Menander: Menander’s New Comedy inspires poets to find dignity in ordinary life: “He wrote not kings, but shopkeepers, / who loved, and lied, and paid their debts.”; Poets borrow his focus on domestic truth: “The maid who wept, the son who ran— / these are the souls that shape the man.”; His realism becomes poetic antidote to myth: “No gods descended, no thunder rolled— / just fathers scolding, mothers old.”; Menander teaches poets that comedy is the mirror: “He showed the world as it is worn— / not in the crown, but in the torn.”; A poet might write, “He did not sing of gods above— / but how a loaf of bread, and love, / could heal the soul, and mend the day.”; His legacy: “He did not carve the marble’s name— / but wrote the breath, the sigh, the flame.”