chapter thirty-five

LUCIAN

T.J.G. Whitmarsh

Lucian’s corpus is huge, heterogeneous, and complex: his narratives are invariably overlaid by fiction and role-play. One unifying strand, however, is the author’s consistent involvement with his narrators and narratees.1 In the major narrative texts, as conventionally defined, the primary narrator is always internal;2 in the dialogues, a figure often appears at some point representing the persona of the primary narrator, ‘Lucian’ (there are some exceptions, which will be discussed below).3 Lucian’s narrators repeatedly foreground and problematize their own identities. Narration, for Lucian, is a self-disclosing, but also a self- concealing, act. Let us begin by surveying the narrative forms we shall be considering in this chapter. Lucian’s most celebrated narrative text is the True stories, a quasi-Herodotean account of the narrator’s fantastic travels.4 The narrator is identified as ‘Lucian’ (elsewhere the author’s name only rarely intrudes into his works)5 in an inscription towards the end (2.28), but this identification is subverted by the acknowledgment in the prologue that he made it all up: ‘I had no true story to narrate, since

1 For the purposes of this section, Lucian’s corpus is taken to exclude the works of doubtful authorship transmitted under his name: On the dancers (as opposed to On the dance), Philopatris, Charidemus, Nero, Timarion, Halcyon, Swift-footed, Lucius or the Ass,andthe epigrams. 2 If we are excluding Lucius or the Ass (on grounds of inauthenticity). The Demonax (a quasi-biography of the philosopher) is at one level the presentation by an external narrator of a series of deeds and sayings of the philospher, but at times the narrator becomes internal, when telling about his long experience as a student under him (cf. 1). 3 The exceptions are the sophistic declamations, where the narrative situation is fictitious: Phalaris I (ambassador of the tyrant to the Delphians), Phalaris II (Delphian to his fellow-citizens), The tyrannicide,andDisowned (imaginary defendant to jurors). 4 See Rütten 1997; Georgiadou and Larmour 1998; Fusillo 1999 and von Möllen- dorff 2000. 5 Except in titles and paratextual apparatus, the name ‘Lucian’ appears only here and at Alex. 55; Peregr. 1;[ps.-Luc.]Epigr. 1 Macleod. See further Dubel 1994; Whit- marsh 2001a: 253; Goldhill 2002: 60–82. 466 part eight – chapter thirty-five nothing worth mentioning had ever happened to me; and consequently I myself turned to lying; but I am more honest about it than others are, for I will say one thing that is true, and that is that I am a liar’ (1.4). This is a celebrated appropriation of Socratic nihilism, the ironic assertion that wisdom consists in knowing that one knows nothing.6 In narratological terms, however, it also constructs a delicious paradox. The story is presented by an internal narrator, but one who deliberately rejects any claim to autopsy or personal experience (although autopsy is claimed in the text: e.g. 1.22—a Herodotean touch→). The internal narrator, then, discloses himself as (in a sense) external to the events described. The entirety will be ‘meta-literary pastiche’,7 narration of ‘things that I have neither seen nor experience nor heard tell of from anybody else: things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all’ (1.4). The narrator claims to be motivated not, like Herodotus, by the desire to record true events, but by ‘vanity’, being ‘eager to transmit something to posterity’ (1.4). The primary narratees of the True stories are identified as ‘those who take literature seriously’ (1.1), an ironic vaunting of spoud¯e (‘earnestness’) in a self-professedly comic text (but also an index of the sophistication of the pastiche). The text also employs embedded narratives, with ‘Lucian’ and his crew invariably as secondary narratees: Endymion’s account of the battle between the sun and moon, presented in a mixture of direct and indirect speech (1.11–12); the autobiographies of the old man Scintharus in the whale (1.34) and Homer (2.20); the prophecy of Rhadamanthus (2.27); and the autobiographical letter of Odysseus to Calypso, the intended recipient, which is also discretely read by ‘Lucian’ (2.35– 36). As one would expect from a text that has already jettisoned any pretence to realism, these narratives are also visibly angled towards primary narratees for comic effect: most notably in Odysseus’ letter, where the received tradition, sanctioned by ‘serious’ literature, of like- minded mutuality between Odysseus and Penelope is subverted by Odysseus’ expressed desire to run away to Calypso. Next, there are three narrative texts on religion, which are also presented by internal narrators: On the Syrian goddess, Alexander or the false prophet and Peregrinus.8 The first is another quasi-Herodotean narrative

6 Pl. Apol. 21d; see Rütten 1997: 30–31; Georgiadou and Larmour 1998: 57–58. 7 Fusillo 1999: 351–356. 8 I exclude the ‘diatribes’, On sacrifices, Astrology,andOn funerals, which are not in any strong sense narrative.