The Comic as Critic: Revenging Epicurus: A Study of Lucian's Art of Comic Narrative

Abstract

THE PRINCIPAL disagreement among modern readers of Lucian ultimately con cerns the context in which he is to be read. Should he be seen primarily against the background of the ancient literary traditions he draws on, as a fairly typical product of a highly rhetorical literary culture who offers variations on the old and familiar for mulae of sophistic literature? Or is he, on the contrary, essentially a topical satirist whose work can be properly understood only with reference to the second-century con troversies and cultural trends that inspired it? While recognizing the fundamental importance of Lucian's vast and varied literary borrowings and the force of topicality in some of his works, I believe that both these approaches reflect unnecessarily limited views of Lucian's artistic resources. Moreover, by emphasizing external references or compositional methods they tend to neglect the fact that Lucian's texts were written with the immediate aim of entertaining an audience of second-century traditionalists. Thus he must speak to contemporary concerns, to his audience's ideals and anxieties and to their own specific sense of the congruous and incongruous, but he does so through deft manipulation of conventions and comic representation of traditional material. In his best and most characteristic work, therefore, Lucian engages his reader's judgment with a quizzical, seriocomic technique: contemporaneity is expressed through a parodic