Doctors in a Comic Costume: Medical Language and Mass Audience in the Comedy of Menander

Abstract

Abstract:This article argues that the medical language in Menander's Aspis can be understood as both a kind of medical "gibberish" but also as an accurate representation of a professional diagnosis, and that the choice of interpretation is largely dependent on the medical knowledge of the individual audience member. To simply dismiss any instance of comic medical language as nonsensical, assuming that any other alternative would have made it less accessible to the audience and would have compromised the colloquial basis on which popular comedy operates, misses the point entirely; rather, it is better to think that different members in the audience would have been expected to respond to technical jargon in different ways. Seen in this light, medical language is essentially used by Menander as a means of debating the poet's own linguistic distance from or proximity to different people in the audience: by putting a (fake) doctor on stage—and by making him speak in a strange language which sounds convincing to other characters in the play precisely because it remains elusive, the poet creates an authorial double who tests the linguistic limits of both the internal and the external audience, leaving us to decide how much of his, and Menander's, (deceptively) nonsensical jargon we are in the position to understand.