Download PDF | (Explorations in Medieval Culture, 12) Przemysław Marciniak, Ingela Nilsson (eds.) - Satire in the Middle Byzantine Period_ The Golden Age of Laughter_-Brill (2021).
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Note on Transliteration
Transliterating Greek names from different periods is complicated, presenting challenges for consistency. Given that complete consistency did not seem feasible, we opted for a compromise: in most cases (though not always), we opted for established English forms (Maurice, not Maurikios; Constantine, not Konstantinos; John, not Ioannes). Absent such forms, we opted for transliteration (Eugenianos). Generally, we tried to avoid Latinized forms, except for ancient Greek names (Thucidydes).
It is Difficult Not to Write Satire: A Brief Introduction to the Satirical Mode
Ingela Nilsson
Satire is one of those concepts that everyone understands, but which still evades a clear definition. Most would agree that it has to do with scorn and ridicule, probably but not necessarily with laughter. Some would say it is the same thing as, or related to, parody or invective. Either way, it is an old form with a confusing etymology, a constantly present strategy in most societies, an intellectual and artistic endeavor that demands the audience’s attention and expects some kind of reaction. Satire is accordingly firmly rooted in social and cultural contexts which need to be understood in order for the satire to be effective, which means that its meaning is perishable. A cartoon in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo or an episode of the American Saturday Night Live are efficient only as long as the audience knows the characters and events that are being satirized. Some satires take on more general or prevalent topics and become long-lived. George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) took its theme from the postwar world and offered a satire of not only Soviet communism, but totalitarian societies in general. The dystopic storyworld of Orwell still speaks to readers in a world where freedom of speech is once more threatened by undemocratic regimes and neofascist movements.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, partly as a comment on the dystopic future imagined by Orwell some 40 years earlier. When the adaptation of the novel as a streamed television series was launched about 30 years later, in 2017, several parallels were drawn between Atwood’s storyworld and American society under the presidency of Donald Trump. Others pointed out the similarities regarding the situation of women in societies ruled by Islamic extremism. Such interpretations were not anticipated by the novel itself, just like Orwell did not attempt to write a prophesy; both authors, however, used strategies typical of satirical speech and writing: they stayed very close to an imaginable reality, but represented it with means of parody, exaggeration, juxtaposition and analogy, sarcasm, irony, and double entendre. These strategies point at the interpretative demands involved in satirical discourse: satire requires a shared understanding of the norm and what is ‘common sense, a feature that may be seen as less self-evident in a globalized world. At the same time, it is a world in which political satire is said to be both threatened and particularly powerful.!
Regardless of which is true, these modern examples may serve as a reminder of how complex the working of satire are. Studying satirical writings of the past accordingly involves not only the usual problems of investigating features of a society whose affinities may be to a smaller or larger extent lost to us, but also more complicated issues of emotional ambiguity and social expectations— difficult to detect and even more difficult to decipher.
1 From Rome to Constantinople: A Very Short History
The origin of satire is most often traced back to ancient Rome and Quintilian’s statement that satire (satura) is “all ours” (tota nostra).? Quintilian wished to underline that satire was a product of Roman culture and not simply one of those literary forms taken over from the Greeks. This was in many respects true, but at the same time the Roman satirists—Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal—drew freely from the literary tradition and thus followed in the footsteps of both Greek and Roman authors.? In this sense, the form satura was “stuffed” (like a sausage) with not only consumption, anger, and abuse, but also with literary and cultural traditions—it was a “composite art,’ brimming with intertextuality.* Quintilian’s definition of satire relied on a formalist notion of genre that suited the Roman authors, producing satire in dactylic hexameter, but the narrative setting and persona of the satirist was as important as the form: the satirist was typically a first-person speaker who mocked various aspects of contemporary society, especially its low morality and decadence. This self-presentation of the satirist is something that cuts across different genres and forms, linguistically and diachronically. The satirist claims to react to social or moral problems, often portraying himself as an outsider who takes a stand against individuals or society at large. The topics are, however, often rather traditional and recurs in both ancient Greek iambography, Old Comedy, Roman satire, and so-called Menippean satire: overconsumption of food and luxury, the corrupting influence of wealth, or the dangers of high ambitions. While the satirist thus places himself ‘on the outside, he often turns out to be part of a cultural and social elite, acting from a stable position ‘on the inside. This fictive construction of a satiric alter ego is a significant aspect of the Greco-Roman tradition, still visible in both the Western medieval and the Byzantine production of satirical discourse.
While one may define common features such as this, there was, however, no joint label for texts that scholars today refer to as satirical. The term “Menippean satire” is, in fact, a Renaissance invention that gained a wider and modern popularity with Bakhtin’s account of the Western narrative tradition.> The iambs, comedies, saturae, or silloithey all referred to different kinds of abusive or ridiculing discourse. The latter term, drawn from a now lost hexameter poem of the 3rd century BC, was understood by the Byzantines as a form of invective, while the word satyrikos most often referred to ancient satyr drama.® One significant exception plays a certain role in this volume: the 12thcentury writer Nikephoros Basilakes once refers to his own “satirical writings” (Tv EUdv catvptxdv), claiming that he destroyed them. This text, translated and discussed below, is an indication that the Byzantines might have understood satyrika in a manner that is similar to our modern word satire.” The Latin satura seems to have left no direct traces in Byzantine writings, but the Roman tradition lived on through the Second Sophistic form of so-called Menippean satire, represented by the alleged student of Menippus, Lucian of Samosata. Together with Aristophanes, the famous satirist of Old Comedy, Lucian came to form the basis of much satire produced in Byzantium.
Due to the terminological variety and formal diversity, it may be wise to avoid seeing satire as a genre in the formalist sense. While some full-fledged satires do exist, in Byzantium and beyond, satire is often a mode of writing rather than a specific form. Such modes may be more or less prevalent or episodic, and they may appear in all kinds of genres. Their aims and functions differ, because the societies for which they have been composed are different. The classical traditions are sometimes adapted to voice new concerns—Juvenal in the Western Middle Ages or Lucian in Byzantium—but satires always need to be analyzed on the specific terms of the time and place at which they were produced. When Lucian became immensely popular in the Age of Enlightenment, offering models for authors such as Nicolas Boileau and Jonathan Swift, they adapted Lucianic strategies for entirely new circumstances, retaining the basic form but creating new aims and functions. There are many similarities between Western and Byzantine satires of ecclesiastical or monastic greed, making it tempting to read works such as the Treatise of Garcia of Toledo on the same terms as the third Ptochoprodromic poem, but while both texts deal with the unfair feasting of ecclesiastical authorities, they represent societies that were distant not only geographically but also culturally.®
What is clear is that satire, in spite of its purportedly base and often burlesque form, always is an intellectual and artistic endeavor—it is not enough to call someone names or make fun of them; satire demands more from its creator. The satirist needs to be not only dissatisfied, but also nurture a wish to tell everyone about the immorality, corruption, or simply stupidity that surrounds him. His purpose it to scorn and ridicule, but also to inspire social change: “He shows us ourselves and our world; he demands that we improve both. And he creates a kind of emotion which moves us toward the desire to change.”? While an immediate or instinctive reaction to satire may be laughter, an additional or sometimes even primary aim is thus to force the recipient to think.
2 Byzantine Satire and this Volume
Satirical writing in Byzantium is made up by a heterogeneous group of texts, often but not always with links to the Aristophanic and/or Lucianic traditions. Our ambition here is to offer an overview of that heterogeneity—to underline the multiple forms and functions of the satirical mode in Byzantium. As already noted, the terms used to define what is now called satire have varied greatly throughout the centuries, as have the strategies involved in its composition: irony, sarcasm, parody, invective, and so on. Sometimes words like parody or invective are even used as alternatives to satire itself, which contributes to even larger conceptual confusion. In the present volume, the editors have not tried to enforce any specific terminology or approach, but rather encouraged the contributors to offer their own take on what satire is and how it functions in Byzantium. This means that the different chapters offer complementing but sometimes also competing views of how to approach and define the topic. Part 1 of the volume focuses on traditions, approaches, and definitions of Byzantine satire. Charis Messis offers the first comprehensive survey of the use of Lucian in Byzantium—a reception that Messis describes as a long relationship between Byzantine literati and the ancient author. He underlines that this was not an evolutionary or linear relationship, but one that shifted in accordance with the cultural changes of Byzantium itself. Messis’ chapter offers a useful basis for several of the other chapters of the volume, dealing with different strands of the Lucianic traditions. Floris Bernard then approaches satirical discourse from the perspective of laughter. Bernard investigates how texts provoke and perform laughter, seen as a social phenomenon whose ultimate purpose spans from liberation to humiliation. Focusing mainly on historiography and poetry of the middle Byzantine period, Bernard looks at social settings that provided people in Byzantium with the opportunity to verbalize derision, abuse, and humiliation. He thus approaches satire from a sociocultural rather than a formalist perspective. In the third chapter of this part, the neighboring concept of parody is investigated by Charis Messis and Ingela Nilsson. The aim of this chapter is to offer a methodologically useful definition of parody in Byzantium and to identify, based on that definition, a corpus of Byzantine texts that could be termed parodies, partly in relation to the Western tradition. Such a definition can be useful when dealing with the conceptual confusion that often surrounds satire, its various forms and strategies. Part 11 of the volume concerns some of the many forms and functions that can be attributed to Byzantine satire. As already mentioned, satire is not necessarily a genre in the formalist sense, but satirical discourse often appears periodically or occasionally in various literary and artistic forms. Byzantine hagiography is no exception, in spite of some expectations of it as a ‘serious’ genre of religious concerns. With a point of departure in Northrop Frye’s definition of satire as “militant irony,’ Stavroula Constantinou studies satirical impulses in hagiographical narratives. In her investigation of satirical features in Passions, monastic Lives, and Miracle Stories, she seeks to underline their strong satirical character and bring to the fore the power of satirical characterization in such texts. From satire in this religious setting, we turn to political satire in Paul Magdalino’s chapter. He takes a broad definition of both politics and satire, arguing that all satire is basically political and that only little has survived because of the deeply conformist culture of Byzantium. Discussing different kinds of texts from the entire Byzantine period, Magdalino shows how the targets of satire were most often churchmen, intellectuals, and professionals— equals of the satirists themselves. As an appendix to this volume, Magdalino also offers a translation with commentary of Nikephoros Basilakes’s prologue to his own writings, in which he refers to the “satirical texts” that he has destroyed. Magdalino suggests that Basilakes did so because of the dangers involved in satirical discourse in Byzantine society.
Satirical strategies are of course not limited to texts, and Henry Maguire offers an art historian’s perspective in his survey of parody in Byzantine art. Maguire sees parody as a “subgenre of satire,” an aspect of satire that is more suitable for presentation in visual media than, say, irony or sarcasm. He distinguishes between two types of parodic images in Byzantine art: depictions of actual performed parodies and artistic parodies of other images in art. Both religious and political examples are set out, including portraits of both Islamic rulers and Byzantine folk heroes. From the visual, we move toward the performative in the following chapter. Invective, and especially personal invective in Byzantium often takes on a form of social and personal rivalry. Emilie van Opstall offers an investigation of such word duels, sometimes interpreted as one-sided, as a performance of abusive language. She offers a close reading of the 10th-century duel between John Geometres and a certain Stylianos, but van Opstall also takes on a comparative approach, examining the Byzantine examples in relation to other, both medieval and modern slanging matches. She accordingly takes the reader from Arabic nak@id poetry in the pre-Islamic period all the way to modern rap battles.
As already noted, satire is always an intellectual endeavor, involving a more careful art than just calling someone names—even in seemingly base situations as the word duels staged above. It seems that some Byzantine writers took this even further, making philology and logos their main satirical concern. In Part 111 of this volume, three chapters focus on satires that seem to take a particular interest in such philological activities, and they all return to the Lucianic tradition. First, Przemystaw Marciniak investigates the Philopatris, which he considers “the most Lucianic of all Byzantine dialogues.” Dated to the 10th, uth, or perhaps even the 12th century, this dialogue discusses issues of Christian religion and pagan heritage, but its main concern is, according to Marciniak, the problems of logoi (discourses) and their effect on people. Janek Kucharski then turns to the Pseudo-Lucianic Charidemos or On Beauty, yet another dialogue that most likely belongs in Byzantium. As indicated by the title, the focus is on beauty and the discussions take place within the frame of a classical symposium. The Platonic influence is clear, offering an imitation of Lucian with a dramatic setting drawn from Plato, but the dialogue also has several borrowings from, for example, Xenophon’s Symposium and Isocrates’ Helen. Charidemos thus offers a kind of intertextual bricolage which through its Lucianic style, argues Kucharski, may be seen as satiric, in spite of its lack of traditionally satirical features. Finally, Eric Cullhed discusses the anonymous Anacharsis or Ananias, in which a personification of Philology consoles the desperate protagonist. This Lucianic piece was probably written in the late 12th century, but the question of authorship remains unresolved; it may have been composed by the student of Theodore Prodromos, Niketas Eugenianos. It offers an inversion of its model, Lucian’s Necyomanteia, with the protagonist Aristagoras having left Hades and made his way toward Grammar, standing in the light. This is, however, not the Hades we know from Lucian’s dialogues, but the dark world of intellectuals in 12th-century Constantinople. Cullhed encourages a careful study of intertextual links as a way of understanding the philological concerns and anxiety of this complex work.
The 12th-century Constantinopolitan environment depicted in Anacharsis or Ananias clearly consisted of literati very fond of satire and satirical strategies. As noted by Charis Messis in his study of Lucian in this volume, the Komnenian century may perhaps even be seen as the ‘golden age of satire. Part Iv of the volume focuses entirely on this period. Lucian was of course a model particularly cherished, but another prominent influence came from the comedian Aristophanes. It has often been assumed that Aristophanes was studied by the Byzantine primarily as a stylistic model of good Attic Greek, while the vulgar side of his art was seen as provocative and problematic. Baukje van den Berg challenges that image in her chapter, showing how the plays by Aristophanes played an important role not only as a linguistic ideal but also as a model of satire. She focuses on three authors and their didactic texts—John Tzetzes, Eustathios of Thessalonike, and Gregory Pardos—and argues that the Byzantines appreciated and appropriated the laughter and ridicule that is characteristic of Aristophanic discourse. In the following chapter, Panagiotis Roilos turns to so-called satirical modulation in various genres of the 12th century. With a point of departure in Tzetzes and Eustathios, Roilos moves on to the poetry of Eugenios of Palermo and then to a genre that is most often seen as romantic rather than comic, namely the Komnenian 12th-century novel. Arguing that the ‘revival’ of the novel in the same century as the strong interest in satire is not coincidental, Roilos shows how scenes from the novels by Theodore Prodromos and Niketas Eugenianos—authors of other satires—are strongly marked by performative and comic discourses.
Like both van den Berg and Cullhed, Roilos underlines the theoretical and philological interest in satirical discourses and modes that seems to characterize the Komnenian period.
In the next chapter, Nikos Zagklas digs even deeper into the Komnenian satiric soil, focusing in particular on satire as a way of voicing criticism against fellow authors and intellectuals. As already noted, Lucian is considered the model for much 12th-century satire, but Zagklas wishes to underline another important influence, namely the Hellenistic mock epigram. Two Prodromic pieces written in verse—Against a Lustful Old Woman and Against a Man with a Long Beard—are here thus seen as iambic rather than Lucianic. Some names keep coming back in this part of the volume, and Zagklas discusses not only Prodromos but also Tzetzes, rather well known for his attacks on other writers. In a comparison between the two, the differences in appropriating ancient models of invective are brought out—there were many ways of using ancient literature for attacking your opponents. In the final chapter of the volume, Markéta Kulhankova looks at one of the most famous comic texts of the 12th century, the vernacular Ptochoprodromika—the poems of ‘poor Prodromos.’ After a discussion of the complex issue of authorship, Kulhankova approaches the poems from the perspective of genre and text type. The Ptochoprodromic poems have been labeled as ‘begging poetry’ and satire, both of which have been criticized, but they have also been described as mimographic and rhetorical—something that indicates the complexity of their form. Here, they are instead seen as a mixture of laudatory, supplicatory, satiric, and parodic discourses. It is noted by Kulhankova that similar strategies, including the mixture of learned and vernacular, can be observed in contemporary Western poems by Hugh Primas and the so-called Archpoet, but also earlier in the Greco-Roman tradition. The satirical mode has simply been part of most literary endeavors throughout history.
It is clear that not all Byzantine satires or satirical discourses have been included in this volume. There are no chapters on the Timarion or the Katomyomachia, none on the Dramation by Michael Haplucheir or the Spanos. While such chapters certainly could and perhaps should have been included, the editors have been more interested in underlining the variety in satiric strategies than in the typical and full-fledged satires that are traditionally listed as part of the Byzantine tradition. We therefore refer the interested reader to the studies referenced in the respective chapters of this volume, hoping that the wider and partly comparative perspective offered here will be a welcome change for both Byzantinists and others. As noted by Przemystaw Marciniak in his Afterword, centuries of linguistic and cultural change may stand between us and Byzantine satire, but we hope that this volume can still make it more accessible to modern readers.
Satire is a powerful tool—so powerful that today’s world leaders fear its consequences and feel the need to ban any attempt at mocking them. In 2016, Turkey asked Germany to prosecute comedian Jan BGhmermann over an offensive poem about President Erdogan. Boris Johnson, then Conservative MP, responded by composing a limerick in which ‘wankerer’ rhymes with the Turkish capital Ankara, and Erdogan has sex with a goat. Johnson invoked freedom of speech, as he did so often when he was writing mean parodies, defending them in the name of satire. But when he became prime minister in 2019—and a constant victim of vituperation in the British and international media—his penchant for ridicule waned. In that sense, not much seems to have changed. Some journalists and comedians argue that it is difficult to write satire in a world that appears to be increasingly absurd, but it is worth remembering Juvenal’s words: difficile est saturam non scribere (Satires 1.30)—it is difficult not to write satire. In any society that still strives or longs for social change, laughing at those in power is a crucial strategy; as argued by Ronald Paulsen, the satirist “demands decisions of his reader, not mere feelings.”!? As we hope to show with this volume, Byzantium was no exception.
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