In these Dionysiac festivals the processions and parades represented everything imaginable that was bizarre or ridiculous.
As in all ages, before and since, the mummers clothed themselves in the likeness of animals, and invented horrible masks.
Comedy came to be abuse, ridicule and parody of sacred things.
Notwithstanding Coleridge’s comment, laughter was universal in Greece and Plato declared the agelastoi or non-laughers to be the least respectable of mortals.
Small wonder then that their mirth exhibited itself in drawings and paintings. These mediums were easier to come by than writings, and the early grotesques and caricatures of the Greeks are drawings on Greek vases which show the playfulness as well as the serious purpose of the artist-potter. The first and greatest of Greek poets adds strokes of wit to his stories of the Trojan war. When Ulysses returns from the siege of Ilium he stops at the island of Sicily, and he and his companions are caught by the one-eyed giant Polyphemus and imprisoned in his cave. Then comes the story of the crafty leader’s escape, after some of his companions had been slain and eaten by the monster. It is a most amusing story, told with all Greek humor, how the giant was blinded with the burnt stick which gouged out his eye while in a drunken sleep; how the Greeks escaped through the entrance by clinging under the bodies of his sheep, while he felt of them one by one to see that not a Greek escaped. Then comes the giant’s howling call to his distant companions, and in answer to their question, who had blinded him, his telling them that “Outis” (Nobody) had done it, Outis (Nobody) being the name Ulysses had given the giant as his own. “If nobody has done it”, replied his companions, “then it is the act of the gods”, and they left him to endure his loss. Thus the Greeks escape to their ships and taunt the monster as they flee away, followed by his vain pursuit. Homer relieves the wisdom of Ulysses and the dignity of Agamemnon with the gibes of Thersites or the rude humor of the suitors of Penelope, the trick of whose embroidery is itself an amusing story.
Greece, of course, was the cradle of all that we now call art. Landscape painters, painters of animals and portrait limners, as well as still life artists and sculptors and workers in mosaics reached a high state of perfection.
Then naturally the caricaturists and comic artists could not be wanting there. Burlesque affected their pencils and brushes as it had their speech and caricature and parody were rampant.
A marvelous example is the parody or caricature of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. It is taken from an oxybaphon which was brought from the Continent to England, where it passed into the collection of Mr. William Hope. The oxybaphon, or, as it was called by the Romans, acetabulum, was a large vessel for holding vinegar, which formed one of the important ornaments of the table, and was therefore very susceptible of pictorial embellishment of this description. It is one of the most remarkable Greek caricatures of this kind yet known, and represents a parody on one of the most interesting stories of the Grecian mythology, that of the arrival of Apollo at Delphi. The artist, in his love of burlesque, has spared none of the personages who belonged to the story. The Hyperborean Apollo himself appears in the character of a quack doctor, on his temporary stage, covered by a sort of roof, and approached by wooden steps. On the stage lies Apollo’s luggage, consisting of a bag, a bow, and his Scythian cap. Chron is represented as labouring under the effects of age and blindness, and supporting himself by the aid of a crooked staff, as he repairs to the Delphian quack doctor for relief. The figure of the centaur is made to ascend by the aid of a companion, both being furnished with the masks and other attributes of the comic performers. Above are the mountains, and on them the nymphs of Parnassus, who, like all the other actors in the scene, are disguised with masks, and those of a very grotesque character. On the right-hand side stands a figure which is considered as representing the epoptes, the inspector or overseer of the performance, who alone wears no mask. Even a pun is employed to heighten the drollery of the scene, for instead of ΠΥΘΙΑΣ, the Pythian, placed over the head of the burlesque Apollo, it seems evident that the artist had written ΠΕΙΘΙΑΣ, the consoler in allusion, perhaps, to the consolation which the quack-doctor is administering to his blind and aged visitor.
The comic and grotesque led on to the representation of the monstrous, and queer, strange figures became part of their art and architecture. Out of these, perhaps, grew the hideous masks and strange distortions of the human figure.
Perhaps this is why Æsop was represented as a dwarf and a hunchback.