Year: 1987
Type: article
Abstract: Vainglorious Menippus In Lucian'sDialogues of the Dead> aXka.Tcapct vcKpoiq SoyixaTa Lucian, DMort.6(20).3("Pythagoras"). JOELC.RELfflANLucian's Dialogues of the Dead are known to the world in two different ways.The most important is through their modem descendants: they are part of Lucian's massive influence on Erasmus, and are frequently imitated in the French and German literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.^Theother is through the study of the literary era that gave them birth: the Greek Second Sophistic, its principles of literary imitation, itsallegiance to rhetoric, and its artful irreality.Of these two I am not competent to address the former, except to suggest that the familiarity that Western readers inevitably feel when reading these infernal dialogues does much to obscurewhat is strange, fantastic, and poetic.But I take issue here with the latter, for the investigation of Lucian's habits of composition and use of motifs, so spectacularly (if sometimes tendentiously) documented by the monographs of Graham Anderson,^runs the risk of reducing the study of Lucian to a contemplation (and sometimes a rather joyless contemplation) of a secondrate artist's notion of art for art's sake, and would ask us to see as the only content in Lucian the erection of a literary facade and the clever adoption of pretenses and poses.The words of critical appreciation become such things as "graceful," "effortless Atticism," "sophistication," and numerous variations that suggest that we have to do only with shadow and not with * An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a public lecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana in March 1987.I should like to thank Professor Bracht Branham for his valuable suggestions toward its revision.^Christopher Robinson, Lucian and his Influence in Europe (Chapel Hill 1979), pp.165-97 (Erasmus), 144-63 (18th and 19th centuries).^G.Anderson, Lucian, Theme and Variation in the Second Sophistic (Mnemosyne Supplement 41 [Leiden 1976]); Studies in Lucian's Comic Fiction (Mnemosyne Supplement 43[1976]); see the illuminating but unnecessarily scathing reviews by J. Hall, Journal ofHellenic Studies 100 (1980), 229-32.' C. P.Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian (Cambridge, Mass.and London 1986), provides a useful introduction to the trends and vicissitudes in Lucianic scholarship and the appreciation of Lucian's literary qualities in his Preface, pp.v-vii, and Introduction, pp.1-5.See also the analysis of the Alexander by B. Branham, "The Comic as Critic: Revenging Epicurus-a Study of Lucian's Art of Comic Narrative," Classical Antiquity 3 (1984), 143-63; Chapter XVIII, "Lucien en son temps," in L. Robert, A Travers I'Asie Mineure, Poetes et Prosateurs, Monnaies Grecques, Voyageurs et Geographie, Bibliolheque des ficoles Fran^aises d'Athenes et de Rome 239 (Paris 1980), pp.393^36; and J. HaU, Lucian's Satire, Mcmographs in Classical Studies (New York 1981).^Hall, Lucian's Satire , pp. 64-150, devotes a long chapter to "Lucian and Menippean Satire" which concerns itself entirely with the question of Lucian's probable dependence on Menippus, not literary analysis; Jones, op.cit., does not discuss the Dialogues of the Dead at all.
Author: Joel C. Relihan
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1523486033