Playful ImaginationsIn the immortal words of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight! Some of the writers in this category whisper, What fools these mortals be! while others, perhaps wiser, merely smile and say instead, What lovable fools these mortals be! Here is the realm of every sort of laughterwit, irony, repartee, satire, gallows humor, imaginative exuberance, the fanciful and the surreal. The resulting literary vaudeville show ranges from skits about the outrageous nightlife of the gods to the antic oafishness of a bumbling clown to the manic wordplay of S. J. Perelman. A good time is had by all.LUCIAN (c. 115200 b.c.)The True History; Lucius, or The Ass; Dialogues of the Dead; EssaysSpeak of the ancient Greeks, and one immediately thinks of noble philosophers, tragic dramatists, mournful choruses and a fair amount of rape, incest, madness, sacrifice, and blood. No matter what these serious-minded folk undertake, they almost never seem to be doing it just for fun. Aristophanes is the most obvious exception to this generalization. His plays satirize philosophy, sex, waranything. The philosopher Diogenesthe one who went searching in vain for an honest manalso possessed a playful spirit and a dry wit. When he observed a beggar drink from the palm of his hand, the philosopher threw away his cup; when Alexander the Great stood over him and offered to grant any wish, Diogeneswho had been working on his tansimply asked the master of the world to stop blocking the suns rays. Arguably the most amusing of all the Greeks, though, is the writer history knows as Lucian. (In fact, there may have been both a Lucian and a Pseudo-Lucian, but scholars have suspected this only in modern times.) The True History takes us on the kind of journey we associate with Odysseus or Jason and the Argonauts and turns it into the adventures of a Greek Baron Munchausen. Lucius, or The Ass is a picaresque and sometimes bawdy tale about a young man transformed into a donkey by witchcraft. It climaxes with a sex-crazed matron wondering what the beast would be like in bed; the next morning Luciuss owner decides he wants to sell tickets for a follow-up performance. Lucians numerous dialoguesalmost brief playletsread as if written by a Greek Bernard Shaw. In the Dialogues of the Dead, the characters complain about the boring society of Hades. Charon grouses that his boat is too small and, whats more, it leaks; Hannibal and Alexander argue over who was the better general; Socrates assures us that he really did know nothing and wasnt being at all ironic; and Tiresias is asked to describe, in detail, his transformation from woman to man. In the Dialogues of the Heterae old whores discuss sex, passion, jealousy, and money with younger women new to the game, while in the Dialogues of the Gods Jupiter, like a tired executive, patiently explains Ganymedes new duties as cup-bearer, though the young shepherd cannot quite grasp Excerpted from Classics for Pleasure by Michael Dirda All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
