Zachary Elliott (University of Pennsylvania)
Lucian’s Icaromenippus opens with Menippus reckoning the distance of his travel to the moon and the citadel of Zeus. The category confusion produced by describing travel to non-terrestrial destinations in terrestrial terms marks the spatial and temporal incongruities between the sublunar and superlunar worlds as a theme that recurs in each stage of Menippus’ narration of his journey. As he travels farther away from the earth, Menippus can view the world below him synchronously and participate in the mythological space of the gods because time and space are increasingly collapsed. I argue in this paper that Lucian’s play with configurations of space and time in the Icaromenippus is inextricably tied to his broader program of metaliterary satire.
This paper draws on two threads of scholarship on the Icaromenippus to explicate the metaliterary function of the spatiotemporal play that Lucian employs. Much of the previous scholarship on the Icaromenippus has treated it as a part of understanding Lucian’s level of indebtedness to or engagement with various literary precedents (Bompaire; Anderson), especially Menippus (McCarthy) Aristophanes (Branham; Brusuelas), and Homer (Bouquiaux-Simon; Wilshere). Karen Ní Mheallaigh (2014; 2020a; 2020b) has extensively considered the role of the moon in the Icaromenippus, arguing that it is a location where one can consider reality while being detached from it. I consider, for each part of the narrative, how the text depicts Menippus’ position in relation to space and time and the metaliterary play that occurs in each of those positions in order to see how these simultaneously active literary games inform one another.
The start of Menippus’ narrative—in which he experiences frustration with philosophers and adapts the invention of Daedalus—presents a straightforward configuration of space and time, with Menippus able to act in the present and access the past only through the stories he hears about it. On the moon, Menippus looks down on the earth and from the height of his vantage point can see both a spatially synoptic view of the earth and a historically synchronous one, seeing several scandals among prominent Hellenistic political figures and philosophers at once despite their actual separation in time. In the superlunar world, the gods have an even greater synoptic view of the sublunar world, but they are stagnant in their ability to act in relation to it. The end of the dialogue sees a decision to destroy the philosophers next year and Menippus sent home, stripped of his wings. Internally, Menippus celebrates the impending annihilation of philosophers, but externally, a Second Sophistic or modern reader knows that the “next year” never came.
In the end, the dialogue retroactively emphasizes the literariness of each previous instance of spatiotemporal play by revealing that it is ultimately through Lucian’s multi-generic fiction that the reader has the capacity to see both the worlds of this text and the whole literary tradition synoptically and synchronously. I conclude the paper by sketching how Lucian’s approach to playing with time and space here can inform our understanding of mythological play throughout his corpus.