Joel Allen
Note: I am grateful to Menelaos Christopoulos, Athina Papachrysostomou and Andreas P. Antonopoulos for the superb organization of both this volume and the Conference that precipitated it, and to the New York City Roman History reading group for their comments: Sulochana Asirvatham, Graham Claytor, Matthew Perry, Cristiana Sogno and Liv Yarrow.
Abstract
Three of Lucian’s texts – Toxaris sive Amicitia, De Dea Syria and Hercules – demonstrate the author’s interest in the primacy of Greek myth and its reception among the far-flung populations of the empire. Each essay, in varying levels of detail, portrays a non-Hellenic, non-Roman figure (a Scythian, a Syrian and a Celt, respectively) reinterpreting themes, plots and characters from Hellenic mythologies to suit their own understanding of history and ethics. These outsiders to paideia repeatedly find fault with their Greek interlocutors and the exegetical methods they deploy. Lucian thus reveals that although the cosmopolitan Mediterranean of which he was a part was dominated by a single mythology, it harbored a mess of meanings, each ‘blurring the lines’ that are the focus of this volume in its own way. Any (hi)story could support a multiplicity of beliefs, consonant with the empire’s variously fraught ethnicities.
Introduction
Lucian of Samosata’s subversive habit knew many targets. Throughout his body of work an overall project – Lucian’s passion, it seems – was to challenge received wisdom, upset conventional expectations and adopt new perspectives that reveal the contrivances behind human behavior. All is artifice, be it philosophy, religion, gender roles, even athletics.1 But more than these, or perhaps a part of all of them, Lucian took a particular interest in what we might call ethnicity – the characteristics and precepts of one’s culture that were determined, at least as Lucian’s contemporaries saw it, in a collaborative way by geography, by language and by family or tribe and which became fixed across an expanse of time and thus were innate to every individual (or thought to be). The identification of a group’s ethnicity in the second century CE constituted an assertion of paradigms that should govern its actions and reactions, whatever the context: all Scythians act as follows; the typical Syrian believes thus; we can expect the same behavior from any Celt. Atop a basic, tiered arrangement of ethnicities – again, according to Lucian’s peers, as he himself implies – sat paideia, that brand of Hellenism and the Hellenic point of view that prevailed among the Greek-speaking elite in a sophisticated and orthodox vein. But as recent scholarship has shown,2 across multiple texts Lucian deconstructed paideia, generally, into its constituent parts, the better to plumb its depths and potentially to chart its waters anew. As a Syrian – or more specifically, as a Commagenean, on the fringe of Roman Syria which was itself already a fringe province –, Lucian was especially well positioned for his distinctive, outsider perspective.3
For the purposes of this chapter we take up what Lucian seems to view as a principal facet of any ethnicity’s defining traits, including that of paideia – its understanding of myth and myth’s relation to history. As we shall see, in three texts – the Toxaris sive Amicitia; the De Dea Syria; and the Hercules –, Lucian depicts the act of interpreting myth as part of an agon of ethnicities, in which different peoples find different meanings in the same sets of stories and the same sets of histories.4 What follows is not a study of the myths themselves as recounted by Lucian’s characters, but rather Lucian’s portrayal of conversations about myth among speakers of divergent backgrounds. In these three texts Lucian features a non-Hellenic speaker putting a new spin on Greek myth and its exegesis: the Toxaris has a Scythian in direct dialogue with a Greek; the speaker of the De Dea Syria self-avows as a Syrian, even while engaging in Herodotean modes of story-telling; and the Greek-speaking orator of the Hercules reports on a conversation he once had with a Celt.5 The essays differ from each other in important ways – in genre, in style and in content – but I argue that they collectively demonstrate an ‘ethics of exegesis’ as espoused by Lucian, one that is at odds with conventional paideia. To Lucian’s view, certain conditions must be met before a myth can be credibly grounded in meaning, and time and again, paideia, as presented, is not up to snuff, in spite of the Hellenic ‘ownership’ of the stories to begin with. Outsider views, by contrast, in presenting novel exegesis that challenges well-worn topoi, read as more satisfying and harder earned and thus constitute radical acts. Lucian himself, to be sure, was a member of the Greek-speaking elite, but even as he is a zealous participant in paideia, we see him going to great lengths to valorize alternatives.6
A review of the texts in question is in order. In the Toxaris, a Greek, Mnesippus, confronts a Scythian, Toxaris. Mnesippus wants to know why Toxaris and his fellow Scythians venerate Orestes and Pylades from Greek myth, in spite of the tradition that those two heroes perpetrated an assault on Scythia during their peregrinations. Toxaris replies that their collective interest is in the close friendship of the pair, which was exceptional to the point of obscuring all other aspects of their narrative. In Scythia, Toxaris asserts, friendship is a paramount virtue and the type enacted by Orestes and Pylades made them exemplary. Mnesippus and Toxaris then enter into a dialogue about how each of their ethnicities conceives of friendship and in a spirit of competition, however absurd, they debate which one reveres it more. The question will be decided after each has recounted five stories of friendship – the word they use is mythoi – from their respective cultures.7 The tone between the two begins cordially but grows increasingly combative and even ridiculous: in a meager resolution Mnesippus and Toxaris realize that they forgot to appoint a judge and so they call it a draw. No-one’s tongue will be cut out after all and no-one’s right hand will be chopped off.8 Still, in ways that we shall see in the coming analysis, Lucian manages to privilege the Scythian and thus undermine the paideia of his opponent.9
The De Dea Syria is not a dialogue but rather takes the form of history, and not just any history, but the kind practiced by the forefather of them all, Herodotus, complete with the type of ethnography that he pioneered. The text famously mimics Herodotus’ old Ionic Greek in its morphology, syntax and vocabulary. But Herodotus’ presence is seen not only in the language: the methodology, as well, follows his mold, as the speaker rambles through a number of origin-stories, or aitia, explaining various elements of the cult of the goddess at Hierapolis in Syria, identified by the speaker as an alternate form of the Greek Hera. He both begins and ends by highlighting his ethnicity:
γράφω δὲ Ἀσσύριος ἐών, καὶ τῶν ἀπηγέομαι τὰ μὲν αὐτοψίῃ μαθών, τὰ δὲ παρὰ τῶν ἱρέων ἐδάην, ὁκόσα ἐόντα ἐμεῦ πρεσβύτερα ἐγὼ ἱστορέω.
(Syr. D. 1)
I myself that write am an Assyrian; and of the things that I relate I have seen some with my own eyes, while others – the parts of my account that happened before my time – I have learned from the priests.
τοῦτο καὶ ἐγὼ νέος ἔτι ὢν ἐπετέλεσα, καὶ ἔτι μευ ἐν τῷ ἱρῷ καὶ ὁ πλόκαμος καὶ τὸ οὔνομα.
(Syr. D. 60)
[after describing a ritual of native-born Assyrian youths dedicating a lock of hair to the goddess] I myself did this when I was young, and still to this day in the temple are the lock and my name.10
The speaker is a Syrian who has himself participated in the cult, which surely read as strange given his quintessentially Hellenic mode of presentation as a latter-day Herodotus. As I will argue, it is as if the Syrian is in a dialogue not with an interlocutor but with a literary, historiographical technique, which in turn comes up short. Andrade has memorably described the De Dea Syria as a case of Lucian ‘writing back’ against his Hellenic peers, in the sense of mocking the nature of Greek ‘inquiry’, or historia, as Herodotus coined the term, and satirizing their naïveté.11 Versions of such a reading appear elsewhere in scholarship,12 but I argue further that some specific lines of comparison can be drawn among this satire and the Toxaris above and our third text, the Hercules.
The Hercules occupies yet a third Lucianic genre – not a dialogue, not a history or ethnography, but a prolalia, or, a prologue to an epideictic speech that is not included in the corpus and which is not crucial to the prolalia’s integrity in any case. To set his stage, the orator is recounting his journey to Gaul and his conversation with a Celt about a painting of a deity that the Celts had associated with the Greek Hercules.13 The god displays some familiar iconography – a club, a lion skin, a bow and quiver – but his epithet is Ogmios and unlike the Greek Hercules he is depicted as elderly and broken down. What is even more peculiar, the god’s tongue is linked by chains of amber to a crowd of acolytes who joyfully attend him, thus ‘hanging on his every word’, figuratively. The Celt explained that in their view, true strength – even superhuman strength such as emblematized by the Greek Hercules – came from eloquence and the ability to persuade and to lead, skills that are best honed with age, hence the metaphor of the tongue and the chains as contrasted with the the hero’s frailty. We learn relatively late in the text that the speaker of the prolalia is himself an old man, which explains why he has chosen this opener – to justify his presence before an apparently skeptical audience.
Scholarship is extensive on all of these texts individually. What may be gained in putting them side by side is to observe how the author Lucian – who is best seen as different from the speakers he deploys – establishes a set of standards for finding meaning in myth, for tracing historical elements in myth and for shaping one’s identity thereby.14 In all three, I argue, the non-Hellenes are depicted as performing ‘good’ exegesis in three distinct ways, each of which exists in opposition to how contemporary paideia functioned, or failed to function, at least as Lucian portrays it. First, each essay argues for an openness of texts to a range of viable meanings. That is, myth and history, history and myth are flexible in their applications and as such may inherently hold universal relevance beyond the parochialism of paideia. Second, the new exegesis relies on work – active, responsible and thorough-going. Lucian’s non-Hellenes often trace precepts famously articulated by Greek historians of yore, like Thucydides, but which have fallen into abeyance in their day: autopsy is prized, and in its absence, there must be evidence and proof of other sorts. Hearsay or slavish reliance on past models are to be eschewed, even if they have become part and parcel of paideia. Third, the stakes are high in non-Hellenic exegesis and more than just intellectual gamesmanship hangs in the balance. What is more, as matters of near life-or-death they require, and are worthy of, documentation: ideally there is a physical, venerated text of some kind among the non-Hellenes – an inscription, a painting, a lesson for children – which possesses an authority that makes their new interpretation canonical. In sum, outsiders to paideia, in Lucian’s formulations, subscribe to myth’s universality even if it is Hellenic in origin; they study it with rigor; and there is much that they derive from the enterprise. By contrast, their Greek counterparts are narrow in their outlook, passive in their readings and at times, apathetic in any case.
The Universality of Myth
To begin with the first point, universality, Toxaris makes it clear that Mnesippus and the other Greeks have no monopoly in what to do with Orestes and Pylades (Toxaris 5):
[Toxaris:] κωλύει τε οὐδὲν ὅτι ξένοι ἦσαν ἀλλὰ μὴ Σκύθαι ἀγαθοὺς κεκρίσθαι καὶ ὑπὸ Σκυθῶν τῶν ἀρίστων θεραπεύεσθαι. οὐ γὰρ ἐξετάζομεν ὅθεν οἱ καλοὶ καὶ ἀγαθοί εἰσιν, οὐδὲ φθονοῦμεν εἰ μὴ φίλοι ὄντες ἀγαθὰ εἰργάσαντο, ἐπαινοῦντες δὲ ἃ ἔπραξαν, οἰκείους αὐτοὺς ἀπὸ τῶν ἔργων ποιούμεθα.
The fact that they were not Scythians but foreigners is no hindrance to their having been accounted good men and their being cherished by the foremost Scythians; for we do not enquire what country proper men come from, nor do we bear a grudge if men who are not friendly have done noble deeds; we commend what they have accomplished and count them our own in virtue of their achievements.
Toxaris thus contends that the quintessential qualities of a Greek hero (καλοὶ καὶ ἀγαθοί) are relevant to others, and such a figure may ‘belong’ (οἰκείους) to another group by virtue of his actions. Similarly, in the Hercules, the unnamed Celt who addressed the speaker drew an explicit distinction between ethnic readings of myth (Hercules 4):
τὸν λόγον ἡμεῖς οἱ Κελτοὶ οὐχ ὥσπερ ὑμεῖς οἱ Ἕλληνες Ἑρμῆν οἰόμεθα εἶναι, ἀλλ᾿ Ἡρακλεῖ αὐτὸν εἰκάζομεν, ὅτι παρὰ πολὺ τοῦ Ἑρμοῦ ἰσχυρότερος οὗτος.
We Celts do not agree with you Greeks in thinking that Hermes is Eloquence: we identify Hercules with it, because he is far more powerful than Hermes.
Celts do not follow Greek thinking by any stretch – not about Hermes, not about Hercules. The implication is that the list could go on: when it comes to exegesis of Greek myth, anyone can legitimately aspire to participate.
But Lucian’s Greeks do not agree: in both the Toxaris and the Hercules, the respective Hellene is displeased by the appropriation of ‘their’ story by the Other (capital O, intended). Mnesippus says Toxaris is ridiculous (γελοῖα, Toxaris 3) and the speaker of the Hercules, before the Celt intervened, was fuming (ἀγανακτῶν, Hercules 4) at the image of Hercules Ogmios and later was described as troubled, (ταραττομένῳ, Hercules 4), believing that the Celts were trying to spite the Greeks (παρανομεῖν, Hercules 2). Both are proven to be wrong by the end of their respective texts; in the Hercules the speaker’s opinion of the Celt is pointedly reversed: he has been persuaded to the Gallic view (Hercules 8).
In the De Dea Syria, universality is conveyed both explicitly and implicitly. At De Dea Syria 11, the speaker reports that he encountered a range of stories in his research, “some sacred, some manifest, some thoroughly mythological, and others barbarian, of which some agreed with the Greeks” (οἱ μὲν ἱροί, οἱ δὲ ἐμφανέες, οἱ δὲ κάρτα μυθώδεες, καὶ ἄλλοι βάρβαροι, οἱ μὲν τοῖσιν Ἕλλησιν ὁμολογέοντες). A multiplicity of ethnicities at the locus of the cult is also implied, as the Syrian recounts the important roles played by a range of Others in the rituals of the goddess. Tributes to the temples of Hierapolis arrive from Arabia, Phoenicia, Babylon, Cilicia and Assyria. Participants in a ritual include Syrians, Arabians and many from ‘beyond the Euphrates’. Offerings to this ‘Hera’ came from Sardinia, Egypt, India, Ethiopia, Media, Armenia and Babylon. Oracles similar to that at Hierapolis exist in Greece, Egypt, Libya and Asia.15 The Syrian goddess thus exists in a wide world, not at all the province of any single interpretation.
The Rigor of Reading
Lucian’s non-Hellenic exegetes in these three essays all lay claim to a special degree of diligence in their investigation of stories, a diligence that turns out to be lacking among their Hellenic counterparts. In the Toxaris, both speakers, Greek and Scythian, are obsessed with the legitimacy of their stories of friendship. But at every turn Mnesippus is challenged by Toxaris. After Mnesippus’ first story, Toxaris suggests that it is fabricated and after all the stories are done, he points out inconsistencies among them (Toxaris 35) and accuses Mnesippus of embellishment (Toxaris 42):
καίτοι ἐγὼ μέν σοι γυμνὸν τὸ ἔργον διηγησάμην· εἰ δὲ σύ τινα τοιοῦτον ἔλεγες, εὖ οἶδα, ὁπόσα ἂν κομψὰ ἐγκατέμιξας τῷ λόγῳ, οἷα ἱκέτευεν ὁ Δάνδαμις καὶ ὡς ἐτυφλοῦτο καὶ ἃ εἶπεν καὶ ὡς ἐπανῆκεν καὶ ὡς ὑπεδέξαντο αὐτὸν ἐπευφημοῦντες οἱ Σκύθαι καὶ ἄλλα ὁποῖα ὑμεῖς μηχανᾶσθαι εἰώθατε πρὸς τὴν ἀκρόασιν.
I have told you the naked facts; but if you were describing anyone like that, I know very well how many embellishments you would intersperse in the story, telling how Dandamis pleaded, how he was blinded, what he said, how he returned, how he was received with laudation by the Scythians, and other matters such as you Greeks are in the habit of manufacturing to gratify your hearers.
Mnesippus is also criticized implicitly for accepting outlandish hearsay about the Scythians without examination. Elsewhere in the text we learn, somewhat preposterously, that Mnesippus ‘has heard’ that Scythians cannibalize their fathers (Toxaris 8).
In the Toxaris, much attention is paid to the oaths sworn by the interlocutors to guarantee the truth of their stories. Mnesippus makes a rather conventional vow in the name of Zeus Philios (Toxaris 12). For his part Toxaris’ oath is sworn by the Wind and the Sword (Toxaris 38):
ΤΟΞΑΡΙΣ: … μᾶλλον δὲ πρότερον ὀμοῦμαί σοι τὸν ἡμέτερον ὅρκον, ἐπεὶ καὶ τοῦτο ἐν ἀρχῇ διωμολογησάμην · οὐ μὰ γὰρ τὸν Ἄνεμον καὶ τὸν Ἀκινάκην, οὐδὲν πρὸς σέ, ὦ Μνήσιππε, ψεῦδος ἐρῶ περὶ τῶν φίλων τῶν Σκυθῶν.
ΜΝΗΣΙΠΠΟΣ: Ἐγὼ μὲν οὐ πάνυ σου ὀμνύντος ἐδεόμην · σὺ δὲ ὅμως εὖ ποιῶν οὐδένα θεῶν ἐπωμόσω.
ΤΟΞΑΡΙΣ: Τί σὺ λέγεις; οὔ σοι δοκοῦσιν ὁ Ἄνεμος καὶ ὁ Ἀκινάκης θεοὶ εἶναι;
TOXARIS: … but stay! first let me take my oath for you in our way, since that also was part of the agreement that I made with you in the beginning. I swear by Wind and Sword that I shall tell you no falsehood, Mnesippus, about Scythian friends.
MNESIPPUS: I scarcely felt the need of your swearing, but you did well to avoid taking oath by any god!
TOXARIS: What is that you say? Do you not think Wind and Sword are gods?
Lucian draws attention to this oath by stopping the flow of the text abruptly. Mnesippus challenges the nature of these attributes as gods and Toxaris rather impatiently goes on to clarify them as metaphors, chastising Mnesippus for splitting hairs and excessive ‘bickering’ (Ὁρᾷς τοῦτο ὡς ἐριστικὸν ποιεῖς καὶ δικανικόν). The result is that Toxaris establishes the primacy of his oath in that it is complex, innovative and not a reflex.16
The Celtic interlocutor of the Hercules is also more sophisticated than the Greek speaker he addresses. He is given little to say in the limited quotation of him, but what is there takes the form of references to Homer, Euripides and an obscure comic playwright unknown to modern editors, as evidence for his view of what Hercules should represent. The speaker, by contrast, has no use for such erudition and thought that the only reason that the tongue held the followers by the amber chains was because Hercules’ hands were already occupied with the bow and the club (Hercules 3). It is an egregious misinterpretation of an obvious metaphor, which Lucian must have inserted as an illustration of the orator’s limitations. As mentioned earlier, the speaker ends with an admission that he learned from the Celt in the end.
In the De Dea Syria, the absence of rigor in Hellenic exegesis is conveyed more discursively, through the flaws of the Herodotean method deployed by the Syrian toward his subject. The principal case-in-point is the longest and most detailed aition of the piece – the mythos explaining the origins of the Galli, the self-castrating priests of the Syrian goddess. This constitutes the central third of the entire text (sections 17–27). To account for the ritual, the Syrian tells the story of Stratonice, queen of the region, and how she passed in marriage from her husband the king to her stepson, who then ascended the throne (Syr. D. 17–18, excerpted):
Δοκέει δέ μοι ἡ Στρατονίκη ἐκείνη ἔμμεναι, τῆς ὁ πρόγονος ἠρήσατο, τὸν ἤλεγξεν τοῦ ἰητροῦ ἐπινοίη· ὡς γάρ μιν ἡ συμφορὴ κατέλαβεν, ἀμηχανέων τῷ κακῷ αἰσχρῷ δοκέοντι κατ᾿ ἡσυχίην ἐνόσεεν … πείθεται μὲν τουτέοισι, καὶ τῷ μὲν παιδὶ λείπει καὶ γυναῖκα καὶ βασιληίην, αὐτὸς δὲ ἐς τὴν Βαβυλωνίην χώρην ἀπίκετο καὶ πόλιν ἐπὶ τῷ Εὐφρήτῃ ἐπώνυμον ἑωυτοῦ ἐποιήσατο, ἔνθα οἱ καὶ ἡ τελευτὴ ἐγένετο.
I think she was that Stratonice whose stepson fell in love with her and was discovered by a stratagem of his doctor. For when disaster struck, he was helpless against a plight he thought shameful and suffered in silence … The father complied, and ceded to his son both wife and kingdom; he himself went to Babylonia and founded a city named after himself on the Euphrates where he indeed died.
Elements of folklore are obvious – in this case, seduction by a stepmother – and they continue in the ensuing story of Combabos, Stratonice’s architect for this temple of ‘Hera’. Combabos knew that he would be in jeopardy if he were accused of trying to seduce the queen and so, to preempt the charge, he castrated himself in secret.17 This is not the place to review the rest of this long and grizzly tale; it is sufficient to note, along with Lightfoot, that the tale’s revelations, twists and variant accounts place it in the category of myth.18
And yet, the story is rooted, at least in the beginning, in history – and well-known history –, at that. Readers of Lucian would have had perfect familiarity with the story of Seleucus I giving Stratonice, the daughter of major Hellenistic players Demetrius Poliorcetes and Phila, to his son Antiochus I, as a way of ensuring the succession. To now encounter a version of the story in which the context of politics and foreign relations is entirely absent and in which none of the famous men are even named, is to witness the active reduction of history to fantasy.19 What Lucian’s readers are seeing foremost is thus an absence of rigor. But there is reason not to think of the speaker as the culprit so much as the Herodotean tendency to simplify and obliterate native readings of themselves. Whatever exegetical rigor does exist in the De Dea Syria, is performed by those outside paideia, as reported by the Syrian. For example, it is from the research of a naturalist from Byblos that the reader learns that the red color of the Adonis River comes not from the blood of the hero but from effluvia of colored soil further upstream (Syr. D. 8):
ἐμοὶ δέ τις ἀνὴρ Βύβλιος ἀληθέα δοκέων λέγειν ἑτέρην ἀπηγέετο τοῦ πάθεος αἰτίην. ἔλεγεν δὲ ὧδε· “ὁ Ἄδωνις ὁ ποταμός, ὦ ξεῖνε, διὰ τοῦ Λιβάνου ἔρχεται· ὁ δὲ Λίβανος κάρτα ξανθόγεώς ἐστιν. ἄνεμοι ὧν τρηχέες ἐκείνῃσι τῇσι ἡμέρῃσι ἱστάμενοι τὴν γῆν τῷ ποταμῷ ἐπιφέρουσιν ἐοῦσαν ἐς τὰ μάλιστα μιλτώδεα, ἡ δὲ γῆ μιν αἱμώδεα τίθησιν· καὶ τοῦδε τοῦ πάθεος οὐ τὸ αἷμα, τὸ λέγουσιν, ἀλλ᾿ ἡ χώρη αἰτίη.”
But a certain Byblian who seemed to be telling the truth gave another explanation. His account was this: “The river Adonis, stranger, passes through Lebanon, and Lebanon has very yellow soil. Strong winds which arise on those days carry the earth, which is red in the highest degree, into the river, and it is the earth that makes it bloody. So the reason for the phenomenon is not the blood, as they say, but the terrain.”
Herodotean analysis misses the obvious; non-Hellenic analysis digs deep. The effect is to throw into question all that Herodotus stood for as a standard-setting historian. Herodotus’ old accounts of far-flung realms are essentially thus recast as simplistic and incomplete.20 The De Dea Syria implies that Greeks like Herodotus, who started the enterprise of ethnography, have been getting it wrong for centuries, and now with the eclipse of the foundational Seleucid dynasty’s narrative by the Syrian speaker, the Greeks are getting a taste of their own medicine.
The Stakes of Exegesis
Finally, for the non-Hellenes, the stakes in exegesis are high. On several occasions, Toxaris faults the Greeks for having stories of many types – tragedy, epic – that have become meaningless over time (Toxaris 9):
Ὑμεῖς γάρ μοι δοκεῖτε τοὺς μὲν περὶ φιλίας λόγους ἄμεινον ἄλλων ἂν εἰπεῖν δύνασθαι, τἄργα δὲ αὐτῆς οὐ μόνον οὐ κατ᾿ ἀξίαν τῶν λόγων ἐκμελετᾶν, ἀλλ᾿ ἀπόχρη ὑμῖν ἐπαινέσαι τε αὐτὴν καὶ δεῖξαι ἡλίκον ἀγαθόν ἐστιν· ἐν δὲ ταῖς χρείαις προδόντες τοὺς λόγους δραπετεύετε … ἡμεῖς δὲ ἔμπαλιν· ὅσῳ γὰρ δὴ λειπόμεθα ἐν τοῖς περὶ φιλίας λόγοις, τοσοῦτον ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις αὐτῆς πλεονεκτοῦμεν.
It seems to me that you Greeks can indeed say all that is to be said about friendship better than others, but not only fail to practise its works in a manner that befits your words, – no, you are content to have praised it and shown what a very good thing it is, but in its times of need you play traitor to your words about it and beat a hasty retreat … We are your opposites; for we have as much the better of you in practicing friendship as we fall short of you in talking about it.
The Scythian predicts that Mnesippus will have plenty of examples of friendship at his disposal from antiquity, but that their value is lessened by Greeks’ refusal to live by the ethics that are so described.21 Moreover, to Toxaris’ view the Greeks favor stories that are relatively inconsequential (Toxaris 35–36, excerpted):
πάνυ γὰρ εὐτελῆ ταῦτα καὶ μεγαλουργὸν ἐν αὐτοῖς ἢ ἀνδρεῖον ἔνι οὐδέν. ἐγὼ δέ σοι διηγήσομαι φόνους πολλοὺς καὶ πολέμους καὶ θανάτους ὑπὲρ τῶν φίλων, ἵν᾿ εἰδῇς ὡς παιδιὰ τὰ ὑμέτερά ἐστιν παρὰ τὰ Σκυθικὰ ἐξετάζεσθαι.
[T]hose are very paltry matters, and there is nothing of greatness or bravery in them. I shall tell you of many deeds of blood and battles and deaths for the sake of friends, that you may know the achievements of your people to be child’s play in comparison with those of the Scythians.
Whereas Greek stories pivot around things like social status, personal wealth, good marriages and a complete education, the Scythians talk of war and heroism and life-or-death situations.22 The Scythians feel so strongly about what the stories mean that they produce documents, weighty, sacred and complex, which become touchstones of their identity (Toxaris 6):
καὶ ἅ γε μετ᾿ ἀλλήλων ἢ ὑπὲρ ἀλλήλων ἔπαθον ἀναγράψαντες οἱ πρόγονοι ἡμῶν ἐπὶ στήλης χαλκῆς ἀνέθεσαν εἰς τὸ Ὀρέστειον, καὶ νόμον ἐποιήσαντο πρῶτον τοῦτο μάθημα καὶ παίδευμα τοῖς παισὶ τοῖς σφετέροις εἶναι τὴν στήλην ταύτην καὶ τὰ ἐπ᾿ αὐτῆς γεγραμμένα διαμνημονεῦσαι.
All that they went through in each other’s company or for each other’s sake our ancestors inscribed on a tablet of bronze which they set up in the Oresteum; and they made it the law that the first study and lesson for their children should be this tablet and the memorizing of all that had been written upon it.
The existence of the bronze tablet among the Scythians is similar in effect to the physicality of the painting of Hercules Ogmios among the Celts – a material text that outlines their exegesis. In a way, the De Dea Syria also ends with an authoritative document – the speaker’s own votive offering to the goddess containing a lock of his hair from adolescence and inscribed with his name, τὸ οὔνομα (quoted above), the final word of the entire piece (though the speaker ironically – purposefully? – is unnamed). The temple itself – not a textual interpretation of it but the physical place – is where one may find the speaker’s ‘true’ experience of the goddess.
Whose Stories?
In writing about how others talk about the balance, the intersection, the negotiation between myth and meaning, Lucian broadens participation in the legitimizing project of exegesis to the entire oikumene. As Swain has shown, writers like Plutarch tended to tell every story, even earliest Roman history when it was its least Hellenic, with the vocabulary and paradigms of his own Greek culture.23 Up against these precedents, Lucian seeks to decouple Greek ethnicity from its paideia and thus render the latter less exclusive and more open to others. In this way, he is pursuing a project similar to what Andrade observed in Josephus’ Against Apion, to what Richter read in Favorinus’ exilic literature, and to what Allen interpreted in Herodes Atticus’ promotion of an Ethiopian student in his entourage – all cases of outsiders breaking in.24 The reorientation of cultural credibility is clear in a fourth, brief text of Lucian’s that also recounts acts of exegesis, only not by capital-O Others. In his essay Electrum – which is a prolalia like the Hercules – Lucian portrays the interpretation of myth by none other than a crowd in Athens, the expected locus for classical knowledge. The speaker knows that myth attributes the poplar trees lining the Eridanus River to transformations of Phaethon’s sisters after he was thrown from the chariot of the sun, and the amber that falls from them are their tears. But when asked, the boatmen of Athens do not comprehend such thinking: what would be the need for oarsmen to row boats if they could collect amber for cash? With such elementary reasoning, they come off as rubes, oblivious to the possibilities of poetry and to the romance of meaning. These are the types of jaded, simple Greeks at which Lucian’s Scythian, Syrian and Celt, in the Toxaris, De Dea Syria and Hercules, would roll their eyes.25
The above analysis has proposed a unifying theory for a small corner of Lucian’s corpus, but as with any study of this remarkable writer we must be attuned to layered ironies and remain open to alternative readings. Lucian is irrepressibly ludic, to the point of abject inscrutability.26 As Tim Whitmarsh has said, one can never be sure if Lucian is laughing with you or at you.27 In our cases, could it be that Lucian is in fact laughing at the non-Hellenic interlocutors?28 In these three texts, rather than challenging paideia might he simply be joining in its fun? Notably the Scythian, the Syrian and the Celt are well versed in Hellenic learning – is this not a form of praise? Whatever the case, we must certainly resist so dogmatic or so schematic an inference as to declare that Lucian is ‘anti-paideia’, or that he’s ‘pro-’ it. But it is possible, by way of conclusion, to rest as many others do: Lucian is complicated. A choice of metaphors is available: Lucian is an amoeba, or he is a hydra; he is hard to pin down.29 Nesselrath, in his (1990) article about how to define the genre of Lucian’s peculiar prolaliai, ends one sentence with a noncommittal, ‘whatever’.30 But in saying Lucian is complicated, especially in these ways of depicting exegetical conversations, perhaps we are reaching a useful observation after all. If the paideia that Lucian encountered was becoming anodyne and – a worse crime to him – boring, then complexity could itself be the point. This Roman Empire is far more expansive than the Alabama-sized peninsula that is Balkan Greece,31 and so Lucian inherently highlights the importance of alterity. Elsewhere Lucian exploded the notion that Hellenic paideia was an all-powerful force that was embraced by those foreign to it, who were then transformed for the better.32 Rather, as our three texts go on to declare, cultural transformation was a two-way street. Debate exists; debate matters; and it may have the effect of rescuing paideia from superficiality. Radical exegesis may be destabilizing, but nevertheless Lucian views it as a form of oxygen on dying embers, just in time to reinvigorate a flame, and one that is more enlightening by virtue of its newfound ubiquity.
Bibliography
Allen, J. 2006. Hostages and Hostage-taking in the Roman Empire. Cambridge. →
Allen, J. 2017. Herodes Atticus, Memnon of Ethiopia, and the Athenian Ephebeia. In Imperial Identities in the Roman World, eds. Vanacker, W., and Zuiderhoek, A., 162–175. London. →
Anderson, G. 1976. Studies in Lucian’s Comic Fiction. Leiden. a, b
Andrade, N.J. 2013. Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World. Cambridge. a, b, c, d, e
Andrade, N. and E. Rush. 2016. Introduction: Lucian, a Protean Pepaideumenos. ICS 41: 151–184. a, b, c, d
Berdozzo, F. 2011. Götter, Mythen, Philosophen: Lukian und die paganen Göttervorstellungen seiner Zeit. Berlin. a, b
Billault, A. 2006. Very Short Stories: Lucian’s Close Encounters with Some Paintings. In Authors, Authority, and Interpreters in the Ancient Novel, eds. Byrne, S.N., Cueva, E.P., and Alvares, J., 47–59. Groningen. →
Blondell, R. and S. Boehringer. 2014. Revenge of the Hetairistria: The Reception of Plato’s Symposium in Lucian’s Fifth Dialogue of the Courtesans. Arethusa 47.2: 231–264. →
Bozia, E. 2015. Lucian and his Roman Voices: Cultural Exchanges and Conflicts in the Late Roman Empire. London. a, b, c
Branham, R.B. 1985. Introducing a Sophist: Lucian’s Prologues. TAPA 115: 237–243.
Branham, R.B. 1989. Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions. Berlin. a, b
Braund, D. 2004. Scythians in the Cerameicus: Lucian’s Toxaris. In Pontus and the Outside World, ed. Tuplin, C.J., 17–24. Leiden. →
Camerotto, A. 1998. Le metamorfosi della parola: Studi sulla parodia in Luciano di Samosata. Pisa. →
Camerotto, A. 2014. Gli occhi e la lingua della satira: Studi sull’eroe satirico in Luciano di Samosata. Milan. →
Costantini, L. 2019. Dynamics of Laughter: The Costumes of Menippus and Mithrobarzanes in Lucian’s Necyomantia. AJPh 140.1: 101–122. →
Dickie, M. 2010. Lucian’s Gods: Lucian’s Understanding of the Divine. In The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations, eds. Bremmer, J.N., and Erskine, A., 348–361. Edinburgh. a, b
Elsner, J. 2001. Describing Self in the Language of the Other: Pseudo (?) Lucian at the Temple of Hierapolis. In Being Greek Under Rome, ed. Goldhill, S., 123–153. Cambridge. a, b, c, d
Fields, D. 2013. The Reflections of Satire: Lucian and Peregrinus. TAPA 143: 213–245. a, b
Flinterman, J-J. 1995. Power, Paideia, and Pythagoreanism: Greek Identity, Conceptions of the Relationship between Philosophers and Monarchs, and Political Ideas in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius. Amsterdam. →
Hubbard, T.K. 2009. The Paradox of “Natural” Heterosexuality and “Unnatural” Women. CW 102.3: 249–258. →
Jope, J. 2009. Lucian’s Triumphant Cinaedus and Rogue Lovers. Helios 36.1: 55–65. →
Kemezis, A. 2014. Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic. In A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. J. McInerney, 390–404. Malden, MA. →
Lightfoot, J.L. 2003. Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess. Oxford. a, b, c, d
Nasrallah, L. 2005. Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic. HThR 98.3: 283–314. a, b, c, d
Nesselrath, H.-G. 1990. Lucian’s Introductions. In Antonine Literature, ed. Russell, D.A., 111–140. Oxford. a, b
Richter, D. 2005. Lives and Afterlives of Lucian of Samosata. Arion 13.1: 75–100. a, b
Richter, D. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford. a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h
Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire. Oxford. →
Swain, S. 1999. Plutarch, Plato, Athens, and Rome. In Philosophia Togata II: Plato and Aristotle at Rome, eds. Barnes, J., and Griffin, M., 165–187. Oxford. →
Whitmarsh, T. 2001. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford. →
Whitmarsh, T. 2003. Varia Lucianea. CR 53.1: 75–78. →
Notes
1
On philosophy, see the De Morte Peregrini, the Nigrinus, the Hermotimus, among many others, alongside Nasrallah (2005), who imagines Lucian operating within a ‘philosophical marketplace’, in which participants “ru[n] around in philosophical drag, claiming serious interest in philosophy but really in love with money and fame,” 289–290); also Berdozzo (2011) and Fields (2013). On religion, see Alexander and Philopseudes sive Incredulus, alongside Dickie (2010); Berdozzo (2011) and Costantini (2019). On gender, note the Amores or Dialogi Meretricii, among others, alongside Hubbard (2009); Jope (2009); Blondell and Boehringer (2014). On athletics, the Anacharsis, with Richter (2011) 161–164. For an overview of Lucian’s satirical method, see especially Camerotto (2014).
2
Branham (1989); Camerotto (1998); Whitmarsh (2001); Lightfoot (2003); Nasrallah (2005); Richter (2011); Bozia (2015); Andrade and Rush (2016).
3
Cf. Andrade and Rush (2016) 161 and Richter (2011) 159: in Lucian’s Revivescentes sive Piscator 19, a Syrian figure named Parrhesiades (‘Bold Speech’) is described as the son of ‘Truth’, who is the son of ‘Famed Investigator’ (or might we call it ‘Exegesis’?): Παρρησιάδης Ἀληθίωνος τοῦ Ἐλεγξικλέους.
4
On the centrality of agonistic exchange in Lucian’s work, see Fields (2013) 230–234, in this case with emphasis on the De Morte Peregrini and also Richter (2011) 147–152, as regards Syrians in Lucian’s oeuvre (though not in the De Dea Syria).
5
It is not necessary to argue that the speaker of the Hercules, even in first-person singular, is Lucian himself, nor that this speaker is Syrian. Other texts of Lucian’s may be viewed as ‘near misses’ from the category of analysis of this chapter: the Bacchus, for example, presents Indian characters encountering the Greek god, but they do not actively reinterpret the mythologies surrounding him; in the Anacharsis, a Scythian character postulates on the meanings behind aspects of Greek culture, but none involving myth; in Bis Accusatus sive Tribunalia, a Syrian character questions oratory and other dominant modes of paideia, but again, without reference to myth.
6
See Richter (2005) 91, who identifies a ‘postcolonial Lucian’ along the lines of Chinua Achebe and Jamaica Kincaid, “writers who self-consciously use the language of the dominant other as a vehicle for the exploration of their own ambiguous cultural identities.”
7
Anderson (1976) 12–23 analyzes the ten stories as separate classifications of myth.
8
Perhaps Lucian is playing with Herodotus’ ethnography of the Scythians (4.62–64) and its salacious emphasis on violence.
9
This Toxaris is different from the homonymous figure that appears in Lucian’s Scytha, the main character of which is rather a stooge for Greek paideia, clinging to Greek texts. It is this latter Toxaris that inspired the identification by Braund (2004) of a Scythian figure in the Kerameikos – a costumed figure who cradles a Greek-style book.
10
All ancient texts are from the Loeb translations, which have also influenced the translations of the Toxaris and Hercules, discussed below. Translations of De Dea Syria are from Lightfoot (2003). Elsner (2001) 143 interprets the speaker’s reference to the lock of hair as a “sacred affirmation … of its author’s Assyrian identity.”
11
Andrade (2013) 288–313.
12
Swain (1996) 305; Elsner (2001); Richter (2011) 235–242.
13
Billault (2006) compares Lucian’s use of ekphrasis with novelistic techniques for propelling narrative.
14
Some combinations of these texts have appeared in scholarship, but with different goals and observations. Andrade (2013) 303–304 discusses the De Dea Syria alongside the Hercules (see Andrade and Rush [2016] 163); Bozia (2015) discusses the Toxaris alongside all prolaliae, not just the Hercules, as well as other essays.
15
These four examples: Syr. D. 10, 13, 32, 36.
16
Again, with attention paid to Ἀκινάκην, Lucian may be alluding to Herodotus’ Scythian ethnography (4.62). Cf. Bozia (2015) 69: “Lucian’s unprecedented social awareness displays itself when the Scythian’s cultural and religious maturity assumes the primary role throughout the entire work and is sharply contrasted to the Greek’s narrow-mindedness and cultural intolerance.”
17
Elsner (2001) 144–149 reads the Combabos myth as an encoded representation of the author’s experience of self-sacrifice in regard to his cultural identity as he functions in a Hellenic realm.
18
Lightfoot (2003) 384–388.
19
Andrade (2013) 298–299 argues that the speaker is eliding (the unnamed) Seleucus I with the line of Assyrian kings and queens as an undifferentiated line.
20
This reading differs from Andrade (2013) 299, who sees not a Syrian mockery of Herodotus but an appropriation of him; rather, I interpret the essay as an assault that is as withering as it is subtle, perhaps because it is subtle. As Richter (2011) 147–160 has shown, Lucian seems to endeavor to put his Syrian characters into agonistic situations, cataloguing a number of examples – Bis Accusatus sive Tribunalia; Revivescentes sive Piscator; Scytha. He omits the De Dea Syria, but perhaps the text fits the trend if one understands the agon as internal, between the speaker and a mode of historiography that is pure affect. For other assaults on Herodotus in Lucian (and in Plutarch and others) see Elsner (2001) 128–129, complicating Branham’s (1989) 158 argument for the text as a ‘comic homage’. See also Lightfoot (2003) 161–183.
21
Compare the speaker of the Hercules, who has no access to relevant texts for interpreting Ogmios.
22
See Richter (2011) 154–158: in the Bis Accusatus sive Tribunalia, Oratory is a shadow of her former self, duped by a Syrian.
23
Swain (1999) 173: “Plutarch’s presentation of his Roman heroes … reflects a view commonly held by educated Greeks that there was only one culture worth pursuing in the ancient world.”
24
Andrade (2013) 262; Richter (2011) 143–144; Allen (2017). Compare also Philostratus’ portrayal of Greek-speaking Indian and Ethiopian characters in the Vita Apollonii and the challenges they level against paideia: Flinterman (1995) 103–106.
25
Cf. Kemezis (2014) 395 on Lucian’s “attacks on any complacent equation between Athenian birth and true Greekness.”
26
Dickie (2010) 349.
27
Whitmarsh (2003) 76.
28
For example, Anderson (1976) 13 reads Toxaris’ oath by the Wind and the Sword (above) as a species of ridicule on the part of the author. Richter (2005) 91 (noted above) reads Lucian’s complication of paideia along postcolonial lines, but one may easily defend an opposite reading: for example, in Lucian’s Somnium sive Vita Luciani the speaker (Lucian?) claims to have proactively chosen paideia as his path when faced with an alternative (sculpture).
29
Or, Nasrallah (2005) 292: “the David Sedaris of the second century.” A superb overview (of that-which-cannot-be overviewed) is Andrade and Rush (2016).
30
Nesselrath (1990) 111.
31
On Lucian’s ‘geographical thinking’ in depicting the varied settings of his essays, see Nasrallah (2005) 298.
32
Note Allen (2006) 151–152 on the provocatively ironic passage at Ver. hist. 2.20, where the character of ‘Homer’ is portrayed as a Babylonian hostage (a homeros) who took up Hellenism in captivity; he had formerly been called Tigranes, an effectively clichéd name for Armenian detainees in Rome.