rhetoric, lyric poetry), the seriocomic genres did not rely on legend or long-held tribal belief and custom for their legitimacy. Instead they consciously relied on experience and free invention, often manifesting a critical and even cynical attitude toward conventional subjects and forms. They eschewed the single-voiced, single-styled nature of the serious genres, and intentionally cultivated heterogeneity of voice and style. Characteristic of these genres are "multi-toned narration, the mixing of high and low, serious and comic; the use of inserted genres – letters, found manuscripts, retold dialogues, parodies on the high genres... a mixing of prosaic and poetic speech, living dialects and jargons..." Thus in the ancient seriocomic genres, language was not merely that which represents, but itself became an object of representation. Socratic dialogue Originally a kind of memoir genre consisting of recollections of actual conversations conducted by Socrates, the Socratic dialogue became, in the hands of Plato, Xenophon and others, a freely creative form bound only by the Socratic method of dialogically revealing the truth. Bakhtin lists five aspects of the genre that link it to carnivalization: The Socratic notion of the dialogic nature of truth and human thought, posited in opposition to "official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth" (Bakhtin notes that this is a formal quality only, and that in the hands of a dogmatic school or religious doctrine the dialogue can be transformed into merely another method for expounding a ready-made truth); Syncrisis, the juxtaposition of differing perspectives on an object, and anacrisis, the elicitation or provocation of a full verbal expression of the interlocutor's opinion and its underlying assumptions; The protagonist is always an ideologist and the interlocutors are made into ideologists, thus provoking the event of the testing of truth; A tendency to create the extraordinary situation (e.g. Socrates on the threshold of an impending death sentence in The Apology), which forces a deeper exposition through the loosening of the bonds of convention and habit; It introduces, in embryonic form, the concept of the image of an idea (which will later attain full expression in Dostoevsky): "the idea is organically combined with the image of a person... The dialogic testing of the idea is simultaneously also the testing of the person who represents it". Menippean satire The tradition known as Menippean satire began in ancient Greece with Antisthenes, an author of Socratic dialogues, and the Cynic satirist Menippus, although it first