Lucian: Selected Dialogues (Oxford World's Classics)

295 Pages·2006·2.67 MB·English

by  C. D. N. Costa

Lucian
Selected Dialogues
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LUCIAN
Selected Dialogues
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
Desmond Costa
1
3
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lucian, of Samosata.
[Dialogi. English. Selections]
Lucian, selected dialogues / translated with an introduction and notes
by Desmond Costa.
p. cm. –– (Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
. Lucian, of Samosata––Translations into English. . Dialogues, Greek
––Translations into English. . Satire, Greek––Translations into English.
I. Costa, Charles Desmond Nuttall. II. Title. III. Title: Selected dialogues.
IV. Series: Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)
PA.AC ′.––dc 
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         
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Select Bibliography xv
LUCIAN: THE DIALOGUES
    
   ’  
    
   
      
 
    
     
     
 
      
    
   
    
Explanatory Notes 
Index 
v
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INTRODUCTION
L was one of the most gifted and entertaining of comic
satirists, and he was notably influential on a very diverse range of
subsequent writers. Yet few details of his life can be regarded as
certain; with the exception of a disputed passage in the Greek doctor
Galen, no contemporary writer mentions him, and we have to piece
together what we can of his life and activities mainly from a scattering
of allusions in his own works. He was born probably around  
and died sometime after . His birthplace was Samosata, a town on
the Euphrates, in the old kingdom of Commagene, which had been
incorporated by the conquering Romans into the province of Syria.
That much seems clear.
Both the period of his lifetime and the area in which he busied
himself are important in assessing the nature of Lucian’s work. The
area which we now call Asia Minor and the Middle East had been,
since the conquests of Alexander the Great and under his successors,
a Greek-speaking society, at least in its upper classes, and dominated
by Greek cultural ideals and traditions. When the imperial Roman
sway spread eastwards and absorbed the Greek world of Asia Minor
and beyond, there seems to have developed on the whole a mutually
tolerant coexistence of Roman political domination and the existing
Greek cultural traditions, with respect shown by each side to the
qualities and achievements of the other. The local Greek and Greek-
influenced elements could not and did not usually question the
imperial superiority of their rulers; and the Romans tolerated and
respected, as they had always done, the cultural achievements of their
Greek subjects. There are innumerable friendly references in Lucian
to the emperors of the time, and to local Roman-appointed governors.
Falling within the second century , Lucian’s lifetime coincided
with a period of crucial importance in the story of later Greek litera-
ture. This was a phase, which is usually called the Second Sophistic,
in which writers thought it highly desirable to recall and imitate
the language and the style of what they regarded as the golden age
of Greek literature, the Attic prose which was written in the fifth
and fourth centuries , taking as models, for instance, Plato in
philosophy, Thucydides in history, and Demosthenes in forensic
oratory. We have a great deal of surviving works from this later
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
period, and many of the writers were remarkably successful in
recapturing the earlier vocabulary and style. Among them Lucian is
unsurpassed as an Atticizer, even though Greek was probably an
adopted language for him and he originally spoke Aramaic. (A good
parallel to this achievement might be the Pole Joseph Conrad, who
spoke hardly any English until he was over  and became one of the
greatest of English novelists.) This harking back to earlier literary
ideals was a very basic element in both Greek and Latin literature,
and it was part of the almost universal practice of mimesis, or creative
imitation of chosen models. This was not slavish plagiaristic copying,
but an imaginative reworking of a theme on which the writer set his
own individual stamp. It might of course take the form of comic
parody, as in Lucian’s own The Syrian Goddess, which is a pastiche of
the Herodotean style. But mimesis was commonly more allusively
linked with its model, as with his Dialogues of the Courtesans, in which
the themes and situations are recognizably derived from those of
Greek New Comedy and the mime.
Thus mimesis formed a core element in the educational system at
the period of the Second Sophistic and Lucian’s lifetime, and among
the most important and influential men who had gone through this
educational mill were the sophists. These were professional speakers
or ‘rhetors’, who not only worked in the courts as pleaders, but also
travelled around giving declamations, or show-piece speeches, on a
wide range of historical or fictitious topics. Many of them were also
distinguished teachers, they found employment as secretaries to great
men, and the more illustrious were asked to serve as ambassadors. It
would be hard to exaggerate the prestige and influence of the sophists
in the intellectual and literary world of the second century, and it was
perhaps inevitable that a man of Lucian’s talents would be attracted to
try his hand at professional rhetoric.
What we know of his life and his travels has to be derived mainly
from his own works, and this information is often delivered in an
oblique and allegorical way; as when in The Dream he tells us that
when he was a youth the personified figures of Craft and Culture
competed for his allegiance, and he chose Culture; or when in The
Double Indictment he faces dual accusations from personified Rhetoric
and Dialogue: Rhetoric reproaches him for deserting her, and
Dialogue complains that Lucian has devalued him from his serious
philosophical role to become a vehicle for comedy. Putting together
those bits of evidence it seems reasonable to trust, we have something
viii

like the following picture of his career. He would have had the stand-
ard education of that time, with its strong rhetorical basis. It is not
clear whether he formally took up the career of a professional sophist
(he does not actually say this), but he seems to have spent his early
years as a pleader and travelling lecturer in Asia Minor, and sub-
sequently in Athens and Gaul. Then at about  he abandoned his
oratorical career, if not his interest in the techniques of rhetoric,
and after experiencing a passing interest in philosophy, turned to
literature. Later in his life (the date is disputed) he took a minor
government post in Egypt, working in the retinue of the prefect there.
He died sometime after : Marcus Aurelius, who died in that year,
is referred to as dead in Alexander.
As we have seen, Greek prose at this period was deeply infused
with the techniques and the rhetorical productions of the professional
speakers and teachers, the sophists, and Lucian’s works show many
examples of the traditional exercises of the orators. One of the most
important of these exercises was the ‘practice speech’ (melete), either
forensic or deliberative, a declamation on a set historical or fictitious
theme: Lucian’s Phalaris is a clear example of this type. Then there
was the ‘display speech’ (logos epideiktikos), a term which applied to a
wide range of occasional oratory, and in particular speeches of praise
and blame: in our selection The Fly is a whimsical specimen of this
class. A third form was the ‘introductory speech’ (prolalia), a more
informal, usually short, preliminary talk before a public performance.
Lucian enjoyed writing these pieces: we have eleven of them,
including The Dream in this selection.
These were all traditional categories which Lucian inherited, and
his virtuosity made expert use of them, whether as straight exercises
or with humorous adaptation. His real originality, and his lasting
importance in the history of satiric literature, lies in his development
of the comic dialogue. The dialogue had of course long been used
by writers of philosophical treatises: Plato was the most famous
exponent; and Cicero also favoured this form of dramatic presenta-
tion in some of his treatises. But these were serious works, though of
course they had plenty of room for humour and light relief. What
Lucian did was to transform the function of the philosophical dia-
logue and make it a vehicle primarily for humour. It clearly had the
potential for this, offering scope for vivid characterization, cut-and-
thrust comic back-chat, and so on; and Lucian made full use of all
this, as well as adapting from Plato the Socratic method of insidious
ix