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CHAPTER 21
LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA
DANIEL S. RICHTER
THE Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata has been something of a growth industry in recent years—a sort of Second Sophistic answer to early twenty-first-century questions about cultural and ethnic hybridity (Bartley 2009; Goldhill 2002; Mestre and Gómez 2010). It was not always so. Eduard Norden, while he confessed to a certain amount of youthfully indiscreet contact with the Syrian satirist, reported that in his sober adulthood, he returned to Lucian’s work only with reluctance, for he had come to see Lucian as an “Oriental without depth or character . . . who has no soul and degrades the most soulful language” (Norden 1898).1 Similarly disappointed in the quality of Lucian’s soul was Rudolf Helm, another towering figure of turn-of-the-century Lucian scholarship: Lucian was a “thoughtless Syrian,” Helm lamented, who, “possesses none of the soul of the tragedian”; the best contemporary parallel to be found for Lucian’s writings, Helm suggested, could be found in the work of Heinrich Heine, the “mockingbird in the German poetry-forest” (der Spottdrossel im deutschen Dichterwalde) (Helm 1906, 6–7). Heine’s and Norden’s concern with the status and character of Lucian’s “soul” is ironic, given the conclusion of the Sudas that it is burning in hell for all eternity as a result of Lucian’s blasphemous remarks about the Christian Peregrinus Proteus. But Helm’s comparison of the Syrian Lucian and the Jew Heine is also instructive; preconceived notions about the “oriental character” of both men have tended to inflect the ways in which readers have understood the nature and the worth of their literary projects. In the case of Lucian, earlier generations of readers spoke of the “oriental” qualities of his satire with a tone that resembled the reflexive and genteel anti-Semitism that marked so much scholarly discourse in the Anglo academy prior to the Second World War (Fredrickson 2002, 2; Hollinger 2006). More recently, however, Lucian’s Syrianness has come to dominate discussion of his work once again, as the postcolonial critique has caused scholars of the ancient world to embrace Lucian—often productively but sometimes reductively—as an early imperial paradigm of the “ethno-cultural hybrid.”
Although certainly interesting in many ways, this ancient and modern attention to what we might call Lucian’s “identity” has resulted in some of the worst excesses of biographical criticism of Lucian’s texts. The trouble is that while Lucian himself speaks of many of his contemporaries, none appear to have returned the favor. In spite of the fact that Lucian does not appear in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists or any other surviving contemporary text or inscription, scores upon scores of biographies of Lucian have been confidently written since the Byzantine period on “evidence” drawn exclusively from Lucian’s own texts (Richter 2005). To take a single example that highlights the circular nature of this kind of argumentation: M. D. Macleod, the editor of the eighth Loeb volume of Lucian’s works, argues for the authenticity of the text Gout by pointing out that “Lucian probably suffered from gout himself”—the only evidence for which ailment is the text Gout itself (Macleod 1967)! But with Lucian—as with so many satirists whose speaking personae seem so fully engaged in their particular worlds—the siren song of biographical criticism has never been easy for many of his readers to resist. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the fact that Lucian’s texts themselves clearly and repeatedly seem to challenge the reader to imagine and engage with their author in a multitude of complex ways, perhaps the most obvious of which is the frequency with which Syrians and characters with names that echo Lucian’s own appear in the corpus: “Lukinos,” “Lukianos,” “Lucius,” “The Syrian.”2
The analysis of Lucian’s works that follows proceeds from a few fundamental premises: first, while I am interested in the question of the intentionality of the author “Lucian” behind these texts, I in no way conflate this author with the speaking personae of the texts themselves (cf. Kim 2010; Ní Mheallaigh 2014). These various “Syrians” and “Lucian-like” figures are not, in my view, “masks” or “alter-egos” or “mouthpieces” of the author through which Lucian expresses his own views about culture, ethnicity, and the proper role of the pepaideumenos in the early Roman Empire. Rather, I approach these texts as object lessons and the characters within them as precisely that: characters. In other words, the “Lucian” of the biographical tradition is, himself, a fictional character. The many “Lucians” and “Syrians” in the texts, I will argue, are particularly good for Lucian the author to “think with” when he writes about the interplay of ethnicity and culture in the Second Sophistic. Second, this recent interest in Lucian’s “identity” has, in my view, tended to become somewhat reductive and has served to limit our appreciation of other aspects of what is an exceptionally large and diverse body of work. This chapter will seek to present a more holistic view of Lucian’s corpus and to give a sense of the various subjects and perspectives that inform his texts. Lastly, I am only tangentially interested here in Lucian’s views of Rome and the Romans (see Jones 1986, 78–89; Swain 1996, 298–329; Whitmarsh 2001, 247–294). I remain convinced that Lucian found the problem of being Syrian in a Greek world far more compelling than he did the related but distinct difficulty of being a Greek in the Roman world. I have chosen to structure this discussion around Lucian’s own interests as they emerge from his vast and variegated corpus: Greeks and barbarians; cultural and literary mimesis; the gods; and imposters. Lucian’s corpus is large and while I cannot discuss each text, I focus here on those texts that best address ideas that Lucian seems to have found interesting and important.3
GREEKS AND BARBARIANS: SYRIANS AND NON-SYRIANS
On my reading, Syrianness and, by extension, barbarianness are, for Lucian, authorial strategies. Lucian’s Syrians appear most frequently in those dialogues that explore the nature of Lucian’s literary project; in particular, Lucian’s Syrians find themselves constrained in these texts to rebut the charge that the Syrian author—the inventor of the comic dialogue, we are often told—has somehow outraged the purity of a Greek idiom or genre. I want to suggest that L
ucian uses barbarianness as a literary trope—as a means of positioning his various internal authors as both insiders and outsiders able to simultaneously embody mastery of the tradition and the critical distance necessary for innovation; Syrianness enables this distance while the linguistic proficiency—demonstrated by the text itself—guarantees fidelity to ancient models. Indeed, ideas about literary and cultural mimesis in Lucian’s work are so interwoven that disentangling them from each other would do more to obscure than to clarify. Literary mimesis of the ancients is inextricably linked in Lucian’s work with the cultural mimesis of Hellenism by ethnic non-Greeks.4 As we shall see, Lucian uses these various “Syrians” to define good and bad mimesis in both literary and cultural terms. For example, in the dialogue the Dead Come to Life, the “Son of Free Speech” (Parrhêsiadês) finds himself before the tribunal of Philosophy, accused by the great philosophers of old for libel. The offending text was Lucian’s Philosophies for Sale in which Hermes, in a slave market, auctioned off personifications of the various philosophical “lifestyles.” In the Dead Come to Life, Lucian acknowledged the greatness of the ancient worthies but nevertheless pointed out that they had all missed the point of the joke; it was not Plato, Aristotle, and the rest who were the butt of the satire but their sham-philosopher descendants. Still, Philosophy herself demands to know who this Parrhêsiadês might be. “I am a Syrian, Philosophy, from the banks of the Euphrates,” Parrhêsiadês answers:
But so what? I know for a fact that some of my accusers are no less barbarian than I am with respect to ethnicity [genos]. But their manner [tropos] and their culture [paideia] are not that of men of Soli or Cyprus, Bablyon or Stageira. And yet, in your eyes, it would make no difference even if a man were a barbarian with respect to his language if only his mind were to appear to be straight and just. (Dead Come to Life 19–20)
“You have spoken well, whereas I asked the question without a purpose,” Philosophy answers. The passage is typical of Lucian; he puts into play the antithesis of ethnicity (genos) and culture (paideia) in a way that obliquely engages in the simultaneous mimesis and subversion of a well-known iconic intertext5—in this instance, the Panegyricus of Isocrates, in which the aged Athenian statesman attempted to rally the Greeks in support of a Macedonian-led invasion of Persia. Isocrates famously declared that Athens had brought it about that,