At the beginning of the easy road to Rhetoric, by contrast, the student will find a rather different man whose very feminine and coquettish manner and whose “woman’s glance” (gunaikeion to blemma) contrasts with the “manly man” of the rough road. If the student will follow this man, the teacher promises, he will, with a modicum of effort, “become a rhetor immediately” (11). The more specific advice that follows lays out a road map of bad mimesis and offers one of the great parodies of early imperial sophistic performance and pseudo-intellectualism in general. The student is instructed to bring from home the following kit: ignorance, senselessness, arrogance, and shamelessness; a loud voice, a mincing gait, a see-through gown; and a book to carry around. In terms of vocabulary,
Pull together fifteen but no more than twenty Attic words and practice them well; have them on the tip of your tongue—“sundry,” “eftsoons,” “prithee,” “in some wise,” “fair sir,” and the like11—and in every speech, drizzle on a few as a sweetener. And don’t be concerned if they are inconsistent with rest of the speech or unrelated or unharmonious. Just be sure that your purple stripe is beautiful and clean, even if your cloak is but a blanket of the thickest sort. (16)
Such a display, the teacher is confident, so long as it includes “forbidden and strange words, rarely spoken by the ancients” (ἀπόρρητακαὶ ξένα ῥήματα, σπανιάκις ὑπὸ τῶνπάλαιεἰρημένα) will be more than enough to convince “the many” of his paideia.
The satire of the Teacher of Public Speaking raises interesting questions about the appropriateness of a “straight” reading of the Dream. For starters, the two texts display two markedly different perspectives on the value of labor (ponos) in the attainment of cultural competency. Similarly, the Dream’s antithesis of the pursuits of sculpture and rhetoric seems ambiguous and is destabilized by the fact that Lucian’s dialogues present figures much like the small figurines the boy creates with the wax of his writing tablets. But if the Dream lightly conceals its own intentional self-subversion, both texts direct our attention to the importance of the conspicuous consumption of ponos in the training of the pepaideumenos.
LUCIAN’S GODS
The gods wander in and out of Lucian’s texts with a casualness that has led many readers to doubt his piety (in general, Caster 1937). Indeed, the question of the authorship of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess has depended upon precisely this point. Lucian, it was long felt, as a soulless oriental, was without religious feeling and so incapable of genuine piety. And so because the text about the Syrian goddess seemed to generations of scholars genuinely reverent, it was removed from Lucian’s corpus;12 more recently, the text has been restored to Lucian by those who have come to appreciate its satirical nature (Elsner 2001; Richter 2011b; in general, Lightfoot 2003). If the conclusions of both groups of scholars differ, their underlying assumptions are shockingly similar. But the Dialogues of the Gods, Dialogues of the Dead, and the Dialogues of the Sea Gods have long been understood to accurately reflect Lucian’s purely literary and even belletristic interest in stories about the gods (Branham 1989, 125–178). Indeed, these Dialogues, though much admired and imitated in the early modern period, read somewhat flat today. Those set among the dead return repeatedly to the vanity of human nature; Lucian presents us with a parade of the rich and famous reduced to an anonymous skeleton by the radically democratic power of mortality. The Dialogues of the Gods and the Dialogues of the Sea Gods are clever send-ups of traditional myths told from unfamiliar perspectives. In short, these texts are more belles-lettres than serious reflections on the nature of the divine. In any event, I would argue that the question of Lucian’s piety—like all purely biographical problems—is something of a red herring. Rather, in what follows, I am interested in how certain of Lucian’s writings about the divine display the sorts of problems and issues that animate the rest of his corpus.
Lucian’s gods inhabited as variegated a space as the world of their believers and much of Lucian’s writing about these diverse divinities reflects the sorts of concerns that animate his thought about the cultural and ethnic politics of his own human world. It seems that gods, like men, must contend with the varieties of confusion that result from the claims of outsiders to belong on the inside. In the Twice Accused, for instance, Justice demands of Hermes what the Syrian is doing in Athens—and on the Areopagos, no less—in the first place: “wouldn’t it be more seemly,” Justice inquires, “for him to receive judgment on the other side of the Euphrates?” (14). Similar concerns animate several texts in which Lucian writes about the problems arising from the presence of “foreign” divinities among the Olympians. In Zeus the Tragedian, for instance, when Hermes calls all the gods to an assembly, problems about precedence immediately arise in the seating arrangement. Since Lucian’s gods, here as elsewhere, appear in the form that their mortal worshippers have given them (a topos of ancient critiques about the anthropomorphism of the gods since at least Xenophanes of Colophon), Hermes proposes to arrange them according to “material and workmanship” (7). Awkwardness arises when the barbarian gods Bendis, Anubis, Attis, Mithras, and Men—who are all made of solid gold—wind up sitting in front of the Olympians who are made of marble. “How is it just,” Poseidon demands, “that this dogface Egyptian [Anubis] should sit in front of me when I am Poseidon?” (9). What is more, Hermes complains in the same vein, these “Scythians and Persians and Thracians and Celts don’t even understand the language of the Greeks” (oux . . . tên Hellênôn phônên suniasin) (13).
Similarly, Lucian plays for laughs the ethnic and linguistic confusion of Olympus in the Parliament of the Gods, a text which opens with Hermes declaring an open meeting of the gods “concerning the question of resident aliens and foreigners [ἡ δὲ σκέψιςπερὶ τῶνμετοῖκωνκαὶ ξένων]” (1). Momus, the god of blame, begins to berate those divinities who have “fraudulently registered themselves on Olympus;” interestingly, the verb, paragraphô, that Lucian uses here is the same word that Rhetoric uses in the Twice Accused (discussed above) to describe her registering of the Syrian in her own phulê in Athens. And on Olympus as well, Lucian foregrounds the criterion of ethnic origin to explore issues of belonging: Momus points out that Dionysus is, “not even Greek on his mother’s side, but the grandson of some Syro-Phoenician trader named Cadmus” (4); what’s more, Momus continues, Dionysus has brought with him Lydians and Phrygians. Momus strongly objects to the presence of this polyglot rabble on Olympus: “But Attis, Zeus, really? And Korybas, and Sabazios—how did we get surrounded by all these? And then there is that Mithras, the Mede, with his caftan and tiara, who can’t even speak Greek” (10). A tirade against the outrageousness of Egyptian gods follows. Attacks on Egyptian animal worship are, of course, common in ancient literature and need not have an ethnically charged component (Isaac 2004, 356ff). But Lucian focuses his satire on these gods precisely on this point. At the end of the dialogue, in conspicuously litigious language (in which seating arrangements again appear prominently), Momus declares that,
Whereas many aliens [xenoi]—not only Greeks but barbarians as well . . . have pushed aside the ancient and true gods and claimed pride of place [proedria] for themselves and, contrary to ancestral usages, wish to be worshipped on earth, be it resolved that seven gods of full legitimacy be chosen—three from the ancient Boulê of the time of Cronos and four from the twelve, including Zeus—that they come with witnesses prepared to swear on oath and with proofs of lineage [ἀποδείξειςτοῦ γένους]. (15)
The “legitimate” gods, Momus stipulates, will purge the lists of any god unable to produce such tokens of their right to be counted among the gods of Olympus. The language and the tenor of the passage evoke the long history of Athenian struggles over the citizenship franchise. The metabolai of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE—the cyclical expansion and contraction of the citizen rolls—as J. H. Oliver noted (Oliver 1980), continued into the early Imperial period. Indeed, Oliver su
ggested that Marcus Aurelius’s rescript about Athenian “trigonia” might have provided the immediate background of the Parliament of the Gods. While Oliver’s suggestion seems somewhat overdetermined to me, it is, nevertheless, true that in the Parliament of the Gods, Zeus the Tragedian, and other texts, Lucian’s “barbarian” gods must defend their presence in Hellas in ways similar to Lucian’s Syrian producers and consumers of Greek paideia. Nor is it surprising that the “proofs of decent” that Lucian’s outsider gods must produce are textual in nature. Legitimacy, on Olympus as on the written page, is rooted in a connection to the ancient, authoritative textual past.
IMPOSTERS: SAGES, SOPHISTS, AND PHILOSOPHERS
Related to Lucian’s ideas about good and bad mimesis is his concern with various sorts of imposters—people who gain undeserved reputations for virtue or holiness or learning by preying upon the ignorance and gullibility of the masses (in general, see Anderson 1994, 131–150). Several of Lucian’s texts seek to expose these poseurs either as a generic class (such as philosophers, sophists, or holy men) or, on occasion, in the context of a directed attack on a particular historical individual. The fatal flaw that all these would-be great men share is a love of fame (erôs tês doxês) (Passing of Peregrinus 22)—a passion that causes them always to choose the easier (and false) path to excellence in whatever field they wish to gain a reputation. A celebration of labor (ponos) and various forms of expertise is implicit in each of these critiques and Lucian often alludes in these texts to the Prodicean “Choice of Heracles”—the path to virtue (expertise) is long, rough, and steep while that leading to vice (empty reputation) is short, smooth, and even.
There is some overlap between these fame seekers, the ideal student of the sham sophist of the Teacher of Public Speaking discussed above, and the hyper-Atticizer Lexiphanes, whose desire to gain a reputation for excellent Attic diction Lucian mocks in the satire of the same name. The Lexiphanes opens as “Lukinos” encounters Lexiphanes, the “Word Flaunter,” carrying a copy of a dialogue that he has recently composed. The text, which Lexiphanes insists on reading aloud to Lukinos, is a sort of Platonic symposium but without plot, character, or philosophical interest. Rather, Lexiphanes’s dialogue is essentially a string of the most absurdly recherché locutions that are so obscure as to almost constitute neologisms. As so often in Lucian’s corpus, we have another satire of bad mimesis. Indeed, the trouble with this kind of wordplay, as Lukinos points out, is that it is not enough to rummage around in the dusty basements of the ancients’ vocabulary if one has not internalized their stylistic virtues of clarity and correctness of expression; and while Lexiphanes might have succeeded in fooling the many with his display, the pepaideumenoi know better. And so the dialogue ends when a physician (whom scholars have often wanted to identify as Galen [Baldwin 1973, 36ff; cf. Jones 1972]) arrives who produces an emetic with which Lukianos succeeds in purging Lexiphanes’s bloated lexicon. Lukinos then sets about “re-teaching and instructing [Lexiphanes] how he must speak” (21). This “metapaideia” takes the form of a course of learning precisely antithetical to that advocated by the teacher of public speaking: to be fully cured, Lexiphanes must carefully study the ancients—the poets first, to be followed by the orators, Thucydides, Plato, and finally comedy and tragedy. Above all, Lukinos advises Lexiphanes (again, in contrast to the teacher of public speaking) to avoid the writings of those who have lived only recently.13
Lucian’s corpus contains a rogues’ gallery of poor practitioners of the mimetic art—all of whom desire to seem rather than to be learned: the ignorant book collector’s books only serve to throw his lack of paideia into relief; the teacher of public speaking advocates a superficial training in rhetoric whose emptiness would be instantly apparent to the truly learned (the pepaideumenoi); the parody of the Lexiphanes itself depicts lexical display for its own sake run amok. But there are other sorts of sham intellectuals who come in for similar scrutiny under Lucian’s censorious eye. Closely related to these wretched sophists are the self-styled philosophers and sages who milk public credulity for their own private gain. We have already come across the degenerate Platonists, Cynics, Aristotelians, and Stoics in Philosophies for Sale and the Dead Come to Life. The holy men Peregrinus Proteus and Alexander the False Prophet are villains of a somewhat different order.
Whatever other ancient authors might have felt about the sometime Cynic philosopher and erstwhile Christian Peregrinus,14 for Lucian, he was a charlatan who, like the sham sophists and philosophers, was motivated more by a love of reputation (erôs tês doxês) (1.22) than a search for truth (Koenig 2006). By Peregrinus’s own account (according to Lucian), Peregrinus threw himself into a fiery pit at the Olympic games of 165 CE in an effort to teach his followers not to fear death (23); Lucian, however, who claims to have witnessed the event, suggests that Peregrinus’s death was the final act of a lifetime of performances of shameless self-promotion—a judgment confirmed by the fact that Peregrinus had announced his intention to self-immolate four years previously at the Olympic games of 161, thereby giving himself and his followers ample lead time to propagate the cult of this latter-day Socrates. Lucian recounts the scene at the pit itself and boasts to his friend Cronius (to whom the text is addressed) that after the spectacle ended, he mocked Peregrinus’s followers on precisely this point:
I said, “let’s go, you idiots—it’s not a pleasant spectacle, this looking upon an old, roasted man while our noses get filled with this nasty stench. Or are you waiting around for some painter to arrive and paint you as the companions of Socrates in prison are portrayed beside him?” (37)
Not surprisingly, Peregrinus’s grieving students chase off Lucian with sticks. But this criticism of Peregrinus—that his attempt to imitate the ancients only serves to cast his own inadequacy into high relief—is programmatic in the text. Peregrinus was no “new Socrates” (kainos Socrates), as his students styled him (12); neither was he an Empedocles, whose own solitary and unwitnessed leap into the caldera of Aetna was no publicity stunt (1); neither was Peregrinus “the one and only rival [zêlôtês] of Diogenes and Crates” as the Parians claimed (15); similarly, Peregrinus’s comparison of his own trials to those of Musonius Rufus, Dio, and Epictetus rang hollow (19). Much like Lucian’s sham sophists and false philosophers, Peregrinus Proteus is incapable of proper mimesis of the ancients. And again, the success that Peregrinus enjoyed was a function of the ignorance of the crowd; it is only the true pepaideumenos who can distinguish true mimetic art from counterfeit. This is the central conceit of Lucian’s dialog Runaways—a sequel of sorts to the Death of Peregrinus—which begins with Apollo asking Zeus whether it’s true that some old “wonder-worker” (thaumatopoios) had thrown himself into the fire at the Olympic games.
Runaways begins with reference to Peregrinus’s death (Zeus recalls the awful stench) but the text is a more general indictment of the class of charlatans to which Peregrinus belonged. Philosophy reappears here to complain to Zeus about the rogues who presently claim to be her adepts and in doing so, cause the many to cease to honor her. Runaways resembles the satire of the Teacher of Public Speaking in accusing the false philosophers of desiring to seem rather than to be learned; unwilling to submit themselves to the rigors of actual philosophical study, Philosophy compares these would-be wise men—with their philosopher’s capes, long beards, and staffs—to Aesop’s story of the ass of Cumae who covered himself in a lion’s skin and brayed (rather than roared) that he was a lion. Again, like Aesop’s Cumaean lion, who deceived some, so the false philosophers who “dress and adorn” (sxêmatizousin kai metakosmousin) (13) themselves to seem learned, convince all but the pepaideumenoi that they are truly sages:
Moreover, they saw, I think, that they could stand on the same level with those who philosophize correctly, and that there would be no one who could judge and discern in such matters, if only the externals (ta exô) were similar. (15)
The satirist as cultural watchdog appears frequently in Lucian’s texts. H
is task is to expose the various ways in which sham intellectuals of various descriptions delude the masses with hollow mimesis of the ancients. Whether philosophers, sophists, or sages, these charlatans consistently adopt the forms of intellectual practice while neglecting its actual content. And the content—true paideia—is attainable only through labor (ponos)—long, difficult, and careful study of “correct standards of usage.” Only the well-trained man, as the Syrian says in Against the Ignorant Book Collector, is able to read and understand the ancients properly. It is not enough to own beautiful editions of the ancients’ works unless
you know what is excellent and base in each passage’s contents and understand the sense of the whole, what the arrangement of the words is, how much has been accurately expressed by the author in accordance with correct standards [πρὸςτὸν ὀρθὸνκανόνα] and what is false, illegitimate, and counterfeit. (2)
In other words, not just their imitators but also the ancients themselves are subject to the censorious eye of the true pepaideumenos; good mimesis, then, involves proper discernment of worthy objects of imitation. But all good mimesis, and this is central for Lucian, begins with careful study—what Bourdieu describes in something of a mixed metaphor as the conspicuous consumption of intellectual capital (Bourdieu 1991).
THE OUTSIDERS
Lucian is not the only author of the early Imperial period to play with the tension between ethnic origin and cultural identity. Philostratus tells us that first of the three paradoxes of self-definition of the Gallic sophist and philosopher Favorinus of Arelate was, “although a Gaul, he spoke Greek” (VS 489). Indeed, in passage of the Corinthian Oration in which Favorinus describes himself as a Roman and a barbarian Celt, Favorinus presents his own status as a Hellene as a paradigm so that the “inhabitants of Greece” can understand that, “having been acculturated [τὸ παιδευθῆναι] differs nothing from birth with respect to reputation” and as a model for the Celts, “so that no one even of the barbarians will despair of attaining Hellenic culture [paideia] once they have looked upon this man” (Or. 37.27). The Romanness of the Corinthian context, of course, provides ample space for Favorinus to explore the theme of Hellenism and acculturation. Compare two early Imperial north African writers: in his Apology Apuleius acknowledges that his “half-Numidian and half-Gaetulian” ancestry is a part of his public persona as a rhetor (Keulen 2014; Richter 2011 173–174) and explains that,
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