Menippus

▪ Greek philosopher

flourished 3rd century BC, b. Gadara [now Umm Qays, Jordan]

      Greek philosopher who followed the cynic philosophy of Diogenes and who founded a seriocomic literary genre known as Menippean satire. It was imitated by Greek and Latin writers and influenced the development of Latin satire.

      Menippus was allegedly a slave by birth who became rich by begging or by usury, afterward being made a citizen of Thebes, in Greece. His writings are lost, but some idea of their character can be gained from his imitators, notably Varro (Varro, Marcus Terentius), Seneca (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus), and Lucian. His criticism was an innovation in the presentation of philosophic ideas because it was aimed at reaching as wide an audience as possible. It abandoned the serious form of dialogue or essay and instead conveyed its cynic message in a satiric style, mocking institutions, ideas, and conventions in a mixture of prose and verse. Unusual settings—including a descent into Hades, an auction, and a symposium—were employed with striking effect; they were used also by his Latin successors. The 1st-century-AD Satyricon of Petronius (Petronius Arbiter, Gaius), a picaresque tale in verse and prose containing long digressions in which the author airs his views on topics having nothing to do with the plot, is in the Menippean tradition. A later example is the Satire Ménippée (1594), a French prose and verse satire on the Holy League, the political party of the Roman Catholics, written by several royalists.

Additional Reading

Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (1980); Joel C. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (1993); Carter Kaplan, Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology (2000); Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (2005).

* * *