Stephen Hill (University of Virginia)
The notion of reversal (περιπέτεια), famously developed by Aristotle in the Poetics (1452a), is integral to the genre of tragedy. This paper explores the importance of περιπέτεια for Lucian’s Menippus or Necyomantia, in which Menippus tells a friend about his recent journey to the underworld, by focusing on its Euripidean tragic intertexts. These operate on multiple planes: the plot’s circumstances, the plays’ themes, and Lucian’s broader socio-critical project. While previous scholarship has noted the superficial appropriateness of these passages – Euripides’ plays also feature underworld journeys and Menippus is dressed like Aristophanes’ Dionysus in Frogs (e.g. Helm, Piot, Householder, Anderson, Branham, and Karavas) – the Euripidean plays’ striking emphasis on reversal and its implications for Lucian’s Necyomantia have gone unnoticed.
Menippus’ first three utterances in the Necyomantia are quotations from Euripidean tragedies; I focus on the prior two. The first is from Heracles, in which Heracles saves his family from the cruel tyrant Lycus but later kills them himself. Menippus, freshly returned from Hades, borrows the words Heracles speaks on his own return, before both reversals: ὦ χαῖρε μέλαθρον πρόπυλά θ ̓ ἑστίας ἐμῆς, | ὡς ἄσμενός σ’ ἐσεῖδον ἐς φάος μολών (523–24). These lines, superficially appropriate, also create for Lucian’s readers (or audience) soon-to-be-fulfilled expectations of reversal. Menippus next uses the words of Polydorus’ ghost in Hecuba: ἥκω νεκρῶν κευθμῶνα καὶ σκότου πύλας | λιπών, ἵν ̓ Ἅιδης χωρὶς ᾤκισται θεῶν (1–2). Again, the immediate context fits Menippus’ borrowing. But Hecuba, too, spotlights reversals: after the murder of her children Polyxena and Polydorus, Hecuba kills her son’s murderer, Polymestor, and is herself changed into a hound. Both plays, then, feature sudden reversals which also implicate the gods (e.g. Hec. 162–64), making them well suited for Lucian’s interest in human vanity and the problem of divine justice.
In the climax of the Necyomantia, Menippus describes his vision of human life as a procession (πομπή), with Fortune (Τύχη) leading (χορηγεῖν): in it, he sees Philip of Macedon repairing shoes, former tyrants such as Xerxes, Darius, and Polycrates begging in the crossroads, and Diogenes the Cynic laughing at the laments of Sardanapalus and Midas for their lost wealth (16). In fact, Menippus describes humans not merely as participants in Fortune’s procession but actually as “tragic actors” (τραγικοὺς ὑποκριτάς) “on stage” (ἐπὶ τῆς σκηνῆς), who change from Creon, Priam, or Agamemnon to a slave at the command of the “poet.” Thus the relevance of the Euripidean intertexts not only shifts from circumstantial (Heracles’ or Polydorus’ words in Menippus’ mouth) to thematic (the reversal of fortune), but it also undergoes yet another transformation so that the intertexts’ very theatricality, even more than plot or theme, becomes ammunition for Lucian’s satirical attack on the entire spectacle of human life. This culminates in Menippus’ claim, targeting tragedy’s attempts to grapple with the moral implications of reversals, that the extremes of fortune exist only to give the “show” variety (παντοδαπὴν γάρ, οἶμαι, δεῖ γενέσθαι τὴν θέαν (16)).