SOURCE: "I: Lucian: the Man and the Work—Ingenuity and Humour" in Lucian and His Influence in Europe, The University of North Carolina Press, 1979, pp. 20-45.

[In the following excerpt, Robinson discusses Lucian's use of such literary forms as parody, pastiche, and satire, as well as his handling of invective, burlesque, and irony.]

… If there is one relatively clear-cut division between the works, it is quite simply between those whose principal effect is humour, and those whose principal effect is ingenuity. The second category contains the eleven prolaliai and the pieces which can be assigned to one rhetorical genre, Disowned, The Tyrannicide, Phalaris I and II, In Praise of my Country, The Fly (whose paradoxes are clever, not funny) and The Consonants at Law, where the fantasy of the situation is subordinate in interest to the linguistic display. With these can be classed Anacharsis, Toxaris, Essays in Portraiture, Essays in Portraiture Defended, Slander, On the Dance, Hippias, A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting and Apology for 'On Salaried Posts'; all of which are exercises in the skilful combination of a number of traditional forms. Some of these works have amusing elements, especially in their anecdotes, but they are clearly intended to be admired for their artistry rather than their humour. The first and larger category, comic works, falls into two groups: pastiches, transpositions and parodies, where the humour derives from the nature of the material imitated or from the skill of the parody, and what may loosely be called satires, including pamphlets, dialogues and the mock treatises. In making such a subdivision the criterion has to be that of principal effect, for many of the satirical works use both parody and pastiche among their comic techniques.

To analyse what makes a work funny is almost impossible, humour being a decidedly fragile commodity, apt to vanish into dust at the first probing touch. At most one can isolate within a work those structures, themes and stylistic devices which are clearly designed to amuse. Lucian's comic techniques are particularly complex, but with the exception of transposition and pastiche, they are all designed to play upon the gap between a concept of normality which writer and audience share, and what passes for normality within the text. Since pastiche and transposition fall partly outside this definition, let us look at them first.

A true pastiche is an almost evenly matched exhibition of verbal dexterity and humour. The ingenuity lies in the ability of the writer to recreate the flavour of his model in theme, structure and style, without merely copying it. The comic element derives in part from the fact that the audience is constantly aware that the text is not what it purports to be. An additional source of comedy is frequently that the imitation is modified by touches of burlesque or parody. Closely allied to the pastiche proper is the transposition, where the essence of a work or of a genre is transferred into another genre. The technique doubtless derives from the rhetorical exercise of paraphrase, in which verse is re-expressed in prose and vice-versa. Transposition is not an inherently comic form. It results in comedy if the material transposed is comic, or if, as with pastiche, elements of parody or burlesque are allowed to creep in.

Three of Lucian's collections of short dialogues, Dialogues of the Gods, Dialogues of the Sea Gods and Dialogues of the Courtesans, are all essentially pastiches or transpositions. Most of the Dialogues of the Courtesans are pastiches of New Comedy, but some recreate in a comic light themes from Hellenistic love poetry (e.g. the complaint of the lover shut out by his mistress in Dial. 14). A rare example of a dialogue modelled on a particular poem is Dial. 4, which has the same thematic structure as Theocritus Idylls 2. The humour in these works is less an additive of Lucian's than a quality inherent in the types and situations of the source material. The Dialogues of the Gods and of the Sea Gods are slightly different. They transpose elements from Homer, the Homeric Hymns and Alexandrian poetry. (The sources are not exclusively literary. At least two dialogues, Dialogues of the Sea Gods 14 and 15, may well represent transpositions from pictures, of Perseus and Andromeda and of Europa and the bull respectively.) In these two sets of dialogues the burlesque potential of humanizing the gods, so evident in dialogues such as Zeus Rants, is uniformly played down in favour of picturesque detail, and of ingenuity in the rethinking of the poetic material. A good example of the manner is Dialogues of the Sea Gods 2, which reworks the material of Odyssey IX. 216-525. The Cyclops is complaining to Poseidon about the behaviour of Odysseus. Within the short space of some forty lines of prose, the major events of the episode are all presented. Odysseus and the companions are trapped in the cave; Polyphemus devours some of them; he is drugged with wine and blinded with a red-hot, sharpened stake; the 'No-man' ploy deceives the other Cyclopses; the prisoners escape beneath the sheep when the Cyclops removes the rock in the entrance; Odysseus taunts his former captor. Poseidon's final words suggest the Homeric sequel, with the threat of punishment at sea. But not only are the major events there. All the details are culled from Homer too. The Cyclops' suggestion that the companions 'obviously had designs on my flocks' develops the image 'as sea-robbers over the brine' from his first question to Odysseus (Od. IX. 254). His description of relighting his fire, 'kindling it with a tree I had brought from the mountain', elaborates Homer's first image of the Cyclops as he enters the cave:

He bore a huge load of dry wood for the preparation of his supper. (233-4)

At times a detail suffers deliberate reduction. Homer's Polyphemus, who is very much an epic figure, says of the drugged wine: 'This is a rill of very nectar and ambrosia.' Lucian's Cyclops, who has the air of a plaintive child, can only manage: 'It was sweet and smelled nice.' In general the most important feature of the presentation in Lucian is clearly his ingenuity in recasting the Homeric narrative in as much detail as possible into a retrospective dialogue, put mostly into the mouth of the victim. The comic element, deriving almost exclusively from the contrast between grand subject and domestic presentation, is merely a spin-off from the traditions to which the dialogues have been attached, for the portraiture of the gods as having the manners and problems of ordinary men is a standard feature of Homer and one favoured by Alexandrian poets.

Outside the short dialogues, pastiche as an extended form occurs largely as linguistic pastiche, in Lexiphanes and The Syrian Goddess. The two cases are widely different. The Syrian Goddess is a pastiche of the language and manner of Herodotus, particularly with reference to his account of Egypt in bk. 2. The description of the temple and cult, with its naive acceptance of the most implausible tales and its delight in erotic anecdote, is well within the Herodotean manner, as are certain themes: the borrowings made by other peoples from Egyptian mythology, the parallels between Greek and barbarian gods, the taboos relating to various animals. There are also typical formulae of presentation, of the type 'I saw it myself', 'I am only recounting what I have been told', 'This seems probable but I also heard another version'. If the work is read as a tongue-in-cheek imitation of a well-known writer, the difference between the credulity of the religious attitudes put forward in it and the dismissal of such stuff elsewhere in Lucian becomes irrelevant. The aim is to out-Herodotus Herodotus, and the comedy lies therein. Lexiphanes, on the other hand, very plainly combines pastiche of hyperatticism with a mild parody of Plato's Symposium, as Lexiphanes himself informs us when he defines the theme of his latest work as 'counter-banqueting the son of Ariston'. Over half the text is devoted to reading the extract from the supposed new work. It is a comic reduction of Plato's dialogue to all its extraneous details: minute description of the preparations for the banquet, the paraphernalia of the feast, entertainments, the uninvited guest, the guest who is unwell. Nothing serious is said at all. The linguistic pastiche for which the parody is the vehicle depends mainly on the profusion of words from Old Comedy, mostly concrete nouns for items long disappeared, intermingled with a few Platonic formulae and the occasional syntactic oddity. Wherever possible Lucian has sought to make the archaizing diction funnier by playing on the differences between obsolete and current uses of words. Unlike The Syrian Goddess, this pastiche-parody does not provide the entire structure of the work, however. It is set within a dialogue framework which allows the linguistic theme to be expressed in two quite different ways. First the recitation is followed by a farcical scene, doubtless modelled on Old Comedy, in which a doctor, Sopolis, literally purges Lexiphanes of his archaisms. Secondly, Lycinus, the author's mouthpiece, rounds off with a short homily on true learning and its contrast with the excesses of Lexiphanes. Though the pastiche is the main comic device of the work, it is integrated into a schema of other such devices. In this it is more typical of Lucian's work as a whole than is The Syrian Goddess.

Parody forms a bridge between the verbal ingenuities of pastiche or transposition, and the content-oriented humour of satire. It shares the technical preoccupations of the former, but, like the latter, it depends ultimately on the gap between accepted norm and what is presented in the text. Extended parody is relatively uncommon as a self-sufficient literary form in Lucian's work. However, the two examples of it, The Parasite and A True Story, are both works of substance. (There are three in all if Gout is accepted as a genuine work.) A True Story is too elaborate a work in its variety of comedy to be seen exclusively as a parody, but that is certainly the major element in its structure. Lucian himself says so in his opening paragraph:

Each detail of the story is a veiled allusion, not without a touch of satire, to the old poets, historians and philosophers whose writings are full of wonders and tall tales. I would name names, but you will surely recognize them for yourself from your reading.

The Byzantine patriarch Photius (c. 820-891) indicates the main source for Lucian's work as a novel by Antonius Diogenes, The Wonders beyond Thule, of which he possessed a copy. According to his very complicated résumé, the main features of the plot seem to have been a double voyage whose action was of less interest to the author than the opportunity it provided to elaborate a series of 'strange but true' anecdotes about men, animals, plants, the moon and the sun, with a suitable admixture of plain magic. It is obviously difficult to estimate the degree to which A True Story parodies a work we do not have, though some of the details provided by Photius, the voyage to the moon, for example, and the description of its inhabitants, confirm the parallel. Into the framework of the mock traveller's tale Lucian has inserted an immense variety of short pastiches and parodies. In certain instances the parody is simply that of a traditional theme. The 'perfect island', for example, for which the prototype is Phaeacia in the Odyssey but which occurs particularly as a series of utopias in various philosophers and historians, appears here as the Isle of the Blest, with every possible traditional aspect exaggerated to its uttermost, but recorded with the apparent precision of a Guide Bleu. In the traditional picture of the Isle of the Blest there are two springs; in Lucian's island there are no less than 365 springs of water, 365 springs of honey, 500 springs of myrrh ('but those are smaller') seven rivers of milk and eight of wine—not to mention the river of finest myrrh one hundred royal cubits wide which surrounds the city. The technique is to pile up detail, each element more absurd than the last, while retaining total gravity of presentation.

As well as the parody of traditional themes there is considerable specific parody of individual authors. Lucian himself names Ctesias and Iambulus, snatches of whose work we know through Diodorus and Photius. The formal disclaimer of truth at the outset of the story is already an inversion of the protestations of Ctesias and Antonius Diogenes: 'I am writing about things which I haven't seen, haven't experienced and haven't heard about from anyone else. In fact, they are things which don't exist at all and couldn't possibly exist. So those who happen to read this account of them should certainly not believe in them.' There are more immediately recognizable parodies of Herodotus and Thucydides. In the first case it is, as in The Syrian Goddess, the author's naive delight in the supernatural which Lucian picks upon. The 'divine footprint' theme is a good example. Lucian and companions not only find an inscribed bronze plaque recording the visit of the gods (an early example of 'Queen Elizabeth slept here'), but 'near at hand there were also two footprints in the rock, one a hundred feet long, the other shorter. I think the smaller one belonged to Dionysus, the other one to Herakles.' This is a typical comic exaggeration of Herodotus' account (IV. 82) of the wonders of Exampaios in Scythia: 'They show you a rock with the imprint of Herakles' foot; it looks like a human footprint, but it is three feet long.' Twice the number of gods, and thirty times the length of the footprint. Thucydides provides the pattern for the descriptions of armies and military engagements. Particular battles in A True Story may reflect the tactics of particular episodes in the Peloponnesian Wars. The first phase of the battle between Heliots and Selenites (I. 17-18) bears some resemblance to the pattern of the engagement between Boeotians and Athenians in Thucydides IV. 96. More often the parallel is a general one depending on the vocabulary and upon the kind of detail selected. In this sense the confusion and brutality of the fight between the floating islands recalls the encounter between Corinthian and Corcyrean fleets in Thuc. I. 48. Sometimes it is not really necessary to assign a specific source. The whole Heliot-Selenite war, with its disputed colonies and the building of a Long Wall, is meant to suggest the Peloponnesian Wars, so what more natural than that the account of it should be concluded by a pastiche treaty, using appropriate official language, just as Thucydides records the terms of the Athens-Sparta treaty in V. 18? There is no need for verbal echoes here; the imitation is thematic.

The comedy of the Thucydidean references does not lie in the multiplication and exaggeration of elements, but in the straightforward application of the historian's techniques to a totally absurd topic. Much the same is true of the borrowing from Homer. That there should be borrowings from Homer in a tall tale is only natural. His reputation as the greatest of all liars, and the authority of the Odyssey as the original roman de voyage made him an obvious target. Lucian in fact lists Odysseus as the original charlatan 'telling tales to Alcinoos about winds enslaved, one-eyed men, cannibals and savages, and about animals with many heads, too, and magic potions that metamorphosed his companions' (I. 3). The Homeric touches are less thematic, however, than this reference might suggest. The most extensive thematic borrowing is the reference to the Isle of Dreams, and this is not really comic at all. Lucian goes out of his way to pinpoint his source: 'Only Homer mentioned it, and he did not describe it entirely accurately' (II. 32). He then takes Penelope's simple statement 'Twain are the Gates of shadowy dreams; the one is fashioned of horn, the other of ivory', and elaborates a whole fantasy landscape, in which the element of exaggeration, 'there are not two gates in it, as Homer says, but four', is less important than the imaginative ornamentation. This example is exceptional, however. The bulk of the Homeric reference could loosely be called stylistic. It serves to parallel Lucian himself, as narrator, with Odysseus, by associating the style of his voyage, his landfalls, his adventures, with certain Homeric narrative mannerisms. Just as Odysseus and his companions, reaching Aeaea, 'stepped ashore and for two days and two nights lay there consuming their own hearts for weariness and pain' (Od. X. 142-3), so Lucian and his companions, after the tribulations of their (79 day!) voyage, 'putting in and going ashore … lay upon the ground for a long time because of their long misery'. When Lucian wants to seek out the lie of the land, he leaves a detachment of men to guard the ships and takes the rest to explore (I. 7; cf. Od. IX. 193-6) or climbs a vantage point (II. 42; cf. Od. X. 148, 194). When leaving a place he camps out on the beach, feasts, and leaves at dawn, like Odysseus and his men after their encounter with the Cyclops. All of which makes it the funnier that when something actually happens to some of his companions—the sexual encounter with the seductive tree-women, an incident with undertones of Circe and the Lotus-eaters combined—Lucian shows no Odyssean heroics, or even noble lament. Not for him the risks of outfacing Circe, or leading his men weeping back to safety (Od. IX. 98). Instead, 'We left them in the lurch and beat it back to the boats' (I. 9). The Homeric references provide an epic flavour whose inappropriateness to the narrative is a useful comic additive.

The purpose of the tissue of parody and pastiche in A True Story is quite clear. It is to amuse, to dazzle, and to tease the audience by keeping them alert for stylistic and thematic allusions to well-known works. Just how well-read they must have been can be judged from the fact that they were expected not only to know their Homer and their Ctesias, but also to be capable of spotting that the description of the halcyon's nest in II. 40 is a humorous exaggeration of the account of the bird in Aristotle History of Animals V. 8 (542b) and IX. 14 (616a). The nature of the parody in The Parasite is very different, but the purpose is hardly more serious. As with Lexiphanes, the work is built up from two separate elements. One theme is purely rhetorical, the paradoxical encomium of the art of the sponger. A substantial part of the work accordingly follows the standard school-room formulae for the genre. The encomium of the soi-disant art is put into the mouth of its practitioner; a formal comparison is made between 'Spongery' and the other arts (here, rhetoric and philosophy); the sponger in peacetime is compared with the sponger in war, thus introducing the enunciation of the physical and moral qualities natural to the sponger. This aspect of The Parasite is marked more by its skilful use of traditional motifs and structures than by its humour, though there is something inherently funny about the fact that Simon the sponger, in demonstrating the superiority of his art to rhetoric and philosophy, uses precisely the literary methods of his opponents. This is where the parody proper comes in. For not only is the centre of his defence a rhetorician's, but its framework is a philosopher's. The lengthy reasoning by which spongery is defined as an art echoes the process of defining sophistry as an art in Plato's Sophist, and Simon's style of argument is in more general terms a caricature of the Socratic method. He professes great modesty as to his own skills, he leads Tychiades on with immense patience, he uses the reductive method to compel his companion's assent. All that is missing is the logic of the ideas, for which Simon substitutes the quotations, examples, and paradoxes of rhetorical display. At one point, the actual conduct of the argument is made to suffer a comic hiccough. Tychiades is allowed to ask a question that Simon cannot answer. So he simply ignores it, and passes swiftly on to another topic:

Tych. Don't you think that it is wrong to take things that belong to other people?

Sim. Certainly.

Tych. Then why should the sponger be the only person for whom it is wrong to take other people's things?

Sim. I couldn't say.—Then again, in the other arts (etc.).

The proper effect here can only be judged if one imagines the piece performed: split-second facial dismay, covered by Simon hurrying loudly on to his next point. This is the way, Lucian seems to suggest, that Socrates must have dealt with those tricky questions that Plato didn't tell us about. This particular instance of humour is at Socrates' expense. In general, however, the humour derives quite simply from the incongruity of associating a serious philosophical method with an entirely frivolous subject. It does not constitute any kind of critique of philosophy. Like the pastiche-parody in Lexiphanes, it is merely amusing.

Lucian's comedy is not usually so overtly l'art pour l'art, for the remaining works all give the illusion of having a butt for their humour, be it institution, value or individual. Lucian's satires divide sharply into two groups: those which are presented as an aspect of reality, and those whose circumstances belong largely or entirely to a fantasy world. In practice this division does not mark any important thematic differences, but it does constitute a basic stylistic dichotomy. The realistic approach itself offers a variety of forms of presentation. The simplest is the treatise—On Funerals, On Sacrifices, How to Write History, where the author directly denounces the shortcomings of what can loosely be called institutions. Allied to the treatise is the pamphlet (see above, pp. 18ff.), where the satire is focussed on an individual, or, in the case of On Salaried Posts, a particular section of society. Again, direct denunciation of vices is the most natural (though by no means the only) method of criticism. More complicated in form are the dialogues. These fall into two main groups. In the first the dialogue is a disguised narrative; Lycinus recounts to Pamphilus the details of the lawsuit between the two philosophers (The Eunuch), Lycinus describes for the benefit of Philo the unedifying events at the wedding feast of Aristaenetus' daughter (The Banquet). In this sort of dialogue the listener has an almost passive rôle, though he does contribute a limited amount of moral commentary. In the second group, the dialogue forms the framework for a series of short narratives (The Lover of Lies, The Ship). The Lover of Lies retains the disguised narrative element, in that Philocles' rôle is to listen to the account given by Tychiades, and to reinforce Tychiades' moral position. Tychiades' narrative, on the other hand, is a Ship in reported speech, with each character contributing his own story or stories. In The Ship all the, characters contribute to the dialogue and to the narrative, and hence are all active expressions of the moral argument of the work. The distinction between an authorial voice, as in treatises and most pamphlets, and the genuinely dramatic presentation of The Ship is a substantial one. For one thing, the more a character is allowed to speak for himself, the greater the opportunity for ironic self-betrayal. The extreme example of this is A Professor of Public Speaking, where the values proposed by the speaker, and by the rhetorician himself, are (for most of the dialogue) plainly the opposite of what a rational man would suppose. For another thing, the less a character is allowed to stand outside the action of an event, the less he becomes the porte-parole of the author. The moral criteria of The Banquet, conveyed for us by Lycinus, are as clear as those put forward explicitly by the author in The Ignorant Book-collector, whereas it is a great deal less plain where the satirical emphasis lies in The Ship, for Lycinus to some extent puts himself in the wrong by taking the game of wishes seriously.

Despite this variety of presentation, there is a notable uniformity, in the 'realistic' dialogues, about the way in which Lucian creates his satirical effect. If the gap between the world as it is shown in the text and the world as it ought to be is to be properly appreciated by the audience, there must exist a common moral standpoint between writer and audience. Lucian has chosen (for reasons which I shall discuss later) the most neutral of all standards, the appeal to practicality. In The Banquet Lycinus contrasts the behaviour of the ordinary people present at the banquet with that of their supposed betters (34-5), pointing the moral that actions speak louder than words: 'While all this was happening, Philo, I was privately thinking a number of things—among them the obvious point that knowledge is useless if you do not try to improve the way you conduct your life.' In The Eunuch, 6, Pamphilus opines that a philosopher should be judged by his mores, not by his doctrinal competence. In Hermotimus the climax of the dialectic is the 'proof that philosophy is unnecessary to sensible living. Even in The Ship, though we may not thank him for it, Lycinus recalls us to reality from the extravagances of Samippus' dreams of power:

Sam. My dear chap, do you think you're still in Athens? This is Babylon. You're one of a host of soldiers camped on the plain outside the city walls, planning tactics.

Lyc. Thanks. You did well to remind me. I thought I was sober and talking about reality.

In The Lover of Lies the appeal is directed toward a specific, necessary aspect of practicality: commonsense. Philocles and Tychiades open with a discussion that assumes truthfulness, in a limited and strictly pragmatic sense, to be a social norm, and Tychiades restates the idea at the close of the work by assuming the value of rationality. What is, perhaps, very significant is not the repetition of the same moral standpoint in each dialogue, but the fact that in almost every case it is merely touched upon, as if to remind the audience, not to convince it. This leaves the focus of the works on the alazones, the characters who create the gap by pretending, or believing themselves to be, or trying to be something more than they are.

The alazones in the realistic dialogues are almost all philosophers; in The Eunuch the two Aristotelians, in The Banquet representatives of all the major sects, in The Lover of Lies a Stoic, an Aristotelian, a Platonist and a Pythagorean. The importance of this professional identity is to allow the author to exploit the difference between theoretician and practitioner. He can, and does, use other professions: grammarian and rhetorician in The Banquet, doctor in The Lover of Lies. But philosophy has the advantage of claiming to deal with life as a whole, rather than a single aspect of it. The difference between philosopher as theoretician and the actions of a philosopher as man can be varied into three types of contrast. The tenets of particular philosophies can be contrasted with an abstract concept of philosophy. Philosophers as they are can be contrasted with an abstract concept of what a philosopher should be. Philosophers as they are can be contrasted with what the tenets of their particular philosophies say they should be. Lucian appears to take as his definition of perfect philosophy and the perfect philosopher the rather vague notion of moral superiority to the ordinary man. He then uses the incidents of his narratives to show particular philosophies and their followers as clearly morally inferior to the ordinary man. The opening of The Eunuch neatly illustrates how the different motifs can be fitted together. On his entrance, Lycinus explains his hilarity as the effect of a court case between philosophers which he has been watching. Pamphilus responds initially on an abstract plane:

You are indeed right to call it absurd that men professing philosophy should take one another to court when they ought to settle the matters in dispute peacefully between themselves.

This sets the particular conduct of the philosophers against what Pamphilus sees as the standards appropriate to philosophy as a discipline. When Lycinus goes on to describe the abuse which characterized the case (i.e. these philosophers were actually more contentious than ordinary men in the same situation), Pamphilus returns:

I suppose, Lycinus, they were adherents of different sects disagreeing over doctrine as usual.

The 'as usual' changes the ground, showing that there is a permanent contrast between the adherents of particular philosophies and what Pamphilus expects of a philosopher. The audience has thus been encouraged to accept the philosopher as an alazon by definition. This leaves the rest of the dialogue free to concentrate on the contrast which has the greatest comic potential, the contrast between the private lives of philosophers and what they profess to be. This has the greatest potential because it is the least abstract and the least technical of the possible contrasts. Lucian wastes little effort on ridiculing doctrines, except in Hermotimus, a work whose tediousness proves how wise he was to avoid such an approach elsewhere. In general the characterization of his philosophers by sect is minimal. A Stoic may mention one or two of the classic fallacies, or be associated with indifference to pain. A Platonist will probably invoke the theory of ideas. Rarely is there any deeper representation of doctrinal differences. By concentrating on the problem of the private man and his human failings, Lucian has given himself almost endless scope for comic disparities.

Endless in theory, that is. In practice Lucian sticks to a very specific range of vices. The Lover of Lies deals with charlatanry; Lycinus ridicules the various philosophers as they recount their supposed mystic experiences and lay claim to supernatural powers. The Eunuch is principally about sexual misdemeanours, the paradox of Bagoas the eunuch taken in adultery, and secondarily about quarrelsomeness and material greed. The Banquet offers examples of greed (food and money), sexual misdemeanours (hetero- and homosexual, including adultery and attempted rape), quarrelsomeness, physical violence and egocentricity. We are back in the realm of stock types, a fact emphasized by the use of two names (Cleodemus and Ion) in both The Banquet and The Lover of Lies. What is more the range of vices is quite close to those picked out in the pamphlets …, so that the philosopher appears as merely a variant of the villain. Accordingly, the contrast between the possession of vices and the profession of virtue depends for its satirical interest not on the individuality of the vice, but on the variety of techniques which Lucian uses to describe and ridicule it.

The Ship offers an immediate contrast with the other realistic dialogues, in that its satire is nominally exercised at the expense of an abstraction, human aspiration and the material goals which it proposes for itself. I say nominally, because although the fantasies of the three proponents, Adimantus (riches), Samippus (power) and Timolaus (magical powers), are in many ways inherently absurd, so is the flat refusal of Lycinus to join in the fun, especially given his declaration (17): 'I'm not going to be disparaging amid the general good-fortune.' As I said earlier, Lycinus does not have the privileged position, here, of retrospectively reporting and commenting upon a completed action, as he does in The Eunuch, The Banquet and The Lover of Lies. The audience is thus freer to reject his position, at least in part, and with it the moral basis of the dialogue. When one looks at the three wishes themselves, however, and the arguments used against them, the dialogue falls more into line with the other three. Instead of concentrating on a single comic type, Lucian has taken three themes, two of them—the triviality of material possessions and the vanity of human power—themes of Cynic diatribe, the third—the non-existence of magical powers—being a rephrasing of the magician motif which provides half the portrait of charlatanry in The Lover of Lies. Each theme is embodied in a stock figure: the rich man (with overtones of the parvenu, for Adimantus' wealth, and some of the use to which he puts it, is extremely vulgar), the king-cummilitary commander, and the wizard. Clearly, as with the other dialogues discussed above, the satirical interest cannot derive from the novelty of the subjects, but is dependent on the comic skill with which the wishes are built up and deflated.

Although the comic interest derives in part from purely humorous elements, such as puns, misused or adapted quotations and parodies, it relies in the main on three satirical manners which are common to all the realistic satires, whether pamphlets, treatises or dialogues: invective, verbal irony and burlesque. Invective is the direct denunciation of vices, irony rejects the claims of the alazon by contrasting them with his reality, and burlesque is reduction to the ridiculous by singling out and exaggerating certain salient characteristics. Of these categories, irony is the most complex. At its most transparent, it is sarcasm, where the difference between what the words superficially mean and what they actually mean is intended to be understood by the victim. Slightly more opaque is the technique whereby the author or his porte-parole begins by adopting the persona of an innocent, who accepts the alazon at face value and then gradually casts off his mask. (Ingenu irony, which is a variety of the same technique in which the criticism is transmitted via the observation of a genuine innocent, is not used in the realistic satires, although it forms an important sub-section of the fantastic ones.) Finally, there is the irony of self-betrayal, where the author allows the alazon unwittingly to expose himself, the irony being perceptible only to the audience.

The mock treatises, On Funerals and On Sacrifices,¹ are the simplest in their satirical approach. In each case, the first paragraph is used to establish the author's standpoint, just as the 'morality' of The Eunuch or The Lover of Lies is established in the opening dialogue. In On Funerals this takes the form of a plain statement rejecting that common view of death which is essential to the attitudes about to be ridiculed. In On Sacrifices it is a piece of mild invective attacking religious practices. Thereafter the main weapon in both works is sarcasm. This can be confined to a word or phrase slipped into an apparently neutral description. For example, in On Funerals 9 Lucian explains the custom of pouring libations and making offerings of food at the tomb of the deceased, by the need to nourish them'… so that if there is anyone without friend or relative left on earth, he lives out his life an unfed and starving corpse.' The custom had been one of the greatest importance: Orestes in Aeschylus' The Libation Bearers (484-6) says in complete seriousness to the dead Agamemnon that if he helps his children avenge his death, he will get his due share of the funeral feasts, 'but otherwise at the rich and savoury banquet of burnt offerings made to earth thou shalt be portionless of honour.' In Lucian's version, the absurd image of a starving corpse, reinforced by the peculiarly inappropriate technical precision of the verb politeuetai, stressing that the corpse lives as a free citizen, make it transparent that the speaker finds the whole suggestion nonsensical. At other times, the sarcasm orders the structure of an entire paragraph, as when Lucian treats seriously the details of a custom which he considers ridiculous in its entirety. Of the custom of placing an obol in the mouth of the dead man to pay his passage across the Styx he says:

They do not give any forethought to the problem of what currency is in use in the underworld, of whether Athenian or Macedonian or Aeginetan coins are legal tender there. Nor have they considered the fact that it would be better not to have any money to pay the fare with. For then the ferryman would not accept them, and they would have to be brought back to the world of the living again.

The whole centrepiece of On Funerals, in which the corpse of a young man is imagined as commenting upon his father's behaviour at his funeral, is devoted to sarcastic developments of this kind. The youth, substituting the Cynic view of the world for the common one, pretends to suppose that what his father regrets is his son's inability to experience life's deprivations. This kind of technique in unbroken sequence risks becoming extremely monotonous. Accordingly Lucian seeks to vary it. Whereas the insistence of the sarcasm is alleviated in On Funerals by the device of making father and son speak for themselves, On Sacrifices achieves a lightening of tone by an admixture of burlesque. Of its three objects for attack—beliefs about the gods, concepts of heaven and religious rites—the first, which occupies about half the work, readily admits the downgrading of myths by (i) reducing the gods to human status, with Artemis sulking at home because Oeneus has not invited her to the sacrifice, and Apollo and Poseidon working as bricklayers for Laomedon, and (ii) by stripping the myths to their least credible or creditable details and then piling them up in rapid succession (two dozen and more in seven paragraphs). Essentially, however, the technique of the two treatises is the same. Like the Cynic diatribe from which they derive both their form and their sentiments, they depend principally on a single satirical manner.

A similar narrowness of manner is found in the pamphlets. But there the weapon is invective. Alexander, Peregrinus, The Ignorant Book-collector and The Mistaken Critic all concentrate on exposing the vices of a single figure drawn according to a particular set of conventions. … In addition to a certain amount of abstract denunciation, each vice is allowed to emerge as vividly as possible from the details of a series of scabrous anecdotes. The verbal variety of the invective ranges accordingly from the simple insult, 'But the so-and-so also dreamed up a smart fiddle, not the sort of thing just any old crook would come up with', to the technicolour description of a particular enormity. The insults are sharpened by a limited amount of sarcasm, and at the same time made funny by the selecting of absurd (frequently obscene) detail:

When this work of art shaped by nature's own hand, this example of Polyclitan perfection, crossed the threshold of manhood, he was promptly caught in the act of adultery in Armenia, was soundly beaten, and finally got away by jumping off the roof with a radish stuffed up his arse. (Peregrinus 9)

Variety is also achieved in other ways. Where the alazon is a charlatan the scope of the invective is widened to include those who are taken in by him (particularly the Paphlagonians in Alexander) and those who are associated with him, such as the Cynic Theagenes in Peregrinus. The delivery of the invective can be partly allotted to a figure other than the author but either a barely disguised alter ego, like the 'other man' in Peregrinus, or even an openly fictional projection, as with 'Damning evidence', the personified figure, apparently from a Menander prologue, who takes over the attack in The Mistaken Critic. But the most sophisticated variant is to place the attack in the mouth of the alazon himself, making him deliver a mock-encomium of his own vices. This is the case with A Professor of Public Speaking.

The possibilities of such a technique are played with in The Mistaken Critic where Lucian gives the conduct of the attack to the personification of the victim's tongue. This allows him to couple the charges of professional (i.e. linguistic) incompetence and moral degeneracy (fellatio) within the activity of the one organ, symbolizing its owner. However the presentation is still that of invective, because the tongue, though physically a part of its master, is set up in opposition to him. There is still a distinction between speaker and victim. For the second part of A Professor of Public Speaking this distinction has disappeared. The Professor's assumption of the rightness of his own professional and personal conduct is total, an assumption apparently supported by the case proposed by the speaker. Yet the bulk of what the professor says is easily recognized as false, because it offends against commonsense. It is the vocabulary of attack posing as that of eulogy:

Bring with you ignorance as your most important weapon, then impudence, and recklessness and brazenness as well. A sense of shame, of fair play, of moderation, a tendency to blush, all those you can leave at home. (15)

It seems strange that the authorial voice of the first part of the pamphlet should appear to accept the validity of what is to follow. A closer reading shows that the speaker inserts into his introductory encomium certain asides which do not in fact quite fit with the case he is presenting. Rhetoric is, note en passant, to be 'a great deal below the inflated style of poetry', which is hardly complimentary to poetry but a great deal less so to rhetoric. The guide whom we are to reject is given an attractive physical presence; the professor, though described as 'very clever and very handsome', is attributed with 'a swaying walk, a gawky neck, an effeminate glance'. So that when, in the closing phrases of the work, the speaker finally dissociates himself from the position he initially supported, there is no change of view involved, no inconsistency. The moral stance of the work merely becomes explicit. Such a form of irony is hardly subtle, but it is a great deal subtler than pure invective.

The satirical manner of the dialogues takes a similar form of simple irony, and combines it with burlesque. The philosophers of The Banquet, The Eunuch, The Lover of Lies, are as much condemned by their own words and actions as by the commentary of Lycinus or Tychiades. At the same time, they have been deliberately reduced in stature so that they are nothing more than the sum of their vices. Caricature makes them subhuman, yet they lay claim to superhuman status. In The Banquet, for example, Lycinus describes the arrival of Ion the Platonist thus:

When he appeared, they all got to their feet and greeted him as if he were one of the higher powers. It was just like a visitation from a god, when the wonderful Ion joined us.

But when we see Ion in action, he is making an inconsequential and quite inappropriate little speech (a rigmarole of Platonic jargon), and swapping abuse with the rhetorician (39-40).

Self-revelation through action and dialogue is a very varied medium of irony. However, Lucian evidently appreciates that any single satirical device will eventually lose its effect. Ion's set speech is just one of the ways of varying the technique. Where the ridicule is aimed at intellectual qualities, the speech or extended narration by the alazon is the most common device (e.g. Lover of Lies); where the moral qualities are the focus of attack, then action and dialogue are equally appropriate. One of the most sophisticated variants is the petulant letter in The Banquet sent by the Stoic Hetoemocles to the giver of the banquet, Aristaenetus. It succeeds in fulfilling two separate satirical functions. Following the rhetorical rules for the genre, it reveals the character of the sender; but what is revealed is the opposite of what is said. Hetoemocles parades his indifference to rich living, and his humility. What we see is his pique at not having been invited, his greed, and his bitchiness. At the same time the letter is a piece of comic invective against the philosophers actually present, notably in exposing Diphilus as a pederast.

As long as the balance between irony and caricature is sufficient to remind the audience that the dialogue has (or purports to have) a moral point, the cumulative effect is genuinely satirical. But when, as in The Eunuch, the burlesque reduces the philosophers to the embodiment of no more than two or three characteristics, in the case of Bagoas virtually to the single one of sexual impropriety, the satirical manner hardly seems more than the peg on which purely comic elements are hung. The Eunuch has the air of an after-dinner story, moving relentlessly towards a single joke. The absurd definition 'a philosopher is a man who has normal sexual powers', which Lucian deduces from the arguments of the case, leads in the final paragraph to lewd double-entendre—Bagoas is 'practising his masculinity and keeping the thing in hand'—and closes on the punch line, 'I could wish my son … may be well-tooled up for philosophy'. In The Lover of Lies, the effect of the imbalance is to make one forget the identity of the story-tellers and simply to enjoy the stories told, an effect Lucian seems conscious of when he makes even Tychiades and Philocles agree about the enjoyable aspect of the romancing. In both cases it is clear that the reduction of the satirical aspect to a subsidiary rôle, and the promotion of purely comic aims to the main rôle, alters the reader's response to the work as satire.

The dialogues which portray a self-consciously unreal world present a surprisingly large number of characteristics in common with those that purport to represent reality. These fantasy dialogues fall into two categories: (i) underworld visits (and variations on that form), as in The Downward Journey, Menippus, Charon and Icaromenippus, and (ii) works where the action takes place in heaven (The Parliament of the Gods, Zeus Rants), or in which non-human characters intervene in human affairs. The 'underworld visit' dialogues are the most homogeneous of all Lucian's works. They are among the earliest extant examples of ingenu satire, demonstrating its three major types. In Charon a member of another society comes to visit the earth. In Icaromenippus a member of our own society gains the perspective of an outsider by seeing the world from above. In Menippus a member of our own society visits another, and compares it with our own. The Downward Journey and certain of the Dialogues of the Dead (e.g. nos 2-10) present a variation on the latter where the ingenu is a recent 'immigrant' to another society. The phrase 'other society' needs qualification here, because the society that Lucian chooses, hell, is a consequence of, and not a utopian alternative to, our world. This leads to a greater similarity between the types of ingénu satire, since the lower world is much concerned with actually rehearsing the crimes of the upper, and does not merely serve to show them up by implied comparison. There are, obviously, distinctions of motif that accompany the choice of this world or the next as primary focus. Those dialogues set in hell use, for example, the ferryboat across the river Styx and the judgment of the dead by Rhadamanthus as their stock situations; whereas Icaromenippus and Charon have as initial motif the idea of attaining a great height and then employing magical means to obtain the sharp sight necessary for perceiving the insignificant doings of man. But all these elements are really only questions of decor, and do not mark any essential difference between types of satire. A more important distinction is that of audience perspective, how far our view of the two worlds is defined for us from within the dialogue. The significant factor here is the narrative form, which can either be dramatic (Charon, The Downward Journey, Dialogues of the Dead 20), or retrospective narrative (Menippus, Icaromenippus). In the latter Menippus functions more or less like Lycinus or Tychiades in the realistic dialogues, formulating our criticism for us. In the former, he, or his substitutes (Diogenes, Cyniscus, Micyllus the cobbler) perform a rôle closer to that of the strict ingenu.

Whatever the décor and whichever of the narrative structures is used, the themes are the same. The moral norm is again that of the common man, personified, as by Micyllus in The Downward Journey, or propounded, as by Menippus in Menippus. As the latter puts it (4):

They swiftly proved to me that the way ordinary men live is the golden one.

This championing of commonsense is reinforced by the Cynic theme of the vanity of human endeavour, and its variant, the mutability of fortune. These, too, are in part preached direct; thus Menippus (Menippus 16):

When I saw all this, I felt that man's life is like a parade for which Fortune has furnished the costumes and organized all the details.… Often, in the middle of the pageant, she swaps round the costumes of some of those taking part, and will not let them follow the parade through to its end in their original rôles.

For the most part, however, the themes are embodied in the usual stock types and human institutions. The range is neatly summed up by Charon at the end of the eponymous dialogue: 'kings, gold bars, sacrifices, battles.' The dreams of Adimantus and Samippus (The Ship) and their deflation by Lycinus are here re-expressed in terms of the contract between famous kings, generals, outstanding examples of wealth (sometimes, as with Croesus, the categories overlap) as they were in life, and as they are now in the featureless equality of Hades (vice-versa in Charon). Similarly, human beliefs about the dead are ridiculed after the manner of on Sacrifices, and the usual run of vices with which philosophers and charlatans are pilloried in the realistic works are now liberally distributed throughout humanity. Adultery, corruption, theft and murder cease to be the monopoly of one type, as society in general takes on the rôle of the alazon. Coupled with all this material there is also, in Menippus and Icaromenippus, the theme of the vanity of human knowledge, inevitably expressed through the contrast between what philosophy, in the abstract, purports to teach, and the jumble of contradictory theories which specific philosophies actually put forward. As in Philosophers for Sale, and rather more randomly in The Dead Come to Life, stylized examples of ethical (Menippus) and scientific (Icaromenippus) doctrines are piled one upon another, but here a moral is drawn. The authors are 'presumptuous charlatans'. In Icaromenippus, this satire of systems is complemented by the stock portrait of the moral and physical short-comings of the philosophers themselves, which Zeus paints to the hastily assembled gods. This juxtaposition of attacks on wealth and power with ridicule of philosophy and its adherents is not as incoherent as some critics have maintained. It merely extends the range of human futility by adding another of Lucian's stock topics, viewed principally from the more abstract angle that is the norm for that particular topic in the fantastic dialogues.

Clearly, in the ingenu satires, as in the realistic works, it is not the themes and characters, stock types all, which maintain the satirical interest. More important is the skill with which Lucian varies their presentation. In Charon the two main themes are the vanity of human values and the innate corruption of man. The first of these is embodied in the type of the tyrant, Megapenthes, who reveals the emptiness of his values as he attempts to persuade Clotho to let him go back to earth again. In contrast to this ironic self-exposure, the cobbler Micyllus directly denounces the same gap between Megapenthes' values and mortal realities, as he contrasts the tyrant's life with his own for Clotho's benefit. Finally Cyniscus, using stronger invective, accuses Megapenthes before Rhadamanthus. But this time Lucian has moved to the second theme of the dialogue. The emphasis is on the man's vices, not his illusions. The two strands are then brought together by the punishment that is devised: to pay for the sins of his life by eternally yearning for life's illusory pleasures. Two stock themes and one stock type, by judicious variation of dialogue and set speech, irony and invective, have been neatly brought together to reinforce one another. A comparable blending of elements is used in Icaromenippus to give variety to the attack on philosophy. In the first place, as was said above, the gap between philosophy and philosophies is coupled with the gap between philosophy and philosophers. The attack on the first is given to Menippus, in an account seasoned with little ironies that prepare us for the later introduction of the second motif:

… so I selected the best of them, which I was able to judge by the grimness of their faces, the pallor of their complexions and the length of their beards …

The ridicule of Menippus' tirade is given variation by the fact that the person he is addressing, characterized merely as 'companion' is made a genuine naif (cf. Pamphilus in The Eunuch), expressing his astonishment at the dissensions between the sects. When the subject occurs again it is put into the mouth of the moon, who reiterates Menippus' theme of the divergency of scientific doctrines, this time about herself, and then switches, via the conceit of 'deeds that do make the moon to draw her veil', to an attack on the mores of the philosophers themselves. This then becomes the topic of Zeus' oration to the gods. There, within the invective manner already used by Menippus and the moon, Lucian inserts the little variation of self-irony. A philosopher's supposed definition of his profession reveals his own faults:

I bawl, go unwashed, take cold baths, go around barefoot in winter, wrap myself up in a dirty old cloak and slander everything other people do (31).

Through the dialogue the theme remains essentially the same, but there are three variations of manner and motif.

The second group of fantasy dialogues are obviously a fairly disparate group, but share significant characteristics. The characters they stage are principally gods, personified abstractions and philosophers. Other human types—spongers in Timon, the rich in Saturnalia—may be substituted for the philosophers, and in one case, The Cock, the non-human element is supplied by a magic bird. The admixture of these types varies considerably, ranging from The Parliament of the Gods, set exclusively in heaven, to The Dead Come to Life, where there are no gods at all. Thematically, the dialogues share much of their material with the realistic dialogues. The Runaways, Philosophers for Sale, and The Dead Come to Life deal with the claims of philosophy and its reality, or the shortcomings of those who profess it. Saturnalia, The Cock and Timon deal with wealth in the Cynic manner (cf. Adimantus' wish in The Ship), but with the emphasis, particularly in the first two, on the contrast between rich and poor. There are, however, new themes, notably relating to the nature and power of the gods, variants of which are essential to Zeus Rants, Zeus Catechized, and The Parliament of the Gods. In terms of structural techniques there is an even greater homogeneity. A dramatic action, sometimes with change of scene, is widely used, the only exceptions being Zeus Catechized, which uses a catechism format, and Saturnalia, which is a series of letters. The dramatic sequence may be the only structure (The Parliament of the Gods), or it may provide the framework for a separate structure, such as the exchange of Damis and Timocles in Zeus Rants. It involves its own special motifs, e.g. the gods descending to involve themselves actively in the doings of men, as in The Runaways, Timon, and The Double Indictment. The retrospective narrative so widely used in the realistic dialogues is not excluded—Zeus' account of the initial debate between Damis and Timocles is an example of it—but it is never a major structural device, even where Lucian assumes a direct rôle in the piece (The Double Indictment, Saturnalia).

Invective and irony play their part in the satirical manner of these dialogues as much as elsewhere in Lucian's work. Momus is a handy character for open critique of the gods, while men, especially philosophers, are handled here much as they are in The Banquet or the pamphlets, the rôle of censor being assumed by the personified abstracts, particularly philosophy herself, or by the author's porte-parole, where there is one, e.g. Parrhesiades. The dramatic presentation of most of the dialogues provides a good opportunity for characters to condemn themselves, too: either in action, the philosopher-fish swallowing the bait of gold in The Dead Come to Life, or verbally, like the Cynic in Philosophers for Sale. But the most striking feature of these dialogues is the importance of burlesque in them. It can, of course, be said of the alazones in all Lucian's satires that caricature is an important way of diminishing them in the eyes of the audience. But in this group of works, not only are the gods consistently reduced to human status and men, especially philosophers, to subhuman status, but the audience is also frequently made aware of the caricature as a literary game. In Zeus Rants, the satirical function of the scenes in heaven is to portray the disarray of the gods, their inability to counteract the threat posed by Damis' attack on them: in other words, the demonstration of that very powerlessness which Damis is ridiculing. The ironic potential of the situation is expressed en passant, as when (25) Jupiter condemns himself out of his own mouth in reminding Poseidon of the limitations placed on the gods by Fate:

If the matter were in my power, do you suppose I would have allowed those temple-robbers to get out of Olympia without a blow from my thunderbolt the other day, after they had cut off two of my gold curls weighing almost six pounds each?

In fact, this satirical function and ironic potential are largely ignored in favour of the purely humorous possibilities which the scene offers in terms of parody, cento and the general use of literary reference in an amusingly out-of-context way. Within the opening seventeen lines of dialogue, all in iambics or hexameters, Hermes, Athena and Zeus contrive a cento of lines from New Comedy, a loose parody of Homer, a precise parody of the opening lines of Euripides Orestes, and a quotation from Euripides' Hercules Mad. For the uninitiated Hera is made to underline what is going on:

Calm your wrath, Zeus. We can't put on a comedy or sing an epic lay like this lot, and we haven't swallowed Euripides whole, so as to be able to play supporting parts to your tragic lead.

At times the literary borrowing is made the very subject of conversation. When Zeus complains that Hermes has not got the right style for a proclamation, Hermes pleads in defence that high style is for minstrels and that he himself is not a poetic sort of chap. Zeus' advice is to put in a lot of material from Homeric proclamations. The proclamation that results is, indeed, a patchwork of Homeric lines and formulae. Similarly, when Zeus begins to address the gods, himself borrowing from Homer, Hermes advises him to change his material, and points to the source for the new á la maniére de …:

If you like, unload your metrics, and string together any old one of Demosthenes' speeches against Philip, changing a few details.

Zeus promptly obliges with a version of the opening of the first Olynthiac. This flood of borrowings continues throughout the scenes in heaven: Apollo's absurd oracle, Hermagoras' speech with its references to Euripides' Orestes, and a host of Homeric quotations. The parodic atmosphere has in its turn a considerable effect on the tone of the confrontation between Damis and Timocles, for so much of the Epicurean's damaging documentation (40) against the gods is also borrowed from Homer that the entire work becomes a bravura exercise in using literary classics for a variety of comic effect. The seriousness of the topic which the philosophers debate becomes submerged in the cleverness of the inter-reference between the illustrations of the argument and the style of its framework.

The device is not confined to scenes in heaven. The opening of The Dead Come to Life is a slanging match of Homeric and tragic quotations between Parrhesiades and the philosophers. At the climax of The Runaways, Philosophy and the gods locate the runaway Cynics when they hear the abducted woman lamenting and declaiming invective in a series of four short Homeric parodies. There is, too, a comparable use of literary burlesque in the 'underworld visit' dialogues. Menippus in Menippus opens with a series of lines of Euripides, and one from the Odyssey, emphasizing this literary game by his costume—a felt cap, for Odysseus and his descent into hell, a lyre for Orpheus and a lion-skin for Herakles (as in Euripides' Alcestis), the whole reminiscent of Dionysus got up in fancy dress for his descent into the underworld in Aristophanes' Frogs. Doubtless the rest of Menippus' adventures owe much to the Menippean satire Nekuia, though the surviving evidence is too slight to allow profitable theorizing; but the audience's attention is already sufficiently drawn to the game of literary reference for them to be alert both to the many Homeric references in the description of hell, and to other references no longer accessible to us (the magician Mithrobarzanes, similar in type to the sorceresses of Alexandrian verse, may be a figure from New Comedy). In all these instances the effect is much that of Zeus Rants. The burlesque passes from being an adjunct of satirical criticism to being the main comic purpose in itself.

This overt use of parody in the framework to a piece, thus distracting the audience in some measure from the apparent seriousness of the theme, is in fact the tip of a literary iceberg in both groups of fantasy dialogues. I have had occasion to mention earlier (p. 12) the presence of motifs and structure typical of Old Comedy in The Dead Come to Life, Timon, and Philosophers for Sale. There are set-piece parodies of non-literary conventions too (unless they were among the stock-in-trade of Menippean satire), such as mock decrees (The Parliament of the Gods 14-18, Timon 50-1, Menippus 20). Another completely different approach to the use of literary material is that of Zeus Catechized, where the method is to take as many contradictory references as possible out of Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, and for Cyniscus to embarrass Zeus with them. The result is not strictly satire, either on the gods or on the authority of the poets. It is an ingenious network of familiar but mutually incompatible traditions, given added literary respectability by its links with anti-stoic polemic.

Clearly Lucian's satires, whether realistic or fantastic, are satires of a very specific kind. They draw heavily on the prevailing rhetorical tradition and on previous literature for their themes and types, they consciously play with the audience's awareness of their literary antecedents, and in certain cases they openly give pride of place to comic techniques, which eclipse rather than enhance the critical element of what they are saying. In fact, what we are dealing with is an excellent example of literary irony. A Lucianic satire relies on the previous existence of myth, romance, tragedy, comedy, the novella, all of which it absorbs into its own pattern. It belongs to an esoteric tradition, in that only the cognoscenti—those who can identify the ingredients and thus appreciate the assimilation—will fully appreciate the art. To take a simple example of the process in the popular arts, Ken Russell's film The Boy Friend required of its audience the ability to appreciate not merely its relationship with the musical comedy on which it was based (itself a pastiche), but also with the general traditions of English musical comedy in the 1920s, the American musical extravaganza of the 1930s (including broad reference to the films of Busby Berkeley and visual 'quotations' of famous scenes from films like the Rogers and Astaire Flying Down to Rio), plus the conventions of the Hollywood 'drama of backstage life'. All these elements, whether pastiched or parodied, were blended into a new self-contained fantasy. Lucian is presenting a much subtler, more complex and more intellectually demanding version of the same game. The theme of the satires is not, in a sense, their ostensible subject matter, but the fact of imitation itself. It is not 'the immorality of philosophers' but 'the presentation of the immorality of philosophers in Old Comedy'. It is not 'the absurdity of the Olympian gods', but 'the presentation of paradoxical traditions about the gods in epic and tragedy'. This is an extreme and self-aware form of a phenomenon that is true of all literature. As Northrop Frye puts it:

Literature may have life, reality, experience, nature, imaginative truth, social conditions or what you will for its content; but literature itself is not made out of these things. Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped externally.²

And why not poems out of novels, novels out of plays etc.? It can be shown that whole families of character types and associative clusters of themes and images connect together works by different authors and of different periods. In most modern authors this is unconscious acceptance of tradition. In Lucian it is conscious exploitation of the relationships in different ways for the purpose of entertainment.…

Notes

¹How to Write History is difficult to classify. It is a genuine treatise, but its raison d'être is a string of faintly absurd anecdotes and parodies of contemporary historians, coupled with sarcasm and a little mild invective. Perhaps the work is more remarkable for its ingenuity than its humour, and should be thought of as a rhetorical display, rather than as even the semblance of satire.

²The Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton 1957, 97.