Friendship And Otherness In Lucian S Toxaris

Friendship and Otherness in Lucian’s ›Toxaris‹

In Lucian’s Toxaris, the characters’ speeches play a performative role as they become their deeds of friendship. Between irony and (self-)othering, past and present, the dialogue negotiates a mixed form of identity by affirming a Hellenocentric position and deconstructing an Athenocentric per-spective on Greek culture. Eventually, both aspects converge, as the characters’ ability to make speeches on friendship displays their mastery of Greekness. This book, itself a hybrid of commentary and monograph, consists of an introduction, which con-textualises the dialogue in its cultural, philosophical, and literary background; the Greek text with textual critical notes, followed by an English translation; and a commentary, which is organised ac-cording to the central themes of the dialogue: the representation of friendship and the decon-struction of stereotypes. The commentary helps us to better understand how friendship is ap-proached in this dialogue and how the latter relates to the value of friendship in the context of the Roman imperial period. Simultaneously, it provides an examination of the way in which different voices – serious or deriding, Greek or Scythian, etc. – are ambiguously entangled in Lucian’s dia-logue.

Lucian and His Roman Voices

Lucian and His Roman Voices examines cultural exchanges, political propaganda, and religious conflicts in the Early Roman Empire through the eyes of Lucian, his contemporary Roman authors, and Christian Apologists. Offering a multi-faceted analysis of the Lucianic corpus, this book explores how Lucian, a Syrian who wrote in Greek and who became a Roman citizen, was affected by the socio-political climate of his time, reacted to it, and how he ‘corresponded’ with the Roman intelligentsia. In the process, this unique volume raises questions such as: What did the title ‘Roman citizen’ mean to native Romans and to others? How were language and literature politicized, and how did they become a means of social propaganda? This study reveals Lucian’s recondite historical and authorial personas and the ways in which his literary activity portrayed second-century reality from the perspectives of the Romans, Greeks, pagans, Christians, and citizens of the Roman Empire

Studies in Lucian's Comic Fiction