ABSTRACT
The widest context for this profusion of parodic forms is the contested status of the stories about the Olympian Gods, since it is the often scandalous incidents of these legends which provide the opportunity for parody, as Norwood notes. Homer, as the great source and repository of many of these stories, provides both the stylistic model and the narrative opportunity for parodies of all kinds. Both mock-heroic (high style, low topic) and travesty (high topic, low style) can be found in relation to the great epic poet. What remains extraordinarily difficult to establish is the effect of this parody on the sacred stories themselves. Part of the difficulty concerns the very status of religious myth in classical Greece, where religion was unsupported by a priestly caste, bound in with the ritual life of the people, and the occasion for Dionysian as well as civic celebration. It thus had a status quite unlike that of Christianity, and the categories of the modern (i.e. post-
medieval) world simply do not translate to this early social world. It is not therefore useful to speak of popular and elite culture, or even of the carnivalesque, though perhaps some of the Dionysiac celebrations had a comparable role to medieval and Renaissance carnival. At all events, the Greeks seemed able to sustain an attitude or frame of mind in which the serious forms and their parodic counterparts could exist side by side, even when these serious forms-and thus their parodies-carried some of the most sacred stories of their culture.
