8 - In Praise of the Fly

Summary

Lucian’s In Praise of the Fly offers a delightfully wry encomium of the humble house fly. While the speech engages wittily with sophistic traditions by praising this troublesome insect, it also raises important questions about social marginality and the workings of power, and about the mechanisms through which value is conventionally assessed and reinforced. This chapter examines scale, social status, and literary self-consciousness in Lucian’s representation of the fly as a creature of immense cultural importance. The encomium, it is argued, plays with conventional associations between size and value, revelling in comic juxtapositions of scale, and in the mismatch between ambition and achievement. It also exploits traditional modes of discourse that present animals as models for the socially disenfranchised, and draws on the vocabulary of literary criticism and composition in order to evoke and challenge the symbolism traditionally attributed to other insects and to represent the fly provocatively as the new emblem of a refined literary and cultural aesthetic.