5 Ancient Parodies That Prove We've Always Been Snarky
For as long as people have been creating, there’s been someone to say, “Nice tablet, dweeb.” Likewise, people in power have faced the scorn of their more creative subordinates. We like to think of the people of the ancient past as more dignified, but the truth is that parody goes back way further than SNL.
The Diliad
The Diliad really sounds like what a modern comedian would pull out of their ass to play an ancient Greek humorist writing a parody of The Iliad, but it actually was one. It’s even funnier in Greek, in which it’s a pun that suggests cowardice. It’s been lost to time, so we don’t know what was in it, but we know it was hot enough to piss off Aristotle. “Homer, for example, makes men better than they are,” he said. “Nicochares, the author of The Diliad, worse than they are." Imagine what inspired him to spit those bars.
Battle of the Frogs and Mice
The Iliad was a popular target of parody, including by the story called Batrachomyomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, which recasts the characters of Homer’s epic as cats, snakes, crabs and, well, frogs and mice, with all the limitations that implies. Is that basically how the Muppets tell stories? Yes. Is that why the Muppets rule? Also yes. No one knows who wrote it, but the Romans initially believed Homer was having a go at himself, which must have really annoyed him.
The Frogs
Whoever wrote Batrachomyomachia was likely inspired by Aristophanes, the premier satirist of Ancient Greece, not the least by his story The Frogs, in which the amphibians are ittedly more metaphorical. It’s about the party god Dionysus journeying to hell to bring Euripides back from the dead because he’s so annoyed by the sorry state of contemporary theater. The only time frogs show up is to engage Dionysus in exasperating debate, which you must agree is a sick burn.
The Clouds
Aristophanes didn’t only target the gods, though. In The Clouds, he follows the students of a school known as “The Thinkery,” a con man training center that basically churns out little Alex Joneses that illustrates just what Aristophanes thought about contemporary philosophy. It’s best known for its caricature of Socrates, who took the whole thing in stride way better than Aristotle did.
The Golden Ass
We know what you’re thinking, but Apuleius’ The Golden Ass is just about a man who accidentally turns himself into a donkey. Still, it’s a masterful parody of what were known as “Milesian tales,” consisting of multiple stories connected by an overarching narrative. (We know them today as the Tarantino section.) In fact, it was so masterful that it became an influential work in and of itself, inspiring everyone from Shakespeare to Machiavelli. You know how Pinocchio turns into a donkey? That’s Apuleius right there. It turns out that ass really was golden.
