The Cambridge companion to Lucian

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

Lucian of Samosata is an author whose particular fascination lies in his view of the past. He writes of times and places long lost or completely unrecognizable as if he lived among them. This is particularly appealing to the reader steeped in the past who is inevitably unable to access it. Lucian approaches this gap as a satirist. His stance is slippery, his views difficult to pin down, and it is tempting to let him stand in as a cipher for us as readers, much as he inserts himself as a cipher into a lost Athens during the height of the Roman Empire. Many of the readings in The Cambridge Companion to Lucian wrestle with this temptation and emerge with new ways of reading. Lucian, a prolific writer of the so-called Second Sophistic and foundational reading for Greek learners in the Renaissance, fell into obscurity for much of the 19^th through 20^th centuries, but that has changed in the last twenty-five or so years. This volume offers a long-awaited intervention in contemporary Lucian studies. Many of the contributors to this volume have been instrumental in renewing his popularity, with increasing attention to his role in the Second Sophistic from Simon Goldhill, Tim Whitmarsh, and Jaś Elsner,[1] a monograph on Lucian by Karen ní Mheallaigh,[2] and a new Loeb edition by Peter Thonemann.[3]

Cambridge Companions often come in one of two flavors, either serving as an introduction to the state of the field, or as a launch-pad for new directions of research. Goldhill sets up this volume as the latter, though there is quite a bit of material to help the new reader of Lucian find their footing. The companion is comprised of an introduction and seventeen chapters, divided into three sections: thematic readings, individual texts, and reception. The first section on themes covers literary criticism, poetics, philosophy, religion, art history, and sexuality. Despite being thematic, this section involves close readings of Podagra (Greensmith), Demonax (Van Nuffelen), De Dea Syria (Whitmarsh and Elsner), and Erotes (Blanshard). The second section contains analyses of In Praise of the Fly (Kneebone), Phalaris (Thonemann), True History (Formisano and König), Icaromenippus (ní Mheallaigh), Dialogues of the Courtesans (LaValle Norman), and Dialogues of the Gods (Goldhill). It also has a chapter on Lucian and Christianity by Eleni Bozia, which may perhaps fit better with the thematic contributions. The third section contains chapters on Lucian’s reception in Renaissance Italy (Fantappiè), Northern Europe (Romm), and a final chapter on Voltaire and Leopardi (Loi).

Goldhill suggests that the chapters should be read in sets, pairing themes with close readings, and in certain cases treating those readings as sets themselves. Sometimes this is a useful framework, such as Richard Hunter’s chapter on literary criticism and Emily Kneebone’s In Praise of the Fly, which deal with Lucian’s play with scholastic tradition literally and metaphorically, respectively; but sometimes the connections seem tenuous. All the chapters can stand alone. Nevertheless, especially for Irene Fantappiè and James Romm’s chapters on the reception of Lucian in Italy and Northern Europe, this can create an uncomfortable amount of overlap. As promised, some chapters offer truly novel ideals for future research, such as Thonemann’s on Phalaris. He suggests one can find literary echoes of Ovid and a critique of Domitian in the text, countering the usual assumption that Lucian has little interest in the Roman Empire, its politics or its literature. Emma Greensmith’s take on Lucian’s poetry offers another new direction. Lucian is often assumed to be a prose writer, but, as Greensmith points out, a large of his work involves poetry; not only the Podagra, his oft over-looked tragedy about gout, but also his Menippean Satire, which intersperses verse with prose, and his engagement with Homer as character and poet in the True History. Other chapters introduce the reader to and build on longer pieces of scholarship, such as ní Mheallaigh’s chapter on the Icaromenippus, treated extensively by her elsewhere,[4] which offers detailed charts of Lucian’s mathematical calculations. These seem to lend an air of probability in his autoptic texts. On the contrary, she argues, they are a commentary on the potential for deceit and fictionality in the hardest sciences.

Embodiment is a major theme of this collection. Marco Formisano and Jason König give embodied interpretations of Lucian’s poetics. The two are placed in conversation by the ordering of the chapters, and both give a reading of Lucian’s True History, especially the episode inside the whale. Formisano reads Lucian’s swallowing by the whale as an incarnation within the text, and König sees it as an entanglement in the landscape. In the next chapter too, ní Mheallaigh sees Menippus’ flight as an embodiment of the “most incorporeal of the natural sciences, astronomy itself” (267). These chapters are an example of how Lucian’s works, especially the ones that claim autopsy and contain a version of the author within the text, lend themselves to post-modernist readings.

Closely tied to embodiment is sexuality. Both Alastair Blanshard and Dawn LaValle Norman take texts that are considered significant for evidence of queerness in antiquity, Erotes and Dialogues of the Courtesans (especially dialogue 5), and place them in new contexts. Blanshard argues that Lucian’s encomium of “boy-love” is so commonplace that it can be considered “vanilla” (148). LaValle Norman, on the other hand, sees Lucian’s treatment of lesbian and trans couples in the Dialogues as part of a larger interest in every kind of sexual pairing. In a novel move, she examines the Dialogues of the Courtesans as a collection rather than piecemeal, allowing her to contrast them with one another and draw out themes of “identification and distance” in the treatment of women with respect to their diction, familial relationships, private space (festivals and magic), and more. Finally, in the fifteenth chapter, after a useful but rather belated introduction to Lucian’s comic dialogue, Goldhill gives a close reading of the erotics of Aphrodite’s dialogue with Selene about Endymion.

Lucian’s relationship to religion, whether he is antagonistic or moralistic, is deeply entangled with his reception in later centuries. Many of the chapters deal with this topic in one way or another. This can be attributed to Lucian’s frequent use of the satirical mode, making him notoriously difficult to interpret. Is he critiquing philosophy and religion in order to call out hypocrisy, or to undermine the establishment? One voice missing from this conversation is that of Inger Kuin, whose 2023 book on Lucian, comedy, and religion was probably too close to this collection’s publication.[5] There are three main ways the chapters discuss Lucian and religion: philosophy, Greek religion, and Christianity. Peter Van Nuffelen argues that Lucian’s critique of philosophy is inextricably tied to religion, since Lucian’s contemporaries claim special knowledge of the good life. He thinks Lucian is aligned with schools like Cynicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism, which were more critical of the hypocrisy of other philosophical schools, and speaks as an insider, not a rogue. Bozia places Lucian side-by-side with early Christian apologists, a novel take on exploring his relationship to religion. She departs from the usual examinations of Lucian’s actual mentions of Christianity and instead styles him as a “social anthropologist” (269) who works “by creating a universal grammar of spiritual debates” (293)—that is, for all religions of his time, not only paganism or Christianity.

Lucian and his stance towards religion cannot be separated from his identity and reception. Whitmarsh has a similar conception as Van Nuffelen with respect to Lucian and religion, arguing that he is a “serious analyst of religion” (114) but also contrasting this view with Willamowitz’ dismissal of Lucian’s views in the 19^th – 20^th century. Whitmarsh also claims that despite his self-construction as a Syrian, Lucian does not use his Syrian background to explain differences of religion. This argument relies on a rejection of De Dea Syria as spurious. The authorship of this work becomes a bone of contention between several of the entries in this companion (Whitmarsh, Elsner, König). Elsner, in the very next chapter, makes a case for its authenticity (as well as for the authenticity of Erotes, the subject of Blanshard’s chapter). Like Whitmarsh, Elsner analyzes Lucian through early-20^th-century scholarship, in this case Irwin Panofsky and art history. They both conclude that some element of Lucian’s fall from favor is connected to his Syrian identity and his readers’ antisemitism, an idea first suggested by Manuel Baumbach,[6] but Elsner attributes the rejection of De Dea Syria’s Lucianic authorship in the 19^th century to that same antisemitism.

While reception is often included in Cambridge Companions, the emphasis on Renaissance and pre-20^th century reception in the final section is apt, since Lucian was a key figure of the Renaissance period starting with his inclusion in Manuel Chrysoloras’ first Greek textbook in Italy of 1398, and, as Whitmarsh and Elsner underline, only became a marginal figure in the last two hundred years. The three final pieces on reception address Lucian from his heyday in the 15^th through 18^th centuries, to his fading influence in the 19^th, something Giacomo Loi suggests is due to Voltaire and Leopardi’s successful Lucianic stylings—that they have supplanted the original for French and Italian culture respectively. Fantappiè provides an excellent overview of Lucian’s transmission in Greek, Latin, and the vernacular. She attempts to synthesize two Lucians: one the moralist and one the atheist, tracing the disjunction especially to the transmission of the True History in Latin and the vernacular. Key to her argument is Erasmus and More’s translation of selected works into Latin as well, which in turn influence Italian readers. Erasmus and More are the subject of Romm’s contribution, where he argues that More took Lucian as more of a moralist, while Erasmus emphasized his satire, but also used him for patronage. These concluding chapters provide new directions for scholarship. This is an area ripe for growth.

Authors and Titles

Introduction, Simon Goldhill

Part 1

1. Lucian and the Culture of Criticism, Richard Hunter
2. Lucian’s Poetics, Emma Greensmith
3. Lucian and Philosophy, Peter Van Nuffelen
4. On Believing in Lucian: The Religious Polemics, Tim Whitmarsh
5. Lucian and Art History, Jaś Elsner
6. Some Queer Entanglements in Lucian’s Erotes, Alastair Blanshard

Part 2

7. In Praise of the Fly, Emily Kneebone
8. Lucian’s Phalaris, Peter Thonemann
9. Lucian the Doorkeeper: Inside and Outside in Lucianic Poetics, Marco Formisano
10. Geographical Authority and Bodily Entanglement in Lucian’s True Histories, Jason König
11. Menippus Goes to the Moon: Fantastical Astronomy and Lucian’s Scientific Imagination, Karen ní Mheallaigh
12. Lucian and Christianity, Eleni Bozia
13. Identification and Distance in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans: Subjects and Their Absences, Dawn LaValle Norman
14. ‘Here’s Looking at You…’: The Dialogues of the Gods and the Erotics of the Visual, Simon Goldhill

Part 3

15. Lucian of Samosata in Renaissance Italy, Irene Fantappiè
16. Lucian Goes North: The Luciani Opuscula of Erasmus and Thomas More, James Romm
17. From the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Century: Voltaire, Leopardi, and a New Avenue of Philosophical Critique, Giacomo Loi

Notes

[1] E.g. Goldhill, Simon, ed. Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2001; Whitmarsh, Tim. The Second Sophistic. Vol. 35. Greece & Rome. New Surveys in the Classics. Oxford University Press, 2005;

[2] Ní Mheallaigh, Karen. Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks and Hyperreality. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

[3] Lucian. Volume I: Phalaris I–II. Hippias. Dionysus. Heracles. On Amber. The Fly. Nigrinus. Demonax. On the Hall. Encomium of the Fatherland. The Long-Lived. True Stories I–II. Slander. Lawsuit of the Consonants. Symposium. Edited and translated by Peter Thonemann. Loeb Classical Library 14. Harvard University Press, 2026.

[4] Ní Mheallaigh, Karen. The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination: Myth, Literature, Science and Philosophy. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

[5] Kuin, Inger Neeltje Irene. Lucian’s Laughing Gods: Religion, Philosophy, and Popular Culture in the Roman East. University of Michigan Press, 2023.

[6] Baumbach, Manuel. Lukian in Deutschland: eine Forschungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichtliche Analyse vom Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart. Beihefte zu Poetica. W. Fink, 2002, 217-19.