SOURCE: "Lucian," in Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 9-25.

[In the following excerpt, Duncan discusses the playfully detached viewpoint Lucian adopts throughout his works.]

From the late fifteenth century until well into the nineteenth, Lucian held his place among the most widely translated and imitated of Greek authors. He later came to be banished from the pantheon of nineteenth-century Hellenism, partly because he was a 'silver' Greek—or rather not a Greek at all but a Syrian of the second century A.D. who had copied the styles of an earlier age—but mainly because of his ambiguous attitude toward the nobler ideals of Attic culture. His status today typically reflects the split between the scholar and the general reader of ancient literature which the decline of classical education has brought about. The object of recondite and forbidding monographs on the shelves of university libraries, he also appeals directly, with his agile and mocking wit, to a larger public which encounters selections of his work in attractive contemporary versions.¹ There is need for a scholarly study of Lucian which would unite the interests of his readers in a common focus on his satiric art, and also provide a basis for a thorough assessment of his impact on European literature. Neither of these functions can be attempted here, but even a sketch may indicate the perils of ignoring him altogether. Although his influence on master-satirists, from Erasmus and More to Fielding and Voltaire, has often been noted and in some cases analysed in detail, it remains true that the average student of literature uses his name less often and less confidently than those of Horace and Juvenal.

Explicit acknowledgments of debt to Lucian, and precise definitions of his character as a satirist, are not as common in the highways of literature as a writer on this subject might wish. Had they been more common, the subject would have been long ago exhausted. In fact, as will later be shown, educated people in the sixteenth and following centuries had a clear idea of the general characteristics of 'Lucianism', though they disagreed about its moral usefulness and rarely analysed its methods. Lucian's influence is readily detectable by those who have read him, especially (though not necessarily) if they can share with earlier ages an appreciation of his beautifully light, lucid and flexible Greek. And a likely reason why it was not more often openly acknowledged is that writers assumed that it would always be recognized as clearly and intuitively as it was in their day. Many a witty ghost such as Swift's has been vexed as a result of that assumption. But if we ask why renaissance criticism transmitted no image of Lucian as vivid or definite as those of the Roman verse-satirists, we must look for an explanation to the varied, and in one sense anonymous, nature of his work.

The writings attributed to Lucian are numerous but short, and were printed by his earliest editors in a single Folio. (The beautiful editio princeps of Lascaris appeared at Florence in 1496, that of Aldus at Venice in 1503.) The renaissance critic, trained to classify authors in terms of genre, was faced with a baffling diversity of pieces, ranging from various forms of rhetorical display through narrative, biography and epistle to several distinct types of dialogue. In his influential De Satyra Graecorum Poesi atque Romanorum Satira (1605), Isaac Casaubon classed Lucian as a 'Menippean' or 'Varronian' satirist because a mixture of prose and verse is found occasionally in his dialogues and because Menippus himself, the Cynic philosopher, appears in a few of them. Another factor which led to that classification was Lucian's claim to have invented the Comic Dialogue by uniting the serious connotations of philosophical dialectic with the wit and fantasy of Aristophanic comedy, a claim which Casaubon associated with Strabo's description of Menippus as spoudogeloios and Cicero's somewhat similar characterization of the writings of Varro.² Properly defined, the concept of spoudogeloion, or jocoserium, is distinctly relevant to Lucian, but without close definition it could fit other satirists equally well, and since the intermixture of verse in Lucian's prose is almost always by way of parodic quotation, little but confusion could result from linking him in that respect, as Casaubon did, with such different writers as Petronius, Martianus Capella and Boethius. 'Menippean/Varronian' was probably the best single label that a classifying critic could stick on Lucian, and it has been endorsed by Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism. But its clarity and usefulness are diminished by the fact that the satires of Menippus and Varro have almost totally perished; nor is it applicable to many of Lucian's unless we interpret it, as Frye does, very broadly indeed. To read all of Lucian is to perceive the first reason why he has never been definitively typed in terms of genre. The immediate impression he gives is of dazzling variety, and such constant factors as are present throughout his work resist analysis in formal neo-Aristotelian terms. They are of a kind which renaissance authors were better able to imitate than to define critically.

One of these constant factors, the evasiveness of his personality, provides the second and more important reason for the failure of critics to clarify Lucian's image. We are taught that the images which Horace and Juvenal present of themselves in their satires were carefully-modelled personae which ought not to be mistaken for autobiography. None the less, the masks are so memorable—in Juvenal's case so forceful and in Horace's so subtle—that the temptation to treat them as self-portraits has always been irresistible. This is less true of Lucian, and not solely because of his fondness for the dramatic method. Ultimately it makes little difference to the character of a Lucianic piece whether the author presents himself in it or not, and whether in the first person or in the third, but it is worth noting for a start that he does, in fact, present himself often. Thus, to take random examples, there are The Dream, or Lucian's Career and To one who said 'You're a Prometheus in words' in which he uses the first person to tell of his choice of career and his invention of the Comic Dialogue respectively; there are pieces which he introduces as Lucian (Nigrinus) or in which he refers to himself as Lucian (A True Story); and there are many dialogues such as Hermotimus, The Double Indictment and The Dead Come to Life, or The Fisherman where he disguises himself thinly as Lycinus, the Syrian, or 'Frankness'. He shows no reluctance to talk about himself and his concerns. What is meant, then, by referring to a quality of 'anonymity' in his work?

We can approach an answer to that question by noting the difficulties experienced by seventeenth-century interpreters in trying to decide what kind of a man they were dealing with. Two editions of Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt's French version of Lucian, published respectively at Paris in 1654 and at Amsterdam in 1697, are each prefaced by a portrait, the second being clearly a reworking of the first. A jester in cap and bells, with a bauble in one hand and holding a mask in front of his face with the other, stands on a platform and addresses an audience below. But the figures of the satirist are totally different: the one masculine and burly, the other short and effeminate. There is no correspondence at all between the faces behind the masks; the first is stern and angry, the second is delicate and smiling; the components of joco-serium have been separated. What has happened is that Lucian has been interpreted in terms of the more familiar and more easily visualized characters of Juvenal and Horace. The vivid way in which the Roman satirists stamped themselves on the seventeenth-century imagination is best illustrated by the astonishing substratum of sexual metaphor in Dryden's famous comparison, to which the portraits of Lucian provide a good gloss:

The delight which Horace gives me, is but languishing … He may ravish other men; but I am too stupid and insensible to be tickled. Where he barely grins himself, and, as Scaliger says, only shows his white teeth, he cannot provoke me to any laughter. His urbanity, that is, his good manners, are to be commended, but his wit is faint; and his salt, if I may dare to say so, almost insipid. Juvenal is of a more vigorous and masculine wit, he gives me as much pleasure as I can bear; he fully satisfies my expectation; he treats his subject home: his spleen is raised, and he raises mine: … and when he is at the end of his way I willingly stop with him.³

By contrast, it is Dryden's inability to muster any kind of intimate response which makes his Life of Lucian (written three years later) so flat. His perfunctory comments on Lucian's wit might suggest that, like the artists, he saw no distinctive face behind the mask at all: 'for the most part, he rather laughs like Horace, than bites like Juvenal. Indeed his genius was of kin to both, but more nearly related to the former.'⁴ The Life of Lucian sometimes reads like an exercise in writing upon nothing, yet it is not altogether imperceptive, and Dryden's failure to bring his subject to life stems rather from the fact that the face which he did see was inscrutable. Lucian's genius, he declares, 'whose image we may clearly see in the glass which he holds before us', was that of a Sceptic who

doubted of every thing; weighed all opinions, and adhered to none of them; only used them as they served his occasion for the present Dialogue, and perhaps rejected them in the next… never constant to himself in any scheme of divinity, unless it be in despising his gentile gods.⁵

The Sceptic is essentially faceless, though as a Protean artist he may wear any number of masks. The near relation which Dryden saw between Lucian and Horace was in part that between the Sceptic and the Eclectic, but the latter builds a positive identity where the former does not. And in noting an affinity between Lucian and his own times ('all knowing ages being naturally Skeptick, and not at all bigotted') Dryden was well aware that uncommitted knowingness could involve some loss of 'humanity'. When we assess the effect of the numerous personal appearances of Lucian in his work, it is true that the total picture is of a kind of thinker and a kind of artist—the contexts always present him in one role or the other—rather than of a recognizable individual human being.

Where the Roman satirists use the persona to establish a persuasively human and authoritative character through whom to launch their attacks, Lucian uses it more flexibly as a means of making witty points in a variety of ways. Normally it will be Lucian or Lycinus who is used when a precise attitude is to be adopted on a philosophic or artistic issue, but as Dryden noted their attitudes may vary from one piece to the next, and they can also have the laugh turned against them, as when Lucian becomes the foolish narrator of A True Story or Lycinus is overwhelmed in The Cynic. On specific issues with which Lucian was not professionally concerned, such as the social position of hired writers or the cult of athleticism, the mouthpiece is likely to be anonymous (On Salaried Posts in Great Houses) or else an invented character (Tychiades, for instance, who explodes superstitions in The Lover of Lies but also becomes a victim of ingenious special pleading in The Parasite). When the object of satire is more general, the mouthpiece will be a character from history or myth: Menippus surveying life as a comic chaos or Charon observing the vanity of human wishes. But a large number of Lucian's most characteristic dialogues do not employ a mouthpiece character at all. The short Dialogues of the Courtesans, Dialogues of the Gods, Dialogues of the Seagods and Dialogues of the Dead are fragments of 'overheard' conversation in which the satiric point has to be deduced by the reader from the unconscious self-revelation of the speakers. Lucian's touch is of the lightest, and many of these pieces are no more than witty embroideries on well-known literary situations, but the technique has obvious possibilities for the theatre. The best example to cite in a book on Jonson is the ninth Dialogue of the Dead, where old Polystratus, newly arrived in Hades, recounts with bland satisfaction to an equally cynical acquaintance how he had pitted legacy-hunters against each other by making separate promises to each and finally left his money to 'ennoble' a handsome young slave. The effectiveness of such dialogues depends absolutely on the non-expression of the author's viewpoint. Corruption and cynicism are made to appear as the norm, endorsed from beyond the grave.

But even when the characters are objectively conceived in this way, they have no function beyond enabling the author to make his point, either obliquely (as in the case just cited) or more directly. This is why the presence or absence of a mouthpiece makes no essential difference to the nature of a Lucianic dialogue. The subordination of character and plot to intellectual play is the key factor in Northrop Frye's broad categorization of 'Menippean' fiction, distinguished from other forms in which character and plot have greater independent value.⁶ Most of us first become aware of this distinction after falling down in the attempt to read Gulliver's Travels 'straight'. We note that the storyline subserves the making of satiric points; that Gulliver is not so much a consistent character as a multi-functional mechanism for implicating the reader; and that Swift does not mean us to reconcile our responses to the creatures he shows us—the Brobdingnagians, for instance, being physically repellent and politically admirable in something like separate compartments. It is certain that Lucian did not invent this uncomfortable mode of fiction, but the accident of survival made him the main starting-point for its later development. With regard to its effect on drama, its tendency to relegate character, as Frye says, to the expression of 'mental attitudes' points an obvious affinity to Roman comedy's representative types and to Jonson's 'humours'. The theatre, however, resists the mode to the degree that an actor cannot help imposing a single, consistent identity on the character he portrays.

Intellectual play, teasing impersonality, a glittering and superficial virtuosity over the whole range of classical prose-forms—the very factors which made it difficult for the Renaissance to feel at home with Lucian as a man made it easy to recognize him as a type of the uncommitted thinker and the artist dedicated only to his art. Historical criticism of the past hundred years has attempted to unearth the 'real' Lucian, to trace his career as a rhetorician and lecturer around the Mediterranean, to relate his culture to that of the Second Sophistic period, to examine the genres to which his various pieces belong and the purposes for which they were written. There is no reason to suppose that the Renaissance knew nothing of these matters, since most of the evidence is present in Lucian's writings, and it is likely that Erasmus and More were able to draw some historical analogies between Lucian's cultural position and their own. None the less, if his place in the mental landscape of sixteenth-century writers is to be properly understood, it is not the historical Lucian that we must study, but rather the dominant concepts which spring from his work, and especially the dominant metaphors which the renaissance imagination was quick to apprehend.

The unifying concept is detachment and the key metaphor is that of the detached observer, or kataskopos.⁷ The viewpoint of the 'down-looker' or 'over-viewer', who belittles human concerns by seeing them from a great height, was a favourite commonplace of the Cynics. That it was especially associated with Menippus is implied by Lucian's dialogue Icaromenippus, where the philosopher, seeking eternal verities, harnesses himself to the right wing of an eagle and the left wing of a vulture and launches himself from Olympus on a flight to the Throne of Zeus. He pauses en route on the moon, from which, with a little help from Empedocles, he obtains insights into the activities of men, swarming below like ants in ant-hills.⁸ This passage, though it has many analogues, was to become the locus classicus for the ironic world-view of the kataskopos. For Lucian the figure meant much more than a Cynic device to be parodied; it keeps recurring in various guises as the leitmotiv of his art and thought. All his writings reflect in some way the search for a detached point of vantage, a rejection of prior commitments, a compulsion to get out in order to look in. Even as a professional educator he kept his public at a distance. In The Dream, or Lucian's Career (15) the first reward he receives from Paideia (Education), after choosing her service, is to be taken for a sky-ride in her chariot:

I was carried up into the heights and went from the East to the very West, surveying cities and nations and peoples, sowing something broadcast over the earth like Triptolemus. I do not now remember what it was that I sowed; only that men, looking up from below, applauded, and all those above whom I passed in my flight sped me on my way with words of praise.

Probably that is what it feels like to make a successful lecture-tour, which most of Lucian's life seems to have been. Not for him the image of the teacher agonistes, sweating it out with his students in the classroom day after day. He is the travelling performer wafted to the airport on waves of applause. Above all, he is the actor kataskopos (on a podium, as in the portraits) who recollects an endless succession of upturned admiring faces more clearly than the message he has tried to convey.

Lucian is always to some degree sceptical about the substance of what he writes, except where the substance is scepticism itself. Failing to perceive this, earnest critics often used to assume that a writer whose main stock-in-trade was philosophy ought himself to be judged as a philosopher, and so proceeded gravely to fault him on the score of inconsistency or lack of commitment. Since Nigrinus pays tribute to a Platonist, The Cynic to Cynicism, and Alexander the False Prophet to Epicurus, sympathetic attempts were even made to salve Lucian's reputation for sincerity by arguing a chronological progression from one allegiance to another. Nowadays it is generally agreed that Lucian's intellectual positions are almost infinitely variable, depending on the subject in hand, so that the exposure of a sham prophet, for example, was appropriately conducted under the mantle of Epicurus, the chief enemy of credulity. For Lucian's true position, in so far as it matters, one looks to Hermotimus, which certainly seems—one can say no more—to be the philosophical dialogue with the least infusion of jocus in its serium. It favours scepticism on the ground that no choice of a philosophy can be valid unless based on full experience of all, for which life is too short. The farcical complement to Hermotimus, and much more typical of Lucian's tone in such matters, is Philosophies for Sale, in which representatives of the different sects are paraded for auction. The last to be auctioned is the Pyrrhonian, or Sceptic. Reduced to worm-like inconsequence by being sure about nothing, he tries to balance arguments equally on a pair of scales until any kind of preference becomes impossible. His standpoint is caricatured as wittily and incisively as those of the others, yet is conspicuously close to the underlying assumption of the dialogue itself that all creeds are equally prone to absurdity, especially when valued by the common-sense norms of the market-place.

Defending Philosophies for Sale in its sequel, The Dead Come to Life, or The Fisherman, Lucian's spokesman wins acquittal on the charge of insulting philosophy by advancing the stock argument that he has ridiculed abuses and perversions rather than the founders of the great schools themselves. But the sparkling comedy of the trial-scene is persuasive evidence that Lucian should always be read as a satiric artist and not as a thinker. It is in fact in relation to art that his cult of detachment is most interesting. He enjoys the idea that the creator of the universe must have stood outside it (Icaromenippus, 8), and at a more practical level he is scornful of artists who sell themselves to patrons (On Salaried Posts in Great Houses). But he is also concerned about the extent to which aesthetic distance is desirable. When Charon the ferryman comes up from Hades to investigate for himself the human scene which his clients are always so reluctant to leave, Hermes proposes a high point of vantage with a good view in all directions (Charon, or The Inspectors, 2). Piling Pelion on Ossa, and Oeta and Parnassus on top of both, they achieve a kataskopic survey of the earth. Charon objects, however (6), that he is now too high up to see anything plainly. 'What I wanted was not just to look at cities and mountains as in a picture, but to observe men themselves, what they are doing and what they are saying.' The details of human behaviour are as important to the satirist as the total picture. Charon is classed as an idiotes (4), a term regularly applied by Lucian to the uninitiated and the unenlightened.⁹ His problem is solved for him by Hermes, the divine wit, who endows him with the necessary bi-focal vision by reciting a charm out of Homer. Only the highest art, Lucian would seem to be saying, has the power to reconcile close observation with large-scale perspective.

A more technical account of a similar problem is found in The Dance. The art-form discussed here (orchesis) was the dramatic representation of myth by a dancer and a speaking actor, supported by chorus and musicians. Lucian's concern is with the balance between detachment and involvement to be achieved in the performers' role-playing, which in turn determines the degree to which the audience will identify with the spectacle. The ultimate aim is to effect in the audience a sort of katharsis, which Lucian appears to interpret as the inducement of mental equilibrium, a cure for disturbed emotions: 'If a lover enters the theatre, he is restored to his right mind by seeing all the evil consequences of love; and one who is in the clutch of grief leaves the theatre in brighter mood, as if he had taken some potion that brings forgetfulness' (79). But this can only be achieved if the audience is persuaded to identify with the performer: 'The praise that he gets from the spectators will be consummate when each of those who behold him recognises his own traits, or rather sees in the dancer as in a mirror his very self, with his customary feelings and actions' (81). Thus drama enables the audience to fulfil the Delphic injunction, Know Thyself, 'and when they go away from the theatre they have learned what they should choose and what avoid, and have been taught what they did not know before' (81). That is the ideal. Typically, however, Lucian concentrates on what is apt to go wrong. An incompetent performer will fail to involve the audience at all. Even more disastrous will be one who enters too fully into his role and causes the audience to forget itself by identifying to excess. Lucian gives an amusing sketch of a dancer who ran amok in 'The Madness of Ajax', almost brained the actor playing Odysseus, and fetched up in the front row of the stalls, to the consternation of the senators who feared he would mistake them for the sheep which Ajax traditionally slew. Though the 'polite' and 'understanding' sector of the audience was embarrassed by the performance, its effect on the unenlightened (idiotai) was to make them throw off their clothes and behave as wildly as the performer. This is to 'debauch the histrionic art' (84) by confusing mimesis with reality. The decorum of the theatre requires from both performer and spectator that emotional involvement should be controlled by the detached intelligence.

The vision of the detached observer led Lucian to large, simplifying metaphors of human life. Though inevitably shared with many other writers, these are so characteristic of Lucian that some of them should be described. 'Ants in ant-hills' has already been mentioned—another good one is bubbles at the foot of a waterfall (Charon, 19)—but most are taken from the theatre. The main impression derived by Menippus looking down from the moon is of life as a discordant chorus:

It is as if one should put on the stage a company of singers … and then should order each singer to abandon harmony and sing a tune of his own; with each one full of emulation and carrying his own tune and striving to outdo his neighbour in loudness of voice … Such is the discord that makes up the life of men. Not only do they sing different tunes, but they are unlike in costume and move at cross-purposes in the dance and agree in nothing until the manager drives each of them off the stage, saying that he has no further use for him. After that, how-ever, they are all quiet alike, no longer singing that unrhythmical medley of theirs. But there in the play-house itself, full of variety and shifting spec-tacles, everything that took place was truly laughable (Icaromenippus, 17).

The emphasis here is on competitive chaos, with the implication that the chorus ought to be working as an ensemble, though it would be less amusing if it did. In Menippus, or The Descent into Hades (16) the grim figure of the Manager becomes more prominent and is identified as Fortune, dressing the actors for roles in her pageant. The following reflections are suggested to Menippus by the sight of heaps of indistinguishable skeletons on the Acherusian plain:

So as I looked at them it seemed to me that human life is like a long pageant, and that all its trappings are supplied and distributed by Fortune, who arrays the participants in various costumes of many colours. Taking one person, it may be, she attires him royally, placing a tiara upon his head, giving him body-guards, and encircling his brow with the diadem; but upon another she puts the costume of a slave. Again, she makes up one person so that he is handsome, but causes another to be ugly and ridiculous. I suppose that the show must needs be diver-sified. And often, in the very middle of the pageant, she exchanges the costumes of several players; instead of allowing them to finish the pageant in the parts that had been assigned to them, she re-apparels them, forcing Croesus to assume the dress of a slave and a captive, and shifting Maeandrius, who formerly paraded among the servants, into the imperial habit of Poly-crates. For a brief space she lets them use their costumes, but when the time of the pageant is over, each gives back the properties and lays off the cos-tume along with his body, becoming what he was before his birth, no different from his neighbour.

Such metaphors have their force but are somewhat simply fatalistic. Lucian's kataskopoi are expert at pointing to the vanity and absurdity of the human spectacle, but they rarely offer a more positive response. In Greek tradition the observer could respond in one of two ways: he could look on and laugh with Democritus, or look on and weep with Heraclitus. We shall therefore not be surprised to find the figure of Democritus, the laughing philosopher of Abdera, intimately linked with renaissance Lucianism. He does appear also in Horace, and presides memorably over Juvenal's Tenth Satire, a kataskopic survey of the vanity of human wishes in which Juvenal stands unusually far back from his material. But the mask of irresponsible, disembodied laughter was not one which Horace wore for himself, and Juvenal's poem does not fail to end by urging a life of virtuous action and praying for Stoic firmness of mind to resist the paralysing concept of Fortune. Lucian only once shows the world-stage metaphor inducing an active response. His Nigrinus sees Roman life at least in part as a moral challenge:

Seating myself, as it were, high up in a theatre full of untold thousands, I look down on what takes place, which is of a quality sometimes to afford laughter and amusement, sometimes to prove a man's true steadfastness … Don't suppose that there is any better school for virtue or any truer test of the soul than this city and the life here; it is no small matter to make a stand against so many desires, so many sights and sounds that lay rival hands on a man and pull him in every direction. One must simply imitate Odysseus and sail past them; not, however, with his hands bound (for that would be cowardly) nor with his ears stopped with wax, but with ears open and body free, and in a spirit of genuine contempt (Nigrinus, 18-19).

But even the Platonist prefers to turn to the comic aspect of the scene. We soon learn not to expect Lucian's characters to run for the immortal garland or welcome the dust and heat of the arena. Instead we note that the strenuous Stoic, toiling incessantly up the steep hill of virtue, was a favourite mark for his wit (A True Story, 11.18).

Compulsive detachment can also be seen reflected in some of his commonest fictional devices: most obviously, in the dialogue-form itself. Lucian's speakers tend to be far removed from the battle. His mythological characters talk like men but belong to a timeless world. His Gods comment on life from above, his Dead from below, and even his Courtesans gossip off-duty. Perspective is variously achieved. In The Dream, or The Cock, for instance, it comes from the bird's remarkable capacity to remember its previous lives; and in A True Story we find the opposite device of the appropriate after-life, when Lucian journeys to the Elysian Fields and sees how well-known figures from the past are spending eternity.

A True Story—always Lucian's most popular piece and effectively the source of that fertile genre, the Imaginary Voyage—also provides the most spectacular indication of how much he worked through literary allusion. His tale will be enjoyed, he says,

not only for the novelty of its subject, for the humour of its plan and because I tell all kinds of lies in a plausible and specious way, but also because everything in my story is a more or less comical parody of one or another of the poets, historians and philosophers of old, who have written much that smacks of miracles and fables. I would cite them by name, were it not that you yourself will recognise them from your reading (1.2).

Lucian is always fundamentally the cultural gamesman, holding the whole of Greek culture at his finger-tips and requiring his readers to be able to do the same. What he says to the philosophers in The Dead Come to Life, or The Fisherman (6) can well be more widely applied:

I have always consistently admired philosophy and extolled you and lived on intimate terms with the writings you have left behind. These very phrases that I utter—where else but from you did I get them? Culling them like a bee, I make my show with them before men, who applaud and recognize where and from whom and how I gathered each flower; and although ostensibly it is I whom they admire for the bouquet, as a matter of fact it is you and your garden, because you have put forth such blossoms, so gay and varied in their hues—if one but knows how to select and interweave and combine them so that they will not be out of harmony with one another.

Not only his ideas but his art and his humour are highly esoteric. He makes most of his points and gets most of his laughs by turning a story on its head, playing on the recorded quirks of his characters, juggling with myth, punning on etymologies, quoting from Homer or Herodotus or Plato in incongruous contexts. Editors are constantly acknowledging that many of Lucian's jokes are lost to us through the disappearance of his sources, and although his sense of the ridiculous is universal enough to attract readers who share little of his background, it inevitably appeals most to those who share his background most fully. Even by classical standards, Lucian carried the practice of literary allusion to quite extraordinary lengths. Concluding an exhaustive study of this subject, the French scholar J. Bompaire asserts that Lucian's main claim to originality lies in the extent of his imitation.¹⁰ Thus an important part of his appeal in the Renaissance was to humanist scholars who enjoyed pitting their newly-acquired knowledge of Greek literature against his. Those who were clever enough to understand his game were far from repelled by his bookishness. An Asiatic who had out-Greeked the Greeks, a writer of the Christian era who had brought a thousand years of Greek culture to life as though it were contemporary, he was an example of what still might be done.

Did Lucian's joking really have a serious purpose? In the following chapters we shall be concerned with conflicting answers to this question that were offered in the sixteenth century. Here we may note his own suggestions on the matter, which, though they need not be accepted at face value, did provide a basis for later assessments.

There is first of all the defence of the preserver and popularizer, the custodian of the Greek garden who kept it open to the public. We have been visualizing an elitist who wrote for the initiated and scorned the idiotai, but Lucian would have denied that he lacked an educative purpose. He makes clear that his invention of the Comic Dialogue was a popularizing gambit. In his defence of it he begins by identifying his own type of public epideictic oratory ('we … who come before a crowd and offer our lectures'), and then proceeds to a series of flippant analogies between himself and Prometheus as inventors.¹¹ The serious analogy which demands to be drawn, though he is too witty to make it explicit, is that he, like Prometheus, has applied his invention to the good of mankind. His claim to have made philosophy attractive by 'farcing' the Platonic dialogue with Aristophanic ingredients could be read as an extension of the well-known Promethean claim of Socrates to have brought down philosophy from heaven to earth.¹² Thus, although his 'invention' is now generally seen as only a small step in the movement to popularize philosophy which had already been going on in his day for hundreds of years, one can readily understand how his claim could establish him in sympathetic eyes as a responsible educator, one who had cleverly made use of a popular medium to disseminate ideas, along with high standards of wit and polish, to a wide audience.

Lucian also parades as a serious critic of contemporary abuses. The remoteness of his satiric standpoint and the element of literary pastiche in his writings do not prevent him from giving us a detailed picture of life and manners in the second century A.D. Even when his themes are stock subjects of satire, such as funerals or sacrifices or the parasites and legacy-hunters who haunt the rich, his treatment of them is clearly enlivened by personal observation. He does not always confine himself to general ridicule of the human comedy; many of his shafts are aimed quite precisely at specialists who traded on ignorance and folly, bogus men-of-learning who imposed on the public and thus trod on his professional toes: pretentious jargon-mongers (Lexiphanes), meretricious lecturers (A Professor of Public Speaking), and sham philosophers of all sects (passim). Two pieces which came to be particularly admired as attacks on the exploitation of ignorance are The Passing of Peregrinus (on the well-advertised suicide of a religious maniac) and Alexander, or The False Prophet (a caustic account of an all-round charlatan). In most of Lucian's writings the values upheld are honesty and common-sense, not wit or learning, with the result that there is frequent disparity between the simple norms which he states and those which he implies through his highly sophisticated manner. Readers more influenced by the latter might well suspect that he took nothing seriously at all except his art, but the unimpeachable safeness of the norms through which he sought to make contact with his public could always be accepted as evidence to the contrary.

For posterity, however, the most significant of Lucian's claims to seriousness lay in the hints he gave about the value of literary play. The concept of lusus is widely recognized as among the most influential which the ancient world bequeathed to the Renaissance. Used by Virgil to describe his pastorals, and by Horace of his slighter odes, the term was an expression of conventional self-depreciation (eironeia) about work done in unpretentious literary genres. It was often associated with the idea of 'playing' on traditional materials, as in our word 'allusive'. Lucian's writings qualified as lusus by their modest scope and parodic method as well as by being generally light-hearted. Essentially, of course, the term was a metaphor from the school-room, so that literary play meant relaxation from ambitious intellectual labours and strenuous didactic intent. No humanist who knew the consummate works of art which Virgil and Horace had classified as lusus would use the term disparagingly, and although opinions certainly differed about the value of Lucian's contribution in the field, we shall find it significant that the first sentence of A True Story, his best-known work, had provided a classic statement in defence of it. Just as athletes regard relaxation as the most important part of their training, so (says Lucian) nothing is more important for students, to refresh their minds and prepare them for further labours, than the right kind of light reading. As we have seen, the particular form of lusus which Lucian had in mind in A True Story was no simple rest-cure but a teasing literary puzzle. Following the example of Odysseus, who had 'humbugged the illiterate Phaeacians' (idiotas) with a sequence of tall stories, Lucian will tell a tissue of 'plausible and specious' lies, under a misleading title, and challenge his readers to do better than the Phaeacians by spotting his parodies from poets, historians and philosophers. Here, in essential form, is the defence of lusus on which Lucian's renaissance imitators were to build. It is a diversion in which the writer not only displays his own wit but also tests and invigorates the wit of his readers.

There is always a danger of reading into an ancient author the motives of those who imitated his art in a later age. This applies particularly in trying to assess the seriousness of an author's wit, and we can be thankful that we do not have to make a final judgement on the relative importance of jocus and serium in Lucian. As early as the fourth century, Eunapius destroyed the balance of joco-serium and loaded the scales in favour of irresponsibility by describing Lucian as 'a man who made serious efforts to be funny'.¹³ Most classical scholars today would accept this morally dismissive view. It was not, however, the view of Erasmus and More.

Notes

¹Lucian: Satirical Sketches, trans. P. Turner, Penguin Books (Harmondsworth, 1961); Lucian: Selected Works, trans. B. P. Reardon, Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis and New York, 1965). The complete four-volume translation of The Works of Lucian (Oxford, 1905) by H. W. and F. G. Fowler remains very readable.

² Cicero, Academica (Loeb ed.), I.2.8.

³Discourse concerning … Satire (1693) in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), II, 84.

⁴Prose Works of John Dryden, ed. E. Malone (London, 1800), III, 374.

⁵Ibid., p. 371.

⁶Anatomy of Criticism ([Princeton, 1957] New York, 1965), pp. 308-12.

⁷ The term will be used, with misgivings, on the authority of J. Bompaire, Lucien Ecrivain: Imitation et Creation (Paris, 1958), p. 327: 'le rôle… qui du haut d'une montagne ou d'un astre observe (et méprise) les humains est conforme a l'affabulation cynique'. But its usual literal meaning of 'spy' or 'scout' (because troop-movements were observed from high ground) is retained metaphorically by Epictetus (Loeb ed., 111.22.24) where the philosopher observes good and evil and reports his findings to humanity.… Thus the proper term here would be episkopos, but its metaphoric associations have been pre-empted.

⁸Icaromenippus, or the Sky-Man, 19. English titles of Lucian's works, references to and quotations from them, are taken from the Loeb translation (8 vols., London and Harvard, 1913-67), trans. A. M. Harmon (vols. 1-5), K. Kilbum (vol. 6), M. D. Macleod (vols. 7 and 8).

⁹ The term means originally 'private citizen', hence 'layman', hence 'unskilled', hence its modern sense. The opposite term in Lucian (The Dance, 84) is … 'the politer sort who understand'.

¹⁰Lucien Ecrivain, p. 742.

¹¹To one who said 'You're a Prometheus in Words', 2ff.

¹² Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (Loeb ed.), v.4.10.

¹³… (cited by Reardon, p. xxxi).