Lucian and the Latins: Humor And Humanism in the Early Reniassance.

David Marsh. Lucian and the Latins: Humor And Humanism in the Early Reniassance.

University of Michigan Press, 1998. $47.50. ISBN: 0-472-10846-8.

No one is better equipped than David Marsh to write a book on the nachleben of the Lucianic dialogue in the Renaissance. Marsh has not only written the standard work of criticism on the humanist dialogue in the fifteenth century, he has also translated the greatest of Lucian's literary heirs in the early Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti Marsh, in his influential book The Quattrocento Dialogue (1980), presented a view of the fifteenth-century humanist dialogue as a thoroughly Ciceronian form descended in an unbroken tradition from the Roman orator: "The Quattrocento revival of Ciceronian forms and ideals of dialogue represents the culmination of a literary and intellectual tradition which from antiquity to the Italian Renaissance was repeatedly transformed. The tradition begins with Ciceror ... [and] ends with the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, who sought to return to the Ciceronian concept of dialogue and discussion" (1). The Lucianic dialogue was a mere complement to, or detour from, Ciceroni an forms (8). In Lucian and the Latins, Marsh demolishes this view with the thoroughness of an apostate. His list of authors who translated or imitated Lucian chronologically spans and effectively epitomizes the Renaissance humanist canon: Guarino, Poggio, Valla, Griffolini, Vegio, Vergerio, Pontano, Alberti, Ariosto, Erasmus, More, Rabelais.

Born in eastern Syria around 125 A.D., Lucian toured the Roman Empire as an itinerant rhetorician. He authored some eighty extant works, principally dialogues. The Lucianic tradition begins early in the fifteenth century with the first Greek books brought into Italy from Constantinople by the humanists. By 1470, twenty-six different works of his were circulating in Latin translation. His early translators included Guarino da Verona, Giovanni Aurispa, Leon Battista Alberti, Lapo da Castiglionchio, Rinucci da Castiglione, Poggio Bracciolini and Lilius Tifernas (chapter 1).

Chapter 2 deals with Lucian's treatment of the locus classicus of the protagonist's journey to Hades. Borrowing from Homer's account of Odysseus's journey to the underworld in Odyssey 11, Dionysus's crossing of the Styx in Aristophanes' Frogs, and the lost Nekuja of Menippus, Lucian wrote thirty short Dialogues of the Dead, his Menipp us, and The Downward Journey The debt of Renaissance writers to these dialogues is extensive and includes Alberti's The Deceased, Matteo Vegio's Palinurus, and the most celebrated Renaissance Lucianic imitation, Rabelais's Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which Homeric heroes are reduced to rustic laborers.

The dialogue of the gods theme, in which the protagonist visits Olympus, was equally popular with Renaissance readers (chapters 3 and 4). In Lucian's zany Icaromenipp us, Menippus, a new-age Icarus, attaches an eagle's wings to his back so that he can fly to heaven and talk to Zeus. By mistake he lands on the moon, where he discovers that his special wings have given him "eagle eyes" enabling him to see from afar the corruption and vanity of humans on earth. Marsh notes that Alberti (in The Clouds and The Dream), Ariosto (in Orlando furioso, cantos 34-35), and Rabelais (in Pantagruel 1) all borrow heavily from Menippus's lunar adventures in Icaromenipp us.

The fifteenth-century imitations of Lucian's dialogue of the gods to which Marsh devotes his most detailed analyses are Alberti's Momus and Pontano's Charon (chapter 4). Both works have bizarre and rollicking plots. In Alberti's dialogue, a political satire with veiled references to Eugenio IV's papacy, the rabble-rousing god of mockery Momus is exiled to Earth for fomenting a revolt against Jupiter; after raping the goddess Praise on Earth, he incites a riot but is recalled to heaven only to be castrated by the female gods and chained to a cliff for having insulted them. Heavily influenced by both Plautus and Lucian, Giovanni Pontano's Charon has twelve scenes and antiphonal choruses of guilty and innocent shades; the work features the Lucianic restyling of Dante's savage boatman Charon as an amateur philosopher, a tour of dead souls, and a peroration by a soul who opines that laughter is the only wisdom.

After a brief excursus in chapter 5 into a genre Marsh calls the "paradoxical encomium" -- a rhetorical display piece eulogizing a trivial or disagreeable object (Alberti's The Fly, Erasmus's In Praise of Folly, Rabelais's In Praise of Debt, among others) -- Marsh concludes with a discussion of Lucian's True Story (chapter 6), as exemplary of the fantastic voyage theme so dominant in later Western literature (episodes include a lunar landing; arriving in a country made of cheese; encounters with strange hybrid species). Marsh sees the True Story as a forerunner of More's (another translator of Lucian) Utopia and suggests that Renaissance curiosity about the New World may explain Lucian's popularity in that era.

Marsh has successfully shown, and with dazzling erudition, that the Lucianic tradition has been a major (yet neglected) strain in Western literature. His final claim, however, that Lucian was "the first author to apply poetic imagination to prose narrative" is not strictly true (207). Certainly Plato's myth-making in the Republic (Er, the Cave, the Ring of Gyges) prefigures fantasy fiction in the early modern period and science fiction in modern times; moreover, Lucian was a creature of his time whose exotic ekphraseis, swashbuckling characters, and disdain for authority characterize the works of many other second-century fiction writers, particulary Apuleius's Metamorphoses and the Greek novels of Achilles Tatius, Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, and Heliodorus, which circulated widely in translation in sixteenth-century Italy,