PARODY, in the strict meaning of the word, implies a comic imitation of a serious poem (rapcoota is "a song sung beside"). To ridicule the grandiose is a primary impulse, not confined to any one form of art, or indeed to art at all. It is of this stuff that satire is made ; but poetic parody, partly through the accidents of history, has acquired a small literature of its own. The Greek epic, the Greek drama, amongst a people quick-witted and politically minded, were especially liable to this kind of critical assault. Thus, though the true father of parody may well have been the neigh bour of the first man who sang, Aristotle is able to attribute the origin of parody as a definite art to Hegemon of Thasos, whose imitation of The Battle of the Giants appears to have consoled the Athenians for the disasters of their expeditionary force in Sicily.
We have, however, other examples of early Greek parody. There is a fragment of several hundred lines still extant, by Matron, in which the dishes of an Athenian banquet are intro duced in the epic style of Homer, and the Batrachomyomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, a travesty once ascribed to Homer himself, is certainly far older than Hegemon of Thasos, or Hipponax of Ephesus, another claimant to the title of first parodist. Hipponax, a man himself embittered by the rude cari catures of sculptors, wrote a parody of the Iliad, of which the four opening lines have been preserved by Athenaeus. But the Greek parodist par excellence is Aristophanes, who imitates Aeschylus and, with greater gusto, Euripides. His attack upon the latter poet in The Acharnians embraces all that is possible in the realm of parody, being a brilliant burlesque not only on manner isms but on spirit and modes of thought. There is no exact parody so penetrating and acute, or rather, none that has been preserved, until we come down to comparatively modern times.
It should be remembered, however, that rigid forms of metre and an eagerly sophisticated period of letters are the forcing ground for the parodist, while burlesque and satire flourish abundantly, especially in light drama, on every kind of soil. Roman literature produces the satires of Persius, which contain interludes of parody, some of which are supposed to have been modelled on the verses of Nero. Mediaeval romance is mocked in Cervantes' Don Quixote, but the verbal felicities here are plainly not so important as the great conception of the satire as a whole. Scarron's Vergile Travesti, written about the middle of
the 17th century, was borrowed from the Italian Lalli's Aeneid Travestita, and part of it was translated into English by Charles Cotton. This poem is a coarse burlesque, and not in the true sense parody. In England Shakespeare mimicked Marlowe, and was himself parodied by Marston, who wrote a travesty of Venus and Adonis. John Philips, who composed The Splendid Shilling, a burlesque of Paradise Lost, is described on his monument in Westminster Abbey as a "second Milton." But the epithet, even if humorously intended, is flattering in the extreme.