Adrienne Atkins (University of Pennsylvania)
When epic language appears in genres like comedy, iambus, and hexameter parodia, the first impression it lends is one of incongruity; epic collides with non-epic, high register with low, past with present. However, to late Archaic and Classical audiences, epic represented more than the corpus of written poetry that survives to us. Using case studies from Hipponax (fr. 128 West) and Aristophanes (Peace 1270-80), I illustrate how non-serious uses of epic language that seem to function simply by incongruity may involve a more complex engagement between contemporary forms of epic reception.
Scholars have largely examined playful and mocking uses of epic language in 6th and 5th century poetry genre by genre, or author by author (e.g. in comedy, Revermann; in Hipponax, Bettarini). These interpretations tend to treat epic as a clearly circumscribed literary object, representing a single register and genre. However, epic was a living literary, social, and religious phenomenon. Audiences experienced epic poetry not through text, but through a variety of types of performance, and also encountered epic language elsewhere, such as in oracles and curses. Thus, when confronting non-serious uses of epic language, one must identify the forms of reception underlying them. A passage that seems to function by juxtaposing epic with other genres and registers may also involve a juxtaposition of different forms of epic reception.
Hipponax and Aristophanes use epic language in precisely this way. In fr. 128, Hipponax invokes the Muse in dactylic hexameter to sing how a glutton will die (or in order that he may die), parodying an epic proem (Degani). He also evokes the use of epic language in oracles and curses (Faraone), but these elements do not prevent the fragment from constituting an epic parody, as Faraone argues; they in fact facilitate the parody. With the invocation of the Muse, Hipponax takes on a rhapsodic voice, strengthening his invective by framing it as divine truth. It is by capitalizing on non-poetic uses of epic language that he assimilates his invective coherently to this voice.
Aristophanes’ Peace 1270-80 incorporates epic language differently than Hipponax, but to a similar effect. Here, Trygaeus attempts to persuade a boy singing the Epigonoi to sing about peace rather than war, and he resorts to inserting new hexameter lines about feasting between the boy’s martial verses. Trygaeus’ interjections transform the boy’s song into a poetic agon like that found in the Certamen (Richardson; Compton-Engle; Telò). By evoking this dialogic form of epic performance, Aristophanes assimilates epic into the dramatic medium. Furthermore, Aristophanes develops the tension between war and peace by juxtaposing contemporary agonistic and non-agonistic forms of epic performance; ironically, in this conflict Trygaeus becomes the aggressor.
Non-serious uses of epic do more than exploit its archaism or loftiness. By considering epic as a multifaceted contemporary phenomenon rather than an archaic literary monolith, it is possible to achieve a richer understanding of these passages and more profitably place them in dialogue with one another.