The Menander mosaics
Scenes from lost comedies with their characters named in writing.
**The most famous comic playwright after Aristophanes — and with his work almost entirely lost, its pictures became testimony.** ✅ **Who he was**: **Menander** (about 342–291 BC) was an Athenian writer, **the leading name of the «New Comedy»** — a theatre unlike Aristophanes's biting political comedy: **family stories, love, misunderstandings and stock characters** (the stern father, the cunning slave, the young lover). ✅ **His influence is enormous**: **through Roman comedy** (Plautus and Terence) his formula reached the European stage — **and the comedy of errors and situations we know today owes much to him**. ⚠ **The problem**: **his works were lost** almost entirely in the Middle Ages — leaving only **one nearly complete play** (*Dyskolos*) and passages of others, **most recovered on papyrus in the 20th century**. ✅ **Hence the mosaics' value**: the floors of a Roman house in Mytilene **depict particular scenes** from Menander's plays, **naming the play, the act and the characters** — **so they tell us about plays we have never read**: who is in them, what happens, and how they were staged.
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**A museum in two buildings, best known for mosaics depicting scenes from the plays of Menander** — in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos. The museum is **divided in two** across separate buildings minutes apart: the **old wing** in a small early 20th-century mansion holding the prehistoric and archaic finds, and the **new wing** in a modern building covering the Roman period. ⚠ **Its most important holding is in the new wing**: mosaic floors from the **"House of Menander"** — a Roman villa in Mytilene — **depicting named scenes from Menander's comedies**, with the characters' and plays' names written in. ✅ **Their value is exceptional**: Menander's plays are **mostly lost** — **so these mosaics are among the most important witnesses to their content**. ⚠ You need two tickets or a combined one — ask.
Scenes from lost comedies with their characters named in writing.
Sculpture and pottery from Lesbos before the classical period.
Floors and sculpture from Mytilene's Roman villas.
Mytilene, 81100 Lesbos, Greece