The use of 'spoudaiogeloion' in Greek and Roman literature 9783111559506, 9783111188867

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STUDIES

IN CLASSICAL

LITERATURE,

6

T H E USE OF SPOUDAIOGELOION IN G R E E K A N D R O M A N LITERATURE

by

LAWRENCE

G I A N G R A N D E

University of Ottawa

1972 MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1972 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

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Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

The reader is invited to share in an excursion into our remote literary heritage to study one aspect of reality of the written word: the serio-comic in antiquity. "Nec in eadem intentione aequaliter retinenda mens est, sed ad ioca devocanda. Cum puerulis Socrates ludere non erubescebat, et Cato vino laxabat animum curis publicis fatigatum, et Scipio triumphale illud ac » militare corpus movebat ad numeros... (Seneca, De Tranq. Animi, 17.4)

PREFACE

At the end of Plato's Symposium Aristodemus, the narrator, tells how, when waking up after the night's pleasurable indulgences in discussion and drinking, he heard Socrates saying argumentatively to Aristophanes and Agathon, who were nodding with drowziness from a night well spent in debate, that the genius of comedy was the same as that of tragedy, and that the writer of tragedy could also be a writer of comedy. Aristotle himself (Poetics 5. 1449a) conceded a similarity in the accidental origin of both tragedy and comedy, though the characters represented are different. Tragedy originated with the leaders of the dithyramb, while comedy grew out of a fusion of many primitive elements, and especially phallic songs and phallophoric processions. Both genres developed from improvisations. How the real-life Socrates developed the above-mentioned thesis will forever remain a mystery, but it is known that later thinkers like Lucretius and Hobbes have entertained the reflection that these forms of literature ran together. Moral incongruity, appearing in the form of envy, wrath, avarice, hypocrisy, intemperance, prodigality, vanity, and a host of other human weaknesses may form the basis of either comedy or tragedy, and this may have led Aristotle, for whom foibles would be the substratum for comedy only, to his observation that universality is proper both to tragedy and comedy, for each embodies the type rather than the individual. Yet, when there is a disequilibrium — a tension of incompatibles — be it physical, mental, moral, or social, and the disorder is of a harmless nature, we have comedy, an attempt to restore order to the conflict between reason and emotion. When, on the other

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hand, the disorder that threatens is harmful, we have tragedy. If equilibrium is restored to this disorder of body, mind, spirit, or manners, the resultant adjustment or harmony achieved is in the nature of contemplative delight, which is the end of art. An artificial method of reinstating this equilibrium is through the stylistic method of spoudaiogeloion, which combines the serious and the comic into a consonance which allows us to laugh at the moral incongruities of life, withal rectifying our perspective, making us more sensible and self-critical, and enhancing our ethical and aesthetic experience. Since our main concern here is with the nature and extent of the use of the serio-comic in the Graeco-Roman literary tradition, we might begin by citing briefly some opinions regarding this stylistic method uttered by the chief Greek philosophers, not excluding references to ethical comedy in the pre-Socratic thinkers. Aristotle repeats the statement of Gorgias (Rhet. 3.18.7.1419 b3) to the effect that the orator should counter his opponent's seriousness with laughter, and vice-versa. The orator could quiet the minds of his audience and dispose them favorably toward him by showing his justice, humanity, and courtesy. Laughter used properly could win him the favor of his listeners and judge. Plato had defined the function of laughter as that of refreshing the mind by interrupting earnestness, or rendering the serious more easily intelligible by contrast with a humorous view (Laws 816d-e). The humorist's comment on contradictions makes them more readily tolerable, or at least understandable. While Aristophanes was conscious that laughter could serve a serious moral purpose, and Plato would seem to justify moderate laughter as a means of relaxation and as a method for attacking vice and folly (Rep. 452d) as well as a means of understanding serious things (Laws 816d-e), it is primarily among the later Cynics that laughter and moral teaching become formally allied in order that through the comic a serious lesson may be imparted. Spoudaiogeloion is a reaction to the harshness of the earlier Cynics who followed the stricter teachings of Diogenes of Sinope, and it includes the practice of self-reproach as well as that of revilement of others.

PREFACE

9

Crates of Thebes, the third head of the Cynic school, instituted a kindlier philosophy, a hedonistic Cynicism which opposes the harshness of his predecessors, and it is to this that we owe the origin of spoudaiogeloion which is the kunikos tropos or Cynic manner in popular philosophic exposition. Horace expresses allegiance to this method (Satire 1.1.24-25): "quamquam ridentem dicere verum/quid vetat?" His twenty-seventh verse is ironic: "sed tamen amoto quaeramus seria ludo." To Aristotle (Ethics 10.6.7.1176 b27), happiness, the summum bonum, does not consist in amusement or play (paidia), which is like anapausis or relaxation, but in a virtuous and serious life, inasmuch as serious things (he establishes straightway a hierarchy of values) are better than laughter and amusement, and relaxation is merely a means to further activity. Though laughter is necessary to life, it is subordinate to its serious conduct, and it is from this that we derive our conception of the relative values of seriousness and humor. Laughter for reforming purposes, used prudently and opportunely, as in feasts and symposia to rebuke luxury and extravagant living, for example, soon became a highly commendable device to the Cynics and spoudaiogeloion after Crates' time. The philosophers of Crates' day, such as Bion of Borysthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, and Timon of Phlius, became fully aware that serious things can be better understood by means of laughter, and that laughter is an effective weapon against vice and foolish behavior. By a creative wilful act, one should blend comic and tragic views. The earlier precepts of the pre-Socratics had not been rationalized into a systematic ethic of the laughable as we might have received in a second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, but did reveal an interest in ethical comedy for rebuking evil. The dicta of the preSocratics did, however, seek the improvement of conduct, for example, Chilon and Democritus' "Do not laugh at the unfortunate", Solon's "Be gentle with your friends", and Periander's "Revile with the idea of becoming friendly". Cleobulus' "Do not laugh at the jester, for you will be hated by those who are ridiculed" is in the same vein. Democritus, the "laughing philosopher", had

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illustrated the philosophic attitude of laughter at men's foibles, but his attitude was passive. It was only later, with the spoudaiogeloioi, that good-natured laughter asserted a moral purpose. Now the dulce and the utile were combined formally, and the utile was reinforced by means of the dulce. Exciting laughter and giving wise advice to the reader or listener were, after the formulation of a definite theory, subsumed under one term: spoudaiogeloion. The spoudaiogeloioi, apparently aiming first at entertainment and secondly at earnestness, established the stylistic setting for humor and invective. It took the form of ironic humor wherein the truth is spoken, half-concealed by a jest. Now irony, like the sermo of Horatian and Lucilian fame, partakes of both seriousness and humor. Its method is that of suggestion (huponoia), rather than that of frank declaration or license of tongue (parrhésia). Irony also harmonizes best with the ease and friendliness of the sermo since it employs laughter and earnestness subtly. Goodnatured laughter belongs to the sermo, which is quieting in its nature, and didactic in its purpose. The type of humor represented by the facetus and the urbanus, and in most cases by the eirón, was good-natured. The eirón is a dissembler who disparages himself as less intelligent than his interlocutor. Cicero says of him whom Timon had defined as a humorist, (Acad. 2.5.15): "Socrates autem de se ipse detrahens in disputatione plus tribuebat iis quos volebat refellere. Ita cum aliud diceret atque sentiret, libenter uti solitus est ea dissimulatione quam Graeci vocant". And, at another point in his voluminous writings, in De Oratore 2.269, irony (urbana dissimulatió) is thus described: "cum toto genere orationis severe ludas, cum aliter sentias ac loquare". With irony, the type of wit most appropriate to the sermo, are associated such terms as dulcis, facetus, urbanus, elegans, lepos, and humcmitas. It is interesting to note (with Radermacher, Weinen und Lachen, 96), that Plato's teleós sóphrón is the self-perfected man who has, in his battle with pleasures and sorrows, achieved a victory over them, and for whom we may infer that the comic and the serious have combined (cf. Laws 647d). Plato's eirón, Socrates, is an ideal type of man (Symposium 216e). For Aristotle, the cater spoudaios, the man who is always in harmony with himself and

PREFACE

11

who therefore has achieved the golden mean — that is of virtue — is the ideal. At least, so taught the Peripatetics. To Plato, further, men who create only images through the medium of painting, plastic, poetry and music, are indulging in paidia, amusement or play (Laws 889cd). Again, in Rep. 388e, he opposes loud laughter and disapproves of poets who create men controlled by the ludicrous, or who represent the gods as Homer had done (Rep. 389). Regarding the cathartic effect of laughter, a theory of catharsis to which Aristotle likely subscribes, Plato affirms that a disturbance of the soul is produced, whereas Aristotle counters that laughter is a pleasant and useful tickling (kinesis) of the soul, which improves and heartens it. Therefore, while Plato makes laughter derive from envy (Phileb. 48b: "we see the envious man rejoicing in the misfortunes of his neighbours"), Aristotle would say it comes from benevolence, philanthropy, and the good disposition of the soul. Thus laughter would result, for Aristotle, in serenity of the soul and the disposition to do good. In another context we note that, for Plato, man's life would seem to be a game not worth taking seriously, though Plato is not a philogelds (Rep. 388e). True, the average person may hold the false view that man is a puppet — this is analogous to the viewpoint of many Greeks, particularly Pindar and the three major tragedians who pessimistically saw man as a shadowy dream, ephemeral, made of earth and destined to return thereto — but Plato palliated the severity of this commonplace by attributing it only to the average man. Although it is not certain to the philosopher whether man is merely a toy or was rather created for serious action, yet man can still take serious things seriously (Laws 803c). However game-like life may be, it may be played and lived honorably. Man is a miracle of the gods, whether you prefer to consider him fashioned out of play or seriousness (Laws 644d). Therefore, our existence is a mixture of joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy (Phileb. 50), the latter, indeed, to such a degree that we have no need of tragic poetry (Laws 817b). The mixture is further represented in oxymoronic expressions such as paizein spoude (Xenophon's Cyrop. 6.1.6) and Plato's spoude charientizetai (Apology 24 c4). Chapter

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five of Xenophon's Symposium, an agón on beauty between Critoboulos and Socrates, is considered to be in the serio-comic vein, and only Antisthenes preserves strict solemnity, in contrast to Socrates. The serious playfulness of the eirón is apparent in the mixture of the serious and the pleasant in Plato's (.Apology and Crito) description of the last days of Socrates, and it may be advanced that Socrates is a spoudaiogeloios. As to the etymological significance of yeXàco, Plebe conjectures (but see P. Pucci's strictures, Belfagor 3, 1956, 352-355): Gli Ariani ... al loro arrivo in Grecia portano con se una radice della loro lingua che indica ancora indistintamente parecchie cose tra loro connesse: lo splendore, la serenità, il riso ... della gioia, della serenità della natura ... gai-gel ... sin dall'Oriente, dove infatti la si ritrova anche presso gli Armeni calr-calu, a significare appunto 'splendore', 'riso' (cf. E. Boisacq, Diet. étym. de la langue grecque, 1961, p. 143). II. 19.362: yèXaaae 8è Jt&aa rcepì x9(bv. Hesiod's Theog. 40 speaks of Zeus' dwelling (the sky) which laughs (as the lilylike voice of the goddesses floats through it). Od. 10.94: ...XeuKf| 8'ijv à|iv SeSjiTmivoi'

6 . 2 4 4 :

Od. 14:13: gvxoaGev 5'ai>X/fte avxpeouq SuoKaiSsKa 7ioisi 14: TtXriaiov hXkx\kay\, ebvaq aucriv. tv 8£ ¿Kdcrap 15:7tevxi|Kovxa true«; x a H a i e u v d 6 e < ; £pxax6a>vxo, 16: 0r|Xevai xoKdSei;.

Ilium and its kingdom, Trojan pride and heroism had fallen. Ithaca's kingdom was still thriving; Eumaeus had 600 breeding sows, and 360 boars outside the yard — despite the inroads of the suitors — and plenty of other livestock. In a matter of days, Odysseus would again occupy his throne, and Laertes, his proud father, could say: (Od. 24.514-515: Dear gods, what a happy day for me; I truly rejoice; My son, and my son's Son are vying with one another in valor.)

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The cultivation of aristocratic ideals reaches its culmination in these words. Archaic Greek values have been achieved. Crates wrote many parodies; his "fragment 10" in Paignia mocked Solon's prayer to the Muses (fr. 13), and his Descent to Hades — a katabasis in which Stilpon is mocked — was a parody of Homer's Nekyia in Od. 11: The Platonico-pythagorean somasSma parable is now a commonplace, and jokes are made about it (cf. Diels, A23). Since parody is an important element of satire and closer to spoudaiogeloion than any other satiric element, we must credit Homer with entertaining this element and approximating the sophisticated and kindly serio-comic approach whereby spleen is softened by good will when we read examples like the above-quoted ones. It is in such a moment of self-parody that Homer approaches spoudaiogeloion, for parody, being the imitation of a serious passage for humorous purposes, became a favorite technique of the humorist-philosopher Crates of Thebes. Menippus of Gadara, probably influenced by Metrocles, Crates' brother-inlaw (cf. Dudley, History of Cynicism, p. 69), and Lucian, with their Nekyia and Dialogues of the Dead respectively, made fun of all human philosophies and gave us scenes of rollicking humor at the expense of those in the underworld, not unlike Aristophanes in Frogs. Menippus adapted the dialogue for comic and satiric purposes. While previous Greek literature had used stories of the underworld for the enforcement of lofty philosophical lessons, Crates and Menippus banalized these myths and showed how miserable were their philosophical enemies in their subsequent life below. Menippus judged all men mad, and found wealth, the pedantry of learning, and the vanity of beauty all equally absurd (cf. Dudley, ibid., p. 74). The only people who enjoy the afterlife are the poor and the Cynics, because both in this world and the next they have no illusions, Menippus, who was komodopoios, gelotopoios, and spoudaiogeloios, implied. Francis R. Bliss, in "Odyssey Eight" (Bucknell Review 16, Dec., 1968) would have us believe that Homer indulges in social satire in revealing the "crass bourgeois attitude of the gods who are constantly mouthing proverbial expressions in support of what they say" (p. 68). But what is the need to explain the morality of

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the gods? They can neither illustrate nor set standards for human morality. If the poem is about marital fidelity, as well it is in one particular aspect, a happy hedonist minstrel Phaeacian with his story of adultery unpunished is not logically a source for moral education. This divine adultery story is pre-Homeric; Homer did not invent it out of whole cloth. Bliss also assumes too much when he declares the story is told to impart a lesson : "the human marriage relationship and its destruction in faithlessness" (p. 64), and whether the Phaeacians are morally weak because of "material wealth and well-being" (p. 71), and as such are the victims of Homeric social satire, is debatable. We may agree with Bliss that the poem has many moralizing sermons on marital fidelity, even as the Iliad is concerned with martial friendship, but to assume that a story about erring divinity is to be taken seriously by initiated hearers is going a little too far. The Homeric audience wanted to laugh, so they were given food for laughter, even as the Yugoslav audience customarily asks the guslari to make it laugh. I suspect Homer redivivus would laugh boisterously were he to hear that a modern critic has foisted social satire on his work, however fashionably. Homer did set the stage for social satire by his use of the various comic devices which were later to become vital elements to the spoudaiogeloion type of literature where the objective is reform, the weapons the benevolent smile and wise advice, the teacher, usually, a popular philosophical propagandist. These devices were wit, irony, hyperbole and meiosis, sarcasm, invective, caricature, and gentle, thoughtful humor. The soupçons of parody in Odyssey 14 and possibly in the Circe episode are the closest Homer comes to the serio-comic which, as such, is post-Homeric. It devolved upon the Cynics of the Alexandrian age to accept the role of instituting gnomic poetry and prose in moral education to improve man's conduct. Two important bridges from Homer to the Cynics were Aristophanes and Socrates, both of whom were interested in the destiny of the common man and skirted along the serio-comic. Aristophanes depicted in Birds a successful blockade of Heaven when few deities, great or small, escape a ribbing, while the underdog birds, i.e. men, take on new importance. Socrates,

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in his life and behavior, was at times a spoudaiogeloios, a serious humorist who practised the art of the good-natured eirôn, Plato's ideal type of man {cf. Symp. 216 e). These men served as steppingstones for the Cynics in their ascent toward the therapeutic earnest jest, quite an advance over preceding expressions of the comic spirit, and the instinctive kinds of comic sensibility of a Homer. Homer's playfulness is, for the most part, far from that of a sophisticated Aristophanes whose work is an intellectual comedy of idea. But, like Aristophanes, Homer enjoyed a good joke at times. Thus, Homer's fondness for a joke is on the threshold of spoudaiogeloion, although not much more than a germinal sign. Some other types of persiflage and laughter in Homer? The laugh of joy, for instance, derives from the superiority felt by the victor in a military combat who has laid his opponent low. Polydamas exults over the slain Panthous (77. 14.454-457), and Patroclus jokes about Cebriones after killing him (77. 16.745-750). Even the infliction of a mere wound may be followed by a laugh of joy, as when Paris pierces Diomedes Tydides' foot with an arrow {II. 11.378), although, judging by Diomedes' reproach, we may scarcely consider Paris to be a superior warrior. The laughter of scorn is illustrated by Homer in Odysseus' angry and harsh derision of the weak and defeated, bandy-legged, lame, and partially bald rebel (there is an element of eirôneia here, since he himself is disguised as bald! Od. 14.430) Thersites {II. 2.246). Homer's comic irony is shown by Diomedes' mockery {ibid. 5.349) of Aphrodite, Aeneas' mother, as she defends her son with her splendid oriental peplum {II. 5.315-316) and, being wounded in the hand, uneasily flees {II. 5.352). Here no ethical purpose is intended — we are simply experiencing the brutal force of primitive "comicity" of an unsophisticated age. The laughter inspired by the panicky flight of the fearful Odysseus {II. 8.91-98) is scornful of weakness; yet, even here Homer has no apparent reforming motive. I have already mentioned the skômmata and loidoriai of the gelôtopoioi at the banquets, buffoons who entertained the guests as they imbibed the "grape" {cf. Od. 14.463-465). Like the clowns of a later age, such as those at medieval courts, they produced a

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convivial atmosphere of hilarity, but had no ethical reform in mind. The sophistic antikeimenoi logoi were amusing disputations held at banquets to entertain and relax the diners — these exercises, too, preceded our notion of spoudaiogeloion, which entails a serious counterpart to mere jocularity. Intrigue, cleverness, and furtive love functioning at the expense of honesty, credulity, and marital devotion are illustrated in the lives of the Ionian Greeks and in their literature, but the asbestos gelds aroused when Ares and Aphrodite are caught in their misadventure by the cuckold Hephaestus (Od. 8.282-299), an incident also reflected in the unfortunate-in-love Margites, is again an example of the laughter of derision, a device in Homer's vast comic repertoire, following upon the discovery of the ridiculous. The non-Homeric Margites is a stupid fool, a good-for-nothing unfortunate lover or, perhaps, phony intellectual. Homer's Hephaestus is similarly worthy of scorn, although it may be argued that the asbestos gelds is pure amusement in Homer, as at the end of the first book of the Iliad where there is no moral complication. It is a ridicule of deformity. In addition to the laugh of scorn, the laugh of joy, the comedy of derision, and comic irony, caricature and invective may be employed as a paired aggressive device for eliciting comic effects. The latter two, caricature and invective, are evident when Thersites' {II. 2.217) and Hephaestus' (II. 18.371) lameness is taunted, but surely not that of the Prayers (II. 9.403); the beggar Irus (Od. 18.1-3), having provoked the disguised Odysseus to a fist-fight, causes all the suitors to laugh heartily, for he is a glutton; and the man heavy with wine is an object of reproach in an invective devoid of comical elements, at least to the modern reader. Eurymachus, as mentioned above, makes sport of Odysseus' baldness, drawing laughter from the other suitors (Od. 18.350-355) when he refers to the light-reflecting quality of a hairless pate. These examples suggest the cruel and savage origin of laughter, a far cry from the more sophisticated and later development of humorous laughter at oneself which will first appear in Aristophanes (cf. Clouds 443-451). Homeric humor is rarely benevolent, but more commonly a cruel, barbarian gesture against gluttons, drunks, antagonists and repres-

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sors. Invective, as I have said, is the avowed intention to humiliate. Caricature here is perhaps not quite on the threshold of humoristic satire, for one is laughing at form or automatic gesture with no intent to reform. A type of spoudaiogeloion, parody, was also shown to figure in the Homeric poems. Mythically oriented, this parody appears, perhaps, in the Odyssey in Odysseus' insincerity and duplicity, and in the pseudo-Homeric Margites.1 The parody element is at any rate, forceful in the post-Homeric Batrachomyomachia, the mockheroic struggle between frogs and mice in the form of an animal fable. Despite the occasional intrusion of the spoudaiogeloion element of parody into the Homeric writings, however, it would be inaccurate to conclude that Homer is a poet of the spoudaiogeloion variety, for his "comicity" does not have a didactic intent. Homer's methods of producing comedy do not include the satiric element, although we do meet with wit, irony, and sarcasm in his epics.

B. THE IAMBOGRAPHERS

Where invective — when combined with caricature, for example, — has a comical element and is not utterly violent, we may speak of the presence of the serio-comic element. However, in the case of the first three authors — Archilochus of Paros, Xenophanes, and Semonides of Amorgos — here briefly discussed, there is little "comicity". Archilochus of Paros (born c. 729 B.C.), creator of the iambic meter and earliest recorded satiric writer of Greece, leads the iambists in a rather brazen, cynical, and, indeed, heavy-handed application of the earnest jest, for frank declaration (parrhesia) without trace of suggestion (huponoia) or dissimulation (eironeia) characterizes his method. Archilochus, in fact, uses loidoria rather than geloion, and that is why his style, as well as that of the whole group of iambographers who followed him, was often characterized by such words as hubris and pikros. It has been, further, commonly held that the 1

Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 4.1448 b37.

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characteristic emotion of these "wasps" or "dogs", as they were called, was one of anger. Their motives were, then, presumably not unselfish, but directed toward the gratification of personal revenge. In a fragment 2 referring to the ideal general, now unhomeric, Archilochus "debunks" the conventional preferences of his own and former ages which placed favoring emphasis on the heroic type of epic fame. But these preferences turn out to be illusionary, if not hypocritical, and he opposes them with a sounder judgment: I don't like a tall general, nor a longlegged, wide-striding one, Nor one who is proud of his curls, or sports a dandy shave; Rather give me a short one, and even with bow-legs, If he be sturdy on his feet and full of heart. The contrast between the true general and the tall, straddlinglegged general who may well be a poseur prefigures the theoretical conflict between appearance and reality in which it will be shown that common opinion may indeed have a delusionary character. An elegiac writer of later date, Xenophanes ( f l . c. 535 B.C.), a mystic philosopher conscious of right order (eunomia) and of himself, attacks the aristocratic, agonistic culture of the Hellenic polis in which the victor at Olympia has become the successor to the Homeric hero. He also assails the glory of panhellenic excellence which contributes nothing to the right order of the polis. Xenophanes thus enables us to understand Plato's appeal of later days directed to the Athenians in the Republic for spiritual reform and the newly sought excellence : sophia.s In other passages Xenophanes, using the form of silloi (short satirical poems), attacks the improper presentation of the gods. He discovered that due to naïveté the early poets Homer and Hesiod had ascribed to them shameful and disgraceful acts prac' '

Fr. 58, Edmonds' Lyra Graeca: Elegy and Iambus, vol. I. J. M. Edmonds' Lyra Graeca has the fr. of Xenophanes in elegy B2.

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tised by men. In this respect, too, Plato's strictures in the Republic are but echoes of the Xenophantic sophia. Semonides of Amorgos' psogos gunaikon (fr. 7), an ungallant satire against women of all types, is elegant, though condemning. He ends: "Zeus made this supreme evil — women; even though they seem to be of good, when one has got one, she becomes a plague". Semonides ( f l . c. 630 B.C.) here demonstrates his characteristic spirit of bitterness, but caricature relieves the numbing effect of invective. The satire which Archilochus had unleashed against private enemies was extended by Semonides to a whole sex, though later Hipponax of Ephesus (fl. 542-537 B.C.) would restore satire to its pristine function in his attack against the two Chian sculptors, Bupalus and Athenis. We learn from the Stobaeus collection of Semonides' works that the latter observed the life of men with the deepest pessimism. He felt that man, ignorant of what the future might bring, should leave the issue with Zeus. He was thus closer to tears than to laughter. Like Heraclitus, the unhappy, tearful philosopher, Semonides must have experienced moments when he could not restrain his tears at the dreary spectacle of human life. The iambists, ever personal and spiteful, were characterized by phlegma and choli. Unconcerned with social values, they sought only to gratify their desire for personal revenge. Archilochus' fragment 65 becomes the motto of iambic poetry: "I know one important thing, to answer with evil reproaches the one who treats me badly." We may conclude from the foregoing indications, therefore, that like the subsequent vicious epigrams of Catullus, the epodes of Horace, and Juvenalian satire, the iambics of Archilochus, like those of Hipponax of Ephesus and Semonides of Amorgos, belong to the province of invective, for their jesting is not subject to the restraints of reason. Over-serious, the iambographers are unrestrained, unrefined, and unbalanced. They appear to be inveighing against mortal enemies. They remind us of the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus who could not check his tears at the spectacle of human life and strife, and we can appreciate why the conservative Seneca the Younger admonishes his readers (Dial.

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9.15.2): "Democritum potius imitemur quam Heraclitum; hie enim quotiens in publicum processerat, flebat, ille ridebat."4 Montaigne was later to express Seneca's viewpoint, for he preferred to scoff at life's paradoxes rather than regret his reverses. Horace's early poetry, the Epodes, were very polemic in spirit, and we recall that in referring to Hipponax he uses the words acer and hostis — Horace too feels that revenge is sweet — in Epodes 6.14. The Palatine Anthology describes the phlegma and chole of Archilochus and Hipponax. It is little wonder, then, that Aristotle condemned the mordant tone of the aggressive iambists, and praised instead the pseudo-Homeric Margites as an example of the true comic spirit of parody (Poetics 5.1448 b37), as well as Crates (not the Cynic philosopher of a later age), an Old Comedy playwright whose vis comica he seems to appreciate. This Crates first abandoned personal lampoons by substituting type comedies (c/. Poetics 5.1449 b7). Early Greek literary criticism was subject to the belief that poetry's purpose is to teach pleasurably, and this theory of didacticism explains why the gnomic and lyric poets were continually quoted for their advice, and why the dramatists were considered didaskaloi. The confusion of the literary critics, running through all ancient criticism from that of Aristophanes to Quintilian, was in seeking to discover how far instruction could be combined with pleasure. This pleasure-instruction formula of the ancient critics influenced much of their contemporary writing, and poets themselves consequently wrote with pleasure and teaching as two-fold aims. However, before Aristophanes, some poets had neglected this two-fold aspect of literary creation, and it was such neglect of the educational import of poetry which elicited from Xenophanes, in * Cf. Juvenal, Sat. 10.28-34: iamne igitur laudas quod de sapientibus alter ridebat, quotiens de limine moverat unum protuleratque pedem, flebat contrarius auctor? sed facilis cuivis rigidi censura cachinni: mirandum est unde ille oculis suffecerit umor. perpetuo risu pulmonem agitare solebat Democritus,...

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the sixth century B.C., his scathing attack on Homer and Hesiod who had attributed to the Olympians all that is shameful and blameworthy to men — stealing, adultery, and mutual deceit. Similarly, neither Theognis of Megara nor other gnomic poets, e.g. iambographers, could resolve why the bad should prosper, while the just were miserable. C. OLD COMEDY AND EARLY EXPRESSION OF THE COMIC SPIRIT

Aristophanes (c. 450- c. 385 B.C.), as indicated in Chapter I, regarded Euripides as a degrader of human ideals, for he equated religion and morality with education and regarded instruction as the self-evident function of the drama. He felt that a tragedy which neglected to provide good advice to the spectators was immoral, and that Euripides was just such an immoralist. Thus, when in the Clouds Phidippides is depicted as an adherent to the new educational theories, Aristophanes is actually attacking Euripides, even as he does in the Thesmophoriazousae. Old Comedy, then, had a strong moral intent. Subject in its later days to the prohibition of personal abuse and influenced by the Epicharmian type-comedy, it prefigured the development of a balanced commingling of the serious and comic into spoudaiogeloion. Old Comedy satirized individuals and travestied political figures, revealing the comic as aggressive and displaying its two forms of attack as caricature and invective. Old Comedy shows, for example, what occurs when the magico-apotropaic transvestism5 of man into animal develops into the masquerading comic mananimal caricature. In the caricature of both physical and moral qualities defects are accentuated by the dikin ("in the manner of") formula, followed by the name of the animal. A recent book by Giusto Monaco, Paragoni Burleschi degli Antichi (Palermo, Palumbo, 1963) discusses eiKao(ioi in Greek and Roman literature. This custom had its origin in a magico-agrarian setting, and in it we perceive the 1 For a detailed discussion of this transvestism, see Armando Plebe's La Nascita del Comico, pp. 68-71.

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influence of the fable — whose teachings may be immoral — in the aggressive comic. Like the savage, the Greeks imitated, not only by costume but also by appropriate gestures and with musical accompaniment, the animals whose nature they were representing. This is animal mummery. At the Brauronian festival, for example, a Greek girl "was a bear"; and depicted on an Attic vase is a birddance, a prototype of the comic chorus that so often impersonates an animal. Miss Lawler's Dance of the Ancient Greek Theatre (University of Iowa publication), and her numerous articles attest to many examples of this phenomenon. The physical characteristics most commonly mocked in comedy of the early farce type are a large stomach, huge buttocks, a big or snub nose, and a stiff or pointed beard. Ctesophon's paunch is the object of mockery in the Achamians 1002, as is Xenophanes' hirsuteness in Clouds 349, physical defects that were objects of the greatest risibility to Athenian audiences. Archilochus had spoken of the wrinkled (fragment 113) old woman and the fat-legged one (fragment 28), and the bald-headed and red-haired man of Old Comedy were two fixed types who moved the audience to laughter. In Michel Tremblay's text for Lysistrata, an incongruous pair of virgins, Boeotian twins, appear amid the nations' rebelling wives, happily mounting their guard on the Acropolis, while the other ladies feel the pangs of sexual starvation. In this 1969 Ottawa National Arts Center performance, they wear red wigs. Caricature was in its golden age in Aristophanes: the "demagogue" Cleon {Knights 137 and Acharnians 381) was called kukldboros (devourer). Aristophanes calls himself the bald (phalakros) in Peace 111. We also note that Antimachus (Acharnians 1150) is called son of dew (psakas), because he sprinkles saliva while talking. Excessive height (Frogs 55) is caricatured, but dwarfness also in Acharnians 367. Alcaeus, the politically oriented lyricist, called the tyrant Pittacus (fr. 37) phuskdn, i.e. big sausage, or Fatty. Horace's Sat. 1.5 has Cicirrus mocking Sarmentus' smallness, and the latter calling the former a monstrous unicorn, in a similar type of "character assassination". Aristophanes (Wasps 1388) caricatures the bread-girl, noisy and insolent, who reproves Philocleon for having jolted her. The

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woman hosteler (Plutus 435-436) cheats in mixing wine. It is apparent from these examples that such caricature is on the threshold of humoristic satire, and would be particularly mortifying if combined with invective. Invective, another significant form of attack and of the comic spirit, may be personal or political. The personal type was represented in the iambos, and is especially salient in the works of Archilochus and Hipponax mentioned above. Aristophanes' invective is both personal and political, and is sometimes concealed by the artifices of allusion or nuances of suggestion. Invective, when moderate, possesses a rich vein of comedy, but when it is violent, it loses the comical element and becomes a defamating attack. Why we laugh is a problem for the philosopher and the psychologist rather than the literary critic.6 Yet, we are certain that the staple of comedy is moral incongruity. While farce is satisfied with physical incongruity, literary comedy must go into the realm of moral incongruity with its unhappy aspects of envy, wrath, avarice, hypocrisy, intemperance, prodigality, vanity, absentmindedness, pedantry, and awkwardness. These universal failings and follies appear in the comic character types, and are perhaps traceable to the well-springs of the comic, sex and politics. It is well, therefore, at this point to trace the development from "comicity" to didactic intent, taking these two sources of the comic as our media of illustration. The sexual element, an aggressive force, takes the form, on one extreme, of the magic exorcisms illustrated by the apotropaic value of the phallic symbol in the Roman child's bulla or the concept of the fascinum, and, on the other extreme, of licentious gestures in which the element has a tendency to develop into songs of rejoicing, and especially in licentious hymeneal songs. Public exhibition of sexuality (exhibition of the male organ to frighten away evil spirits) in its negative aspect may develop into obscenity of gesture and allusion which, in turn, becomes comic (cf. Aristophanes' Clouds, 537-538). * See Leonard Feinberg's The Satirist (Iowa State U. Press), pp. 54-60, and 218, and A. Rapp's The Origins of Wit and Humor (New York, Dutton, 1951).

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As an expression of power and joy and as a ritual formula to propitiate fertility of field and individual, public sex exhibition retains its licentious element but loses its comic quality as it is sublimated into the art form of licentious hymeneal songs. The licentious and the politically subversive have their origin, respectively, in magical ceremonies of sexual basis in country life and customs, and in the expressions of discontent by country people vis-à-vis city dwellers. Aristotle {Poetics 5.1448 b49a) says that the phallophoric processions gave origin to comedy. We note that there is a transition from phallic ritual (involving the mystery of sex and the forbidden) to comic gesture and curiosity. Expressions of political discontent become comic when they enter the conservative milieu of the city, where they develop a semi-concealed form rich in comic possibilities. In such a fashion, where there is despotic government, with furtive expressions of feelings the tyrannized attack the tyrant, as when, for example, Demosthenes (Knights 230-233 and Wasps 1284-1291) assails Cleon. This type of allusive "comicity" always threatens to fall from its comic purpose to a didactic intent. It becomes an attempt to teach through laughter, and thus it implies the ultimate death of the pure comic spirit and the birth of spoudaiogeloion. (Cf. Plebe, La Nascita del Comico, pp. 106-107 and passim). Aelius Donatus, grammarian and favorite teacher of St. Jerome, says (Donatus, Commentum Terentii, Wessner, ed., vol. 1 Leipzig 1962 (1902) 22, V. 1 [Evanthius, De Comoedia]) "comedy is a fable (play) ... from which we learn what in life is useful, and what is to be avoided". To recapitulate, the primitive aspect of the comic spirit has its origin in the licentiousness and subversiveness of magical ceremonies in country life and customs and in the expression of discontent by farm people towards city dwellers. This primitive comic expression is evident in the least sophisticated and most rustic communities and is associated with phallic ritualism and sexuality as an expression of joy. As soon as the comic, whether in an urban or rustic setting, is used as a defence, the subversive spirit arises. This type of allusive "comicity" threatens to fall from a comic to a didactic intent. The rise of the serio-comic corresponds with the

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appearance of didacticism in the comic and the disappearance of the pure comic spirit. Comic force does not easily lend itself to be bent to an educative end, but having become subtle and equilibrated to an instructive purpose, it becomes eminently didactic (cf. Plebe, La Nascita del Comico, 106-107 and passim). It is by this didactic intent that Aristophanes justifies the aggressiveness (i.e. no flattery, bribe, trickery or cleverness) of his poetry (parabasis of Acharnians 656-658). Cicero, too, will later refer to the inherent seriousness of the comic (De Oratore 2.250): "There is no type of jest from which we cannot simultaneously derive serious and weighty thoughts". There is a subtle delicacy in licentious and subversive "comicity"; they require concealment and a struggle with the status quo of society and an atmosphere of modest serenity in which to operate to produce jest. Once this delicate nature is disequilibrated (equally undesirable from the point of view of the development of spoudaiogeloion as from that of the pure comic spirit), the comic disappears, leaving behind only its original forbears: on the one hand, the pure and simple "comicity" of the rustic which takes the form either of mere sexuality that degenerates into pornography, or, on the other hand, of mere social struggle which degenerates into tract literature or didactic poetry with its intent to improve customs (cf. Plebe, ibid., 106-107). Not until fifth-century Attic comedy did this delicate equilibrium prevail, allowing expression of a true vein of licentious and subversive "comicity". Such a type of subtle "comicity" forms the warp and woof of spoudaiogeloion, for it is only when the comic has a positive educative value, either to improve men or to demonstrate or refute a thesis, that we have spoudaiogeloion, an indulgent, moderate, and philanthropically inspired comic force which allows one to liken it to the pathetic. Aristophanes was, then, an exponent of the serio-comic, and this is particularly evident in Frogs. His function in society, as he envisions it, is educative, to unify religion, art and society, to reinforce religion, the state and the family, to make better men of citizens (cf. Frogs, 1008 ff. where Aeschylus says this should be poetry's moral aim). Thus, the duty of both tragedian and comedian

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is similarly conceived. The songs of the Mystae show the desire for a combined laughter-seriousness mentality, if the needs of the community are to be served. "The entire Euripidean outlook is rejected as hostile to the spirit of communal regeneration" (Charles P. Segal, Unity of Frogs, in 20th Century Interpr. of the Frogs, ed. David J. Littlefield, N.J.: P.H., 1968, 56). The geloia-spoudaia dichotomy of this bipartite play (Dionysus appears in roles of comedy and tragedy respectively) must become a unitary approach to life and its problems, and particularly the problem of the imminent collapse of Athens which is in a life-and-death struggle. Dionysus, representing the community of Athens, goes to Hades, the land of truth, seeking the poet-teacher who will re-educate Athens. But Athens is doomed by historical events which preclude any spontaneous regeneration. Throughout, Dionysus assumes two aspects, the first, a ridiculous Xanthian buffoonery with no potential didacticism in his comic role, the second, a serious intellectual awareness which ultimately makes of him a judge whose divinity is fully recognized as a result of his victory (the rebirth of Aeschylus, and triumph of Life over Death; cf Segal, ibid, 53). A new note of earnestness has been struck for the first time in Greek Old Comedy (cf. C. H. Whitman, A. and the Comic Hero, Ch. 7: Death and Life).

D. THEOPHRASTUS, MIDDLE COMEDY, AND NEW COMEDY

Theophrastus (c. 371-287 B.C.), Menander's teacher and Aristotle's pupil, is a serious humorist who employs the character-sketch or charakterismos — the minute delineation of weak, assailable types of individuals. Some of his types are described in the following character descriptions: (1) Dissembling would seem to be ... an affectation of the worse in actions and words, ... [the dissembler] would easily forgive his detractors and laughingly approve things said against himself. (16) The superstitious man, upon catching sight of a mad-man or an epileptic, shudders, spitting into his bosom [to ward off the evil].

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(30) Meanness is the longing for shameful profit, and the mean man characteristically, when giving a banquet, does not set out enough bread for his guests, and he borrows from a stranger who is staying at his home, ... He will not send his sons to school during all of February because of the many holidays to save the tuition. ... When a friend or a friend's daughter is getting married, he goes abroad some time beforehand, so he may not have to send a present In Theophrastus' characterization of weak, morally defective, and clownish types we have a species of spoudaiogeloion. Like the physical stylizations (the comedy of derision) of the past, we find in this Hellenistic or post-Hellenistic writer immoral and otherwise defective types delineated. Charakterismos, the minute delineation of weak, assailable types of persons, originates with Bion of Borysthenes, gathers impetus in New Comedy and Aristotle's Ethics, and appears now, in "Hellenistic" times, in Theophrastus. Later, the Roman satirists Lucilius and Horace would carry on the tradition of delineating these weak sorts of characters whom Theophrastus so well depicted. Also in Theophrastus we find examples of mime, which is, however, best represented in New Comedy. In the objective sketching out of character, Menander delights. But before Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon came the writers of Middle Comedy, among them Antiphanes, Alexis, and Plato Comicus. In the Middle Comedy the coarse obscenity habitual to Aristophanean and Old Comedy generally gives way to delicate innuendo (huponoia). The element of personal satire does not completely die out — hetairae are often maligned for either their heavy drinking or eating, or for their preference for young men and old wine, but the tone is that of light badinage rather than of venomous denunciation. Characterized by a love of parody, and a parody of love (Alexis finds a cure for this "disease" in a courtesan; see K. 279), and the ridicule of poets and myths, Middle Comedy is a nearer approach to the presentation of a more balanced and real type of life situation when there is not an outright depiction of life as a festival in which erotic or gustatory fancies are fulfilled. This is apparent in the frequent and extensive use of stock characters such as the loquacious cook — food is of central importance in

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these plays of Middle Comedy — , the blustering soldier, the grovelling parasite, and the philosopher who is caricatured. Humorous aphorisms regarding the arts of spending, cooking, and eating and drinking are rife. The mythological travesty comes into vogue once more; it was originally practiced by the early comic writer Epicharmus. The stories of the births, marriages, banquets, and gallant adventures of the gods, again as in the comedy of Epicharmus, are humorously narrated. Whereas in Old Comedy such a subject — allied to the influence of tragedy on comedy — had been employed as a framework to political satire, it now becomes, instead of the fantastic political allegory, more nearly an allegory of human life, disclosing the types of mankind in the figures of the humanized "feet-of-clay" Olympians. Let us be fully aware, however, that travesty of the gods in the works of these Greek writers indicates neither lack of loyalty to the divine forces which they embodied nor lack of respect for the traditional principles of religion to which the Greeks subscribed. Contrariwise, when the Olympians are burlesqued, it is generally the writer's intention to clear away some of the superstitious and cruder elements of belief in order to restore the gods to a position of meaningful and motivational significance vis-à-vis their worshippers. Mythological burlesques are intended, if it is granted that a serious purpose is at all entertained by the writer, to destroy bad morals rather than to construct good ones, and yet the importance of loyalty and reverence for the Olympian deities, we must conclude, was uppermost in the mind of the writer of such travesties. Middle Comedy has two main themes: travesty of myths and parody of epic tales of gods and heroes, and realistic representation of daily life. It also continues the political abuse of Old Comedy. Current tragedy affects both its content and language. Thus, in these comedies, Auge, the Bacchants, Medea, and Orestes appear, and though the language of Middle Comedy becomes more reserved and delicate, it becomes less vigorous. A typical writer of this period is Antiphanes whose works include The Painter, The Physician, The Soldier, and The Flute-Player, The Sisters, The Twins, The Heiress, The Gay Ladies, and The Selfish Person.

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The Middle Comedy probably also had the love-motif as a prominent characteristic. Euripides, who had started the trend during the age of Old Comedy's Aristophanes, was portraying the sinful love of a married woman (Hippolytus), the jealousy of a betrayed wife {Medea), and the hatred of a childless wife towards the illegitimate offspring of her husband (Ion). Romantic or amorous intrigue would be characterized by the essential pair of lovers, a hindrance, and a slave as helper. Euboulus' Stephanopolides, Pamphilus, and Kampylion contain such a quadrangle. Such love-seeking type of adventure later acquired supreme importance in New Comedy for which Menander is our best source, and this theme, without serious rival, has remained basically central to all subsequent comedy until the modern age. But such adventurous love interest found its fullest expression not in Middle Comedy, but in the elegy of the age. Middle Comedy dealt with outstanding women of high society, but in the later comedy of Menander, Diphilus and Philemon, courtesans also played an important role along with the more fashionable, socially prominent set. Unlike Middle Comedy, New Comedy placed emphasis upon the careful delineation of character; even hetairae were ennobled. Also, it gave full expression to the love-motif and that of parental resistance to young lovers. Menander had undergone the influence of Aristotle who, in his Nicomachean Ethics, cited numerous individual traits by which the unsound extremes beyond the golden mean could be recognized, and of Theophrastus who drew faulty characters such as the boaster, the flatterer, the dissembler, the filthy man, the chatterbox and the superstitious man. He uniformly assigned both good and bad qualities to his characters, thus realistically imitating real life. Thus, a hetaira may be both unscrupulous in her business affairs and gentle and understanding in her personal relationships. Thus, the boastful soldier combines awkward boisterousness with fine sensibility, honesty, and deep passion. Similarly Davus, in The Hero, is not only impudent and cunning, but also of high moral standards, charming and modest in his refusal to make advances to the slave girl. Menander reveals a deep Euripidean sympathy for this young slave, Davus. Despite her social position, too,

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Habrotonon, in The Arbitrants, is a rather dignified and lovable figure. She is kind-hearted though calculating, helpful and devoted to her young friend, Pamphila; yet she is no model of virtue. Menander, subject to the conservative influence of Aristotle — who had represented the golden mean between extremes — and to Theophrastus — who had taught him the art of character delineation — was influenced perhaps even more by the serious Euripides who was ever concerned with the betterment of human life and thought, who defended the down-trodden at every turn, and who studied human emotions with psychoanalytic pity. Menander did not write purely humorous plays. His drama was sympathetic. His character studies were engagingly realistic. "Philanthropy" comes to the fore in its pristine meaning, love of man as man. Love, jealousy, maternal affection, and hatred of war in Euripides find their counterpart adequately expressed in Menandrian representations of truthful situations: the exposure of unwanted babies (usually females), father-son conflicts (generation gap divergences of view), the greed or faithfulness of slaves or concubines (hetairae), the sentimentality, adventuresomeness, and boastfulness of the young, and the superstition, credulity, and harshness of the old. Parents or guardians are always disapproving of love among the younger set; husbands and wives often show jealousy. Yet rape and seduction however decently expressed, good nature and liberality unattended by moral conviction and virtuous living, and naturalistically drawn characters that are never consistently upright could not advance the spiritual and intellectual development of men. Menander, in emphasizing the geloion, neglected the ethical, the spoudaion element. Where vice prevails, however gaudily dressed in adventure, fortune, and over-sophistication, lessons of moral significance cannot be taught. Spoudaiogeloion did not find its most efficient expression in Menander, witty and refined mirthologist that he was. It would no doubt be an exaggeration to claim that the New Comedy, a mirror of the age it portrays, founders in a dissipated, effete and spiritual degeneracy. Yet coarse gaiety does weigh down ennobling or serious thought as geloion heavily

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tips the scales. We find there few sentiments to improve on spiritual infirmities. When daily life is depicted rather idealistically, we have the moderate realism of Menander, Herodas, and the Theocritean mimes and characterizations. The mime, like the fable, was a dramatic form related, as we indicated in Chapter I, to spoudaiogeloion. It was a decidedly early forerunner of New Comedy and influenced its eventual development. Theophrastus defines the mime as "an imitation of life combining the most contradictory elements". Employing the characters, the rigor, and the topical realism of the mime, New Comedy partook of an indulgent, nonaggressive satire which attempted to describe human weaknesses from the viewpoint of the benevolent smile. Theocritus, Herodas, and Menander followed the model of Socratoplatonic intellectual humorism in their moderate realism. They were also the heirs of the unpretentious Sophron of Syracuse (c. 470-400 B.C.) who wrote mimes "of men" and "of women", which showed improvisation, close fidelity to actual life in both language and manners, and disregard of established artistic principles of structure. The ironic comedy (the gentle assumption of weakness bordering on the satiric) of the Platonic dialogues seems inspired by an intellectual humorism created for those of refined and subtle intelligence. Menander's models were the idealized and partial realism of Euripides and the characters so subtly depicted in Theophrastus. Thus the Coislinian Tractate (11) states that while Aristophanes' comedy was founded upon laughter, Menander's "leaned towards the serious: (jrpdi; 5£ T6 aenvdv ^¿Jtooaa)". One could say the same for Aristophanes, if one were considering his more serious plays. For Theophrastus all poetry was a substantially irrational activity, and comic catharsis became a type of orgiastic enthusiasm, unrestrained and irrational. Theophrastus was convinced that comedy must resemble daily life, and thus he eliminated the absurd or unreal. He, Menander's teacher in the Garden at Athens, around 320 B.C., influenced him into dealing psychologically with his characters and revealing their natures and customs. Personal

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caricature, parody, the subversive, and the licentious were significant elements in New Comedy, and all of these characteristics led to the description of Menander's comedy as "a mirror of life" and "an imitation of life", though here no confusion is intended with the mime despite Theophrastus' earlier definition. "O life, O Menander, which of you has imitated the other?", asked Aristophanes of Byzantium. Menander plunges into the miseries of married life and those of hunger, drunkenness, or ignorance, realistic themes that are perhaps couched in misanthropic and misogynistic sentiments; yet he treats them humorously, romantically, and, for the most part, with sympathetic understanding. The technique of peripeteia (reversal of fortune) to which Euripides had given a particular turn was imitated by Menander in his anagnorisis (recognition). He made the unexpected (x6 ¿K TOO n a p a T t p o a S o K i a v ) — a technique present in Aristophanes' Frogs in the Dionysus-Xanthias scene (480ff.) — his basic technique, but it did not, as in Aristophanes, produce so great hilarity. Thus, although Menander's devices of the unexpected and recognition (Aristotle, Poet. 1454 b20-21, found the latter a poor, simplistic device) do not of themselves obtain truly comic effects, they may aid in the creation of comic situations. Menander avoids the aischune and bomolochia, wherein man mocks society, illustrious persons, and even gods, and admits only painless comedy (anddunon), and a harmless (ou phthartikon) one, concepts touched upon respectively by Plato (Rep. 606c) and Aristotle {Poet. 5.1449a 35). The New Comedy, unlike the Old which was at least gouailleur and often vulgar, was based not on aischrologia, but on huponoia (innuendo, suggestion). Menander's comedy is the outcome of a broad sympathy with the foibles of men, and with humor pathos is mingled as in The Hero where the jests of the unsympathetic Geta show in a more favorable light Davus' dovotion and self-sacrifice, especially since we do not expect those qualities in a slave. Pathos is naturally limited by the fact that Menander must (il faut plaire a la foule) entertain the Athenian "groundlings" who seek a happy ending. Therefore, Menander emphasizes the geloion even in a

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problem play like the Arbitrants, imitated in Terence's Hecyra. Both plays have a similar theme, and use similar characters in parallel situations, the latter being a copy through Apollodorus of the former with certain changes, embellishments, and improvements (as in plot construction) and dealing, like its prototype, with the age-old story, taken from folk-lore and ancient Greek tragedy, of the desertion (or contemplated abandonment) of a new-born child because it is a nothos. The reasons for exposure, or contemplated exposure in both plays, is to conceal the mother's shame, with the added reason in the Hecyra that the father refuses to recognize the child as his own. In both plays the husband is estranged from his wife over the birth of a child which he thinks not his own. Eventually it turns out that the violator of the wife before her marriage was the husband himself. The story of the desertion of a new-born infant has its explanation, according to Murray, in the origin of New Comedy, which, like other forms of drama, may have its origin in the performance of a religious festival ritual, the nativity concept, i.e. the renewal of life and vegetation in the spring. Here we have the symbol of the divine babe or animal which typifies the new life. Later, in Greek tragedy, the rite develops into a drama, and the birth into a heroic myth. Still later, in New Comedy, the outcast child is human — the fruit of some forbidden or secret love affair or chance meeting or rape, and the recognition exalts him not to divinity, but merely to wealth and fortune, a place in the sun. In Menander's Epitrepontes (Arbitrants) the rape takes place at the Tauropolia, a festival in honor of Artemis, when the intoxicated Charisius overcomes Pamphila. Similarly, in the Hecyra, the young Pamphilus, also inebriated, overpowers Philumena. Later, unknown to each other, these couples marry through parental direction, and the confusion and quarreling shared by all parties when the children are born derives from ignorance — an uncontrollable factor — as to who they are and what they themselves have done. In many of such New Comedy plays, as in the Epitrepontes, the

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bastard offspring is exposed with trinkets (ta Sépala Kai xá yvcopÍCTuaxa, cf. the crepundia of Plautus' Rudens, 389 and Cistellaria, 732 and Terence's Eunuch, 753.) — often in the form of a husband's ring which the violated woman has snatched (the Hecyra reverses this) — which its mother has placed with it, with the hope that the father of the child may some day be found and restore the child to its proper place in society. It is by the device of these trinkets that the parents are found and joined in lawful marriage (if they are not already married) to provide the denouement of the play. In the meantime, before the parents and the child are rejoined, the helpless baby may fall into the unscrupulous hands of ignorant or grasping foster-parents or a slave-dealer, and if the discovery takes a very long time and the child is female, even into the hands of a leno. The Epitrepontes and Hecyra are, then, plays of reconciliation. In such plays, as has been indicated, two lovers (who actually become husband and wife) become estranged through misunderstanding or an act of folly; reconciliation is finally brought about when it is realized that the wrongdoing was not deliberate, but due to some uncontrollable cause or factor, like ignorance, anger or drunkenness. The recognition of the child, which makes it acceptable for rearing in a wealthy home, — the ávayvópvmq — is brought about in both plays by a well-meaning courtesan; but in Menander the process is much more subtle and entails more dramatic action, whereas in Terence, the plot appears to be improved by the addition of the elements of uncertainty and surprise, or as Harsh says "mystery and suspense". Yet, to Harsh, the plot of the Hecyra is simple, involving "one man and his differences in love". Furthermore the Hecyra is sadly lacking in dramatic action. As Tenny Frank has said, Terence is the first ancient dramatist to develop the element of suspense which depends for its effect on the elements of uncertainty and surprise. Terence has his recognition scene occur at the very end of the play, through the agency of Bacchis, and he builds up the suspense of the self-torment of Pamphilus until the last act, when Bacchis appears as the "homo ex machina" to provide the denouement.

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Widely divergent opinions have been expressed by scholars about the Hecyra. Harsh (A Handbook of Classical Drama, 1944) calls it "dramatically weak" and blames its failure on two occasions (165 B.C. and 160 B.C.) on the author's failure to produce the qualities of dramatic irony and to create effective characters. Gilbert Norwood {The Art of Terence, 1923) rebukes the modern reader who would take as guides "the barbarians [Romans] who twice rejected Terence's Hecyra, possibly the finest masterpiece of high comedy in the world". In this opinion, Norwood is in a minority, possibly of one. "The Romans", says Norwood, "didn't appreciate good art, particularly subtle, unforced art." This latter viewpoint is more reasonable, for as to the former opinion, a close comparison of the Epitrepontes and the Hecyra reveals that the latter, though perhaps showing some advance in plot-structure and suspense, yet lacks interesting characters and a dramatic situation, and is therefore not to be considered so great a play as Norwood would have it. That the Romans did not appreciate subtle art is borne out by Horace's words in Ep. 2.1.189 if. where he refers to the type of (comic or) tragic drama which did please them: Quattuor aut plures, aulaea premuntur in horas, dum fugiunt equitum turmae peditumque catervae, mox trahitur manibus regum fortuna retortis; esseda festinant, pilenta, petorrita, naves, captivum portatur ebur, captiva Corinthus ... This, then, is the kind of spectacle a Roman audience would relish — the popular play of the day, a spectacular tragedy or praetexta, not comic at all. Elsewhere, Horace had called his forefathers overly patient, if not foolish, to praise "Plautus' wit and numbers" — et numeros et sales Plautinos. {A.P. 270ff.). Plautus may have early recognized the need to remove boisterous elements from his plays, though of course he says ironically in his prologue to the Captives (11.56-58): Neque spurcidici insunt versus immemorabiles; hie neque periurus leno est, nec meretrix mala, neque miles gloriosus. Ne vereamini...

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Terence, too, follows in the tradition of making plays more dignified, calm and conservative. We may compare lines 35-40, and 46 of his prologue to the H.T. (another of the plays of Menandrian source): Adeste aequo animo, date potestatem mihi Statariam agere ut liceat per silentium, Ne semper servos currens, iratus senex, Edax parasitus, sycophanta autem impudens, Avarus leno adsidue agendi sint mihi Clamore summo, cum labore maximo. In hac pura est oratio ... However his play is inconsistent with his promise from the time of the appearance of Bacchis and her train, at which point the play becomes a farce. In one important respect the Hecyra is differently constructed than is the Epitrepontes. In the latter the audience knows the story's basic elements from the beginning, so that the element of irony (more characteristic of Sophoclean tragedy) is present throughout. In the Hecyra, the audience does not learn till the last act that Pamphilus is the father of Philumena's child. To the suspended denouement of the Hecyra (not until 81 Iff., when reference is made to the ring, does the audience discover that Pamphilus himself had violated Philumena before their marriage) Frank attributes the double failure of the play, for "the audience was kept in doubt and anxiety to the very end ... in complete suspense before an accumulating mass of perplexities". Terence has thus reduced the scope of dramatic or comic irony to the last three scenes of the play. Here, Bacchis is the life-saver (servatrix) who tells Parmeno (Habrotonon had differently handled a similar situation with Onesimus) that Myrrina has recognized the ring as her daughter's and that Parmeno should relay the message post-haste to his young master Pamphilus. Parmeno, in typical fashion, complains of his lot but rushes off to inform his master of what seems to himself a stray bit of information. The audience, however, knows its meaning.

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In another important aspect the plays differ. Menander has the very skillful arbitration scene. This scene is paralleled in Plautus' Rudens (Gripus and Trachalio), but is completely lacking in the Hecyra. I will discuss the arbitration scene last. Whereas Menander plays up the notion of the Tauropolia, Terence succeeds in creating the image by merely alluding to the act of violence by the words "in via". In both instances, the misconduct of the midnight festival is counteracted and more than off-balanced by the repentance, bitter self-reproach and humanity of the young rioter. The idea of a divine ravisher (cf. Euripides' Ion and Alope) has, in both of these plays, become humanized. In this New Comedy, the child is the fruit of a forbidden chance encounter (sometimes a secret love), and recognition makes the child acceptable for rearing in a wealthy home. As to the portrayal of characters, we observe both in Plautus' Philematium (Mostellaria) and in Terence's Bacchis (Hecyra) — no doubt a reflection of Menander's Habrotonon — a more refined and sympathetic meretrix, not one who plies her trade unscrupulously. Phidippus resembles Smicrines in that he, too, seeks a reconciliation between his daughter and her "dissipating" husband, but if such is impossible, would just as soon recover the dowry and marry off his daughter to a stable and dependable husband. The young men of both plays experience the same self-torture. In the Epitrepontes, Charisius appears to be taking revenge on his "cheating" wife in a much more violent and conspicuous way by "revelling" next door with Habrotonon, though in reality he is quite as heartbroken as is Pamphilus. Charisius is a novice in affaires d"amour, but Pamphilus has had a liaison with Bacchis for some time prior to his marriage to Philumena. But this difference of experience between the two does not matter much in the general scheme of things or in the plot of the plays. We have observed that even in the points of difference between the two plays there is a close literary relationship. Since the Hecyra is similar in plot to the Epitrepontes, we observe many parallels and may conjecture others in the plays. Both wives

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have become pregnant by their own future husbands at the midnight festivals and later bear children whose fathers are unknown to them; the characters of both Philumena and Pamphila stand out clearly, though the latter appears not to have a speaking role (L. A. Post has restored it here, however); Parmeno and Onesimus are both chatterbox slaves through whom much of the plot is unfolded; Habrotonon and Bacchis both play decisive roles in the recognition and reconciliation scenes; Phidippus and Smicrines are both furious at the scandalous behavior of their sons-in-law and at the apparent failures of the marriages, but only Smicrines is inclined to be hotheaded, greedy and inconsiderate of his daughter's welfare. Smicrines ignorantly scolds Sophrona as Phidippus Scolds Myrrina, and Laches Sostrata. We may conjecture that like Pamphilus, Charisius probably agreed to keep the birth of his wife's child a secret to spare his wife the dishonor; also like Phidippus, Smicrines was probably kept in ignorance of the real reason for his daughter's intentional separation from her husband. The most important aspect in which the plays differ is in the arbitration scene of the Epitrepontes, which is completely lacking in the Hecyra. Davus and Syriscus call upon Smicrines to judge their dispute over the dvayvcopiCTnaxa. Later Onesimus recognizes his master Charisius' ring in Syriscus' possession, and this leads to the happy outcome. The thing most hateful to Menander is agndmosune (unkindness, want of feeling), a characteristic of Davus, the only villain in the play (though a protatic character) whom swift retribution overtakes when he is hatefully bent on defrauding the baby of its only chance of recognition. The shepherd Davus is unaware of the moral implications of his greed, and his stupidity is such that he doesn't see the danger of committing the case to Smicrines, who proves to be impartial and reasonable in arbitration. Even Smicrines, though stingy and crusty, betrays his innate sense of justice by his indignant verdict in favor of Syriscus against Davus. Syriscus says to Smicrines (173-177 K.), thus setting the mood: ¿v Ttavxi Set Kaipfi) T6 Sucaiov ¿JtiKpatElv ditavraxoO,

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THE GREEK EPIC, GREEK SATIRE, AND GREEK COMEDY K a l TÔV J t a p a x o y x à v o v T a TOUTOU TOO (lépooç ë x e i v J t p ô v o i a v KOIVÔV è a x i T $ PiQ icàvTcov.

Syriscus, a charcoal-burner, demands the tokens from Davus as his rightful property, because only thus can the baby be identifiable and have a chance to be recovered by its true parents. And although Smicrines is mean, grouchy, and disagreeable, and his anxiety about his son-in-law's squandering of the dowry appears at times to transcend his interest in his daughter's welfare, his paternal aifection does surface. Menander succeeds in showing the irony of the arbitration scene. Smicrines becomes, incidentally and unwittingly, the arbitrator over the fate of his own grandchild. The audience appreciates the irony of the situation, and in this respect the Epitrepontes (or Arbitrants) proves far superior to the suspenseful Hecyra, where the audience is "in the dark" until the very last act. Having developed the comedy of manners, Menander represented daily life with its contemporary individual types who were never so excellent that they did not have failings, never so imperfect that they did not possess desirable qualities. The most serious problems society can encounter — seduction or violation of young girls, exposure of children and their recognition by their parents only years later — are treated in a mood of familiar sympathy and common-sense resolution. In his role as a literary critic, George Meredith ("The Essay on the Comic Spirit") betokened his particular appreciation of this mood of intimate compassion and reasonableness. The Menandrian play is not so much oriented and determined by the external events or plot as it is a vehicle of expression for the personalities of its characters which are consistently in process of development, e.g. Knemon, the misanthrope, awakens our sympathy because he seeks justice in human affairs (Dyskolos). And yet, Menander is not, except à contrecœur and minimally, a teacher of morals. Admittedly, the pagan moralist Plutarch considered Menander an extremely effective instrument for the implanting of kindly, civilized, humane and inspiriting principles. The Greeks also considered him worthy to be placed beside Homer as an eminent educator. However, if Menander had any lessons to

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impart, any didacticism, his instruction in the art of facing up to and dealing adequately with the everyday problems of living was at best indirect. It is the deep conviction of Professor Levi Arnold Post (From Homer to Menander, p. 243) that Menander's personages are as moral as those of Homer and Sophocles, a conviction in which we do not wholly concur. Many of Homer's characters are very moral, but many are correspondingly amoral, or ambiguous in their morality. Odysseus, operating in Athena's sphere of cunning and deceit, cannot be considered moral when under such influence. Achilles opposes themis (order) and brings the whole Achaean army to the verge of defeat because of his wanton insubordination. Homer's relation to morality is at best ambiguous if even an Aegisthus who behaved treacherously (Od. 1.35-39) bears the epithet "blameless" (Od. 1.29), or must we translate amumon as "noble"? Sophocles is a tragedian of the highest moral convictions, putting great emphasis on the genesis of ate from koros. There is no point of comparison between his morality and Menander's. Menander, we submit, did not make "comedy a serious and moral commentary" (Post, ibid., 244) on what men do and what they ought to do (exactly Sophocles' orientation in his plays) in their daily lives. Menander produced plays to arouse laughter and reflection, and since he allows the scales of his comedy to tip in the direction of the geloion does not achieve the perfect balance of serious and comic. Transplanted to the Roman stage, New Comedy does not particularly improve. The Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence generally employ Menandrian plots, and it is likely that Terence preserves more fully the spirit of the mature Menander than does Plautus, who introduces much buffoonery of a generally farcical and undramatic nature. Plautus' spontaneous witticisms are rooted in the commonplace ridiculous which grows primarily out of the high-jinks and schemings of shrewd slaves and equally astute white-slavers, antithetically oriented towards freedom and money-making. There is, admittedly, some serio-comic material in the Plautine corpus. Similarities, for example, have been observed between

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Plautus' Amphitryon and Euripides' Bacchae, and we note that Plautus himself termed this play a tragicomoedia for its nearly tragic tone and action combined with its brilliant comedy, wherein gods and kings share the boards with slaves and other "worse men". It is conceived of as a parody or an imitation of tragedy. Sosia's lengthy review, for example, of the battle against the Teloboae and its aftermath (203-261) is a reflection of a herald's speech in tragedy; it translates heroic life into everyday terms. Roman New Comedy, like the Greek, gave amusing sketches of everyday life, but the bitter social and political satire of Aristophanes survived only in good-humored banter and in plays dealing with human nature. The characters of Plautus and Terence are below average in their moral and intellectual attributes, and their blindness to the truth already known to the audience makes them laughable and often ridiculous. The Plautine characters are very often caricatures: parasites, slave-dealers, soldiers, series and young men are debased, for their vices and foibles — stemming from vanity — are exaggerated in a ludicrous fashion. Plautus often arouses in his spectators {hoi polloi) the laughter of derision (a form of "comicity" already present in Homer). Yet, as often. Plautus laughs with his characters, not at them. Terence, who writes drawingroom comedy for an aristocratic intelligence, is not at all concerned with arousing boisterous laughter. He hovers about the reasonable, and his characters are less puppet-like than those of Plautus. Indeed, Terence seldom laughs at all, but rather smiles tolerantly and sympathetically at the follies and errors of men who are basically decent. Neither Plautus nor he reveals an intent to satirize with bitter invective or to degrade his personages. Professor Duckworth has pointed out in this regard that Roman comedy is unusually devoid of bitter or satirical laughter. While Plautine comedy is largely buffoonery and slapstick, Terentian comedy presents a more refined atmosphere. Terence's comedy occasionally has a deeper purpose than mere amusement, a subtly expressed moral purpose wherein laughter is subordinated to the serious. Humanism comes to the fore, especially in such plays as the Andria and the Heautontimoroumenos. In the Adelphoe, for example, modeled on Menander's Adelphoe,

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two diametrically opposed theories of education are shown to be equally unsuccessful, and at the end of the play a wiser Demea points out that liberty duly restrained by a father's advice and correction is the golden mean of education. Moving in the direction of restraint and refinement, Terence limits verbal humor and caricature, but with frequent irony and parody, a more subtle kind of humor, arouses "thoughtful laughter". It was this particular quality that appealed most to George Meredith. There is, for example, exquisite irony, a serio-comic element, in the description of how Syrus, a clever and unscrupulous rogue, banters Demea and sends him on a wild goose chase after his brother Micio (Adelphoe 573-587, 713-716). The element of parody appears when Syrus burlesques Demea's words (ibid. 422432). Terence eliminates from his plays scenes of madness, drunkenness, and vulgar song and dance. Other Plautine elements of farcical buffoonery such as wild, boisterous action, indecent allusions and jests, and abandoned gesticulation are foreign to Terentian comedy. While the Menandrian ridiculous is occasionally subordinated to the serious, Terence's laughter yields to the serious. In avoiding the farcical and portraying normal, decent, wellmeaning persons, Terence's insight into human nature proves keener than that of Plautus. His more respectable and dignified characters are less amusing than those of Plautus, but truer to life. E. GREEK PHILOSOPHY

Diogenes of Babylon (c. 240-152 B.C.) was called a Stoic by von Arnim, author of the Real-Encyclopaedie article.7 He was one of the early philosophers who, defying convention and living meagerly and in opposition to society, spoke critically of social evils and the inordinate search for wealth. Disregard for material comfort evoked from him the statement that money is the source of all evils. It has not been ascertained whether Diogenes of Babylon, 7 This Diogenes of Babylon is the 45th of the 54 "Diogeneses" mentioned in Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll's Real-Encyclopaedie.

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often referred to as a Cynic, gave any impetus to the promulgation of the spoudaiogeloion method. The Cynic, Crates of Thebes (c. 365-285 B.C.), an influential figure in the development of the stylistic method spoudaiogeloion, believed in the combination of the gay and the serious. As third head of the Cynic school, he instituted a more tolerant philosophy, a hedonistic cynicism which tempered the harshness of his predecessors. To this changed form of philosophy we owe the origin of spoudaiogeloion as an actual literary device. One of Crates' followers, Demetreus (of Phalerum) Phalereus (3rd century B.C.) compiled the first European collection of Aesopic fables at the beginning of the Alexandrian age and commended8 the use of laughter for reforming purposes, referring to the chreiai and gnomai of the Cynics who from Crates' time used laughter prudently and opportunely, as in feasts and at symposia, and in rebukes against luxurious living. Earlier Cynics had followed the rigorous precepts of Diogenes of Sinope and had included the practice of self-reproach as well as reproach of others. A famous law of 440 B.C. to which Horace refers (A.P. 282-284: ... sed in vitium libertas excidit et vim dignam lege regi: lex est accepta, chorusque turpiter obticuit sublato iure nocendi.), directed against invective, immorality, and wantonness had already affected Old Aristophanic Comedy, leading to the decline of these undesirable elements. Platonic "theory" about the seriousness of laughter and spoudaiogeloion itself (Phaedrus 234d and Symposium 197e) and Aristotle's theorizings about the nature and intent of the comic may have influenced the thinking of Crates and his followers in the Cynic school of moral reform. Bion of Borysthenes,9 another 3rd century thinker, fore-runner of Lucilius' and Horace's (cf. Ep. 2.2.60) autobiographical techniques and propensities, was a mordant Cynic who scorned riches and vice and proposed a philosophy of conduct predicated on the ideal of self-sufficiency. A philosophical humorist and mime• Peri Hermeneias 170. He compiled a collection of Aesop's fables (cf. S. A.

Handford, Tables of Aesop, Perquin, 1966, p. XVI). 8

This Bion is 10th of the IS "Bions" mentioned in the Real-Encyclopaedie.

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writer, he revealed himself to his readers in the diatribe, occasionally brutally frank, attractive in its variety, and characterized by the Belustigung which throws the spoudaiogeloion off balance, favouring the geloion. He adopted the literary form which derived from the philosophic treatise, the public speech, the schoolsession and the dialogue (all the ingredients of the diatribe). Preaching about virtue and happiness, he overturned values, and joked about serious things, often using vulgar expressions to please the hoi polloi; thus his use of "the Cynic spoudaiogeloion was not merely as a medley of jest and earnestness..." (Van Rooy, Studies in Classical Satire..., Leiden: Brill, 1966, 110). "In Bion's spoudaiogeloion there's a decided lightness or hilaritas which is foreign to the fundamental moral seriousness of the Latin satirists proper" (Van Rooy, ibid.). Bion's younger contemporary Menippus of Gadara ( f l . c. 260 B.C.), too, put extra weight on the geloion scale — his only seriousness consists in provoking laughter — "his spoudaion, as reflected by his imitator Lucian considerably later (2d cent. A.D.), is a sham seriousness 10 ... he seems to have written chiefly for entertainment" (Van Rooy, ibid.). His message is nihilistic: laugh at Hellenic mythology, overcome your superstition and empty fears of death (Nekyia), laugh a lot, putting aside futile philosophical and metaphysical speculation. Whether Menippus' "satire" had quite the parodic character of Lucian's, however, cannot be ascertained, though he did burlesque epic and tragedy, taking his cue from Aristophanic criticism. F. THE MIME IN GREECE AND ROME

The literary mime, a short, quasi-dramatic treatment of ordinary people in an ordinary situation, served as a principal source of the Roman satura, and its elements appeared intermittently11 in satire. The real people of mime were often taken from the profanum vulgus, so that artisans and shady types of the community were represented. 10

Cf. D. Laertius, 6.99 Cf. the paraklausithyron theme and see Frank O. Copley's monograph in volume 87 of TAPA, 1956. 11

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Greek mime was a genre akin to the Platonic dialogues. Plato committed himself to the traditions and conventions of the mime, which were much like those of comedy. Just as comedy made its hero the ironic man, an individual in perpetual conflict with the boaster, so did the mime and the dialogue. Yet, neither mime nor comedy (New Comedy specifically) proposed to teach men how best to live in the ethical sphere, whereas the Platonic dialogue did entertain a significantly moral purpose, and it often illustrated the ideals and methods of spondaiogeloion. Cicero records (DND 1.34.93 : Zeno ... Socraten ipsum ... scurram Atticum fuisse dicebat) that an Epicurean, Zeno, called Socrates an Attic scurra. Horace's strictures against Lucilius included the accusation that Lucilius had written the "mimes of a Laberius", Horace's contemporary metteur en scène. He implied that Lucilius' mime-like satires were in reality farces representing scenes from the life of the profanum vulgus and were usually coarse in nature and racily realistic. How could such writings, therefore, possibly edify the reader? The mime has already been somewhat cursorily treated in the first chapter as a form of spoudaiogeloion. We may add here that Sophron's Doric-dialect mimes dealt with men and women, respectively, in comical situations. His Penthera, for example, dealt with the mother-in-law. Herodas' coarse realism and Theocritus' tender treatment of Simaitha are illustrative of this formal imitation of private and daily life. The Greek mime, best exemplified in New Comedy, "deteriorated into" the Roman version, the indigenous and unrelated Atellan farce, a type of work of unrestrained laughter and hasty improvisatory style. Soon, the Roman "groundlings" became thoroughly acquainted with their favorite figures: Maccus, Bucco, Pappus, and Dossennus. To these were added the figures of Manducus, Mania, Lamia, and Pytho. These farces, originally intended as comic descriptions in simple dialogue of the life in small Italian towns, combined saturnian meter, coarse jokes, lively and obscene gesticulations, and plebeian diction. Like the Punch and Judy shows which George Meredith derides in his "Essay on the Comic Spirit", the Atellanae did little to advance the comic

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spirit, for boisterous laughter and ribaldry precluded the development of a refined, sophisticated comedy. One of the aspects of the mime, namely, the delineation of character, was caught up and employed by both Lucilius and Horace. They continued, thus, to keep alive this aspect of the mime as they successfully characterized weak types; this was originally a Theophrastean accomplishment. There remained, however, this inescapable distinction between comedy and mime. Whereas comedy concerned itself primarily with plot, mime emphasized character delineation. Therefore, it is not surprising that the paraklausithyron was one of the mime's favorite themes, known to Roman comedy readers in the form of the exclusus amator, a theme appearing as early as Lucilius, which Horace and the elegiac poets later adopted. The mime was also taken up by Rome's Neronian age novelist, Petronius. Trimalchio is delineated as an emperor-aping nouveau riche who claims to have urbis acta, tremendous estates, and ascribes to himself genium, maiestas, and elogium. He is virtually a caricature in the Petronian "dramatic" or "mimic" work. Marzullo (// Satiricon, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1967, p. xi) says that Petronius draws on sermo plebeius, Atellan farce and the popular theatre. Tanto che delle vicende più strane si dice che sono roba da mimi, così quando Gitone è conteso tra Encolpio ed Eumolpo, la minaccia di morte è detta mimica mors (XCIV), con mimicis artibus si definisce un grossolano travestimento (CVI), mimum componere, troviamo al capo CXVII; e il rifacimento di scherzosi motivi drammatici è qua e la ripreso in tutta la satira, specialmente quando persone in contrasto si dividono in schiere e si apprestano, con buffi arnesi e atteggiamenti, a contendere. Here, the mime is shown to serve as a principal source of satura, being a dramatic form tending to the objective delineation of character. G. MENANDER AND HORACE AS

EIRÓNES

Menander as eirón is concerned with representing realistic characters whose virtues or vices are rewarded or punished at the

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play's end, without his passing judgment on them. He maintains a detached, yet kindly attitude, and his audience is often informed beforehand of the result of the interaction of actors unaware of their fate. It is a Sophoclean irony with seriousness at a low key. Yet, this type of eirdneia affords spectators ironical satisfaction from observing the blindness of the characters and from seeing the good prevail over dishonesty and ignorance; it differs widely from the self-disparaging type of Bionean irony which Horace displays and which results in his own person becoming the scapegoat and butt of ridicule. Horace as eiron represents an advance over Aristophanes' eiron, a shady character (Clouds 443-451, Wasps 174-176, and Birds 1211), and Aristotle's eiron as philopseudes (Eud. Eth. 3.7.1234a 3) and that of Theophrastus, a lazy man (he likes to take it easy) who lies habitually and senselessly. Demosthenes accused the eiron of refusing to serve in the army and pay taxes. Those who found the philosopher's questions irksome applied the injurious term to Socrates {Rep. 337a). Subtle and elusive, the Socratic eiron is a master of understatement, never speaking for personal advantage, but to avoid ostentation. In a recent article, Pavlovskis ("Aristotle, Horace, and the Ironic Man", CP 63 1968, 28) tells us: Panaetius [a member of the Scipionic Circle whose theories may have influenced Horace], as Fiske sees it, in developing the theories of his teacher, Diogenes of Babylon, attached to Diogenes' ideas on rhetoric an enthusiastic commendation of Socratic, hence, ironic, humor. This he did, presumably, in order to combat the coarseness and brutality of the Cynic style (Fiske, The Plain Style, 73-74). Like Socrates, Horace likes to appear simple, and certainly humble, kind and harmless. The eiron, Horace, is a superior, but modest man who does not wish to overawe others, and who gets as much pleasure from jokes on himself as he does in practising such deception as conceals his own abilities, attainments and real character. Indeed, Horace's ironic reserve is his most endearing quality, and functions didactically in his instructive sermones. Horace poses as an eiron in his satires "in that he pretends not to take himself seriously" (Pavlovs-

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kis, ibid., 29). Horace is self-disparaging about his art, and his morals. He allows Aristius Fuscus to outdo him in eironeia in 1.9 and Davus, his slave, to brand him as a weak-willed gourmet and lover in 2.7 (cf. Pavlovskis, ibid.). Verse 46: "te coniunx aliena capit, ..." reveals Horace in the very position from which he had dissuaded sensible men in 1.2.28-29: "sunt qui nolint tetigisse nisi illas quarum subsuta talos tegat instita veste;" and 1.2.54: "matronam nullam ego tango.", and 57: "nil fuerit mi, inquit, cum uxoribus umquam alienis". He disparages his poetry as "jottings" and "just talk", sermo merus (1.4.48); writing is for him "a minor vice" (mediocribus illis/ex vitiis unum (139-140)). His forerunner Lucilius "is a better poet than he is (1.10.47-48) and better man (2.1.28-29)". Yet, two decades later, in Ep. 2.1.128-138, he offers principles of literary criticism and a defense of poetry as worthy instruction for people in all walks of life. The poet "forms" the heart with friendly precepts (128), corrects roughness, envy and wrath (129), sets noble examples for the rising generation (130) and consoles the person in need and sick at heart (131). He produces hymns to the gods for youth choruses to enroll the gods' assistance in dire times(134-137). This statement of serious purpose exonerates Horace of any nihilistic attitude toward human values which objective irony seems to imply to some critics. In the Satires, his is a characteristically ironic apology: ... amoto quaeramus seria ludo (1.1.27) Di bene fecerunt, inopis me quodque pusilli finxerunt animi, raro et perpauca loquentis; (1.4.17-18) and Primum ego me illorum dederim quibus esse poetas excerpam numero ... (ibid., 39-40) Of his "inability" to desist from composition: Peream male si non/ optimum erat; verum nequeo dormire. (2.1.6-7) Elsewhere, especially in Book 2, he assigns the educative role to other "teachers", in one case to a farmer: Quae virtus et quanta, boni, sit vivere parvo — nec meus hie sermo est, sed quae praecepit Ofellus rusticus, ... (2.2.1-3)

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to Tiresias in 2.S, to Davus and Fundanius in 2.7 and 2.8, and to the Stoic Damasippus in 2.3. He ingenuously feigns a childish simplicity (cf. Pavlovskis, ibid., 33) when pointing out that his father schooled him to observe human failings; the important key words in the passage, liberius and iocosius, remind us respectively of Greek parrhesia and jesting inclusive of irony: liberius si dixero quid, si forte iocosius, hoc mihi iuris cum venia dabis: insuevit pater optimus hoc me, ut fugerem exemplis vitiorum quaeque notando. (1.4.103-106) We have now surveyed with rapid glance some comic spirit manifestations in Greece and Rome. Homer, the iambographers, Aristophanes, Theophrastus, Menander, Diogenes, Crates, Bion, Menippus, Plautus and Terence have passed before us in hasty procession. Yet an equally interesting study remains. What were the fortunes of the serio-comic in Roman satire? After a preliminary investigation of Horatian satire, we shall compare and contrast two satirical approaches, those of Horace and Juvenal, who vie with each other for the title of satirist par excellence of Roman letters. Persius should certainly not be neglected in a study of this sort, but a work has recently been published exclusively on this author: Cynthia S. Dessen, Iunctura Callidus Acri: A Study in Persius' Satires (Chicago and London, Univ. of Illinois Press, 1968), and the reader is directed, therefore, to this edition — the first and yet latest of its kind.

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A. HORACE AND SPOUDAIOGELOION

Horace appears to resume the general concept of this semitechnical literary term or stylistic method in his principles: 1 ridentem dicere verum / quid vetat? and et sermone opus est modo tristi saepe iocoso. Horace's tolerance is a noteworthy improvement over the wantonly outspoken or parrhesiastic, and sharp satire of Aristophanic comedy, yet the earnest jest, spoudaiogeloion, differs from satirizing proper, the onomasti komodein or iambizein of the major production of Old Comedy. Lucilius, in the tradition of Old Comedy and because of his great moral vigor, is characterized more by the spoudaion than by the geloion. Earnestness has become the primary, and entertainment the secondary, goal of his writings. In Horace, on the other hand, we find a rectification of the equation and a balancing of the scales, and the oxymoronic term, composed of light and temper, as one might say of a good brandy, resumes a perfect balance, for both factors are now become of equal weight. Also, the "good-natured" Horatian satire, since it envisions the educational role as that of developing judgment and discrimination in everyday social experience, establishes a close rapport between the satirist and the reader, for it replaces the bomolochia (buffoonery, scurrility) of Old Comedy, pikria of a Semonides of Amorgos and Lucilian invective (an emphasis on the acre) with the true comic spirit, attended by understatement, self-mockery, and a sloughing1

Satires 1.1. 24-25, and 1.10.11.

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off of certain undesirable satura elements such as uninhibited and crude invective and raillery. The comic spirit is thus enriched by spoudaiogeloion elements. Perhaps the most significant advance made by Horace is in the field of humor. A blandness has obviously evolved, "for harsh wit and licence of speech have been removed; this paves the way for a golden mean of expression by virtue of the more humorous situations, eironeia and dialogue. Horace's strictures against Lucilius, his predecessor in the satiric genre, are that Lucilius is neither nitidus (elegant), catididus (clear and pure), subtilis (suggestive), nor tenuis (restrained). Declaring himself in favor of the irony of the urbanus who would be dissimulator opis propriae1 and whose writing is marked by reserve and studied understatement, Horace is convinced that: 3 ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res. Horace seems to praise the Old Comedy writers who, in blending the ridiculum and the acre, laid stress on the former: 4 ilia scripta quibus comoedia prisca viris est hoc stabant, hoc sunt imitandi. Lucilius is not truly a discriminating follower of the spirit of Old Comedy, for he reproduces only their harsh wit and license of speech: multa cum libertate (Sat. 1.4.5). Why is it, one may ask, that Horace is a more efficient exponent of spoudaiogeloion than Lucilius? With the calm conviction of a philosophic moralist, Horace laughingly tells what he considers to be the truth, that is, he teaches moral "truths". Horace's ideal of urbanitas or restrained humor involved the element of urbana dissimulatio and had its origin in Socratic irony. It followed in the tradition of Panaetius who had objected (c/. Pavlovskis' citation above, p. 102) to the socially harmful moral coarseness of Cynic speech. Good-natured satire without censorious references of the Lucilian type shows Horace as a spectator who relates incidents ' Epistle 1.9.9. » Satire 1.10. 14-15. 4 Ibid., 16-17.

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and scenes with no obvious ethical instruction in mind. But the lesson is there for the cautious reader. Although Horace assigns a certain virtue to Lucilius' vis comica, he adopts a theory of comedy more in accord with the restrained humor of New Comedy. Horace's irony, the trembling equipoise between jest and earnest, enables him to withhold decisions concerning human values. He manages to be sincere without becoming deadly serious. Observing and judging himself and his fellow-man through non-committal and good-natured irony, he maintains a tolerant, wise, humane, and middle-of-the-road approach to problems of living. Thus, for example, in Satires 2.3.326 and 2.1,6 he directs satire even against himself in an ironical and humorous fashion. It would prove superfluous to analyze each of the Horatian satires in detail in order to signalize the numerous examples of earnest jest, bland humor, urbane irony, and good-natured satire. The field has been too often covered by such scholars as Fiske, Fraenkel, Cartault, Rudd, Bennett, Rolfe, Kiessling, Heinze, Lejay,® and others. We can, therefore, only hope to parade before the reader's view a modest proportion of the wealth of material which the aforementioned subjects entail. Heterogeneous in subject matter, most of the Horatian satires are replete with jokes jostling their judgments, although they do convey serious instructions. Social conscience and moderation, moral conviction and sober-minded abstinence from cloying self5

Where the Horatian work is not mentioned, the Satires are meant. • All the scholars mentioned here have contributed to a fuller understanding of satire in general and, in particular, to our comprehension of the Horatian opus. G. C. Fiske concerned himself with the similarities between Lucilius and Horace both in their way of life and in their subject matter. He also treated the question of the rhetorical theory of imitation, showing how both Lucilius and Horace are heirs to this tradition in that they imitate their Greek predecessors in satiric expression. Eduard Fraenkel's Horace is a definitive work on the Odes and Satires of Horace. He reveals Horace's personality to us through the Horatian writings. Cartault's study of the Satires of Horace, a work published in 1899, is still a worthwhile source for students of Horace. Bennett and Rolfe, co-editors of the Complete Works of Horace, have copiously annotated all the writer's literary accomplishments. Kiessling and Heinze have done the same for the German reader in the Satiren. Lejay's Œuvres d'Horace similarly discusses for the French public Horace's versatile artistry and ironic satire. Rudd's eminent study (1966) is indispensable.

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indulgence, the blend of humor and antagonism for moral edification: these are the weapons Horace employs against foolishness, whether of the criminal, gastronomical, amorous, or luxurious variety. The wisdom of the mus rusticus of Satire 2.6, that of Ofellus in 2.2, and that of Davus in 2.7, combining with the urbanity, tolerance, good judgment, and perennially jesting comments of their literary creator, sound serious, convincing notes for the weak, criminal, vice-ridden and stupid men of pre-Christian Rome. Yet, Horace is no ardent Scotch Presbyterian preacher. His easy and resourceful rhetoric, forever couched in the most artistic poetry, reveals the eloquent perfectionist of literary art. Horace's bore (Sat. 1.9) is an excellent example of Theophrastean character delineation as are his superstitious man and woman (2,3), his avaricious man (1.1), his self-portrait (1.6), his selfmockery (1.4.140-144), and his exclusus amator (2.3.259-271), victim of self-indulgence. The mock-heroics of the scurrae (1.5), of the deus agrestis Priapus (1.8), and of the mice (2.6) are, for the most part, parodic. Several examples have been adduced, above in Chapter I, of the other forms of spoudaiogeloion — namely, the mime, ainos, and chreia — but rarely does one find among his writings the acrimony of Juvenalian exempla. Throughout the Horatian opus human conduct is criticized with the intention of clearing the social atmosphere of its polluted elements. The pitfalls that beset men in search of the good life are described so cheerfully that the reader is encouraged to avoid them, for, while Horace continues to reform, he keeps his readers laughing. The teacher who shows self-understanding and good-natured tolerance beckons his disciples to companionship and good cheer, to self-education and moral rectification. Horace is such a teacher. We have noted that the serio-comic may be weighted too heavily on one of the scales, and that the spoudaion, for example, as in the case of the iambographers, (and the Roman Lucilius), outweighs the geloion, or that, as in the case of Menander (pace Coislinian Tractate, 11), the geloion outweighs the spoudaion. The longed-for trembling equipoise is not attained in such writers. It may prove

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useful at this point to illustrate in some detail the balancing elements of the equation of seriousness and jest.

B. JUVENAL AND HORACE: TWO ASPECTS OF SATIRE

The distinction between the two aspects of spoudaiogeloion is best illustrated through a comparison of two diametrically opposed satiric approaches to the extirpation of undesirable traits in our fellow human beings — the quite different ones of Juvenal and Horace. An inferior form of satire attacks where it is impossible for the accused to respond, and, while infuriating its victim, does not edify his heart. It is only through the weapon of jest which treats what is perverse and objectionable as merely ridiculous that the follies and frailties of men can be modified and eliminated. The pure and unmitigated reprobation of the moralizing preacher, the indignant satirist (at least of the first three books of satires) Juvenal, could not but prove ineffectual with its caustic and bitter invective. The satirist's anger and hatred lead him to universal and undiscriminating denunciation, and, in his volley of savage and cynical onslaught fraught with melancholy and unrelieved by sympathy, he alienates those whom he would improve. Horace, by treating vice in a spirit of geniality and tolerance, is able to point out to errant persons a better course in life. The vitriolic satirist Juvenal, lacking warm concern for society's mores and having lost all sense of balance in human affairs, exaggerates, makes sweeping generalizations. Despite his rhetorical brilliance, he is not so potent, so incisive as Horace, for Juvenal's indignation, venom, and irresponsible idealism color his descriptions and expressions. Horace manages to be sincere, virile, and effective without losing the common touch. He is sociable and tolerant of error, but never a sanctimonious moralizer. Juvenal conceals his personality, for the expression of his seemingly purely emotional reactions to unbearable circumstances replaces any image of his character, appearance, surroundings, or past life.

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Throughout his satires Juvenal merely exposes, by the technique of progressive simplification, a single idea, whether it be perversion, luxuria, cannibalism, feminine immorality, or Domitian's tyranny. Horace, on the other hand, renders a preliminary idea complex by elaboration. He analyzes the relevant factors, for he aims at a comprehension of the whole. He does not betray us with ugliness, unreality, crudeness and sentimentality. In Satire three, for example, Juvenal concerns himself almost solely with the degeneracy of Rome where only flattery and vice prosper, the reason why Umbricius, his spokesman, plans to leave the capital city. In a simple antithesis, Juvenal creates a completely sympathetic Umbricius and a thoroughly unsympathetic Rome — now rendered un-Roman because of its newly acquired tawdry values, its violation of the innocence of the purer and nobler past, and the invasion of clever Greeks and Orientals. This alien element with its luxurious tastes has caused the moral standards to be displaced by materialistic ones. Rome has degenerated into a city of corruption through excess of freedom. Whereas Juvenal portrays a thoroughly vitiated, disorderly, and disintegrating Rome, Horace views the city as both good and bad. In Satire 1.6, he tells us how he roams about the city at will, and enjoys the Forum after business hours, slyly observing the tricks of quacks and fortune-tellers near the Circus. This Horatian view is a more complex, moderate, and tolerant one of the capital city. It betokens a detachment characteristic of an "outsider", but one not devoid of sympathetic understanding. In Juvenal's second satire sexual deviation concealed by hypocrisy is the dominant theme. This theme, however, is partially obfuscated by the early section of the satire. In this first section, Juvenal exposes the hypocritical moralists of the upper classes who imitated Domitian's vice. The latter secretly indulged himself in an unnatural relationship with his niece, while inveighing against the morals of the day. In lines 65-148, his major theme is the exposure of the flagrant pervert, that is: the effeminate homosexual. Horace had treated a vaguely reminiscent theme in Satire 1.2, adultery and intrigue. He pointed out that excess and a distorted view of romantic love can lead men into the most com-

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promising positions, and he provided admonitions against such unreasonable and absurd conduct. After a scandalous review of such typical excesses as seeking relations with married women, Horace opposes to them his well-tempered and moderate though obviously pagan solution. Enjoy love affairs, by all means, but if you go about it foolishly or dishonestly, you will regret the day you were born. Horace's preliminary theme was that fools, by avoiding one vice, namely prudery, run into its opposite, that is, perilous adultery. In alternating sections of discourse, Horace declares the dangers and then offers his sane advice. This elaboration of the introductory theme enables the reader, now thoroughly admonished, to see a balanced picture of human nature with its capacity for both good and bad action. We might now contrast the treatment of philoploutia, the craze for wealth, in these two Roman satirists. Juvenal's fifth satire shows all possessors of wealth to be people who have attained it unlawfully. Those who possess enormous fortunes are, to him, automatically luxurious, irresponsible, and despicable users of that wealth. In the satire, Virro, a wealthy man, has invited among others Trebius, a client and a man of the less fortunate class, to share a meal with him. Virro, however, takes every precaution that his own food be best and that his guests' be mediocre in content and preparation. There is honest, unrestrained indignation in Juvenal's strong language and vicious sarcasm, for he zealously represents the rich as utterly repulsive. Horace's Satire 2.2 analogously exposes to view the extravagant meals of the wealthy. Horace, no less than Juvenal, knows the excesses to which a wealthy house is susceptible, yet he does not flay it unmercifully but deals with the problem in a more tolerant and genial manner. It thus appears that while both authors evidence a strong aversion to the abuse of wealth, for they assail this vice in several places (Horace's Satire 2.8, a banquet given by the nouveau riche Nasidienus, and Juvenal, Satire 11 and passim), Horace feels that money is not in itself evil while Juvenal thinks it is. While Horace attacks the ostentation and vulgarity displayed by the wealthy and

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the curious and affected erudition of pronounced epicures, Juvenal, without discrimination, viciously slurs and condemns all who possess wealth. Horace's Nasidienus provides an extravagant meal, cheerfully revealing his poor taste by his fussy exposition of the merits of everything served, and by his generally Trimalchian behavior. Yet, Horace does not show bitterness as he ridicules the wealthy fool. He sees the folly of the vice, but hopes for the reformation of the guilty party. Juvenal, seemingly bred in an atmosphere of pagan pessimism and condemning human beings with his despondent preaching, casts his victims as types who cannot be improved. His prejudgment of mankind is clearly unbalanced. Viewed through his anti-humanistic eyes, man will never mend his evil ways. Juvenal, it would appear, has the peculiar misconception that a man who has accumulated wealth ceases to function as a desirable social being and becomes, among other things, a notorious and extravagant gourmand against whom invective is mandatory. He condemns without allowing that men have redeeming elements. He does not entertain the hope that the fool of today may become the sober, restrained, and temperate man of tomorrow. Juvenal's fault lies in looking at bad things retrospectively, and not looking for good things prospectively. While Juvenal's satire glows with the fire of indignation, Horace's satires tend to be free from vehemence, and, in the faults and follies of men, he sees occasion for laughter more often than for anger. Juvenal bitterly attacks all classes of society and characterizes them by such crudeness and lack of humor that the fury he feels against mankind has no element of relief. While Juvenal employs malignant backbiting and bitter, wounding invective, Horace is usually gently magnanimous, playful and genial in his raillery. Horace moderately condemns (Sat. 1.4.100-103) the distasteful use of riches: hie nigrae sucus lolliginis, haec est aerugo mera. quod vitium procul afore chartis, atque animo prius, ut siquid promittere de me possum aliud vere, promitto. He opposes the buffoonery of the scurrilous jester who indulges

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in immoderate and unreasonable laughter and will not even spare his friends, recommending a combination of seriousness and play (Sat. 1.10.11): et sermone opus est modo tristi saepe iocoso, and in lines 14-15: ridiculum acri fortius et melius magnas plerumque secat res. Throughout his satires, Horace consciously exposes his kindliness and mellow tolerance of expression. He excuses defects and laughs at abnormalities in behavior, criticizing such faults as foppery, effeminacy, the antique-collecting craze, wealth and licentiousness. Conceiving his satire in a spirit of playfulness, allied to didacticism, he writes to educate and entertain simultaneously. Men's minds want to be amused and seduced to the right course of action, to the truth and to an awareness of reality. Horace pleases the reader in writing frank and easy-to-read sermones free from malignity under a sportive demeanor; his satire serves a moral end, employing a homespun doctrine. In Juvenal's satire we find only grim humor, the reflection of his indignatio. While Horace's attitude toward all undesirable types involves a wish to reform them, his judicial approach remains nevertheless lenient and kind. Juvenal, on the other hand, intends to alarm the vicious wrong-doers, and thus to chasten them. But men excoriated by Juvenal were more likely to be goaded to even greater folly and vice by such reproof. Thus, though Juvenal's intention was to exterminate vice, his method was eminently inadequate. He lacked that happy combination of the serio-comic in his writings which the urbane, sympathetic, and, needless to say, realistic Horace possessed. When we look back on the period in which Juvenal wrote, the earliest years of the second century A.D., we observe that literature encountered a virulent despotism primarily in the person of Domitian who, though no longer alive, had, in concentrating in his own hands complete control of the government, begun to threaten with trials everyone who might possibly be a personal

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enemy. Therefore, Juvenal's rhetorical poetry, restlessly versatile and morbidly irritable, corresponded to the uncertainty of existence. Juvenal felt that Domitian's was a maniacal despotism that afflicted men's minds and threatened their lives. It is not, therefore, unusual to find in Juvenal a poetic force striving against the emperor's tyranny, a decided pugnacity. Horace's attitude toward his sovereign may be humorous, but it is "basically respectful" (cf. Rudd, Satires of Horace, Cambridge, 1966, p. 230). Juvenal was a man of little sympathy for his fellow-man and less sense of humor toward the moral incongruities of life. He despised nearly all foreigners. The Jews whom he misunderstands (3.14) and the hungry Greekling (3.78) illustrate his xenophobia. But his hatred of the filthy "Egyptian" Crispinus (1.27 and 4.23-33), a scented and arrogant commander of the imperial guards in Egypt, may be a reminder of his three- (or four-) year exile in that country. The fifteenth satire which is entirely about Egypt reveals his hatred of the inhabitants' superstition, cruelty, religious fanaticism, and in a lesser degree, their alleged cannibalism. While no personal enemy so irked Horace, Crispinus, an ex-fish-peddlar, was, next to Domitian, Juvenal's most hated enemy. Egypt is indeed savage: horrida sane Aegyptos (44-45). Living as an impoverished ex-gentleman after his exile, fear and disappointment always grieved Juvenal, and the attacks he launched always seemed to be dictated by personal grudges. In this he recalls Lucilius' combativeness. Horace's assaults were tame by comparison. The Venusina lucerna is more ironic, more tranquil. Unworthy men who had succeeded in the equestrian career, as well as the selfish, the vicious, the ineffective Roman nobility, and those who coveted the favor of the imperial court — all these elicited his most violent lampoons. Horace never had cause for pessimism similar to Juvenal's, for he always co-operated with Augustan policy of his own will, and he found in Augustus an urbane and jovial person, even in reproof (compare Epistle 1.7 to Maecenas), and what is more, a fond friend. Nor did he ever quite despair of the future because of a lonely, tormented, or embittered life. Similarly, in still earlier days, Lucilius, the knight, had enjoyed

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the patronage and friendship of Scipio. Lucilius was an esteemed member of the Scipionic Circle and enjoyed intimate friendship, characterized even by playfulness, with Scipio. The familiar story is current that he once stole Scipio's napkin from him and was pursued around the dinner table by him. Lucilius' denunciation of the increase of luxury, the affectation of Greek manners among his contemporaries, and the failing popular parties on the political scene was shared, no doubt, by his close friend, Scipio, the cultured aristocrat. It was not until two decades after Juvenal's exile into Egypt in 96 that he became once more independent, thanks to the gift of some patron of the arts, possibly Hadrian. Defeated in spite of his promising brilliance, pessimistic despite his culture, he then wrote the fiercest denunciations the ancient world has known. His writings, mainly monologues — for there is only one dialogue in sixteen satires — are almost all argumentative, not only in the sense that he proves his points by hammering home proof after proof, but also in the sense that he vehemently protests against all manner of social conditions: the decay of the Roman nobility, the superabundance of poetasters, the nouveau riche, the sexually abnormal, the abusers of wealth, women, and marriage. In the third satire, Juvenal denounces Rome and its iniquities, its pullulating foreigners (especially Greeks), and its dangers: accidents, famine, criminals, fire, and the crumbling architectural, social, and moral fabric. All these are ample reasons for leaving the city. Horace's reasons are less mandatory. His ideal would appear to be a perpetual commuting between Rome and his Sabine farm. Further, he enjoyed the city life of Augustan Rome, and though he looked with jaundiced eye at usurers, quacks, and other trouble-makers, he never developed the cynicism which afflicted the poor but honest Juvenal. We shall now continue to review briefly some of the themes of the Juvenalian satires and comment, wherever parallelism exists, on the treatment of similar material by Horace. Hatred of Domitian's regime and court is the dominant note of the fourth satire. It does not have a parallel in the Horatian opus, for Horace had no similar reign of terror to contemplate. Indeed,

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Augustus' policy regarding literature, religion, moral revival, and nationalism was all the more a strong bond which kept Horace sympathetic to the imperial family and to the capital city. Besides, Horace loved Rome, though not, perhaps, when it bustled most with noise and traffic. This poem shows influences of both Statius and Martial (the Silvae and Martial's Epigrams 4.30, 12.6, 13.81, etc., respectively) and immortalizes an enormous turbot presented to the emperor by a fisherman who had taken it in the Adriatic. The whole question revolves around the method of preparing the king-size fish for the "royal" table. Crispinus, also ridiculed in Sat. 15 and here cabinet minister, is the butt of attack. There follow ten other charactersketches of the emperor's political advisers, most of whom are deceased, but all of whom were or had been sycophantic public figures subservient to a capricious Domitian, though forever fearing his displeasure. To the four characters Horace had briefly commented on and quickly disposed of in Sat. 1.6, Juvenal, starting with Crispinus, the purple-clad parasite (verna and scurra, Sats. 1.26-27 and 4.31 respectively), draws up eleven types of undesirables. His Lucilian masquerade ends with the twelfth cabinet-member, Domitian himself, the Flavius ultimus who had brought on his reign of terror (4.30). Juvenal "wishes that Domitian had devoted his days to nonsensical deeds (such as this convening of his councilors to discuss a fish) rather than to cruelty" (R. E. Colton, "Cabinet Meeting: Juvenal's Fourth Satire", CB 40 (Nov., 1963), p. 4). Horace had no occasion to write about cringing courtiers, for Augustus was not tyrannical, but Juvenal describes the subservience and fear in which the present "bald Nero's" (38) retainers stood, for they lacked the courage to laugh even at this comic juncture when the emperor asked the ridiculous question: quidnam igitur censes? conciditur? (130), these being his only words. Horace's Sat. 1.6 elaborates on paternal devotion, whereas Juvenal's fourth belabors a trivial fish story. Juvenal's fifth satire, (like his ninth, it treats the patron-client relationship) deals with the patron Virro and his retainers or hangers-on, particularly Trebius, a subject which he had broached

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7

in the earlier satires of Book l. Bitterness and disillusionment characterize this poem as the dependant is theoretically persuaded that such a life (aliena vivere quadra) is not worth living. The rich patron is here described as cruel and callous. The humiliations which the poor and the middle-class parasites like Juvenal himself bring upon themselves are equally satirized. After describing the insulting treatment that Trebius has received at the hands of his patron, now virtually a slave-owning host, magister and rex, dominus and dives, he ends by shifting the attack back from patron to guest, from the callous Virro to the miserable Trebius who is being treated like a slave. The vigorous satiric indignation of the poem has no counterpart in the cena Nasidieni of Horace. Here the vulgar, parvenu host is left by the disgusted and vengeful guests, who have made fun of him throughout, after a canopy collapses and the host has wearied their ears with his elaborate descriptions of the viands. His explanation ad nauseam of every refinement of the cuisine drives the guests from their triclinia. Horace merely parodies the archetypal pattern of satire, the satura with its medley of edible ingredients, a distinctively Roman literary genre. What Horace saw as a joke, Juvenal sees as a revolting contrast between wealth and poverty, characterized by the antitheses of slavish friendship and cruel hospitality. Juvenal's sixth satire catalogues the scandals of high society women, satirizing rich wives, and warns men not to marry. The poem is a nightmare of incoherent violence of invective against sexual immorality. The nightly excursions of Messallina, for example, are one of its highlights. The collapse of family life is the other significant theme. Horace, too, had foreseen the dangers inherent in such conditions as Juvenal describes, but he never yielded to such an unrestrained and hopeless conviction that women were incapable of anything but cheating, tyrannizing, ignoring, or worse still, psychologically castrating, tormenting and killing ' W. S. Anderson's article: "Studies in Juvenal", in YCS vol. 15 (1957) discusses in detail Juvenal's method of composition in Book 1, satires 1-5. His Anger in Juvenal and Seneca insists on a distinction between Juvenal and Juvenal's satirist, and an even sharper differentiation of satires 1-6 and 10-16.

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their husbands (cf. Highet, Juvenal, The Satirist, p. 101). At most, Horace, early in his career, had written a semi-serious diatribe {Satire 1.2) on the foolishness of seeking adulterous liaisons with society women, but his treatment of this popular philosophical theme begins with mock-solemnity and continues with Lucilian candor and jocular banter. Man should avoid mere sexistentialism, of which adultery is a reflection. Juvenal's seventh satire describes the hopeless poverty and misery of the intellectuals who work hard but earn little. Juvenal is sympathetic to the epic, tragic, and lyric poets, historians, lawyers, and teachers. His distorted view of the Greek foreigner throws the true picture of the intellectual and aesthetic life of Rome out of focus, however. A Greek musician, he says, earns more per performance than a teacher does annually. In this satire, also, Juvenal indiscriminately attacks the rich and finds these callous and hypocritical wealthy Romans guilty of neglecting deserving thinkers and artists. They abuse and misuse their wealth while creative men starve in garrets, annihilated by the rising cost of living. The eighth satire is primarily a piece of advice to a young noble who will go east to serve as governor. Juvenal warns him to avoid the ignoble actions of foolish and vicious aristocrats who had thus belied their ancestry. He points out that noble origin makes wicked behavior most ignominious. Horace, however, never so bitter as Juvenal, does not approach such a discussion with destructive criticism. To a recent scholar, Juvenal 10 seems to mark a turning-point in that it shows a philosophical mellowness which such traditional designations as "a satire on the vanity of human wishes" deny. Bernard F. Dick, "Seneca and Juvenal 10", HSCP 76 (1969) 237246, with whose sweeping conclusion it is difficult to concur, finds "Sat. 10 neither negative nor angry", (ibid., p. 237); "Sat. 10 owes more to Seneca than to anyone else" (p. 239), and "that one should pray for nothing is consonant with Senecan Stoicism" (ibid.). "There is a giant question mark hovering over Juvenal 10: for what exactly should one pray, and to whom? And the answers seem to be nothing and no one respectively" (ibid., p. 243). Dick holds that Juvenal abandons Heraclitean tears and opts for Democritean

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laughter in this satire and simultaneously espouses Senecan selfsufficiency. Thus, "a Senecan reading of the poem removes the charge of pessimism... the satire argues for an enlightened attitude toward prayer..." {ibid., p. 246). Again, Dick would have Juvenal declaring it is enough for men to attain prudentia, for sapientia is somewhat beyond their attainability. The mens sana (356) we must pray for subsumes prudentia (365) since, if we prepare ourselves for any outcome, Fortune loses her power to ruin our lives. Even if we adopt this premise, we need not accept the final interpretation that Juvenal is here a mellow Senecan Stoic. To me, the satire is, pace Dick, still pessimistic. It speaks of the dangers of ambition, and Sejanus' downfall (he is a tyrannus; cf. 113) and execution are vividly described. Demosthenes, Cicero, Hannibal, Alexander the Great and Xerxes — all met violent deaths because they aspired to fame and power. A Nero will convert a handsome boy into a Lustknabe. Old age, too, Juvenal holds, is a heavy cross to bear and is as degrading as it is painful. "Why should men pray for it?", he inquires. These commonplace satiric themes find a more moderate and, consequently, less vivid treatment in Horace, whose Sat. 2.3. 161-223, also on ambition, is limited to the wise instruction of Servius Oppidius to his two sons, on the one hand, and types of folly as illustrated by Agamemnon and Ajax, on the other. Juvenal's eleventh satire, like the twelfth, is gayer in tone and, protreptically, serio-comic. Like the twelfth also, it is close in content and expression to the Horatian sermo. Moderation is the theme, and a simple dinner menu provides the subject of conversation. Older and independent now, Juvenal tends to be genial as he plans a pleasant meeting with a friendly guest. W. S. Anderson points out that Juvenal's satirist is now Democritean and that the indignant satirist of the early satires has been supplanted. Dick would have this Juvenalian reformation occurring in the tenth satire, but, like the lengthiest satire against women, this second-inlength poem seems to me to strike somber tones of gloom. The twelfth satire reminds us of Horace's attack against captatores in Satire 2.5, for just as Horace had expressed intellectual scorn of these legacy-hunters, Juvenal views them with contempt.

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The now milder Juvenal dismisses the cunning greed of such leeches and mocks the huge profits of these shrewd flatterers. Friendship means much more to him now, and loyalty to a friend is more meaningful than wealth. Juvenal's mood is tender and mellow, for he has grown decidedly milder and sensible. Horace would have shared his views, had he known him now. Juvenal's thirteenth satire, a mock consolation, (cf. Pryor, AUMLA 18, 1962, 167-180) seems Christian in its message, but is "a caricature of conventional arguments" (Anderson, CW 63,1970, 221). Do not seek revenge, he says, you will be avenged, for the embezzler will surely be committed to justice for his crimes. Horace's Epistles of Book 1, though attentive to ethical problems, did not, though it could well have contained such, include similar advice to a friend or protégé to avoid the petty pleasure of revenge. To Maecenas, in Epistle 1.19.49, Horace does say: "Anger breeds fierce hostility, and deadly war." Juvenal's fourteenth satire is largely a sermon against the vices of greed and avarice. Horace's first satire had dealt partially, in less denunciatory fashion, with this theme, the commonplace of philoploutia. The earlier part of Juvenal's satire dealt with careless education, a solemn theme unrelieved by the jesting elements it might have revealed had Horace treated it. However broadly distinct the petty social maladjustments and the violent crimes of Juvenal's pages, thrown together indiscriminately into a farrago, Juvenal's main theme remains Rome and its corrupt denizens, and, in his rhetorically exaggerated but sincere and truthful satire, he combines indignation and amusement for the purpose of the grim joke. In the latter respect, he does tend to resemble Horace, though the gloomy pessimism in his satire outweighs the comic. Living in that corrupt first century of the empire when the degenerate Nero and the equally cruel Domitian reigned, and writing a form of spoudaiogeloion which laid too much emphasis on the gravity of a theme, Juvenal offended his readers with his satire. Further, whereas Horace conceived of satire as a genre close to comedy and serio-comic philosophical discourse, Juvenal likened

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8

it to oratory, tragedy, and even epic. But it is, however, incongruous to deal with minor failings and eccentricities with the same grave rhetoric with which one assails shocking crimes. Such misplaced enthusiasm and emphasis is not a Horatian trait. In the foregoing Chapter, we have attempted to show how Horace resumes the general concept of spoudaiogeloion, thanks to the happy combination of earnestness and entertainment. Through his use of irony and through his abandonment of the undesirable satura elements of crude invective and raillery, harsh wit and wantonness of speech, Horace is an urbanus who laughingly teaches moral "truths". Sincere, but not deadly serious, Horace observes and judges himself and other men through non-committal and goodnatured irony. Blending the geloion and the spoudaion, Horace shows his geniality, sympathy, and tolerance of human failings and produces a virile and effective corrective in the form of goodnatured satire. It is with these considerations in view that we conclude this section of the monograph. In ancient classical literature, Horace is the most felicitous exponent of spoudaiogeloion, for he achieves in his writings that universality proper to tragedy and comedy of which Aristotle spoke, and he restores the equilibrium which counters seriousness with laughter, laughter with seriousness. Horace's ironic humor combined with serious purpose achieves the golden mean of expression in the literary sphere and, what is more important, the golden mean of virtue in the ethical life.

• On page 42 of W. S. Anderson's article (cf. note 7 above) we learn that Juvenal, in Satire 1, 162-169, says that "epic themes are preferable to satiric, because they are so safe, being devoid of relevance to the present. Satiric themes affect personal feelings directly and stir emotional reactions in the people they touch. Still, Juvenal infinitely prefers indignation to the sterile emotions of epic; real themes dealing with real people possess a patent superiority to the silly tales of Hylas and Heracles or even the more serious stories of Achilles and Aeneas." Anderson says that Juvenal speaks in an ironic vein here.

CONCLUSION

As we had indicated at the outset of this monograph, spoudaiogeloion is a stylistic method used to restore equilibrium to the disorder of body, mind, spirit, or manners with the purpose of attaining a harmony of contemplation which is the end of art. It has been our intention to synthesize the Wissenschaft on the subject, to show the significant aspects of this stylistic method, and to illustrate manifestations of this method in various writings of Greece and Rome. The study has been by no means exhaustive, nor could it have been, for only some of the outstanding writers of both comedy and satire have come under consideration. A more complete study would necessarily have included a more detailed analysis of the works of Marcus Terentius Varro of Reate, as well as an intensive study of Horace's Letters and Persius'1 works, to mention only some of the Roman authors. We have wished merely to lay down lines of approach to a vast subject. We have ascertained that there is copious employment of spoudaiogeloion in the gnomic-writing iambographers, Aristophanes, and several Cynic philosophers, to mention only a few of the outstanding exponents of the method in Greece. Among the Romans who employ the method we have touched on Terence, Plautus, and the satirists — among whom Horace is the most conspicuous for his effectiveness. 1 See R. G. M. Nisbet's "Persius" in Critical Essays on Roman Lit.: Satire, ed. by J. P. Sullivan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 39-71. Also, see Cynthia S. Dessen's Iunctura Callidus Acri: Persius' Satires (Chicago: U. of Illinois, 1968); K. J. Reckford, "Studies in Persius", Hermes 90 (1962) 467-504; and W. S. Anderson's bibliography of recent vintage in CW, February, March, 1970, 181-194, 199, 217-222.

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In our second Chapter, which served as a transition and dealt with Greek epic, early Greek satire, and Greek comedy, some forms of laughter in Homer were discussed: the laughter of derision, the laugh of joy, and some sources of laughter: comic irony, caricature, invective, and the parody element. The attacks of the iambographers revealed primarily the personal revenge motive. The staple of comedy was shown to be moral incongruity. Developing as a primitive aspect of the comic spirit in the sexual and political spheres, moral incongruity takes the form of the licentious and the subversive and gives rise either to comic poetry or to didactic poetry of a serio-comic nature. It is to such a groundwork that we must look, for example, for the origins of Aristophanic comedy. Finally in this transitional Chapter II, it was shown how Theophrastus and Menander contributed much to the realism of New Comedy and to the stylistic method which combines the unsound extremes, if we may borrow the terminology of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 10.6, of spoudaion and geloion into the golden mean of the serio-comic. It is, of course, usual for Aristotle to designate the specific mean lying between two extremes (e.g., in his Metaphysics when he discusses publishing and advertising, to pithanon met' euschemosunes lies between the extremes of alazoneia (overstatement) and eironeia (understatement)). Litterateurs simplified their task by hyphenating the two words, or making it one. Such a task Aristotle did not undertake (cf. Nic. Eth. 10.6), and it devolved upon Diogenes Laertius to designate Heraclitus (9.17) and Strabo to call Menippus of Gadara (16.2.29) spoudaiogeloios. Part of the value of this study is that it has advanced a justification of sensitive moderation in the literary sphere, where creative imagination tends to have free scope for expression. This moderation may be exhibited in the following equation, however unmathematical: laughter is necessary to life; no one can gainsay it; yet, it is either subordinate to its serious conduct or, at most, on a par with it. When the ratio is a proper one between the laughable and the serious, spoudaiogeloion is functioning at its highest peak of efficiency.

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CONCLUSION

In determining the nature and extent of the use of the seriocomic in the Roman literary tradition, a study was made in Chapter III of the diametrically opposed approaches of the respectively "rough" and "smooth" satirists Juvenal and Horace, and an attempt was made to show how Horace, who is primarily genial, is far more felicitous as an exponent of spoudaiogeloion than the vitriolic Juvenal whose writings tend to be merely sardonic, indignant, and deadly serious. Horace combines the grave and the comic into a harmony; through his semi-jocular criticism of contemporary society, as only a sensitive observer can envision it and appreciate it, he allows us to laugh at the moral incongruities of life but also rectifies our perspective and purview in the ethical and aesthetic life.

APPENDIX

Lucretius, at one point in his De Rerttm Natura, the ivory tower passage at the beginning of book 2, seems to entertain the reflection that comedy and tragedy run together, that is, that moral incongruity may form the basis of either comedy or tragedy. This view may be juxtaposed to our earlier statement that when the disequilibrium or disorder is harmless, we have comedy, whereas when it is harmful, we have tragedy.1 Lucretius superimposes the two in the passage alluded to above, and poses a question thereby. For tragedy deals by definition with the horrible, the pitiful, the disastrous. Lucretius, like Aristotle, is troubled by the problem of how we can take delight in the representation of such painful things. From our vantage point, we solve this dilemma by saying that art is not reality, but rather pictures and images which make up illusion. It is an illusory fiction which is generating emotional reactions, not real causes. As Aristotle had pointed out in his allusion to catharsis, the purgative service performed by tragedy on the emotions of hate, terror, grief, and pity minister to the higher delight which is the refinement and ennoblement of character — the self-appointed intent of great literature. Motivated, we should like to believe, by love of the good and the commendable, and the hatred of wrong, and proceeding from a sure moral criterion, Lucretius lashes out at human folly and crime and evokes feelings of just hatred and derision, even disgust of man's errant ways and actions; nevertheless, in the following lines at the beginning of book 2 of De Rerum Natura he poses the dilemma by saying: 1

See the beginning of this discussion in the Preface on p. 7-8

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Suave man magno turbantibus aequora ventis, E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem; Non quia vexari quemquamst iucunda voluptas, Sed quibus ipse malis careas quia cernere suave est. Suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri Per campos instructa tua sine parte pericli, Sed nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere Edita doctrina sapientum templa serena, Despicere unde queas alios passimque videre Errare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae, Certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate, Noctes atque dies niti praestante labore Ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri. People find comfort from the spectacle of others in distress, Lucretius says, thus rewarding themselves with the indulgence of an easy "pity".2 Yet this is not true tragedy, but is more akin to Hollywoodian melodrama. In Hegel's idealistic estimate of true tragedy, justice is restored automatically to the internal warfare of man's ethical life. The conflict between good and evil or even opposing good forces is erased and we do not indulge in Hobbesian laughter because we feel superior, nor do we satisfy the sadism in our envious hearts. We are delighted because the claims of competing forces are balanced, Hegel would say, or the more justifiable force proves superior. Is there not, however, a truer and more reasonable view of tragedy? Is it not more accurate to view tragedy as the representation of a world out of focus, where the forces for good and evil are irreconcilable and the ideal of absolute and reasonable justice is not attained? The Lucretian view of man's fruitless struggles for philosophical peace without the benefit of Epicurus' wisdom, and for success, which is always elusive because it is founded upon illusionary values and inaccurate presuppositions, in this passage depicts man in a tragi-comic role (as master satirist Lucretius is concerned with man's tragic role and destiny) wherein the sufferer's misfortune is the onlooker's source of satisfaction and comic relief. That is, the other man's tragedy is our comedy, and vice-versa.3 * Cf. for this viewpoint Victor M. Hamm's discussion of tragedy in The Pattern of Criticism, pp. 265-276. ' Cf. Hamm, p. 278, and note 2 above.

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The corrective for such a drastic ill-natured satiric bent, as Lucretius here illustrates, is the universality proper to tragedy and comedy (for each embodies the type rather than the individual) as indicated by Aristotle, universality which re-establishes an equilibrium of seriousness and laughter and which leads us along sure ways to a virtuous ethical life. E. B. Holtsmark points out how Lucretius shows "more the altruist's solicitude for his fellow human beings than the insulated egoism of the madman ... active sympathy for man's condition. ... Far from sadistic, the pleasure which Lucretius speaks of is one whose roots are deeply embedded in the all too barren soil of human compassion and concern."4 Indeed, returning to the important theme of satire, Lucretius is, in many respects, comparable as satirist to Horace, Juvenal and other Roman fault-finders. Believing himself saved by Epicurus, he trusts in the moral development of man, rejecting and satirizing the Stoic notion of divinity and perfection in the world. A positive, optimistic philosopher (he adheres to Epicurus' "friendship goes dancing round the world"), Lucretius satirizes the follies of private life, e.g. the misuse of prayer (5.1198-1202), superstition, fear of gods and death (2.55-58), men's anger (5.1151-1153) and their philoploutia (5.1432-1435). With Murley's statement ("Lucretius and the History of Satire", TAPA 70, 1939, 380-395), on page 395: "Lucretius may well for Horace have elevated the definition and tone of Roman satire...", the present writer concurs. Lucretius attacked human foibles, but his vehemence is tempered by his message of confidence in a sage, didactic and moral satire; and he tended to avoid offensive topics. Since he elevated the thought and expression of satire, we may, accepting Murley's findings, conjecture a possible influence on Horatian satire (c/. 3.98 to Horace, Sat. 1.1.119). His message, and Horace would be the first to agree, is an invitation to the simple life and self-possession and indifference to social or political climbing. • Cf. Erling B. Holtsmark, "Lucretius, 2.1-19" TAPA 98 (1967), 193-204, esp. 204.

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