sights and then goes quickly back To whence he came - the sun which all men share, The stars, the rain, the clouds, and fire. All these you’ll always see before your eyes, Whether you live a hundred years, or few. And nothing will you ever see holier than these’. ‘Think of this time I speak of as a festival, A visit to the world above; crowds, thieves, The market place, dicing, and wasting time. If you leave early, you will lodge the better.

1 See, for example, the discussion in R. L. Hunter, The New Comedy of Greece and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985), 150.
2 A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander: a commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 377, 711.
3 R. Kassel and C. Austin, eds., Poetae comici Graeci, VI 2, MENANDER Testimonia et Fragmenta apud scriptores servata (Berlin/New York, 1998), nos. 373, 871 and 372.
4 M. Balme and P. Brown, eds., Menander: The Plays and Fragments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 273-274.

1

†ἂν πρῶτος απίῃς καταλύσεις βελτίονα.† ἐφόδι ̓ ἔχων ἀπῆλθες ἐχθρὸς οὐδενί. ὁ προσδιατρίβων δ ̓ ἐκοπίασεν ἀπολέσας, κακῶς τε γηρῶν ενδεής που γίνεται, ῥεμβόμενος ἐχθροὺς εὗρ ̓, ἐπεβουλεύθη ποθέν, οὐκ εὐθανάτως ἀπῆλθεν ἐλθὼν εἰς χρόνον παύσασθε νοῦν ἔχοντες οὐδὲν γὰρ πλέον ἁνθρώπινος νοῦς ἐστιν, ἀλλ ὁ τῆς Τύχης, εἴτ ̓ ἐστι τοῦτο πνεῦμα θεῖον εἴτε νοῦς, τοῦτ ̓ ἐστι τὸ κυβερνῶν <ἅπαντα> καὶ στρέφον καὶ σῷζον, ἡ πρόνοια δ ̓ ἡ θνητὴ καπνὸς καὶ φλήναφος. πείσθητε, κοὐ μέμψεσθέ με πάνθ ̓ ὅσα νοοῦμεν ἢ λέγομεν ἢ πράττομεν, τύχη ̓στιν, ἡμεις δ ̓ ἐσμὲν ἐπιγεγραμμένοι

You’ve left with money for your journey still, And no man’s enemy. But he who hangs around Grows weary, losing all and growing old In misery, becoming poorer as He drifts around, he will find enemies, Suffer from treachery, and leave this world In an unhappy death when his time comes’. ‘Stop reasoning; for human reason adds Nothing to Luck, whether Luck is divine Spirit or not. It ́s this that steers all things And turns them upside down and puts them right, While mortal forethought is just smoke and crap. Believe me; don’t criticize my words. All that we think or say or do is luck; We only write our signatures below’.

These reflections on life’s passing are full of melancholy. The text can be taken seriously and appreciated by a modern reader, and is arguably far from ‘philosophical rigmarole’. Moreover, it is not important whether we attribute the sentiments to the speaking character or to Menander himself. In the following, I refer to the speakers as Menander.

The fragments from Hypobolimaios express a pessimistic worldview. This is a strand that extends through the whole of Greek literature since Mimnermos. These views, however, are not foreign to biblical literature, since we should not forget that the Jews and the Christians had their Ecclesiastes. In the fragments quoted above, Menander appears as a disillusioned man, but a sensitive spirit can very well pass from burdensome depression to overwhelming joy. This is what happens in the next fragment.

The fragment was formerly called Papyrus Didot 2, but today it is referred to as Fabula Incerta 2. It is to be found in the third volume of Geoffrey Arnott’s excellent Loeb edition, and consists of fifteen trimeter lines. The attribution to Menander, according to my judgement, is almost certain. Style, content and metre tell us so.

The text is a monologue, probably from the beginning of the play, presented by a young man who has recently come to Athens from the countryside. It was likely first performed at the theatre of Dionysos around 295 BC. The papyrus fragment containing the text stems from the temple of Serapis in Memphis; an informed guess dates it at 160 BC. The priests received catechumens, in whom they tried to instil Greek paideia. Our piece was a rhesis, a set text to be learnt by heart as something of literary importance, highly educational and typically Greek. The catechumen Apollonios, a boy none too bright of about fifteen or sixteen, had tried to do so, and his didaskalos then asked him to write it down from memory. Apollonios made many mistakes, but shrewd philologists have succeeded in creating a fully legible and understandable text.

The text from Arnott is reproduced below together with Maurice Balme’s translation. While Arnott’s translation is also good, it does not as closely adhere to the wording of the original.

Fabula Incerta 2 (text from W. G. Arnott)5 Trans. by M. Balme

5 G. W. Arnott, ed., Menander Volume III (LCL 460; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 477- 478.

 

ἐρημία μέν ἐστι, κοὐκ ἀκούσεται οὐδεις παρών μου τῶν λόγων ὧν ἂν λέγω. ἐγὼ τὸν ἄλλον, ἄνδρες, ἐτεθνήκειν βίον ἅπανθ’ ὃν ἔζων. τοῦτό μοι πιστεύετε.

‘Now I’m alone and no one’s near to hear The words I speak .Throughout the life I’ve lived Till now, I was quite dead, you must believe Me, gentlemen. All was a shadow then, The beautiful, the good, the holy and

2

πᾶν ταὐτὸ τὸ καλόν, τἀγαθόν, τὸ σεμνὸν <ἦν>, τὸ κακόν. τοιοῦτον ἦν τί μου πάλαι σκότος περὶ τὴν διάνοιαν, ὡς ἔοικε, κείμενον, ὃ παντ’ ἔκρυπτε ταῦτα κἠφάνιζέ μοι. νῦν δ ενθαδ’ ἐλθών, ὥσπερ εἰς Ἀσκληπιοῦ ἐνκατακλιθεὶς σωθείς τε, τὸν λοιπὸν χρόνον ἀναβεβίωκα. περιπατῶ, λαλῶ, φρονῶ. τὸν τηλικοῦτον καὶ τοιοῦτον ἥλιον νῦν τοῦτον εὗρον, ἄνδρες ἐν τῇ τήμερον ὑμᾶς ὁρῶ νῦν αἰθρίᾳ, τὸν ἀέρα, τὴν ἀκρόπολιν, τὸ θέατρον.

The bad; such was the darkness that appeared To enwrap my mind from long ago, which hid All this from me and made me blind to it. But now I have come here and, as it were, Slept in the temple of Asklepios And have been cured – I’ve come to life again For good; I walk around, I talk, I think; I have discovered now this sun, so great So splendid, gentlemen; I see you in Today’s clear light, I see the sky, I see The theatre and the Acropolis’.

It is interesting that our character’s first words tell us that he is looking for solitude and yet he confides the secrets of his city life to an audience of about fifteen thousand spectators. F. Leo called such an approach naïve, but Gomme and Sandbach (in their commentary on almost everything written by Menander) are correct when they remind us that the spectators were quite capable of recognizing a dramatic convention.

A key word of our fragment is of course σωθείς in line 10: ‘cured, saved’. In the fullness of time, it became a sort of terminus technicus for the unique Christian experience. Τὸν λοιπὸν χρόνον ἀναβεβίωκα in lines 10–11 is the other key phrase: ‘I have lived up again, I have been given my life back, for the rest of my time here on earth’. This phrasecorresponds to the phrase ‘I have been reborn’, ἐγεννήθην ἄνωθεν, in the language of the Gospel of John (John 3), renátus sum. The metaphorical sense of ἀναβεβίωκα is not known from earlier Greek. In Plato, the verb is used quite differently. Concluding his soliloquy, our unknown character expresses in jubilant words his joy of life: he can really see, as if for the first time, the theatre and the Acropolis – never before, to my knowledge, mentioned together in a Greek text.

Our fragment tells of a philosophical conversion. In his classic study of that phenomenon, A. D. Nock defined ‘conversion’ as the reorientation of the soul of an individual, which implies a definite break with the past, in contrast with mere ‘adhesion’, which does not imply such a break. Adhesion, according to Nock, is the characteristic form of religion in the classical Greek city-states where religion was part of the inheritance of its citizens. In such a society, there is no need for conversion to another tradition, as the members of each social unit are served by their own. According to Nock, the opposite pole of this traditional type of religion is the prophetic type. This type springs out of a dissatisfaction with

6

the state of things, and offers a new beginning – the conversion to a new message.
world was changing after the deaths of Alexander and Aristoteles. The city-state with its regular cults and beliefs, was gradually losing its importance. What was left meant something only to the rich upper strata of the population. The new internationalization and urbanization in the kingdoms post-Alexander left the little person alone, making him an individual without connection with his past. One could say, following Nock, that the small man simultaneously

7
are the thousands of preserved epitaphs. Our monologue is an example of this self-assertion.

suffered from a feeling of inferiority and a pathetic desire for self-assertion.

Evidence of this

The Greek

6 A. D. Nock, Conversion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), 1-7. Nock’s work are still discussed and evaluated, cf. R. M. Calhoun, J. A. Kelhoffer and C. K. Rothschild, eds., Celebrating Arthur Darby Nock (WUNT 472; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). According to many of the contributors to this volume, Nock’s model of two types of religion is still useful; see the contribution by J. J. Collins ‘Nock’s Typology of religion’ (39-47).
7 Nock, Conversion, 212.

3

I consider this monologue an example of Personal Religion – an expression first used

8

in 1950 by Martin P. Nilsson in the second volume of his history of Greek religion,

then a

couple of years later by Pater André-Jean Festugière in his Sather Lectures (from 1954).

These lectures were later published as Personal Religion Among the Greeks, the only work

published in English by Pater Festugière. One of the characteristics of personal religion in the

Hellenistic age, according to Festugière, is that the convert enters a congregation (θίασος,

ἔρανος, κοινόν). These replace the more ancient structures of the tribe or brotherhood into

which one was born. In contrast, the joining of a convert to these new congregations rests on a

personal decision, and in this Festugière finds the proof of a personal religion. The conversion

to believing in a god of one’s own choice makes possible a more intimate relation with the

Many years before I discovered our monologue, I learnt from the Swedish poet and aphorism writer Vilhelm Ekelund that, according to Ekelund’s intuition, there was a path from Menander to the NT and to Paul. He identified the first steps along that path in some passages of the preserved Menander texts: above all, in the one-liners and two-liners ascribed to Menander – but quite often also written by Ekelund, as he had an unusual knack for producing short sentences of deep, existential value, comparable to those of Jesus. Ekelund was obsessed with Antiquity and also viewed Christianity as an outflux of earlier Greek thinking. He was neither familiar with nor interested in the Jewish background of Christianity. The following quotations bear witness to his way of connecting pre-Christian Greek antiquity with the NT:

‘Tonight when reading the NT I thought that what I would do in connection with Menander,

11

‘For the majority of educated people the “classical” stands as an historic coincidence, an epoch like all others, which came and went. But the “classical” is just as little an historic phenomenon as the “religious”. It is the main human experience which has asserted itself there [...] It is the main line of everything human. With antiquity it is the same as with the

12

Ekelund thus brings the classical and the Christian experience into close connection. In Luke 17:20–21, we read: ‘And when he was demanded of the Pharisees when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said: The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you (ἐντὸς ὑμῶν)’. The similarity between antiquity and the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed is that they are both within us, ἐντὸς ἡμῶν. The classical was within Ekelund; it was always with him, as it is with me as a classical scholar and a neotestamentarian.

Menander must have been a bystander when Demetrios Poliorketes entered Athens in 307 and people greeted him as a sun god – the son of Aphrodite and Poseidon – because of services he had rendered to the Athenians. The people shouted and Menander likely listened, amazed. To quote from Hermocles’ Paean, ‘The other gods are too far away; they do not hear us. But you, we see you, face to face’. They were praying to the visible god who had brought peace onto earth. Those feelings mirror those that Augustus would inspire in his

8 M. P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion II (München: C. H. Beck, 1974), 185.
9 A.-J. Festugière, Personal Religion among the Greeks (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), 40.
10 See A.-J. Festugière, La vie spirituelle en Grèce à l ́époque héllenistique (Paris: Picard, 1977), 159.
11 V. Ekelund, Ur en Scholaris verkstad (Lund: Gleerup, 1974), no. 87.
12 V. Ekelund, På hafsstranden (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1922), 164-165.

divine. Incerta 2.

9

It was through reading Festugière that I became aware of the fragment called Fabula 10

could be arranged within the σχῆμα (id est the thought figure) From Menander to Paul’.

Kingdom of God: Nobody can say: here it is, or there it is’.

4

contemporaries, three hundred years later. Augustus, too, created peace, pacem Romanam. Indeed, in the eastern parts of the Mare Nostrum, the Greeks called him Σωτήρ, the Saviour. The town of Priene in Asia Minor even voted to start the new year on Augustus’ birthday.

Pater Festugière seems to think, as does Vilhelm Ekelund, that there is a path, starting with Menander texts – like our fifteen lines and those fragments I have quoted from Hypobolimaios – across the Hellenistic age, down to Paul and the NT. The Greek world was preparing itself for the good message: the euangélion.

Lecture given at the SNTS meeting in Athens, 2018. I want to thank Vemund Blomkvist for assistance in editing the manuscript.

Head of Menander in the Corinth Archeological Museum. Author’s photo. Roman copy (end of 2nd cent. AD) of a Greek original attributed to Solanion (end of 4th cent. BC). The eyes lie very deep. There is a secret, melancholy atmosphere about the face. Apparently, Menander was known and liked by the the second century Christian (?) Corinthians, perhaps also performed in the the small Odeion.

5