Degree Date
2025
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies
Abstract
This study shows that Lucian is deeply engaged with Old Comedy as a literary model, and that the kind of comic dialogue he claims to invent (Bis Acc. 33, Prom. Es 6) is not an evenly balanced hybrid of Platonic Dialogue and Old Comedy as has been previously thought. Instead, Lucian prioritizes Old Comedy in his conception of the comic dialogue. Lucian solves the tension between the pedigree and prestige available to an imitator of Old Comedy and the risk of moral compromise for the same by enacting a satirist’s defense. He claims to be the morally righteous outsider, wins the audience to his side by appealing to their intellectual vanity, and vindicates his choice to style himself a writer of Comedy.
Lucian defends his position with the literary tools of Old Comedy: he employs parody, satire, parabasis, autobiography, personification, making the abstract concrete, metatheater, and fantasy, alongside comic language and tropes of mockery, to not only declare himself a skilled comic author, but to demonstrate it as well. One by one, he uses the mythology that has sprung up around the three lights of Old Comedy: Cratinus, Aristophanes, and Eupolis, to remedy their faults, rewrite their defeats, and undo their deaths, all while replacing them with himself in the center of their narratives.
In order to do this, Lucian engages polemically with these poets’ detractors using the same comic arsenal. He does what the comic poets cannot, he acknowledges the long biographical tradition, along with the doxography of his favored satirical targets, the hypocritical philosophers, heirs of Socrates, and wrests back the power to define the objects of his mockery and return them to the comic stage. Lucian recomposes the portrayals of Socrates and the philosophical schools as found in Plato, Lucian’s contemporaries, and the scholarship of his time into a new comic fantasy where mockery prevails, and Lucian’s stand-in emerges triumphant above all the rest.
Citation
Glaser, Jenni. 2025. "Lucian's New Old Comedy." PhD Diss, Bryn Mawr College.
