The Transmission of Attributed to Menander Proverbs in Medieval Slavic Monasticism

Abstract

While the plays themselves are poorly preserved, proverbs attributed to Menander survived in collections compiled in the Byzantine Empire and subsequently translated into various old languages, including Old Church Slavonic. The techniques used bythe Slavic translator(s) to render Greek morphological, lexical and syntactical units and, in particular, philosophical (even pagan) content, allow a deeper understanding of Byzantine-Slavic cultural contact, being good illustrations of the challenging task of grasping the translational praxis of medieval Slavic bookmen-churchmen and an excellent tool for tracing their world-view (ideology) in a moral rather than ethical atmosphere, and in a monastic rather than laic arena.