4 - Parody, Symbol and the Literary Past in Lucian

Summary

By Lucian's era, the second century CE, to write about Greek laughter and tears was to write after centuries of tradition of tragic and comic theatre, after Aristotle and (later) Alexandrian scholars had dissected, labelled and theorised the main canon of texts. Similarly, philosophical schools and their key expositors, the prime target of Lucian's many satirical guises, had spawned commentaries, imitations and adaptations. The idea of ‘being Greek under Rome’, or in the term most scholars adopt, to write within ‘the Second Sophistic’, meant that paideia, politics and literary culture all consisted of a sustained backward glance, a marked indebtedness and (often ironised) appropriation of the glory that was Greece. Even the written language used to describe the classical past was an anachronistic, classicising marker of elite education and culture: Attic prose to reflect the erstwhile summit of Greek style. Lucian is himself as much a partaker of this appropriation of Greek past, both in his style and in the subjects of his discourses, as the contemporaries he satirises. Yet it is how Lucian receives and styles this past that is vital for understanding the nature of his satire. In this chapter I will analyse the literariness of Lucian's satire, and in particular his representation of the literary past as a lens for laughing at the less educated; that is, Lucian's depiction of famous figures, literary and mythical, who view earth's happenings from a privileged distance, mimics the very process a pepaideumenos of Lucian's era experiences in utilising his paideia to understand, and mock, the present. In the True Stories, on the other hand, this experience is fixed on parody of famous representations of truth, especially historiographical and philosophical. Thus, laughter, one of the two themes that motivate this volume, is represented in and provoked by the re-enactment of the past to undermine the cultural and literary trends of the present in which Lucian's readers, ancient and modern, find themselves. I will discuss key scenes from four of Lucian's works, the Charon, Icaromenippus, Nigrinus and especially the Verae Historiae, to demonstrate that fantastical journeys fail to provide insight into the operations of humanity without the inevitable accompaniment of literary history.