La Podagra de Lucien : une paratragédie existentielle aux échos galéniques ?
Résumé
To the modern reader, Lucian's Podagra could easily strengthen the cliché idea that imperial poetry was scholarly and virtuoso, and yet completely out of touch with its socio-cultural context. This paper argues, on the contrary, that the complexity of Lucian's play increased dramatically because of diachrony, and that today's readers probably struggle to grasp its humour and topicality. For even though the extant imperial prose corpus is larger and therefore tends to outshine the Second Sophistic's dynamic poetic production, Lucian's Podagra was written in an age when poetry was still a very popular genre. Furthermore, it deals with gout, a cruelly topical subject for the imperial elites. Most of all, despite its apparent fantasy, the play betrays Lucian's vast knowledge of the medical treatises and controversies of his time, and maybe even of the Galenic corpus. It is thus necessary to reassess the Podagra's aesthetics and satirical strategy, in order to get a better grasp of its sophistication.