Lucian And His Roman Voices
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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
Lucian and the Atticists
Author: David W.F. Stifler
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2025-02-06
This book focuses on Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian writer of the Greek language in the second century CE, and his engagement with contemporary debates regarding the form and register of language best suited to composing Greek literature in the Roman Empire. Many authors of the period advocated or practised writing in a revived version of Attic Greek, the dialect used in classical Athenian rhetoric, philosophy and drama of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. However, this book argues that Lucian distinguished himself from other writers, including those who also commented extensively on the linguistic dimensions of classical reception, through his self-aware, humorous approach to sociolinguistics. As Stifler demonstrates, the focal point of much of Lucian's satire is at the intersection of, on the one hand, vocabulary, syntax and usage, and on the other hand, cultural, racial and political identity a space in which other authors also operate but which they seldom acknowledge. In Stifler's view, a crucial component of Lucian's satire is in fact sociolinguistic, constituting a complex but ultimately coherent ideology of Atticism expressed through multiple perspectives, or personae, and comprising a sophisticated commentary on the sociolinguistic imaginaries of Lucian's period. The result is Lucian's approach to integrating and negotiating his authorial persona, as a non-Greek practising Greek sophism, by decoupling linguistic expertise from ethnic identity.
Lucian’s Laughing Gods
Author: Inger NI Kuin
language: en
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Release Date: 2023-04-10
No comic author from the ancient world features the gods as often as Lucian of Samosata, yet the meaning of his works remain contested. He is either seen as undermining the gods and criticizing religion through his humor, or as not engaging with religion at all, featuring the gods as literary characters. His humor was traditionally viewed as a symptom of decreased religiosity, but that model of religious decline in the second century CE has been invalidated by ancient historians. Understanding these works now requires understanding what it means to imagine as laughing and laughable gods who are worshipped in everyday cult. In Lucian's Laughing Gods, author Inger N. I. Kuin argues that in ancient Greek thought, comedic depictions of divinities were not necessarily desacralizing. In religion, laughter was accommodated to such an extent as to actually be constituent of some ritual practices, and the gods were imagined either to reciprocate or push back against human laughter—they were never deflated by it. Lucian uses the gods as comic characters, but in doing so, he does not automatically negate their power. Instead, with his depiction of the gods and of how they relate to humans—frivolous, insecure, callous—Lucian challenges the dominant theologies of his day as he refuses to interpret the gods as ethical models. This book contextualizes Lucian’s comedic performances in the intellectual life of the second century CE Roman East broadly, including philosophy, early Christian thought, and popular culture (dance, fables, standard jokes, etc.). His texts are analyzed as providing a window onto non-elite attitudes and experiences, and methodologies from religious studies and the sociology of religion are used to conceptualize Lucian’s engagement with the religiosity of his contemporaries.