Efficacité et temporalité de l’invective et de la satire dans la poésie grecque

Satirical literary genres are continually faced with the question of efficacy: such literature is highly localized in place and time, and thrives on the pretense that their invective and ridicule will have an effect on the human targets and events they attack. These genres are supposed, in short, to do something. But such a pretense can really only be entertained at the time when the works were actually produced. For what kind of efficacy can exist for such literature in subsequent chronological eras when the targets of invective are barely known and certainly have no real significance for the lives of their readers? This paper discusses various works of the Greek iambus and Old Comedy in support of the argument first, that literary satire, more than any other genre or mode, relies on a continual tension between two perspectives—the synchronic (the work situated in its own time) and the diachronic (the work considered in posterity)—and next that understanding this tension is critical to an understanding of ‘meaning’ in satirical literature