The previous chapter showed how Menander used mistakes about comparatively objective aspects of identity to generate conflict and reveal aspects of character. This chapter focuses on mistakes about more subjective aspects: “what” a woman is, morally, rather than “who.” Misperceptions of character and misperceptions of status have much in common: what characters see is partly determined by what they expect and what they expect is shaped by their assumptions about sex and status. Again, we watch distraught characters reason their way into false conclusions about women they love. We have already seen Sostratos' sudden convictions about the sterling qualities of Knemon's daughter (she has real virtues, of course, but they are not what inspires his enthusiasm). The mistakes examined in this chapter are less flattering than Sostratos'. Where female characters are concerned, misperceptions of character typically involve “discovering” in a more or less innocent figure the negative stereotype of the avaricious prostitute and concluding that this is the real truth – everything else about her is pretence. Mistakes about moral character accordingly tend to center on socially marginal women: foreigners, orphans, and slaves. In other words, they involve women who are or might easily become prostitutes.

There is a certain cultural logic to this. The prostitute was an adaptable villain. Her vices included greed, lust, drunkenness, shamelessness, dishonesty, pretense, and servility, and her misbehavior ranged from ruining young men and breaking up marriages to threatening the stability of respectable households.