For a detailed presentation and reconstruction of the play, W.G. Arnott, Menander (the first of three Menander volumes in the Loeb Classical Library, 1979) remains invaluable. W. D. Furley’s edition of the play (Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2009) is more up to date and very helpful, but also harder to find.
A. Traill’s Women and the Comic Plot in Menander (Cambridge 2008) serves up an excellent analysis of the dynamics among all the characters in the play. Angela M. Heap’s Behind the Mask: Character and Society in Menander (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) has informative reflections on slave characters in particular, but the bibliography on ancient slavery is vast, and readers interested in this aspect should study deeply and thoughtfully. Susan Lape’s Reproducing Athens: Menander’s Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City (Princeton 2004) includes some perceptive comments on the socio-political dynamics in the play, though her larger thesis that Menander was an advocate for restoring the Athenian democracy has not won wide support among scholars.
A. Scafuro’s The Forensic Stage: Settling Disputes in Graeco-Roman New Comedy (Cambridge 1997, esp. pp. 154-92, 424-66) provides an outstanding look at the ways scenes like the arbitration in Act 2 of Epitrepontes work in various plays and how they correspond to legal proceedings outside the theater.
S. Kiritsi’s “Menander’s Epitrepontes in Modern Greek Theatre: The Poetics of Its Reception and Performance,” in Menander in Contexts (edited by A.H. Sommerstein, London: Routledge, 2014: 233-48) is a helpful look at a rare and thoughtful staging of the play. The volume in general also contains many valuable essays representing the directions of scholarship on Menander. A.K. Petrides’ Menander, New Comedy and the Visual (Cambridge 2014) offers one of the most sophisticated models for understanding Menander’s plays, though not focusing on Epitrepontes in particular. Finally, S. Nervegna’s Menander in Antiquity: The Contexts of Reception (Cambridge 2013) provides an invaluable study of Menander’s legacy in antiquity.