SOURCE: "The Rhetoric of Laughter" in Uruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions, Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 11-37.

[In the following excerpt, Branham discusses the seriocomic nature of Lucian's works.]

Few men, I believe, do more admire works of those great Masters who have sent their Satire (if I may use the Expression) laughing into the World. Such are that great Triumvirate, Lucian, Cervantes, and 5wift. These authors I shall ever hold in the highest Degree of Esteem; not indeed for that Wit and Humour alone which they all so eminently possess, but because they all endeavored, with the utmost Force of their Wit and Humour to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which chiefly prevailed in their Countries.

—Henry Fielding, Covent Garden Journal, 1752

As Horace wrote, the author who combines pleasure with utility has achieved true perfection. In my opinion, if anyone has accomplished this, it is our Lucian.

—Erasmus, preface to his translation of Lucian 's Cock

Lucian from Samosata was serious—about raising a laugh.

—Eunapius, Lives of the Sophists

In spite of a recent revival of interest in Lucian, including some excellent attempts to place him in specific social or cultural frames, the Syrian remains one of the most curiously elusive of ancient authors and his standing in the classical canon uncertain. While his place among the inventors of satire would seem secure, he is more noted for the influence he once exerted than for the intrinsic interest of his own work. Unlike Aristophanes or Petronius, Lucian has simply not received the form of critical attention accorded other classics. This was not always so: for the acknowledged masters of the comic genres between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries Lucian was of fundamental importance, and they repeatedly attest to his impact on their work and their delight in his.¹ Erasmus and Thomas More expressed their admiration for Lucian not only with explicit tributes and translations, but also through creative imitation in their most ambitious works. Henry Fielding owned nine editions of the complete works of Lucian,² and the Lucianic humor of his great comic novels is often unmistakable. Thwackum and Square are the direct descendants of Lucian's prating philosophers and licentious tutors, Jonathan Wild an eighteenth-century version of Lucian's Alexander or the False Prophet. Yet strangely, despite his diverse and far-reaching influence not only on Erasmus, More, and Fielding but also on other major writers as different as Rabelais and Diderot or Jonson and Swift, Lucian himself is more often cited as evidence than read for pleasure. My aim here is not to return to a Renaissance or eighteenth-century appreciation of Lucian, which is no more desirable than it is possible, but to develop a contemporary form of attention that does justice to those distinctive features of his work that earlier readers have so consistently acknowledged—and enjoyed.

Lucian's comparatively poor reception in the twentieth century may be explained in part by the fact that he had the misfortune of living in the second century A.D., which has too often been regarded as bearing much the same relation to classical and archaic culture as postnatal depression does to birth. The relative paucity of critical literature on the period seems too easily to corroborate Gibbon's dubious assertion that "if we except the inimitable Lucian, this age of indolence passed away without having produced a single writer of original genius, or who excelled in the arts of elegant composition."³ But with Lucian the problem is not simply one of neglect. The criticism he does attract often seems to hold him at arm's length when it comes to evaluating his literary qualities—as if any acceptable criterion defied formulation. Even the confident Gilbert Highet, who in his Anatomy of Satire breezily dismisses Lucian as a satirist, seems puzzled when he concedes in The Classical Tradition: "His work is unlike nearly everything that survives from Graeco-Roman literature."⁴

As the epigraphs of this chapter suggest, this difficulty in characterizing Lucian's art and its achievements is reflected in fundamental disagreements about his generic intentions. In sharp contrast to the views of writers such as Erasmus and Fielding, if there is a consensus among modern scholars, it is that Lucian is too frivolous to be taken seriously as a satirist; Eunapius' epigram ("serious—about raising a laugh") is sometimes taken to suggest that this assessment was accepted in the ancient world as well. Nihilistic is a term used to describe him more often than any other ancient writer—as if this were evidence of a lack of seriousness.⁵ It is not simply that Lucian worked in a bewildering variety of forms and styles, some of which confound traditional generic distinctions. That in itself need cause no problem. It is rather the difficulty of deciding how to gauge the tone of whole works and the emphasis of crucial passages. Are they seriously satiric, anarchically comic, or frivolously epideictic? Or has Lucian left us with a collection of cultural dinosaurs that have outlived any suitable audience?⁶

The source of these critical quandaries is most immediately evident in the antic qualities of those authorial surrogates through whom Lucian typically addresses his audience. While the size and diversity of a repertoire of over 170 characters,⁷ including Lucian's own creations as well as numerous figures drawn from literature and history, resist any simple characterization, recurring qualities of humor and perspective link those authorial voices who seem to personify the particular comic ambience of Lucian's work: figures adapted from tradition such as Timon the Misanthrope, the Cynics Diogenes and Menippus, and Anacharsis the wise barbarian, resemble Lucian's own Lycinus and the first-person narrators of his biting biographical essays, Alexander or the False Prophet and On the Death of Peregrinus, in ways that are more than coincidental. Menippus stands out among this crowd of detached observers, inquisitive outsiders, and blustering misanthropes as perhaps the most succinct embodiment of those qualities that distinguish Lucian the writer. While few scholars are any longer persuaded by the view so systematically advanced by Rudolf Helm,⁸ that Lucian literally appropriated some lost classics of Menippus in "writing" his own Menippean narratives, Lucian's Menippus pieces remain peculiarly expressive of his own ambiguous relationship to tradition and the kind of humor it yields. Given the prima facie affinity of these pieces to Old Comedy, it will be useful to broach the kind of interpretative questions they raise by analogy with Old Comic structures.

Resurrecting Menippus

Historically Menippus was'a Cynic polemicist and parodist (third century B.C.) whose lost works bear intriguing titles such as The Descent to Hades and Exquisite Letters from the Gods.⁹ In Lucian, however, Menippus appears not as a historical figure, the author, but as a parodic elaboration of the literary stereotype his works helped to create: the unruly Cynic jester who inhabits an Aristophanic world of manic wishes and mythical machinations. The plots of both works in which Menippus figures as the jocular narrator of his own quasi-mythical exploits, Icaromenippus or Beyond the Clouds and Menippus or a Necromantic Experiment, are comparable in plot to Aristophanic plays in which the hero seeks release from some insoluble mess by mounting a fantastic journey to Olympus (Peace) or Hades (Frogs). Both Lucian and Aristophanes are eager to exploit the parodic potential of familiar mythological traditions that recount heroic confrontations with the gods or visits to the dead, but a comparison of their treatments reveals differences symptomatic of Lucian's distinctive generic aims as well as his continuity with Aristophanic traditions.

Lucian departs from Old Comic procedure most obviously in his use of narrative framed by dialogue. This mixed arrangement, common in Lucian, combines advantages of both dramatic and narrative forms. It enables Menippus, as narrator, to control our attention more exclusively than an Aristophanic hero would, while the dialogue provides him with the license of a fictional setting and addressee. These purely formal differences facilitate thematically significant changes in the motives and consequences of the fabulous deeds on which both authors center their plots. Whereas Aristophanes' disenchanted heroes are typically provoked by concrete topical complaints arising from actual events, such as the Peloponnesian War or the death of Euripides, Menippus appears in a timeless "classical Athens," and his motive is accordingly more universal and less dependent on the concerns of a particular audience or occasion. His is a philosophical quest spurred by long-standing puzzles and conundrums of Greek culture: the evident conflict between the traditions of myth and law on issues of deportment (Menippus), or the mutually contradictory accounts of the natural order offered by competing philosophical schools (Icaromenippus). These cosmic perturbations plunge Menippus into a state of philosophical perplexity (aporia: Icaromenippus 10, Menippus 4) and, what is worse, into the hands of those whose business it is to dispel perplexity for a price.

Menippus' exposure to the welter of conflicting opinions issuing from the philosophical schools succeeds in converting his initial puzzlement into Cynic derision of the pretense to knowledge on the part of professional thinkers. He presents their endless arguments over such questions as the number of worlds and the nature of the stars as as arbitrary and as futile as those between the Small- and Big-Endians in Lilliput (Icaromenippus 6, Menippus 4-6). This skeptical response to the quarrels of the philosophers echoes the thought of contemporary Pyrrhonists, who, surveying the battle of beliefs and the relativity of perceptions, doubted the very possibility of knowledge, arguing that nothing "is any more this than that" (Diogenes Laertius 9.61, 75). Like them, Menippus assumes that the contradictory opinions of traditional authorities on basic questions of moral and natural philosophy imply ignorance of the truth and reveal the imposture (alazoneia) of those claiming to know. Unlike the Pyrrhonists, Menippus persists in his desire to find something that truly can be taken seriously (ton alethos spoudaion: Icaromenippus 4) and refuses to rest content with the contradictory picture he has found.¹⁰

As in Aristophanes, the failure of the hero to solve his problem within the confines of the familiar world of common sense drives him beyond its borders. Instead of adopting the Pyrrhonian tack of suspending judgment (epokhe) in the face of his epistemic cul-de-sac, Menippus opts for consulting still higher authorities, Zeus (Icaromenippus) and Teiresias (Menippus) in the hope of finding the best kind of life (ho aristos bios: (Menippus 6; cf. Icaromenippus 10). The hero's disregard for ordinary limits, his willingness to make the Aristophanic leap from the plausible to the absurd, is a parodic recreation of the powers of such mythical prototypes as Odysseus, Orpheus, or Heracles, in whose heroic trappings Menippus is costumed (felt cap, lyre, lion's skin: Menippus 1). As strength and cunning make their epic adventures possible, so Menippus' imaginative capacity for the absurd gives him access to the extraordinary comic perspectives he discovers on his journey. Thus the Cynic single-mindedly seeks out his mythical destinations by transforming himself into a primitive flying machine (Icaromenippus 10-11) or engaging in a necromantic experiment on the banks of the Euphrates (Menippus 6-7). The magical quest rapidly becomes the pretext for a literary jeu d 'esprit. When it begins, the ordinary requirements of reason are suspended in favor of parodic fantasy, satiric conceits, and the mock logic of the mobile jester. The stage is set for a world that really is "no more this than that" as the hero becomes what he pretends to be, a tragic hero returning from Hades or a second Icarus.

But just as the motives of the comic fantasy differ significantly in Lucian and Aristophanes, so does its thematic function. Aristophanes' plays typically follow a pattern of wish filfillment in which the "strange and mighty deed" of the comic hero "inverts reality"¹¹ by, for example, replacing war with peace or bringing a tragic poet back from the dead. In this respect Aristophanes stays closer to the structure of traditional heroic narratives in which the hero's exertions are commensurate with their effect. No such triumphant inversions of reality are achieved by Menippus' mad sojourns. The fantasy of order restored, which is at the very heart of Old Comedy, remains a mere fantasy or wish in Lucian in spite of the mythical setting. If the upshot of the Cynic's quest does not finally fit the Aristophanic premise of the plot, the childlike notion "that desire can reshape the world,"¹² it does serve to produce a dramatic change of perspective, and it is this which constitutes its end.

How we construe the significance of any change in Menippus' point of view depends, however, on subtler matters of tone and technique from which the theatrical productions of Old Comedy may seem distant. Menippus' journeys are essentially a progression through a series of dramatized attitudes from the most to the least familiar, as he moves from perplexity with traditional beliefs and disenchantment with philosophers in Athens to comic misadventures in Homeric settings; the humor of his tales, however, is generated by overlapping perspectives, as we come to see one tradition by means of another in a kind of generic pun: thus Lucian uses the theme of the quest as a device for presenting the familiar machinery of the old myths through the alien lens of Cynic discourse. It is this generic distance between Menippus the Cynic and his legendary setting that creates the possibility for humor. By transporting the wry Cynic into the terra abscondita of mythology, Lucian accentuates a conflict between naturally divergent traditions and endows the tales with a knowing sense of their own absurdity. This characteristic ambiguity in tone has led to criticisms of Lucian's "sham seriousness" and failure to define an effective satiric stance.¹³ But these charges against Lucian's seriousness as a satirist betray a failure to appreciate the kind of performance his texts represent and the relations they seek to create between the author, his characters, and his audience.

In spite of the fact that Lucian clearly wrote much of his work for public recitation, as is obvious from his prologues (prolaliai) and as scholarship has confirmed by analyzing the meticulous dramatic technique of his dialogues, his texts are rarely considered as intended for performance. Yet Lucian's sense for his immediate audience and for his relationship to them, on the one hand, and to his characters, on the other, is always present and forms an integral part of his work, as it would have for even less agile sophists. While we cannot know exactly how these pieces were presented—whether one or more speakers took part or whether masks might have been used for gods or other known types—Philostratus' picture of more traditional rhetorical performers makes clear the importance of the theatrical possibilities of the text.¹⁴

The best guide in these matters is Lucian himself and any cues in his texts that indicate the reception they sought. Significantly, in his discussion of dramatic impersonation in The Dance, Lucian directly equates the dramatic skills (hupokrisis) of the performing rhetorician with those of the dancer interpreting myth (65) and, while paying tribute to traditional notions of empathy and catharsis (74-81), insists on the necessity of controlled involvement for a performance to achieve an appropriate effect. To illustrate the dangers of identifying too completely with a part, he recounts in full the comic mishap of an actor who got so caught up in his portrayal of Ajax's madness that he snatched a flute from one of the musicians onstage and cracked Odysseus over the head as he exulted in his victory. The crowd went mad over the authenticity of the performance until Ajax began to threaten two consuls in the front row: "The spectators were divided between wonder and laughter; some suspected that [the actor's] ultra-realism had culminated in reality" (83 Fowlers). This performance is contrasted with that of a rival who acted his madness "discreetly and sanely," staying within the bounds of his art (84). Moreover, Lucian correlates the relationship of the actor to his role with the audience's reception of the performance in a surprisingly Brechtian contrast between those spectators who simply empathized with the crazy Ajax (surphetodeis) and those who maintained the requisite distance for contemplating and judging a performance (asteioteroi). Lucian's use of the comic anecdote to conclude the dialogue suggests the importance he attached to the distinctions it illustrates as well as his acute awareness of a performer's ability to modulate his audience's response.

The controlled evocation of a role is in fact a conscious part of Lucian's technique; it is clearly reflected in his method of distancing his audience from his characters by emphasizing their comically theatrical or artificial qualities and by using inside jokes shared by the author with his audience but inaccessible to the character "onstage" or inappropriate to his role. Both devices are at work in Menippus. For example, at the outset of the narrative portion of the dialogue the interlocutor makes a point of calling Menippus philokalos, "a lover of beauty," and attributing his anticipated virtues as a narrator to this unexpected quality (Menippus 3). While philokalos is an apt epithet for the sophisticated stylist who is in fact impersonating Menippus as he narrates his tale, it is scarcely appropriate to the rough-and-tumble Cynic himself, standing there before us (or our mind's eye) attired in Heracles' lion's skin!¹⁵ Similarly, in Menippus' description of the court of Minos in Hades, we hear much in a Cynic vein about punishments given the rich and powerful, but the only case singled out for any detail is the acquittal of the infamous Dionysius of Syracuse, who is spared because of his generosity as a patron to "men of letters" (pepaideumenoi)—a playful allusion to the values of a pepaideumenos such as Lucian, who, as an old hand at the pursuit of patronage, surely relished the justice of this particular case (Menippus 13). Jokes of this kind serve to detach us momentarily from the fictional world of the text (or performance) and invite us to respond to it as a kind of literary game rather than to enter into it as an illusion. We find ourselves responding, at one moment, to the author's assumption of the role of Menippus, at another to the role itself; or, as Rohde shrewdly observed, "we frequently detect Lucian behind his masks."¹⁶

The theatrical qualities of Lucianic dialogue (or narrative) are thus akin to the nonillusory theater of convention as we see it in such ancient forms as Aristophanic comedy: although it operates within narrower limits, in that a character never steps completely outside his role, it makes comparable demands on an audience. Thus, the text is less an attempt to create convincing illusions than to engage the audience in an "occasion for imaginative activity" unlimited by plausibility in plot or character portrayal.¹⁷ As J. J. Winkler argues, "Lucian and his roles form an asymmetric pair whose performances are simultaneous and indissolubly linked—the speaker [that is, the character] and his silent partner [the author]. In listening to a single voice we hear both persons talking."¹⁸ But if Lucian's characters are not meant to be credible, it is because the air of exaggerated theatricality is instrumental to the performance: the stylized character that typifies his work is a means to an end, a flexible pretense that serves to provoke, joke, speculate, amuse. To play out the pretense makes certain kinds of perception possible.

Thus when Menippus comes onstage, all the elements of his role, his absurd attire (felt cap, lyre, and lion's skin) and his penchant for speaking in tags of Euripidean verse, are comically reflected in the astonished reactions of his friend:

Menippus: All hail, my roof, my doors, my heart and home! How sweet again to see the light and thee! …

Philonides: Man, you must be mad; or why string verses [tragoidon] like a tragic actor instead of talking like one friend to another?

Menippus: My dear fellow, you need not be so surprised. I have just been in Euripides' and Homer's company. I suppose I am full to the throat with verse, and the numbers come as soon as I open my mouth. But how are things going up here? What is Athens about?

Philonides: Oh, nothing new; extortion, perjury, forty percent, face-grinding. (1-2 after Fowlers)

While the flamboyant entrance serves to identify Menippus by his habit of mixing verse and prose and to place him in a fictional context, it also overtly emphasizes the idea of role-playing, central to Menippus' narrative, by ostentatiously evincing the author's delight in presenting the ludicrous Cynic, himself as old as legend by Lucian's time, in the act of aping in verse a series of tragic heroes just returned from the dead.¹⁹ Indeed, much of Lucian's appeal as a literary entertainer springs from just this sense of play shared by the author with an audience highly conscious of tradition: we know the kinds of difficulty involved in impersonating Menippus on still another journey to Hades—a theme treated countless times since Homer²⁰—and want to see how Lucian will utilize the resources of tradition in a witty and pointed re-creation. At the beginning of A True Story, the author actually challenges the audience to disbelieve the narrator and to spot the point of his literary allusions. Authorial distance is as much a part of this kind of entertainment as the cultural and historical distance that separates the audience from the world of the main characters and shapes the nature of the performance.

Clearly a performance of this type has its own order of seriousness. If we consider the shape and tone of the Menippus pieces as a whole, for example, we can construe them either as circular and essentially jocular or as dramatizing a change or significant discovery. In the first case the plot works rather like a shaggy-dog story. The hero's elaborate preparations and fabulous feats are comically inconsequential in their results: the journey seems only to confirm the soundness of Menippus' original Cynic aversions to the most egregious examples of false-seriousness (alazoneia) and self-delusion (tuphos) by revealing that the gods share his distaste for philosophers (Icaromenippus) and the rich (Menippus). Menippus' journey thus serves to parody the quest for knowledge that even when facilitated by magic and fantasy can only return us to our starting points. The surprising coincidence of the Cynic point of view with that of such mythical authority figures as Zeus or Minos is, on any reading, the comic mainspring of the plot. But this is only part of the story: the journey is also offered as a process of discovery, a comic quest, leading to recognition of the basic perceptions that authenticate Menippus' satiric stance, as when he peers down from the moon and imagines men as ants scampering around their tiny polities (Icaromenippus 19) or inspects the skeletal remains of the heroic past on the Acherusian plain (Menippus 15). At such moments Menippus' jocular tales take on a glancing seriousness: which element carries the emphasis, the satiric perceptions or the comic vehicle?²¹

If the Menippus pieces are especially Lucianic, it is precisely because they raise questions of this kind. The point is not that Lucian is ambiguously serious, but that the serious qualities of his texts are the product of a subtle style of impersonation that wavers between wry caricature and authoritative evocation of a given role or mental attitude, the humor of which serves as a means of making foreign, fanciful, and subversive points of view accessible: a task to which Menippus is ideally suited. If we follow him on his visit to the dead, we see that the journey does more than simply sanction the values of the traditional Cynic role (bios) or lampoon his conventional antitypes, the professional philosopher and the plutocrat.

While Menippus' visit to the court of Minos and his meditation on the Acherusian plain may not solve his original epistemic dilemma, it does prepare him for the climactic encounter with Teiresias. First, he finds that justice in the underworld pursues a comic logic of role reversal and ego deflation. The gravest offense in the court of Minos is the Cynic sin of false-seriousness; the most conspicuous malefactors are "those puffed up [tetuphomenoi] with wealth and power," who must face implacable witnesses for the prosecution—their own shadows. Menippus gleefully reports that Minos reserves a special dislike for their "ephemeral presumption [oligokhronios alazoneia] and arrogance, their failure to remember that they were mortals" (Menippus 12). Second, there is a thematic progression from the comic comeuppance distributed by Minos, qualified as it is by leniency for the poor and for patrons of the arts, to a more general consideration of mortal ends on the Acherusian plain. Comparing the skulls of the ugly Thersites and the beautiful Nireus, Menippus is struck by the illusory nature of all distinctions between men, not just the transgressions of those alazones at the top of society: "With all those anatomies piled together as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I know not how to tell Thersites from Nireus the beauty, beggar Irus from the Phaeacian king, or cook Pyrrhias from Agamemnon's self. Their ancient marks were gone, and their bones alike—uncertain, unlabelled, indistinguishable" (Menippus 15 Fowlers).

The search for a privileged perspective, or, as one critic put it, the desire "to get out in order to look in,"²² is a central preoccupation of Lucian's work. His affinity for fantastic journeys and authorial figures who stand on the edge of society or above it, its critics and observers, manifests this tendency. The perspective achieved is usually enabled by humor and expressed metaphorically. Menippus thus seeks to convey the disillusioning perspective discovered in Hades with one of Lucian's favorite devices for imagining a point of view that combines at once participation and detachment, a theatrical simile.²³

When I saw all this, the life of man came before me under the likeness of a great pageant, arranged and marshaled by Chance, who distributed infinitely varied costumes to the performers. She would take one and attire him royally, with a tiara on his head, bodyguards by his side and diadem on his brows, but on another she put the costume of a slave. One she made beautiful, another ludicrously ugly. For the spectacle must be varied … For a few moments she lets them wear their new clothes, but when the time for the pageant has passed, each player gives back his props and sheds his costume with his body becoming what he was before birth, no different from his neighbor. But out of ignorance some are angry and indignant when Chance demands the return of her trappings, as if they were being deprived of their own property instead of giving back something loaned temporarily. (Menippus 16 after Fowlers)

Thus the error of self-delusion is seen to be the universal theme in Chance's pageant. Through an illusion of perspective all the mortal players are seduced by the reality of their own roles; but Chance, like a cosmic ironist, sooner or later unmasks time's fools, leaving them like actors out of work, "sans everything": "The play over, each of them throws off his gold-spangled robe and his mask, descends from the buskin's height, and moves a mean ordinary creature … Such is the condition of mankind, or so that sight presented it to me" (Menippus 16 Fowlers).

Menippus' theatrical metaphor provides the perspective assumed by Teiresias' advice in the climactic scene of the quest: taking the wandering Cynic aside, the Theban prophet urges him to ignore those peculiarly Hellenic avatars of self-seriousness, philosophers, and to go on his way "laughing a great deal and taking nothing seriously" (gelon ta polla kai peri meden espoudakos: 22). While Teiresias' advice has sometimes been dismissed as an example of "nihilism" or erroneously conflated with "late Cynicism,"²⁴ it is in fact covertly traditional, echoing a famous line of the archaic poet Simonides (sixth century B.C.),²⁵ cleverly adapted to its thematic context, and quintessentially Lucianic. For if we are all actors in Chance's pageant, dressed in our little brief authorities,²⁶ then a suspension of seriousness, a festive detachment from our own role in the play, is the best antidote to alazoneia, or delusion.²⁷ To confuse oneself with one's role is to be like the crazy Ajax in The Dance or those who quarrel with Chance when she demands that her costumes be returned (Menippus 16). The ironic distance from experience that Teiresias commends—to take nothing seriously—is an appropriately self-denying form of wisdom: "if sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either."²⁸ Hence, the best sort of life is that least sought after by the world, that of the idiotes,²⁹ the "improvising amateur" unencumbered by illusory notions of the seriousness of his role. Liberated from the contradictions of those who presume to know what is to be taken seriously, Menippus returns eager to inform the powers that be of the reversals that await them. The fantastic journey serves to convert the puzzled Cynic to a Lucianic perspective; indeed, Teiresias' dictum is so expressive of the mock-serious tone of this narrative, which, like so much Lucian, seems to stop short of taking anything quite seriously, including itself, that it is tempting to see it as an oblique reflection on the author's own modus operandi as a touring sophist playing an astonishing number of traditional roles, all unseriously, with the calculated detachment of the comic performer.

Thus are serious questions woven into texts as thoroughly ludicrous as Menippus' quests undoubtedly are. In its unexpected collapse of satiric and comic topoi into a parodic celebration of role-playing as the only game in town, Menippus exemplifies some of the salient qualities of Lucian's art. If writers such as Erasmus and Fielding found much that they valued in Lucian, it is precisely because of the kind of complexity of comic effect that we have seen in Menippus. They regarded Lucian as a model of the satiric perspective presented in a pointedly comic manner, a master of what can most aptly be called the seriocomic style, which, in Fielding's phrase, sends satire "laughing into the world." Erasmus points to just such a quality when, in the preface to his translation of Lucian's Cock (quoted as an epigraph to this chapter), he characterizes Lucian's achievements in specifically Horatian terms as at once serious (utile) and comically diverting (dulce).³⁰ But can we specify more precisely how these divergent functions are related in Lucian? If laughter provokes thought, its sources and implications are, after all, integral to the work's meaning and an index of its significance for an audience. While Fielding and Erasmus may well have exaggerated Lucian's didactic intent, they were nevertheless right to see as the distinguishing characteristic of his art its curious and studied blend of serious and ludic qualities, an accomplishment that can scarcely be described as frivolous or nihilistic, nor understood without a careful analysis of his varied comic procedures and the multiple purposes they serve.…

In his most concentrated reflections on his literary self, The Fisherman and The Double Indictment, Lucian uses agonistic and forensic structures from Old Comedy to present his alien or "barbaric" qualities, his generic peculiarities, and his calculated disrespect for certain forms of contemporary classicism as themselves the products of tradition. Both works are brilliant acts of comic self-dramatization that display the distinctive intermixture of literate "buffoonery and speculative fantasy"⁴⁶ that became Lucian's hallmark. Both are of central importance for assessing Lucian's carefully nuanced self-concept as an author, according to which he is more truly "classical" than his detractors acknowledge, precisely because of the liberties he takes in making traditions his own.

In The Fisherman Lucian seeks to legitimate the satiric function of his art, which apparently came under attack after the founding fathers of Greek philosophy from Pythagoras to Diogenes were auctioned off as slaves in his hilarious caricature Philosophers for Sale! Instead of merely invoking a tradition in propria persona, as in The Would-be Critic, Lucian takes his self-presentation a step further by casting himself as the personification of verbal license, Parrhesiades ("Freespeaker"), "son of Truthful, grandson of Exposure" (tou Elegxikleous: 19), thus evoking a value long associated with Athenian democracy, Aristophanic comedy, and the old Cynics.⁴⁷ Parrhesiades is used both to signal Lucian's generic link with Old Comedy and to suggest his underlying affinity with the angry sages who have risen from their graves to stone him to death for his affront to philosophy. In choosing this mask Lucian counters his critics from two traditional angles by implying that he is not really antiphilosophical, since parrhesia is a celebrated Cynic value, and that he is authorized to attack fakes anyway as the heir apparent of Old Comedy. This implicit claim is reflected explicitly both in Parrhesiades' protests of solidarity with his assailants and, more important, in the Old Comic structure of the plot: from the attack with stones to Parrhesiades' vindication, The Fisherman is patterned after the famous confrontation between Dicaeopolis and the angry patriots in Acharnians (204-571) who, like the sages, are initially outraged at the hero's treasonous conduct but are later persuaded of his loyalty to their cause.

Like most Old Comedy, The Fisherman is allegorical and agonistic. It progresses rapidly through a sequence of wildly contrasting parodic structures, moving from a paratragic suppliant scene, in which Parrhesiades begs for his life by quoting bits of Euripides, to a trial scene played out before Philosophy and Truth, "the shadowy creature with the indefinite complexion" (16 Fowlers). In his formal defense Lucian/Parrhesiades defines his dialogues as closer to the pursuit of truth than contemporary philosophy (33). Insofar as Parrhesiades is willing to speak his mind in the old style, to censure the fakery of professional thinkers, he is reasserting the truth-teller's role, which is the point of having Diogenes, the most free-speaking philosopher, prosecute him unsuccessfully. Parrhesiades' acquittal by a jury of fabled sages designates Lucianic dialogue as the vehicle for unflattering exposure (elegkhos) that Socratic dialogue, Old Comedy, and Cynic diatribe once were. This claim is given Aristophanic confirmation in the closing scene, in which Parrhesiades fishes for fake philosophers off the side of the Acropolis—using gold and figs for bait. As always in Lucian, the explicit argument is less important than its formal articulation. By resurrecting the burlesque seriousness of an Aristophanic contest (agon) with himself as the redoubtable comic hero, Lucian has authorized his claim to be the rightful heir to the satiric privilege (parrhesia) once accorded the Old Comic poets under the auspices of Dionysus.

If his was an age of pious classicism, Lucian's fractured brand of traditionalism threatened to make him the odd man out. The Double Indictment is his most ambitious attempt at using the idiosyncratic form of dialogue he had developed as itself the means of projecting a respectable literary pedigree; but he does so, typically, by placing his work precisely at a point where known traditions diverge. He appears in The Double Indictment as a nameless foreigner, "the Syrian," who in the course of a wayward literary career has managed to offend both lady Rhetoric and the old man Dialogue, son of Philosophy, rival bastions of ancient letters, by treating neither in the traditional fashion. His literary torts have landed him in court once again, charged by his former paramours with "ill-treatment" (kakosis) and "mental cruelty" (hubris). Parodic fantasy in a forensic setting and cartoonlike allegory in the Old Comic vein are given another twist: the Olympians summon Justice to the Areopagus to judge a backlog of cases brought against men by "the Arts, Professions, and Philosophies" (13). When the case of Lucian is announced, Justice wonders comically, "Who is this Syrian?" The trial is Lucian's means of answering her seriocomically and in the process disarming any would-be critics of his tampering with traditional forms.

In a generic gesture Rhetoric seeks to impress the jury by opening her speech with a pastiche of famous bits of Demosthenes. She then accuses the defendant not only of desertion but inversion: she found him, a "barbarian" in speech and dress, and civilized, that is, Hellenized, him by turning him into a famous rhetorician and a Greek citizen. But after he had learned all the tricks of her trade the ingrate became supercilious, fell in love with the old man Dialogue, and moved in with him. As a consequence, he took to clipping her leisurely sentences down to size and sought pensive nods and smiles of approval from his audience instead of real applause (26-29). In his defense, the Syrian concedes the many benefits conferred by his estranged spouse, but reverses the charge of infidelity: it was in fact the meretricious habits Rhetoric had acquired, openly receiving crowds of admirers at the house and listening from the roof to erotic ditties, that drove him to live with his decorous neighbor Dialogue. In spite of her Demosthenic posturing, contemporary Rhetoric is branded as a licentious vamp, happily vulgarized to fit the fashions of the time. Besides, adds the Syrian, at his age a Platonic relationship with Dialogue in the groves of Academe has more to offer than the trials of sophistic declamation. In ridiculing the intellectually limited, if popular, practice of forensic and epideictic rhetoric, Lucian could hardly distinguish himself more emphatically from the mainstream of sophistic performers as we see them in Philostratus.

No sooner is the Syrian acquitted of the charges brought by Rhetoric than Dialogue states his case using a rhetorical strategy that contrasts him neatly with his traditional rival. While she has borrowed her opening lines from Demosthenes' most famous prooemia (On the Crown, Third Olynthiac), Dialogue imitates Socrates in the Apology by dispensing with a florid exordium and denying that he has any rhetorical skills whatsoever (atekhnos). His performance of course belies his disavowal as he proceeds to appropriate some of the most high-flown imagery in Plato (Phaedrus 246e) to describe the contemplative heights he inhabited "on the rim of heaven" before the Syrian demoted him so rudely to the level of hoi polloi. While Rhetoric is represented as prostituted to popular approval, Dialogue is just the reverse: he disdains the common crowd. Much to his disgust he has been fenced in with a ribald gang of Cynics, blame poets (iamboi), and Old Comic playwrights such as Eupolis and Aristophanes, who "mock all that is holy" (33). The Syrian even let into the pen an ill-tempered old bulldog, Menippus, who bites unexpectedly even as he wags his tail (gelon hama edaknen: 33). To add insult to injury Dialogue is given nothing to go out in but comic roles, absurd plots, and a motley patchwork of styles: "I am a ridiculous cross between prose and verse; a monster of incongruity; a literary Centaur" (33 Fowlers).⁴⁸

Thus Lucian uses comic personifications of the arts of contemporary rhetoric and Platonic dialogue to define his literary practice as an attempt to avoid both the meretricious diversions (dulce) of fashionable Rhetoric and the arid pedantry (utile) of disputatious old Dialogue. The trial is a comic dramatization of aesthetic choices in which Lucian claims a link with tradition that consists of crossdressing alien genres. This is made clear by the Syrian's defense (34). He is astonished that Dialogue, of all people, should file a complaint against him. Just as Socrates is said to have brought philosophy down to earth from heaven, so the Syrian claims to have taught Dialogue how to walk on the ground like a human being. He has shifted his gaze from Plato's ideas to what lies at his feet. What is more, he gave the old man a bath, taught him to smile, and, with Comedy's help, even found him a willing audience. If Dialogue is unhappy, it is because he can no longer "scratch where it itches": endless refutations and metaphysical speculations are supplanted by a comic logic. Humor is the means of reconceptualizing Dialogue's generic perspective. In freeing the old man of logic-chopping arguments (leptologon: 34) he has restored him to the earthly reality of common understanding. He frankly admits that the result has an unfamiliar look, woven as it is from antagonistic traditions, but that is precisely its virtue: more engaging than philosophy and more truthful than rhetoric.⁴⁹ He may be a "barbarian" (barbaros autos einai: 34), but, insists the Syrian, his outlandish dialogues are clothed in native Greek attire.

Dialogue's accusations in The Double Indictment suggest how odd Lucian's innovations must have appeared to a second-century audience accustomed to the relatively well-defined and easily recognizable genres of ancient verse and prose. "Laughable," "strange," "monstrous," "satyric" (geloion, xenon, phasma, saturikon: 34) are the terms that Dialogue uses to denounce the absurd condition to which the Syrian has reduced him from the grandeur of Plato's Phaedrus: narrative and dialogue, verse and prose, sublimity and burlesque are freely combined. There is in fact no definitive model for his condition, but there are important precedents, as we shall see.

Thus in these two forensic fantasies Lucian defines and defends his relation to tradition in broad generic terms. In The Fisherman Lucian presents himself as reviving the satiric liberties of an Old Comic poet or Cynic jester and in The Double Indictment as the suspect inventor of weird new forms of comic literature. These self-dramatizations are extremely valuable in that they specify the literary terms in which Lucian himself conceived his adaptation of classical traditions and through which he sought to sanction those adaptations.…

Notes

¹ For Lucian and later European literature, see the Bibliography.

² C. Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe (Chapel Hill 1979) 198.

³Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 2; cf B. A. Van Groningen, "Literary Tendencies in the Second Century a.d.," Mnemosyne 18 (1965) 56: "It is a neglected [literature] in a neglected century, and, generally speaking, it deserves this neglect."

⁴ G. Highet, The Classical Tradition (Oxford 1949) 304; idem, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton 1962) 42-43.

⁵ For Lucian's "nihilism," see C. A. Van Rooy, Studies in Classical Satire and Related Theory (Leiden 1965) 111; J. Bernays, Lucian und die Kyniker (Berlin 1879) 44; K. W. F. Solger, Erwin: Vier Gespräche über das Schöne und die Kunst, ed. W. Henckmann (Munich 1970) 388; for his lack of seriousness, cf. R. Helm, Lucian und Menipp (Leipzig 1906); U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Die Kultur der Gegenwart³ 1.8 (Berlin 1912) 172-174; Wilhelm Capelle, "Der Spotter von Samosata," Sokrates 2 (1914) 606-622; W. H. Tackaberry, Lucian's Relation to Plato and the Post-Aristotelian Philosophers (Toronto 1930); Lucian: Selected Works, trans. B. P. Reardon (Indianapolis 1965) xxiv-xxx.

⁶ J. Bompaire's Lucien écrivain (Paris, 1958) is significant as the most systematic study of Lucian as a literary figure rather than as a moralist, philosopher, journalist, or plagiarist. (Cf. J. J. Chapman, Lucian, Plato, and Greek Morals [Boston 1931]; and Tackaberry, Wilamowitz, Helm, cited in the note above.) Bompaire's aim was "the explication of Lucian's oeuvre by reference to a cultural heritage" (Revue des etudes grecques 88 [1975] 228), and his work serves as a sounding board for most later studies: 0. Bouquiaux-Simon, Les lectures homériques de Lucien, Académia Royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres, Memoires, vol. 59.2 (Brussels 1968), argues from Lucian's knowledge and use of Homer that Bompaire's concept of rhetorical mimesis is too close to mere imitation to account for Lucian's relation to tradition (57-58, 374); B.P. Reardon, Courants littéraires grecs des II et III siécles aprés J.-C. (Paris 1971) 155-180, places Lucian's work in the context of the major literary movements of his time and emphasizes the centrality of the dialogue form, parody, and humor to an understanding of Lucian's art or "philosophical thought." B. Baldwin, Studies in Lucian (reviewed by J. A. Hall, JHS 97 [1977] 189-190), and C. P. Jones, Culture and Society, in Lucian, (Cambridge, Mass. 1986) reject Bompaire's approach as ahistorical and attempt to specify. the contemporary contexts of Lucian's works; Jones draws heavily on the work of L. Robert, particularly A travers I'Asie Mineure: Poétes et prosateurs, monnaies grecques, voyageurs, et géographie, Bibliothéque des Ecoles Français d'Athénes et de Rome (Paris 1980) cap. 18; J. A. Hall, Lucian's Satire (New York 1981), offers a judicious survey of Lucian's work concentrating on questions of chronology, sources, authenticity, and social context. G. Anderson, Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic, Mnemosyne suppl. 41 (1976) and Studies in Lucian's Comic Fiction, Mnemosyne suppl. 43 (1976), both reviewed by Hall, JHS 100 (1980) 229-232, studies Lucian's compositional methods by focusing on his repeated use of similar material; cf. also Anderson, "Lucian: A Sophist's Sophist," YCS 27 (1982) 61-92. Other important studies include: H. D. Betz, Lucian von Samosata und das Neue Testament (Berlin 1961); J. Schwartz, Biographie de Lucien de Samosate (Brussels 1965); and E. L. Bowie, "Lucian," in CHCL 1: 673-679, 872-874. The most significant developments in work since Bompaire include a tendency to reinstate the dimension of social reality that his "mimetic" approach discounted (e.g., Baldwin, Hall, Robert, Jones) and to replace the notion of traditionalism as imitation (mimesis) with a more comprehensive, dynamic, and flexible concept of the phenomenon of archaism in imperial Greek culture (Bowie, "The Greeks and Their Past").

⁷ A. R. Bellinger, "Lucian's Dramatic Technique," YCS 1 (1928): "As a matter of fact, in the one hundred and eighteen dialogues he employs two hundred and thirty-four characters, all but sixty of whom are named, though fourteen are mere personifications such as 'Riches,' 'Justice,' and the like" (8). Cf. also Bompaire, "Quelques personnifications litteraires chez Lucien et dans la litterature imperiale," in Mythe et personnification, ed. J. Duchemin (Paris 1977).

⁸ See B. P. McCarthy, "Lucian and Menippus" YCS 4 (1934) 3-58; Hall, Lucian's Satire chap. 2.

⁹ Other titles include: The Birth of Epicurus and The School's Reverence for the Twentieth Day; Wills; Against Natural Philosophers, Mathematicians, and Grammarians; The Sale of Diogenes; Symposium; and Arcesilaus (D.L. 6. 101, 6. 29; Athenaeus 14.629f, 14.664e). The three brief fragments add little to this picture. One, cited by Athenaeus (14.629e-f), contains a comic reference to the Stoic doctrine of ekpurosis. How Menippus used dialogue or parodic verse is not known, but "Probus" testifies that the link between the Cynic and Varro was an affinity for generic mixture: "Varro … Menippeus non a magistro … nominatus, sed a societate ingenii quod is quoque omnigeno carmine satiras suas expoliverat": In Verg. Buc. 6. 31; cf. Hall, Lucian's Satire 469 n. 10; J. C. Relihan, "On the Origin of 'Menippean Satire' as the Name of a Literary Genre," CP 79.3 (1984) 226-229.

¹⁰ While philosophical perplexity (aporia) was originally a Socratic theme and would have been a familiar reference, it is also central to Pyrrhonean Skepticism (e.g., Sextus Empiricus, P. 1). The notion that the philosophical schools are mutually contradictory, prominent in both Menippus pieces, is pointedly Skeptical. The overlap of Cynic and Skeptic positions is not new. Pyrrhonean Skeptics also took over such Cynic terminology as tuphos (smoke/vanity), a word that recurs frequently in Lucian, particularly in Dialogues of the Dead. The Pyrrhonists shared the Cynic hostility to alazoneia, especially where dogmatic philosophers are concerned. Lucian shows a diffuse reflection of Skepticism that, whatever its provenance, complements his own impartially satiric treatment of the philosophical sects (e.g., Philosophers for Sale!, Symposium, Hermotimus, Eunuch, Liars) as well as his rhetorical use of philosophical stances generally (see Alexander and Chapter 4 in this volume). Lucian's skepticism is invasive but not programmatic. His caricature of Pyrrho, for example, in Philosophers for Sale! shows no favoritism (cf. S. E., P. 1.13, where S. E. denies that Pyrrhonists doubt what is "evident"). In The Fisherman (29-37) Parrhesiades defends Lucian's caricature of famous philosophers in Philosophers for Sale! by arguing that it applies only to those who play the role of philosopher badly, aping the genuine philosophers who founded the sects. The discrepancy between the ideal and the actual is in fact a central preoccupation in Lucian, but he often uses the contrast to call the ideal itself into question. See McCarthy, "Lucian and Menippus"; A. A. Long, "Timon of Phlius, Pyrrhonist and Satirist," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 24 (1978) 68-91; idem, "Sextus Empiricus on the Criterion of Truth," Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 25 (1978) 35-49; A. Brancusi, "La filosofia di Pirrone e le sue relazioni con il Cinismo," in Lo scetticismo antico, ed. G. Giannantoni (Naples 1981) 213-242; K. Praechter, "Skeptisches bei Lucian," Philologus 51 (1882) 284-293.

¹¹ K. McLeish, The Theatre of Aristophanes (New York 1980) 69-70.

¹² "A premise … behind all performance"; V. Turner, "Are There Universals of Performance?" Comparative Criticism 9 (1987) 50.

¹³ For Lucian's "sham seriousness," see Van Rooy, Classical Satire 92. For his failure as a satirist, see Highet, The Anatomy of Satire 42.

¹⁴ See Bellinger, "Lucian's Dramatic Technique": "We must conclude that Lucian wrote his dialogues to be read aloud, and to be self-sufficient relying on the imagination of the audience and on the ingenuity of his work to make them enjoyable and understandable" (40). For the possibilities for dramatic readings in various genres (including Plato, the Mime, Old and New Comedy) at dinner parties, see Plutarch, Quest, Conviv. 613a, 711-712.

¹⁵ Cf. the effect of the interlocutor's comparison of Menippus to Ganymede in the opening of Icaromenippus.

¹⁶ E. Rohde, Über Lucian's Schrift "Loukios e onos" und ihr Verhältniss zu Lucius von Patrae und den Metamorphosen des Apuleius (Leipzig 1869) 32.

¹⁷ L. J. Styan, Drama Stage and Audience (Cambridge 1975) 190; for a lucid application of this concept to Aristophanes, see McLeish, Aristophanes chap. 6; also N. W. Slater, Plautus in Performance (Princeton 1985).

¹⁸ J. J. Winkler, Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius' "Golden Ass" (Berkeley 1985) 275.

¹⁹ Both the role and the costume echo the Cynics' penchant for self-dramatization. Diogenes Laertius reports that the Cynic Menedemus went about "in the guise of a fury" saying he had just returned from Hades to spy on vicious conduct for the gods below. He wore "a gray tunic draped to his feet, a purple belt, an Arcadian felt hat embroidered with the twelve signs of the zodiac, tragic buskins, and an enormous beard" and carried an ashen staff (6.102). The Suda, s.v. phaios, attributes this costume to Menippus. See J. C. Relihan, "Vainglorious Menippus in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead," Illinois Classical Studies 12.1 (1987) 194 nn. 28, 29.

²⁰ Cf. A. M. Young, "The 'Frogs' of Aristophanes as a Type of Play," CJ 29 (1933-34) 23-32.

²¹ See H. Levin, Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (New York, 1987): "When comedy becomes more purposeful than playful, then it is satire" (195).

²² D. Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge 1979) 16.

²³ Cf. M. Kokolakis, The Dramatic Simile of Life (Athens 1960).

²⁴ Cf Van Rooy, Classical Satire 111; M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington 1984) 387; Winkler, Auctor & Actor 271: "This wisdom that Menippus brings back is a conventional Cynic diatribe on wealth." Cf. also R. B. Branham. "The Wisdom of Lucian's Tiresias," JHS 109 (in press).

²⁵ Cf. Simonides fr. 141 Page (quoted by Theon 3.268, Butts ed.): "play in life and be entirely serious about nothing" (paizein en toi bioi kai peri meden haplos spoudazein). See F.W. Householder, Literary Quotation and Allusion in Lucian (New York, 1941) 37.

²⁶ The remarks of R. L. Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York 1987), suggest how the detachment of the "inner life" from the "stage play" of ceremony and tradition, such as that repeatedly conveyed by Lucian's theatrical metaphors, far from being an empty trope, may in fact be symptomatic of some of the underlying anxieties of this classicizing culture (66). See M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis 1984) 119.

²⁷ Cf. Freud's conception of humor as the superego's means of consoling the ego: Humour, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey, vol. 21 (London 1961) 166: "The main thing is the intention which humour carries out whether it is acting in relation to the self or other people. It means: 'Look, here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children—just worth making a Jest about."' See F. Roustang, "How Do You Make a Paranoiac Laugh?" trans. D. Brick, Modern Language Notes 102.4 (1987) 709; J. Moreall, Taking Laughter Seriously (Albany 1983).

²⁸ T. Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge 1973) 23.

²⁹ The idiotes is an amateur without specialized skills or an acknowledged role. Cf. Charon 4, where the idiotes is contrasted with the poietikos, with Socrates characterization of himself as an improvising amateur (idiotes autoskhediazon: Phaedrus 236d) as opposed to the "experts." Lucian could also use idiotes in a merely pejorative sense (Salt. 83). I infer the idea of "improvisation" in this context from 'Teiresias' phrase to paron eu themenos (21).

³⁰ For Erasmus, see C. Robinson's introduction to Luciani Dialoghi Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami (Amsterdam 1969) vol. 1, bk. 1, 379 ff.; for Fielding, see Covent Garden Journal, no. 52 (1752), and Robinson, Lucian 198-235.…

⁴⁶ Levin on Rabelais; Playboys and Killjoys 137.

⁴⁷Parrhesia is a privilege generally associated with Athenian democracy and Old Comedy (cf. Eur., Hipp. 422; Plato, Rep. 557b; Isoc. 8.14) and in Aristotle (E.N. 1124b29) with the "magnanimous man." In The Education of Children (1B), attributed to Plutarch, it is the right of the wellborn; cf. Superstit. 165. See also D.L. 2.127. For Cynic parrhesia, see on Diogenes later in this chapter. The idea of parrhesia is fundamental to Lucian's self-concept as a writer. See Ind. 30, Conc. Deor. 2, and the discussion of the Demonax later in this chapter. M. D. Macleod, "Lucian's Activities as a 'Misalazon,'" Philologus 123 (1979) 326-328, notes that parrhesia and aletheia are linked at Dem. 11, Tim. 36, Cont. 13, Merc. Cond. 4, Lex. 17, Hist. Conscr. 41 (327).

⁴⁸ If Dialogue seems to exaggerate the amount of verse he has to tolerate we should remember that he is trying to earn the jury's sympathy. While there are few extended passages of parodic verse set in prose (I. Trag. 1-2; Fug. 30; Pisc. 1.3; Nec. 1), parodic quotations and paraphrases of poetic traditions are fundamental to Lucian's technique, as Householder's study shows. Cf. Bompaire, Lucien écrivain 599-654. On the supersession of verse by prose in the second century, see Reardon, Courants 231-232; cf. Aelius Aristides, Or. 55. 1-13.

⁴⁹ Cf. W. Trimpi, Muses of One Mind (Princeton 1983) 24.