Dynamics of Laughter: Mithrobarzanes’ Disguise as a Magos in Lucian’s Menippus (original) (raw)
Related papers
In this paper, I focus on a particular aspect of the dramaturgy of Philemon and Diphilus, Menander’s two greatest rivals: dramatic ethography, i.e. the construction and delineation of comic characters, especially secondary professional and auxiliary figures, such as soldiers, cooks, parasites, and also pimps, doctors, and philosophers – the figures who surrounded the central families of the main comic plot and provided colourful humorous effect and resonance to the dramatic intrigue. Comic characterography was one of the foremost fields in which Menander displayed his innovative poetics and endeavoured to metamorphose the heritage of his craft in a sustained manner. In a number of plays, Menander consistently strove to upturn the standard ethological constitution and dramaturgical operation of the professional figures, as known from the established traditions of the Greek comic stage. Philemon and Diphilus do not appear to have handled their character creations in a comparable manner. As far as can be discerned from their extant remains, they designed the professional types of their plays in accordance with the established patterns and models of the comic repertoire. They reproduced standard features of the characterological tradition, or they developed and enriched the personages with additional humorous ideas, but always in consonance with their standard ethological constitution and scenic behaviour, as known from the earlier comic theatre. In this respect, Philemon and Diphilus adopted a more conventional approach to dramatic characters by comparison to the radical ethological experiments of Menander. Philemon and Diphilus anchored their work firmly within the heritage of earlier comedy and exploited the traditional stock characters, retaining the core of their established dramatic identity and reproducing many of their emblematic traits. This does not mean that Philemon and Diphilus limited themselves to imitating the earlier characterological tradition in a sterile manner, or that they did not display innovation and creativity in this direction. On the contrary, they evolved the standard figures of the earlier repertoire, enlarged their ethological horizon, and enriched them with new humorous elements and original ethopoeic ideas. Occasionally, they even created eccentric or heretic character parts, figures that react or revolt vis-à-vis the earlier stock personas of their kind and disclaim some of the typical facets of their hereditary stage identity. In all these endeavours, nevertheless, Philemon and Diphilus kept themselves within the range of the comic tradition, even though occasionally broadening its scope and renegotiating its long-standing borders. Unlike Menander, they do not seem to have striven to radically uproot and upturn the established characterological standards, refuse the core and substance of their comic inheritance, or metamorphose the repertoire beyond the point of recognition. Unsurprisingly, Philemon’s and Diphilus’ poetics, due to their moderately inventive and creatively conventional approach, proved in many cases more seminal and influential for later comic theatre than Menander’s groundbreaking and experimental ethopoeia. Conceptions such as the encyclopedic cook offering an inventory of the comic canon, the scientific cook posing as a medical expert, the soldier that envisages himself as a great imperial marshal, or the revival of philosophical satire, set off trends and tendencies that would become more or less widespread in subsequent comic theatre, from the ripe Hellenistic period to the Roman palliata.
For the Most Part Serious? The Comic Potential of Authorial Metalepsis from Aristophanes to Lucian
Mnemosyne, 2023
Scholarship has drawn a contrast between modern uses of metalepsis (illogical transgressions of narrative levels), which are frequently assigned comic effects, and their ancient counterparts, which are deemed more serious. This article argues that in the case of authorial metalepsis, a way of expression presenting the narrator as bringing about the effects he describes, the comic potential was already discovered in antiquity. Case studies from Aristophanes, Plato, Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, and Lucian demonstrate how ancient authors use authorial metalepsis to evoke paradoxical scenes of interaction across different levels of representation that support a mocking presentation of other authors.
The Shadow of Aristophanes: Hellenistic Poetry’s Reception of Comic Poetics
M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit and G.C. Wakker (eds.) (2018) Drama and Performance in Hellenistic Poetry. Hellenistica Groningana 23. Leuven (Peeters): 225-271.
The significance and influence of Attic drama on Hellenistic poetry has been a topic of little consistent focus in recent scholarship, reflecting the dominant academic emphasis on Hellenistic poetry as a written artefact, allegedly detached from any immediate context of performance. This paper attempts to reverse this trend by setting out the continuing vitality and cultural importance of drama in the Hellenistic world, before exploring the role of Attic Old Comedy as both a precedent and a model for Hellenistic poetry. Much of what is often thought distinctively ‘Hellenistic’ can in fact be shown to have clear old comic precedent: Old Comedy, just like Hellenistic poetry, is heavily intertextual (even to the point of re-appropriating Homeric hapax legomena); engages in frequent generic manipulation; displays a strong interest in literary history; emphasises its own literary and metrical innovations; and displays a self-conscious awareness of the tensions between textuality and performance. Yet more than this, Old Comedy also offered a key paradigm of agonistic self-fashioning and literary-critical terminology which Hellenistic poets could parrot, appropriate and invert. Hellenistic poets’ direct engagement with Old Comedy extended well beyond the famous literary agon of Aristophanes’ Frogs.
2024
This is my doctoral thesis - at last finished. It aims, as I put it, to 'lift the weight' of Aristophanes by redirecting our attentions to the 'other' comic poets, primarily through a thorough analysis of the Protagoras' reliance on Eupolis' Kolakes (or 'Flatterers'). The title would have been better written as 'an analysis of the Protagoras *through* Eupolis' Kolakes'. The thesis is in many ways the culmination of my previous work but far exceeds it in detail and in major components: the third chapter, for example, sees in the Kolakes a 'competition in wisdom' characteristic of poets and sophists, the likes of which we see in Aristophanes' Frogs. I argue Plato appropriated or alluded to that competition in the Protagoras when showing Socrates and Protagoras locked in combat. I also argue, in the fourth chapter, that the Gorgias and the Protagoras are *metaphysically* linked just in respect of Plato's understanding of flattery as a fundamental feature of sophistry (at a certain point in his career, to be clear). There is of course much to be done on it yet, but I especially look forward to developing the conclusion--Plato's response to himself on the Middle Comic stage in the 'Digression' of the Theaetetus (unfortunately I had to rely on Farmer's - albeit excellent - translations of Middle Comic passages re: Plato due to haste; also I'm still perfecting my written 'British English' over my natural Americanisms; something also happened with the Word document after uploading here in terms of formatting; some infelicities, etc). In any case, a close analysis of Plautus and other sources with their profound similarities to the dialogue form (in the other Socratics too, not just in Plato) will help us, I aim to show in future, understand the *origin and development* of Sokratikoi Logoi as such, and perhaps also the development of comedy too throughout the period of Plato's literary and philosophical life. There are too many people to thank here for helping me with this project over the years, and only a few could be recognised in the document alone. Here is a snippet from the abstract not included in this document. It contains the spirit of the work: This thesis has two aims. The first is to reorient the scholarly norm when thinking about Plato in relation to the genre of Greek Comedy. That is, since modern scholarship started taking Plato’s relationship to comedy seriously as a means of analysing his work, it has been dominated by the thought and writings of Aristophanes, especially his extant Clouds. I aim to show that such scholarship has become overburdened by this figure. Socrates, for example, was a character of concern for many poets of the fifth century, those contemporary with Aristophanes. What, then, can or should we say about Plato’s reactions to the ‘other’ comic poets surrounding him both before and during his life? I thus aim in this thesis to ‘lift the weight’ of Aristophanes from the standard scholarly procedure in the discourse on Plato’s intertextual dealings with comedy.'
The literary history of mythological comedy, from Epicharmus, the inventor of the genre, to the Attic dramatists, is permeated by intertextual relations and cross-references between individual authors. Cratinus took over the Epicharmean form of myth burlesque and combined it with political satire of Athenian public life. Cratinus’ mythical plays owe to Epicharmus a number of comic themes and dramaturgical patterns: the portrayal of the cannibalistic Cyclops as a gourmet, the games of disguise and role-playing, the sophisticated meta-literary exploitation of the epic tradition and of the spectators’ Homeric knowledge. Aristophanes avoided full-scale myth burlesque in his acme, but he included individual vignettes of mythical parody in his complex polyphonic plots. The scene of the three gods’ embassy at the finale of the Birds employs all the typical techniques of mythological comedy. The new volume of the journal "Veleia" is now available online (https://ojs.ehu.eus/index.php/Veleia), including the proceedings of a wonderful conference on parody and comic exploitation of myth, held last year at the University of the Basque Country, at Vitoria-Gasteiz. Many thanks to my colleagues Marco Antonio Santamaría and María José García Soler, who organised the event and brought us all together. Marco Antonio Santamaría has also magisterially curated the proceedings.
Imagining Divine Laughter in Homer and Lucian [AUTHOR'S FINAL MS]
M. Alexiou and D. Cairns, eds., Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After (Edinburgh University Press)., 2017
This paper employs a historicising approach to laughter, of the kind elaborated more fully in my book Greek Laughter: a Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (2008), in order to investigate some important but elusive aspects of the Greek mythico-religious imagination. My central focus is on depictions of divine laughter at opposite ends of the spectrum of ancient Greek culture, in Homeric epic and Lucianic satire. What does it mean to imagine gods who can laugh at and/or with one another, as well as at and/or with humans? Is such laughter a marker of distance between divine and human conditions of existence, or does the idea of laughter serve to limit the gods by subjecting them to inescapably human evaluation? I reject models of explanation (both ancient and modern) which treat the laughter of the Olympians either as a contamination of an originally purer conception of the gods or as consistently expressing a serenely detached state of immortality. I argue, instead, that divine laughter reflects tensions between the literal and the symbolic which are intrinsic to anthropomorphising Greek religious sensibilities, and that far from conveying blissful detachment divine laughter characterises gods who are heavily invested in the conflicts of the human world.
In Aristotle’s Poetics praise and blame are used as grammatological tools for the classification of poetic genres. Aristotle distinguishes two basic forms of blame poetry, iambus and comedy, and places them in a line of teleological development. The comic writers of fifth-century Athens (Cratinus, Aristophanes) expressed similar views through their theatrically enlivened poetological conceptions. In this respect, they may reflect theories of contemporary intellectuals, who had perceived the generic connection between iambic poetry and comedy. A determinative factor that points to an actual genetic connection between these forms is the protodramatic character of early iambography. Many iambic poems take the form of a poetic monologue delivered by an invented character or role, whom the performer of the poem impersonates before the audience, thus turning the iambic composition into monodrama. An interesting aspect shared by Archaic iambus and comedy is the depiction of humorous human types. The large but cowardly general (Archilochus fr. 114) forecasts the miles gloriosus of the comic stage. The taxiarch of Aristophanes’ Peace (1172‒1190) develops and enriches this Archilochean miniature. The flatterer or parasite, who appears uninvited at rich banquets, is sketched by Asius (fr. 14) and Archilochus (fr. 124). Eupolis (Kolakes fr. 172) places an analogous characterological sketch on the lips of the flatterers themselves, thus turning the iambic lampoon into sarcastic self-presentation. The humorous poem Margites, which was akin to iambic mockery, introduced the archetype of the foolish loser who fails in all his tasks; Hipponax describes similar failed characters, who fall victim to humiliating mishaps. Variants of the same type are developed in lampooning Aristophanic songs, such as the denunciation of the incompetent Antimachus (Acharnians 1150‒1173). The personages of the iambus are usually satirical portraits of individuals from the poet’s social milieu. However, the iambographer invests his characters with universality and upgrades them into diachronic characterological archetypes. In this respect, the iambus also forecasts the invective of Old Comedy.
Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies , 2016
This paper attempts to analyze the curious effects of the comic scenes in The Castle of Otranto (1764) through a close reading of Walpole's famous prefaces to the novel. The comic scenes evoke an incongruous dramatic response and contradict the claims made in the prefaces, according to which comic elements highlight dramatic ones. While being often thought of as indicative of a general aesthetic failure, the comic elements in this foundational text of the Gothic are indeed subtle, complex and artful. More precisely, Walpole's curious use of laughter makes a complex appeal to an extra-dramatic level which undercuts the reader's identification with the dramatic situations represented in the novel.